I'm a huge fan of what he made The Intercept into, but I think his departure came at the exact moment he crossed from "reasonable... most of the time" to completely insane.
My favorite Intercept drama was when their reporters [broke a scoop that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into American voting systems in 2016](https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/) and Greenwald immediately took to Twatter to [express skepticism about his own outlet's reporting](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/871832554604818432).
Ultimately, the leaked documents in that story proved authentic enough that [the Intercept's source was arrested](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner), which overshadowed everything else about it.
The maddening thing about types like Greenwald is that the American National Security State needs watchdogs. But all too often, the people who decide to take that task upon themselves (e.g., Assange, Greenwald) decide that if the American National Security State does some bad shit, then it follows that Uncle Vlad must be a stand-up good guy because he opposes it.
It’s very interesting how trump just ... broke a lot of people. A lot of otherwise principled people, including those who I agreed and disagreed with, just lost their fucking minds over the last four years. It’s utterly bizarre.
Tankies have always been nuts, but they’re pretty rare nowadays. What’s new is this “Democrats make me so angry that I need to ally myself with fascists to get them”. It reminds me a bit of the left trying to use the rise of the nazis against each other rather than stopping the nazis. This is not a comforting comparison.
To be fair, it's not just that he won a pulitzer. He's done major work in domestic spying and on corruption in Brazil. Lots of us who appreciate that work are the same people who might be irritated by his conspiracy theorizing and vendetta against social justice. It's enough to make one feel conflicted.
Greenwald has also been interviewed
by a white
supremacist on Substack, made tweets
about how the real problem is Black Crime after the recent
white supremacist mass shooting, and played
into fears about lesbians being pressured to identify as trans based
on a misreading of a table. These ideas are markedly similar to what you
hear from NRx and right-rationalists.
I would argue that this is the outcome of the anti-liberal-elite
politics Scott describes in his Modest Proposal. This is the
result of allying with the right to attack the status quo: being, very
charitably, a useful idiot like Scott Alexander was for the NRx
movement. Though I think both Glenn and Scott have both said enough that
it’s clear they are more than mere useful idiots. Perhaps a better
example would be Yudkowsky, funded in his early days by Thiel (who is
fully enlightened, according
to Moldbug).
I would actually guess that Glenn’s politics are genuinely left-wing
in some ways. But I would also wager that Scott is liberal in certain
respects, and yet Scott has trafficked, with apparent intent, the “good
ideas” from Race Realism and NRx into the Rationalist community. What
could Glenn achieve with a much bigger audience?
The “guy you knew as an intellectual a few years ago is now a rightwing propagandist” trope is pretty common and documented in Germany at least; I found this relevant (German-language only, sorry) writeup recently: http://www.getidan.de/gesellschaft/georg_seesslen/76722/renegaten-verraeter-konvertiten-ueberlaeufer-oder-ueberzeugungstaeter; they present some ideas of why that happens, but I don’t think there’s a really coherent explanation there yet, besides each one falling for one or another concerted recruitment tactic.
If Google Translate is translating it correctly, the article's proposed explanations are:
1. Progressivism is dominant in modern politics and mainstream culture, so for an intellectual who wants to seem like, or to think of themselves as, a heroic fighter against or sympathetic victim of the establishment, supporting the actually un-prestigious politics of the right makes that more plausible. (This is similar to Scott Siskind's argument [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/).)
2. Some degree of nationalism had been present in the populist part of the older Left, making nationalism and associated forms of conservatism more intuitive to older leftists disenchanted with modern progressivism.
3. Some leftists start by criticizing some aspect of modern politics (the article cites Hendryk Broder criticizing part of the left's antisemitism and Heino Bosselmann criticizing the German education system) and find a more attentive audience for such criticism on the right than the left or center.
4. Many 'leftists' have just become establishment neoliberals or progressives (the article suggests that this is because many of them became leftists out of a desire for liberation from tradition &c. in their personal lives which they have by now achieved), so people whose leftism was based on being anti-establishment are attracted to the Right because it is more anti-establishment now than the progressives.
5. Many leftists-turned-rightists oppose or dislike the atomizing individualism accepted by the Left.
6. Modern progressivism hasn't done enough to help the lower classes but has deemphasized the issue of class or (the article claims) denied that it was still relevant, repelling many people interested in reducing or ameliorating poverty and social immobility.
7. For public intellectuals, right-wing takes get more attention, especially if they are from former leftists denouncing the left.
8. Some leftists developed an excessive and pervasive paranoia of political power, which now drives them to support the right against the political power of modern progressivism.
9. Leftists who want to change politics and society "from the ground up" are naturally attracted to narratives of crisis and catastrophe, which the modern Right provides (the article especially mentions European fear of Middle Eastern immigrants).
Then again, I didn't entirely understand the article (I'm not sure how much of this was due to Google mistranslating and how much to my own failings), so this is probably not entirely correct.
"Cthulhu always swims left" is a phrase coined by NRx to describe the supposed trend for democratic governments to become more left-wing over time (and thus more dysfunctional).
Moldbug argues that democratic societies are actually oligarchies controlled by left-wing hierarchies (the media, academia, hollywood) constituting the *Cathedral.* The people with real influence are *priests*, located somewhere in this hierarchy. The solution, if you listen to Moldbug, is control by a just hierarchy. This can be in the form of Monarchy, or rule by corporations unshackled from their subservience to the *Cathedral.* The post Glenn links to describes how corporations are not the enemy, they are simply being subservient to the *Cathedral*. Essentially, Zuckerberg is being forced to censor by the liberals.
This insane ideology might sound like a bad joke, but it has real influence. After all, *Glenn Greenwald* is endorsing it as a more detailed explanation of his views on big tech. It's also the basis for Thiel's desire for a [libertarian paradise in international waters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading). Scott Alexander's [*Modest Proposal*](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans) is clearly influenced by it. One could also make a connection to the rationalist desire for a god-king AI.
And yeah, I definitely deserve to be made fun of for knowing this much about NRx ideology.
>"Cthulhu always swims left" is a phrase coined by NRx to describe the supposed trend for democratic governments to become more left-wing over time (and thus more dysfunctional).
Has Curtis experienced the 21st century?
One of the amazing things of the world is that people can see one event and draw radical different conclusions.
Like jordan b peterson talking about trans issues, explaining how gender is a social construct, that only people themselves can say which gender they are and then concluding 'this makes no sense' instead of 'that makes sense'. (Saw a clip of him doing this recently, and I was confused by him drawing the transphobic conclusion).
Or the 20th? In matters of economics and government, America took a *huge* swing to the right from the 60s until very recently. But gay people can get married, and we're still not a monarchy, so it doesn't count.
I think the real issue for the right is that they lost a lot of the social arguments badly. The fact that gay people and women are now liberated grinds their gears badly, and they’ll support fascists to win that argument via force.
They’re completely oblivious to how successful they’ve actually been in getting power and passing laws.
Cultural resentment politics- what they really want is for everybody to treat them with the deference and respect they feel they are due. Materially they still are near the top of our hierarchies, but they can't act with impunity in interpersonal interactions (no casual slurs, no sexual harassment, no outright classism). So even though they have consolidated economic and institutional power, they don't *feel* powerful, which to a reactionary authoritarian is ultimately more important.
> And yeah, I definitely deserve to be made fun of for knowing this much about NRx ideology
Nah Greenwald promoting it shows that this is getting scary relevant. Not many people watch these proto fascists and authoritarians.
E: esp as the new far right loves to speak in code (not much changed there) we need people who can understand and explain what they mean, without being part of the libertarian->fascist pipeline.
Since you've read their theory so that I don't have to, mind if I ask: What's their proposal for dealing with the relatively common historical problem of a monarch who starts out fine and then becomes intermittently incapable due to mental illness or age-related degeneration or just plain old illness? A repeated theme of medieval history is, "And then the country went to shit for thirty years because the king was too messed up to properly govern but not messed up enough to justify appointing a regent," and I figure they have to have some kind of answer for that problem.
Moldbug in particular thinks that "shareholder monarchy" is the rightful successor to hereditary monarchy. This looks something like fiefdoms controlled by private corporations. The corporation's CEO is the monarch in this analogy, and a CEO who fails to generate sufficient profits for the shareholders of the "shareholder monarchy" can be replaced, much like in a modern company. No, I'm not kidding.
Though I don't think this "solution" is necessarily the part of the ideology that has spread to Glenn. The Cathedral diagnosis is the part of the ideology that has wings.
Ah, so not a monarchy at all, since even elective monarchies wait until the monarch dies or abdicates before picking a new one. More like a dictator chosen and replaced by the rich, then, I guess?
Moldbug essentially thinks absolute monarchy was the best available social technology at the time, which is why forms of it were used in both political and commercial sectors, but commercial sectors have since developed better mechanisms for power disputes at the top (the contractual checks and balances around shareholders, an executive, and the board that ideally do not interfere with daily executive action) so a "restoration" of the ethos that drove absolutism will adopt those social technology innovations for political organization. That's really the key to this whole thing: they LARP as jacobites in powdered wigs, but their greatest desire is to transplant Samsung's org chart into a bunch of city-states.
Of course, this doesn’t even work for corporations. The board and executives drive companies into the metaphorical rocks *all the damned time*. We just accept that as a society because no single corporation is that important to society, and we use destructive competition to kill off old companies that are poorly lead and replace them with newer, better ones.
This would work terribly with the state, which by its very nature must be a monopoly within its own borders.
I could've sworn that the innovations in corporate governance which led to modern forms mostly happened under (and in parallel with the development of) republican and parliamentary governments, and that absolutist governments mostly gave us innovations in bureaucratic organization, but... anyway... I'm already deeper into this than I wanted to get.
Not quite. The East India Company (EIC) for example developed under a set of political circumstances that couldn’t strictly be called Parliamentary, beyond the fact that Parliament existed, and acted in roughly the way Moldbug is describing anyway. Since the EIC was a great innovator in the origins of corporate governments you might be going a bridge too far.
I think I could make a pretty good case, from northern Italian republics through the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA, with an occasional side trip to republican France and the British Dominions, for the parallel development of parliamentary/republican institutions and business governance. (If I tried hard enough, I could probably even tie many specific people to both sides of the development, people who brought parliamentary-style procedures to their business ventures while using their parliamentary influence to advance their businesses.)
But... besides being too lazy to actually do that, I think I'm getting the impression that Moldbug, like you say, is looking as much for Parliament-circa-1600 as he is for an absolute monarch. Combine Iran's Assembly of Experts choosing the Supreme Leader with the Delaware Court of Chancery? Revive the spirit of an age when government was of the business classes, by the business classes, for the business classes with a patina of ancient holy monarchy to keep it respectable?
Yeah. And I should probably spend more of my time learning about good governance ideas than dumb governance ideas. At least I know a little more about what I'm sneering at with Moldbug than I did before, so thanks for that.
While the existence of corporations didnt happen under strictly parliamentary govenrment in the modern sense, it was also far from under absolutism. (which seems to be a general problem that Moldbug and his ilk fails to recognize: That the number of monarchs who could make absolutist pretensions with some degree of seriousness were pretty rare, and even then in practice things tended to be much more complicated)
I imagine their ideal king is in reality a CEO, and that the corporation that's in charge of everything just selects a new one.
FWIW, hereditary monarchy is not that old - but it was instituted in reaction to previous elected monarchies because those quickly devolved into civil wars as different warlords who felt passed over tried to seize power by force.
I've read that Henry VIII didn't kill off all his wives because he wanted fresh booty, it was because he had an institutional memory of the horrors of the War of the Roses and wanted a legitimate heir.
Both hereditary monarchy and elected monarchy had a lot of “largest army succession” moments. The only reason why the medieval world wasn’t terribly bloody is because the states these kings ruled over were poor and inefficient administrators over their wealth. Most of them couldn’t afford even one of the multiple armies that ancient empires would regularly lose, so while wars were driven by the whims of unstable monarchs, they were at least relatively small comparatively.
The real issue came when you tied the instability of monarchies to modern administrative states which are capable of producing and running massive armies. That is a nightmare scenario, and it’s part of why the time from basically Napoleon until the end of WW2 was so damned bloody.
Most of that time was actually relatively not that bloody, and most of the blood that was shed was shed in the colonies and not due to monarchical politics.
>I've read that Henry VIII didn't kill off all his wives because he wanted fresh booty, it was because he had an institutional memory of the horrors of the War of the Roses and wanted a legitimate heir.
I know this is a silly thing to nitpick, but he only killed two of them. In fact, he literally made a new official religion for England just so he could have a divorce instead.
I have no idea why the right seems to think that Zuckerberg is this great ally to the left in its goal to censor the right; have these people never been on Facebook? The top shared post is always from Ben Shapiro.
Sheesh. Well thanks for the write up, it's very helpful. I was googling it and found some quotes and stuff but I definitely wasn't about to read Unqualified Reservations to figure it out.
Glenn is one of those people who make useful evidence for horseshoe theory. Maybe he’s left wing personally, but he’s so far left wing that he’s supporting actual fascists and religious theocrats.
The sad thing is that if he has his way, his own allies will put him against the wall, and I don’t think he realizes it.
I've never seen any evidence that Glenn Greenwald is 'left' beyond a few vague anti-war opinions. Has he ever shown an understanding of socialist political theory?
the only evidence that Glenn Greenwald is "left" is when anyone says he isn't, he gets very very angry. he also thinks "neocon" is a meaningful name for a thing he opposes (beyond the 9/11 context, when he.. supported the neocons. all is well though)
Greenwald is such a notorious sack of shit that, when he's gracious toward leftists, [they feel obligated to (weakly) defend his honor](https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1374157616046350337?s=19), which is a familiar dynamic with bullies.
Left in the sense us leftists use the term, no. Progressive--scrolling through his Intercept articles, he generally reported more favorably on progressive candidates, criticized big ag, opposed Islamophobia, supported BLM (well, [mostly](https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/the-abrupt-radical-reversal-in-how-public-health-experts-now-speak-about-the-coronavirus-and-mass-gatherings/)), and criticized Israel's policies towards Palestinian. His general opposition to American militarism and surveillance goes without saying.
That evidence might be outweighed by his comments on Twitter or whatever, but it's still pretty understandable, IMHO, that he would be viewed as progressive.
Glenn is 'left' in the sense that he critiques both the Republican party and the Democratic party. So not really left, but you might think so if your brain's broken by tte US's fucked up politics.
Greenwald began writing from a “left” perspective after turning from much more conservative sentiments. About (I think) maybe 20-odd years ago. So I suppose you could make a minor case for his becoming more left-wing.
His motivation was primarily from his perspective as a defender of constitutional law during the Bush years.
So he’s basically a constitutionalist liberal, at least in theory.
Well, which race _is_ statistically over-represented when it comes to gun violence? You cannot simply wave this fact away with cries of “neoreactionary!”. It's similarly disingenuous to associate any deviation from hard blank-slatism with ominous ‘Race Realism’ and implications that anyone who questions blank-slatism is on a slippery slope to ultracatholic archconservative neoreactionry fascism.
[Nothing is ever permanent](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/551520.The_Wisdom_of_Insecurity), every political order and paradigm comes and goes, and changes in our understanding of the world are threatening the current one, with denialism of the inherent ambiguity and insecurity of our age taking, in the extremes, the form of both an abject defense of the old status-quo and a similarly narrow marriage with some particular, paradise-promising alternative. Both approaches offer their adherents an escape from the increasing sense of a loss of certainty and legitimacy for our social order.
Glenn could at any point, take a break from twitter to enjoy his
lovely mansion situated in a tropical paradise, and relax by spending
his time with his hot husband and many adorable dogs but he chooses to
spent 18 hours a day angrily posting like he has nothing better to do. A
true icon.
wow. nobody is more critical of Glenn’s assholery than I am, and yet
even I would not have predicted him getting this explicit & falling
as far as he has recently (at least in public–I think he was always this
low in reality). it is especially remarkable that so many people still
don’t see through his grift.
You can really see this from how the related tweets Twitter shows after his tweets have changed: they used to be your typical left wing stuff, slowly started to show some right wing stuff, and on this one it's literally Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern, And Ngo, James Lindsay and, worst of all(?) ... Stephen Miller. So the twitter algorithm thinks that *these* are the people who would most interest someone who liked this tweet of Greenwald's, which I think is pretty telling
I’m not sure he wasn’t always fash-adjacent, as a civil rights lawyer at the very start of his career did he not do a disproportionate amount of freeze peech for Nazis work?
I’ve always found him suspect tbh.
Yeah. While there are principled libertarians in the mold of old-school ACLU, it's incredibly suspicious when said principled libertarians' principles almost always seem to involve defending fash.
I mean, even if I didn’t think free speech absolutism is one of the dumbest positions going when it’s not totally disingenuous, if I was allocating scarce legal resources for civil rights litigation you can be sure that Neo Nazis would be at the very back of the queue.
That’s not inherently fascist adjacent. Free speech restrictions always come for unpopular speech first, so tons of reasonable non-fascist civil rights groups and lawyers end up defending the free speech rights of incredibly despicable people.
> Free speech restrictions always come for unpopular speech first
this is a well-known view, and obviously has many adherents, but it seems worth pointing out that it is not universally accepted by legal scholars and other thinkers on the left who do support free speech as one among many human rights, but do not necessarily think the US doctrine of pseudo-absolute free speech actually does protect "unpopular" speech that is more associated with the left than the right, or that protecting the speech of minorities and legitimate leftist political speech necessitates the defense of antidemocratic fascists--and who question whether the motives for asserting that one must defend Nazis in order to defend communists and Black civil rights advocates are as obvious as they seem. The most narrowly targeted work on this is Delgado and Stefancic (central scholars of critical race theory in legal studies), *Must We Defend Nazis?* which, agree with it or not, is well worth reading.
One critical observation they and others make is that in practice, especially in the US, the doctrine of "absolute" free speech (which is kind of a fraud) has been deployed far more often to defend Nazis than anyone else, especially civil rights protestors and communists.
So in the most charitable interpretation they’re so blinded by dogma that they end up becoming useful idiots for fascism.
Coming from Europe and in particular from a country with a comparatively abridged free speech rights in law, I always find it weird how worked up some American liberals get about the rights of Nazis to promote their genocidal ideology. You would have no legal recourse here over something like that, yet I’ve personally never felt like my freedom of thought or expression has been curtailed in any way. I guess that’s because I’ve never tried to promote fascism. Funny how that works.
Speaking of “unpopular speech”, also, I’m always somewhat baffled that apparently mainly Nazis that they chose to take a stand for.
Honestly, I understand that at least *some* of them are coming at it in good faith, but I really feel like those ones should read their Foucault and think about how power and discourse actually operate. Of course, many of the others, such as Glenn I suspect, understand this just fine.
He's always kind of been like that. You can find old articles on his blog complaining that anti-Bush protestors in Argentina are too far left:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/meet-oh-so-noble-peace-protestors-in.html
Quite.
My general impression is that as time has gone on he's become more and more reflexively anti-mainstream Dem to the point where he disagrees even when they have a good take.
Personally I’d avoid saying “Moldbug”. Call him Curtis Yarvin.
“Mencius Moldbug” sounds like a hogwarts professor - fun, whimsical,
weird, out there - whereas Curtis Yarvin sounds like an asshole.
His big break case decades ago was defending a WS, one of whose followers went on an anti-POC rampage while the trial was ongoing(Greenwald claimed judging the guy for someone he was closely affiliated with doing what he had been telling people to do for years was "guilt by association"), and his early writings are littered with reacrionary ideological buzz-talk and
The dude has always been like this, just more genteel about it.
Yeah it's real weird, like others in the comments pointed out it's this streak of contrarism that both goes hard for and directly against what he claims to be about.
Remember, he rage quit from his own publication because the editors he hired asked him to provide *evidence* for his assertions, and that was the last straw.
Our society is being guided towards the rocks by crazy people with poor emotional regulation.
Glenn has a unique talent for doing things that by rights would lead to nobody taking him seriously ever again
but he won a pulitzer so hes never going to go away ever
Greenwald has also been interviewed by a white supremacist on Substack, made tweets about how the real problem is Black Crime after the recent white supremacist mass shooting, and played into fears about lesbians being pressured to identify as trans based on a misreading of a table. These ideas are markedly similar to what you hear from NRx and right-rationalists.
I would argue that this is the outcome of the anti-liberal-elite politics Scott describes in his Modest Proposal. This is the result of allying with the right to attack the status quo: being, very charitably, a useful idiot like Scott Alexander was for the NRx movement. Though I think both Glenn and Scott have both said enough that it’s clear they are more than mere useful idiots. Perhaps a better example would be Yudkowsky, funded in his early days by Thiel (who is fully enlightened, according to Moldbug).
I would actually guess that Glenn’s politics are genuinely left-wing in some ways. But I would also wager that Scott is liberal in certain respects, and yet Scott has trafficked, with apparent intent, the “good ideas” from Race Realism and NRx into the Rationalist community. What could Glenn achieve with a much bigger audience?
Glenn could at any point, take a break from twitter to enjoy his lovely mansion situated in a tropical paradise, and relax by spending his time with his hot husband and many adorable dogs but he chooses to spent 18 hours a day angrily posting like he has nothing better to do. A true icon.
wow. nobody is more critical of Glenn’s assholery than I am, and yet even I would not have predicted him getting this explicit & falling as far as he has recently (at least in public–I think he was always this low in reality). it is especially remarkable that so many people still don’t see through his grift.
the twitter account https://twitter.com/GlemGreenwald surely belongs in the sneer Hall of Fame, so at least there’s that
Greenwald’s descent from left-libertarian to fash-adjacent has been…something.
Personally I’d avoid saying “Moldbug”. Call him Curtis Yarvin. “Mencius Moldbug” sounds like a hogwarts professor - fun, whimsical, weird, out there - whereas Curtis Yarvin sounds like an asshole.
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Glenn, what are you doing? Glenn, stahp!
fascinating occurrence
“Gray Mirror” is Moldbug?