Of the many fun things that have taken place since Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Robert Mueller’s investigatory findings on Sunday afternoon is the number of dyed-in-the-wool progressives that have come out as being a bit ashamed that their side became so heavily invested in what many of us have called a grotseque charade from its inception. While most have taken simply slunk away, averting their eyes from the train wreck and trying not to draw attention to themselves, a few on the left were open skeptics of the whole story from the beginning. One of the most prominent is Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, you’ll recall, was a major opponent of the Iraq War, he broke the Edward Snowden story, and, like his fellow travelers at The Bulwark, is funded by progressive billionaire Pierre Omidyar. This is Greenwald on the whole Russia nonsense from January:

The reason is Russia. For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”

And even if claims about Russian meddling are corroborated by Robert Mueller’s investigation, Greenwald’s not sure it adds up to much — some hacked emails changing hands, none all that damaging in their content, maybe some malevolent Twitter bots. In his eyes, the Russia-Trump story is a shiny red herring — one that distracts from the failures, corruption, and malice of the very Establishment so invested in promoting it. And when in January, as “Journalism Twitter” was chastising the president for one outrage or another, Congress quietly passed a bipartisan bill to reauthorize sweeping NSA surveillance, you had to admit Greenwald might have been onto something.

“When Trump becomes the starting point and ending point for how we talk about American politics, [we] don’t end up talking about the fundamental ways the American political and economic and cultural system are completely fucked for huge numbers of Americans who voted for Trump for that reason,” he says. “We don’t talk about all the ways the Democratic Party is a complete fucking disaster and a corrupt, sleazy sewer, and not an adequate alternative to this far-right movement that’s taking over American politics.”

Interestingly enough, though I think Greenwald is wrong about just about everything when it comes to the United States, I think his last paragraph has more than a little truth on it.

Last night, Greenwald was on Tucker Carlson’s show and he unloaded on MSNBC and other leftwing outlets who led the mob on the Russia collusion lies for the past two years.

It wasn’t just Howard Dean, it was continuously on MSNBC, which––let me just say, should have their top hosts on primetime go before the cameras and hang their head in shame and apologize for lying to people for three straight years, exploiting their fears to great profit. These are people who were on the verge of losing their jobs. That whole network was about to collapse. This whole scam saved them. And not only did they constantly feed people for three straight years total disinformation, they did it on purpose, Tucker.” And the proof of that is, unlike you, who has been criticized in many different ways by the left. Some of which I agree with and we’ve talked about before. The first time I ever watched your show, you had on Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat, to talk about—on your set for 12 straight minutes—collusion, so that your audience could hear the other side of the story.

MSNBC did the exact opposite. There was a whole slew, not just me, of left-wing journalists with very high journalistic credentials, far more than anyone on that network, like Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill and many others, including myself, who were banned from the network because they wanted their audience not to know that anybody was questioning or expressing skepticism about the lies and the scam they were selling because it was so profitable.

They did it on purpose. It was a total fraud that they perpetrated on their audience and to the extent that they talked about it at all, it was to call us agents of the Russian government to defame us as traitors and to lie about us continuously to their audience. And there’s still no accountability, they still won’t put us on their airwaves, they still won’t apologize, and they’re still lying to their audience.

They don’t want their audience to know what they did to them for three straight years on purpose

There is literally nothing here that is surprising. MSNBC has created a brand out of lying about President Trump and pushing the collusion conspiracy theory. It doesn’t matter what the politics are of the guests, the unifying feature when the subject of Trump and Russia come up is that MSNBC pushed the story as true. Hopefully, if more folks like Greenwald come forward, we can reach a national consensus that what happened to President Trump was so wrong that it should not happen to anyone again.

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