The leftist media’s rush to bury the Joe Biden corruption scandal has hypercharged cancel culture, leading Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded The Intercept in order to further free speech and a free press, to resign from his own institution after facing censorship. Specifically, Greenwald aimed to expose the evidence behind the Biden scandal and to condemn the legacy media’s attempts to suppress the story — but the editors at his own publication censored him.
Greenwald, who had grown increasingly uneasy with The Intercept’s rush to support leftist orthodoxy rather than free journalistic expression, considered this the last straw.
“It meant that not only does this media outlet not provide the editorial freedom to other journalists, as I had so hopefully envisioned seven years ago, but now no longer even provides it to me. In the days heading into a presidential election, I am somehow silenced from expressing any views that random editors in New York find disagreeable, and now somehow have to conform my writing and reporting to cater to their partisan desires and eagerness to elect specific candidates,” Greenwald wrote.
Greenwald envisioned The Intercept in 2013 and helped launch the outlet in 2014, pushing the Edward Snowden leaks. According to the launch article, “a primary function of The Intercept is to insist upon and defend our press freedoms from those who wish to infringe them.”
Yet even Greenwald, the outlet’s co-founder, faced censorship for his desire to buck the stifling legacy media trend of burying the Joe Biden bombshells.
“It is astonishing to me, but also a reflection of our current discourse and illiberal media environment, that I have been silenced about Joe Biden by my own media outlet,” he wrote at Substack.
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Greenwald listed a long train of abuses at The Intercept, key among them the Reality Winner saga, in which a former intelligence specialist sent documents to The Intercept to prop up the Trump-Russia narrative. When The Intercept ran with the story, it exposed her in the process.
The co-founder faulted The Intercept for “its utter lack of editorial standards when it comes to viewpoints or reporting that flatter the beliefs of its liberal base (The Intercept published some of the most credulous and false affirmations of the maximalist Russiagate madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as ‘Russian disinformation’ by mindlessly and uncritically citing — of all things — a letter by former CIA officials that contained this baseless insinuation).”
Even that letter openly admitted that the former intelligence officials did not have evidence proving that the Hunter Biden emails were “Russian disinformation,” it merely claimed that they appear to echo previous disinformation attempts.
Greenwald took pains to praise many of the writers and editors at The Intercept, and noted that “none of the critiques I have voiced about The Intercept are unique to it. To the contrary: these are the raging battles over free expression and the right of dissent raging within every major cultural, political and journalistic institution.”
Greenwald condemned the increasingly stifling cancel culture that enforces a stifling orthodoxy in mainstream institutions.
He described the efforts to silence dissent as “the crisis that journalism, and more broadly values of liberalism, faces. Our discourse is becoming increasingly intolerant of dissenting views, and our culture is demanding more and more submission to prevailing orthodoxies imposed by self-anointed monopolists of Truth and Righteousness, backed up by armies of online enforcement mobs.”
Greenwald lamented that “nothing is crippled by that trend more severely than journalism, which, above all else, requires the ability of journalists to offend and anger power centers, question or reject sacred pieties, unearth facts that reflect negatively even on (especially on) the most beloved and powerful figures, and highlight corruption no matter where it is found and regardless of who is benefited or injured by its exposure.”
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Greenwald is not a conservative. On the contrary, he has focused his recent reporting on exposing corruption in the administration of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. He is not resigning from The Intercept in order to help Trump, but in order to expose the media’s shameless attempts to silence important reporting that should see the light of day.
The Joe Biden corruption scandal involves specific claims that, contrary to his repeated claims, the former vice president was deeply involved in his son Hunter’s notorious foreign business deals in China and Ukraine, among other places. Biden served as former President Barack Obama’s point person on both China and Ukraine, and his son Hunter made lucrative business deals in both countries, despite lacking experience in the sectors involved.
Notoriously, Hunter Biden joined the board of the corrupt Ukrainian gas firm Burisma while his father negotiated with Ukraine’s government. Joe Biden would later pressure the president of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who claims he was investigating Burisma at the time.
Worse, Hunter Biden’s business deals in China arguably undercut America’s interests in military technology, nuclear technology, and rare earth minerals. His deals helped the Chinese in their oppression of the Muslim Uyghur minority.
The New York Post published a bombshell article on emails discovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those emails suggested that Joe Biden knew about and even financially benefitted from his son’s deals. Yet Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented actions to suppress that story.
In the wake of this suppression, former Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski came forward with documents backing up his testimony that Joe Biden was indeed deeply involved. Bobulinski handed over those documents to the FBI and to a Senate committee. On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) told the Daily Caller that all the material Bobulinski provided that the committee had reviewed so far has turned out to be legitimate. The committee did not come across any “signs” or evidence to suggest the content is false.
This confirmation adds to a growing list of evidence suggesting that the bombshells revealed in Hunter Biden’s emails and Bobulinski’s testimony are true. While the Biden campaign, Democrats, and legacy media outlets have insisted that the bombshells are Russian disinformation, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, the FBI, and the DOJ rebutted that claim. Vladimir Putin himself came out in defense of Biden’s business deals.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) claims his staff had verified the Hunter Biden emails. Team Biden has not claimed that the documents were forged. Perhaps most importantly, Bobulinski has risked his reputation to come forward, presenting reams of evidence to back up his story.
These bombshells have proven a historic reckoning for the legacy media. Rather than reporting on the story — or even running stories critical of Bobulinski and the evidence — outlet after outlet has sought to suppress the story.
Greenwald has joined the ranks of Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and many others who have either quit or been forced out after daring to dissent from the stifling orthodoxy of the Left.
Tragically, the woke inquisition shows no signs of slowing down.
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Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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