 The people who support the Democratic Party, they're now in a full union with the Neocons, the Bush Cheney operatives, the CIA, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. No living American journalist has a fiercer reputation for independence and invective than Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer turned blogger turned Pulitzer Prize winner who helped break the Snowden revelations, who was once threatened with jail time by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and who was part of the team that launched the intercept in 2014 before resigning abruptly six years later. The very outlet that I co-created that was built on my reputation, my credibility, my journalistic accomplishments, then tried to intervene to censor me six days before an election. We're joined by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. What are we to make of the fact that Greenwald, who first gained attention for his work as a contributing writer at Salon and who once appeared regularly on the left-wing news show Democracy Now is a fixture on Tucker Carlson? How do we explain the fact that Greenwald, known for his progressive critique of American foreign policy, is now welcomed in conservative circles but considered a pariah by many of his former colleagues on the left? Has Glenn Greenwald changed or have the rest of us? Reason caught up with him in Las Vegas where he was speaking at Freedom Fest, an annual gathering of conservatives and libertarians where Donald Trump appeared back in 2015. Greenwald was part of a roster that included Senator Rand Paul, Steve Forbes, Betsy DeVos and James O'Keefe. We talked about why he has no qualms about appearing on a right-wing news channel, why so much of the legacy in left-wing press is quick to apologize for state power, how the trans movement shows the limits of identity politics, and whether the state has any business regulating the internet via antitrust actions. Glenn Greenwald, thanks for talking to reason. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. So, you know, we talked about 18 months ago and a lot has changed there. And I mean, the first thing I want to throw out there and have you respond to it is you now appear on the Tucker Carlson show regularly. So you're on the highest rated show on the biggest cable news network on the planet, and you regularly invade against corporate media, including places that you've worked, you know, like places kind of like Salon or The Guardian, or places that you started like The Intercept. As corporate media and as shills and all of this, what the fuck happened? Like have you changed or has the world changed? I think it's mostly the latter. If you go back and look at even my earliest writings, you know, I began with a very narrow range of aspirations about what I wanted to write about. It was mostly these legalistic and constitutional debates about article two theories of executive power, promulgated by George Bush and Dick Cheney. And this was a free salon. It was like, you know, blogger or whatever, you know, just hit start blog on that Google free blog spot platform, mostly to talk about this very narrow range of issues from the perspective of a civil libertarian and quickly realized there was no way to have an impact without also confronting political dynamics and especially journalistic ones because you were running into a wall of deceit and misinformation promulgated by the corporate media about the war on terror and what was being done. So I've been invading against the kind of systemic problems in corporate media almost from the beginning. That's nothing new. I would go MCNN and MSNBC and would do the same thing about those networks, about other networks. I think one of the reasons, the main reason Snowden has said that Edward Snowden has said that he was drawn to me wasn't so much because of my views about privacy and surveillance, surveillance, although those aligned with his, but he saw that I looked at journalism in a radically different way than most of the media. He was concerned that if they went to them, they would cooperate more with the government than I would. They'd be more persuadable not to publish things than I would. So I've always had a very prominent component of my work be media criticism. Obviously appearing more on Fox than MSNBC and CNN is something that's new, but I think that's because the views that I've always espoused, the kind of values I've always embraced or heard more on Fox than CNN and MSNBC where they're not welcome. That is kind of amazing though, right? Because 15 years ago, Fox News was the national security network and CNN was a critic, MSNBC in particular. What has changed that? Is it simply the fact of before and after Donald Trump or that Republicans are out of power or partly out of power, so they want to attack the government and liberals or progressives are in power. So they want to protect the government. I actually think the primary impetus originally was the reliance on Russiagate as the principal theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Once you start positing if there's some evil foreign villain bent upon wrecking havoc inside the United States and that the political opponent domestically is aligned with that foreign power, that's already kind of very jingoistic way of looking at the world. You stimulate a sphere of and hatred toward a foreign enemy and suddenly you want to be protected from that foreign enemy, on top of which Russiagate itself emanated from the bowels of the CIA, the bowels of the U.S. security state, which was feeding leaks to the Washington Post and the New York Times and liberals began viewing those security state agencies, the hatred of which has always been fundamental to left-wing politics for decades as not just their allies, but these kind of guardians of all that was good and decent in the world. And that began this radical transformation about these kinds of questions. So there's two things I want to kind of ask about. One is, you know, when Hillary Clinton was doing this. I mean, was she being purely cynical because it's like, okay, Russiagate is, you know, she gets screwed with her, you know, Russia or Russian hackers, you know, spreading her emails that make her look bad and she's in a race that should have been a layup and she really screwed the pooch on that. Is she just doing this out of, you know, you know, just rank opportunism or is she channeling her, you know, her inner goldwater girl where she is really terrified that Russia where foreign power is taking over America? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of authenticity to it. If you look, for example, at what the Clintonian project was in the early 1990s, it was to take the Democratic Party out of the hands of the left and to put the power in the hands of corporatists and centrist and the kinds of people who are status quo guardians of ruling class orthodoxy. But then Hillary Clinton herself, and I think people didn't realize this at the time, including me, that there was a lot more dissent about foreign policy taking place inside the Clinton, the Obama administration than was widely known. Obama himself was somebody who, ironically, if anybody should be accused of being soft on Putin or trying to appease the Kremlin, it was he, a primary line of attack on him was that he was too soft when it came to confronting Russia. That was at the famous Mitt Romney line in 2012. Rubio and John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the kind of militarists in the Republican Party constantly attacked him on that ground. The main specifics were his refusal to arm the Ukrainians based on his view that Ukraine was never going to be a vital interest to the U.S., but always would be to Russia. His refusal to confront the Russians in Syria and overthrowing Bashar al-Assad and kind of constraining the CIA. And his biggest critic inside the Obama administration, insisting that Russia was a far greater threat than Obama was recognizing, was Hillary Clinton. So she was already prone to this hard line interventionism, militarism, already looking at Russia as this grave and central threat that was her primary split with Obama. So when this opportunity presented itself to Tai Trump to Russia, of course, part of it was opportunistic, but I think part of it grew out of her actual worldview. What is the essential link between kind of corporatism in America and the CIA or the deep state? Is it, I mean, is it the military industrial complex or is it a deeper fusing of kind of big government and big business that neither the left nor the libertarian right kind of can really grapple with? I think, you know, one of the things that the left and right housing common is an awareness that our government is essentially been co-opted by corporate power. The richer you are, the more powerful you are within the corporate world, the more extra, the more power you exert in Washington, which isn't how a democracy should function. It's how a democracy does function. And that means in general that there aren't radical divisions between, say, health insurance companies or Wall Street investment firms and hedge funds on the one hand and say general dynamics and rapion and Booz Allen on the other, the kind of espionage and military contractors. It's a very united ideology. It's the ruling class ideology. They fund bull parties with equal vigor, one more than other, depending on the circumstances. But in general, they wield a lot of influence within bull parties. I think that ideology prevails regardless of the outcome of elections. And so I think absolutely there's a union between state power on the one hand and corporate power on the other. You see that, for example, with how big tech censors, they don't censor in a way that undercuts or subverts Washington policy. They do it in a way that promotes it. They're censoring now anyone questioning the U.S. and NATO warrants in Ukraine. That's not a coincidence. And so ironically, Democrats are very obsessed with finding fascism under every rock. If you look at the academic definition, one of the primary prongs, one of the most menacing is the merger of state and corporate power, which I think does lie at the heart of the establishment of liberal project in the United States. And that has either remained intact or is struggling to stay intact since the end of World War II. It's, I think, been a constant kind of tension. And I think those tensions have been largely resolved. I mean, it's why you see, for example, corporate America fully on board with a wide range of corporate, of liberal cultural positions about feminism and about LGBT issues and things like that. Oh, it's great. Pride Month just ended in June, right? And Ray Theon and Halliburton, everybody. And the CIA. Yeah, the CIA. Exactly. As a gay man, do you laugh harder than I do as a straight man when you see the ad where the CIA has a Latina, you know, who I think is also, you know, a lesbian or something. And she has all like the full piano play of like millennial mental health pathologies that they're proud of her for having. You know, I'll tell you the first time I saw it was when I did this note in reporting, what I realized was the GCHQ, which is the British version of the NSA, always tried to go a little bit further and demonstrate its willingness to transgress legal limits just a little bit more. Because in general, the British compensate for their collapsed imperial project by trying to maintain relevance through just being a little bit more unethical and illegal. And the first time I ever really noticed this was when the GCHQ in 2015 bathed its very futuristic UFO looking headquarters with the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate some sort of LGBT identity day or other. And specifically to make patents for what they did to Alan Turing during the war when they drove him out of the British Security Services for being gay, even though he's cracking all the Nazi code. And, you know, I asked myself, why is the GCHQ one of the worst and most menacing surveillance agencies on the planet raising the rainbow flag? You know, and obviously it's because they cynically understood that this was a way of getting their roles and even parts of the left to view them as more benign, as more benevolent. And this kind of ideology became both a tactic, but I also think a driving belief system. To go back to corporate power for a second, what how do you I mean is in your worldview is all corporate power basically the same like it reaches a certain level of magnitude. And then it has to act to shore up the system. I was thinking when you were talking about, you know, kind of corporate power and, you know, and the elite government and then something like the Quincy Institute that came up a few years ago funded by George Soros, you know, a, you know, a left wing billionaire, you know, international financier, and Charles Koch, a right wing, you know, you know, attack object of the left. Are they doing something different with their corporate power? Or is that also just part of window dressing to allow them to kind of keep making billions and billions of dollars? I mean, I think, you know, capitalism is the governing ideology of both the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. You know, a lot of Republicans like to think Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are some sort of socialists or communists when not even AOC and Bernie are say when in fact, you know, hot Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are communists, as far as, you know, from my point of view, no, absolutely. And, you know, I think one of the most potent national media segments I've seen questioning the root assumptions of capitalism came from Tucker Carlson, who did a 19 minute segment on how predatory capitalism is, you know, destroying talents throughout the Midwest. And he specifically singled out Paul Singer, who's a large shareholder in Fox News. I think what you see is the populist wings of each side, the left and the right, question capitalism now, but the kind of crux of American power very much embraces it. There was this amazing little vignette where Nancy Pelosi had a town hall on CNN, and some kind of Bernie supporter, this kid, it was 20 or 22, stood up and said, look, why can't we just be a little more socialist than the Democratic Party or neoliberals? And she moved faster than she's moved in probably like 50 years. She leapt out of her seat before the words were out of his mouth. And she said, we are capitalists. And this is something you need to, and she meant it. I think I wrote about that because I was happy to hear it. Yeah. And so if you're somebody who's, you know, a libertarian capitalist, very weary of socialism, above all else, you should be big fans of the Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer wings because they are capitalists. They're big, they're crony capitalists. And are you arguing then, I, you know, without getting too lost in the weeds on this, is it possible to have a capitalism that is not crony capitalism or that is not big government and big business put together? I don't, the reason I don't think that, the reason I tend to avoid that question, apart from the fact that it's somewhat hypothetical, is because I think one of the ways that people on the right and left can unite, I'm always looking for those opportunities, is by viewing whatever passes for capitalism in the United States as something that ought to be objected to, either because you're against capitalism in theory as people on the left are, or because you want capitalism that's functioning and healthy and free of corruption as people on the right do. But what we have is crony capitalism, which is, serves none of those interests. Now part of Tucker Carlson's critique of capitalism, which sounded, he sent it a lot like Bernie Sanders when Bernie Sanders was, you know, was harrumping about like, how many flavors of toothpaste do you need? How many types of shoes? And I always, when I think of that, I'm like, well, you know, as many as you want. And also like, how many genders do we need? How many sexual orientations? To me, the function of capitalism or the purpose is, it is a meaning generation machine that allows people to pursue all sorts of ends. And I like that about that. Do you, I mean, is that what is what ultimately, you know, when Tucker Carlson is critiquing capitalism, and it's giving you more plastic crap that won't make you happy, do you agree with him about that? Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, these ideologies work only if they work, meaning only if they actually maximize human happiness, self actualization, self fulfillment. And there's no debate required. All you have to do is look at every metric, every available data category, and you'll see that the mental health of younger generations in particular in the United States and more broadly in the West is suffering greatly. People aren't happy. They have spiritual deprivation. They have a loss of purpose, a loss of community. This choice that you're talking about is one that I would say most people no longer believe they have in life. They can't get married until they're 38. They can't have children. But that's all horseshit, right? Is it? I mean, people aren't. I mean, well, are, you know, is it that we lived in a better world when spiritual alienation anatomy was reserved for the upper classes, you know, who had free time? No, you would know. But I mean, even if you look at states of great economic deprivation, we don't have anywhere near the level of mental health pathology that we have now. One of the things I, one of the statistics that struck me most in my entire career as a journalist is in 2020, the CDC issued new data about mental health and one out of every four Americans under the age of 28, one out of every four has strongly considered suicide, not briefly or casually considered it, strongly considered it within the last 30 days. So you look at every indicia of mental health pathology, anxiety and depressive disorders, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, all radically on their eyes. There's no way to say that whatever prevailing ideology we have is serving the needs of humans when you see that. I mean, not to just be a reply guy, but it's also like that's the same CDC, which, you know, completely fucked up, you know, the past couple of years. Yeah, I'm not saying they're infallible, but it's very consistent with anecdotal evidence from healthcare providers from what people's own testimony are from the suicide rate. Well, two things. One, to go back briefly to what we were talking about. Do you think the rights embrace of a kind of anti-capitalist ethic end of like authoritarian regimes like Putin, you know, because people like Tucker Carlson and people like Rod Dreyer, you know, they say there's a spiritual crisis and they look at people like Orban or Putin as a defender of the great Western culture of religiosity and spiritual meaning. Are they opportunistic or are they like Hillary Clinton actually kind of being authentic in their support for these authoritarian regimes that have nothing to do with, you know, spiritual values? I mean, I think one of the reasons why this topic matters so much, you know, and Josh Hawley talks about it in moralistic terms or seemingly moralistic terms that there's a crisis of young men because they're trapped in this nihilistic cycle of video games and pornography and social media. There is truth to that. And without you strip it of its moralism about whether porn is good or bad, for example, and you look at lives like that and you see that it's producing negative outcomes for the society and for those individuals. And I don't think it's so much that people think Victor Orban or Vladimir Putin or the answer, although some people do turn to authoritarianism when they feel society is fracturing and failing. That's natural and quite common. I think it's more that, and this is what I think about QAnon, for example, and its popularity, is that it wasn't so much about embracing this particular ideology and believing that there was this person that said that I think it was more a thumbing of the nose at establishment authority that was communicating very clearly that this was an ideology that was off limits and people found purpose in community in this kind of common ground by embracing this ideology that was hated by the ruling elites that they have come rightly to despise. And I think that's a lot of what's going on with people like Victor Orban who thumb his nose at Angela Merkel and Macron and the Eurocrats and Brussels, as opposed to really having some sort of affection for his ideology. So that though, I mean, obviously there's an analog with Trump, right, that it's less about Trump per se and more of his willingness, even from the inside the citadel of power to say, fuck you, to people like, you know, I mean, nobody ever spent more time running down the Ivy League as an Ivy League graduate than Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, Nixon used to do that, but no, but he was not an Ivy League guy, right? So it meant something different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he had that real resentment. I mean, I think Trump has a real resentment because he grew up in Queens and has that like sense of inferiority. He grew up as a mere, you know, millionaires kid. For sure. But you talk like that. Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree. I agree. I think that's very real, that resentment. But I don't think he's some like genuine avatar populist sentiment. I'm just saying that's the reason he's successful in, but I think it's important like in the kind of framework of professional pundits and journalists and political operatives, the thing that makes no sense is that anybody would twice vote for Obama and then vote for Trump. Right. How do you make sense of that if you see the world through conservative versus liberalism? It makes no sense. Right. It makes perfect sense, though, if you're driving ideology is not conservatism or liberalism, but contempt for the status quo and the ruling elites that safeguard it because that is what Obama channeled more than anything, right? Because I'm an outsider. I have this funny meme. I've never been, I haven't been watching him very long. I want to go change the way Washington works. It's exactly the message Trump vessels within his own different style. And there's no question, I mean, that people, spiritual meaning is such a vague and soft drink for me that, you know, it has a lapsed Catholic and which probably means a future Catholic or a deathbed convert back to Catholicism or something. I'm uncomfortable with it on a certain level, but what are the, you know, what is a actual program, if any, I mean, and it may not come from politics that actually fills that for, and what we're talking now, you know, we used to talk about the underclass a lot and it seemed to be more class based. Now it's more gender based. Is it, you know, if something like 40 college students now it's like 60% women, 40% guys. Is it that, you know, the women's growth and opportunity comes at the expense of men and like men and boys have to suck it up and figure out what to do next? Or what is a positive agenda for them to get moving with their lives rather than merely bitching and mounting that, you know, women have it all, gays have it all, blacks have it all. I mean, that seems to be where we're stuck as a country. I think that's definitely part of it is when you teach people and you breed resentment for your own particular gain and politicians on the right are very good at doing that, the politics of resentment, but also people on the left are as well. You can extract short term political gain, but you're also leaving behind this like trail of bitterness and anger and people believing that the world is stacked against them. And that is not the stuff of which a healthy society is made. But I also think that it's not politicians feeding that as much as it is this kind of globalistic neoliberal order engendering it as well. I mean, when you strip countries of their middle class, when you deindustrialize entire towns by the millions and ship jobs overseas and take away from people would have been the generational aspiration that they were going to have better lives and their parents, that entire American dream. And you leave them in these broken towns filled with addiction and filled with joblessness and working three shitty jobs with no benefits at Walmart and Amazon warehouse. And you leave people with the idea that their future holds nothing of greater value than themselves. They have no, that's that I think is what lies with the heart of spirituality. There is a connection between economic reality and people's spiritual well being. Can I, I mean, you as much as anybody, and certainly in this conversation, more than me, you embody that kind of economic cosmopolitan elitism where you live, you live a, you know, a gay married life with children and dogs in Brazil, like you jet set around you're in Vegas for freedom fest and then who knows what, you know, you're going to Ulaanbaatar or something like that, open a shopping mall or something. Is the problem, are you the problem or is it that people, more people don't have the access to your lifestyle? Well, and I guess what I want to, you know, kind of zero in on is there, you know, in the critique that you give, there's this primacy of place. Oh, well, you know what, I'm the third generation born in a shitty Midwestern town in, you know, a Tamua, Iowa, or in Middletown, Ohio, you know, where JD Vance passed through, you know, in a library and memoir, you know, why, why should they say that? Should you, you grew up in Florida, right? Should you have been stuck in, you know, Coral Gables or Orlando or something your whole life? But I mean, I think, but I think that's part of the point. Look, I mean, for one thing, you know, I'm very well aware that I'm not, my life is not connected to working class values. I don't pretend that. I also, though, did grow up, you know, in a pretty working class environment. I was raised by a single mother. My father was around that kind of thing. And I think, so I'll just say two things about that. One is I think there was a lot more class latitude back then where the idea was that if you worked hard about talent and ability, you could find a way out of it. And I, and I did, and I, you know, I'm grateful to that system that allowed that. I think there's much less of that now for a lot of different reasons. But I also think this is, and maybe this is my own personal kind of journey. And I think ultimately our politics are shaped a lot by our own personal perceptions. You know, when I was 25, because of that childhood, I had a lot of resentments about, you know, what other people have that I didn't have. You know, I had my list of things that was going to make me happy in life or things that, you know, by the time I was 40, I had pretty much acquired all of them, you know, checked all the list off everything around me. Like certain kinds of education, you worked as a lawyer for a while. Yeah, financial stability, being well known, like those who haven't my work known those kind of things, being about to write books and do all the, you know, having a thriving career. And I looked around and found that I wasn't happy. And it wasn't only, it was only until I began balancing that kind of pursuit of material fulfillment with things like kids and, you know, other non-material ventures. Being a trader, right? Yeah, serving the Cremland, serving the Cremland, working against my own country. And I found this value greater than myself. Only then did I realize that. So you're like Whitaker Chambers, really, 2.0. Exactly, exactly. I call it his path. So, you know, part of, I'm curious, because I look at social reality and I lived in the Midwest on and off for 20 years as an adult, I had no natural, you know, connection to it. But my ex-wife and kids are there. So, you know, I was there. The material reality, you talk about like deindustrialization, industrial jobs as a percentage of the labor market peaked in 1943, they've been going down ever since I've lived through at least four major periods of deindustrialization. I went to grad school in Buffalo in the late 80s and early 90s. You know, and they were still talking about, you know, the jobs had left, you know, and now they still talk, you know, it's like, it's been 70 years since Buffalo was, you know, and when you look at, when work by people like Scott Winship and others, when you look at tax, after tax income and transfer payments, something like 70% of Americans at age 30 are doing better than their parents were. It's true that if you were born in 1960, 90% were doing better, but that was mostly because America was a much poorer country. So, I guess I say that as a prologue saying, I disagree with your description of social reality, which is the common narrative, that America has been eating out all the jobs that have moved to China, and now even the poor Chinese, they're moving to Vietnam. How would you entertain the possibility that journalism, a profession that you've spent a lot of time critiquing, has locked into a narrative that serves its purposes, but that is really not connecting very well with, you know, how people actually live and what's in front of them? I mean, first of all, I'm not entirely sure that it serves the purposes, this narrative serves the purposes of elite, which is why I don't think it's a very, I don't think it's a very popular one in elite culture. I think there's a tendency to try and claim that these harms are overstated in the way that you just did, because for people who are being served well by a system, there's the interest is to protect that system. I've yet to meet an Ivy League person who isn't convinced that, you know, except for the rare precincts they live in, it made me move to, they might have been, you know, like, yeah, the interior of the country is like the hunger games, and we alone can fix it, whether they're right or left. You remember all those debates that like Ross Perot ran on when he ran against Clinton and George Butch the first about the sucking sound of NAFTA, sucking away jobs to Mexico. I'm not saying this is an instantaneous, you know, emergence of this, this problem, it's definitely developed over decades, but there's no question again that if you look at, you know, the number of people who are living with their parents until they're 30, the ability of people to start families early, the number of children that people are having, the percentage of people who people don't have children, women have children and women want fewer children because they go to school longer and because they have more opportunities everywhere around the world, more fertility. I mean, but at the same time, it's harder to have children. It's almost impossible to raise children without both parents working outside of the house. Is that weight-wise? Because you need two incomes in order to survive. Or maybe, well, isn't that you need two incomes or that women now are more fully in franchise and have actual careers. But I think all of these are questions, you know, when, for example, people talk about the extraordinary rise and the number of people who now identify as being transgender. Particularly among a generation. Younger people, yeah. I mean, it's like 20%. Yeah. I mean, it's shocking. And I'm sure some of that, you know, that people use that left-handed chart where once left-handed, people being left-handed no longer would stigmatize the percentage of the population identifying as left-handed increase. You would expect that. I'm sure that's part of it. Just like the population, the percentage of the population that identified as gay increase naturally as it became less stigmatized to be gay. I'm sure there's part of that, but I'm also certain, based on testimony, based on data, based on the studies of public health professionals, that what society encourages and valorizes is something that people get drawn to, whether they want to or not. And so what society, I believe, has taught people is that what matters more than anything is career success. That's ultimately what defines you. And women who wanted to stay at home and take care of the house, be homemakers or whatever the term used to be are women who are selling themselves short. It's not really value. Society pushes women into the workforce, pushes everybody to value career above all else. And so the fact that people do it doesn't indicate to me that that's actually what's giving them the most happiness or that they're choosing with full agency on autonomy. I think out of these unintended consequences that you're describing of the change in relationship between men and women in their 20s and the like, that women no longer need men, which is a good thing, but at the same time it has changed the dynamic. It changes society. Yeah. And in ways that we haven't really grappled with, I think that there's a lot of this going on and we're not very good at talking about people's mental health or fulfillment of spirituality. We're much better at talking about their economic materiality. One of the things that is more valorized now, or is it less stigmatized, is having alternative sexuality. And even within the straight world, people, I mean 20 years ago nobody was talking about kinks and now everybody talks about everything all the time. Is it possible that one of a major contributing factor to mental health issues for people, say under 30 or 35, is that we talk about it all the time, that it's iatrogenic, that it's actually, you know, are the counselors, the therapists that people are now seeing in, you know, starting in kindergarten and in grammar school, et cetera, that that's generating some of this. Yeah. I mean, I'm somebody who thinks that talking about things going on inside of you is positive. Yeah, I do too. My view is like everyone needs therapy. And if I may, I'm amazed that, you know, as somebody as old as I am and came from a lower middle class background, I, you know, I thought I was being sophisticated in college when I first saw a counselor. I'm amazed at how many upper income, highly educated people think only nut jobs go to therapy. Yeah. I mean, I spent, you know, my mother's, you know, 25 years trying to convince my mother to go to therapy, knowing she needed it so badly, like everyone does. And her answer was, I'm not crazy. And that's what that generation thought. It was only for people who are, you know, deeply insane. So I don't think it's that people are talking about it all the time. I think it's the way in which it's being discussed. It's very politicized. It's very, there's a pressure to it. I think there's bizarre, distorted incentives. I think there's value, particularly in liberal enclaves that become very influential socially, because they are the people who have the loudest voice and attainment in politics and journalism to be able to say that they have trans and non-binary children. Those children kind of get encouraged or pushed. It's a lot of complicated factors. And I think that, but I think it goes in the other direction as well. I think the pervasive mental health problems that we were talking about searches for an outlet. And what you hear from a lot of, for example, detransitioners is I was suffering in lots of different ways. I was depressed. I was, you know, alienated from my own body. And I was promised that if I joined this community and identified as trans, I would be liberated and free. So I think there's a mutual kind of bidirectionality to it. Let's talk a bit about identity politics in America, because you do, I mean, do you still identify as progressive or socialist? I never really cared about, you know, I never like, I have no identity, the only label I've ever really embraced is civil libertarian. Right. Okay. But you, I mean, you, you kind of either implicitly or explicitly often do a kind of class based analysis of things as opposed to identity politics. For sure. Yeah. And which I also, you know, from a libertarian point of view, I'm much more interested in class than kind of ethnic, the create, I mean, I'm interested in the creation of ethnic or racial or gender identity, but class also, you know, do you think the discourse in America, particularly among liberals, is it utterly destructive of any kind of meaningful, like of creating the possibility of, you know, of communal action? You know, I have, has the, the, you know, the grants, whatever it is, the, you know, glorious rainbow or glorious mosaic, is it so fragmented that even on the left, you can never really get a mass of people to do something. One of the most amazing experiences I had with Shirley before quitting the intercept, there was a diversity counselor who was brought in by the parent company of the intercept, First Like Media. And I went just out of morbid curiosity. I think it was required. I usually wouldn't have gone precisely because it was required, but I wanted to go because I wanted to see what was going on in these sorts of things. And one of the first things they did, I think they even announced it in advance to managers and email was that they were going to divide everybody shortly after the session commenced by race. So if you're white, you're going to be in one room. And if you were a non-white, you're going to be segregated into another. And the idea of segregating a workforce by race explicitly, it was offensive to me just like on an instinctive level because this is something we're inculcated to, you know, to shun, not to embrace. And so the idea that there's like this neo-racism being practiced in the name of liberal enlightenment, I think it's incredibly toxic. You know, also, I mean, I think, you know, I have a multiracial family. My husband is black, our children are mixed race. And the idea of trying to divide people up on race for me personally is something that has become, you know, extremely alarming. I think when you have kids, you do start thinking about things in a little bit of a different light. Like what kind of world do you want your kids to drop in as opposed to yours? And the idea of having society tell my kids who they're supposed to be and what they're think by virtue of their race that, you know, they have obligatory ideas. They have to ascribe to you not because of their own process of reason and critical evaluation, but because of the color of their skin is repulsive to me on a personal level. But I think very danger, why would you want to balkanize society even more than it's already divided? Well, what's your answer to that? Because, you know, who's interest is that survey, right? It's always QE Bono. But you know, why, you know, when you say, why would somebody want to balkanize? What is the answer? I do, I really, I don't mean this in a very conspiratorial sense. I think that the way power functions is, you know, I believe in power. We talk about power. I don't think everyone believes in power though, but the way what power means is ideologies thrive to the extent that it serves people in power. They, they, they foster those ideologies that advance their interest in balkanizing and dividing people by race and keeping them kind of blaming one another as a way of keeping attention off, off rolling across the leads. And I don't mean that in a very conspiratorial way. I mean, organically, this, this is the sort of thing that gets primitive. What's odd about that now is like, you understand, if you say like, okay, you know, look at Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia, and he would take Croatians and put them over here in Serbian, you know, he was doing that for, you know, pernicious reasons, it's a way of kind of maintaining order. But when you have liberal progressives being the people doing that, are they unwitting dupes? Or is that, are they actually the super elites? Because they seem to be the people who are saying, no, you're not, you're not Asian American even, you're, you know, you're North Korean versus South Korean, you're this, you're that. I think, you know, I think part of it, I think there's always, I don't think people are so Machiavellian that they're willing to, to pound the pavement in defense of a worldview they completely disbelieve. I don't think that level of cynicism is available to most people other than sociopaths. It's always a kind of mix of human incentive combined with, you know, an authentic conviction. And I think if you go into elite liberal institutions, you're going to be taught that certain groups are, you know, more violent, more domineering, more repressive, that that is what has driven history and that other groups have been more victimized and deserve more consideration and even more kind of reference because their values are better, their culture is better. And when you immerse yourself long enough, and those kinds of in any institution, you're going to start to believe it's, it's defining more age. So I think a lot of it is that at the elite level, people believe in, in these radicalized racialized views of the world in a way that I think people not in those cultures don't believe. Where, you know, what are, and obviously it's determined by multiple factors, but what do you think happened? I mean, we're roughly the same age. We kind of grew up in the same America, which went from, I mean, when I think about it, you know, it was like you were white or black and maybe Hispanic and, you know, and then it got to a point towards the end of the 90s where it seemed like a real kind of ethnic, you know, a racial, ethnic, gender, individualism, I would say in a very positive way was kind of moving forward. And somebody like, you know, there, what's this Tiger Woods was kind of like the emblem of the new America, you know, he called himself a Kaplan Asian because he was Caucasian, black, Indian, Asian, Asian, Indian, Native American, et cetera. And now that has totally gone and we are back to categories like I grew up in the New York and New Jersey area where nobody was white, you were Italian American, Irish American, Jewish, et cetera. And now that's gone. Like you're white, you're black, you're Latino, and you're Asian. What's driving that push back to this, these very crude collective identity? I want, you know, I think, I wonder a lot about, I think, you know, you and I work within professional media. So the people with whom we often communicate, the people to whom we're listening to people are reading tend to be other people who work inside this kind of, you know, isolated elite culture, you know, no one likes to think of themselves that way. The reality is that's true. Just like I'm flying around the world in my gay marriage life or whatever, you know, you're invisible playing you borrowed from Wonder Woman. You know, I see you in multiple places all over the world and you have all these improvements here. And so, you know, we're not in a factory on a factory floor with you coming off of your job with a rent. So I really question the extent to which elite media culture and discourse tracks how the vast majority of the public thinks, I think one of the reasons why people love so much and find so amusing, the idea that the, you know, the academic world invented for Latinos this word Latinx that they hate and despise. And the reason that's so amusing is because it shows kind of the arrogance and condescension, but also this cleavage between the elite culture over here and the rest of everybody else. I really question the extent to which ordinary people who aren't plugged into these kinds of, you know, elite conceptions go around the world looking at everything through these hardened racial prisms. You know, I remember, and this is very anecdotal, but my mother until the day she died, she worked in a kind of blue collar job. She wasn't a factory worker, but she worked in like the kind of customer service division of a company that sold airplane parts. And so it was like a little back office with 25 people or so, very multiracial. And she wanted me to come in. Some of them saw me from, you know, they knew me from TV and stuff. So I went in, she was always telling me about their political arguments and their political fights. And it's kind of amazing. They had them, right? Yep, they're not even supposed to have that. But you know, she loved them. She loved everybody she worked with, even though they would fight all the time. And the guy next to her was a Jamaican immigrant who loved Trump. My mother hated Trump, you know, so it was all very divergent from these stereotypes. And I went in and they started kind of making fun of each other and ribbing each other using overtly racial and ethnic and gendered humor. And you know, as somebody who lives in a world where this is not permitted, you know, I was kind of like the church radio was like, Oh my God, you can't make those jokes. But to them, they found it completely benign because they knew there was no malignant intent behind it. And the discourse was unrecognizable. You know, people were able to fight with each other and argue and then, you know, consider themselves good work friends. And there was just no sense of looking for ways to divide yourself from the person in the next cubicle, because that's just not what ordinary life encourages. It's not, it's not how you thrive and get ahead. Whereas, you know, if you're looking for an audience, if you're looking for a platform, encouraging people to identify villains and scapegoat is one of the most beneficial tactics you can embrace. Do you feel like that? I mean, so that's obviously happening in elite culture. Do you think is that leaking into, I don't want to say real America, regular America, but is it is it actually starting to affect people outside of elite circles? I mean, I suppose elite culture always contaminates the country as a whole. That's why it's elite culture. It's powerful. But I really question the extent to what's happening. I mean, if you look at what is the predominant media narrative about the Republican Party in the age of Trump, it's essentially that the Republican Party has become a political faction steeped in the overarching ideology of white supremacy, and that its principal project is installing a white nationalist authoritarian regime or dictatorship. At the same time that you have this almost as a religious conviction on the part of journalists and people in Washington, you have an enormous stream of non-white voters going from either apathy or captivity to the Democratic Party into Republican Party politics, more Latinos voting for Republicans than ever before, Black voters and Asian voters and Muslims voting for Trump than any other prior Republican candidate in decades. And so I think you see this, it's like almost two different completely different worlds, two completely different realities of what elite culture teaches you to think and what people are actually seem to be embracing. Now is it that can that continue to happen as long as it doesn't threaten the kind of corporate government project that is going to maintain power? I think if you look at the kinds of people who are tolerated and the kinds of people who are demonized widely, I think in that question is a very interesting revelation. It's the people who are demonized are obviously the people that sort of the system for lack of a better term in regard to threatening. When is the last time you heard anyone really complaining about let's say Sean Hannity? He almost never. He's like he performs his role. I have actually forgotten that he exists. Exactly because no one talks about him. He's not because no one's watching his show. He's number four or five. He makes a ton of money on top radio. He's a big audience but he's very unthreatening because he's just like a partisan. He's a Republican Party loyalist. You know what he's going to say. He's out there preaching the same, you know, established. Whatever comes out of Mitch McConnell's mouth comes out of Sean Hannity's mouth. There's no division. Whereas Tucker Carlson to a lesser extent, Laura Ingraham, are people who are widely despised because they're actually doing something a little bit more subversive. As you said, they're questioning. But they're also big. I mean, Tucker Carlson right now is, you know, he's the Edward Murrow of his day, right? Or he's better than that. He's bigger than that. He's the Bill O'Reilly of the moment. Right. But I think, you know, I think that if you even, and it happens both on the right and the left, you know, when Bernie looked like he might actually get the nomination in 2016, it was all, you know, out to make sure he didn't. Right. The same in 2020. Ron Paul had a, I mean, he was never as big a threat as Bernie. He became a threat. Like in 2012, he was going into Iowa and South Carolina and say, why are we, you know, why do we have 600 military bases around the world? And I'm saying, I just, he didn't get as far along. No, he was really demonized. I mean, I remember the one time he wrote a positive article about Ron Paul. It was one of the most, you know, damaging things I inflicted on myself within left of global politics. Or, you know, you look at people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gates, like the people who are dissidents to establish an orthodoxy for good or for bad are the people who become the most threatening and therefore the most attacked and most demonized. How would, you know, so I guess let's talk about Tucker a little bit, because he's big. I mean, like, you know, Matt gets, you know, we've heard the last of him, basically, you know, Madison Cawthorne, maybe, and Marjorie Taylor Greene will, you know, fade away at some point or is just as a marginal character. What do you think is the point when, you know, does Tucker either, you know, convert to the establishment, you know, or what does he have to do where it's like something happens and he disappears? I think, you know, one, I think the tactic that you saw is remember after that massacre in Buffalo where the guy who was influenced by the people he said he was influenced by, along with people not Tucker Carlson, you know, went into a grocery store in a particularly, in a prominently black part of town that he chose for that reason and shot 10 people, instantly there was an attempt to put the blood of those people at the doorstep of Tucker Carlson. So I think the strategy is to isolate him as this grave threat that we cannot tolerate. I don't know if you remember, but Glenn Beck had a bigger audience at five o'clock hour, which is not a very popular hour for television than Tucker had. I mean, he had, he was breaking insane amounts of records. And at the peak of his popularity, he was off box news because he had become so radioactive to establishment prerogatives that no advertiser was willing to touch him and Fox got rid of him, even though he was bringing in many millions of people. So I think there's a line that you can't cross no matter how large your audience size is. And I think Tucker is flirting with that line. And you saw the kind of attempt to basically start to say that he is too dangerous to allow on air. I wouldn't say he's too dangerous to allow on air, but I did a video about that. I mean, he does believe in the great replacement theory. What does that mean to you? You know what it means is that he believes that America is being white America, which is America is being overtaken by ethics of various sorts. And we need to stop that. I think what it means is something different, which is if you look at Democratic Party strategists, as I'm sure you know, for decades, their promise for Democratic Party dominance internally was going to be that immigration was going to change the face of the United States demographically, make it more liberal, make it more left, and that the Republicans would therefore no longer have a chance. So when you, you know, we know there's what it reminds me of so much is I remember in the kind of the mid 2000s when I started writing the politics, you would often see in the weekly standard and other neocon outlets articles that would say American Jews are immoral if they vote for the Democratic Party, because the Republican Party is more pro-Israel. The obvious assumption of that argument is that American Jews cast their votes, not based on what's best for the United States, but what's based on a foreign country, which is Israel. If you say that kind of speaking as a Jew, urging Jews to vote Republican, it becomes completely permissible. If you observe, however, that that is actually taking place from the perspective of critiquing it, you will be instantly vilified as an anti-Semite, even though you're embracing exactly the same theory, albeit for a different purpose. That I think is what is the great replacement theory went into. I don't, I don't agree. I don't agree. I don't agree that his argument is that the only real citizens of the United States are white Americans. He's never hinted at that. Well, he, he wants to, you know, stop immigration. He wants to, he believes that ethnic people end up voting. Foreign people. However, well, also that there are massive numbers of foreign people who are coming here and immediately voting, which doesn't happen, but that they are, he essentializes them. That if you're a Latino, you're always going to vote this way. If you're this, you're always going to vote that way. But I think he's pointing out the best the Democratic Party plan because they say it is. But ironically, you have these huge numbers of Latinos who are actually voting for Republicans. Yeah, sure. And I mean, your argument about a kind of Jews and Israel or, you know, that was also following a long time Catholic argument, which no longer makes sense. And pollsters don't talk about it because being Catholic, it doesn't actually indicate how you're going to vote about anything. But that was the assumption about, you know, John Kennedy, that was the big attack that was going to be loyal to the Vatican of the United States. So, you know, what do you do with, you know, I was just in preparation for this, I was looking at the number of people who have attacked you for being on Tucker's show. And obviously you love that kind of spotlight on a certain level, like you get to talk, but, you know, Chelsea Manning, who was somebody who you supported as much as anybody, I mean, along with WikiLeaks. And, you know, what's, apart from ideology and stuff like that, how does it feel when somebody like that attacks you and, you know, says that you are, you know, has denounced you and has said that you're dangerous and things like that? Yeah, I mean, you know, for me personally, I would never allow a friendship to become spoiled, nor would I ever end a friendship as a result of political differences. In fact, whenever ideological conflict or dissension emerges inside friendships, I regard that as a valuable opportunity because within friendship is where you can really explore that safely and based on the confidence that someone's engaging in good faith and isn't going to try and vilify you. So you can speak openly, I regard it as an incredibly valuable opportunity. What I did find personally so hurtful about that particular case was that when Chelsea was at her lowest point, like when she was in prison, she wasn't able to get visitors because she wasn't in a real prison, but in the military prison. And you had to be either a lawyer or a journalist in order to be able to, so I was one of the very few people who could and would visit her. I flew from Brazil. I went and visited her, drove into the middle of Kansas. I sent her all kinds of money because I was one of the few people able and willing to do that. I defended her publicly all the time. We developed a very close friendship. She would call me for hours and I would just talk to her simply to keep her company while in prison. And so when she came out and kind of just out of the blue denounced me, first I wanted it to be clear that it wasn't some kind of personal conflict. We had no personal conflict. It was not a case where she was alleging I had harassed her or threatened her. So I published all of her. I had barely spoken to her at a prison because all she ever wanted to talk about with me was why are you going on talk or why are you giving eating comfort to this fascist movement? It was purely a political critique, nothing personal. And what she had done was basically taken a friendship that had a lot of loyalty to it, a lot of devotion to it and publicly threw it away for attention for herself over political disputes. So that was a case where I was actually personally hurt by it because that was a case where someone was attacking me who I thought was my friend. I let kind of be a friend in general though. I don't need validation in the political world. I get that from my family and my friends, my kids, my people in my private life. In general, people want to attack me for whatever. I just realized that's part of having a public platform. I can give it up at any time. The fact that I don't means either I want that or I'm willing to pay that price for it. But that was just an odd case because it was so personal. What about appearing on Fox? Are there networks that you, part of, I've read part of your rationale for going on there is that you get to reach a large audience and certain people who are not necessarily familiar with your critique, even if you go, you travel a certain distance with a kind of right wing narrative these days. Is, are there places that you won't go on? Is there something that Fox News might do where you're like, okay, I'm done with that? No. I mean, when I, look, I mean, I'm not going to say no. I mean, if actual neo-Nazis were in swastikas and talking every day about how do you should be returned to the gas chambers or slavery was up. So you're back to Hannity. Right, or Bill Riley. No, but in general, I honestly believe, when I released my first book in 2006 about the Bush County administration, the first place that I went to to talk about the book was the ACLU. The second place was the Cato Institute. So I've always been this believer in finding ways that I've always thought that the right and the left have more common ground than either of them are willing to admit that one of the few valuable political projects where you can actually make progress in changing the society as opposed to just profiteering off your platform is to find ways to bring those, those sides together based on those common values. So it's always been an important project of mine. But in general, I think that if you go into journalism or politics, it's because you believe you have something to say that if enough people are persuaded by it, it will change the society for the better. Otherwise, why do it? And so the idea that you have an opportunity to speak to a hundred thousand people or four million people and you return it down makes no sense to me. Why would you look for ways to minimize the audience that's hearing your views rather than max other? If you're doing that, it's just self-indulgence. You don't really have a conviction about changing anything. Are you a paid contributor for Fox News? No, I've never been paid a penny by Fox or CNN or MSNBC or any cable network. Any reason for that other than they haven't offered? No, I mean, I've never pursued it. I think it's better to just to keep my independence. I don't want to be paid by any of these places. My independence has always been the most valuable thing to me. We live in an incredible age of the barriers to entry for media, broadly speaking, you know, are like zero now and you can really generate an audience. And I think you are a great example of somebody who effectively came from nowhere in the early aughts or mid aughts and look at you now. Like you have an Academy Award, right? And you, you know, all of all sorts of things. They were forced to give me a Pulitzer while slowing their tons. Yeah, one of the few Lanny Friedlander prizes that reason awarded for and, you know, is a lot of the rhetoric now, both on the right and the left. And you can even see this with somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who's now at the Washington Post, who early on was celebrating platforms like TikTok, because it allowed, you know, young people to express themselves in ways that other people couldn't control is now like, yeah, maybe TikTok should be regulated, maybe social media needs to be regulated. What's your sense of these types of arguments from the right and the left? Are they are they making the same argument? And is it ultimately is it anxiety over too many people being able to speak? You know, when I, when I, you know, I have somebody who, who encountered the internet in my mid twenties, when in the mid nineties, I was exploring or you go on like CompuServe and AOL, just kind of like walled off communities. And there were like political debate forums that you could participate in completely anonymously. And I found it so invigorating. And then when I started thinking about the broader kind of macro political potential of it, the idea that human beings could connect to one another without the mediation of centralized corporate and government control was what made it so exciting. That was the promise of the internet was it would be a technology of liberation and empowerment. And then as always happens as, you know, any innovation or technology emerges that become a, can become a threat to ruling class, you know, hegemonic power, they start looking for ways to grab it and co-opt it and control it. And that's what they always did. And I felt like, I feel like my cause, one of my primary causes, it certainly was the cause of the Snowden story for both myself and Edward Snowden, but also all the work I'm doing now is to protect the internet from being invaded and turned into a kind of tool of coercion instead of emancipation, which was what it was supposed to be. And so this cause of free speech on the internet for me is one that is so profoundly felt for me because I think if you allow increasing government and corporate control over the internet, which is absolutely what we're having, I mean, the range of ideas that you can express now over the internet is so much more constrained than what you could even say in a newspaper 20 years ago that not only has the potential of the internet been lost, but the internet itself has been converted from what it was supposed to be, which is this incredibly innovative tool of liberation and egalitarianism into one of the most dangerous tools of coercion and propaganda and deceit and control and surveillance that human history has ever witnessed. And so the people who want to regulate and empower these ruling class institutions to constrict and control what can be said on the internet, I think there's nobody more threatening than that. Can you kind of name names, you know, because does that include, you know, on the left, it might include people who want to nationalize Facebook or have, you know, effectively the government regulate access, you know, to and from the internet and things like that. But then you have people like Ron DeSantis in Florida or Greg Abbott in Texas, who have passed legislation, which has mostly been held up saying, if you're a social media platform, you can't regulate who's on your platform. Like, are these analogous threats or and you know, and if so, what is how do we get back to or maybe not looking backwards, but how do we preserve, you know, a kind of individualized, dispersed, decentralized internet? Well, this is such an ironic example of this, the breakdown of left and right, because whenever I talk about big tech censorship, liberals start talking like they work at Reason magazine and always have like their devotees of libertarianism, they say, how dare you interfere with the right of private corporations to make whatever decisions they want. The reality is just like capitalism is really crony capitalism. This is not what's happening. The reason Facebook and Twitter and Google have been escalating the regime of censorship is not because people from Silicon Valley want to control the internet through censorship. They never wanted that for a variety of reasons. They were kind of libertarians and their ideology that was libertarian, that was the ideology of Silicon Valley. Also from just a pure self interest perspective, why would you want to remove people from using your platform? You want to increase the number of users, but also they just didn't want that responsibility. Who would want to be the person who's arbitrating what can and can't be said? It's a thankless job. It was foisted upon them by primarily Democrats saying by allowing, especially after the 2016 election, free speech over Facebook and everybody to express views, you're basically a laboratory that's empowering fascism and disinformation. And we demand that you impose more content moderation in accordance with what we think. And increasingly Democrats and the government have been directing these quote unquote private corporations to censor in accordance with what they want. They believe disinformation as they see it needs to be censored if they're not. They're threatening these companies with all. So it's a coercive regime. It's not these companies that they're taking directions from the government about what speech they can and can't allow. So it's not this beautiful free market that of private corporations. On the other hand, the official position of the Democratic party and increasingly a number of Republicans as well who like work on the anti-trust committee in the House who issued this 450 page comprehensive report that all kinds of anti-trust scholars believe is very well reasoned. One of the best documents Congress has produced concluded that the four biggest companies, tech companies, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are classic monopolies. So if you believe that they're monopolies violating the anti-trust law, even some libertarians probably not you are at least on board with the idea that government can start regulating them and saying that if you are just a private company allowing competition, have at it do what you want. But because you essentially eliminated competition, we're now going to start to be that's the only way that legislation like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott's can possibly be justified. If you don't think these corporations are monopolies, then of course that too is undoing interference in the private sector. Are you comfortable with the idea of in Florida saying if you have a social media platform however defined over a certain number of users, you can't kick people off or people who get kicked off can sue you for damages. Between the government demanding that big tech censor and government telling them that they can't, I regard it as much more dangerous, the government telling them they have to censor, but in general I think the government's posture should be to keep their hands off those companies except that I do think that some of these companies have violated, have gone into antitrust. Do you think Amazon, and it's an interesting question to say like is the government forcing these companies to regulate more strictly or one argument is that it's actually younger mid-level employees who are the ones who are blowing a gasket over Amazon selling a book when Harry became Sally that argues that transgender or the Abigail Stryer book about wire. Well this one they actually kicked off and then a bunch of senators, Republican senators, wrote to Amazon just asking questions like why did you take that off? That seems odd, like I mean it's a very coercive act to get a letter from senators saying why did you do this, but should Amazon be forced to carry books that it doesn't want to or Well so again I mean Amazon's getting two kinds of letters, one from Republicans saying why did you remove this book and another from Democrats saying why didn't you and if you don't you're going to face serious consequences. So both parties have their hands on these platforms precisely because they're so powerful. The question is do you believe whether these companies are allowing healthy competition or have they destroyed it? The most important example to answer that question is what happened to Parler which became the number one most popular downloaded app after January 6th when Trump was removed from Facebook and Twitter more popular than YouTube and TikTok and every one of them. Americans were downloaded that app by the millions Nick and AOC and Ro Khanna and a bunch of Democrats went on social media and said hey Google and Apple why would you allow an app like this on your stores? Google and Apple responded and removed them which basically disabled the app and then they turned to Amazon and said why are you hosting this this this site and Amazon 24 hours later removed Parler and Parler was destroyed. That is not a healthy that competition cannot thrive. Yeah I mean well two things one is that there were also a bunch of technical issues with Parler so that's problematic but it's also like when you look at the web hosting services I mean Stormfront the neo-nazi newspaper can find an ISP. Parler can do that right? Yeah and I agree with you there's something deeply disturbing where people are saying here you know as a brand you should have nothing to do with this thing where it's like you are just allowing somebody to park some files on a server. But Parler did not disappear or right wing alternatives did not disappear because AWS you know Amazon web service. Parler went from you know thriving like on its way to becoming a major player in the social media world and that was always the argument I heard from liberals was if you don't like Twitter and how they're setting those guys on free speed and it was built it wasn't built by Mac or people it was built by libertarians by like Ron Paul Ackley and Parler within 48 hours was destroyed. Also you know I will disagree over yeah I mean it was it was severely it was crippled it was severely injured maybe part of it I think you know companies are now looking at what happened to Parler and finding ways to fortify themselves. And it's also true that you know that one of the arguments that goes along with this from a conservative side is that Facebook is killing conservatives but you know and I find it deeply deserving that they bounce Trump you know without any chance of coming back same thing with Twitter. I found that you know that when Twitter banned the the New York Post story about Hunter Biden deeply chilling to go to a social media site and try to link to it and it's just that space that was terrifying. Having said that it's also true that the you know these places are like giving massive voice to conservatives. I mean you know Ben Shapiro seems to be doing pretty well on Facebook. No I don't think I don't think Facebook is a site devoted to destroying conservative voices I think Facebook is a site that will remove people who are kind of anti-establishment dissidents which Ben Shapiro is in. There are people on the left who are removed from YouTube through Google but I'll just give you an example you know one of the video platform with which I work and in which I believe most is Rumble because it's a free speech alternative to Facebook not ideological but it's a free speech. If you go and try and find a Rumble video using Google which is what 97% of search users use you will be unable to find it because Google purposely buries Rumble because it's a competitor to what's other to YouTube. Is that healthy thriving competition or is that using vertical monopoly power to crush competition? I don't think it's such a clear answer but I'm just saying to me again the more threatening thing is when the government tells companies to censor rather than not censor especially these companies that have so much influence we have billions of people on them using them as the way to communicate but in the ideal world the government would keep its hands off the question is are they now monopolies where government at least under the law you might want to change the law has a responsibility to start regulating. Are you in constant or are you in regular contact with Edward Snow? I am yeah we're friends and yeah because I was at the Libertarian Party Convention in Reno where the Mises Caucus people kind of took over and it's widely seen as a kind of trumpification of the Republic of the Libertarian Party becoming more social accepting or actually kind of calling for social conservatism. Edward Snow gave a talk there and he talked about how globally libertarians seem to be the only countervailing force to an encroachment on people being able to kind of make choices about how they live what they consume all of that kind of stuff. Do you you know do you do you broadly agree with him and obviously you call yourself a civil libertarian so you know there's an economic issues but there are these other issues like is there a global kind of libertarian impulse towards keeping things free and open communication free and open trade free and open and things like that. I think there's a an American impulse and an ethos that is very much of the long lines of kind of live and let live that we don't interfere in or try and judge or control least control maybe judge is okay but control the although this is kind of like in the original Star Trek series the prime whatever it's called the prime directive where you're not supposed to interfere but every episode is based on you interfering with. Yeah there's exceptions for sure but in general like I think you know when I when I talk about the trans women I always say that I think the gay and lesbian movement succeeded primarily because the demonization was eliminated through interpersonal contact people seeking out people had those perceptions and ultimately people realized like why is that for me to decide like if they want to marry someone of the same sex that's not my place to control I think it's like there's a that libertarian impulse that I like in American culture that I think the gay and lesbian movement used to succeed and the trans movement would have been able to succeed or they can find themselves too adults who have gender dysphoria want to live as men or women and people to say well that's you know that's that's your choice um the trans movement went further that is the schools and into like forcing people to adopt certain views which is why I think it's it's run into problems so in general I do think there's that impulse that's known as describing that I think is very good in American political and and cultural life on the other hand I think humans are naturally prone to embrace authoritarianism as well if fear isn't instilled in them fear is a very important part of our our psychic makeup we need it for survival if you can stimulate it if you can you know kind of play with it and inflate it people will obviously start prioritizing safety and anyone who can promise it and I think there's extreme amounts of authoritarianism that has long been on the right that's still there and that increasingly is on the liberal left um that's growing rapidly and I think what's known as essentially saying I don't want to talk for him but I've heard him say this before and it's something I believe as well is that there's kind of a group of people you can call the libertarians if you want but they may not identify as that but they have a libertarian ethos whose basic idea is you know I don't want to control what other people are doing you see that in abortion lots of people are uncomfortable with abortion morally religiously or otherwise don't actually want to ban abortion at least from you know conception because there's a sense that that's just too invasive to for government to involve itself in and I think that that's that kind of ethos is one we want to work to foster because that's where I think society's role ultimately is to allow people to seek self-actualization and the more we kind of let people make their own choices um something you were alluding to earlier I think that Snowden was talking about as well I think the better off we are how is he holding up uh kind of you know I mean because he's under you know he lives in an authoritarian regime which is getting more authoritarian like all countries do during war yeah but not well it's also you know there was a war of choice right uh you know on the part of no I'm just saying like you know Ukraine is in war and they banned lots of parties it's just you know we're in war we put Japanese Americans in well before we go to snow I mean do you feel a need to uh you know kind of uh do a what I do I do with Ukraine and Russia yeah I do why is that because I think that the reality and I'll I'll just throw it out there like a lot of when I told people I was going to be talking to you they were like are you going to ask about this because you seem to have a need to make moral equivalence because I think one of the things that first of all I think there's a context that we can't ignore which is that we're American citizens sitting in the United States it's very easy to kind of cast aspersions to other countries and I think one of the effects that it doesn't change what's happening in those other countries when we do it we don't actually we don't you don't have a platform in Russia nor do I don't speak Russian I'm not speaking to the people of Russia I don't know enough about it to opine in a detailed way the way we do with the United States so I think our primary role as American citizens is to think about our own government in our own society and I think one of the ways that all people even look at the individual level like you know you probably know people in your life you don't want to face their own flaws and so they're constantly focused on the flaws of other people so I think you know it's very easy to say oh look what's happening in China and look at those Russians it's incredibly cheap and easy and rich free to do no one is going to do anything to us if we do it doesn't change anything I think the only effect that it really has is it lets us feel better about ourselves and might be warranted and so the person who's talked best about this I think is is is Noam Chomsky who has faced this criticism his entire life like why are you always so focused on the evil of the American United States and you don't talk enough about the Soviet Union and his answer was because I'm an American citizen am I concerned with my own government in part because I feel the ethical responsibility to be more concerned about what my own government does and what I can control but also ultimately our responsibility as humans what determines the ethics of our actions is the outcome and I can change my own government and my own society but I can't change others so why you know what did Ukraine do to you know invite Russia to invade I think by the way and I think we would probably agree that the American I don't think America is responsible for the invasion of Ukraine but the way that we structured our foreign policy the way that we controlled NATO and things like that made conflict much more likely than it had exactly I don't think there's any moral justification well that's I mean then we're in agreement I don't think there's any moral justification for the Russians to send huge you know amounts of soldiers onto a sovereign into a sovereign country and blow things up and and and try and take over cities I don't think there's any justification for that that's illegal it's unethical it's immoral but I also think that and again I think our responsibility is to ask whether our own government has played any role and we clearly have we've encircled Russia with a hostile military alliance that was never supposed to go up to Russian borders as we promised when the Soviets allowed you know the Germans to reunify an incredibly threatening thing to do for Russia if you look at the history of the 20th century they did it on the condition that NATO would not go east beyond Germany we immediately went east under Clinton and then Bush like up to the Russian border not only that you know look at how involved we were in Ukraine when Burisma wanted favors they didn't pay off the son of a Ukrainian politician they paid Joe Biden's son because that too was running Ukraine so we're running Ukraine since 2014 with the change of government that we had a role in right on the most sensitive part of the Russian border that was twice used to invade Russia during the 20th century and then suddenly we say oh we have nothing to do with Ukraine of course we're playing a major role in Ukraine and have been since at least 2014 and of course that's threatening to Russia and the same way it would be if the Russians were that involved in Mexico. How is Snowden doing I mean just kind of you know it's he's almost like you know the main character in the tin drama or something where it's like his life effectively ended you know on a certain level at a certain point in time but you know well I mean Snowden's a Southern Eastern character I mean the thing that I remember most about that time that I spent with him in Hong Kong when I first met with him under the most stressful circumstances as possible in our lives was just how kind of he had this like equanimity to him you know I was sleeping like an hour an hour and a half every night we didn't know if the Chinese or the CIA or whoever was going to burst down the dock down the door any minute and he would at 10 30 I remember every night would tell myself and Laura Poitras who were frantically working you know he would say all right guys I'm going to hit the hay as though you know it was just like any other day he would go and sleep for eight hours and wake up at 7 30 completely unbothered and unworried so he's a very kind of centered person I think that in large part it's his personality but also when you've done something that you really on your deepest level believe is noble and right it gives you this kind of internal tranquility that to this very day you know shapes who he is but also you know given what we thought his outcome was going to be you know which we thought 95% sure he was going to end up in the hands of the United States and was powerful country on earth why would any country harbor him right and it wasn't just Russia but it was also the Hong Kong authorities that stuck their middle finger up when the US demanded that he be kept there given what we thought he was going to go which is an orange jumpsuit and shackles and a high security national security prison for the rest of his life he married his high school sweetheart this beautiful woman who he loves and she loves him they have now two babies he is regarded as a hero by millions of people around the world he speaks at all kinds of conferences he gets to participate in the debate that he helped to catalyze so I you know he's now the president of the freedom of the press foundation the group that I was it was created by myself and Daniel Osberg and Laura Poitras to protect press freedom so he's you know incredibly fulfilled and happy despite the fact that he's in a country he didn't choose and can't get out probably indefinitely how about Julian Assange what do you I mean do you know him and yeah I mean are the reports true that I mean he's essentially insane now I mean he's been driven saying that you know clearly not a not a perfect human being by any stretch but none of us I mean this yeah especially people who decide they're going to vote their lives to spilling the secrets of the most powerful governments on earth while stopping they're likely to be a little off in some way but the last time I visited Julian was 2018 in the London embassy so shortly before he was uh taken out of there by the London police and he was definitely physically impaired because he hadn't seen the sun in seven years being in the embassy obviously there's a mental health hold that comes from that I haven't visited him because nobody can since he was imprisoned in what the bvc calls guantanamo want the British Guantanamo that's not a joke of a prison where he is in Belmarsh it's a high security prison so I rely on you know accounts from his lawyers and his wife and people who know him very well who are allowed to see him and yeah I mean he's definitely he's had a mini stroke it's a absolute tragedy and horror so when you that's one of the reasons why when people say to me as you did a couple minutes ago uh russia's an authoritarian government you know I immediately think about what we're doing to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and it's just hard for me to sit in judgment so proudly as an American of the repression of other countries because I want to focus my attention on what our government is doing do you do you have strong feelings about Ross Ulbricht the founder of silk road yeah I don't know the case with great expertise in general I think that we very aggressively over punish and over incarcerate people spend far longer in prison in the United States is why we have a far larger prison population than any country in the world I think what he there's a lot you know he there was suggestions that he was encouraging pay for murder for hire and the like but in terms of what he was charged with essentially creating a drug market that people would be able to obtain narcotics uh without being detected legal narcotics I'm somebody who absolutely believes in decriminalization and ultimately legalization I think if you're not coercing adults to buy narcotics but offering them the opportunity to do so and they're doing so from their own autonomy and agency as they were doing although I recognize it's a crime under American law I don't think it should be and it certainly doesn't deserve life in prison um so I think he's a victim of all kinds of perversions in our criminal justice system and I would totally support a pardon or a commutation of a sentence so there was there was a period you know certainly it built through the 90s but then in the I guess in the late aughts maybe or and in the early teens where people like Assange people like Ross Albrecht people certainly people like Snowden always extremely controversial but it did seem like there was a I don't know if not a majority of plurality of people who were willing to say you know what these people all in different ways represent the um the potential of the internet or of a more broadly decentralized dispersed they're like dissidents right like dissidents using the internet yeah and people were like into that yeah you know and and uh Chelsea Manning you know yeah you know because I knew even like some hardcore warriors were like well the documents were real and what they showed needed to come out you know kind of in the way that I guess Daniel Ellsberg is still widely hated by the you know industrial military industrial complex but the American people kind of understand that do you think that moment has passed and we've kind of like hunkered down into just a much more uh I don't know scared defensive crouch towards the potential of the internet the potential of a globalized economy the potential of a world where it's easier for more types of people to live in more types of places and just do whatever they want so it's interesting this is where I do think there's a relevant left right dichotomy which is and you have to kind of divide these cases up a little bit but you know in the case of Snowden there was always a fair amount of right-wing support for Snowden in part because he exposed a bomb secrets under a bomb so there was a partisan angle to it too but there was also there's a long-standing skepticism a strain of libertarianism and republican politics about not so much the local police which the right tends to like but the federal police which tends to dislike especially when it comes to things like spying on americans one of the first prominent politicians I was ever contacted by right after the Snowden story broke to express support for Snowden was Gordon Humphrey who was a two-term senator from New Hampshire you know conservative slash libertarian senator but he said as long as he didn't give secrets to the russians which he didn't you know tell him that I regard him as a hero but in general you know I think that there was when it came to Assange in the 2010 leak of Iraq and Afghanistan war secrets it's almost all the animosity was on the right and the left was divided you know people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden wanted them dead and Dianne Feinstein but the left you know the kind of left-wing flank revered Julian Assange there was almost unanimity about that I was always amazed by the way that the american state department actually came out relatively good in a lot of that stuff because they were I mean obviously they were committing war crimes in various places but they were talking privately and publicly the same way in the way when you looked at like other governments like you know the french government and what not just you know that were revealed to be yeah I mean you know when the war the diplomatic cables what they did was because they were speaking so candidly yeah they exposed a lot of corruption on the part of american allies in the middle east it was really the afghanistan and iraq war laws that exposed actual war crimes so yeah I think there's some difference in what each revealed but these days if you want to find an advocate for Julian Assange you need to go to Matt Gaetz or Tucker Carlson who crusaded for a pardon for Assange during the Trump years or Marjorie Taylor Greene who's become obsessed with this same with Snowden um in the case of Ross Olbrecht you like you can't that's always been a right-wing cause and I think still is and I think what this reflects is I think with Trump there has become this kind of institutional ethos this like greater reliance on and belief in the goodness of american institutions such that anybody who is in a dissident to them is now regarded with a lot of contempt you know so Snowden's looked at a rush as a russian agent they blame Assange for having hillary lost he's two beauters russian agent um anybody who breaks the law like these people are real authoritarians real institutionalists they have zero tolerance for any kind of dissent let alone law breaking and even as belief and trust and confidence in american institutions continues to hit like historic lows but it's not among american liberals if you look for example at polling data american liberals have very high opinions of the fbi and the cia much higher than republicans do the only institutions republicans like more than democrats is the church and the local police but on the federal level these federal institutions the irs the cdc the atf the fbi democrats love these institutions believe that they're really fundamentally good it's not me saying this is pulling down is showing this they want to empower them more and that's why it's almost impossible to find a democratic politician to speak well of edwards sonan gelina son because they know they're they're they're a crowd they're constituent in what they do and don't want to hear um i guess there's a just a final um question you know you mentioned your kids um and you mentioned the future and think about differently about the future when you have kids um you know i think that's your i've kids myself and it definitely changed the way i think by the same token uh because i'm a libertarian i suppose i want to definitely kind of under underscore and this is i'm embarrassed to even be saying this like i don't want to be a parental exceptionalist it's like i think you know many people who don't have kids actually think more profoundly about the future than i do uh having said that um are you confident um you know or you know hopeful that your kids will grow up in a better world um and you know or are you like no it's actually we're kind of hitting a slide or going downhill i think there's you know one of the things i think is a pitfall in and i'm sure you've seen this too is there are these generational conflicts you know and i'm sure it's true of every generation where you know whatever younger people like or believe it's different from what the older generation thought was true they looked at it as insane and crazy and as you get older you find yourself almost instinctively doing that and you try and do it but then you know it's a very real perspective and i think maybe as you get older your perspective changes a little bit um and that causes you to gravitate to certain ideas at the as opposed to others so i think it's probably a standard instinct to believe things have gotten worse you know there's that kind of cliche like things were better in my day when i was you know your age i had to you know add all this self-reliance and you have none and well but now it's kind of flipped right where it's like now the world was better when we were young and now it's all ashes that's what i hear from millennials and gen z they're convinced they have grown up and you know in a post apocalyptic well and i i think there's and that's why i say i mean my instinct is to answer your question by saying i think the world has become grimmer and and kind of drearier and and and less hopeful but the only my only hesitation is recognizing that that's a common thing to believe as you get older about the world and so whether how much of that is my own kind of bias and getting older versus um actually seeing that to be true it's hard to if i if i may it's also i mean it's interesting since you you live in the global south as well as you know in your b-52 where you just fly anywhere and mobs notice but how much of it and i think trump was kind of channeling this without really being able to articulate like we are living after the american empire i mean it's not that america is still but it's never going to be as important or as hegemonic as it was 20 years totally agree and you know we're kind of in the place of england or france in 1950 and we don't know how to accept that or even think about it and you know but when you look at places you know broad places like asia and africa and south america which south america is a bizarre and obviously very very continent but you know things are changing there and they're moving into the future in a way that 50 years ago nobody thought africa would be you know an inhabitable place or asia would be leading the global economy um do you think i mean part of it is that we uh you know in american north america and in europe haven't come to terms with the fact that the the sun is moving over to a different part of the globe yeah i mean you know if you look at how people are talking at the beginning of the russian invasion of ukraine which you support i am i planned it yeah um i advocated for it and and now i'm the primary theorist justifying it um as twitter will be happy to tell you but if you look at the kind of narrative that arose it was oh the entire world is united behind united states and we're all against russia the entire world is rising up against this you know immoral invasion and the entire time the biggest and most important countries on the world outside of nato outside of the of western europe were making very clear that they intended to not only maintain relationships with the russians but fill that gap with you know all kinds of aggressive ways of undermining us hegemonic control including by moving away from the dollar which is the you know the whole basis of the relation between the united states and saudi arabia has been will keep these despotic monsters in power using our superior weapons and money and diplomatic force in exchange for them keeping the dollar as as the reserve currency for for oil and they were talking openly about selling oil to to russia um or to china using other kinds of currency um india just said right from the beginning you know the second biggest country on the world in the world along with china no we're not joining this sanctions regime brazil did the same brazils in in this brooks alliance with with russia and china and and has been for many years and sees their growth and so this you know and the ruble actually is at its highest amount russia's oil income um has actually increased largely because the price of oil has increased but um so i'm not saying things just have been irrelevant but we don't have the ability to strangle and put a chokehold that's fatal on any country that we want like we did even 15 or 20 years ago all right um is there are you working on any big projects that you are interested in pointing people towards i'm working on a big project that i'm not interested in pointing people towards because i'm not ready to ask that i wonder what he means well we'll leave it there glenn greenwald thanks so much for talking to me great i really enjoyed thank you