Glenn Greenwald Twitter
- Glenn Greenwald Twitter Matt Gaetz
- Twitter.com Glenn Greenwald
- Glenn Greenwald Twitter Quote
- Glenn Greenwald Twitter
Libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald, a frequent Fox News guest, this week said that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has the right to have sex with a 'consenting' 17-year-old girl.
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Greenwald made the remarks on Twitter although Gaetz has denied that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz has also said that he is innocent of sex trafficking allegations.
'All or some of these accusations against Rep. Gaetz very well may be true and, one day — perhaps imminently — there will be ample publicly available evidence demonstrating this,' Greenwald wrote on Twitter. 'But that day has not yet arrived. That should matter for how the case is discussed.'
He went on to note that the age of consent is 16 or 17 in 37 states, although it's illegal for a 38-year-old man to have sex with a 17-year-old girl in Florida.
If you don't think it should be legal for 17 year-olds to have sex with anyone they want, go write to the governors and legislatures in 37 states & the District of Columbia which made it legal. I'm not the one who passed those laws.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 12, 2021
'If you don't think it should be legal for 17 year-olds to have sex with anyone they want, go write to the governors and legislatures in 37 states & the District of Columbia which made it legal. I'm not the one who passed those laws,' Greenwald said in defense of Gaetz.
He failed to note that many states that allow 16 or 17 year olds to have sex require that both consenting partners be of similar ages. For example, Virginia has a close in age exemption that allows teens between 15-17 to have sex with each other. At age 38, Gaetz could not legally have sex with a 17-year-old girl in Virginia because the de facto age of consent is 18 years old.
But Greenwald refused to back down in his defense of Gaetz.
'I think consenting adults should be able to do what they want in their private lives and those who try to control them or restrict their choices or impose judgments on moral grounds are creepy sexual morality police similar to the Moral Majority & Pat Robertson of the 1980s,' he opined.
I think consenting adults should be able to do what they want in their private lives and those who try to control them or restrict their choices or impose judgments on moral grounds are creepy sexual morality police similar to the Moral Majority & Pat Robertson of the 1980s.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 12, 2021
Greenwald did not address the allegations of sex trafficking.
The simplest answer may be inertia, and time—essentially, nothing—but for better or worse I have a particular fixation on this question, and there is no denying Greenwald has become, shall we say, more problematic over the last couple of years.
Glenn Greenwald needs no introduction, so suffice it to say: he first came to prominence as an anti-Bush blogger, became a sort of celebrity when he published much of the Snowden reporting in The Guardian, and subsequently (along with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, with funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) co-founded The Intercept, where he worked until his apparently acrimonious exit this week.
Lately most Greenwald columns tend towards highly specific media criticisms of mainstream liberal outlets, like MSNBC and the New York Times. At least I think they do—I haven’t read one of his columns fully in months, because they’re insufferable. At this point, Greenwald seems to have almost no ideology besides reflexive contrarianism. Perhaps this is simply the end result of spending hours on Twitter every day for years, or spending two (or four?) years focused laser-like on the Russia inquiry. His incessant—and often finely detailed, and articulate—criticisms have transformed the man into a kind of fanatic.
Glenn Greenwald Twitter Matt Gaetz
More problematic, obviously, this tendency towards contrarian criticism has increasingly aligned him with the far right. Some of this can clearly be chalked up to the simplification of information within the context of social media; self-reinforcing media bubbles are created. But we pick our bubbles, and Greenwald appears to be comfortable with his niche.
It is worth noting that the rhetorical overlap between Greenwald and the far right was always there, but could, in the past, usually be plausibly discounted as both-sides hostility towards a corrupt elite—consider the comparisons between Trump and Bernie. Or at least that’s how I felt. No longer. Take a look at Greenwald’s Twitter feed, which reads as an unending stream of right-wing grievance against cultural liberalism, and/or specific and almost exclusive amplification of right-wing media.
Twitter.com Glenn Greenwald
Greenwald and others in his niche (like Matt Taibbi, who has taken a similar turn) might counter that they serve as reliable, and perhaps anti-partisan, media critics, in reaction to a hegemonic, neoliberal media elite. This may be partially true, but the justification appears increasingly irrelevant as they come to identify—admitimgly or not—with one side of the partisan divide. This is to say nothing of the fact that their insistence to the contrary ultimately lends cover to the far right, who are able to launder their media through the ‘contrarian’ niche.
At face value one wonders how Greenwald, who made such a name for himself as an opponent to the national security state, and who lives as a prominent gay journalist, married to a Socialist congressman, in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, can now spend so much time and energy effectively running cover for the American fascist right. But, as I suggested above, the answer may be uncomplicated. Clearly, Greenwald’s fixation on the vapidity of the American liberal media elite—coupled with his experience of American domestic politics through a curated, algorithmic Twitter feed—has narrowed, and hardened, the aperture through which he sees the world. Moreover, as the targets of his criticism increasingly and desperately associate cultural liberalism with a neoliberal agenda, both become targets for Greenwald, and he finds himself neatly aligned with the far right. Still, this is a charitable reading, given Greenwald’s intelligence and presumed awareness of the dynamic.
Glenn Greenwald Twitter Quote
I often compare Glenn to his colleague Jeremy Scahill, whose podcast, Intercepted, I regularly listened to over the first couple years of the Trump administration—and who recently released an audio documentary recapping, quite artfully, the last four years of Trump. Scahill, like Greenwald, had a natural skepticism of the obvious bizarreness of the Russia fixation. Unlike Greenwald, he covered this and related topics with nuance, emphasizing that while Trump-as-Manchurian-candidate was clearly crazy, serious questions of corruption remained. More importantly, also unlike Greenwald, Scahill never cedes any ground to what was and is obviously a fascistic, right-wing movement, one Greenwald repeatedly dismisses as an imagined liberal hysteria (or, indulges).
Glenn Greenwald Twitter
I will conclude by emphasizing that Greenwald was instrumental in my own political understanding around 2015-2016, and I recall his piece following the last election was one of the first and most sensible I read after Trump had won. Clearly, he has held this role for others. But at this point, unless he alters course, he is a spent—and possibly dangerous—voice in US politics.