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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier work.

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Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.

His ideology is “America bad”, which leads to some alignment with foreign influence and arguably leads to him spreading propaganda

If only his ideology was "Republican America bad, Democrat America good", then he would not be aligned with foreign influence and wouldn't be spreading propaganda.

^ This ... and note, it is sarcasm.

To anyone on Twitter in like 2016-2019, this is a rather funny sentiment to have about him. I can remember my respect for him dissolve day by day. I didn't even remember until now if he was pro- or anti- Trump, probably neither still. But I simply remember that he slowly turned into the worst caricature of a smug Twitter media guy. Just turned into "hot take" haver and seemed to lose his own plot.

If you know you know I guess, but even then, broken clocks and all that. There was a point where he was such a cool guy to me, and I grew up a little in a good way seeing him turn into whatever he did.

It may just be Twitter's fault at the end of the day too!

It's probably Twitter. There are people I know IRL who are completely different on that platform, it's unbelievably toxic.

This was my experience too. So many 'voices' just turned into grifters and self promoters. Garland, Mensch, etc.

That’s my impression, too. Not hardcore MAGA so much as falling into the addiction of thinking he was smarter than “the establishment” about everything and taking contrarian stances to show they couldn’t boss him around. Twitter’s algorithm was like a drug for those guys because they’d give a radioactive hot take and get a bazillion notification pings.

"pursuit of the truth" is an ideology. What are you trying to say here?

Glenn is, essentially, hypocritcal because he ignores things that go against his predetermined narrative.

Does he post true things sometimes? Sure, but is it really worth filtering through the rest?

I think what they are saying is a common sentiment among people who don't belong in any of the major political camps. It's a common experience to take heat from all sides because, surprisingly, neither "side" in politics is perfect nor particularly virtuous.

But we're not criticizng him for not registering for the democratic national convention or the republican one or whatever you think "belonging to a political camp" even means (what does it mean, exactly?)

He's being crticized for repeating lies and refusing to post truths.

Uh, that’s how he likes to style himself but that’s more of an ideological stance than you’re complaining about. A true focus on truth and defense of the public would have included questions like “are the Russians totally unbiased in feeding me this information?” or “am I serving the public by refusing to admit I made a mistake and repeated untrue claims which were highly beneficial to the political party who amplified my claims?”

This is the same "useful idiot" trap that Julian Assange fell into. It's a challenge to incorporate the lessons of people like these without falling into the opposite trap, that of cynical apathy.

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