In the spill of the 20th, I linked very much in passing to an interview with Glenn Greenwald:

(A conditional answer to a rhetorical and tangential question.)

It was really far too good to leave as a sidetrack like that, so I’m pointing at it with more force here. Also, it turns out that there are two more long clips from the same interview.

GLENN GREENWALD on The Media Elite!

The part of this one that warmed my heart and made me post up separately like this came when Mr. Greenwald responded to a question about two former friends, named Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.

“They’re both like perfectly nice people … it’s not that they’re evil …
What happens is they go work for evil institutions, and then they get co-opted into the pernicious prism of that place.”

He goes on to explain, expertly using Chris Hayes’ own written theses in Twilight of the Elites, about Cognitive Capture, which is what happens when you immerse yourself in an institution and become dependent on the money and perqs they give you–“you WILL start seeing the world through their distorted perspective … and you’ll lose your capacity to see outside of it“.

The reason this is important to me is that I believe that (almost?) ALL institutions mindlessly produce this same result among the people that become dependent on them for a paycheck. It’s not just evil MSNBC. A fucking job at McDonald’s actively indoctrinates you and prizes loyalty to the grail of meat-based consumer profits above all else. When I worked there I was very young and very fiery and I actively resisted the cult–but honestly the only reason my resistance was successful is that the job paid almost nothing and was trivially replaceable. I wasn’t dependent on it, so I could never be cognitively captured.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and my resistance failed.

It’s true that as a professor I was still quite independent, especially in the beginning. The first college President to play oh-so-reluctant executioner to my employment life once spoke of me in a public meeting as an Anarchist. The weirdest part of the whole fiasco is that, at the time, it wasn’t an accusation or an indictment. It was said with a healthy dose of admiration, and I think even … envy.

But in the end that didn’t stop her from tripping the trap door out from under me and watching me swing by the neck. The best that can be said for her is that she might have had some mixed emotions, about my hanging. But she was corporately cognitively captured, and let it happen anyway. On her watch. With her signature on the death warrant.

To take an even more extreme example–earlier in this interview segment, Greenwald talks about the termination of his own employment with The Intercept. The incredible thing about this story is that this was an institution he co-founded with two other journalists of impeccable repute, a mere six years ago. Even so. The institution was an institution, and over time it became as inherently evil as MSNBC, and he resisted the evil, and that, fellow travelers, was the end of that.

What I admire so intensely about Glenn Greenwald is that he never became dependent on the gravy train, the way I did at a lower level, or Chris and Rachel did at a much higher plane. Bronze handcuffs, golden handcuffs, it doesn’t matter, you’re still living like a slave.

When the institution became fascistic, he said fuck it–it’s going to hurt, in the wallet, but I don’t need your money that bad, bitches. I’m going back to doing what I was doing in 2004 on freakin’ Blogspot–the freedom of my truthful voice über alles, to coin a phrase. It’s all the more ironic that the final blowout took place because his Institution refused to let him be objectively critical of … Joe Biden, the institutional choice of nominee for the corporatist Dems.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s rationally possible to maintain a perfect standard of integrity when you take an Institution’s money. You can’t work within the System to change things, and if you think you can, the System is going to change you, and not the other way around.

I don’t want a fucking job.

Yes, I still might take one, for two years, out of cowardly pragmatism. But if I do, my heart is going to beat strong and rage against the machine precisely the way it did bent over the fryolators at good old Mickey D’s.

It would be far better to let an audience fund me, even at a pitiful level, because an audience is emancipation from the Institution, and thank you. Thank you for that, in the past and in all the days of spill to come.

The last five minutes of the segment are even more razor sharp. Just go watch it. Please.

Last part: GLENN GREENWALD Smashes Pro-Censorship MSNBC Goons

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights died screaming under Bush. Today, the First Amendment is looking pretty pale and sickly too.

“Distinguished” journalist Richard Engel has been, ahem, Onboarded to the Biden transition team. He wasted no time in coming out strongly for censorship. The honorable Mr. Engel is a former employee of the Institutions known as MSNBC, and Mr. President Obama’s Department of State. Notably, Obama himself has gone on the record very recently, flogging this identical censorship horse in no uncertain terms.

Journalists literally used to be working class anti-authoritarians.

Nowadays you go to Penn or Columbia or Yale, get your J-school graduate degree, and go immediately to a captured, non-working-class life for The Authority, and you praise god for them because you don’t live in a trailer, never mind what that fat paycheck is costing your soul.

“Who thrives in corporations, or just any (institution)? Little authoritarian goons who believe that the masses need to be controlled by their superiors, by their betters … they look at the people … as primitive mongrels who can’t conduct their own discourse without Their control.” –Greenwald

The average Trump voter doesn’t think about these things with any nuance or sophistication.

The average Trump voter is reacting to the whole system of corporate capture, especially among journalists, with a visceral, blind, inarticulate, poorly educated, and absolutely appropriate rage.

In the absence of any media gatekeepers worthy of their trust (they even feel betrayed by Fox, after the early call in Arizona), they turn to voices like Q, as in Q-anon.

Is that stupid? It absolutely is.

It also happens to be their god-given constitutionally protected right.

The gatekeepers are witnessing this in horror, and suddenly censorship isn’t such a dirty word anymore on their airwaves. Suddenly the First Amendment … well … maybe we mighta oughta start re-thinking that whole deal.

Welcome to America, citizen. Keep your shoulder to the wheel, your ear to the ground, your nose firmly up the ass of the boss on the ladder in front of you .. and Enjoy Your Stay! Captivity is Freedom! USA!