Joe Rogan Experience #1556 – Glenn Greenwald | Hacker News Reader

Joe Rogan Experience #1556 – Glenn Greenwald

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107 pointsremarkEon112 comments

This isn’t entirely on topic with this thread, but I’ve been shocked by HN’s base reaction to this article. Calling reasonable edits censorship is akin to calling a code review censorship, yet who among us doesn’t participate in code reviews???

Greenwald was not censored, rather he refused to be edited. That’s not journalism, that’s a personality cult. “Journalism” only works when journalists and editors work together - journalists go off, get excited and follow a story; editors keep them connected to publishable truth and article sized bits of context.

Speaking as a former publisher who has edited my share of complex pieces, Greenwald’s original article was poor. He had, I believe 2k words to tell a story, but he chose the wrong 2k words.

Wrong according to whom?

Not sure how your team is doing code-reviews, but they shouldn't be changing the message of the PR, rather just help clean it up.

It's misleading to say the editor was asking to change the message. The opposite: it's clear to me Greenwald did not clearly communicate the intended narrative of his piece, so the editors thought the article lacked focus.

It's like telling Greenwald, hey you added functionality that was not originally part of the design doc. That's fine and all but now test coverage is diminished. Heres a few tests to consider so you could strengthen the robustness of the code. To say editors were overstepping their bounds is silly.

Greenwald went on a morning show yesterday morning. He admits his journalistic philosophy is unconventional; he started off as a blog and was recruited into media. That's fine. I build a few side projects in my free time and I love it because there's so much freedom on how to structure your code. Greenwald feels the same way about writing his pieces, so he will feel right at home in the blogger universe.

If you read the Matt Taibbi piece about the resignation, there is additional email/slack evidence that shows he both described the piece accurately and he was raising concerns about the process.

The emails are pretty clear, e.g. this part

"Overall I think this piece can work best if it is significantly narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy"

The changes requested are "significant".

"I do think you should treat the origin story of the hard drive – that it came from the Delaware repair store – with a bit more skepticism. It’s true that nothing has emerged yet to significantly undermine it, but it remains a very strange story surrounded by many unanswered questions."

That is a clear request to change the message, whilst admitting there is not much grounds on which to make the request - not mere wordsmithing.

"narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy"

My post addresses this at the start, which is why I construed the analogy as such to reflect the editor's requests.

Greenwald's article is fine. But I don't think the editorial followups are unprecedented or objectionable from the perspective of your typical run of the mill engineering practices.

If Greenwald is uncomfortable with collaborating with editors, he may return to his life as an independent journalist, as he has done so.

This is a good comment though I'll disagree with your last sentence. I don't think that the hard drive's genesis story is all that out of bounds for this article - the story is absolutely wacky and served as grounds for some highly qualified people to call this a disinformation campaign.

From there, Greenwald could have taken the other editor's suggestion and included coverage on how few media outlets have the hard drive and how they are using that to justify not covering the story.

At that point, you've got some interesting conclusions:

1.) The Biden family has never denied much of anything.

2.) Hunter Biden does not look very good and his future business dealings should face much more scrutiny, particularly if his father wins the election.

3.) If this is a Russian disinformation campaign, it's not a very good one (back to point #1).

4.) What does all of this say about the state of the media? 1 - 3 are a story yet all we hear are crickets. Is that because the career of journalism is so fucked up that it's hard to get good writers to cover a subject unless they can find an exclusive angle? Is this because the business model of journalism is such that if you can't guarantee millions and millions of page views, you can't justify allocating resources towards actual investigative journalism?? Or is this pure bias???

It's a bit rich to claim he wasn't censored when it was demanded, in violation of his contract, to also not run the story anywhere else.

I strongly disagree that the edits were reasonable and I find it to be a huge red flag in your stance that you completely dismiss this.

How is that censorship if he signed a contract saying he wouldn't publish for any other outlet?

Haven't you worked for companies that disallow you from working for anyone else without prior approval?

It's actually the opposite. His contract specifically allowed him to publish in other places if they didn't let him go ahead.

Is there any evidence that they actually stopped him from running it elsewhere, or that they actually refused to publish it? The start of the editor's memo specifically states that they are "comfortable with publishing". And he did publish it elsewhere (on Substack). So both claims are weak.

It seems like he was looking for an excuse to bail from The Intercept, and this was it.

While certainly Greenwald's article could have been improved, this was an opinion piece and it seems clear that his editors wanted not just greater clarity but a different opinion. Using the code review analogy, the editors wanted not just cleaner code, but an entirely different result. As the author of the spec (his own opinion) Greenwald felt this was unwarranted. Had they restricted themselves to helping him better express his preexisting opinion, I don't think he would have "refused to be edited".

How do you feel about Matt Taibbi's defense of Greenwald's actions? While "censor" might not be the right word, Taibbi seems to agree with Greenwald that the editors' pushback went far beyond editing for clarity: Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-on-his-resigna...

(I've seen your comments in the other threads, and appreciate your insight)

Matt Taibbi's article is complicated, but I'd like to draw attention to one paragraph:

> In the last few weeks I’ve heard from multiple well-known journalists going through struggles in their newsrooms, with pressure to avoid certain themes in campaign coverage often central to their worries. There are many reporters out there — most of them quite personally hostile to Donald Trump — who are grating under what they perceive as relentless pressure to publish material favorable to the Democratic Party cause. Greenwald’s story mirrors some of these stories, but his is more striking than some others on a few levels.

This is absolutely chilling.

That aside and back to the original article, let me deal with two pieces of feedback from the editor that would have improved the article:

1.) Talk about the laptop genesis story in the context of what Giuliani and others were doing in the Ukraine. The laptop story is pretty wacky and deserves some actual coverage just to add context.

2.) Talk about how few media outlets have access to the hard drive and how that is one of the excuses given for less widespread coverage.

From here, I think Greenwald could have moved to these points:

1.) The Biden family has never denied the authenticity of any of these materials. Is that because there are so many materials that they don't want to get into the game of confirming some and denying others? Or is it because this is all true?

2.) This certainly does not make Hunter Biden look good and all of his future business dealings call for far greater scrutiny, particularly if his father wins the election. Granted, it makes Hunter Biden look so poor that his odds of getting hired to slang french fries are pretty low, but still...if he gets hired to slang french fries, watch the subsidies for the potato farmers.

3.) If this is a Russian disinformation campaign, they sure don't have the A team working on it. And we go back to #1.

4.) What does it say about the state of journalism that nobody will cover the emails unless they have entire copies of the hard drive?? Has the career of journalism become so utterly fucked up that journalists aren't willing to cover something unless they can find their own career making exclusive angle?? Are news organizations so toxic that if they can't justify getting their front end team working on a fancy scrolling background, they'll kill investigative journalism???

I like that people think that every major newsroom in the country can be involved in a politically motivated conspiracy to shape the narrative, but don't even bother to consider the possibility that a couple of overt Left-wing anti-Democratic-establishment political activists selling unverifiable stories. that exactly fits the ideology of their long-time overt activism might just be doing the same thing.

Sure, the universal mass-media conspiracy the Greenwald-Taibbi axis is pushing is more “shocking, if true” than the idea that they are doing the same kind of narrative-shaping that they are trying to point fingers elsewhere about. But it's not more likely to be true.

At this point in time, it’s a fair assumption that anything the Titular Right accuses its enemies of doing, is what it’s doing itself. Even that notorious house of flaming liberals, the Wall Street Journal, concluded the Hunter Biden thing is nonsense. See also: Swift boating, Obama is a sekrit Kenyan Muslim with fake birth certificate, and so on. It’s the Roger Stone 101.

Meantime, the Trump family kleptocracy is nuts-deep in its graft on the taxpayers’ dime and the fanbois don’t raise so much as an eyebrow because calling that out just isn’t exciting or self-serving enough. This is how democracy dies, drowned beneath addlepated addicts grasping at their next fix and just don’t care about anything else.

Why was it poor? What about it was inaccurate? Just because you don't agree with the message, doesn't make it poor.

Wow! I can understand that people downvote this post. But flagging it? It really shows who you are. Anything that challenges your narrative must be gone. Now I get it.

Is there a way to unflag it like "counter flag" or something?

Is Glen Greenwald really that controversial on HackerNews? I thought that this crowd would be most receptive to him after he helped Snowden expose the egregious misconduct of the U.S government. What is going on with this community?

The left (not the liberal, mind you) has moralized everything. So, they naturally want to censor aany opinion that does not agree with their view. It is, after all, for our own good, and it is only the left who can define what good means.

That's the far left for you. They claim to be the manifestation of anti-facism, yet we see the full ostracizing and "cancelling" of anyone who dares hold a different opinion.

Much of his criticism is focused on the overreach of the US government, but another problem is private sector having too much control , such as tech censorship. The private sector, unlike the public sector, has far fewer avenues for redress of wrongs. try restoring a terminated reddit, fakebook, twitter or YouTube account. The public sector at least has some accountability, which you do not see in the private sector. Civil lawsuits are very expensive, arbitration is not that effective, etc.

It took our ancestors a lot of time and effort to build redress avenues into governments.

I think we have to do the same with Big Tech.

And the Divine Right of Kings absolutist party has made a comeback in the "they are private companies, why dont you start your own Google" crowd.

Glenn Greenwald needs an achievable goal otherwise all that persistence and energy he has is going to be squandered. Lot of it has been already.

His frustrations have been building, if not overflowing, and social media just enjoys/encourages the wastage of those energies. Sad to watch.

I enjoy most JRE episodes, this one as well.

However the one thing I do not get is how he is always complaining about CNN not reporting this or how nytimes is practiced bad journalism going so far as to call cnn fake news, but he never discusses Fox News which is actually the most popular news network by far (record profits this year if 1.5B) and the most obviously bias.

It really weakens his position, and paints him as only a pseudo centrist

I’m not from the US but I can see that this is yet another effect of two-party politics rotting your country. Centrists and pseudo-centrists are giving outright lies more weight by trying to be ”balanced and not biased”. Giving weight to someone’s lies just because they are led to believe that truth is always in the middle. This leaves all editorial responsibility to the reader. And when the reader sees that a media source is not publishing a story that they are violating their responsibility to give the unfiltered ”truth” to the masses so that they can decide its truthiness. A media source not being just a printer of statements beccomes a weakness.

The internet has a lot to do with this since the value of editorial practices does not exist online in the same sense. Bots and blue-checkmark-people give any story validity on twitter.

> I’m not from the US but I can see that this is yet another effect of two-party politics rotting your country.

United States is perhaps the oldest continuously existing democracy [0], in has existed 244 years, and most of that time (about 200 years) it has been a two-party system. I don't think it's the two-party system that is responsible for the rotting now. Something else is going on.

[0] Well, we can debate how to define a democracy (an interesting and educational debate), and who is oldest still existing depends on the definition. But a good case can be made that it's the US.

> Something else is going on.

Money in politics probably as well.

Very debatable.

Democratic traditions in other countries long predate even the existence of the US; it wasn't the first with universal suffrage; it had a troubled history even after that till at least the 1960s, even before we get to any contemporary problems.

I don't know there is a legitimate claimant on the "first democracy" title, or even if we are there yet, but unlikely the US.

> first with universal suffrage

So depending on the definition of "country", the oldest existing democracy is either Finland (1906-) or Norway (1913-)?

Finland: Universal suffrage from 1906, as an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. Independent country from 1917.

Norway: Independent country. Universal suffrage from 1913.

Or maybe, depending on the definition of "suffrage": New Zealand: Women can vote from 1893, women can run as candidates for some positions from 1919, Women can run for all position from 1941.

Yeah, my view also is it's likely one of the smaller, less heralded countries. New Zealand a good contender. For the pre-universal democracies, Iceland has a parliament going back a thousand years.

> New Zealand a good contender

You don't give much weight for women to be able to be lawmakers themselves? As long as women have the right to vote male candidates to an all-male parliament, the suffrage is universal enough for you?

That's a good question (which highlights the difficulty of the definition), but yes, on reflection I think that it is up to those represented to determine who represents them (including constraints), not for us to engineer it for them looking backwards. So a useful (but imperfect) delineation is the year that most adults were allowed the vote.

Clearly, in this case everybody being given that power of determination from 1893 has worked out well for them on the female representation front looking at current stars on the global leadership stage.

The US isn't a democracy. Check the results of the 2016 election if you don't believe me....

> The US isn't a democracy. Check the results of the 2016 election

Almost every country has some unevenness in apportionment. Outside of some microstates that have only one electoral disrict, by your definition no country is a democracy today.

Which is on purpose. We are a representative republic based on democratic principles, explicitly structured to avoid the “mob rule” tendencies of direct democracies. Which doesn’t make the Electoral College any more sensible, but here we are ¯\_(?)_/¯.

Who is the “mob” in this? The citizen majority?

The electoral colleges have their criticisms but they prevent the largest cities from determining the vote for everyone.

No. Without the Electoral College, one vote cast in a coastal city would be equal to one cast in rural Wyoming. Instead, because Wyoming has more Electoral ballots per person than larger states like California and Florida, a vote cast in Wyoming is "worth" about three times as much as one cast in those larger states.

A concern about removing the Electoral College is candidates won't spend time campaigning in more remote, less populous states. A) We have broadcast media and the Internet, you don't need to spend a lot of time in those states. B) Getting rid of the Electoral College doesn't mean getting rid of the state caucus and primary systems, there would still be plenty of in-state campaigning to win those (though typically not by an incumbent president).

> Instead, because Wyoming has more Electoral ballots per person than larger states like California and Florida, a vote cast in Wyoming is "worth" about three times as much as one cast in those larger states.

Anyone truly irked by this arrangement is free to move to Wyoming.

Wyoming is the least populous state. Of course they will have more electoral ballots per person, that was my argument. Less populous state will have more "votes" (electoral ballots) compared to the largest states.

You wrote, "they prevent the largest cities from determining the vote for everyone."

Why should people living in a less populous state have more influence on the outcome of an election than people in more populous states (or cities)?

If people living in large cities have more influence it's not because of where they live but because there are more people. More people, more influence; the Electoral College dilutes this principle of fairness.

While the two party system does have problems they tend to be vastly overstated (and are much more difficult to solve than the complainers want to acknowledge).

The problem is that US conservatives, both elites and ordinary voters, have become profoundly radicalized since 1964, and specifically since the Civil Rights Act (Edit: though the underpinnings for this started with McCarthyism and Brown v. Board - it was really the 1964 election that moved this radicalism into the white conservative mainstream, not just the Birchers.)

In that sense things are really similar to Weimar Germany, which was a multiparty democracy in which there were many viable non-Nazi options for conservative voters. Yet German conservatives across the board decided that a Nazi dictatorship was preferable to a democracy where socialists might win. In general it is very difficult to sustain a democracy when 40% of the electorate rejects the concept.

See Senator Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy. The Republican party won over the white southern votes that it craved, and all it had to sell was its soul. Rinse and repeat with the fundagelicals in the 1980s to establish an unshakeable base. From there it’s just a matter of persuading the rest of the country not to vote for anyone else.

Telling that you’re downvoted, but honestly the Overton window today would give even old Adolph a suntan. 50 years of the Republican party gently transitioning the US to a one-party state, with a spineless Democratic “opposition” content to normalize each new lurch to the extreme.

Democracy doesn’t die in the dark but on top of a stove: like a pot of gently simmering frogs.

I live next to Poland. They have a multiparty democracy and a serious turmoil in the streets now, because their polarization problem mirrors the American one very closely.

I think this is an effect of social media. It rewards the most extreme positions with likes and shares, hollowing out the former core of shared values.

Fox's bias are well known and have been known about for a long time. Complaints about CNN are more common because CNN's bias is new. At least to the point that it has impacted it journalism so deeply.

It is not bias at CNN, it is that the conservative media and pundits have spent so long working the refs that people who do not know any better assume the bias exists and continue to parrot the point.

No that is a total load of BS. CNN is horribly biased. They are guilty of extreme sensationalism with a leftward bent.

They all deserve equal criticism, there is no scale of bias because they're all bottom feeders.

The New York Times repeatedly claimed there were WMDs in Iraq based on evidence that was fabricated. This helped sell the invasion to the public leading to the deaths of thousands of people. [1]

CNN was caught leaking debate questions in 2016 to the Democrats [2] and falsely linking an innocent man to a fabricated Russia conspiracy and then being forced to retract and roll the 3 journalists involved in the deception. [3]

That's just scratching the surface!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...

[3] https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/06/26/cnn-resig...

The NYT apologised for their Iraq war coverage [1]. The people involved in your [2] and [3] got fired/resigned, and acted on their own.

Meanwhile the right wing media still hangs on to lies or very misleading reporting/propaganda without consequences. Is there any apology for the WMD reporting by right wing media? Did any fox news staffers got fired for propagating lies (climate change not existing for example)? On the contrary, the very popular Fox news anchor Shepard Smith ended his career because of misleading reports (Clinton + uranium one) spread by fox news.

Claiming they are somewhat similar is plain wrong. Also, it's the classic 'trick' used by self described centrists to normalize right wing ideas when in reality on is clearly more wrong than the other (e.g. Hunter Biden conspiracy vs Trump nepotism).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th... [2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...

>The NYT apologised for their Iraq war coverage

Is this an adequate punishment for the thousands of families decimated in the US and the Middle East? How many people have to die before it can't be brushed away with "we're sorry"?

>Hunter Biden conspiracy

This is conjecture. The emails have not been disproven. In fact, at least one email has been cryptographically verified using DKIM headers by an independent third party Errata Security. [1] Additionally, both the FBI and the head of the DNI have stated that the leak is not the result of Russian disinformation. [2]

If you have proof that the FBI, DNI and Errata Security are in fact wrong, you need to back up your claims.

>Is there any apology for the WMD reporting by right wing media

You seem to have erroneously accused me of defending Fox News. Please re-read my comment. You'll find I called them a bottom feeder in no uncertain terms.

[1] https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1322007153415200768

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/fbi-russia-disin...

> Is this an adequate punishment for the thousands of families decimated in the US and the Middle East? How many people have to die before it can't be brushed away with "we're sorry"?

Out of all the actors who pushed for illegal wars and ignored war crimes, you'd have to be crazy to give the NYT the majority of the blame. If you trust their apology, they've been sloppy rather than malicious.

> The emails have not been disproven.

Just because some parts are true doesn't mean what right wing media makes of them aren't conspiracies. I'm very certain this story will disappear after Tuesday and there won't be any legal repercussions whatsoever.

> You seem to have erroneously accused me of defending Fox News.

You equated them by calling them all bottom feeders when it's painfully obvious that they operate on different value systems and level of integrity.

I'm not a Joe Rogan fan but I share this opinion. Fox News isn't fake news because it isn't news at all. it's literally just a propaganda network. NYT is supposed to be a higher standard.

As to centrism, I'm not sure Rogan has enough of a coherent ideology to even call him a centrist.

Sure, when you know the "news" is all fake, it is easy to call it not news.

But people who watch Fox News - for the most part - are watching for actual news. They often believe it. They aren't questioning the 'facts'. It isn't even as fake as Tabloids saying "I had an alien baby!".

While Fox is as trustworthy as 'The Onion', 'The Onion' openly states it is satire: Fox News is still claiming news and facts.

There used to be a line between op-ed (i.e. subjective-centric) and news (i.e., important, relevant and objective-centric); and journalism used to be firmly alighted with the news side of that paradigm.

Things have changed. Dramatically. And for the worse. Anything and everything is considered news. Relevance and important are not longer relevant; the reporting shamelessly anti-objective. Anyone can at this point call themselves a journalist, without any understanding of the actions and ethics such a title entails. Axe-grinding and whistle-drowning are all too common.

The bottom line: A healthy, proper and transparent Fourth Estate matters. I can't speak for the rest of the world but in the USA the Fourth Estate is in the ICU, and has been for some time now. This is not a diagnosis that is new since Jan 2017.

The vast majority of people don't have a coherent ideology.

It legitimately comes down to however you frame a question to someone.

(Fox) 'It isn't news at all'? You mean you watch it regularly and can therefore vouch for its zero news content? Why would you want to do that and if you don't, how can you make such an evidently uninformed comment? What's the difference between propaganda and literal propaganda?

The same applies to CNN and other channels if we're going to be honest.

From across the pond I have the feeling that fox news is a lost cause, whereas liberal media seems to, at least officially, hold journalistic integrity as a high priority and actually believe what they say.

One quite obvious example from the Atlantic: There was a trump speech maybe 2 months ago when trump acknowledged that there has been people in the military complex profiteering from war (and also choosing the lovely words "making our wonderful wonderful bombs" or something along those lines). This is something that the Atlantic has been saying since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But for some reason they chose not to write something along the lines of "trump acknowledges war profiteering" and recapping why some people (probably including the reader base of the Atlantic) believe that war profiteering in the military-industrial complex is bad thing. Instead they chose to angle it like "trump criticises the army. The atlantic supports the troops!".

This is just a small thing that I (a leftist, Marxist Swedish commie-sheeple) saw when doing my weekly skimming of the news on your side of the pond. There is of course a more complex political game going on, but at the same time: is it so hard to understand why someone becomes disillusioned with the media landscape?

It wasn't only The Atlantic that ignored that. I didn't see a single media outlet acknowledge it. Not a single "friend" on FB or Twitter called it out. Not since Eisenhower had the MIC been recognized by a POTUS like that, and the reference wasn't ignored; it wasn't even recognized. That's highly disturbing.

But it gets worse. Under the current admin the DoD budget has ballooned to nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Imagine that. The POTUS is able to inflate that budget with nearly zero outrage, and then he turns around and calls out the MIC and again no outrage (about the hypocrisy).

The disconnect - media and public - is flabbergasting. How can this be? In plain sight??

The Atlantic isn't "liberal media."

It isn't really a news magazine at all. It's an opinion rag with pundits who range across the ideological spectrum. You will no more find news there than reading the NY Times or Wall Street Journal's opinion sections.

Same as Israel is criticised more often for (minor) human rights abuses than Syria for major ones.

We expect more of them. My guess is also that Glenn is centre-left so he probably used to trust NYT and CNN while having ignored Fox News since forever.

Glenn is right-wing and always has been. And he doesn’t ignore Fox News now - he’s one of Tucker Carlson’s most frequent guests!

Glenn Greenwald postures as a civil libertarian when he wants to attack liberals. He has basically not said a word about Trump’s drone program (which by design is dramatically more lethal than Obama’s policy), and not a word about Trump lawlessly defending convicted war criminals and encouraging more war crimes. This is because Greenwald is a dishonest hack.

As someone who admired Greenwald for years and personally had discussions with him where he (temporarily) changed my mind about things through badgering and gaslighting, I am still very upset that I didn’t see this sooner.

Isnt Greenwald an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter?

IMHO he cannot be pigeonholed into a neat "right wing / left wing" scheme like that.

There are a lot of right-wing Bernie Sanders supporters! A huge part of his appeal is general stances against corruption. Also, though Bernie is more anti-capitalist than most Democrats, he is also very squishy on issues of racism and misogyny. There are a lot of voters out there who support left-wing economics and right-wing social policy, and Bernie has appeal for a lot of them. There’s a large contingent on the left who are anti-“identity politics.”

My dad is center-right, despises Republicans, and likes Bernie (votes for him in both primaries) but thinks Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib are too radical. In terms of economic policy this makes little sense, but that’s not what’s going on here.

Interesting. Now that is not a perspective I could get from across the ocean just by reading the news. Thank you.

Being against identity politics doesn’t make you socially right-wing.

I put “identity politics” in quotes for a reason. I think believing that

a) “identity politics” is a major movement on the left, rather than a pejorative right-wing term for civil rights activism, and

b) somehow deciding you’re “against” this

is in fact right-wing. It is sort of like people who are against “critical race theory” - with a tiny handful of exceptions (mostly left-liberal quibbles), they are not making an academic argument about the actual subject of critical race theory so much as signaling their opposition that they’re opposed to anti-racist ideology. Criticizing the term “critical race theory” without having read a bunch of sociology is basically telling on yourself.

Indeed, I haven't read a lot academic literature about Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Flat Earth Theory or Holocaust Denial, nor am I going to. In my rejection of these ideologies, I mainly focus on the badness of their proposed solutions to (often perceived, not actual) problems.

Specifically for Identity Politics and Critical Race Theory, the main ideological issue I see is qualifying people by their belonging to major groups (often based on race, ethnicity, religion or sex) which results in solutions that go against individual rights/liberties (which I take to be the cornerstone of liberalism). Examples are: not opposing police violence against people but only police violence against black people, supporting discrimination for/against some races (for black / against Asian when it comes to schooling), etc. A lot of these policies would be good if they were instead targeting everybody (or at most class-based (rich/poor) discrimination). A lot of the proposed bad solutions could be better if they were thought-out a bit more (e.g. "defund the police" is particularly bad... instead what you should do is, prevent police buying military gear, stop swatting, ban civil forfeiture, fund (and train) them more, legalize drugs, reduce poverty to reduce crime, ...).

Edit: contrary to my words above, I actually went and read a bit about CRT on Wikipedia... One of the first "Major themes" listed is critique of liberalism. Therefore, I understand why proponents of CRT would want to pain liberals like me as bad ("right-wing"). It's also not surprising that liberals would oppose CRT.

> Examples are: not opposing police violence against people but only police violence against black people,

Can you point to a single person with more than, say, 50 Twitter followers, who believes this? Or even said it provocatively? Maybe Farrakhan, but otherwise...? Almost every Black Lives Matter commentator has pointed out that the US police are deeply violent against everyone, even though black people get it the worst. In fact they have used this to build support for the movement, and argue that white Americans' tolerance for police violence against blacks leads to increased police violence overall.

The way you formulated your view is what (actual) critical race theorists would describe as being "high in racial resentment": you're inventing pro-black racists in response to legitimate calls from black people for civil rights reform.

> supporting discrimination for/against some races (for black / against Asian when it comes to schooling), etc

Harvard artificially deflating the number of accepted Asians is a thorny issue, but calling affirmative action "discrimination" is another of these views that are filled with racial resentment. It's not quite as bad as people who suggest that black beneficiaries of affirmative action are somehow unqualified (this is not how affirmative action works and it's disgusting to suggest otherwise), but it's still a pejorative and antagonistic framework of the issue. It also completely ignores why affirmative action exists in the first place: unlike white and Asian children, black children are badly screwed over by racist teachers and racist administrators starting from kindergarten.

> A lot of these policies would be good if they were instead targeting everybody

The reason why critical race theorists criticize this classical-liberal approach is that a wealthy black person still overall has a much more difficult life in America than a lower-middle-class white person. White people have a lot of difficulty understanding this, hence "class not race" movements on the left. But "class not race" in America is a right-wing idea, one that couldn't exist without a racist erasure of black history and black experiences. Bernie Sanders is also a big "class not race" guy and it's a huge reason why there was a such a split in 2016 between socialists and social democrats. And also why a bunch of centrists and center-right folks (like my father) liked Bernie.

> (e.g. "defund the police" is particularly bad... instead what you should do is, prevent police buying military gear, stop swatting, ban civil forfeiture, fund (and train) them more, legalize drugs, reduce poverty to reduce crime, ...)

OK, I also agree that the "abolish the police" framework is poorly phrased. But Black Lives Matter activists have definitely pushed for every single one of these policies, except "more funding" - even if you don't care about police violence, metropolitan police in particular simply have too much damn money. They spend it very badly! But they don't need more money, they need more oversight on how its spent.

> Therefore, I understand why proponents of CRT would want to pain liberals like me as bad ("right-wing")

You are clearly center-right in a lot of ways. Maybe you are more of a social democrat on economics. But suggesting that CRT is anti-white and that Black Lives Matter hasn't actually thought about policy is... just plain racist.

I disagree with parts, but not a bad reply overall.

Greenwald positions himself as a leftist so that the people on the right, who are the ones giving him money and television appearances, can use him as an easy sounding board for their grievances.

"See? Even this guy on the left thinks they're nuts!"

Glenn is not right wing in the least. He’s a staunch socialist.

And who cares if he went on Tucker. Is there a rule that you can’t talk to the “other side”?

And could you expand on your list of “you must say this to be on my good side”? I hear drones, anything else?

Your commentary actually sounds like an attack on everything but what his actual beliefs are.

He is rich, and Trump's gang is targeting rich people before anything else. Rich people know (or feel) this, so they collaborate, consciously or not.

I think one point of defence for this would be that it's so obvious that Fox is biased, that it need not be mentioned.

I think Joe also mentioned at some point that he used to read and watch CNN a lot (and he implied that he trusted it at the time), so perhaps this is the reason why he's now putting it down.

It's funny but true.

Fox is just an aberration, I assume we all know they are not reasonable - or at least their opinion parts (and it's mostly opinion).

But the rest of the press ostensibly holds themselves to higher standards.

That said, I don't agree with a lot of what Greenwald has to say either.

I laughed at the Truth of this. Fox News honestly doesn't even register as a legitimate news organization for me most of the time. I actively avoid using them as a source. It's like getting upset over supermarket tabloids.

Yet this organization sure had an awful lot of blood on its hands with its recent pandemic coverage and yet all I ever hear about is papers like the New York Times. Rogan himself seems to have shown a lot of sympathy for Fox News worst tendencies on this matter. The last time I remember outlets like the NYT having so much blood on their hands was during the Iraq war and that reporting was about a generation ago, AND Fox was even worse than them even back then. Yet all I hear about is the perils of the dastardly MSM and their legions of partisan so called fact checkers.

Despite the extreme bias of Fox News - and I can't believe I'm writing this - it is still a bit less biased than CNN. I very occasionally see articles lightly criticizing Trump there and recently they had a piece talking about the pros and cons of each presidential candidate. So while Fox is 99% biased towards Trump, CNN appears 100% biased against him.

Actually, I've been reading both sites in the past few months. My rule of thumb is that while each site in isolation is unreadable, whatever they agree on (which is very little) must be the truth!

I strongly agree with this. It's hard to see bias when you agree with the stance. CNN is extremely biased and it can be seen by anyone who isn't a reactionary to everything Trump does just because he's the one that did it

I’ve heard episodes where he shits on fox. I think he focuses more on liberal news outlets because he actually leans liberal himself.

And I completely understand this because as a left-leaning person CNN has become an obsolete atrocity of a news network.

He voted for Bernie, he's definetly on the liberal side. He complains about CNN because he felt it used to be his news network so to speak.

”and the most obviously bias.”

Maybe the most obvious to you, but CNN has always been biased.

“Don’t point out the speck in your brother’s eye when you have a plank in your own”.

I think it is implied that he thinks both are bad

Rogan isn't political. He just pretends to be for money.

Rogan is not doing journalism, or serious interviews trying to get into bottom of anything. It's just a show and content creation. He is just going with anyone who comes into his show.

Here is little deeper take of Greenwald:

Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Blowup with the Intercept https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/inside-glenn-greenwa...

By giving interesting people a large, open, unconstrained platform and plenty of time to speak, he's going 'way deeper' than most of the mainstream press.

Joe is smart but you're right, he does play the nice guy and doesn't ask his guests hard questions - but the format is really powerful.

I watched 2.5 hours (!!!) of Bernie Sanders speak and came to the realization that I don't think I'd seen Bernie speak for more than 5 minutes previous to that - ever. People are supposed to elect national leaders on the basis of sound-bytes, controlled scenarios, ridiculous 'gotcha debates'?

I really don't think you'll find a longer format out there for anyone. It literally takes time to get to know people and the open, conversational format, particularly the length is really helpful. On cable news you get 1 minute if you're lucky, a longer, hurried interview if you're famous.

Many of the 'issues du jour' require some explanation - every unfortunate interaction between police and some assailant that's on the national news has nuance, certainly many of the more theoretical issues have nuance. And public figures, speakers are very often misinterpreted, misquoted.

Not only is there enough time on the format, people are tuning in.

Though you're right to point out Joe is not doing regular journalism by asking the tough questions - he is doing something else, which asking 'un PC' questions which would never get asked in highly politicized or sensitive information systems.

If there is 'editorial bias' on the part of Joe, it's easily circumvented by the guests who have time to answer the questions. Contrast this with most broadcast outlets who design the questions, don't give time to respond, heavily edit the question/response, and shave it down to tiny digestible formats.

Joe Rogan's mere existence is really counter intuitive - if major press outlets were doing their jobs well I don't think he would exist. He's found a credible, if not perfect niche.

I agree with you, Rogan is smart and long format allows more.

The problem is not one Rogan and one show, it's that his style is spreading.

Rogan is smart but lacks general knowledge. Good hosts are very knowledgeable and pretend to know less for the sake of the audience. Rogan can't do that.

Rogan projects sentiments like awe and wonder, but they are not genuine. They are just part of the brand and character.

The end result is that his non-PC stance and alternative viewpoint falls prey to hype, hustlers and pseudointellectuals. He ends up repeating phrases and platitudes and never analyzing them.

Yes, the big drawback is that he's agreeable to people in instances where he shouldn't really agree with them, that's an unfortunate line that's crossed sometimes.

That said - I don't think in those specific cases it's that important, I loathe Alex Jones but I'm not sure how important he is.

He doesn't support Anti-Vaxxer conspiracy theories, he's spoken publicly about that, though I'm not sure if he has publicly spoken out against QAnon, he did have an interesting and nuance guest Tim Dillon [1] to explain it in a nuanced and reasonable way.

One thing that's interesting about his guests is that they are not 'communications' people in the classical sense. On the news, you get people in makeup, nice suits, symmetrical facial features and talking points.

I don't think Rogan is the solution to anything, but it's an valid format.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1fdIP_KyL0

There are longer formats out there, here's the full 8 & a half hour 2010 Sanders filibuster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLNKNq9soLE

You just proved my point, though.

A 'Congressional filibuster' is literally redundant filler used to fill time, often in the middle of the night to literally an empty room with no expectation of an audience or even a coherent message. People literally go up there and read Dr. Seuss out loud.

Find someone having reasonably candid dialogue with Bernie Sanders for 2.5 hours - I don't think it exists.

But that would be besides the point - Rogan's format is consistently an order of magnitude longer than others, it's open and generally unedited - this doesn't exist elsewhere.

Most people only complain out of frustration about stuff they care about it.

He's a liberal so he just assumes everyone knows Fox News is nonsense. His worry is that the liberal media outlets are practicing their own forms of lying.

Joe Rogan is probably more of a pseudo everything than anyone else. He will also ignore reality and loves conspiracy/fantasy stuff.

Two frauds, one show.

He’s also done the Lex Fridman podcast this week.

His sudden appearance on two high profile podcasts seems eerily convenient, almost as if they were timed to coincide with his planned resignation.

No, really? Public figures go on media outlets when they have something to talk about!? /s

The man is going off on his own as an independent journalist of course he is going to promote himself.

He's doing the same hissy-fit resignation nonsense that Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan did. There's a lot more money to be made by charging people directly without having an editor to tell you to validate your claims and cut out your editorialized nonsense than there is as an actual journalist. He wants to be the Perez Hilton of politics. He cut his teeth in the business with opinion blogs, got his big break precisely because people felt comfortable leaking things to him BECAUSE of his opinion pieces, and has never been comfortable just reporting news.

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