GLENN GREENWALD’S DECISION to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus, the preposterous charge that The Intercept’s editors and reporters, with the lone, noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Biden will suffice to refute those claims.

The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism.

We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.

The defining feature of The Intercept’s work in recent years has been the investigative journalism that came out of painstaking work by our staffers in Washington, D.C., New York, and across the rest of the country. It is the staff of The Intercept that has been carrying out our investigative mission — a mission that has involved a collaborative editing process.

We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks. We get it. But facts are facts, and The Intercept’s record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself.

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-the-intercept/

The reality:

Prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald on Thursday resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded in 2014, after editors sought to “censor” an article he wrote about The Post’s exposé on documents retrieved from a Hunter Biden hard drive.

Greenwald is best known for his 2013 reporting on leaked mass-surveillance documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. His work for The Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize.

“The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote in a blog post.

“[T]he brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community,’ to suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying.”

Greenwald, 53, lives in Brazil with his husband, David Miranda, a socialist congressman, and their two children.

He wrote that he will publish articles, including the censored story, on the SubStack platform, which allows subscribers to finance independent journalists.

“Like anyone with young children, a family and numerous obligations, I do this with some trepidation, but also with the conviction that there is no other choice. I could not sleep at night knowing that I allowed any institution to censor what I want to say and believe,” Greenwald wrote.

Greenwald wrote that he was particularly disturbed by The Intercept — owned by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar — referring to the Hunter Biden hard drive as Russian disinformation, without evidence.

“The Intercept published some of the most credulous and false affirmations of maximalist Russiagate madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as ‘Russian disinformation’ by mindlessly and uncritically citing — of all things — a letter by former CIA officials that contained this baseless insinuation,” Greenwald wrote.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said last week that The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden emails “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concurred.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey were grilled by the Senate commerce committee on their censorship this month of The Post’s reporting. Facebook said it throttled The Post’s initial stories pending fact-checking. Twitter blocked distribution of URLs and locked down the account of The Post, journalists and officials who shared the stories.

Twitter censored The Post’s stories under a “hacked materials” policy, despite no evidence that the records were hacked, and The Post’s main Twitter account remains locked.

“Our team made a fast decision. The enforcement action, however, of blocking URLs, both in tweets and in DM direct messages we believe was incorrect and we changed it,” Dorsey told senators.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-quits-the-intercept-over-hunter-biden-article/

See also:

A package containing documents relating to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son Hunter Biden that went missing while being shipped to Fox News host Tucker Carlson in California has been located, according to a report.

The package was first brought up on Wednesday evening by Carlson on his program “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Carlson said a source had sent his team “a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family” that he believed to be “authentic” and “damning.”

His team received the trove of documents while Carlson and his executive producer were in Los Angeles interviewing Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, and had a producer ship them from the network’s New York offices overnight.

The producer used a “large, brand-name company,” according to Carlson, though he did not identify the company.

The problem, however, was that the documents never arrived in Los Angeles, Carlson claimed.

“Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared,” he said.

Carlson credited the company for taking immediate action after being alerted to the missing package, saying, “The company security team interviewed every one of its employees who touched the envelope we sent.

“They searched the plane, and the trucks that carried it, they went through the office in New York where our producers dropped that package off, they combed the entire cavernous sorting facility, they used pictures of what we had sent, so the searchers would know what to look for. They went far and beyond but found nothing,” he explained.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/tucker-carlsons-hunter-biden-documents-reportedly-located/

This is a repeat of an article from: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31027

It all started (or continued on) with a fellow called Voltaire, an elegant wordsmith who fomented a "revolution" with satire. This clown suggested power to the people, the cad... The French revolution soon followed, with a few "let-them-have-cake" heads being chopped off.

After the revolution, satire ebbed and flowed with underground pamphleteers, all becoming more subdued with the serious writer Joseph Marie Eugène Sue. Apart from writing something that we all know about in song, La Coucaratcha (1830s), Sue wrote Les Mystère de Paris which was a full-on anti-Catholic work, promoting strong socialist ideals. But Sue did not stop here. He also wrote "The Wandering Jew" (1844-45). His later writings got censored by the government.

Sue's writings were taken on board by a full-blown satirist, Maurice Joly, who wrote the "Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" (1864), amongst other thing. This piece is quite an enlightened "conversation" (to use an overused word that seems to have relegated the word "discussion" to the dust bin) against "capital", and anti-god — and possibly antisemitic to boot. Nothing new.

This "Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" is a satire of two blokes in hell discussing life, trickery and money. It led some Russian satirists in 1902 to write the antisemitic hoax called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". The "Protocols" are about a plan, like that of Pinky and the Brain, for global domination by the Jews — instead of by dumb/intelligent lab rats.

Of course Hitler was a convert to the book which was studied as a factual manual in Germany's schools, even before Hitler came to power. The Protocols uses a lot of Maurice Joly's Dialogue, as well as ideas from another book, Biarritz (1868), written by the German antisemitic novelist Hermann Goedsche who also wrote under the pen name of Sir John Retcliffe.

This growing satirical rumble of socialist and antisemitic sentiments were never designed to hurt anyone. Only a joke really designed to help the plebs cope with their boring days, while thinking of the greener grass on the other side of the fence.

But the general satire was also the counter-pointed continuation of this other satirical book  —written around the 4th Century AD by dedicated forgers, clever fabricators and some satirists — some people call the bible. Of course these 4th century writings were also based on the greater hoax called the first testament. In there, the Jewish people humbly declared themselves the chosen people of god. All the numbered punch lines explain the Jew's warring relationship with other people, including the Egyptians who did not like them much 6,000 years ago. 

I have already exposed the hoax of Sardanapale about Babylon and Nineveh on this site... History is full of this funny shit. If you accept it, you can become an historian academic or vice verso. The Q'ran followed closely on these crazy footsteps, except every punch line is repeated ad nauseam on the phone line to god, by believers, all in order to give them excuses for conquering other people, as well. 

All in good fun.

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Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

          Voltaire

The French government has placed the entire nation on high alert after three people were killed in a suspected terrorist attack in Nice. Police in Avignon later gunned down an assailant in a separate incident.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/504908-france-vigipirate-terror-attack-nice/

From Glenn Greenwald

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.

The censored article will be published on this page shortly (it is now published here, and the emails with Intercept editors showing the censorship are here). My letter of intent to resign, which I sent this morning to First Look Media’s President Michael Bloom, is published below.

As of now, I will be publishing my journalism here on Substack, where numerous other journalists, including my good friend, the great intrepid reporter Matt Taibbi, have come in order to practice journalism free of the increasingly repressive climate that is engulfing national mainstream media outlets across the country.

This was not an easy choice: I am voluntarily sacrificing the support of a large institution and guaranteed salary in exchange for nothing other than a belief that there are enough people who believe in the virtues of independent journalism and the need for free discourse who will be willing to support my work by subscribing.

Like anyone with young children, a family and numerous obligations, I do this with some trepidation, but also with the conviction that there is no other choice. I could not sleep at night knowing that I allowed any institution to censor what I want to say and believe — least of all a media outlet I co-founded with the explicit goal of ensuring this never happens to other journalists, let alone to me, let alone because I have written an article critical of a powerful Democratic politician vehemently supported by the editors in the imminent national election.

But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept

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I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication:

TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions -- the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election -- journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents' authenticity. One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden's brother Jim were planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in China. And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it.

Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall Street Journal says that it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and that "text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture."

But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated -- so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing.

Beyond that, the Journal's columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documents and "found correspondence corroborates and expands on emails recently published by the New York Post," including ones where Hunter was insisting that it was his connection to his father that was the greatest asset sought by the Chinese conglomerate with whom they were negotiating. The New York Times on Sunday reached a similar conclusion: while no documents prove that such a deal was consummated, "records produced by Mr. Bobulinski show that in 2017, Hunter Biden and James Biden were involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy," and "make clear that Hunter Biden saw the family name as a valuable asset, angrily citing his 'family’s brand' as a reason he is valuable to the proposed venture."

These documents also demonstrate, reported the Times, "that the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president." Strassel noted that "a May 2017 'expectations' document shows Hunter receiving 20% of the equity in the venture and holding another 10% for 'the big guy'—who Mr. Bobulinski attests is Joe Biden." And the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published an article on Sunday with ample documentation suggesting that Biden's attempt to replace a Ukranian prosecutor in 2015 benefited Burisma.

All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them.

The initial documents, claimed the New York Post, were obtained when the laptops containing them were left at a Delaware repair shop with water damage and never picked up, allowing the owner to access its contents and then turn them over to both the FBI and a lawyer for Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani. The repair store owner confirmed this narrative in interviews with news outlets and then (under penalty of prosecution) to a Senate Committee; he also provided the receipt purportedly signed by Hunter. Neither Hunter nor the Biden campaign has denied these claims.

Publication of that initial New York Post story provoked a highly unusual censorship campaign by Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions. And while Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for Twitter’s handling of the censorship and reversed the policy that led to the blocking of all links the story, the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, continues to be locked out of its Twitter account, unable to post as the election approaches, for almost two weeks.

After that initial censorship burst from Silicon Valley, whose workforce and oligarchs have donated almost entirely to the Biden campaign, it was the nation's media outlets and former CIA and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with scorn. As usual for the Trump era, the theme that took center stage to accomplish this goal was an unsubstantiated claim about the Kremlin responsibility for the story.

Numerous news outlets, including the Intercept, quickly cited a public letter signed by former CIA officials and other agents of the security state claiming that the documents have the “classic trademarks" of a “Russian disinformation” plot. But, as media outlets and even intelligence agencies are now slowly admitting, no evidence has ever been presented to corroborate this assertion. On Friday, the New York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”

The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed -- by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories -- that contained this extraordinary proclamation: "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren't."

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored

From the onset, for about a year (at least 9 months ago here), we have indicated that the DNC SHOULD NOT choose Joe Biden as their candidate. He might still win despite his "tax muddles on trillionaires" (which are likely to raise taxes for the middle and lower classes), despite his brains going to mush and despite this story that exposes once more how crooked the Biden son and father have been. Candidates like Pete and Tulsi would have been a better choice. But the DNC goes with rewarding its deep state stalwarts : Biden you shall have... 

And be prepared.... The deep state wants to bomb Damascus... Joe will oblige.

NOTE: GLENN GREENWALD  isn't the first reporter/journalist to resign from the place:

In February 2015, senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein, who had been hired in December 2013, announced his resignation. Writing in Politico, Silverstein described First Look as "a slowly unfolding disaster, not because of editorial meddling from the top, but because of what I came to believe was epic managerial incompetence. …For all of the bean counting and expense account-approving that Omidyar's organizational structure imposed on us, they were shockingly disinterested in the actual journalism. …Top management was so aloof that it was hard to figure out who was in charge."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Look_Media

Piers Moran slammed the media’s failure to report on the Hunter Biden investigation, saying “Imagine if we switched the names around. Imagine if the story was about Donald Trump Jr and Donald Trump. What would be happening?”

“Do you think that the tech giants would be suppressing the story, would the mainstream media be ignoring the story and say that it's all just an unfair smear on the Trumps?”

“The job of a newspaper, of a television network, of anybody, frankly, in the media, who believes in freedom of speech and believes in journalism is to go and investigate the allegations the New York Post has made.”

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US Senator from Texas Ted Cruz in a Senate hearing on Wednesday (28 October) tore into Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the social media platform's censorship of Hunter Biden's (the son of Presidential candidate Joe Biden) stories published by the New York Post.

"...you can censor the New York Post, you can censor Politico, presumably you can sensor the New York Times or any other media outlet, Mr Dorsey who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report... and why do you persist in behaving as a democratic super PAC, silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs", said Cruz.

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But these are no ordinary times... As mentioned earlier, the censorship of the NYP, actually created far more interest for the story, which is reporting about borderline deals (allowed/disallowed by the system). It is most likely that a) the FBI/CIA has more information on the "crookery" but they are and  awaiting the result of the elections — b) they had the information at least since February 2020 —and c) the Trump camp (different from the Republican party) could use this as a challenge to the result of the elections AS BIDEN would not be sworn PRESIDENT until next year... Plenty of rough water to go under the bridge till then...

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