Lol find me one time Greenwald ever co-opted language from the communist movement. Outside of the stroke of luck Snowden reached out to Greenwald and his reporting in Brazil - dudes politics have always been right-leaning libertarian trash.

Maybe “communist movement” is a little too generous, but my point is that he attacks the most blatant overreaches of American imperialism abroad and at home because to some degree he recognizes they are a threat to the empire and he cloaks that in anti-imperialist and free speech language, both traditionally the positions of communists in the US. Here he attacks US-Saudi relationship, Here he says a ‘new domestic war on terror is coming’, No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump. Obviously his politics are libertarian garbage, but American libertarianism emerged as an attempt to reconcile the settler colonial state with an anti-war bend co-opted from the actual anti-imperialists of the 60s and 70s and Greenwald is no different in that respect.

The reason I bring up AOC (it’s her second term btw) is because Greenwald specifically mentions her in his list of “socialists” and he is not wrong. My whole point is that “socialism” in the imperial core is a reactionary tendency from the Leninist perspective and AOC has been happy to walk the imperialist line just as Greenwald would be if it didn’t involve what he considers gross overreaches of the empire. They both are fundamentally opposed to a dictatorship of the proletariat and recognize reforms will be needed to prevent that from emerging. That is what Greenwald means by “socialism” whether he would put it in those terms or not.