When I wrote ‘The Atlantic Looks Forward to Americas Next Great Authoritarian‘ I did not know that Glenn Greenwald would shortly write a very similar article.  He too considered Trump’s supposed legacy as an authoritarian and found the evidence wanting on much the same grounds as I did.  He too followed up this initial ‘legacy’ section with a suggestion on the nature of the actual problem.  He was, to his very great credit, more explicit on the exact path this danger looked ready to travel.  At the time, I still framed the problem in terms of polarization and cleavage, under which perspective Parler’s right wing bias was as much of a problem as Twitter’s left wing bias.  That Twitter’s policies necessitated the creation of Parler means Twitter had more of the blame, but in my argument it was the cleavage that was the problem.  Glenn Greenwald boldly claimed greater certainty, and he seems to have been correct.  I shall quote at length from his Dec. 28 2020 article, “The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump” with my own added emphasis.

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