How Glenn Greenwald lost his way

The problem is that Greenwald’s skepticism is applied selectively. Anyone who had anything to do with the Bush administration, anyone who was once insufficiently skeptical of it (including many Democrats), and any media company that has hired or given a megaphone to administration staffers or one-time defenders now works under a cloud of absolute and permanent suspicion in Greenwald’s mind—while anyone who shares that suspicion of Bush-era Republicans, center-left Democrats, and mainstream media outlets gets treated as a trusted ally in pursuit of the truth.

I don’t see any other way to account for the fact that Greenwald spent almost the entirety of the Trump administration eviscerating center-left Democrats and journalists for pushing the story of Russian collusion in the 2016 election, about which he was thoroughly (and sometimes justifiedly) skeptical, and yet had very little critical to say about the rampant corruption, incompetence, and insurrectionary lies of the 45th president and his political and media enablers.

Or why Greenwald now mixes intense and sometimes reasonable skepticism of Biden administration statements about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government’s own propaganda with credulous takes about the war that tend to align with what Vladimir Putin and Russian apologists say about the origins of the conflict.

Or why he would continually apply severe (and occasionally well-earned) skepticism to Rachel Maddow and MSNBC over their news coverage and analysis while the right-wing fear-mongering, demagoguery, and agitprop of Tucker Carlson and Fox News are allowed to slide.