Glenn Greenwald Speaks Truth to Reply Guys
At various points in the past decade, I’ve considered Glenn Greenwald an inspiration (for his righteous criticism of Barack Obama’s drone strikes, Israel’s human-rights violations, and the justice system’s class biases); a credit to leftist bloggers everywhere (for his unlikely but not unearned receipt of Edward Snowden’s leaks and subsequent transformation into an international celebrity); a polemicist who’s doing righteous and brave work in Brazil, but has gotten a bit too fixated on owning the libs (for treating hyperbolic coverage of an investigation into a presidential campaign’s genuine improprieties as the biggest outrage of the Trump era); and objectively a Republican (for subjecting all major media figures to unsparing criticism except for the blatantly dishonest and racist stars of America’s most-watched cable network, defending the U.S. Senate as a vital check against majoritarian tyranny, and saying on national television, days before the 2020 election, that the prospect of the Democratic Party reclaiming power was “a very alarming proposition because they are authoritarian”).
But I’m not sure I’ve ever considered him quite as tedious as I did while reading his latest Substack blog, “The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates.” If you have always wanted to know what it feels like to get stuck in a nonconsensual, one-way conversation with a libertarian high-school debate captain who’s more in love with his own brain than you will ever be with anyone or anything, Greenwald has just done you a great service. (I can already hear the debate captain shouting “point of personal privilege,” so I’ll try to steer clear of ad hominem from here on out.)
