Glenn Greenwald and the Plot Against America, Part I

To accuse Democratic insiders of conspiring to end Joe Biden's reelection bid, the GOP influencer fabricated the "coup" he needed in order to denounce the cabal's nefarious scheme.

True Colors: Glenn Greenwald and fellow MAGA shills Alex Jones and Darren Beattie, on right, faced off against pro-Democratic political commentators Destiny and the Krassenstein Brothers at a January 6, 2024 debate about whether the Capitol riots three years earlier were “a manufactured crisis.” Team Blue was hopelessly outclassed by Team Red, as Greenwald is a leading expert in manufacturing fact-free political narratives suitable for any occasion.

When I started a job as an investigative reporter at The Intercept in late-2013, I was excited about the opportunity to work with Glenn Greenwald, who I’d long admired. When I resigned from The Intercept 16 months later, I was much less of a fan and my disenchantment grew over the years as Greenwald progressed on his journey from crusading, adversarial journalist to GOP influencer en route to his final destination, where he arrived long ago.

Greenwald brands himself as a model of independent reporting and fearless foe of the corrupt US political and economic oligarchy. Those qualities are absent in his reporting, where he directs virtually all of his easily triggered outrage towards his political enemies while being remarkably indulgent of his friends, who nowadays are overwhelmingly on the right. 

Hence, Greenwald relentlessly portrays top Democrats such as President Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, as irredeemably corrupt and their party as an “authoritarian” entity controlled by corporate oligarchs, hedge fund executives, and other billionaire donors. He’s equally scornful of the mainstream media, MSNBC in particular, which he derides as openly partisan Democratic lapdogs. That’s basically the same way I see things, as would any remotely perceptive journalist or political observer. 

Greenwald isn’t nearly as critical of Republican leaders, in particular Donald Trump, who he has said won the presidency in 2016 “by denouncing and vowing to uproot his own party’s establishment orthodoxies.” He continues to laud him for doing the same thing on the campaign trail this year despite Trump’s abysmal failure to fulfill his past promises during his four years at the White House, undoubtedly because his good intentions were sabotaged by his enemies in the Deep State.

Greenwald also sees great promise in an insurgent wing of the GOP centered in the House Freedom Caucus, headed by the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. The bold upstarts he champions don’t seem significantly less ethically compromised, repression-friendly domestically, or socially conservative than the decrepit Republic establishment they’re supposedly fighting.

The praise he heaps on the House Freedom Caucus for opposing Washington’s bipartisan “foreign policy consensus” is based on a highly selective reading of events as well. Gaetz, Boebert and the group’s other members tend to be lions when it’s politically opportunistic, as in attacking the Biden administration for arming Ukraine, and more like lambs when it requires challenging positions favored by their own party, such as staunch support for Israel, which is at the heart of the political consensus on foreign policy, and an issue Greenwald claims to care about deeply. 

I don’t doubt that but as with his general political worldview, Greenwald is always harsher in his assessment of Democrats than Republicans, and paints members of The Squad as infinitely worse for allegedly selling out the important principles and goals they pretend to care about, which they certainly have been known to do, than their counterparts in the House Freedom Caucus for adhering to their typically rancid beliefs and seeking to impose them on the country. 

During a July 13 installment of System Update, the show he hosts on Rumble that’s currently his primary journalism venue, Greenwald discussed the topic of “What Happened to Gaza in Liberal Discourse?” and criticized Democrats and particularly The Squad, with the exception of Rashida Tlaib, for not really standing up for Palestinians, citing as evidence that they were backing President Joe Biden reelection campaign – this was eight days before he withdrew as the party’s nominee, even though he was the person mainly responsible for US support for Israel’s attempted genocide of Palestinians.

Fair enough, but condemning The Squad for not opposing the party’s incumbent president is a much higher bar than the one he sets for his Republican heroes, at least as far as I can tell from reviewing a good part but not all of Greenwald’s recent coverage, and it’s certainly true in terms of the criticism he directs at the respective sides. To mention one of endless examples, eleven days after the discussion, Israel’s repellent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress at the invitation of GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson. About half of the Democrats in the House and Senate boycotted his speech, including every member of The Squad. 

The only Republican who stayed away was Thomas Massie. Gaetz, Boebert and the rest of the House Freedom Caucus enthusiastically applauded Netanyahu. 

Greenwald is equally hypocritical about the media. He rarely criticizes conservative outlets, especially ones where he regularly appears such as Fox News – at least until last year when he turned against the network for shitcanning his dear friend, “true socialist, and model of journalism excellence Tucker Carlson, whose firing eliminated “the only real sustained dissent on US militarism...and the US Security State” in primetime. He’s also more than happy to share a platform with bottommost bottom feeders Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.

I’m not suggesting Democrats are great when it comes to Israel and Palestine, Middle East policy more broadly, or anything else for that matter. I don’t donate to either of the party’s candidates or vote at all, partly because I live in Washington so it’s pointless, but also because the US political system is totally broken due to both parties having been purchased by the ultra rich long ago, so I don’t believe in feeding the political circus monkeys they have on retainer. But I’d certainly take The Squad over the troglodytes in the House Freedom Caucus any day.

Greenwald’s journalism priorities and positions have become more and more bizarre, and can’t be explained by anything other than a genuine ideological affiliation with the right. I recall him writing years ago that he believed it was more important to cast a critical eye on your friends than your enemies, which is a legitimate point of view because living in an ideological echo chamber is boring and makes you dumber. 

The problem is when Greenwald wrote that, his political views were far further to the left than they are now, as were his allies. The reverse is now the case, so given Greenwald’s more recent distinct embrace of the right, he’s doing the opposite of what he preached back then as he’s still focused almost exclusively on targeting his old friends on the left, but has become even more disinterested in picking fights with the racists, crypto fascists, and conservative billionaires who finance the far right’s agenda, increasingly ties himself into knots in finding the pathetic apologias he offers for them as a way of justifying jumping into bed with his current political partners.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, another breath of political fresh air for Greenwald. “Regardless of what you think about her causes and her ideology – and she is, needless to say, a deeply polarizing figure, as is almost everyone who holds genuinely passionate convictions as a matter of principle,” he once wrote of her, in a variant of his standard approach when preparing to make one of the more cretinous political figures he admires look more palatable. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Greenwald’s approach to journalism is reminiscent of the way some lawyers prepare closing arguments to the jury, namely by sorting through the accumulated evidence and throwing in everything that makes their clients look good and tossing out anything that doesn’t. As a former defense attorney, Greenwald gained a lot of experience in making the facts fit a desired narrative, as he did when representing neo-Nazi Matthew Hale, who was convicted of soliciting an undercover FBI informant to kill a judge that ruled against him in a trademark infringement case.” 

Lawyers are supposed to do their utmost on behalf of all clients, no matter what crimes they’re charged with or how reprehensible their personal views are. Furthermore, the FBI informant prodded Hale to target the judge, so there were plausible grounds to argue that he was entrapped in his ultimately failed effort to overturn his client’s conviction. 

Political reporters aren’t supposed to stack the deck depending on what side they’re on, but Greenwald’s defense of Hale, which was marked by the “viciousness with which he attacked Hale’s critics, as well as the strange and frankly dishonest twists of logic and rhetoric he deployed,” in the words of David Neiwart, became a hallmark of his journalism. His future reporting work was also well captured by his opposing counsel when he represented himself and his then-partner in a lawsuit that charged a New York City landlord had improperly denied them a lease, who said Greenwald had a “wonderful flare of making broad sweeping generalizations without any attention to detail,” and believed his view on any given issue was “the be all and end all.”

Greenwald’s journalism style has been prominently on display recently in his description of a “coup” orchestrated by the Democratic elite that culminated on July 21, with Biden’s withdrawal as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee. It’s also an excellent illustration of his highly refined talent at writing thinly-disguised GOP talking points to make them read more like independent reporting, which in this case was of great service to the Republican Party because it involved what was arguably the most important development of the entire 2024 presidential campaign.

I was first alerted to the nefarious plot against the president when a tweet of Greenwald’s landed in my Twitter feed shortly after Biden announced he was pulling out of the race. “The DNC rats trying to coup Biden out of the race crawl in the sewers, hiding behind anonymity, denying under their names what they’re leaking to friendly journalists,” read the post, which Greenwald had written two days earlier as he espied the scheme unfolding. In another tweet the following day, he wrote, “Stay strong, Joe💪. Don’t let those anonymous, cowardly leaking DC sewer rats get their way.”

Joe Biden is one of Greenwald’s preferred political punching bags, but when he spotted an opportunity to defend him that would help out his right-wing pals, he wasn’t going to waste it, even when it required discreetly flipping the script on his longtime accounts about the president and hoping no one noticed, as will be seen in Part II of this story.

This caught my attention, as I thought Biden had stepped aside a week ago Sunday due to the growing furor that erupted following his disastrous performance at the June 27 debate against Trump, when it became obvious the current occupant of the White House was suffering from severe cognitive decline, other than for  the president’s family and his most loyal supporters who remained in his corner and urged him to resist pressure to step aside. His most important backers in the aftermath of the debate debacle included Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi, and Schumer who Greenwald was now pointing to as the key plotters who organized and implemented the coup.

I was even more surprised because I’d never seen Greenwald mount the barricades in defense of Biden, who’s always one of his favorite punching bags. Furthermore, the coup must clearly amount to a major assault on the the nation’s political system and constitutional order, I imagined, as Greenwald’s bitter denunciation of the plot against the country’s elected leader was far harsher than the occasional criticism he directs at the January 6 protestors who invaded the US Capitol in 2021, or at Trump and his merry band of lunatic associates who used their free time during the riots to press ahead with their efforts to overturn the former president’s defeat to Biden in the previous November’s election.  

In an article he published the following year on Substack on the one-year anniversary of J6, he brutally attacked Trump and his supporters for their involvement in the “lamentable event,” as he labeled it. But to show he was being strenuously fair and balanced as always, he attributed a smidgeon of blame to Democrats for crassly exploiting what in truth was no more than a “three-hour riot,” by exaggerating the whole thing out of proportion to create the perception that their party wasn’t “facing a different ideological camp but rather a band of criminals and domestic terrorists who deserve not a defeat at the ballot box but censorship by a union of state and corporate power, followed by a prison cell.” 

Yet it still wasn’t clear to me how Biden’s overthrow as described by Greenwald and others who joined the chorus, such as brain dead billionaire Trump supporters like David Sacks (“This wasn’t a voluntary abdication; it was a political hit, with Nancy Pelosi as the button”) and Elon Musk (“Shouldn't the nominee be decided by a party vote?") – amounted to a coup. As defined by Merriam-Webster, a coup d’etat is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics, especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” 

Tweet about the “coup” posted by dipshit billionaire Elon Musk, who Greenwald credits with restoring free speech to Twitter.

That would seem to apply far better to what Trump sought to accomplish in January of 2021, putting aside whether the goal of J6 protestors when they arrived at the Capitol was to ensure Trump remain in power, which seems clear, or how close they came to succeeding in that goal, which I’m a lot more skeptical about. Either way, Trump urged demonstrators to come to Washington to support his efforts to extend his term in office against the laws of the land and the will of the voters by overturning the results of the November 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Biden decisively in the Electoral College and by more than 7 million votes, or 4.5 percent, in the popular vote. 

Among the steps Trump took in hopes of accomplishing his goal was threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2 to “find” the votes he needed to make him the winner in the state despite having zero credible to prove the fraud he was alleging, which would have transferred its votes in the Electoral College from Biden to him. Four days later, when the riot at the Capitol began, he and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” pressured Vice President Mike Pence, in the latter’s words, to refuse to certify Biden’s victory.

The sequence of events and actions laid out by promoters of the coup narrative, as indicated in the tweets by Sacks and Musk, is that Democratic voters had selected Biden to be the presidential nominee in the primaries held earlier this year, only to watch powerlessly as an establishment cabal led by “Nancy Pelosi and big hedge fund managers swoop in at the last minute” and pitilessly push aside their legitimately-picked choice after his advanced state of his dementia had become impossible to deny, to use language from Greenwald’s own feverish depiction of the plot. Sacks and Musk are widely seen as cretinous morons, but Greenwald – who for no apparent reason treats the pair and other GOP oligarchs as somehow more virtuous than Democratic megadonors –  is supposed to be independent journalist with contrarian views. He’s also still sometimes treated that way in the media, as the Daily Mail recently did in a story about the president’s withdrawal as the Democratic nominee, when it labeled Greenwald “an anti-Biden left-winger,” so his endorsement of the coup plot storyline carries far more weight.

I was particularly curious to understand Greenwald’s thinking because it seemed to me there waere far more plausible explanations than the one he was peddling. The most obvious was summarized in a nutshell by Edward Luce of the Financial Times, who recently tweeted, “Lot of confused billionaires on here. Stepping down because you’ve lost the support of your party and you’re getting older isn’t a coup. It’s called retirement.” Politico media critic Jack Shafer shared the same general opinion. “Who has written honestly about Biden throwing in the towel -- that he had lost every round and was staggering around like King Lear taking a beating from Sonny Liston and he finally listened to his corner telling him he was spent meat?” he wrote in a post on Twitter. “A little candor would go a long way.” 

Nor was I swayed to rethink that view by the much-discussed July 27 article by the legendary Seymour Hersh, who said Biden only caved to demands to step aside after he had a major medical event at a campaign stop in Las Vegas that was covered up as COVID, and Obama called him with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer and said, “Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,” in the words of his source, an unnamed official. That doesn’t sound plausible to me for many reasons, for example, if three of Biden’s closest allies wanted to press him to withdraw as the nominee, it’s hard to believe they would brusquely threaten him with the 25th and tell him he was to far gone mentally to remain in the race any longer, rather than push him out by gently saying the party no longer believed he could beat Trump and the time had come to let someone with a better chance replace him.

But even if the account from Hersh is perfectly accurate, it still doesn’t amount to a coup, even when added to the evidence cited by Greenwald in his storyline, much of which is logically inconsistent or flatly false. To begin with, Biden is still the president and will remain in office until January. He was replaced as the party’s nominee by his Vice President Kamala Harris, whose political views are extremely similar, and Biden, like the accused plotters, has been a card-carrying member of the Democratic elite for decades and is guaranteed to be unanimously elected on the first ballot to the party’s Hall of Fame. How, then, can his decision to step aside be seen as regime change, even if Obama was deputized to hold a gun at his head? Subbing in Harris isn’t going to lead to any notable policy changes  and the cabal of elite plotters Greenwald points to as the organizers of the scheme to oust him are the ones who picked him to be the Democratic nominee, not the voters as Musk suggests, so he didn’t have a popular mandate either.

Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi and the other key conspirators said to have staged the coup made sure Biden was the 2024 by fixing the year’s primaries to block any possibility that any challenger could win the crown. They did the same thing four years earlier to eliminate any chance that Bernie Sanders — the most left-leaning contender and the one the elite hated most — would emerge triumphant, just as they’d done in 2016 to guarantee the Vermont Senator didn’t defeat their anointed choice back then, future coup conspirator Hillary Clinton. 

After ramming Biden down voters’ throats this year by making him the only possible option, the party royalty protected him, as they’d been doing for a long time, by doing their best to cover up his advancing senility – despite pre-coup polls that showed a large majority of Democratic voters already wanted him to be replaced as the nominee. The elite’s contempt for the base was expressed most openly by Queen Hillary herself, when she mocked Democratic rejectionists by telling them to "get over” themselves. 

The establishment remained solidly in Biden’s corner even after the debate, when they offered flimsy alibis to try to convince Democrats and the media that the president’s dismal performance was due to nothing more than an isolated bad night. When the party elite finally made a backroom decision to force Biden out, which only they could do, in the same way a corporate board must push aside a recalcitrant CEO, they had no more choice in the matter than Biden did to accede to their demand, however the cabal delivered it, because of a revolt by donors to be sure, but older and deeper rebellion by the base as well. When Biden did pull out on July 21, post-coup polls showed as many as 83 percent of voters  approved of his departure.

More than four of five Democratic voters favored Biden stepping aside. Nor had voters ever picked him in fair process because the primaries were rigged to make sure he won by the elite plotters Greenwald accuses of toppling him, in what was far more-anti-democratic than the “coup” that pressuring out a brain addled unpopular candidate without a legitimate popular mandate. Greenwald also had to rewrite his prior assessments about that when fabricating the coup fairytale, as will also be explained in Part II.

Greenwald knew all this because he endlessly repeated the same basic account leading up to the coup, and in virtually the same words, going back for years, and stuck with it until a few weeks ago when it no longer suited his political needs. At that point, he suddenly began mouthing a new version that sounded similar on the basis of the subtle tweaks he made to the script, but turned the original conclusion completely on its head, which made it a perfect fit for the new circumstances. 

I discovered that after reviewing far more of Greenwald’s journalism output than I ever care to again, including past and recent writings, social media posts, and recent commentary he’s offered on System Update and during other media appearances. It’s virtually impossible he didn’t know exactly what he was doing because he altered key points over a very short period of time, in one case within the very same day, as the likelihood that Biden would be replaced, and his past account would need to be as well as a result, moved from a long shot to better than 50-50.

The paper trail begins eight months before the 2020 presidential election, when Greenwald had already diagnosed Biden’s steadily progressing dementia, which he said was “visible to the naked eye.” The electorate remained in the dark, though, thanks to a blackout imposed by Democratic leaders – and enforced by their mainstream media servants – who wanted to keep the information buried as much as possible because they viewed him as their best candidate and didn’t want him to be forced off the ballot before he defeated Trump in the election that November. 

Greenwald was afraid Trump would lose with the same intensity his Democratic enemies hoped to Biden would win, which probably accounts for his overly negative assessment of Biden’s mental frailty in a story that ran on March 9, 2020 in The Intercept, where he resigned from shortly before the election alleging that his editors had ruthlessly censored his criticism of the Democratic nominee. In the article, Greenwald urged his readers to spread word before it was too late that Trump’s challenger had such diminished brain power that he had no business even running for the White House, and earnestly proclaimed that voting in a democracy was “valuable only when it is informed, not the byproduct of elite deceit and propaganda.”  

If Biden were to be elected in November, Greenwald warned – and I’m extrapolating here on the basis of his grim account – it  would only be a matter of time before the country, world and entire planet evaporated in a mushroom cloud when the babbling, drooling incoming president was trying to order a large pepperoni pizza for delivery to the White House, but the last number he punched in to place the call to Domino’s turned out be be the red button on the nuclear suitcase, which he’d mistaken for his new AARP-branded “easy to use and grip cell phone for seniors” that he’d bought at the recommendation of Senator Dianne Feinstein. 

The blame for the end of human civilization would lie squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic establishment for trying to push Biden across the finish line before voters knew he was too incompetent to perform his presidential duties. 

Greenwald maintained that position until less than two weeks before Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, when after demanding for years that the Democrat’s evil leaders force him to resign from the presidency, they did exactly what he’d been calling for. Then he began savaging the elite cabal behind Biden’s downfall for organizing a coup against a legitimate leader, which until that point he’d long described as the only conscionable step they could take. 

Greenwald didn’t have any credible “evidence” or “facts” to support his account. So, like any energetic, creative entrepreneur faced with a similar dilemma would do, he made them up and used them as raw material in the fairytale about the coup plot that removed Biden as the nominee, which he subsequently fabricated as the essential first step before he could expose and condemn the plotters for the imaginary scheme he dreamed up for that purpose.

That wasn’t as easy as it might sound as it required omitting that Greenwald changed core elements of the previous story he’d consistently told for years, which starred the Democratic elite protecting a brain addled head-of-state they knew might accidentally end all life on the planet. If he didn’t revamp the original version of events, some of the details from the older narrative would demolish the updated version, which instead of concluding, as desired, with a cabal of party leaders arranging a coup against Biden, would end with the party establishment having waited too long before eventually doing he right thing and forcing out an enfeebled president, which in fact is what happened. 

Another unfortunate issue Greenwald confronted in concocting the coup storyline was that his old version of events was largely true other than his overly negative assessment of the state of Biden’s mental acuity back in 2020. The new one, as I’ve indicated, was absolute bullshit. Worst of all, he’d have to admit he’d made a mistake because he’d never anticipated that would happen and in fact had provided his personal “guarantee” on System Update it wouldn’t.

My view of the Democratic elite is very similar to Greenwald’s, though I also despise the Republican leaders he shamelessly coddles, and I also initially wrote in 2021 that Biden was suffering from serious cognitive decline, as summarized here, though my prognosis wasn’t nearly as bleak as his the year before. I fucked up as well because I never imagined the Democratic establishment would turn against Biden either, but here too I differed in caveating my certainty by the situation was rapidly evolving and if it turned out I was wrong I’d lay the blame elsewhere.

But I was joking. For Greenwald, however, the roughly 10 days leading up to Biden’s announcement he was stepping aside was a moment of truth, and in this case the truth had to be thrown under the bus for the greater good. 

What other choice did he have but to revise the script, when the alternative if he didn’t was his ultimate nightmare scenario would imminently unfold, and it would make the planet evaporating in a nuclear holocaust initiated by a doddering, senile president look like a picnic in comparison: Greenwald would have to take a day off from excoriating the boundless evil of the Democratic elite and pat party leaders on the back for pressing Biden to step aside, even if belatedly.

That Greenwald was forced to hastily rewrite the coup script under duress makes his handiwork all the more impressive, if evaluated purely on the grounds of creativity and journalistic dishonesty.

Coming in Part II of “Glenn Greenwald and the Plot Against America”: Watch in real time as Greenwald alters his past words and pronouncements to make the facts fit the bogus new political narrative he scripted when the old one no longer served his purposes.