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Source: The Greanville Post
Glenn Greenwald: The Elitist Corporate Media Attacks Populism
Glenn charges the corporate centrist—de facto fascist—citadel with passion and lucidity. See why political labels are shifting.
Glenn Greenwald | System Update
substack
Video Transcript: Plus, an interview with Briahna Joy Gray on Dem. vs. GOP dissent
Watch System Update #19 here on Rumble.
Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Tuesday, January 10, 2023. We have now returned to our normal programming, Monday through Friday live on Rumble at 7:00pm ET and will produce full transcripts within 24 hours of all the live shows we do for our subscribers here and on our Locals page, where all of our written journalism will now be published.
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Sometimes a largely inconsequential person says or writes something, by accident, that is so revealing of the rot at the heart of the establishment, thinking that it actually becomes highly worthwhile and instructive to dissect it. Such is the case with a stupendously ignorant screed published yesterday by MSNBC that, while containing no novel thought of any kind, is somehow so vividly representative of establishment thought, hostility toward populist politics, and deranged conspiracy theories designed to demonize establishment critics, that it is a master class in shedding light on how mavens of establishment power in politics and media think. We will break that down in order to reveal the rot that drives these hegemonic centers.
Then, for the Interview segment, I'll speak with one of the smartest and most independent-minded voices on the left, Briahna Joy Gray, the press secretary for the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, who has become a sharp critic of even the left wing of Democratic politics. We'll compare the defiance last week of House Republican holdouts to the endless subservience of Democratic politicians and discuss much more about the fallout from last week's speakership drama and American politics generally with her.
Every now and then in politics, a person says something or writes something that is so illuminating, so illustrative of prevailing thought, that it is really worthwhile to analyze and dissect it, even though the person lacks importance or note. Such was the case, for instance, when former free speech defender, Sam Harris, articulated the core defining motivating worldview of American liberals, Democrats and their allies in corporate media, and did so, so perfectly, namely that Donald Trump is such a singular evil and that defeating him in the 2020 election was such a paramount, overarching imperative, that literally anything and everything done to advance that singular goal -- lying, cheating, censoring, authoritarianism, suppressing relevant reporting -- was not only justifiable but morally necessary.
That's why that video with Sam Harris went so viral, not because there was anything particularly relevant about Sam Harris, but because what he said was such a pure distillation of establishment thinking that it shined a uniquely bright light on the rotted mindset that has governed the hegemonic left-liberal sectors of our politics and media for the last six years:
(Video)
Every time Sam Harris says something that deliberately is provocative and people then get provoked, he then goes and whines and claims it was taken out of context. So, feel free, very free, to go watch the full context because it makes it even worse. I just assumed you've all seen it and so I showed you a part of it. And it amazes me every time I see it -- not that someone would think that way-- it's incredibly obvious for years that such unscrupulous, limitlessly dishonest corruption is exactly how they thought. What's amazing is that someone was willing to admit, in public, that that's how they think. But credit to Sam Harris, I suppose, for his candor in admitting all of that.
That's exactly how I feel about a new hit piece that was just published yesterday by MSNBC. Written by former Vox writer and current NBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem, the article claims -- and I’m not kidding, not even exaggerating – that, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, I'm leading a sinister and insidious plot to channel innocent leftists into the menacing arms of the authoritarian far right.
There you see the title of this marvel of investigative journalism that uncovered this conspiracy: “How the Populist Left has Become Vulnerable to the Populist Right”.
So, we're not just clandestinely converting leftists into fascists, but we're predators exploiting this “vulnerable” group, this defenseless, marginalized group against our dark arts of manipulation, mendacity, and mind control.
And there you see the picture. Let's put that back up on the screen. The three ringleaders: me, Tulsi Gabbard, and Matt Taibbi. And you see us, they're all in this grainy black-and-white imagery chosen by MSNBC editors, in total good faith -- not to subliminally make us look like fugitive Nazis in the “MOST WANTED” photo, as authorities search in vain for us throughout South America -- but just because it's very difficult, of course, to find color photos of the three of us, that's why they used this grainy black-and-white imagery.
Now there on the left, you see me with my mouth open, presumably spouting my melodic, hypnotic tunes that lead the vulnerable leftists down a long, twisted path where they arrive at meetings where they're taught how to hate Black people and Jews and LGBTs.
Then next to me, you see Tulsi Gabbard there, her hair deceptively flowing in the spirit of Aloha, while actually containing barely visible Nazi iconography, detectable only through the well-trained eyes of a grizzled giant of investigative journalism like Vox and MSNBC's Aleem. And then, on the right, exactly where he is and belongs, on the far right, is Matthew Taibbi, looking there like what he is: the lovechild of Bond villain Ernst Strabo Blofeld, there you see him, and Third Reich propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.
In the lower left-hand corner, there appears for some kind of reason, disembodied arms banging desperately on a door -- presumably representing the vulnerable, well-intentioned lefties, we lured, into a locked room in the middle of a rainforest for their Nazi indoctrination training only for them to realize what was happening to them, far too late to escape it, still begging with futility for their freedom.
And then in that upper right-hand corner appear Roman columns, I guess, because -- I have no idea why: has Roman architecture now become a symbol of fascist power in liberal corporate media giants? And then, along the bottom, you see what appears to be a series of colors, perhaps evocative of the colors of the rainbow flag -- perhaps because we're planning the construction of concentration camps for LGBTs, or because there's a corporate requirement at MSNBC that every article must now contain some artwork in the family of the LGBT flag in order to be inclusive. I'm not really sure why that's there either.
But then, under this incredibly objective and neutral montage is the caption “Former stars of the far left have become aligned with the populist right in surprising ways in recent years.”
Anyway, that's quite a lot of innuendo and subtle smearing before you even get to the article itself. But let's proceed there -- obviously not because former Vox writer, and current MSNBC columnist, Zeeshan Aleem has any particular relevance -- you could randomly pluck literally anyone on Twitter with a resistance hashtag, a Ukrainian flag, or a Lincoln Project coffee mug in their bio to have them write his articles, and literally, nobody would notice. But it's worth looking at because that article -- like Sam Harris’, mega-viral video -- really is a masterclass in demonstrating the stunted, very obsolete, and simple-minded prism through which these media simpletons see the world, as well as the way they have completely inverted what “liberty” and “authoritarianism” mean, what right and left meant, and what the core and defining values of journalism once were.
So, let's dig into the first passage.
“Since the mid-2010s, the rise of the populist left and the populist right has shaken up the American political spectrum. Both movements have maneuvered to pressure and persuade the political establishment to adopt their objectives.” -- which is kind of what politics is about. “But in recent years, something unusual has been happening. We're seeing the formation of a pipeline that circumvents the center altogether -- and directly connects left-wing to right-wing populism”. Oh, no! We can't “circumvent the center,” by which he means the Washington establishment, the only entity Americans hate more than the corporate media, of which he's a part.
But that thinking illustrates one of the reasons there is such a gigantic breach between employees of New York City and DC-based media giants, on the one hand, and the citizenry they pretend to represent, on the other. These kinds of journalists are capable of seeing the world, only through this flat, linear framework: over here is the far left; then comes the left; then establishment Democrats, then establishment Republicans and conservatives; then the dreaded far-right or alt-right.
They see this as a board game with very rigid rules. One can only move one square at a time. So, if you're on the mainstream left, it's fine to move a bit toward establishment liberalism since that's the next square over, but you can't jump all the way over to the far right. The rules don't allow that and, besides, how could that make any ideological sense?
But only insular DC media and political mavens see the world this way. Consider this fact that political journalists are completely incapable of understanding, let alone explaining, even though doing so is their nominal job.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics, 9.2 million Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2012, then voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That was a major reason Trump won in 2016. He attracted large numbers of voters who had not voted Republican in many years but did so in that election.
Now people like Zeeshan Aleem have absolutely no capacity to understand how this could happen, other than by dismissing such people as stupid, incoherent, and confused -- just poorly educated about politics, failing to read enough Vox and listening enough to Rachel Maddow babble about the dangers of the Kremlin and therefore being confused. And trust me, that's how they think of such people. To them, this is bizarre. Or, to use his words when describing our conspiracy, “a pipeline that circumvents the center altogether -- and directly connects left-wing to right-wing populism”. This makes no sense to them.
Last month, Aleem’s former Vox colleague, Matthew Yglesias, was spending his time online like so many of these established media figures expressing similar confusion about my ideology -- and the ideology of millions of people like me -- by insisting there's something abnormal about seeming to have one foot in the populist right and one foot in the populist left, but never wanting anything to do with what Aleem calls the “center”. And Yglesias venerates as “the normal moderate”.
What is a ‘normal moderate?’ What people like Yglesias mean by that is, of course, his politics: embracing establishment pieties, liking and trusting establishment institutions and their leaders, and wanting above all else to avoid anything disruptive or destabilizing to the status quo power. They love status quo power.
Responding to someone, explaining to him that perhaps he thinks my politics changed because the U.S. Security Agencies in which I have long focused my journalistic scrutiny -- the FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security -- went from being more admired by the American Right, two decades ago, to now being revered by the Democratic Party and their followers. Yglesias wrote in response: ”It's definitely true that Glenn Greenwald has a kind of consistent monomania about the U.S. intelligence community, but I don't think that explains the tendency of many people to go from Bernie to Trump without stopping at “normal moderate”.
Matthew Yglesias: Like his fellow corporate centrists, sitting pretty at the top of the filthy heap while society implodes suits him fine. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
What is a ‘normal moderate?’ What people like Yglesias mean by that is, of course, his politics: embracing establishment pieties, liking and trusting establishment institutions and their leaders, and wanting above all else to avoid anything disruptive or destabilizing to the status quo power. They love status quo power. They love status quo institutions. They love anything that preserves and protects it and hates anything that threatens it.
Now, I know it's incredibly shocking that someone like Matthew Yglesias, born to a rich and famous father, educated as a young child at the Dalton School, a private school in Manhattan that costs $60,000/year: imagine spending $60,000/year to send your child to the first grade -- then going to Harvard and spending his life as a couch blogger. I know it's hard to imagine someone like him being incapable of understanding how millions of Americans think and believing that his highly insular views of him and his like-minded friends are the only things that are “normal,” but the establishment-venerating sentiments he harbors are anything but “normal.” Unless you spend all your time in life protected and ensconced within the most elite institutions.
It really should not be hard at all to understand why millions of people twice voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. It's because millions of Americans don't analyze politics or the world through these rigid ideological frameworks anymore. If you're someone who does, then of course it doesn't make sense to watch somebody vote for Obama, the liberal Democrat, and then Trump, the conservative Republican. But if you're capable of understanding the world without those constraining frameworks, it makes perfect sense. And indeed, that's not how a huge number of Americans see the world.
The reason so many people want to “circumvent the center” or avoid Yglesias’ “normal moderates” is because so many people, validly, harbor nothing but contempt for those establishment venues. They don't care if someone is deemed right or left, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat.
What matters to them, what they want is someone who will reject and wage war against the neoliberal and neoconservative order that has dominated Washington for decades at their expense. And if you don't understand this about American or Western politics -- and these establishment journalists, by definition, don't -- then you understand nothing about American politics. And that's why they're so often confused, insisting that people like me and Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Taibbi either have no ideological coherence by which they mean partisan loyalty -- or that one minute we're on the far left and the next minute we're on the far right and they can't figure out what any of it means. It's because they're working with a completely obsolete framework, a totally simple-minded, stunted, and archaic one, that has no room or ability to recognize what is actually now the central division in American political life: pro-establishment versus anti-establishment sentiment.
A very similar thing happened in 2016. It was very common, as political journalists will tell you, for people to go around the country and hear “My two favorite candidates in 2016 are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.” To people like normal journalists who spend their time on Twitter, constantly imprisoned by this stunted framework of who's on the left and who's on the right and who's conservative and who's liberal, it makes no sense for someone to say: “My two favorite candidates are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.” They had a lot in common, despite the fact that one is supposedly far left and one is supposedly far right.
They condemned free trade deals for the same reason that it de-industrialized all of America in order to benefit international capital. They were both credible outsiders to Washington’s power. People forget that Trump had an immigration policy that was actually very similar to Bernie Sanders’ and to the international left for a long time -- until it became racist to have it -- which was that large numbers of immigrants flooding over the borders are something that is an agenda of the Chamber of Commerce and multinational corporations because it keeps wages low for the American worker.
I remember when I was writing about politics, in 2005, it was George Bush and Dick Cheney eager to have immigration reform, and people on the left, including labor unions, were vehemently opposed to it on the grounds that it was a Chamber of Commerce plot in order to drive down wages. In fact, Bernie Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, in 2016, for Vox, that same outlet, and asked Bernie Sanders what he thought about open borders. And Bernie looked at him like he was crazy and said,
“Open borders? Are you kidding? Of course, I'm not in favor of open borders. That's a Koch brothers plot to drive down wages.”
So, they had a lot in common ideologically, namely opposition to this kind of internationalist, globalist neoliberal, neoconservative political order. But more than anything else, they both credibly posed as outsiders to Washington’s power. And that's why people like them - because neither of them seemed to be a partisan loyalist to either the Democrat or the Republican Party. The Bernie Sanders of 2016 promised to wage a political revolution, not against the Republican Party but against the Democratic and Republican establishment, the Washington establishment, just the same way Trump, in 2016, was promising to run against Bush-Cheney foreign policy orthodoxy and even Reaganomics as no longer applicable to a 21st Century America that has been de-industrialized, stripped of all of its quality of life, providing jobs.
So, if you only can see the world as ‘left versus right’, of course, the Matt Yglesias of the world is going to say, this makes no sense: ‘how do you go from Bernie to Trump without stopping at me -- the normal moderate?’ But obviously, millions of people don't see the world that way because it's not Matt Yglesias who is normal. He's deeply abnormal. What's normal is the kind of political thinking these people can no longer understand.
We're talking about relevance, who's relevant, and who's not? Whatever you want to add, whatever metrics you want to use for relevance, I think it's very difficult to dispute that the most influential media figure over the last, say, five to six years is most definitely not somebody who works for a large media corporation like NBC or CNN or The New York Times or The Washington Post.
He's somebody who influences particularly younger people and how they think about politics, even though it's very difficult to define him ideologically or politically. I'm speaking, of course, of Joe Rogan, who has become the symbol of the part of the media ecosystem that is actually thriving independent journalism, for people who not only aren't and don't want to be attached to or employed by some gigantic media corporation that tells you what you can and can't talk about or tells you how you can and can't talk about it but instead, remain independent.
Nor is he somebody who has any kind of overt partisan loyalty. He's willing to tell you the truth and condemn the establishment as a whole, and therefore has inspired huge numbers, millions and millions of people, who trust and listen to him, even though he'll be the first to tell you he doesn't know everything about everything. He often knows very little about some things, but he's open-minded and curious and doesn't treat his audience with condescension, like they're all idiots unless they agree with him -- but he treats them as him, somebody trying to figure out a complex world. And that's what people trust more than anything else.
If you look at Joe Rogan's politics, it's a lot more recognizable when it comes to the average American than Yglesias’ is or the person who wrote this MSNBC article.
Remember that here in 2020, Joe Rogan essentially said that his favorite candidate, in 2020, was Bernie Sanders. You may recall that Bernie Sanders’s campaign did what any smart politician would do, which was to take the endorsement of one of the most popular and influential people in American cultural life, Joe Rogan, and tout the fact that Joe Rogan had said that Bernie was his favorite candidate. People on the left, like AOC, were enraged that he would do that because Joe Rogan is supposed to be off limits -- but that's because, to AOC, he's not a good Democrat, he's not a good leftist. But Bernie's campaign recognized that millions and millions of people don't think that way in those terms. Only professional journalists and politicians do.
And so, here's Joe Rogan saying, in 2020, “My favorite candidate is Bernie Sanders”. Here, just two years later, you see Joe Rogan saying, “I think Ron DeSantis would be a good president”. To journalists who work inside media corporations, this is nothing but incoherence: how can you go from praising a far leftist like Bernie Sanders to praising a hard-core conservative, authoritarian like Ron DeSantis? And yet, to millions and millions of people who listen to Joe Rogan, who identify far more with Joe Rogan than the Dalton School's Matt Yglesias, not only does this make sense, but this is how they think. Voting patterns prove that. What they're looking for are people who seem to be unattached to the prevailing establishment orthodoxy that they rightfully have come to hate.
And that's what brings up so much confusion, when these journalists -- these employees of media corporations who never break any stories, whose only worldview is anchored to a political party -- talk about with so much confusion and anger and disorientation, people who are part of the media that's thriving: myself, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan and so many more. They are incapable of understanding people who are in a sector of politics and journalism that is liberated, emancipated from the prism that suffocates them.
Now, let's look at a couple of passages from this article that declares that Tulsi, Matt Taibbi and I are leading a sinister movement to channel innocent, young, vulnerable leftists into right-wing fascism:
“A group of journalists and media personalities who were once at home on the far left, has formed a niche but influential political subculture that encourages leftists to abandon leftism for the populist right. Its most recognizable faces are former icons of leftist discourse who have millions of diehard fans: Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of The Intercept, known as one of the most powerful critics of the War on Terror in the Bush era. Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone writer who was famous for excoriating defenders of neoliberalism and likened Goldman Sachs to a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” Tulsi Gabbard, formerly a Democratic House member and 2020 presidential candidate who was aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. But in recent years, their focus has changed. What happened to them? These commentators had never hesitated to criticize Democrats alongside Republicans, but now they pivoted to targeting liberals almost exclusively while forming ties with the authoritarian right”
All right. Let's just stop there for a second, because there's a lot there to unpack.
First of all, what do they mean by the “authoritarian right” and “forming ties with the authoritarian right?” Probably the leading cause of mine and Matt Taibbi’s journalistically, and one of Tulsa Gabbard's leading causes, is the primary value of free speech, which, as you might know, is not something we invented but is reflected in the First Amendment, in fact, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The Free speech movement in the United States in its absolutist form was something that was largely codified in Supreme Court jurisprudence by Supreme Court justices in the 20th century, most frequently associated with the left. It was defended by the ACLU, which, being a very principled free speech organization in its old incarnation, was composed largely of Jewish leftists who believed in the need for free speech on the grounds that fascist movements, like the Nazi movement, use censorship, like book burning, to persecute people who think differently.
Therefore, if you're a member of a minority group - as most of them were, leftist Jews - it's in your interest to defend the principle of free speech so that you will have the right to speak and not be persecuted.
So, what is authoritarian in these debates? To me, it seems like what's authoritarian are the people who want to merge corporate and state power in order to censor the Internet -- and I've shown you many times the Pew survey proving that Democrats overwhelmingly, 67%, two-thirds, favor not just Big Tech monopolies, but also the government censoring the Internet in the name of stopping disinformation. They want to fuse corporate and state power in order to censor the Internet.
If you go and study fascism in any first-year undergraduate college, you're going to learn that one of its defining hallmarks, as implemented by Mussolini and then by Hitler, is the merger of corporate and state power, so that there's no such thing as a private sector ever working at odds with the public sector. The government and corporate power are always merged to control the population: exactly what the Democratic Party, the liberals who support it, and largely the left that supports it as well, are in favor of doing.
So, who's the authoritarian there? When they say, “forming ties with the authoritarian right,” - to the extent people on the right support our advocacy of free speech - in what way are they the authoritarians as opposed to the people on the left, who are the ones who actually want to use state power that way?
Now, the other part of that passage that is so amazing is that they go through these views that supposedly defined us as far leftist -- my critique of the War on Terror; Matt Taibbi’s critique of neo-liberal Wall Street fraud; Tulsi Gabbard’s view that Bernie Sanders is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton because he was more antiwar and opposed to international capital.
Now, you would think, in order to claim, as this article is doing, that we changed - that we moved from the far left to the far right - they would have to identify one of those or many of those views that defined our politics previously that we've now repudiated and renounced. But they don't because they can't, because we haven't changed any of those views. My view of the War on Terror is not only something I continue to maintain. It's what formed so much of my current focus today. It's the reason I'm opposed to a domestic War on Terror in the name of January 6 -- because I saw what the first War on Terror, in the name of September 11, did to all of our civil liberties. It's the reason I'm opposed to the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, and the NSA.
So, again, when Matt Taibbi or Tulsi Gabbard or myself are warning about the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and the FBI, and particularly, their growing propensity to interfere in our domestic politics, and people on the right find common ground in those concerns -- in what way is that the authoritarian right? The authoritarians are the people who venerate those agencies -- that's always been the case -- and who seem unconcerned about their involvement in our politics precisely because the Democrats and liberals now perceive – correctly -- that those Security State Agencies are their political allies.
Do you see how they've completely inverted this so that we are now supposedly joined at the hip with the authoritarian right, even though the issues on which we're finding common ground are anti-authoritarian by definition and the enemies that we have are, by definition, the people who have become complete and utter authoritarians, which is precisely why this left versus right framework makes no sense anymore? Is free speech a left-wing or a right-wing value? It used to be a left-wing value, but it no longer is. It’s opposition to the U.S. security state a left-wing or a right-wing value? Is opposition to the war in Ukraine a left-wing or a right-wing value? They have no more meaning anymore except as a function, a byproduct of opposing establishment sentiment, establishment values, and most importantly of all, the maintenance of establishment power.
Now, let's look at this next passage that we've chosen for you:
By the way, this is what you do when you have no argument: you just start throwing around these cliches so you don't have to prove that Tulsi Gabbard is sitting in for an actual white nationalist chief. You just call them that and move on knowing that your liberal audience already thinks that and agrees.
That, by the way, is a total lie and implies that Elon Musk, when he went to Matt Taibbi, the way every source goes to a journalist, imposed on Matt Taibbi constraints about what they could and couldn't say and forced Matt Taibbi to adopt Elon Musk's worldview. I interviewed Matt Taibbi and, I think, three other Twitter Files journalists, including Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, and there was another one whom I interviewed as well. Who? He's not coming to mind.
But in any event, I interviewed every single one of these Twitter Files journalists, and I asked each of them -- What's that? Oh yeah. David Zweig. Exactly. – I interviewed four of the reporters and I asked each of them all: “What were the conditions imposed upon you by Elon Musk when doing this reporting?” And they all said the same thing: other than having to do the reporting on Twitter in the first instance, absolutely none. So how was it any different for Matt Taibbi to have a source, Elon Musk, that gives him access to the internal documents of Twitter and allows him to freely report whatever he wanted -- obviously, Musk had no control over what Taibbi would say -- how is that any different than when someone inside the CIA or FBI or Homeland Security goes, as they do every day, to this person's employer at NBC News and gives information to them? Of course, that's how journalism works all the time. But do you see how this piece is so tendentious and how they try and discredit what, in fact, is totally common?
Here's the last line: “Greenwald attended the premiere of a documentary about right-wing disinformation mogul, Alex Jones, and conducted a shockingly sympathetic interview with him. Collectively, these and other lesser-known pundits push a political position that could be called anti-lib populism”. (‘Lib’ as in the pejorative slang term for a liberal, in currency among leftists and the right, a word I don't think I've ever uttered in my life until I just read it right now off the screen). “Like all populism, it purports to oppose elitism and speaks on behalf of the people. But as a practice, it funnels people toward the snake-oil populism of the right”.
That whole paragraph is filled with all kinds of names and accusations. It's guilt by association. We go on Fox News, and we speak with people who they believe shouldn't be spoken to -- and yes, of course, we do. Why would we not go on Fox News?
Fox News is the only place, for example, where you'll hear a stirring defense of Edward Snowden, my source, and Julian Assange. Tucker Carlson went on a virtual crusade advocating for the pardons of Edward Snowden and, especially, Julian Assange, the only person in media that would do that.
If you want to hear opposition to or even questioning of the U.S. role in the proxy war in Ukraine, you cannot hear that by turning on MSNBC or CNN, which is always captive to the agenda of the U.S. Security State, half of which seems to work for those but you have to go to Fox News. If you want to hear people complaining about the threat of censorship from the Union of Big Tech and the U.S. Security State, there's only one place to go, when it comes to a major network, which is Fox News. Or if you want to speak freely, you come to a place like this, which is Rumble, because on YouTube and Facebook and even still on Twitter, you get censored.
So, this whole idea of ‘guilt by association’ -- that we're somehow on the far right because we speak to people who are conservatives and use their platforms to communicate -- this is what they're trying to do more than anything, keep us all divided. Do you see? That's what's really implicit in this entire article. You are a liberal, you are a leftist. That means you sit over here in this corner. You are a conservative. You're on the right. You sit over here in this corner and you just hate each other constantly, all day, every day. You don't talk to each other. You don't go on each other's shows. You don't interact. You don't treat each other like human beings. You don't see if there's common ground. You just keep all your hatred focused over here on the left, or over here, on the right. Why? What is missing from that? This division that they want to put us in? Any focus on what Matt Yglesias heralds as the ‘normal moderates’ or this writer calls the ‘Washington establishment’. That's how the Washington establishment and establishment venues stay shielded from critique is by constantly demanding that we never talk to each other or find common ground among us. And if we do, we become demonized as people who must be secret fascists, even though we're uniting on definitively anti-authoritarian values.
But through a little more of this: “One of the most prominent strategies of anti-lib populists is casting liberal media as the biggest threat to free speech in America” -- Yes, that's because the primary defenders and agitators of online censorship are liberal employees of media corporations. We characterize them as the biggest threats to free speech in America, because that's precisely what they are.
That's very generous of you to acknowledge that those things are valid, that journalists are no longer focused on power centers like Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the CIA, but instead are trying to destroy the lives of individuals who have ideas and views and donate to causes that these journalists and major corporations, funded by Jeff Bezos, don't agree with.
“But”, he says, ‘But what's odd about the anti-lib outlook is its singular focus on liberals. The right is at least as worrisome on the issue of restricting speech and in some respects, far more. The GOP has become an overt advocate for government censorship on college campuses and in schools and libraries. While he was president, Trump ramped up legal attacks on the media and harassed journalists. The MAGA right endeavors to dampen the very meaning of free speech by embracing disinformation as a political strategy. Billionaires who are hostile to the left own social media platforms and make decisions about speech based on profit motives”.
There's way too much there, too many lies to even dissect.
So, the only point I want to really make is that first of all, I know people on the left – I hate to admit this -- but corporations are completely on their side. It wasn't a Democratic president who was kicked off the Internet. It was a Republican president named Donald Trump. There's a long list of conservative authors and pundits and journalists and even elected officials who have been banned and booted off of and censored by Big Tech and almost none who are Democrats and liberals.
Again, the relevant distinction here is not conservatives and liberals, as they keep saying. If you're an establishment conservative if you're Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy, or any of those kinds of people, you're not going to get censored off the Internet. Mitch McConnell is never a threat to establishment politics. He is the establishment, just like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are, or Amy Klobuchar is. These people are the establishment. No one's targeting them. The people who get targeted are anti-establishment voices on both left and right. Those are the people who get censored. And that's where the real divide is. But again, they're incapable of understanding the world except by reference to left and right.
The final point I want to make here is that the free speech debate has really broken down along this kind of anti-establishment line. But the claim that all of us don't criticize Republicans, but only Democrats is a complete lie. I constantly am pointing out, in fact, that there's way more in common that the Democrat and Republican establishments have with one another than they do with any of you. Just last night on my show, that was the very point I made, that obviously a multimillionaire like Nancy Pelosi, who has spent decades building political power in Washington through raising money from Wall Street, has far more in common with Mitch McConnell, a multimillionaire who has spent decades in Washington raising money through Wall Street than they do with people who are anti-establishment.
It happens to be the case that the media spends over what an overwhelming portion of its time criticizing the Republican Party. So, I do try to use my platform not to echo what everyone else in the media is already saying -- otherwise, what would be the need for me or my show or my platform but to shine a light on what people aren't talking about? And it's also the case that liberal left political views and cultural views have become hegemonic and major institutions of power in Washington, in media, in academia, and in Hollywood. And so, therefore, they deserve a lot more scrutiny than they get. But the idea that populist voices -- that this article is focused on myself, Matt Taibbi, and Tulsi Gabbard -- don't criticize the Republican establishment is utterly false because anti-establishment politics is precisely about criticizing not the left or the right, not Republicans or Democrats, but the establishment itself.
Now, I want to end with this amazing part here where he actually ends by acknowledging that he doesn't actually think that we are members of the far right because he admits that we hold many views which can't reasonably be described that way. He says, for example, “A skeptic of my schematic might say that I'm simply describing right-wing populists. Well, not exactly. First of all, these commentators don't fit neatly into any conventional ideological box”. That's what confuses them. And then, he says, “and complicating things further, never really did fit neatly on the left. Greenwald's stated normative views are decidedly not conservative, not conventionally right-wing”. Oh, you think so? “Gabbard identifies as an independent and has declined to join the Republicans, at least for now. Taibbi calls himself a run-of-mill old-school ACLU liberal who likes Bernie Sanders”.
That's because of what we all are. And in that part of the sentence where he says, my “stated normative views are decidedly not conventionally right-wing” he links to this tweet of mine where -- I was actually having a conversation with him I had forgotten about six months ago that presumably led to this article -- where he asked me about do you have any views that are not conservative anymore. And I said, a huge number. And here are some of the examples I gave: “Factory farms should be heavily regulated, if not dismantled, to stop the mass torture of animals and harm to public health and the environment. The drug war should end with resources devoted to treatment. Big Tech monopolies should be broken up. CIA should be reined in, if not abolished”.
Now, how can you take these views, just these four in this one tweet, and try and depict me as some sort of clandestine agent of the far right leading leftists down this path, the right-wing authoritarianism? You can only do that if you're entirely dishonest and more so, so simple-minded that you just can't understand politics unless it fits into these dumb, stunted, simple-minded boxes. And that's why this article is so valuable because it shows that they are incapable of that. They can't see the world through any prism. And the prism they really don't recognize is ultimately the only one that really matters, which is the prism of are you in favor of maintaining establishment power in orthodoxies, or are you opposed to it?
So, for our interview segment tonight, I'm delighted to welcome Briahna Joy Gray for what will be her debut appearance, but by no means is it our last one on System Update. She, in my view, is one of the most incisive and fearlessly principled political commentators on the left. She currently holds her own podcast Bad Faith, as well as The Hills Rising. She served as Sally Sanders’s national press secretary, in 2020, and before that was a senior political editor for a news outlet. I forget the name of it. I think it was called Intercepting or The Intercept or something like that. I'm not really sure. She's one of the few truly independent thinkers and commentators willing to make criticism of leaders of her own party and to transgress many of her own tribes’ ideological boundaries. She's no stranger to controversy. As a result, she's a good friend of mine. I'm happy to have her on my show.
The Interview: Briahna Joy Gray
So that concludes our show for this evening. As always, we will now move to our Locals community, where we will have our live interactive aftershow.
For those of you who aren't members but who want to be, you can click the red join button in the upper right-hand corner of the page and join our Locals community where you'll have access to the aftershow and also all of my written journalism, which will be very shortly appearing exclusively there.
In the meantime, we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night, 7 p.m., live, exclusively here on Rumble.
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