'Unleash this monster and one day it'll come for you': Glenn Greenwald sounds alarm over cancel culture

close

Video

Greenwald: Trust in media is important story that’s getting little attention

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald weighs in on free speech and censorship on ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’

Nobody will be immune or exempt from the cancel culture mob as long as the media continues to wield it as a weapon to silence their critics and limit free speech, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warned over the weekend.

Greenwald sounded off on Twitter Thursday after a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times was fired from his think tank job over a tweet that jokingly suggested former Vice President Mike Pence be lynched in order to unify the country. 

NYT CONTRIBUTOR LOSES THINK TANK JOB OVER TWEET SUGGESTING BIDEN 'LYNCH MIKE PENCE'

Greenwald aired his grievances in an op-ed published on Substack over the weekend, where he defended the author and ripped his "moronic" firing at the hands of "the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked."

"In the prevailing climate, the rational choice is to avoid social scorn and ostracization no matter how baseless the grievances one must appease," Greenwald wrote. 

The investigative journalist has long warned of the dangers of media distrust caused by a recent embrace of cancel culture, but the latest attack, he said, sends a strong message: You may believe yourself to be above the fray, but it's a matter of time before the media mob "will come for you." 

"Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you," Greenwald wrote. "And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does."

In a subsequent appearance on "Sunday Morning Futures," Greenwald pointed to a new survey by global communications firm Edelman that found only 46 percent of Americans trust traditional media.

" They are losing faith and trust, and this is not a new sudden development. This has been taking place for years," he told host Maria Bartiromo.

The reason, he believes, is because mainstream media outlets have embraced a response of blaming "others who criticize their reporting, their bad reporting, as though they're being unfairly vilified." 

"The rational choice is to avoid social scorn and ostracization no matter how baseless the grievances one must appease."

— Glenn Greenwald

"When that doesn't work," he said, "what they're doing now is a third response, which is trying to censor their critics and those who are actually inspiring trust by saying kick these people off the Internet, their audience is too big, censor these people, throw their platform out the Internet."

What the media has failed to ask is "what it is that they've done that is causing the public to lose faith and trust," he explained. "And rather than do that, they're now at the point where they're advocating censorship to force the audience to listen to them. "