Some POS might do to you what was done to Glenn Greenwald someday

Dusting off this dusty old Substack to write about this

In the last several years, I’ve seen a lot of people whose work I respect get attacked or retaliated against for doing that work in one way or another.

The most obvious example of this is Julian Assange, who probably got retaliated against the worst. Thankfully, his suffering is over. But there are others who have been victims of various types of retaliation.

Richard Medhurst and Ali Abunimah both got arrested after they criticized Israel and a couple of European countries they were in decided that they’d broken the law, hate speech or something like that. I hope that neither man ends up actually getting convicted of anything. It’s bad enough what happened to them already.

Matt Taibbi got threatened by a sitting member of Congress with prison. He also got a visit from the IRS.

Max Blumenthal once had his house raided by cops.

Jimmy Dore was threatened with blackmail by Ana Kasparian, who told him via direct message that if he didn’t change what he talked about, she would publicly accuse him of sexual harassment. Jimmy was fortunate enough to get out in front of that and give his side of the story before Ana could say anything.

And now, some asshole or assholes—whether it’s because they just hate Glenn and think he’s some kind of apologist for fascism, or whether it’s because these are people acting on behalf of a certain government that pays them to do this—have done their best to wreck Glenn Greenwald’s reputation. They want people to laugh at him, to look at him as pathetic, to ignore all of the work he’s done, to lose respect for him. Judging from what I’ve seen on Twitter/X, they have been partially successful. A lot of people have been supportive and understanding, which is good to see, but I have also seen tweets like “How can I trust the credibility of somebody who does things like that and humiliates himself?”

I’ve followed Glenn’s work for over 15 years. I admire his journalism a lot. I think he’s a good person where it matters. But this is also personal for me.

This is personal for me because I have my own set of fetishes that, if everybody on this platform were to see them, lots of people would be thinking “What the hell? How is this Rob guy so fucking weird? What’s wrong with him that he actually enjoys doing that?”

That’s also partly why I hate the idea of mass surveillance without warrants. It could play a part on why Glenn has always been against the same thing, although I won’t assume so and I won’t try to speak for him. But I don’t like the idea of some NSA spook looking at pics or video of me engaged in kinky activities, and I doubt Glenn was ever thrilled with the idea either.

I’m not a public figure, and I’m certainly nowhere near as well-known as Glenn. This Substack has less than ten subscribers. Still, this could happen to anybody, and maybe someday somebody will do it to me, so I might as well get WAY out in front of it and tell you all that I’m like this.

One day in my early twenties, I started having fantasies about different kinds of kinky stuff. Exactly what I was interested in isn’t important, except to say that it was nothing illegal. But it was the kind of stuff that I kept to myself and don’t talk about to just anybody (at least not until today when I wrote this).

I was worried how people would react. By the way, when it comes to this kind of stuff, people seem to judge you a LOT more harshly if you’re a man. If you’re a woman and you enjoy, say, getting spanked, then you might get some people making fun of you about it, but not lots and lots. If you’re a man and you enjoy, say, getting spanked, then a lot more people will make fun of you for that, because they see it as being weak, they see it as not being manly.

Even if you’re a man who simply likes giving head and isn’t into anything kinky, we still live in an age where you can get mocked for THAT. Stephen Colbert called Donald Trump something like “Putin’s cock-holster” because apparently there are still people, including Colbert I guess, who believe that if you’re the bottom in a gay relationship, if you like taking cock more than giving it to somebody, that makes you the weak one. That makes you the pathetic bitch. I’d say that qualifies as homophobia, but people still do it. Even the ones who consider themselves friends to gay people.

So yeah, I was worried how people would react if word ever got out. I was worried that they would find it impossible to respect me. I was worried that they would laugh. I had spent my childhood before that being treated without any respect and getting laughed at all the time at school, and I REALLY did not want to be drawn to any sort of activity that might result in more of the same.

So I tried to suppress it. I tried to repress it. I tried to make myself “normal”. I fought against those fantasies and desires like hell, and I figuratively beat myself up a lot over having them. It fucked with my self-esteem, because I used to judge people for being into the same kind of stuff, for wanting to play a submissive role for a while.

It’s important that anybody who reads this and who is not into anything kinky understand what I’m trying to tell you all: I did not choose to have these fetishes or kinks. I’ve talked to other people who have also told me that THEY did not choose to have their own fetishes or kinks, and they have told me that they fought it at first the same way I did. I talked to somebody who liked playing the dominant role one time, and she told me that when she first realized she was into that, she didn’t want it. Just like I used to think “What the fuck is wrong with me that I want to be treated this way?”, she used to think “What the fuck is wrong with me that I want to treat people this way?”

That dominant person I talked to eventually decided that she should stop hating herself for something that she’d had zero luck in changing about herself. That’s what I eventually did, too. That’s what lots of people do. We all decided that we should live out our fantasies if we really wanted to, because you only get one life and you might as well do what’s fun for you so long as nobody walks away afterwards feeling like they’ve been genuinely abused or violated or anything.

If you want to judge Glenn, or me, or anybody for “choosing” to do things that you find distasteful, you should at least know that before you judge.I guess we did choose to actually do what we had only thought about before, but the pull to do it is very strong and hard to resist. If you’re able to truthfully say “There’s no reason to resist doing this because it’s harming nobody,” then it’s even more difficult to resist, because if it doesn’t harm anybody then why the hell not?

So we do it.

And here’s something else that I think is important. It is what I told myself many years ago to finally stop hating myself, and it’s also true of Glenn and of many, many other people:

“An individual is more than just their turn-ons and bedroom activities.”

If I want to roleplay being like a slave to somebody and that turns me on, so fucking what? I’m more than just that.

I’m somebody who writes a lot.

I’m somebody who’s got a lot of “normal” hobbies including video games, listening to music, playing music (I’d say that I’m a mediocre bass player at this point, and I’d be better if I had a better work ethic about practicing), reading books (everything from Kurt Vonnegut to the classic Star Wars novels that were published before Disney bought the IP to comic books), reading the news from sources I trust such as Glenn Greenwald, and more.

I’m someone who’s trying to stay in decent physical shape, even if I don’t have the kind of muscles that would impress anybody.

I’m a semi-vegan (meaning that I usually stay away from animal products because I don’t like how the animals bred for that purpose are treated in factory farms, but if somebody gives me some meat or eggs that were not factory farmed and came from a wild animal, I’ll eat those).

I’m somebody who’s very anti-war, somebody who’s very pro-freedom-of-speech without being a hypocrite about it like Ben Shapiro is a hypocrite about it, somebody who used to call himself a leftist but doesn’t do that any more because so many other people calling themselves liberals or leftists are now pro-war and anti-freedom-of-speech. (Jimmy Dore had a good line recently, where somebody was described as a “Never Trump Republican” and he said “So in other words, a Democrat.” Because yes, very often these days, Democrats will talk and they will say the exact same things that I remember Republicans saying all the time in the 2000s and much of the 2010s. But I digress…)

Whether the rest of the world agrees with this or not: there is more to me than what I do in the bedroom. There is more to all of us than what we do in the bedroom.

Finally, when it comes to the bedroom: often, certainly in my case, it is all roleplaying, just as much as playing D&D is roleplaying. Generally speaking, I don’t like being told what to do. I can have a temper, and people who’ve followed me on here have seen me lose my temper. Not always with good cause, I’ll admit, but I’m not the meek and deferential type in my day to day life. However, if I get together with someone who’s into BDSM, if they get off on telling me what to do—and if I decide that I like them well enough that I think I’d get off on having them tell me what to do—then we’ll go somewhere away from prying eyes and we’ll do the stuff that gets us off for a while. But after we’re done, we start relating to one another as equals again; it was all roleplaying, or acting if you prefer, and eventually it’s time to shed the role, time to stop acting, time to go back to your regular old non-kinky life. Besides, if you NEVER relate to your partner as an equal, it’s hard to have a meaningful relationship or effectively communicate with one another.

I guess I’ve been rambling a lot, but hopefully everyone who reads this understands what I’m trying to say. I still admire Glenn because regardless of whether you think he still has dignity or not, I think he has done the right thing time and time again, and that’s what’s REALLY important. Breaking the Snowden story by itself was him doing everybody a great service, even if there are ingrates who don’t understand that and hate him for it.

Is it possible that I’ll eventually decide that Glenn’s no good after all, like I think Kyle Kulinski is no good or Cenk Uygur is no good when I used to trust both of them completely? Sure, that’s happened often enough, it could happen with Glenn too, I’m not gonna entirely rule out the possibility. But in over 15 years of listening to him, that still hasn’t happened. If ever does happen, then it’ll happen because he covers a story in a way I don’t like, or because I think he’s lying about something important, something related to his actual WORK. Not his sex life.

Thank you, and peace.