Greenwald co-founded the left-wing online magazine The Intercept in 2014. He was forced out in late 2020 due to a dispute over whether to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in October 2020. He argued the story was clearly newsworthy, but his colleagues disagreed, joining in the chorus from mainstream media claiming it was just Russian disinformation. The laptop has since been confirmed—not least by Hunter Biden himself—as genuine.
In a similar vein, the author thinks what is being perpetrated against the truckers by the Trudeau regime in Canada, with anyone lending either direct or indirect support to the truckers in danger of having their bank accounts summarily frozen, and some truckers being subjected to police beatings that would lead the news if committed against BLM protesters, deserves proper scrutiny and attention.
Greenwald has also championed the cause of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. In other words, he has a consistent track record as a consistent civil libertarian, making him an outlier among his erstwhile colleagues on the liberal left.
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When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.
When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government's use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.
But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West's official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.