All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.
Craig Murray's trial had a similar outcome: he's not a "proper" journalist because he doesn't work for a media/newspaper company. And the judge gave an opinion that bloggers should get tougher sentences than journalists[1].
It'll come back to bite the journos, and some of them know this and are saying it. But most are keen to carve out special exemptions for themselves from laws that the rest of us have to follow.
[0] In journalism circles, "blogger" is an insult. Source: I used to run a newspaper.
[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/06/the-mind-of-...
I agree that powerful media orgs see this as the definition of journalism at stake, and their assessment is close to self awareness in a way that falls comically short. The irony is the harder they fight the despicable internet bloggers the more credibility they lose - near zero at this point in my eyes. The media ideally is a group of citizens exercising their first amendment rights as a bulwark to government abuse; the media we've ended up today is a group of powerful entities aligned with the government. They are always on their best behavior to preserve their access to the latest carefully curated "leaks" and fat and happy in their position as lapdogs. Bloggers, citizen/independent journalists, etc. are the media, and what we call the media is at this point little more than the ministry of truth. Anyone whose worldview could consider Don Lemon a journalist and Glenn Greenwald a fringe internet blogger should be laughed out of whatever room they are in, I just can't take this position seriously.
Just so you know, if you think this is new, its not. Communist speech has been deemed illegal, and upheld by the supreme court, since the McCarthy era. This is not presented as a political view on Communism vs Capitalism, just as a fact that the constitution doesn't matter.
For more recent events, I challenge you to find where a "curfew" on peaceful protests, or "free speech zones" appear in the constitution. Again, not an endorsement of the protest, merely pointing out that laws don't matter.
Also remember that the journalist that exposed the Panama papers mysteriously died in a freak car explosion. Very sad.
I'll take off my tinfoil hat now...
The issue there was precisely how he was emphatically not acting as a journalist.
Journalists do not coordinate news releases with their preferred candidates.
Political operatives do.
No, they would never do anything like that:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
(And, whether wikileaks meaningfully coordinated with trump campaign is debatable)
That's basically a press conference, which are both a mainstay of journalism and you'll see particularly well connected journalists leak what a press conference will be about before it happens.
The better ones you can't tell so easily.
After 2016, i went from getting "oh you radical crazy commie" looks wearing a wikileaks shirt to immediately "oh you're a republican, let me guess you listen to alex jones and joe rogan?"
We should really work on depolarisation.
Also, I'm not sure where this "keep friends and family separate from business" idealogy came from, but business is just organizing production. If we're not going to try to hold those keys with our friends and family, then elites will hold them for us.
Side note-no actual progress can come until there is sound money again.
The problem with the premise that the establishment is a lot like The Matrix. Some people are so hopelessly enamoured with the establishment that they will do whatever it takes to defend it.
The flip side of this is that we're apparently focusing on the wrong things.
Assange was prosecuted under Trump, now he's being prosecuted under Biden. Who were we realistically supposed to vote for in order to make this stop? If this is the only front then we lost before there was even a vote.
The real problem is, which party represents the finance industry? Both of them. Which party is the party of small business? Neither of them. Strong antitrust enforcement? Reducing the scope of wasteful bureaucracy, as distinct from regulatory capture? It's not on the ballot.
How do we fix it? Maybe start here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/clinton-fracking-theworl...
https://www.salon.com/2016/10/18/leaked-email-hillary-clinto...
It's both, just the voters don't get told that.
It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-ri...
They could easily have used the same style of attacks that were used against Trump. "Kids in cages" was the case under Obama, and Trump, and Biden, but we only heard about it under Trump.
They wouldn't have used the same issues because those are the issues you use against a Republican, but the same format works against anyone. Under Sanders there would have been huge concerns about the deficit. Any tax increase impacting the middle class would be condemned but the middle class would inherently have to pay more to have single payer healthcare, so you fight it with "tax increase bad" not "healthcare bad." Not having to pay health insurance premiums would either be ignored or condemned as a giveaway to employers.
They'd find some black families who support school vouchers to go on TV and accuse him of being a racist for supporting existing "racist public schools" and things along those lines.
The general idea is to be horrified to learn that things that have been happening for years have suddenly been discovered happening under the target administration, but choose the things related to the direction they want to move. As if the Overton window is not only not covering what they want to change, it no longer even covers the status quo, and we have to go in the opposite direction or he's literally Hitler (or, presumably, Stalin). So you burn up all their political capital just to stand still while turning the viewer against them no matter what they do. Then four years later the status quo remains intact.
Why do we need a huge federal military in peacetime when we have the state national guard? Why do we need federal welfare programs instead of state welfare programs? It's not an argument against having a military or having welfare programs, it's a question of where to do it. And the US federal government is the wrong place, because it's too big.
"Laboratories of democracy" are a public good, but you can't have them if Uncle Sam is sucking up the public's money and giving it to Raytheon and drug companies and whoever instead of letting the states and the people have that money to implement a diverse set of independent programs and allowing citizens to decide which they want to live under.
Most of which was caused by 20th century screwing up of the original design. US Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures, to represent the states and temper federal power. The 16th amendment, federal taxation without apportionment, provides the perverse incentive for federal spending to increase without bound because you then have the large majority of states as net recipients of federal spending which is coming from a handful of states who are outnumbered. And guess which ones they are -- you wouldn't know it by asking their representatives because given the setup, they have no incentive not to feed from the same trough even while their residents are getting fleeced.
The good news is most of the taker states are still around breakeven and many of those (like Texas) would likely support fixing this if the likes of New York and Massachusetts would take notice that doing so is strongly in their own interest. (The biggest takers are the swing states, for reasons that should be obvious, but the red and blue states outnumber the purple states -- if they'd work together.)
In a blessed future when we figure out a less totalitarian way to organize ourselves, Americans can still live together and trade with each other. The value of federal spending can be overstated, even for "net winners". Sure it's free money, but it's calibrated to the needs of those who hire lobbyists. No existing entitlement program is as beneficial to the population as just giving directly to individual humans would be.
Several factors that keep some Americans opposed to entitlements would no longer apply in the "laboratories of democracy" situation. No population is actually as hard-ass about deficits as some current representation claims, due to nondemocratic aspects of how such representation is currently elected. Simply redirecting the spigot of "free money" deficit spending away from armaments toward anything beneficial to humans would be a windfall. Spending on children would encourage young families to locate nearby instead of moving to the coasts, so eventually the hollowing-out middle states would see the benefits no matter their "traditional" opposition.
In fact, much of the traditional politics of both the "winners" and "losers" are simply negotiating positions that would disappear without a federal government. "Loser" states sending resources to "winner" states is the way that they "bribe" seemingly opposed representatives into accepting entitlement spending. It has much more to do with politics than with what particular areas "need" or "produce".
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/45vsg1/til_c...
(He's old, so a natural heart attack is certainly plausible. But, the powers that be had means, motive and opportunity)
Would he have been as embarrassing and corrupt, probably not, but there more to an administration than all of that.
Or TLDR if you're not going to get good at making sausage stop applying for positions at the sausage factory.
This is 100% a perfect distillation of a great criticism of Sanders from the left and on merits.
I think it's often also undersold how often he's been terribly wrong about foreign policy in the past and how he almost never walks it back.
And in the unlikely event you create a genuine third party, the current two parties will drop all their differences to destroy that party.
Wat. Is this GPT3 or something?