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I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.
It is more that one man can not be an administration, even if the appeal of Trumpism is the fantasy of change.
For all the promise of Trump changing things, at the end of the day his administration will have plenty of typical republicans. But Trump at least represents a promise. And there is some difference.
You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration. And you would be getting a different administration if people more like Pompeo, Mike Pense, etc, were the president.
I do agree with another poster that people should put more pressure on politicians like Trump who they think are supposedly on their side, when pushing counter establishment moves. But also towards other politicians of course.
While some criticism can be warranted, and Greenwald manages to usually be fair about this issue, blaming everything on Trump and doubly so focusing the blame on Trump fans is unwise, even if one isn't doing so from a lefty perspective. It lets off the hook more powerful, numerous factions like the neocons. Especially the permanent bureaucrats who don't change, or lobbyists, or the media and those that run it. It is better to focus on them, than Trump fans who are at least hopeful of a bigger change than what Trumpism probably can bring.
Trump himself isn't any sort of libertarian's dream when it comes to people like Assange and Snowden. From what I recall, he made some vague murmurs about possibly pardoning Assange at one point, but that went nowhere. Meanwhile, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, he strongly hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. Which also went nowhere, of course. But my point is that on this issue, Trump has made as many pronouncements which are more authoritarian than the typical establishment politician as he has made pronouncements that are less authoritarian than the typical establishment politician.
However, I agree that Trump has acted like slightly less of a neocon than the typical US president, although that is a low bar to clear.
Trump's own thoughts are immaterial. The behavior of institutions is moved by organized minorities, not the inner monologues of figureheads. After his surprise election, his administration was quickly captured by typical spook mouthpieces and behaved as such. No surprises.
If he is to win this time, it will be on the legs of a persecution by those same institutions and the support of Project 2025 people who, from my estimation, are absolutely woke on the spook question. I've seen some quietly repeat Moldbuggian slogans about retiring everyone from the CIA and they're specifically drawing a plan to purge the deep state instead of Trump's original total lack of steps to drain the swamp.
I don't know if that means he does anything about Assange and Snowden. I don't know if those people survive his election. I don't even know if he'll be elected. But it seems fair to say he gets a mulligan on this particular question given the situation and his staff.
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Neocon and interventionist like assassinating Iran's most important and revered military leader in a foreign capital by drone strike?
I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.
LCS was horrendously bad, was it even suitable for Iran?
Sounds like it was supposed to be handling Yemen...
Or not.
I think the idea was that it was supposed to help handle the swarms of Iranian speedboats.
My vague sense of Iranian capabilities is that once we fielded the LCS in numbers their capabilities had evolved beyond merely "100 speedboats with warheads" anyway, although we know from Ukraine that the threat from speedboat swarms is real.
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The key is the comparison. Would a typical republican be just as interventionist as Trump was, or much more? The reality is that there is in fact a much more gung ho republican faction and there has been backlash against Trump for not going along with the neocon agenda, as much as they wanted.
Both in regards to Ukraine, Syria, and general American involvement and intervention with other countries.
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I raised an eyebrow at OP's misspelling of his name as some sort of funny-only-to-him joke, but I'm a bit surprised to see you go along with it. Anyway, yeah, the idea that Greenwald in any way supported the narrative that Assange was too paranoid is ridiculous.
I suppose, but as a counterpoint this entire argument seems to rely on a fantasy version of how politics works. Presidents aren't absolute monarchs, they still have to form coalitions, man positions with actual people, not programmable NPC's, etc. That the Republican establishment, which was the pool he had to draw from, were completely hostile to Assange is not a surprise. Trump himself probably doesn't care one way or another.
This is one respect in which Presidents are actually monarchs - he can pardon anyone of a federal crime at the stroke of a pen.
I meant it in the sense that people working for him will have their own agendas. I agree that if he really wanted to get Assange out, he could have, and this is why his base should put more pressure on him.
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Ugh, I thought that there was something wrong with that spelling but didn't bother to check. To be honest I haven't followed or thought about Greenwald for some time.
Even that would be quite a different stance from those who somehow think that Trump and Assange are on the same side (against the globalists or whatever).
Not too different, or at least it makes the idea of voting Trump to bust out Assange a not-terrible one, it's just that you have to put actual pressure on him, instead of hoping he'll do it on his own initiative.
Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.
Unfortunately, I don't trust the population's wishes either.
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