Brazilian Conservatives Really Hate Glenn Greenwald

"Several months later, Moro, now Minister of Justice, remains largely unscathed by the scandalous Vaza Jato revelations. In fact, a poll earlier this year found him to be the most trusted public figure in Brazilian politics, with 33 percent expressing a high degree of trust in him versus 30 percent for Lula, who came in second. That’s despite the fact that neither Moro nor anyone else implicated in The Intercept’s reporting has contested its substance. If Moro is no longer the untarnished paragon of civic virtue, he is seen by many supporters instead as the wily strategist working every angle—above board or subterranean, as needed—to block a Workers’ Party comeback. Unacknowledged by his admirers is the lengths to which Moro has gone to shield his rightwing allies from legal scrutiny. It was perhaps naïve to think Moro’s own words might condemn him, particularly since millions of Brazilians were driven by thirteen years of uninterrupted Workers’ Party governance to see key institutions and conventions of democracy as obstacles to be worked around rather than engaged. Indeed, what is most alarming about the juridical threats Greenwald now faces is not so much that they come from a government intent on silencing him—such thuggery was to be expected from a Bolsonaro presidency—but that so many in Brazil are celebrating thinly-veiled government censorship and flocking to defend the integrity of a man like Moro whose lack of scruples has been amply documented. On Tuesday, Claudio Dantas, a journalist with the popular rightwing website O Antagonista, published a video calling Greenwald a self-serving hypocrite, and saying he laughed when Greenwald asserted his absolute right to protect his source. In the same video, Dantas went on to praise Bolsonaro’s neoliberal economic agenda and to question the corruption scandals of bygone Workers’ Party administrations. Anti-Greenwald schadenfreude has become a prominent feature of rightwing Brazilian politics. "

article by Andre Pagliarini

Brazilian Conservatives Really Hate Glenn Greenwald | The New Republic