You may, like me, be confused about how nationally known pundits who label themselves “progressives” can go on Fox News and encourage Tucker Carlson in his attacks on liberal Democrats. Or how they can tell their readers that the threat of white nationalism and its violence is “nonexistent,” or that calling attention to the threat of hate groups and neo-Nazis is exactly like the neocons blaming all of Islam for 9/11.
But this has been happening with increasing regularity within a certain faction of “progressive” journalists who, as it happens, are also convinced that Russian interference in the 2016 election is a complete non-story—particularly Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey.
Over the weekend, Tracey tweeted out his view that the threat from white nationalism is “nonexistent” and that liberals were being politically overwhelmed by the hysteria of it all:
I replied with an extended thread pointing out the many acts of white-nationalist terrorism before and after Charlottesville, more than enough evidence that the violent hate being stirred into action by the new generation of young fascists is a serious problem that deserves our full attention. We are being inundated by a disturbingly large wave of hate crimes, against an increasing range of victims. We’re even seeing assassination attempts being made by far-right ideologues who believe they are doing the bidding of the authoritarian figure they worship—namely, Donald Trump.
These trends are not contained just to the United States, of course. From Norway in 2011 to Christchurch in 2019, the problem of rising fascist authoritarianism and its attendant violence has become a global one. We’ve seen authoritarian regimes take power in Hungary, in Turkey, and in the Philippines, and the results have all been predictably brutal and frightening for anyone who believes in open democracies.
One of the worst examples of this, of course, is in Brazil, where the ascendance of the proto-fascist authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency has been accompanied by assassinations of his opponents and a surging tide of hate crimes that has resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of assaults targeting the LGBT community—mirroring, perhaps on a more intense scale, what we are seeing in the United States. (Certainly Bolsonaro is more openly fascist and thuggish than Trump.)
So when Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and is highly active against Bolsonaro and his regime, published a tweet describing the kind of fear and loathing that exists within the LGBT community in Rio because of the regime, I politely reminded him that, while many communities (including the immigrant and Muslim, as well as LGBT) in the United States are under a similar cloud of fear, especially amid the current rising tide of hate crimes, people like Tracey—who Greenwald frequently promotes in his Twitter feed—were actively hurting our efforts to combat the problem by dismissing it as “nonexistent.” They “want to tell us that having white nationalists killing people in acts of targeted terrorism in our streets and houses of worship is just a figment of our overactive liberal imaginations.”
Greenwald—who apparently has a different interpretation of “nonexistent” than I do—responded that Tracey was saying “no such thing.” Rather, Greenwald argued, Tracey was “saying it's important to keep the threat in perspective & not be alarmist about it so politicians can't exploit it.” We went to and fro, with me pointing out that “alarmist” is a label that could just as easily—and just as unjustifiably—be plastered on him as on me, and that I’ve been documenting the rise of this problem for years, which he full well knows.
I also pointed out that, in the not terribly distant past, he has himself been an enabler of fascist movements, much as Tracey is being now. So he dismissed me as a liar, and subsequently has sneered that I am a mere Daily Kos poster and “insulated white liberal.”
Well, here are the receipts. It’s a little story I call “The Little Pontifex Maximus Who Wanted to Make America White Again and His Lawyer.” Enjoy. It’s a ridiculously long 110-tweet thread, but it lays the whole sad story bare.
