Which Side are You On?

Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept is one of those rare "which side are you on" moments of brilliant illumination. Yves Smith has a helpful synopsis this morning with links to all the key pieces.

The story in a nutshell is that editors at The Intercept refused to publish co-founder Greenwald's story about evidence of influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop. In response, Greenwald announced his resignation and set up shop on Substack.

I subscribed to Greenwald's substack, as well as Matt Taibbi's. Taibbi's take on Greenwald's resignation is definitive. I hope you read it. 

Taibbi plots the rise of Russophobia starting in 2016 as the key organizing principle of the Democratic Party. Russia went from being dismissed by Obama as barely a regional power to an omniscient many-headed hydra controlling U.S. democracy.

To me it has always seemed obvious that the the target of this new McCarthyism is the voting population of the United States. How to maintain fealty to a neoliberal order that produces more than anything else foreign wars and inequality? Gin up terror over foreign subversion by an official enemy.

As for The Intercept, its support for the war on Syria (Robert Mackey, Mehdi Hasan) and Russiagate (James Risen) shows it's squarely aligned with the U.S. national security state. On the other hand, I think Ryan Grim's reporting on progressive electoral politics is indispensable, and Ryan Devereaux has done great work on the Thin Blue Line.

In the end, does anyone doubt that Hunter Biden, a fucked up young guy, was peddling his father's name for personal advantage? I don't. At the same time, since I have never believed that Joe Biden is some kind of moral exemplar, I had no trouble voting the Democratic ticket. The battles yet to be fought are against the Democratic Party once it attains control of the federal government.