What a horrible piece of news to read today.
I started taking a break from Twitter earlier this week. I signed in today and tweeted that I’d be gone for a while, because in the past I’ve worried about people whom I haven’t seen tweet anything for a long time. I didn’t want my followers and friends to think I got hit by a train, or got killed by Covid, or anything.
But before I sign out of the infernal bird app and try to actually enjoy life for once, what do I see?
From there I saw what exactly was going on when I looked at Glenn Greenwald’s tweets.
I’d better get this out of the way right now: I’m pretty much a Greenwald stan. I have been for many years and unless he starts advocating for endless wars, or denying climate change, or saying that single payer is a pipe dream, or other things that he has consistently argued the opposite of, I doubt that will change.
If somebody wants to get on my bad side real fast, all they have to do is accuse Glenn of being really, really bad. Implying that he’s on “the wrong side” qualifies. Claiming that he “terrifies” you qualifies. (What does she think he’s going to do, fly up to where she lives from Brazil and do a fucking home invasion? Jesus Christ, “terrifies”, give me a break…) I wish I could be impartial all of the time, but when it comes to this that’s very difficult for me and perhaps impossible.
(The irony is that while I’m writing this piece about how low my opinion of Chelsea has gotten and how I can no longer look at her the same way, Glenn’s talking about how real friendships last regardless of political differences. How being friends with someone only as long as they’re on the same page as you politically is no good. So I wonder if I’m being as bad as Chelsea here by doing the same thing as her, i.e. announcing to the world “This person I used to respect is shit because I hate what they’re saying about politics.” Comments are on if anyone feels like telling me whether that’s as bad as her, or if I’m maybe being 50% as bad, 10% as bad, or whatever.)
I read this thread, as well as the article he wrote that a later tweet in it links to:
Here’s the timeline of my opinion of Ms. Manning over the years.
Back when she was being prosecuted, and back when she was still known as Bradley Manning, I felt angry that somebody who exposed war crimes was being treated like this. (Take note of that, because there’s more irony coming up concerning what happened to her.)
I hated that she was finally sentenced to prison. I have no idea what it was like for her in there, but I believe that “torture” isn’t overstating it.
I was glad that Obama did the right thing eventually and let her out.
After she got out, I started seeing takes from her which rubbed me the wrong way on Twitter. I wrote a whole article on my problems with antifa last time and, well, Chelsea was a big fan of antifa. It was enough for me to unfollow her back then.
Nevertheless, whatever bad feelings I had toward her over that faded and after a while I was once again focusing on what was important: “No matter what she’s doing today, this person is still a hero for exposing war crimes.” I thought.
If I’d been following her still, maybe I could have seen this coming. Going by what little I saw by chance, she seems to be tight with her former attorney, Chase Strangio, a man who is helping to ruin the ACLU. The fact that she’s more comfortable talking to censorship proponents than to free speech absolutists and/or people who believe that there should be very little speech that isn’t protected? Maybe that should’ve been a clue that she wasn’t who I was hoping she was.
She demonstrates that in her DMs with Glenn; she thinks Tucker Carlson is Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Vlad The Impaler, and Pol Pot all rolled into one, and she’s 100% behind all efforts to get him thrown off the air.
Pro-censorship people rub me the wrong way, to put it mildly. But that’s what she’s become.
And to her, Glenn going on Tucker’s show and talking about the same things he talks about everywhere else (e.g. “warrantless surveillance is bad”) makes Glenn the enemy. To her, he’s either with her or against her, which he pointed out and which she acknowledged was a shitty position…but it does appear to be her position.
Let me briefly go off-track again and talk about how I don’t know if I’m capable of doing this once more, because if I were a responsible journalist or opinion writer, I would read both sides of the story. I would read the Daily Beast article where Chelsea tells her side and where I’m sure they make Glenn out to be some kind of monster. I would look at Chelsea’s Twitter timeline today. I should do those things, but I really, really, REALLY don’t want to. She’s pissing me off enough without me exposing myself to anything I might read there.
Okay, back on track now.
As pissed as I may be at Chelsea, I tell myself that she was in prison for seven years. Prison is hell. She surely didn’t leave in the same condition she went in. She has problems.
How much leeway should that give her, though? It would be bad enough if she were only denouncing Glenn, but she is also denouncing Assange now, and after she impressed me by refusing to testify against him even under duress:
Remember how I said earlier that I was angry when Chelsea was persecuted for exposing war crimes? Well now, apparently, she’s like “Oh, the guy who helped me expose those war crimes? Yeah, he deserves what he’s getting.” (Or something; I don’t want to listen to or read that interview with her. Feel free to correct me if whatever she said about him wasn’t as bad as that.) And just like that, all the respect I gained for her when she was thrown back in prison for refusing to testify against him, and wouldn’t do so despite the promise of release if she did? All gone.
I’m gonna end on a hot take, a theory that I admittedly don’t have a lot to base on apart from her aforementioned friendship with Chase Strangio and, to a lesser extent, what I’ve seen from others on social media.
My theory is: maybe if she weren’t trans, she wouldn’t be acting like this.
My reasons for having that theory: trans people have it rough. They have it so rough, in fact, that a lot of them are either at their breaking point or reached it long ago. Don’t ask me for what percentage it is who are in that state of mind because I couldn’t begin to guess, but I’ve seen it from a lot of trans people on social media. They talk about how people misgender them, make fun of them, sometimes their families don’t accept them, and also they’ll talk about how it’s transphobic to wonder if cis women are at a disadvantage in sports against trans women, and they’ll talk about how it’s transphobic to have any objections to trans women using not only the same bathrooms, but the same locker rooms as cis women. Like if a cis woman says “I don’t want to see anybody’s penis” as one such woman did during a recent protest at a spa over whether trans women should be in the locker rooms with cis women, that is considered transphobic.
I think it’s crazy to respond to “I don’t want to see penises” with “You’re a goddamn TERF and you should DIE!” If we were talking about bathrooms and trans women using those, then it wouldn’t be an issue and I would say as much to any cis woman claiming it was. I would say, and have said, “Everybody uses stalls in the ladies’ room, with doors, which aren’t transparent, so there is no way you will see any trans girl’s dick.” With locker rooms, as anybody who’s been in a locker room knows, it’s a different story.
Anyway, it seems like being trans in this day and age stands a decent chance of putting you in the same mindset as Chelsea: a mindset where you say “This is WAR, and these people who try to exclude us from anything at all are our ENEMIES, and they deserve NO MERCY! We have to deplatform them! We have to make them too scared to say the hateful, bigoted things they say! We have to tell them to get fucking used to seeing girls with penises, because there’s nothing they can do about it!”
It makes me wonder how many trans people care ONLY about LGBT issues (or specifically trans issues) and absolutely nothing else. Or how many trans people care a LOT about trans issues, and care a lot less about everything else.
Could be that if trans issues are your number one priority, as they appear to be with Chase Strangio and Chelsea Manning, then a lot of things won’t matter to you as much as they would otherwise.
Like, a politician says they’re in favor of censoring transphobic speech. If you’re trans, that might sound good to you because, naturally, you don’t like hearing or reading transphobic things. But you might not think about that being on a slippery slope, how once one thing gets censored then it sets a precedent where it’s easier to censor other things. (“Hey, we’ve already censored some speech, so let’s censor more! I mean, we already agreed that censorship was okay sometimes!”) You might say to yourself “I don’t care about whether or not other things get censored, I just want everybody to stop saying terrible things about me and about people like me!”
So if that’s the way you think, then establishment Democrats who are good on LGBT rights and who are pro-censorship across the board might be more likely to appeal to you. (At least until they start censoring antifa which, it should be noted, has already been done.) Forget about the endless wars that the Dems keep voting for, forget about the terrible environmental policies which don’t do nearly enough to mitigate (let alone stop) climate change, forget about the slavish support of Israel despite what it does to Palestinians, forget about all of it: you wind up caring only about yourself, and people like yourself.
You get drawn into the Blue MAGA cult. You buy all the crap about RussiaGate because you’ve heard about Russia treating trans people even worse than America does and therefore you hate Russia and are scared of Russia, disregarding all other facts about the country and its leadership. Yes, a couple of trans girls I used to be friends with used to talk about Russia being a threat and how no one should never watch RT because it’s Russian state media and so on. (I know: that’s a microscopic sample size and I shouldn’t draw conclusions from it. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder…) You believe all the shit you hear on MSNBC.
Maybe that’s how Chelsea Manning went from heroic whistleblower to the kind of person who’s now, as my friend described her above, a shitlib. Maybe she decided that Glenn was a transphobe after reading some takes of his that have been described as transphobic. (I don’t think they actually are, but that’s me.) Maybe that was all it took; maybe it didn’t matter to her where Glenn stood on other issues and whether they had any common ground, only that he had been branded a transphobe and therefore he was evil to the core.
Or maybe she just sucks now.