Glen Greenwald on the firing of Guardian reporter for reporting on US aid to Israel

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

I hope people on the right, deeply and justifiably concerned with how media outlets casually fire people the minute they express a banished view, will look at what happened here & vehemently condemn it even if they disagree with the punished view.

The Guardian is utter shit:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359530637749805063

Nathan J Robinson

@NathanJRobinson

One of the most serious threats to free speech is the silencing of criticism of the government of Israel.

I have now found this out the hard way, having just been fired as a Guardian columnist for sending a tweet about US military aid to Israel

I knew that this sort of censorship happened. I have long argued that the most pernicious “cancel culture” is the one directed toward pro Palestinian speech. But I was shocked at how blatant it was. They were very clear I was being fired for criticism of US policy

toward Israel.

Losing a job right now is really difficult. Very clear how effective this is in keeping people silent. At-will employment means writers can be put under high pressure to not say anything politically that their boss disagrees with. You can see how easily opinions are stifled.

I am lucky, however, that I have an independent platform at my own small leftist magazine. This means that I have more ability to speak, because I can survive without getting another newspaper column. If I was freelance it would be much more difficult.

https://mobile.twitter.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1359529602243297282

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/02/how-the-media-cracks-down-on-critics-of-israel

>>55503

Not so good bro. Good luck.

>>55500

Can fill in if needed wakes, just holla.

Stellar article from Greenwald on the stazi-state of journalism

The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows

The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows free conversation.

A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on earth where humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people are free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone — influential or obscure — who is saying something they believe should be forbidden, and then use the corporate megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed in order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate managers or challenges their information hegemony.

More at

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship

The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta

The Thirty Tyrants

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Full piece at

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

>>55519

>>ORDER66

Hoooooooooah

Haven’t seen it mentioned for a while gb. Is this an unusual sighting?