“If You Define The Right As The Left, Then I Am Leftier Than Thou”

Apparently tired of talking to the official propaganda network of the American government, libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald gave an interview with its Russian equivalent, with…amazing results:

I think, in Italy you see, for example, that what is traditionally the right and the left is changing very dramatically. There is a government in place formed by a coalition of what traditionally has been called the left and the right. But they are now really called more opposition to the establishment.

In the United States for a long time this shift has been taking place.

He’s still doing this. He’s still acting as if an administration dominated by Wall Street vampires who make Larry Summers look like Rosa Luxemburg and/or corrupt handmaidens for business, devoted to deregulating and redistributing wealth upward as much as white nationalism, represents some sort of revolt against the neoliberal establishment. This narrative was ludicrous at the time and is considerably more ludicrous now, and he’s more committed to it than ever. There is obviously Trump-level gaslighting going on here, the only question being whether he’s gaslighting his fans or himself.

Two of the most important protest movements in the US – one was the Tea Party, the other was Occupy Wall Street – were both perceived to be on different ends of the political spectrum.

Perceived!

Yet they had very similar issues in common. They were protesting the bailout of Wall Street after the Wall Street crisis, the domination of corporations.

Again, this is almost hilariously ignorant. The Tea Party was literally instigated by a pro-Wall Street reporter railing against mortgage relief. It’s funded by elite donors, and its opposition to the party establishment is that it wasn’t reactionary enough.  Yeah, just like Occupy!

When Donald Trump ran for president, even though he was perceived as a right-wing candidate

Perceived!

he did so by criticizing the Iraq war,

He was against it after he was for it, just like his opponent, who on the other hand was far to his left on pretty much everything else.

by criticizing American militarism

Donald Trump opposing militarism? Are you shitting me? Even as a description of his campaign rhetoric this is cherry-picked and misleading. And since becoming president, he has presided over a major increase in military spending (and, natch, a massive expansion of the drones program; odd how Glenn has not put nearly as much emphasis on this issue since January 2017.)  None of which has damaged Trump with his base at all, which is a rather major problem for this acid-drenched realignment theory.

by promising to ‘drain the swamp’ of corporate influence.

See above, only more so. And this is the problem with starting to follow politics in 2003; you don’t notice that conservatives making pro forma arguments against “elites” while being and serving them are ubiquitous to the American right, not something unique to Donald Trump. Anyway, it’s just beyond belief that someone could look at 18 months of ultra-refined Reaganite orthodoxy from Trump/McConnell/Ryan/Roberts, while Democrats trend further left, and see some generalized anti-Establishment revolt coming from both sides sharing common goals. It’s a world of fantasia. (Although nothing new for Glenn, who once pined for a Gary Johnson/Russ Feingold ticket, and both the fact that he apparently wanted Johnson on top and the fact that he thought Russ Feingold would go anywhere near a ticket with Gary Johnson on it help one understand how he came to support Donald Trump.To be Scrupulously Fair, as insane libertarian-masquerading-as-left nightmare tickets go, it beats Paul/Kucinich — hell, you’d even get a good president if Johnson left office. Glenn was always smarter.)

And now, the punchline:

RT: Have the last two years of inquiries and reports convinced you that Trump colluded with Russia?

G.G: No, if anything, it’s convinced me that it’s more unlikely than ever. There are factions within the intelligence community of the United States, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI that hate Donald Trump and will do anything to destroy him, including leaking classified information against him. I believe that if there were evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, when it comes to the hacking of the DNC or the John Podesta emails, we would have seen in by now. We have not seen it by now.

I think we’ve more than reached the point where further commentary would be superfluous.