BLIND ITEM: YOUTUBER on the grift tries so hard to amass a following. But what would his followers think -- or would they even be able to watch him speak -- with his mouth moving -- if they knew that, since college, he's eaten s**t? We don't mean that metaphorically. We mean feces is his fetish, specifically eating feces. From the tap, so to speak, or the sphincter, if you're struggling to follow.
We don't want anyone to struggle, not with the basics. The YOUTUBE grift is quite the con.
You know he lives in fear, don't you? That he gets
outed for his fetish? That streamers drift away because they can't
stand watching his lips flap since it makes them think of his eating
feces. A lot of people hide. Katie Halper doesn't hide.
No,
she's letting it all hang out and it's a lot, so you know we're not
talking about her chest. We're talking about how she sports all of her bitterness and
hate.
Isn't it
strange and telling that Katie and Ana Kasparian were once friends and
buds. They'd had problems before -- they lost it on one another over
Syria, for example. But then they both hug it out until the next time they came out swinging. Such as when a guest made
remarks against Ana on THE KATIE HALPER SHOW and then, on JACOBIN's show
that Ana hosted, Ana ripped Katie Halper apart. And did so with the
help of Nando Vila -- Katie Halper's longterm cohost. The two women
burned each other's playhouses down.
But now that both are massive transphobes and grifters, can they once again find common ground?
Katie needs to find something. And soon.
We
made queries to friends at THE NATION, THE PROGRESSIVE, THE AMERICAN
PROSPECT, COUNTERPUNCH and IN THESE TIMES. Would any of them be
interested in publishing Katie's writing or bringing her on as a
columnist?
Sadly, the most common reply was, "Who?"
When
we would try to jog their memories, they would point out that she's
prone to conspiracy theories (that Sy Hersh attachment did not help
Katie) and that they already had several men writing what what she
offered in commentary. It was a fair point. She doesn't speak with an
authentic voice and never has. She speaks like a woman who has been
browbeaten by men -- Spencer Ackerman, Matt Taibbi and Aaron Mate, among
others.
We're reminded of Mona's response to Sissy in Robert Altman's COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN, "Yes,
uh, yes, but I chose to rise above the attitudes of this small town,
while you chose to lay spread over a gravestone and take them inside
you!" Indeed.
Don't cry for her over being called out like this. "You write like a man" is the ultimate compliment to Queen Bees like Katie.
She
has no distinctive voice except drippy. She exhibits and sports drippy on her own
show and on USEFUL IDIOTS (which she hosts with the matted Aaron)
-- this is especially true whenever some technical problem pops up but she drips incessantly regardless. It's hard to imagine any
broadcast outlet touching her. That includes WBAI. When we called
friends there, they knew her. "We get so many complaints." Of course,
they do.
She
came on like a feminist to land that spot. We even sang her praises.
But she's no feminist and she can't keep an audience.
We keep thinking back to the response we got from a friend at COUNTERPUNCH, "You
mean post her and-and like pay her? Oh, no. No one would pay for her drivel."
Her
drivel does appear to have passed its sell-by-date. Even on YOUTUBE,
she struggles for views. She brought on Glenneth Greenwald in that last
two weeks. And that attracted 76,000 views. Almost like old times.
However, that was one of 13 videos. She got 10,000 for con artist
Bri-Bri Joy Gray coming on and saying she fell to her knees (we can see
it) and cried (no, not really). Joe Biden betrayed her, Bri=Bri raged with
all the conviction of Elizabeth Berkley in SHOWGIRLS. It was about the
student loan debt relief. He put forward a program, the Supreme Court
overruled him. At no point was Bri-Bri -- a non Democrat -- betrayed by
Joe.
Reminds
us of how grifter Katie brought Eugene Puryear onto USEFUL IDIOTS ahead of the 2020 presidential election allowing him to trash Joe Biden and state that he'd never, ever vote for Joe Biden.
Of course, he wouldn't. And Katie knew that. Eugene's a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. They don't vote Democrat. More to the point, in 2008, Joe Biden was Barack Obama's running mate. What was Eugene in 2008? Katie knew, she just didn't want her audience to know. Eugene was Gloria LaRiva's 2008 running mate. He was on her presidential ticket. So not only did he not belong to the Democratic Party -- kind of an important point to disclose -- but he also was a political rival who lost to Joe Biden.
At
any rate, Drama Queen Bri-Bri brought her 10,000 streams. Not good for
Katie Halper of 2020 but incredible for Katie on her downward spiral. Such as other days in the last two weeks. 1.1 thousand streams, 2.8 thousand streams, 3.2
thousand streams . . . It's not good for a grifter.
A
year ago, she could count on thousands of streams for each segment --
20,000 up to 70,000. In the last month, she's done so much damage to her
reputation. Scott Ritter? A convicted pedophile and now someone she
regularly chats up and giggles with because what says "Welcome women!"
more than a female host making nice with a registered sex offender? She
loves him on USEFUL IDIOTS because his appearances get them up to
90,000 streams. Otherwise, they're usually less than 10,000. Say what
you will about transphobe Matt Taibbi but he delivered an audience when
he was on USEFUL IDIOTS -- the matted Aaron continues to bore. Asked
about her relationship with Ritter, two different publications pointed
out that his third arrest found them dropping him and dropping any
mention of him.
Katie, as Annie Lennox sings, "This boat is sinking
. . ." Why, Katie, why-y-y-y-y-y-y?
Katie's
also known for bringing on serial plagiarist Chris Hedges which is a
problem when it comes to others hiring her. "We wouldn't carry his
byline, not with that reputation," said one. Another, "Do I want to
publish someone whose ever other word is plagiarized? No. I don't need
to create more headaches."
It
didn't have to be this way. Katie didn't have to wind down her career
-- or what passes for one -- with a fork stuck in her ass.
But
the grift means so much to so many. Especially to those who don't have
ethics -- remember, Katie traffics in opinions, as she explained to
Bri-Bri when they dished on Krystal Ball's recent wedding. That means,
Katie explained, she's not required to do disclosures.
Oh, we laughed at that. We laughed harder at that than anything Katie ever offered during her brief and sad stand up career.
And
as we laughed, we thought about that and how low journalism has
fallen. We know Jon Stewart and we like him. But in 2008, when
reporters and columnists like Dana Milbank thought they could do comedy
(most infamously with his 'comedy' that Hillary Clinton should drink Mad
Bitch Beer), we grasped that Jon Stewart -- through no fault of his own
-- was ruining journalism. As much damage as Milbank and others did in
2008, it only got worse in the years after as failed stand ups thought they
could do journalism.
We see the tragedy there daily.
Graham
Norton is a comedian who tries to do journalism on his YOUTUBE
program. He was amassing an audience and then it came to an end. How?
He hectored his audience, he told them what to do. YOUTUBERs, you're
clowns, you make us laugh. But we don't take life lessons from you and we
certainly don't take orders. Graham got onboard Train Cornel West and
didn't have a single fact at his disposal. He was getting views -- over
a thousand a segment, sometimes even 2,000. And then he told people to
vote for Cornel. He no longer cracks 1000. He generally comes in at
500 views. And the one he posted, six days ago, has only 175
views.
Graham,
we should note, is a successful comedian. Which may be why he doesn't
grift. But it's also why certain basic facts escape him. Ballot
access, for example. A party convention names a nominee, for another.
We don't care what Chris Hedges told everyone, Cornel was not and is not
the Green Party's presidential nominee. The nominee will be decided in
July of 2024. Cornel really doesn't even have papers filed to be a
candidate at this point.
Graham made a mistake. Others are just grifters. Take Jimmy Dore, Graham's former friend.
The host of THE JIMMY DORE SHOW has been grifting for some time.
And
he's the ultimate grifter. He grifts by lying over and over. Sam
Seder regularly fact checks him on THE MAJORITY REPORT. It was THE
MAJORITY REPORT, in fact, where we learned that -- as is the case with most of these 'left' grifters -- Jimmy was attacking transgender people.
With really bad jokes. But that's what the grifters do, promote
transphobia. Jimmy does it, Glenneth does it, Tulsi does it, Megyn Kelly
does it (did she spend her way through that settlement?), THE GRAY
ZONErs do it. You're appealing to a right wing audience. And it's the
easiest way to get on board with them.
Though
some still repeat the idiotic "God didn't create Adam and Steve" it's
gotten tired -- even for Jimmy. And, in fact, God did create an Adam
and a Steve. And unless Adam and Eve's children screwed each other, God
created many more. You mythology folks do grasp that, right? That if
it's just Adam and Eve and they only have Cain and Able, nobody's
getting pregnant. Unless . . . Cain or Able had sex with Mommy! That
book is so perverted.
So
Jimmy did jokes almost as tired as Adam and Steve and kept making
pop-eyes and mincing it up -- as only a very short man with a very big
ego can.
He and Glenneth play the same con: Democrats be awful.
You
know what, we call out Democrats all the time. We also call out
Republicans. And, honestly, these days the House Republicans are beyond
disgusting.
Glenneth is a garbage dump who reTweets things like this:
AOC
& Bernie have "become the most important weapon of the Democratic
party establishment," pulling young progressives & radicals back
toward establishment candidates. @GGreenwald & @SocialistMMA slam
AOC & Bernie for abandoning the working class they ran to serve . . .
I'm sorry, Libertarian and a man who screamed and screeched at Marianne Williamson say what?
We're
not AOC stans. And we called out fake ass Bernie before most of you
were old enough to vote for him in 2016. But on AOC, is this because
she endorsed Joe Biden for 2024?
If so, how stupid are people?
Joe
needs endorsements right now. He's the president of the United
States. We seriously doubt AOC just gave an endorsement. We're told
that it was discussed at length ahead of time and we're told AOC secured
multiple concessions on issues that matter to her.
And that makes much more sense to us because why else would AOC weigh in right now?
To be Glenneth Greenwald is to always strive to see the worst in people. That's what happens when your head's so f**ked up.
Glenneth
praises Tucker Carlson constantly. Like this week for supposedly holding Mike Pence's
feet to the fire. No, he really didn't. Yes, he did go after Pence . .
. who is polling at 7.3%. In their world, that passes for strength.
"It's impossible even to imagine an MSNBC or CNN host questioning a leading Dem politician this adversarially," Glenneth insisted on Twitter.
Is it? If so it's because you're a liar or an idiot. Dennis Kucinich was doing very well in Iowa
when Tim Russert brought the hammer down in a debate as he went after
Dennis on the subject of UFOs. The straw poll in Iowa -- the first
state to register a preference every four years -- found, "Edwards
garnered 29 percent of the vote, and Kucinich won 24 percent. Illinois
Sen. Barack Obama came in third with 171 votes, and Hillary Clinton,
D-N.Y., took fourth place with 128 votes."
Get it, idiot, Kucinich was ahead.
If Glenneth had to nail down facts or tell the truth, his head would spin faster than Linda Blair's in THE EXORCIST.
Would he then lap up the split-pea colored vomit, that's the question?
And
Katie brings him on her show because it's her way of supporting
transphobia and her way of being part of the grift. People are noticing
and that's why when her revenues dry up, she better hope the right-wing
needs an Ann Coulter Jr. She's not young anymore and she has a bad
track record. Equally true, women don't get second chances. We've
noted that for years and years here.
Chelsea Manning famously broke with Glenneth over the transphobia. Last summer, Eoin Higgins wrote a piece for SALON on how Glenneth abandoned the trans community to become a transphobe:
Last fall, Manning directly addressed the person Greenwald has become, telling her onetime champion that she was "terrified" of him. "You're greedy, unprincipled, and I'm embarrassed for ever considering you a friend," Manning said. In response, Greenwald released private chat records showing Manning's messages to him when she was feeling depressed.
How did this happen? One might date Greenwald's coming out as transphobic — or at least trans-skeptical — to a video interview he did with anti-trans media figure Katie Herzog in March 2021. During the conversation, the pair talked about how trans people, in their view, were taking up more than their share of a presumably limited amount of civil rights. "The minute you declare yourself nonbinary or trans," Greenwald declared, "you catapult up the ladder of oppression that absolutely confers concrete benefits."
A zero-sum view of civil rights doesn't easily allow for solidarity between marginalized groups. But Greenwald's shift on trans rights has also coincided with his tilt toward the far right in recent years. While Greenwald has long had a friendly relationship with extremist Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he's gone further and further down a conservative media rabbit hole since leaving The Intercept in late 2020. It would have once been nearly unthinkable to imagine Greenwald chumming it up onstage with the likes of social conservative Erick Erickson or giving a softball interview to notoriously homophobic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — but both of those things have happened. Perhaps cultivating a new audience of right-wing media consumers has pushed Greenwald to embrace social conservatism and bigotry against trans people.
Greenwald recently laid out his view of the trans rights movement on June 23 during an appearance on the Vanguard YouTube show. In response to a question about his engagement in multiple culture-war issues, almost invariably on the side of the political right, Greenwald claimed that he was just asking questions about "what has become of the trans agenda."
"I know you get accused, if you say they're legitimate questions, of, like, empowering hatred against trans people," Greenwald continued, "which I think is incredibly an intellectually dishonest way to coerce and bully people, to accept your views that 'if you don't immediately accept all of my newfound promises about this new ideology I'm trying to get society to embrace that radically changes so many things about how we think about gender and sex and how we organize society.'"
A week later on an edition of his video streaming show on June 30 — during which he interviewed Christopher Rufo, the hard-right intellectual force behind the panic over "critical race theory," who has now set his sights on LGBTQ rights — Greenwald questioned "this new agenda of trans issues like, you know, demanding everybody say trans women are women." Rufo has made little secret of his intentions to propagandize against the LGBTQ community, laying out part of the strategy in a June 17 tweet in which he suggested that "Conservatives should start using the phrase 'trans stripper' in lieu of 'drag queen'" because "it has a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization."
During his congenial, unchallenging discussion with Rufo, Greenwald pegged the beginning of the trans rights movement to the end of the same-sex marriage fight, saying that the push for trans civil rights was a byproduct of winning that battle. Faced with either going home victorious but unemployed or pivoting to a new fight, according to Greenwald's version of events, equality activists chose to keep the spigot of cash flowing. "Instead, they immediately switched to the trans movement, which they barely had talked about before, because there was nothing else for them to do," Greenwald said — connecting to the zero-sum civil rights argument he made with Herzog over a year earlier.
The mean-spirited comments were notable, perhaps, but they're no longer particularly novel. Greenwald has been lobbing insults and attacks at trans people and trans advocates for well over a year.
His defense of the "Libs of TikTok" account — after Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz dug into who was behind the social-media screen and using their platform to go after teachers and others for adopting accepting language toward LGBTQ people — was that LoTT was targeted as a "real enemy" of corporate journalism and a group of "citizens with the wrong politics." Greenwald made championing the LoTT account a point of pride, boasting at one point that he was its "godfather," despite the fact that it has helped drive the recent spate of street violence and legislative restrictions against queer people.
Should transgender children have the right to go to school without suffering discrimination? Or should teachers have the right to discriminate against them? The most prominent organization advocating for civil liberties, the American Civil Liberties Union, has sided with transgender children. The most famous civil libertarian professional commentator, Glenn Greenwald, has sided with the teachers who are asking for the power to discriminate.
Following a new statewide law directing school boards to meet or exceed state education department standards regarding the treatment of transgender students, Virginia’s Loudoun County school board enacted a policy requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns. One teacher quit in protest during an August school board meeting because the school “promotes political ideologies that do not square with who I am as a believer in Christ.” Three other teachers have filed a lawsuit in state court demanding that the school policy be rescinded.
After the ACLU’s Virginia chapter defended the school policy in a legal brief, Greenwald, who rose to fame as a strong critic of government surveillance and as a recipient of the Edward Snowden leaks, wrote on Twitter, “This is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that [the] ACLU is explicitly arguing in court that the First Amendment’s free speech clause has been interpreted *too broadly* by courts, and are advocating *a more restrictive view* of what free speech means. The ACLU was a crucial influence on my political and legal outlook in childhood and early adulthood. There have been many valid criticisms of them as they changed—including from its former leaders—but to see them explicitly urging more free speech restrictions is shocking.”
Greenwald’s tolerance for shock is much higher whenever he appears with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. But what’s shocking to me is his baseless maligning of the ACLU.
The ACLU of Virginia’s brief does not argue that the courts have interpreted free speech too broadly, despite Greenwald’s histrionic insinuation. What the brief argues is that when it comes to minors in school, the courts have long determined that free speech is not absolute.
If you missed all this in real time, we did too. We don't like Glenn Greenwald, we don't follow him. Our lives would be better if we didn't have to know he existed. In October 2020, he was screwed over by THE INTERCEPT and, because he doesn't know the law, as we've long pointed out, he was too stupid to sue THE INTERCEPT for breach of contract. He was also the target of an organized attack -- organized by Betsy Reed, still with THE INTERCEPT at that point -- and we felt sorry for him. We said that in real time and, go check at THE COMMON ILLS, it was repeatedly stated that we were biting our tongues because he'd been attacked but we wouldn't hold our tongues forever. We don't like Glenneth, we never did. He was always a liar and a whore. He pretended to be a liberal -- he wasn't, we always noted he was a Libertarian -- to butt into the 2008 Democratic Party primary. He went around lying and whoring as cheap tramp will because Barack Obama made his Princess Tiny Meat salute. He hated Hillary and people let him go around trashing her.
Kind of like Katie let the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate trash Joe Biden without informing her viewers Viewers had a right to know because Joe Biden is never going to please a Communist and no sane person (that leaves out MTG) would ever think he could. That doesn't mean Eugene's criticism wasn't valid or that it was. But it absolutely means that audiences have every right to know that this critic is not going to be pleased with any Democrat. By the same token, Amy Goodman and others in 2008, should not have allowed Glenneth to pretend he was a Democrat. Just because he whored with hideous Jane didn't make him a Democrat. He's a Libertarian. He's never going to agree with Hillary Clinton who believes in big government when he believes that you starve off the government.
When Chelsea made her remarks about Glenneth, we wondered, "Where is this coming from?" And that's because we didn't follow him. We may have thought -- wrongly -- that he was gay so he couldn't be anti-trans. We don't think that was the case because we've known his self-hatred and efforts throughout college to deny he was gay and to fit in with the oppressors.
Sidebar, we were sent what is supposedly Glenneth's browser history. If it is accurate, he's even more disgusting than we thought. If it hadn't been sent this morning, we'd be working on that as a story. Not on the Glenneth aspect -- we don't know whether it's really his browser history or not -- but on the issue that Twitter is platforming hate speech. This is much worse than what people usually complain about with regards to Twitter. This is "White power" accounts promoting Donald Trump while ripping African-Americans, gays, trans, Jewish and pretty much everyone. And to be clear, they're not using terms like African-American or gay.
It is disgusting and it is appalling and there's no way in the world that Elon Musk is doing his job yet is unaware of these accounts.
There is a movement to target any group that's a minority.
Whether it's Glenneth's browser history or not, he is part of that movement. His statements and his actions make him part of that movement and it's only surprising to you if you haven't been paying attention (we weren't paying attention).
So when Katie Halper wants to bring him on and make nice?
She's choosing sides and she's not choosing the left.
As a war has been carried out against LGBTQ+ people, she's remained silent. She's acted as though it's not a real issue. As though state legislatures working overtime to rob people of their rights is normal and no big deal. Again, she's chosen her side, the same as Glenneth.
You've
descended into the sewer, Katie. And you're never going to rise. Any
time you try to, that's our stiletto you're going to feel on the back of
you neck. Because we don't play and we don't forgive hate merchants.
