 George Bush and Dick Cheney started new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama started new wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? Do you go down the list? And when you look at things like the destruction of Iraq or the implementation of a torture regime, what has Donald Trump done that even remotely compares in terms of moral evil to any of that? Nothing. And yet, you know, we're supposed to treat George Bush and Barack Obama like morally upstanding statesmen and Donald Trump like the literal reincarnation of Hitler. There's no journalist who is more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Snowden revelations. Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left. A week before the 2020 election, he quit the Intercept, the online news site he co-founded in 2014, because by his account it refused to run a story unless he removed all sections critical of Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called the pathologies illiberalism and repressive mentality that led to him being censored by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center left political organization, academic institution and newsroom. Like a growing number of refugees from more traditional news organizations, Greenwald took his talents to substack, a platform for independent content creators to earn revenue directly from their audiences. He wasted no time lobbing grenades, posting stories and videos with titles like No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush Cheney administration was far worse than Trump. And the three greatest dangers of Biden Harris, militarism, corporatism and censorship all fueled by indifference. I spoke with Greenwald via Zoom at his house in Brazil where he lives with his husband, two children and numerous dogs. Among other topics, we discussed what he sees as a generational fight playing out in newsrooms, the challenge identity politics poses to free expression and whether a coalition of libertarians and progressives can effectively push non-interventionist foreign policy, lifestyle liberation and an end to corporate subsidies during the presidency of Joe Biden. Well, and Greenwald, thanks for talking to reason. Always happy to be with reason. Good to see you, Nick. Yes, you know, let's start with your leaving the intercept, which you announced less than a month ago as we're talking. And in the piece that you wrote explaining why you left this amazing publication platform that you helped start only a few years ago, you said that you were witnessing or experiencing the same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press. So what happened? Well, you, some of you may recall that when I created the intercept with Julia, with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, it was at the height of the Snowden story back in 2013. I was at the Guardian at the time, and I had received a lot of support institutionally and editorially from the Guardian. But I began noticing, as I worked with other media outlets to report that story, a lot of internal obstacles that I thought were quite difficult to overcome in terms of doing the kind of reporting, not just with that story, but in general, I thought needed to be done. And because Laura and I had a lot of visibility with that story, and Jeremy had done a lot of high visibility reporting of his own, including having produced a film about Obama's war on terror called dirty words that had received an Oscar nomination. We had a lot of leverage to create a new media outlet. And we obviously didn't do that, given that we all had very good platforms at the time to replicate what was already being done. We only left the places we were at, which were very secure because we thought we could do something different in journalism. And one of the principal visions we had was that we thought the model for how journalism is often conducted inside corporate media outlets, which is this hierarchical top down structure, where editors impose not necessarily an ideology as much as a kind of tone. So they flatten out the vibrancy and personality and voice in journalism, make everything sound the same, make everything adhere to these very rigid rules of how you can express yourself, what kind of views can be heard with stifling journalism. It was making it not just ineffective, but actually quite boring. And the idea was it's going to be a journalism led media outlet where editors are there to help you when you need it to kind of kick the tires on stories to make sure that things are factually sound, but they're not the bosses. They're not the people you have to overcome who decide whether you can be heard or not. And I had written into my contract, just like I did at the Guardian and Salon, that except in very rare cases where there was like very complex original reporting, like in the Snowden story, the Brazil reporting we did last year, that I would just publish directly to the internet with no editorial intervention. And that was the model we thought we were building that I thought I was building. I never thought of anything to do with ideological dogma and certainly never fealty to any political party. I was a vehement Obama critic at the time, as you know. And before that was a vehement critic of George Bush and Dick Cheney. So it was always that we called ourselves adversarial because we were going to be adversarial to political power, not subservient to it. And so I felt as though we had gotten off course for a few years now by becoming more and more linked with the Democratic Party, particularly in the age of Trump, where we had become not so much a journalistic outlet, but more activist outlet designed not to reporting the truth, no matter who it aggrandizes or angers, but serving the interests of the Democratic Party and more so undermining the interest of Donald Trump, which ultimately became the same thing. And it all culminated in there essentially telling me that I couldn't publish my own story at an internet at a news outlet that was built on my name along with Jeremy and Laura's, but certainly traded on my reputation, traded on my accomplishments that a lot of people associated with me. And it was a huge irony and being stifled in saying what I wanted to say, obviously was something I could never accept that my readers wouldn't want me to. And so I left reading the story that you published eventually and whatnot, you know, and it had, you know, some of that Hunter Biden special sauce on it, which is, I don't know if you've ever eaten that Popeyes chicken, but they have a thing called Cajun Sparkle, which is just MSG on steroids, and it makes everything very flavorful. The story that you wrote was, you know, it was critical of Joe Biden and of Hunter Biden and a variety of things, but it doesn't seem like that should be something that they would be help bent on stopping. Was it just they were afraid this might help Trump win his second term? Yeah. I mean, that's one of the ironies, right? Is that I wasn't doing original reporting. I actually did try and get some of those emails so that I could report on them, but wasn't able to. So it was really just kind of my own analysis of what these emails showed and also of the press's behavior in not just avoiding reporting on them, but creating this kind of edifice of rationalization to avoid talking about them that I thought was journalistically corrupt. So what I wrote was both an indictment of media behavior that was designed to protect Joe Biden and then also my analysis of what I thought these emails showed. So it was really like more of an opinion piece than say original reporting, which is exactly why it was so strange that they were interested in editing it, especially to that extent, because those are exactly the kinds of articles I've written a thousand times that have never touched an editor, let alone had that kind of editorial scrutiny. I don't think anyone thought that article was going to sway the election. It wasn't that big of a deal with that article. Yeah, go ahead. So I mean, it's really just that your editors or other staffers, however, the kind of hierarchy or heterarchy works there, they just didn't want to be part of they didn't want that kind of story coming out at that time because they were pulling for Biden. I mean, is that essentially what you're saying? I think it's actually in some ways worse than that. I mean, if it were the case that I had this huge bombshell that could have actually swayed the election for Trump, I almost would have understood more what they were doing. I would have been horrified and disgusted and would have left anyway. But at least it would have made sense. I think the reason why it bothered me even more, no one thought that article was going to sway the election. What they were worried about was that in 2016, we did do a lot of reporting because we're journalists and not activists for the DNC and the emails from John Podesta and the DNC that revealed a lot of high-level corruption by the DNC, a lot of things about Hillary Clinton, the public got a right to know, and they spent four years being accused of having helped Trump win by virtue of doing this reporting. What they were petrified of was that their friends, their colleagues, journalists, and other outlets that they value on the liberal left were going to say, oh, look, the intercept is doing this again. So if Trump won, they didn't want to go to dinner parties and have people say, why did you help Trump win by publishing this before the election? And even if he didn't win, they didn't want to be accused of that. So no one thought that my article was going to sway the election. They thought that it was going to change the perception of them and they intercept in the eyes of their friends and the people whose opinions they value in the media. And that's why it was actually even more repellent to me, that that was the trivial concerns that they had about what people would think of them. Is that, in a lot of ways, is that the worst thing Trump has done? Is that he's taken people who do not call themselves Democrats. None of the people you work with are thinking Hillary Clinton was God's gift to the universe or Joe Biden, but they become so anti-Trump that they are willing to be repressive in a way that they really shouldn't recognize themselves as doing that. Yeah. So I think there's a few things going on there. I think what happened was media, left-wing media, liberal media in particular, was dying before Trump. Ironically, he was their godsend. Most of the hosts on MSNBC who are now big stars and making millions of dollars a year were on the verge of being fired. Nobody was watching their shitty shows because he's going to tune in to hear people giving fluff interviews to Amy Klobuchar and talking about how lovely Obama is and how mean Mitch McConnell is. It just doesn't get anyone's juices flowing. Trump saved them. He saved them. He made The New York Times this incredibly profitable institution. And so what they learned was the more they elevated the fear levels of people, not just about Trump but about his movement, that he wasn't just somebody with bad policies, but he was actually Hitler. He was a fascist dictator with a fascist white supremacist movement of domestic terrorists who weren't seeking to implement bad policy but who were actually on the verge of ending American democracy as we know it and that he had to be stopped at all costs. Once you implement that narrative, first of all, a lot of them started believing it because they just kept through repetition, hearing it, saying it, all their friends said it. So some of them, it was just true conviction. They really did believe that they were living under the rule of Hitler and that therefore anything you have to do, no matter how unethical, no matter how much of a departure it is from your professional ethics is justified or not even just justified but unimperative. But a lot of them knew that they were benefiting because the more you beat that drum of Trump is Hitler, we're fighting Trump, you feel good about yourself, it gives you purpose, people applaud you, your social media following grows and then even the ones who kind of never bought into that are still immersed in a liberal culture that believes that and when media jobs are disappearing and layoffs are happening in journalism by the millions or the thousands rather, the last thing you want to do is stick your head up and say something that might make you unpopular among media colleagues on whom you might have to rely for your job in the future and it fosters this conformity, this homogeneity, this fear of saying anything off key and I think that is what explains a lot of media behavior over the last four years. You know, a recent piece that you read at Substack is, talks about how Trump Cheney you say, let me get the actual headline, no matter what, no matter the liberal metric chosen, the Bush Cheney administration was far worse than Trump. And in that story, you also point out in various ways how the Obama administration was worse than Trump. Can you quickly sketch why, you know, suddenly out of the last three presidents, Trump seems in at least some significant ways to be the least horrible president that we've had. Yeah, I think that's probably true and it's not because he's necessarily the least horrible person. A lot of times a president can be bad but doesn't get anything done that's bad because they're incompetent and lazy, which I think is true of Trump, or because they just trigger so much anger and resentment and resistance that it prevents them from actually doing anything, which I also think is true. Whereas under Bush and Obama, you know, I started writing about politics because I thought the media was so dormant and complacent about these radical assaults on civil liberties under Bush and Cheney taking place during the war on terror. And then under Obama, they went to sleep even further, right? They got like hypnotized thinking that he was a noble and benevolent leader. And just I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917, one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books, it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson. It was designed to criminalize dissent from US participation on World War One, was invoked against whistleblowers and sources like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined, combined. In fact, it ended up being three times more prosecution under the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost nothing. There were a couple of people in the press, you know, saying that suddenly Trump gets in and the Washington Post changes its motto to democracy dies in darkness, essentially saying, press freedom is under assault. Jim Acosta writes a bestselling book with some pompous self glorifying title like danger, you know, reporting in the era of Trump. What the fuck ever happened to Jim Acosta that constitutes an assault on press freedom? The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was like say mean things about them and tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom. I was threatened by the Obama administration with prison when I was doing the Snowden reporting. I was criminally indicted by the Bolsonaro government at the beginning of this year for the reporting I did in Brazil. Those are attacks of press freedom saying Jim Acosta is an idiot and tweeting something insulting about Wolf Blitzer isn't. So, you know, you kind of go through those metrics like obviously George Bush and Dick Cheney started new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did did Donald Trump start? He escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited in a pretty grotesque way, but he didn't start in a new war. So you go down the list. And when you look at things like the destruction of Iraq or the implementation of a torture regime, what has Donald Trump done that even remotely compares in terms of moral evil to any of that? Nothing. And yet, you know, we're supposed to treat George Bush and Barack Obama like morally upstanding statesmen and Donald Trump like the literal reincarnation of Hitler. So did you vote for Donald Trump in the election? I don't know if you voted in the presidential election, but who did your vote for if you did? Yeah, I didn't vote because I just it's ironic because I do. I that's the one like old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that like if you vote, you kind of psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance. Yeah. You know, it's really interesting to think about the way you're talking about this homogeneity and this, you know, this kind of group think is coming in the old days of kind of legacy media. The story would always be that the editorial side was super independent and that the managing editor and the editor-in-chief was fighting for press freedom. And it was the business side that would be leaning on them to say, like, don't investigate this story because they advertise in our paper or, you know, something like Ibsen's Enemy of the People where, you know, by pursuing truth, you would undermine people's livelihood or the ability of a nation to, you know, kind of defend its borders. When did it become this, you know, world where it's not business pressure? I mean, you are a critic of what you call corporate media, which has, you know, has a lot of money interests that kind of change things. But this is something different, right? This is actually people internalizing group think who are all on the editorial side of things. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, you know, the intercept, for example, one of the things we thought we had done to insulate ourselves in these kind of pressures was we didn't have a whole school of investors. We had one funder who was a billionaire, the founder of Eva Pierre Amityar, but he treated us and we created ourselves as a 501c3, which is a non-profit so that we wouldn't have any pressure to produce revenue. We didn't have to produce clickbait. We could send off young reporters for months and say, don't worry about the news cycle. Just go and investigate this. We didn't have subscribers. He just gave us his money, promised to stay out of our editorial business and kept that promise for seven years. So we had no interference at all. It was like the dream, right? From like the exactly the kind of business influences that would typically contaminate a newsroom. What contaminated it was exactly as you astutely observed, which was the kind of news editorial side that had traditionally defended journalistic freedom. I think two things are happening here. Number one is, it is true that in the age of the internet, media outlets and news outlets and news organizations are struggling financially. How do you survive when local papers can't do ads anymore because Craigslist offers them for free? All the things we know about, there's been barely a digital media outlet, even the ones that looked like they were going to thrive like Huffington Post or Buzzfeed that haven't laid off thousands of hundreds or thousands of people in the last couple of years. So people are looking around for a model that works. And one of the only models that works is the one that Fox News pioneered so successfully, which is to say, we're only going to talk to this audience of this particular partisan and ideological persuasion and we're going to feed them constant high excitement content that's going to keep them watching. In the 1990s, the hatred levels generated for the Clintons over Vince Foster and drug running and Mina and all of that to say nothing of the Lewinsky scandal was so successful. And the drug report and culture and Rush Limbaugh, that became a really scarce model in the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC were all looking at this and saying, we don't have the success. What are we going to do? And so they started thinking, well, we should do it with the other side. And they do. There was a Pew survey from two months ago that I found amazing. It asked people, name your number one source of news, your principal, the principal place you go to get news. And so people who said Fox News, 94% of them are Republicans, as you would expect. People who said MSNBC said 95% of them are Democrats, as you would expect. People who said The New York Times, Nick, 91%, 91% are Democrats. The New York Times was only talking to Democrats. NPR, 88%, CNN, 79%. These outlets have an audience that don't want to hear the other side. I, you know, when Russia becomes, became so important to these media outlets profitability, I used to go on MSNBC all the time. Matt Taibbi did too. Jeremy Scaled did too. They stopped inviting us on. They didn't want any dissent. They didn't want any dissenter questioning because they knew that their audience didn't want to hear it. So when you, and at least Fox News, like Tucker would put on Adam Schiff, he liked having those debates. The other outlets didn't want it. And so they've just turned themselves into the silos of homogenous opinion. And you know, if you want to keep your job at MSNBC or The New York Times, those hiities are ones you better affirm and never question. And so it just becomes financial motive, but then it starts to shape the culture. Yeah, it's interesting too. The New York Times now gets more money from what I understand. They get more revenue from subscriptions than they do from advertising. So the line directly to an audience that is demanding something or expecting something seems even clearer that it might even be at a place like Fox News. Right. And also, I think the other interesting thing is that, you know, for a long time, there was, you know, in like say the 80s, the Republicans were kind of the party of Wall Street and corporate America, right? It was Reagan wanting to cut the corporate taxes and the Democrats and the party of unions. So if you were a corporate media outlet that relied on corporate America for your revenue, which they did, there's an argument that you would want to appease the Republican agenda because that was what corporate America wanted. That has all changed now. If you look at who Wall Street gives their money to, who Silicon Valley gives their money to, it's the Democratic Party. They became a corporatized party. So there's no longer this difference in agendas either between corporate advertisers and the Democratic and liberal politics. I don't mean left-wing politics. I mean, establishment liberalism, Raytheon and Boeing and, you know, Facebook and Goldman Sachs and Citibank love the liberal agenda, meaning like the Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Barack Obama agenda. So even there, there's been this convergence that's just that is the new coalition of power in the United States. So you have migrated to Substack, which I suspect most of the people watching this have some understanding of, but it's a site or a service that allows creators to put up whatever they want and then to charge money for it. You charge $50 a year or $5 a month for what you produce there. A lot of other people are doing the same thing or have done the same thing at Substack or sites like Patreon, which is another kind of creator focused site. I'm thinking of people like all over the ideological spectrum, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Matt Iglesias, late of Vox, people like Katie Herzog and Jesse Single. Is this the future or is this scalable, this type of thing where journalists who have, you know, kind of trouble fitting in even at places that they started can go there and support themselves and produce varied heterodox content? Or is this mostly it's people like you who have a massive following already as well as a reputation where you can go and kind of get a direct stream of revenue? So I think it's a grounds for being optimistic in the sense that it isn't just people like me, you know, like Andrew Sullivan has talked openly about the fact that he's making more money now after being on Substack for I think three or four months. Then he's made in his entire career working at, I mean, Andrew has, you know, is one of the most successful journalists of the last several decades. He's worked everywhere, Thai magazine at its peak and the Atlantic and, you know, New York magazine, New York, everywhere. Matt Taibbi was at Rolling Stone, like one of the most coveted gigs, you know, being a, Matt is making more money than he's ever dreamed he would make. And it's not just us. It's, you know, your colleague Matt Welch has a podcast called fifth column that I've been on twice now that's incredibly interesting. I listen to it all the time. I pay for it. So, and it's discovered and it's letting new voices be discovered too. And it's amazing these platforms say what Silicon Valley started off saying, which was we're not a publishing company. Like Substack says, we're not approving or disapproving the content that goes out on our platform. We're just providing a service that allows business people to come and monetize their journalism or their writing. So in that sense, it is good, but there's two senses in which we need to be very restrained about our enthusiasm. One is that whatever independent entity arises that gives journalists freedom and begins to compete with corporate media outlets, they turn their guns on it. The main people don't realize this. The main reason Facebook and Google and Twitter so actively censor now isn't because they wanted to. They don't want to. They never wanted to. They wanted to tell that story that Substack is telling that AT&T tells, right? Which is like, look, we're just a neutral platform. We don't pick and choose who gets to speak. And nobody expects like if Milo Unopolis calls Alex Jones on AT&T and does a conference call that AT&T intervenes and cuts off their service because people accept no AT&T is a content neutral service. That's what Facebook and Twitter wanted to be. They had to stop doing that. They had to start censoring first Alex Jones on Milo Unopolis and increasingly more and more voices because journalists at CNN and NBC and the New York Times demanded they do so. Turning their huge megaphones and saying, look at the extremists and the hatefulness these platforms are giving voice to and they're going to do the same thing to Substack and Patreon. It's just a question of time. So that's number one is those places are going to start to experience a lot of those same pressures to start kicking people off who the New York Times and CNN successfully demonizes as two extremists. But I think the other important thing is that it's great. I love being on Substack. It's like a throwback to the days of how I started, right? When I was just a blogger, wrote my own column. I only was answerable to my audience. I'm making a lot of money so I can have other journalists working with me, which I do, but still it's basically the same model. But in order to really have a big impact, to like be a competitor in the discourse to the New York Times or MSNBC or the Washington Post, to do real investigations like the Snowden story or what WikiLeaks does or the Brazil investigation, you need a newsroom. You need like a team of journalists and editors and lawyers and technologists. So, you know, I talked about the fact that before I left the Intercept so precipitously because of that censorship, I had already been exploring the possibility of again kind of creating a new media outlet based on this model that would bring everybody together who believes in this vision of free and open discourse, of opposing this new establishment concentration of power. So, I'm still looking to do that, but I think Substack and Patreon are great in that they at least do give people an opportunity to have a place where they can go free of those constraints. So, you are not actively working. I was going to ask you in your resignation letter, you kind of hinted at, you were looking to get to leave and start something new anyway, but you haven't actually started doing that yet. Well, we've started just, I mean, we've, you know, been speaking to people who we think would be interesting to work with us. We talked to potential financiers. We're just in that stage of development, though. You know, part of, so you sketch out a kind of economically driven reason for the homogenization of journalism. It's partly, you know, people at CNN and the New York Times, they want to get rid of people who are going to, you know, kind of get more eyeballs than they do. In another way, some of the work that you've been doing recently talks about it in starkly ideological terms, and you recently wrote a piece discussing kind of trends at the ACLU under Anthony Romero, who's been the Executive Director for 20 years, and your kind of interactions or your sense of recent series of tweets or actions by Chase Strangio, who is the ACLU Deputy Director for Transgender Justice, who had represented Chelsea Manning back in the day, who you have a lot of respect for as a lawyer, but who had recently come out and talked about stopping the circulation of a book by Abigail Schreyer called Irreversible Damage, which questioned certain elements of early adolescent or pre-adolescent transgender kind of operations and whatnot. But you talk about the ACLU as a group that is moving from a kind of free speech absolutism, which you grew up on and which you kind of really idolize to an organization now that is starting to say, well, ideology or, you know, certain positions are more important than the kind of value neutral concept of free speech. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on at the ACLU and how that kind of reflects or refracts larger ideological questions, particularly on the left, it seems. The right is its own problem and they've never been particularly interested in heterodox ideas, I think. But on the left, we're seeing an ideological narrowing of discussion. Yeah, you know, in one sense, what's happening at the ACLU is happening, is the same thing happening on every college campus practically in corporate workplaces and also in newsrooms, which is there's this, it largely breaks down on generational lines, although not completely, of course, but largely in which this kind of younger millennial set who are now not that young anymore, they're in their mid-30s or older and starting to assume managerial authority within these institutions grew up believing that free speech is not an absolute value and that it needs to give way in all kinds of instances where more important political agenda items and more important political values are in conflict with it as they understand it, by which they mean ideas and arguments that might endanger marginalized people by making them uncomfortable or that might lead to the implementation of harmful policies by convincing people to support them are not ideas that should be heard, they're ideas that should be suppressed in the name of these greater political values. And it's something at the intercept that I talked about in that article, we heard explicitly, there's a diversity committee that's part of the intercept union, the intercept union, like most newsroom unions, they talk almost nothing about the typical things unions used to talk about that made them so worthwhile, like more way better wages, more days off, you know, holidays, pensions, all of that, they have no interest in any of that. They talk only about how to control the content of their colleague's speech in the name of human resources and union diversity issues. And there was a letter that they wrote that leaked to the New York Times in which they said, yes, okay, fine, free speech is important. We know the founders of the intercept are free speech absolutists or radicals, but it has to give way when it's in conflict with our anti-racism agenda. And I didn't know that a news organization had an anti-racism agenda. I knew we wanted to make sure we weren't a racist news organization, but I didn't know we were. That was one of our primary purposes. It was news to me. So this conflict is happening everywhere, right? Like Barry Weiss, once you left the New York Times, described the newsroom fight that she kind of live tweeted as being these like millennial editor, you know, young editors and reporters saying, how dare you publish this Tom Cotton op-ed. And the older reporters are saying, that's like what we do. We're a newspaper. We air ideas that powerful people are. So this conflict that is in the ACLU in one sense is a common one. The problem is the ACLU is a singular organization in the sense that unlike all these other institutions that I just referenced, they really were the only game in town when it came to defending an absolutist framework of free speech. They didn't give a shit what other values were at play. They, these Jewish lawyers in the 1970s represented the actual Nazis who were wearing swastika armbands and their right to march down the streets of Skokie, Illinois, where Holocaust survivors, a large population of Holocaust survivors were. That's how radical they were. And not just free speech, but also due process. The idea that you cannot, no matter how, you know, odious a person's crime is that they're accused of, assume they're guilt without giving them full due process. And I know a lot of people at the ACLU. I've worked with the ACLU for years. I have a lot of friends there who are who are lawyers and they are now being driven by the same conflicts in part because they part of it is financial that after Trump, these huge number of liberals who thought the ACLU was just a liberal organization gave millions and millions of dollars, not in the name of civil liberties, but in the name of stopping Trump, which sometimes converged and sometimes didn't. So they started becoming an overtly political organization. I remember one time I was so shocked, Paris had adopted a law criminalizing catcalling on the street whistling at women when they walked by, which is not a good thing to do. But like it was, it was a crime now with this and the someone on the ACLU Twitter feed celebrated the criminalization of speech in the name of these liberal values. Another time, they condemned Betsy DeVos who wanted to expand the amount of due process people are entitled to when they're accused of sexual assault. The ACLU was against due process. They want lesser due process in the name of sexual assault. And so when Chase Strangio came out and said, once Abigail wrote her article in Colette about how Amazon and other publishing houses had been bullied out of publishing her book, Chase said, stopping circulation of this book is 100% a cause I'm willing to develop. It was now not just the ACLU defending the diminution of due process or the criminalization of speech but suppression of books. And like Chase is not some low level ACLU lawyer. He was just named to the time 100 list of the world's most influential people. That's how significant of a person he has become largely because of his work on trans issues. He is a trans lawyer himself. And so it was horrifying. You know, it's one thing for the New York Times to get woke and not allow Tom Cotton's op-eds or for college campuses to disinvite. But for the ACLU to openly cheer at least a lawyer there, the suppression of a book was horrifying to me. For whom the ACLU is extremely important. Where do you think that generational shift, like what drives it? Part of it is probably, it is just generational that every generation kind of rebels or pushes away from the older generation. But what happened or what is happening in American society? Because it does seem to be an absolute trend or it's a fact that younger people do not treat the idea of free speech as an absolute right. It just does not exist in their catechism or their vision of the world. What happened? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, I have to say, you know, when some pundits like Jonathan Chait were obsessed with these college campus controversies, I really didn't pay much attention because I just thought, okay, that you know, I did a lot of, I had a lot of views in college and I grew out of them. You know, I wasn't interested in like chiding 21 year old sophomores at Overland. You know, I didn't think that was like a very important power center to go and denounce and confront the way Jonathan and others were doing kind of obsessively. I have to say, you know, they turned out to be right in the sense that it did, they didn't grow out of it. They brought it with them to their workplaces and they've never grown out of it. And as I said, these millennials aren't 20 anymore. They're 35 and 40 and they still haven't grown out of it. And so when you learn in childhood that if you have something unpleasant, you run to mommy and daddy who protects you from it, which is kind of a new kind of parenting. And then you go off to college and you have, you know, deans and your dorms and high school and college administrators who like, if you hear something in class that upsets you, they don't tell you to go fuck off and go argue against it. They like coddle you and tell you that you have a right to be safe from those things. And then you get to your workplace and you hear colleagues saying things that upset you because you think they're terrible or destructive or harmful or wrong. And instead of engaging them and writing about them the way journalists used to do, right, like go read the nation magazine, like when Chris Hitchens was there with, you know, Eric Alterman and all those people, they had a vicious argument. So it was like so vibrant, you know, that intellectual debate, they run to human resources, they turn it into an HR complaint. And, you know, I think the best book that I've read is one that I'm sure is known to a lot of your audience, which is Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and who's his co-author at FHIR. Greg Lukyoff. Greg Lukyoff, exactly. Which I think explains this. So in fact, it explained it so well that I actually changed not just how I viewed these issues as a journalist who writes about free speech, but also even as a parent, you know, where my instinct is like if my kids have something that's upsetting them, your instinct is to go protect them. And then I realized like, no, sometimes you have to just let them kind of like experience the unpleasant thing and learn those skills about how to navigate it. I don't mean you let them like suffer physically if they hurt themselves. I just mean that you can't protect them from every unpleasant thing in the world because you actually aren't doing them very good. You're going to turn them into little woke warriors who demand that HR fire anyone who has an opinion different than they do. You know, this leads into, I want to ask you a question about a fascinating story you read. I guess this was one of your last pieces or it was at the intercept. But you discussed, you were working on a documentary film about Martina Navratilova, the fantastic openly lesbian women's tennis champion who defected from communist Czech of Slovakia to America, just totally redefined tennis in general, especially women's tennis. And you tell a story. You were going to do a documentary about her because she was one of your heroes growing up. What happened to derail that project? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I mean, she was one of them. She was like, I would say she was like my one or, you know, top one or two childhood heroes, like along with like Daniel Ellsberg and like Woodward and Bernstein, like the obvious ones. And so in adulthood, when I started doing the Snowden story, she started following me on Twitter and then she started like tweeting at me. You know, I like, I'm a journalist, so I've talked to a lot of famous people in my work. I don't give the slightest shit. But like when she first time I ever talked to Martina, I called my friends. I could barely breathe. That was like a 12 year old who was like, you know, some like girl band member had like touched me and I was like, you know, over the moon. And it was, and then my friends started saying like, God, why is she so, like why was she so important to you? And I started thinking about it, you know, it was like an interesting question. And there's the obvious answer that I grew up as a gay kid. She was one of the only few openly gay people in the world at the time who was, you know, famous. And so that gave me kind of an end to someone to identify with. But I realized that it was actually like, she was just a transgressive figure, as you say. She left Communist Peckles of Aki at the age of 18 dangerously. She left her family behind. She couldn't go back to them and see them for like 15 years because she wanted the freedom of the United States. She was openly gay. She hired a trans woman as her coach in 1984. And like with Traveler on the World with her put her on network news. Martina was a huge sports star. So I wanted to make a documentary kind of exploring. She also became like an outspoken defender of like the rights of dissidents. You know, like after 9 11, she was one and the weeks after 9 11, she was one of the few people willing to say she thought George Bush was turning the United States into repressive communism. So she's always been this kind of transgressive figure. So I wanted to explore what it was about her that made her so important in my life. It was kind of be that kind of it wasn't like a bio about her. It was more an examination about our interaction. And what happened was I had hired this. We found this director. The first director was Kim Pierce, who had directed this film called Boys Don't Cry that won an Oscar in 1995 for Hillary Swank. And it was about a trans boy who was murdered. So it was like a pioneering film. And during the course of my working with Kim Pierce, she told me the story of how she couldn't go to college campuses, one in particular, because trans people protested her, even though she identifies as non-binary and did this groundbreaking film on the grounds that she had hired a cis woman, Hillary Swank, to play this role. I just found that fascinating. But then that didn't work out. We had some artistic differences about how to do the film. So my second director was another trans woman, a trans woman, Kimberly Reid, who had done two great films. And in the course of our starting development, Martina had seen a picture on the internet of a trans woman cyclist who has never had gender reassignment surgery. So she has a penis and testicles, no breasts, holding a gold medal. And she was like, this hovering figure over two cis women who had won the bronze and silver who had trained a cyclist their whole lives. This trans woman started cycling very late in life. And Martina, who is one of the main reasons, like with Billie Jean King and Chris Everett, why there is such a thing as professional women's sports, why women female athletes can earn a very good living, was like, wait a minute, all you have to do if you're a man and you want to compete as a woman and take our money and trophies is just say that you're a woman and you get to like compete against us and take all our money and trophies. And then you just go back and you live as a man, you impregnate a woman. And for that, the trans community was like, they assembled and hatred against her and said, you're a hateful bigot. Martina Navratilova, like one of the LGBT pioneers, she was on every board of every LGBT sports board. So she apologized. She said, you know what, I spoke without being informed. I mean, I go off and inform myself, but it wasn't enough. They just kept like at it and kept demonizing her and calling her a bigot. And then finally she just came back with an article in the London Times about a month later saying, I've studied this and I've concluded that if you go through puberty as a man, it doesn't matter how many hormones you take, it will never be fair for trans women to compete on equal footing with cis women and professional athletes. It's a form of cheating for them to do it. And it just made Martina radioactive. The director who I was working with felt like she would have had to have made the whole film about this. And it just, you know, the reality is what I always loved about Martina wasn't that she was this great left-wing figure. It was that she was defiant and transgressive opiates, which is the same thing that led her to do that. But it just made the film kind of radically different and too difficult to make. And we kind of had to just give up on it. I'm sorry to hear that. Some of our listeners may know Martina Navratilova was one of reasons 35 heroes of freedom when we were celebrating our 35th anniversary. For most of the reasons you pointed out, she's a, you know, regardless of her politics or her ideology, she's an individualist who commands the world's attention because she really, you know, lives her life. Let's talk about the Biden-Harris administration. You have recently written the three greatest threats of a Biden-Harris administration are militarism, corporatism, and censorship. Let's work through those one at a time. Or, you know, because one of the things that's interesting about your work, particularly to a libertarian audience, is, you know, during the Russiagate stuff, you were one of the few people who was not just kind of reliving the Cold War and assuming any, any, all you have to do is mention Russia and then people's critical thinking skills disappear and whatnot. What is, what's the threat of militarism from Joe Biden? Well, so Biden, you know, himself is a very veteran politician, right? He has almost 50 years in public life. We know what his ideology is. And he was always a centrist Democrat. And, you know, the great war and peace question of our time of the last generation was obviously the war in Iraq. And at the time when it was being debated in 2002, he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which was the most important Senate committee and Senate position to occupy and played a critical role in advocating the Bush-Cheney case for invading Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, that the intelligence was solid, that we couldn't tolerate a world in which the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, all of that. And, you know, more than Hillary Clinton, who was saying the same thing, more than John Kerry was saying the same thing, it was really Biden who played the key role in getting the Senate behind Bush and Cheney, and ultimately, you know, passing the authorization to use military force in October of 2002 by a vote of, you know, 66 to 33 or whatever it was. And then just beyond that, he's always, you know, been, I mean, he was opposed to the First Gulf War, which is one of the things in this column, but he was a big proponent as well of the intervention in Yugoslavia during the Clinton era. And then during the Obama administration, you know, you look at the Obama administration and the participation in the regime change war in Libya, which turned into an utter and complete disaster, as well as the efforts to help the Saudis bomb the living shit out of Yemen and create the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, where millions of people are food insecure and on the brink of starvation. It is a ideology of militarism without question. They have attacked Trump from the right repeatedly, from the right repeatedly, that he's not belligerent enough toward Moscow, that he doesn't give, that he didn't topple Bashar al-Assad, you know, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and Michelle Forney, all the people who are going to be exercising real authority when it comes to national security are all warmongers. It's the reason why Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jennifer Rubin and those Lincoln Project goons were so behind them. It wasn't just because they hated Trump. It was because there's a really interesting article, Nick, from 2014 before anyone had any inkling that there would be a President Trump. And the New York Times that talked about how neocons were migrating back to the Democratic Party with the expectation that Hillary was going to be President. Because within the Republican Party, there were starting to be obvious strains with the success of the Ron Paul candidacy and before that Papua canon of this kind of isolationist, whatever you want to call it, non-interventionist strain within the Republican Party that was already there when George Bush ran. Remember, he ran condemning what he called the insufficiently humble foreign policy of Clinton and Gore. And so the neocons saw the writing on the wall that if you wanted to keep pursuing imperialism, militarism, the Democratic Party was going to be the place for that. And lo and behold, in 2016, the Republicans nominated the candidate who ran in opposition, not just to the Iraq war, but to regime change in Syria, to questioning NATO, to accusing the CIA of being corrupt, to telling generals they want war so they can sit on the board of Raytheon sounding like Noam Chomsky in a lot of ways, whatever his motives might be. So all these militarists, these traditional, you know, kind of neoliberal neocons are coming back into power. And like we said before, you know, whatever you want to say about Trump, he did not initiate a new war that we escalate to bombing campaigns. And I would be shocked if we get through a four years of a Democratic administration without at least a new war. What about corporatism? How is Joe Biden the herald of corporatism? Well, I think it's more the Democratic Party, although Biden in particular, so again, just to go back to what we know about him in the Senate, probably the most consistent and important policies he pursued while a senator was defending banks and the credit card industry because they're based in Delaware, which, you know, you can justify as pragmatic or whatever, but nonetheless, it's true. And so, for example, when the credit card company was desperate to make it more difficult for consumers to discharge bad debt through bankruptcy, it was Joe Biden who led the way in advocating for a bankruptcy bill that did nothing but help his corporate donors and bank donors. That was the thing that supposedly made Elizabeth Warren so angry about the corruption in both parties that she entered politics and ran for the Senate. She cited that as the reason, that bill that Joe Biden sponsored. And if you look at who funds the Democratic Party now, the contributions from Wall Street and Silicon Valley were overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party. They were when Hillary ran as well. They were when Obama first ran against John McCain in 2008, too. They kind of evened out because Mitt Romney obviously is a creature of Wall Street. They were very happy with him. But in general, the Democrats are the party of the professional managerial class. Joe Biden did not beat Donald Trump because all these people of color and women rose up in anger and the way Donald Trump spoke of March, that's all bullshit. That's media narrative lie. He won because all of these affluent white professional managerial suburbanites who have always voted Republican abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Democrats. If anything, Trump ate into the minority vote that Democrats have always enjoyed despite spending four years being called to racism, white supremacism, fascism, and all that. That's the direction the Democratic Party is headed. That was the choice they made under Bill Clinton was to stop being affiliated with unions, to do things like NAFTA, welfare reform, and just to act. They deregulated Wall Street. It's the party of Larry Summers, not the party of Bernie Sanders. They are in bed with Silicon Valley. They're in bed with corporate America at the expense of the workers who recognize that they've abandoned them. I would argue as well that Joe Biden is one of the great architects of the drug war. You've written a lot about drug legalization and decriminalization in Portugal and elsewhere. And I raised Biden's history of pushing massive amounts of drug regulation. I mean, various crime bills that heighten drug penalties, the Rave Act. In the 80s, he helped create the office of the drugs or things like that. I raise that not because he's a drug warrior, which he is, but is it possible that he is now talking about possibly having a federal legalization of marijuana at the federal level? Partly because times have changed. I mean, has the country moved against war in a way that it will overcome whatever the military industrial complex wants to do? Has the country gotten sick of various forms of crony capitalism in a way that Biden will not be able to? He won't actually play the script that he's been writing for the past 50 years. Well, let's remember first of all that not only, as you say, was Biden the author of things like the 1994 crime bill. They probably did more for incarcerating black people in a year when that became front and center, protest against that. But he also chose this as running mate in Kamala Harris, a person who got out of law school and chose to become a prosecutor to spend her life putting people in cages. And she wasn't as any prosecutor. She's like a hardcore drug warrior, law and order, increasing punishments for nonviolent offenses. So if what you're asking me is, have certain things changed enough that they're going to influence Biden, I would say in once very kind of relatively inconsequential sense, yes, which is politicians do follow the public on culture war questions, right? So there's no way for any Democratic Party politician in most with national aspirations to be against marriage equality or trans rights or increasingly marijuana legalization. Because those are things that corporate America doesn't give the slightest shit about. They don't care of Gays Mary. They don't care if people have abortions. They don't care if marijuana is legal or not. So they let politicians follow populist opinion on those questions because they're not really at the center of power. But on the questions of what are at the center of power, just look at what's happening now. When Trump is trying to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, a country where we've been fighting for 19 years, the longest war in American history, you see Tammy Duckworth giving speeches saying somehow bringing troops home is going to result in them being in body bags. You know, Susan Rice saying that accusing Trump of being precipitous, I watched, you know, three or four months ago, the House Armed Services Committee hearing where they approved the $750 billion budget, which is a weird thing to do, right? If you think a country is being led by a fascist to increase dramatically the military spending over which he exercises discretion. But that's what the Democratic-led House did. And in that hearing, there was an amendment to bar the Trump administration that said, we want to bring troops home from Afghanistan by the end of the year. The Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, led by Adam Smith, who is a congressman from Washington, whose biggest donors are Raytheon and General Dynamics, joined with Liz Cheney to block the kind of left-right anti-war coalition that arose with Tulsi Gabbard and Ro Khan on the left. And Matt Gates on the right, who was saying like, I think we should make America great first before we make Kandahar great first. And they just steamrolled over them. And you see the same coalition now, that's just going to be in power. No, Bill Crystal and David Frum and the Lincoln Project didn't support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in order for them to stop pursuing militarism, nor did Wall Street and Silicon Valley pour their money into that campaign in order for them to abandon the tenets of corporatism. They're going to be much more answerable to their donors and to the centers of power in the United States than they will to popular opinion. That's always been how they functioned. You know, the third thing that you pointed out as a threat from a Biden-Harris administration is censorship. In what ways are you talking about? How will they be sensorial? Well, so we know for sure that censorship is increasing on the internet because of Facebook and Twitter. I think one of the most shocking things I've seen as an American citizen in my life is that when I went to go post the New York Post story two weeks before an election, this isn't some website that got created three months ago. This is the oldest newspaper in the United States, founded by Alexander Hamilton. You couldn't post it. You couldn't even send it as a DM. Twitter blocked it. It was China or Iran. They just said, no, this content cannot be circulated on the internet, on our site, which is basically a monopoly. And when Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and the CEO of Alphabet, which is a parent company of Google, went before the Senate to be questioned, Ed Markey, who is a Massachusetts Democrat who was just reelected because the left, I mean, the real left, not liberals, the left got really behind him. He was running against Joe Kennedy III, who was kind of a more moderate figure, and they destroyed him in the primary and got behind Ed Markey. Ed Markey said to Mark Zuckerberg, our problem with you, Mr. Zuckerberg, is not that you're censoring too much. Our problem is that you're not censoring enough. And went on to show 10 different accounts that he thinks should be removed from the internet that are on the right. They are absolutely going to use their influence with Facebook and Google and Twitter to pressure those companies to censor the people they regard as dangerous, not just on the right, by the way, but also on the left. A lot of people on the left don't realize this, that the censorship they're urging is going to be turned against them. But the other thing that's going to happen that I think is more subtle, but more important is that if you listen to what they're saying, they're talking about, they're not going to let go of this idea that has been so beneficial to them, that there's this fascist movement in the United States that we all have to get behind The New York Times and NBC News and the CIA and FBI, because they're the bulwarks against fascism. That narrative is not going anywhere. That's going to stay there. That's going to be the primary media narrative, even with Trump gone. And so what they're going to be saying is that if you are a critic of the Biden-Harris administration from the right, you're not just an adversary, you're a domestic terrorist. You're a fascist white supremacist militia member. And that the powers of the state should be used against you. People forget that after the Oklahoma City bombing, when militias, right-wing militias became all the rage, the media turned them into this huge threat, like mostly white guys who dressed up in fatigues in Idaho and Montana and were against federal occupation of federal land. After that happened, they used that incident to say that the U.S. government should have backdoor access to all internet communications, that there should be no encryption that the government can't access. That was the Clinton administration. It was very early on in the internet before anyone even understood that. And it was Republicans who opposed that on privacy grounds, and it didn't get passed, although it almost did. This is absolutely the tactics that they used in the war on terror, which were infiltrating five groups of 21-year-olds who were Muslims, getting one of them with emotional problems or financial problems to sign on to some plot that the FBI really devised that they never would have done on their own. And then announcing, oh, look, we just found this Muslim terrorist plot and scared everybody, or they were going to go bomb this or bomb that. That's what they're going to do to kids on math in Montana or Nebraska or whatever. And they're going to find these isolated rings of white supremacists, fascist terrorists, and they're going to MSNBC, and the New York Times is going to blow it up, and then the FBI and the Attorney General is going to say, we need very strong measures in the name of domestic security against these organizations. And one of them is going to be suppressing speech that they're going to say is designed to advance or forward the ideology of those groups. You know, this reminds me of a final point or a conversation topic I want to get to in preparing for this. I came across an old CNN appearance of you with Jeffrey Tubin, who has recently been fired from CNN and the New Yorker, arguing about Bradley Manning at the time and the release of the documents that Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks. And you were arguing that, you know, this was a good thing. It was beneficial for citizens to know what was going on and the information that was in there. Whereas Tubin was saying, you know, as a journalist, that we should not have the right or we should not have access to these sorts of documents, because the government said that they were secret. Do you see that? Is that the dynamic that has really become mainstream? And you see going forward under a Biden-Harris administration with the news media the way it is now? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that disturbs me the most. Hold on, Nick, one second. Let me just get this dog going to just bark for a second. Sorry, this is an old dog who's infirm. He's going to bark until I... Yeah, no problem. One of the things that really bothers and disturbs me the most is that as we were talking about earlier, the intention of Facebook and Google and Twitter and Silicon Valley in general from the beginning was not to censor. They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so. In part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information dissemination need to be regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern day mentality of the journalist. It used to be an anti-authoritarian mentality and now they work for big corporations to become authoritarians. But also they don't believe in the right of citizens to confront power centers. They think that reporting means somebody in power like in the CIA or the FBI gives you information and then tells you to go repeat it to the public and then you go and do that and they think that's reporting. But if somebody outside of the scope of power like some low-level army private like Chelsea Manning who doesn't occupy an important position in Washington or Edward Snowden does the same thing but not with the intention of propagandizing but with the intention of illuminating they view that as criminal. Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principle function and purpose which is what it ought to be if we have a healthy media but it's something to be denounced and condemned. I remember when I did the Snowden story the people who led the way trying to suggest that I ought to be prosecuted not just Edward Snowden where people like David Gregory meet the press and Andrew Ross Sorkin on the CNNBC show The New York Times colonists and plenty of others. It's an authoritarian mentality that has contaminated journalism and it manifests as being pro censorship and anti transparency as shocking it as it is. They are mouthpieces of the institutions of power and not watch dogs over them. You know speaking of Snowden do you think Trump is seriously thinking about pardoning Edward Snowden and also let me bring up Julian Assange who has you know effectively been neutered and you know underwent a kind of psychological trauma over the past several years. He's going to have some kind of extradition hearing in January. What do you think the future holds for whistleblowers you know under Biden and Harris. Well the irony is we were talking earlier about how media figures have petulantly whined about trivial acts on the part of Trump like tweeting mean things about Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd and the reality is that the only thing the Trump administration really has done that's genuinely menacing to press freedom is the prosecution and the tempted extradition of Julian Assange for publishing not information in connection with the 2016 election but the 2010 Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and diplomatic cables that exposed war crimes and other acts of barbarism and savagery on the part of the U.S. and allied governments because the theory that's being used to prosecute Assange is one that would criminalize almost any journalist. In fact the theory used by the Bolsonaro government to try and indict me earlier this year was very similar to that theory and I think they thought well the U.S. government is doing this Assange we can do this to him and it will be used against other journalists as well and you know I think that Trump remembers several things he remembers that Julian Assange published information about Hillary Clinton that helped him win. I think he realizes that Edward Snowden risked his liberty and has been in exile for seven years now because he exposed the abusive nature of spying powers by the NSA and the CIA and the FBI that were used against the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration throughout 2016 into 2017 and that the people who want Julian Assange and Edward Snowden punished John Brennan and James Clapper and Susan Rice and Mike Hayden are the same people who have worked clandestinely and I think correctly to undermine the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration using and abusing the powers of the state to do so and the reason they want Julian Assange to die in prison and the reason they want Edward Snowden to have to live out the rest of his life in Russia or be in prison as well is obviously not because they regard them as ongoing threats but because they want to create a climate where people who discover illegal acts on the part of powerful people inside the government who want to expose those acts the way Snowden or Manning who was tortured or Assange have done think to themselves wait if I do that I'm gonna have my life destroyed the way these people did the people who prosecuted Snowden was the Obama administration the people who tortured and prosecuted Chelsea Manning was Obama even though he out of a humanitarian gesture after seven years let her go by commuting her sentence they chose not to prosecute Assange even though they wanted to but that was before the 2016 election they now hate him even more and so I'm sure they're going to continue that prosecution as well so I'm very worried about what a Biden Harris administration is going to do when it comes to leakers and whistleblowers and sources except for the ones who are leaking to their approved journalists for reasons that are designed to advance their interests final question when you were interviewed by reason in 2014 you received our Lanny Friedlander Prize named after the founder of reason for a variety of ways in which you had increased the possibilities of human expression or free expression you talked a little bit or we discussed a little bit about a libertarian progressive caucus or kind of coalition do you think obviously your politics and kind of reasons libertarian politics overlap in certain important ways and also are at loggerheads what do you think is is a libertarian progressive coalition built around things like pushing back on militarism on state surveillance trying to you know secure free speech in in many ways is that going to be the place where the pushback the resistance to Biden Harris and whatever comes next going to be coming from yeah you know well this is the interesting thing you know I think when we were talking in 2014 when I used to do work with Cato with reason you know the areas of left libertarian convergence were pretty clear they were things like opposition to the drug war distrust of institutions of authority in the national security state though not in the financial realm which is one of the reasons the left and libertarians diverge defensive free speech things of that nature so I think libertarians on the left still have those things in common those things are incredibly important still so I think the left libertarian alliance you know as as we defined it then is is pretty much unchanged except that those issues are more important what I think has happened though is that there's a whole other group of people who never used to identify with those issues who have now migrated to them whether they're like you call them right-wing populists you know you can find it for example in Tucker Carlson and a lot of the right-wing populism that Trump tried to tap into so it was always kind of like before the libertarians who have this common ground where the left were the kind of libertarians like you guys that never I found a comfort or a home in either political party now actual Republicans conservative Trump supporters people on Fox News are realizing that these issues of repressive behavior not just by things like Facebook and Google and Twitter which they're obviously opposed to but also the national security state and the CIA they've seen how this is abused they they feel victimized by it personally they call it the deep state they know what these these institutions are capable of they don't trust them any longer the way they did during the war in terror and I think that is causing a realignment now where you have as I said before this new coalition that I kind of would describe as the Democratic Party the CIA the NSA and FBI Bush Cheney operatives and Neocon Silicon Valley and Wall Street and then kind of everybody else who is very wary of the extraordinary power and the authoritarian mentality that coalition has coalesced around and so I think this opportunity for that kind of an alliance that you described is much greater because there's a lot more people than just leftists like me and libertarians like you who are starting to realize that the big issues to care about aren't abortion and gay rights or tax cuts for the wealthy or opposition to Iran or support for Israel they're the ability to be free as citizens of this incredibly repressive institutional power that is growing by the day all right well we're going to leave it there we've been talking with Glenn Greenwald who is currently starring at substack.com until they kick him off so Glenn thanks so much for talking with reason