Glenn Greenwald: Antisemitism, Attacks on Free Speech, and Everything You Need to Know about Brazil

Here's the episode. You arrive at the same conclusions. I do 100% of the time, at least on Twitter. It's like, yeah, it's an instinct.

Are you older? I think I'm like a year older. What year were you born? 1967.. Okay.

So you're two years older than me. Okay. Congratulations on your robust youth.

Yeah. It's interesting.

sometimes you can consciously like deceive other people for whatever goal, and you can tell yourself it's justified. And maybe sometimes it even is, but the worst thing is to delude yourself, like to deceive yourself. There's nothing worse. you can do to yourself. Or be deceived.

I mean, he, you're talking about the NSA, which was supposed to be like our leading intelligence agency. He was in it, stealing all their stuff over months, figuring out how not to get caught. He walked out with it. He went to Hong Kong with it, having, they have no idea any of that happened. And he was just waiting for us to come and then pass it all to us and, like, put it in all secret places.

Like the only thing he cared about was getting that out before he ended up, you know, imprisoned or killed or whatever. He was so desperate for us to get there. I mean, I really think it's for the reasons he said, like he really felt betrayed. You know, he went to enlist in the Iraq war. He, he enlisted in the army.

He wanted to go fight in Iraq and obviously do that because you believe the mythology 100% entry. And the more he saw, the more he realized it was, you know, a fraud and it makes you like feel betrayed, like ethically betrayed. Like people who want to go fight in wars obviously have like a code of ethics already. Right. They're saying I can risk my life for something that is greater than myself.

And then when you realize that, like what you're told is greater than yourself is in fact a total lie, that you're fighting for completely different reasons, you feel betrayed. And then the question is like, what is really bigger than myself? And he, like I, said, he thought he was going to be killed or spend the rest of his life in prison. Like, if I had to bet, we, I, we, we weren't even discussing the possibility that he wouldn't end up free. It was inconceivable.

I get, that was the darkness that hung over this whole thing the whole time we were doing it. Obviously, I was very excited about the story. We were plotting, we were strategizing, like it was underwater, but the whole time I felt this like sadness that this person had come to like, admire and respect so much. I was never going to say again, he was going to end up in prison for the rest of his life. Like that was, that wasn't like a possibility.

It was like almost inevitable. And he knew that. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, like.

obviously you don't, if you're at all ethical, like not just a journalist person, you don't use somebody as a source without making sure they understand the risks they're taking and the likely consequences. But he, you know, I remember the first conversation I had when I started talking to him, he was like all while versed in the Espionage Act and like every single law that would be used against him, he fully understood he was sacrificing his whole life. He had to hide it from his girlfriend who he wanted to marry. That was like, he wasn't, they were totally in love, but he couldn't have her know anything because she would have been complicit and he was concerned she'd be vulnerable. You know, they would go after her, start charging with their crimes to get at him.

So we had to keep it all from her. He just disappeared. He was like, I need to go on a trip, right? To business. So, I.

at exactly the same time. Internally, they said they knew they could never win the war in Vietnam. and, like many other lies too. It was like, you know, Daniel Ellsberg worked at the highest levels of the government forever. I mean, he got a PhD in nuclear policy and then, you know, was at the, at the Rand corporation with some of the most secret access ever.

And then he just couldn't believe what he was seeing, like inside these documents, comparing them to the public statements. And he was like, how am I going to live with myself for the rest of my life if I don't, you know, make this known. And he would exactly the same thing. But of course, at the time he was completely vilified as a traitor, a Russian agent, the whole thing. A hater of America.

Yeah. I mean, everybody like who wasn't on the left, hated Daniel Ellsberg. And the only reason he didn't spend the rest of his life in prison is because of the misconduct of breaking it. They broke into a psychoanalyst office to try and discover his psychosexual secrets, to discredit him, for. That was like that whole CIA group that did the Watergate break.

And they also broke into his psychoanalyst office and tried to steal all those files. And then, when they couldn't, they wanted to break into the psychoanalyst home. And then that was like the one thing they didn't get permission for. But when that was discovered, the judge threw the case out solely because of government misconduct. Had they not, he would have absolutely been convicted.

But.

Mike Isikoff piece reported on them trying to assassinate Snowden, but also create theories to arrest myself and Laura, calling us information brokers. and like Ader. And like the whole time, James Clapper would always, whenever he referred to us, he would never call us journalists. He would always call us Snowden's, like Aders and Abeders, or Snowden's co-conspirators, because they were trying to create a theory that they could arrest us. That's why I didn't go back.

That's why neither were nor I traveled for a year. They were being super threatening. You know, I had the best lawyers for the Guardian, the kinds who could get Eric Holder on the phone. You know, worked with him, you know, those type of lawyers. And they were like, if he comes back to New York, if it comes back to the US, can you guarantee that he won't be arrested upon arrival?

And they're like, right now we can't.

So that's why you live out of the country. Well, no, I mean, I had lived in Brazil already, but I was always going back to the US, but for a year I couldn't travel outside Brazil. The Brazilian government said, we will always protect you because I did a lot of reporting on how the NSA was spying on Brazil. So in Brazil, like, the reporting was considered heroic and they were like, we'll never turn you over, but we can't guarantee your protection if you leave Brazil. So I stayed in Brazil for a year.

. Like the editor at the time was, like one of those old school British editors. And now it's run by this woman who's like best friends with the editor-in-chief of the... Who, was the editor-in-chief of the Intercept, who degraded it into a partisan outlet. And they're both just like standard left liberal white women.

And they're all into the whole, like everything, all that matters is Trump. They have no animosity toward the security state agencies any longer because they perceive them correctly as their political allies. And there's no chance that they would've run a story like that.

They mock the idea that there's a deep state. That's been fundamental to left-wing politics for as long as I can remember. And now it reads as Trumpy and right-wing paranoia.

And like even the, like AOC, same thing. Like even the left-wing sectors of the Democratic Party, there's no space to criticize.

I think the primary, the two primary views that I hold that used to be identified with the left, that are now identified with the right, is free speech, which began as a left-wing movement. I mean, the free speech movement began at Berkeley. Some of the most important first amendment free speech precedents were written by the most left-wing journalists. And, like it was left-wing Jewish lawyers at the ACLU who are fighting for the most absolutist versions of free speech and now free speech codes as a fascist value. And then the second is this critical scrutiny and focus that I've always had on the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and that too now codes as right-wing.

And the reason for that is so disturbing. It's because those agencies became among the leading enemies of the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency. That's where Russiagate came from, was from the bowels of the CIA, the FBI. They were anonymously leaking every day in the New York Times and the Washington Post, all kinds of information that turned out to be false, but that was designed to sabotage Trump's campaign. and then presidency.

And Democrats looked at that and said, why would we have any problem with these agencies? They're on our side. And they are on that side. And this inversion of politics, and then you add things like neocons, almost entirely migrating to the Democratic Party, whereas when I started talking about politics in 2005,, neocons were being talked about as bloodthirsty Hitlerian types, you know, Nazis and the like. That's how liberals talked about them.

And now, like the most influential pundits in liberal politics are like Bill Kristol and David Frum and Nicole Wallace and all those Bush, Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney was hero of the year by Mother Jones in 2022. Mother Jones is, you know, like a hardcore leftist radical who, like broke the law. I mean, the idea that a hundred years from now, a newspaper named after her would be naming Liz Cheney as hero of the year. Like when people say like, why have you changed?

What have you changed? I'm like, you're the one naming Liz Cheney hero of the year. I hate the Cheneys as much as I hated them 20 years ago. And this inversion of politics is so radical and so visible and, and so transparent and so abrupt, but it's changed almost everything.

And, and they had their permit rejected on the grounds that it was a threat to public safety or whatever, but obviously it was politically and ideologically driven, because the people of Skokie hated the ideology of the Nazi party for obvious reasons. And the ACLU, despite being composed almost entirely of leftist Jewish lawyers and having donors that were overwhelmingly leftist Jews, who were donating to the ACLU, in part because they were also defending the civil liberties of communists. in the fifties and sixties, you know, communists were barred from becoming lawyers and being admitted to the bar because their ideology was considered to prove poor character and fitness and the like. And a lot of those precedents came out of, you know, the idea that you can suppress communist speech, and the ACLU fought to preserve those free speech rights. And then they did the same for the American Nazi party.

That position that they took and ultimately prevailed on was something that destroyed the lives of almost every single one of those lawyers in the organization. I mean, almost every Jewish supporter of the ACLU, including ones who worked there, quit and discussed, turned off their donations and discussed. It basically destroyed the organization, came very close to bankrupting it forever.

And that's what made it so interesting to me was that they were so devoted to this principle that obviously was in defense of a view they obviously found not just disagreeable, but horrific, to the point where they were willing to sacrifice their careers and reputations in pursuit of that principle. And I just remember being so enamored of that posture. So they have proven that they, and even now you have like a few of the remnants, you have a few of these remnants of like old ACLU lawyers, for example, they represent right now, the NRA because the Cuomo, the Andrew Cuomo administration, sought to destroy the NRA explicitly by threatening banks, by threatening advertisers, by threatening anyone who's doing business with the NRA, that they will have their state contracts cut off. And the ACLU, like the old lawyers of the ACLU, like the real free speech ones, looked at that and said, obviously you can't have the state government setting out to destroy a political advocacy group because of their hatred for their ideology and represented the NRA and sued the state of New York and actually won on the grounds that Andrew Cuomo had violated the free speech laws. But primarily, like so many institutions in the wake of Donald Trump, they became completely corrupted, in part because they were, for the first time, you know, they would post like, we're going to take Trump to court on this and we're going to take Trump to court on that.

And they were, you know, turned into heroes. Like the ACLU, had been pretty marginal, well, their whole, you know, existence, they were flooded with tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars. And they became this very well-funded, powerful organization. And they knew that they were captured as a left liberal advocacy group solely to destroy Trump. And now, essentially, the entire organization is unrecognizable.

You know, and you have that key event where they defended the right of Nazis or white nationalists to march through Charlottesville, they represented them. And then you had that woman who was killed by one of the parade protesters, the white nationalist protester who ran over, Heather Heyer. And that caused this huge uproar in the ACLU. People who worked on like LGBT issues or like immigrant issues saying, why are we representing, you know, white nationalists and their free speech rights? And it's like, do you know anything about the organization that you actually applied for a job and then joined?

But they didn't. And that was when the ACLU for the first time retreated by issuing this memo saying, in the future, we're going to weigh the value of free speech versus other political values. And so many other instances, then, where they've taken positions that would have been completely anathema to the ACLU. And to me, this is so illustrative of what happened to, like left liberal political culture. The parts of it I used to really like is that it was renounced, all in the name of defeating Trump, which, in turn, had all kinds of financial values and benefits and benefits and power and the like.

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So many questions. Just take a quick detour. What's so scary is I never liked any of the people in the ACLU. I don't think I want to have dinner with them, but I, like you, absolutely admired, almost revered, their commitment to principle. I'll die for your right to say something that I hate.

So I love that, and I still do love it. That was on the left. That was the best thing about the left, that and their anti-war instincts, in my opinion. It's all gone. So it kind of migrated right, and conservatives start talking a lot about free.

Snowflakes?

I've written articles well prior to October 7th, even with my new alignment with a lot of conservatives who now appreciated my free speech advocacy and my criticism of the U.

S. security state. Lots of people who said, like you, oh, I used to really put my trust in the NSA and the NSCIA. And then there was a Snowden reporting and all these other things, seeing their abuses politically against Trump. that made me realize you were right.

So I had a lot of new right-wing, if not allies, like people who were followers of my work and readers and the like. But I was always aware of the fact and even saying, you have a huge Israel exception embedded within your worldview, because it wasn't just since October 7th. It's been for a long time that, while a lot of right-wing speech has been targeted with censorship on campus, and I've been very vocal and objective with that, among the most common and frequent targets of censorship, both on campus and generally in the United States, have long been Israel critics. Professors who have lost tenure because of it, who have gotten fired because of it. There was Norman Finkelstein, who had his scholarship approved for tenure at DePaul University, and Alan Dershowitz went on a jihad against him to destroy his career and won and basically made him unemployable.

There was a professor at the University of Illinois in 2014,, Stephen Salacia, who was given a contract for tenure. They found tweets of his criticizing very harshly Israel for its 2014 bombing of Gaza and he got fired. The University of Illinois had to pay him a million dollars, but they were pressured by donors. There were Jewish student groups saying, we don't feel safe on campus with someone who's so harshly critical of Israel. So this has been going on for a long time.

This is not a new development. But since October 7th, and I have a lot of friends in my life who are Jewish, but were either skeptical of Israel or kind of apathetic to it, who got really radicalized after October 7th. So Israel has kind of been on the back burner for a long time. So those contradictions weren't very apparent. Now, you listen to the pro-Israel right, and they sound, and not ironically, or as parody or as strategic maneuver, they sound exactly like the left liberals who they've been heaping scorn on for the last decade.

You cannot enter a discussion with an Israel defender without them immediately accusing you of being a racist if they disagree with you. Oh, you're an anti-Semite. And this is one of the primary right wing grievances against liberals for the last decade. Oh, the minute you disagree with the liberal, they call you a racist, they call you a bigot, they call you a transphobe, they call you a misogynist. Try and have an argument, even like a substantive civil argument, disagreement.

Criticize Israel just a little bit and count down the number of seconds before you get accused of being motivated by bigotry and hatred. It'll be, you know, seconds. And these are the people who say, oh, I hate the tactic of accusing everyone you disagree with being a racist. That's their only tactic, their go-to tactic. The minute you question, like, why is the U.S.

financing Israel's military and its wars, when it not only hurts our own country, but when millions of Israelis are having better standard of living than millions of Americans? You're a Jew hater, you hate, you know, you have some kind of problem with Jews. So it's the same tactic there. Do they say that to you? Constantly, you know, being Jewish is not in any way does not give you any kind of immunity from that accusation, like zero.

Are you an anti-Semite? What? It's so crazy. Yeah, I mean, well, it's the same thing. You know, it's like black, you know, this is the amazing thing is I did a debate with Alan Dershowitz in Manhattan on Tuesday, it's about to come out, which nominally was about whether the U.S.

should go bomb yet another enemy of Israel in the Middle East, this one, Iran, but in reality turned into this broader debate about neoconservative dogma, and he actually wants regime change. And they did a vote before and after, and, like, 70% of the audience was with me, which was bizarre, because it was the Upper West Side. But the 30%, who were not, were extremely vocal, both during the debate, but then, as I was leaving, I was accosted by, I would say, like two dozen of them. And they were hurling insults and screaming and trying to be menacing. And their main argument was, how can you be a Jew and say these things about Israel?

And I was trying to say, like, I don't think my being a Jew compels me to have a certain set of ideas about foreign policy or this foreign country. And the amazing thing about that is, there has been this sense all the time, like, if you know, if a liberal sees a black conservative or a gay conservative, they'll immediately say, oh, you're an Uncle Tom, you have some, you know, psychological problem that you're self hating, how can you be a black conservative? How can you be a gay conservative, as though being part of these, you know, demographic groups somehow compels you to embrace a certain political ideology, like there's a relationship between your skin color and the political ideology that you have to embrace. that was always some argument on the right, like, why just because someone's black, are they automatically enslaved to the Democratic Party? And yet, so many people on the right now say, oh, if you're a Jew, you have to have unquestioning support for Israel.

But like, what if I don't? What if I think the government of Israel is actually wrong? But it's that tactic, like, you hate Jews, or if you are Jewish, you're self hating. And then the hate speech, you know, I've been hearing from liberals for the last decade. Oh, yeah, we want free speech, but some things are over the line in our hate speech, and they endanger minority groups, because words are violence, and words can incite violence.

And this has been the thing that the right has been scoffing out, like, oh, these little left wing snowflakes on campuses, want the administrators to intervene and protect them from ideas that make them uncomfortable. There's nothing that we've heard, other than that, from the last seven months from right pro-Israel conservatives, other than, oh, these poor little Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, who grew up extremely wealthy and go to the most elite colleges, are now somehow endangered, even though there's no record of violence at these protests, like almost none, because hearing chants that are pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli make them feel vulnerable. Like the conservatives in Congress, like Elise Stefanik and Virginia Fox, Mike Johnson, they had, like a horde of Jewish students from Harvard coming and saying, I don't feel safe at my school, the very things that conservatives have been mocking so viciously, when that came from black students or trans students, or immigrants or Muslims, or whatever, the hypocrisy, the stench of it is suffocating and nauseating.

God gave me that right. You cannot take it away. And if you're telling me what I'm allowed to say in my country, you're my enemy. Like, it's just kind of that simple. You can't tell me what to say or think, period,

In the United States, we don't have a hate speech exception. There is no such thing. So if you suddenly now start, you know, and it's not just in the discourse, they're passing laws. Oh, I'm aware. Like Greg Abbott issued an executive order that said, there will be no more anti-Semitism, meaning anti-Semitism speech, anti-Semitic speech or ideas allowed in the state of Texas.

And you have, I don't know if you saw the video this week, but there was a video emerging where a school administrator went to a group of Palestinian protesters and said, I just want you to know, if you chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free or globalize the Intifada, you will be turned over to law enforcement. We will call the police on you and you will be arrested and held legally accountable. That is now a crime in Texas. They passed a law. Is that actually true?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, the whole point of Greg Abbott's executive order was to say, no, anti-Semitic speech is permissible in Texas any longer. You're allowed to have anti-Black, racist speech.

You're allowed to have anti-Muslim speech. You're allowed to have anti-gay speech. You can have anti-white speech. You just can't be anti-Semitic. to the point where these students are now being told that if they do these political chants, no violence, no obstruction of buildings, nothing illegal, the chants themselves, the ideas themselves, will be decreed illegal.

Now, as you say, you don't have to hate Israel or whatever, but we talk all the time. At every pro-Israel rally in the United States, you'll hear people saying, wipe out all the Arabs, turn Gaza into a parking lot. Gaza belongs to Israel. We constantly talk about bombing this country, bombing that country. We're always advocating violence against this group, against this country.

This country is illegitimate. There's only one country that has the protection of these laws, which is the country of Israel.

I would have exactly the same position that I have on this or any other speech-related matter, which is I'm an American. Every American has the right to say exactly what he thinks at all times, period, period. I thought that was the whole point of the country. Isn't it?

There were 23 different red states, including Texas and Greg Abbott, but also New York and Andrew Cuomo, who well before, in the Obama administration and then in the Trump administration, passed laws that said this. It said, if you are a contractor and you work with the state, from now on, you have to sign a pledge that you do not believe in and will not participate in a boycott of the state of Israel. I interviewed this woman and profiled her once. She was a speech pathologist in Austin, Texas. Her specialty was she worked with children who.

Let's not go to Israel. Let's not support its products in order to end the occupation and give the Palestinians a state. In the United States, in 24 different states, there is a law that says you cannot get a contract with the state unless you now sign this pledge saying you don't support this boycott and will not participate.

You can say, I'm not going to buy Norwegian goods. You can boycott South Dakota or Wisconsin. Andrew Cuomo, who did this by executive order, said that anyone who boycotts Israel has no right to have a contract. He wrote a Washington Post op-ed. The headline was, if you boycott Israel, we'll boycott you.

Six months before that and six months after, by executive order, he required state employees to boycott the state of North Carolina and then the state of Indiana in protest of their bathroom bills that they enacted for if you have to use the bathroom of your biological choice. So not only are you allowed to boycott your own country and harm economically the citizens of other states, Andrew Cuomo actually ordered boycotts of American states, while at the same time banning anybody from boycotting the state of Israel. It's a single country that has all kinds of special privileges and rights. Let me just tell you another thing. Did anyone say anything about this?

Well, I was writing about it all the time, but few people cared. Finally, those cases got brought to the courts. Thankfully, courts have overwhelmingly, almost unanimously said, this is a grave violation of the First Amendment and are being struck down.

I'll tell you something so amazing. This just kind of encapsulates it for me. Ben Shapiro, a good friend of yours and a longtime political ally, obviously, one of the main unifying views of conservatives is that we shouldn't have jobs set aside for certain groups. We shouldn't judge people based on the color of their skin or their ethnic group when hiring, or their religion, or it should be a meritocracy, or can you do the job best? Exactly.

So. Palantir, which is an intelligence corporation that was started by Peter Thiel, and that has all kinds of contracts with the CIA, the Defense Department, but it's run by Jewish vocal supporters of Israel, announced in October or November, after hearing all this stuff, about Jewish students being discriminated against because of their views or whatever, and it was never really Jewish students. It was pro-Israel students, Jews who support the war, because a lot of these protests have overwhelming numbers of Jews inside these protests against Israel. So it's not a hostility toward Jews, it's a hostility toward anyone who supports this war that they're protesting against. Palantir announced that they were creating 180 new jobs that were available exclusively for Jewish students on campus who felt like they were being made uncomfortable.

It was 180 jobs, no Christians could apply, no Muslims could apply, no atheists could apply, no black people, only for Jews. Ben Shapiro saw that and he went onto Twitter and, above that Palantir announcement, said something like, wow, this is fantastic. And then, after his own followers spent the day saying, what do you mean, this is exactly the thing you're supposed to oppose, at the end of the day, he was kind of forced to say, yeah, you know what, maybe it would be best if it were open to everybody. But then, like, what's the point of the announcement? He would never have commented on it.

Obviously, he was happy about that. Barry White, same thing, you know, anti-woke. This is identity politics, as pure as it gets, creating 180 jobs solely for Jewish students. And it's, I think, very hard to make the case that Jewish Americans are an endangered or marginalized minority in the United States. Very, very hard to make that case.

When she saw that announcement, she put this very excitement, wow, on top of it. And so you see this utter and complete abandonment of what these people have been claiming were their principles, not even in defense of their own country or people in their own country, but this foreign government in Tel Aviv. And, you know, when you watch something like that, and you see a political movement expose itself as a complete fraud. Now, I should say there are a lot of exceptions to like hardcore conservatives, like Chris Ruffo has often condemned some of these bills. You have two, Candace Owens has two.

Tom Massey in Congress has been like incredibly steadfast to the point where he packed drive to take them out and failed. He just won his primary with like 76.. But overwhelmingly, the pro-Israel sector of the American right has proven itself to be such utter and complete frauds about virtually every value they've spent the last decade pretending to champion and believe in. And it's been sickening to watch. The reason it's scary is,

By definition, by definition, there is no totalitarian country.

Well, I know and I've.

The other amazing.

So the Republican Party has basically rebranded as America first, you know, based on the idea that our primary priority should be the people of our country. And you, I can't tell you how many Republican members of Congress or Republican journalists or pundits I've interviewed over the last two and a half years who say, we can't be financing the war in Ukraine, because we don't have the money to be financing other countries wars, nor should we be doing that. our focus should be on our own country. And every single time, well before even October 7, I would ask them, does that also apply to Israel, and they would kind of stammer and stutter and not want to say it. But now, you know, you say like, you don't care about Israel.

And I totally understand that. the problem, though, is, is that Israel has received far more aid from the United States than any other country by far over the last three to four decades, we pay for their military, we pay for every time there's a new war, we send them billions and billions of more, on top of the $4 billion a year that Obama negotiated with Netanyahu. Not only do that, but we arm them the bombs that they use to kill Gazans. civilians come from the United States. And, I think, worst of all, we isolate ourselves from the entire rest of the world.

You know how many votes there have been at the UN over the past seven months, where the entire world is on one side, and Israel and United States stand alone on the other, with, you know, a couple of those tiny little countries that we often bribe, like Micronesia and Marshall Islands, the part of the coalition of the world. Micronesia. Yeah, exactly. micro. It's like, so, you know, it's also just the standing in the world, like our sacrificing of soft power.

So we give up so much for Israel in so many other ways that if you're an American citizen, you have to care about it, even if you.

just I have a lot of affection. I guess that's what I'm saying. So I'm not sort of animated by, you know, any, anything, really, I'm just like trying to, I live here. So do my kids. So did my ancestors.

It's like, I just care about this country. And if you're changing my life or stripping my rights for me, that we've had for 250 years on behalf of any other place, you are my enemy. Like, it's just that simple. You are my enemy. I mean, I don't know what to say.

I don't want even to even have this conversation. Well, that's the.

That is the foundational right in the United States of America. And it's the only thing that prevents us from becoming, you know, Stalinist, period. Who came up with the idea that you only vote in November in elections? No, you vote every single day. with your time and your money.

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You can go to any country, any tyrannical country, if you express the views that people in power want to hear, you're always going to enjoy the free speech. Free speech is for dissidents. Free speech is for people who have opposing views, minority views. And so to watch the right wave the banner of free speech, because it was conservative speech being targeted, everyone will always be in favor of free speech in defense of their own views. The only real task for the authenticity of a free speech advocate is when it comes time to defend free speech for the ideas you hate most, which is why what the ACLU did was.

I searched out on purpose the cases where the views I hate most are being assaulted and censored to defend free speech there, because that's the only way you can really defend that value in a.

And that's the unique idea. That is the idea. And if there's any idea worth defending, it's that. And if that goes away and people who have more powerful computing power or more money or access to the levers of power can use violence in a state-sanctioned way, if they can stop you from saying what you think, if they can force you to believe certain things, we're just done. We're done like that.

You're not allowed to wreck my country, actually. That's how I feel about it.

And he saw the degradation of the free internet, which was always the principle. You go back to the mid-90s with the proclamations about the importance of the internet. It was always a free internet, keep your hands off the internet.

And if you take away the right of free speech, it doesn't only mean that people who dissent lose the ability to express that dissent without being punished. What it means even more seriously, and I think more destructively, that we don't often think about, is that it enables power centers to propagandize without challenge. We drown in a closed system of information that power centers approve of because they've eliminated all these other ideas as disinformation or hate speech, or incitement to violence, or whatever theories they invent to erode free speech. And then we're hopeless. We're totally impotent.

Every other right we have doesn't matter, because our minds are controlled. What we believe is manipulated. So we'll be obedient. We'll be conformist. Those other rights won't be necessary because we'll be good, conformist, obedient citizens who don't realize how propagandized we are.

And that is what's at stake. And so when you see any group of people, especially ones who claim to believe in free speech, suddenly abandon that and start cheering for censorship as a framework, it's incredibly dangerous because, even as a self-interested matter, you know that this system will eventually be used against you, even if it's not at the moment. And conservatives of all people should know how easily it will be weaponized against them. And yet they're cheering for the very systems that they've spent a decade now claiming to hate, along with all these scripts about everyone's a racist who disagrees with me. And no, this isn't free speech.

This is hate speech, you know, or hate speech hoax, hate crimes, hoaxes, like Jesse Smollett, hate crimes hoaxes, like Barry Weisenstein pushed this idea that there are Jewish students walking around and suddenly being attacked by violent hordes of anti-Semitic mobs and being stabbed in the eye with Palestinian flags. And it all began with this one woman, who is a longtime Israel activist, who claimed that it happened, and she went all over the media claiming I was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. There was nothing wrong with her eye. There was nothing wrong with it at all, because it didn't happen. Someone waving a flag was walking past her and it brushed by her.

And that was a hate crimes hoax. And then Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, went two days later to the Holocaust Museum and turned that one hate crimes hoax, this one singular incident and said, we are now a country where Jewish students cannot walk out on the street without being endangered or being stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. So every single component of left-wing culture that the American right has been heaping scorn on and viciously mocking and deriding for a decade are now their defining beliefs and tactics in defense of this foreign country.

How did she all of a sudden become, it's like, she's everything conservatives are supposed to dislike or oppose, maybe not personally. She's very charming, actually. But like, how did she become? like a darling of conservatives?

She's very cunning. She understands how media works. She's very smart. And I know I've gotten to know her personally, and she's impossible to dislike as a person. She's like incredibly charming.

And, I think, like, genuinely compassionate, like it's. you cannot dislike her as a person. I totally agree. And that's a, that's an important weapon. But what the one of the reasons why she became a folk hero is because she resigned from the New York Times was such a kind of denunciation of the New.

There was a lot of truth to that, for sure. But then, you know, if you actually look at and I think this is one of the things that I've only become, I've only come to understand recently, is that there are a lot of. there's been a lot of focus over the last, say, decade, under the banner of anti-woke. And that's really Barry Weiss's kind of brand is like, I'm against woke ideology. I'm against media capture by ideology.

And there was all this fixation on college campuses. And a lot of times people are like, why are 40 year old pundits and journalists constantly talking about what 19 and 20 year olds are doing on college campuses, like almost not just disproportionate,

Idealism and naivete, and just like my view of the world was so simple, because that's part of being young, like you kind of want that youthful energy. But the real reason is that the thing that is Barry Weiss is obviously animating cause is the cause of Zionism in Israel. That's, I don't think she would even deny that. And there has been this fear on the part of the Israeli government, the pro Israel movement, that the greatest danger the Israeli causes faces is the activism of students on college campuses, where it's the only place where robust criticism of Israel is tolerated. And it's the movement, as we were describing, where this boycott, divestment and sanction movement has taken hold.

And that was in part the thing that brought down apartheid South Africa, which is a very close ally of both Israel and the United States. And they were petrified that if that took hold, then that would become a very effective movement against Israel, weakening its position, weakening its standing in the world. And so there were all kinds of strategic memos of saying we need to target college campuses and make sure that this is that this climate is transformed. And the whole reason why people like Barry Weiss, and Bill Ackman, who's uses his billionaire status, suddenly become political activists, focus so much on college campuses. wanting professors, wanting a university president inspired.

Bill Ackman led the way of saying any college student who signs an anti Israel petition will be permanently blackballed, and all his billionaire friends and hedge fund managers, and corporate CEOs and people at Palantir joined in is because they identified college campuses as the place where Israel criticism was bubbling over and was really being active. It's the same reason that TikTok got banned. You know, this TikTok ban, if you think about it, I thought it was because of China. No, okay. So I'm just kidding.

Right? I know. So when it was first introduced, that was the idea, right? Like we can't have the Chinese Communist Party. As though, like, all of that, data is not available on the open market.

Like there was a big scandal that the CIA and intelligence communities were buying on the open market huge amounts of data about American citizens. They're listening to us on this right now. Everything is tracked. You don't. why would China need to create an app to get all this buying information that they can buy from anywhere else.

So, and at the same time, like the people who run TikTok are pure capitalists. Like the guy who's the CEO was born in Singapore. He went to the London school of economics. Then he went to Harvard. He worked for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, like a classic, all he cares about is money.

But this, this idea of banning TikTok, has been around for four years and it couldn't get past. It was considered way too extreme, like banning American citizens who voluntarily choose to use this app to find communion, to spread ideas, to make themselves heard, to read news, taking that away from them or forcing a sale was considered way too extreme. And yet suddenly, after October 7th, instantly an overwhelming bipartisan consensus formed in order to ban it. It ran through Congress and President Biden signed it. Why?

You go to ask any one of the sponsors of this TikTok ban, why it finally got enough people to support it after spending so many years, not even near a majority. And they will all tell you that the reason is because they became convinced that there was far too much Israel criticism being permitted on TikTok. That was the issue that became the tipping point for banning an app that 180 million Americans, a third of the country voluntarily choose to use. It was because of the Israel issue. And I think, like we're, we're required so often to tiptoe around this.

Um, you know, you get accused of like pushing anti-Semitic tropes that like, uh, Jews.

It's not just American Jews who were inculcated from birth with the idea that they have to protect Israel. It's often like evangelicals, it's people in the national security state. Like this country has such a special status and a hold. And it's not me like speculating that Israel was the reason. the people who got the bill through Congress say that the tipping point was that all these members of the democratic party, who previously was resistant to banning TikTok, became convinced that that was one of the major sources that was allowing Israel criticism and pro-Palestinian speech, meaning, like lots of videos circulating about, you know, Gaza and children dying.

They wanted to ban the, the app or force it to be sold to a, an American conglomerate that would be far more susceptible to pressure from the, the, the administration, like Google and, and, and Facebook, have been to censor it, that that was the reason they felt like the reason why young people turned against Israel, because they were getting too much information on TikTok and it was too free. That should alarm everybody. Well, it's, it's again, if you're an American.

You don't have a free country unless someone's fighting for it. And I don't see anyone with power fighting for it. So, no, I mean, well, it's so interesting.

And I feel that way as a Christian, I'm just going to say, I think God created people, there's inherent value in every person. And that's why it's so important to me. It's actually bigger than America. It's like, are we going to treat people like human beings with dignity,

but, conversely, the reason that right needed to be guaranteed is because we are all tempted to look at the views we find most threatening and to hate and to want those banned, and to kind of invent theories as to why they should be, even if we believe that we're supporters of free speech, like somehow, these views that we hate most and find most threatening, those are something different. And you see the left having done that for the past 10 years by claiming that people who question gender ideology are inciting genocide against trans people, or people who are opposed to racial reforms or affirmative action, or people who hate black people, people opposed to immigration, hate non white people. So this is how they created these justifications for supporting censorship. And now the American right, I don't want to say now in the sense that they suddenly started, because, like I said, it's been predating October 7, for a long time. But that's, you know, I don't think it's like so conscious that, oh, we're political centers, I think they view Israel criticism as very dangerous and very threatening.

And they don't fight the human temptation that we all have to want the ideas that we most hate to kind of be outlawed.

Do you remember when people would say exactly, look, and we were taught to revere the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all of the values that are represented. So if you're willing to abandon those and sacrifice those, and this is the thing, it would like the left, the American left, has been accused of being, I think, quite validly, embracing censorship. But at least they're doing it. I don't mean to justify it. I'm just saying distinguishing it, at least they're doing it in defense of what they consider to be other Americans who live here, minority groups who live here, and they think censorship is important to protect the ability of other Americans who are part of minority groups not to be endangered.

They're, it's a totally misguided idea. They exaggerate the extent to which everyone's being endangered. I think racial relations in the United States are better than they've ever been. But that's at least their idea. What the censorship we're talking about now is designed to do is to sacrifice the rights of American citizens in order to benefit this foreign country, to which people in the United States have, obviously, more loyalty than they do to their own country.

And I don't just mean American Jews, I mean, a lot of evangelicals, I mean, a lot of nationalist people. And that is the part that is so bizarre and disturbing that the reverence for this foreign country, I mean, you can say anything you want about American leaders, about the leaders of your own country. You can say, they're evil, they're criminal, they're corrupt, they're genocidal. Yeah, you can do any of that. You cannot do that about the leaders of this one foreign country.

You can have leaders about any other country you want, just not the leaders of this one foreign country. And, like I said, I think the time to stop tiptoeing around that has long passed.

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I'm like hardly anti-Israel, like not even a little bit. I just care about my country and all of a sudden there's like such a massive threat to our foundational rights stemming from this issue and I think, of course, you face all sorts of, I mean, I've had people I know and really like and have known for many decades call me or text me, you know, and really attack me actually and I always, I say exactly what I'm saying to you because I mean it. Let me ask you, do I perceive,

I don't want to go crazy and be mad, and I also don't want the concerns of a foreign country or arguments about that country to define my views. I care about where I live and my family and preserving what I grew up with, and I don't mean money. I mean, you know, your values and your rights and your structure. Yeah, exactly. So I just have really tried to ignore it and tried not to get involved, and I know that people, you know, love Israel so much, which again, which does not bother me at all, but that it makes them super emotional, whatever.

But when you start to tell me that, as an American, I can't say certain things. In my country, I won't have it. I just won't have it. So I just really feel like I was pushed into saying something, and I also have a special concern for Christians in the Middle East, and so I did, I've only done one interview in my life that challenged any... Which was with that pastor in the West Bank.

Yeah, with the pastor. I know nothing, I know nothing about him, and you know, I'm not like carrying water for him. I just think it's a totally fair question to say like, well, how are Christians doing in the Middle East? And the answer is not well at all, and maybe we should hear from them. That was my only agenda right there, and all of a sudden, like, you know, I get attacked personally as some sort of crazed Nazi or something.

That was too unreasonable for me, but even then, I was like, I'm not going to engage. I don't want to have these arguments. It's not worth it. I've got a million different interests. This is not a great interest of mine, and, as I've said five times, I just don't care that much, but then the speech thing, when you're wrecking my country and lying constantly and encoding those lies into my laws, then just it's my patriotic duty to be like, no, and yes.

Do you get destroyed for that, or do people try to destroy you? Obviously, and all of a sudden, Barry Weiss, who's like, you know, I've always gotten along with Barry Weiss. I'm not a... You know what I mean? Super charming woman.

I totally agree. Done a lot of things I like. All of a sudden, she's, like, telling Eli Lake, who I know. I went to the same college as him. I've always liked.

Eli Lake. Writes some hit piece on me saying that I'm anti-American. And Ben Shapiro and the whole daily wire and that whole sector. Totally, so I actually... I was shocked.

I don't read anything about myself. I'm a little bit cut off, so I didn't even know this happened. Someone sent it to me. Eli Lake attacked you. Eli Lake, whatever.

Not a huge part of my life, but I've never disliked Eli Lake, so I text Eli Lake and I was like, you said I hate America in this piece. You've got my text, of course. I texted him. Why don't you just call me and ask me about views on America? And I would just tell you, because I'm, I think, pretty transparent about my views.

No response. I said, you wrote a piece about my views. when you have my text, when you know me. Why don't you just ask me what my views are? I'd be happy to go on the record and tell you what I think of America.

He didn't respond, so I hit him again. He's like, yeah, I guess I should have done that. I'm like, no, this is, I mean, again, I'm not going to dwell on it, or I don't want to whine. I have no cause for whining at all in my life, period. However, that's so dishonest that I just, it's like, oh, that's how it works.

But I think it's such an important point because,

And I think that's the same thing with Israel. It's not like I have some special, I mean, you know, I grew up very much an American Jew. Like all four of my grandparents are Jewish. My parents are Jewish. Most of the people I went to school with were Jewish.

You know, I consider myself a Jew. I think, like Jewish, accomplishment is something to be proud of. I have family in Israel. I have no animus at all. It's to me, it's the same exact, you know, policy principles that led you to criticize the war in Ukraine, that have led me to criticize lots of wars, including the one in Ukraine.

But the reality is, and I think this is so important, is that it's just is the case. And as someone who grew up, you know, embedded in American Jewish culture, my grandmother fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s to come to the United States. She was a Jewish immigrant, Jewish German immigrant, who had a big German accent until the day she died. And only she and her younger sister came and the rest of her family stayed and were all killed in the Holocaust. So these were, you know, the things I grew up with and fed on, and all of that.

And for that reason, I know, you know, I went to my, she sent me to, like Jewish summer camp. I went for like five straight summers and you sing Jewish prayers and, like you're indoctrinated with, like the principles of Jewish culture. American Jews are told and indoctrinated from birth that one of their duties is to be loyal to and defend and protect the state of Israel. Even if you're an American, you're a Jew in Argentina, you're a Jew in wherever, that is something that, being Jewish, kind of, you're told from birth, obligates you to do. And then, recently, evangelicals have also taken on this, this view that Israel is this country of great special, you know, religious and theological value.

And so we do have a lot of people in the United States who, for various reasons, have decided that this one foreign country has such great importance that, if forced to choose between the two, and of course we have different national interests and different strategic interests all the time, that protecting and venerating and elevating Israel is a more important goal than even defense to our own country. And that is just the reality. And you see it manifesting in so many ways so that the emotion, and that's why people can tolerate disagreements of almost every kind, you know, but we lost, I think, like 15 to 20% of our subscriber base and our viewership, like in the first four weeks of the, after October 7th, because of my position on Israel and people, you know, people say I can disagree with you on anything, but this is the one issue I just can't tolerate, like I have to run in the opposite direction. And I think it's important to acknowledge how many people are inculcated from birth to believe that. And that's the thing I think is our greatest obligation as human beings, why free speech is so important as well, and the ability to access other information.

Like I want to read what Russia is saying. The EU made it illegal to platform Russia's state media. Adults in the EU, even if they want to, can't read Russian media because now it's illegal. I want to have different information sources other than what my own country is telling me, because one of the things you have as an adult, I think, is the greatest obligation, is to go back and re-evaluate what you were trained and indoctrinated, inculcated to believe, and not just reflexively continue to believe that in adulthood because it was indoctrinated, but to reassess whether or not those really are your views as a result of your own critical analysis, or whether you have different views, including the role of our own country. Like all of these things are so important to not being a propagandized kind of automaton.

And it is just true for a lot of American Jews that this indoctrination is so extreme, I think now for evangelicals as well, that it's become the paramount view, like the view that subsumes every other. And I think that's why, when you see this conflict between a devotion to protecting the civil liberties and free speech rights of American citizens, when that comes in conflict with this other goal of shielding and protecting Israel, so often the shielding and protecting of Israel wins out, even when it comes time to protect and defend the freedoms of our country.

You just don't have a choice.

But for a lot of people in journalism, especially with the destruction of jobs and the erosion of job security, as, you know, every major media outlet is laying off people in huge numbers, and it's kind of a collapsing industry, the pressure and need to conform is greater than ever, because most people don't have that privilege or that security that you and I both have at this point in our lives and career. And, you know, I can't tell you how many times during Russiagate, when I was as vocal of a skeptic of Russiagate as I could possibly be from the very moment I first heard that script get unveiled by the CIA through the New York Times and the Washington Post, so many journalists who work at major media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post and NBC News and others would write to me and say, I'm so thankful for this skepticism that you're expressing. And, of course, at some point, I was like, why aren't you expressing it? But I know why. Because if they did, even one time, they'd become the target of the liberal mob on Twitter that would put pressure on their editors to fire them.

They'd be the first to get laid off, the last to get hired. And so our journalism profession has become one where conformity is by far the highest value. And I think, for those of us who aren't quite as vulnerable, or as insecure in terms of our, you know, career position or need to keep a job, it's almost like you have an obligation to create that space that a lot of other people can't create. That's really what I feel. And so no one likes having people who are your readers or your viewers or previous supporters turn against you or denounce you.

Nobody likes being called names. It's not fun for anybody. But, you know, if you're going to do a job and have some kind of meaning to it, some kind of purpose to it, some kind of value that it based on, I feel like if you are in that kind of position, you have the obligation to take those risks. Of course you do. And to be as honest as you.

Hate is one of those words that's been weaponized. And of course, hate, but hate is real and we do feel it. And in my religion, you're not allowed to forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Like hate, the sin, but not the sinner. You absolutely are not allowed to hate people.

You have to forgive people. So there are a few people, individuals who I feel like really betrayed by Bill Crystal. I don't talk about Bill Crystal because I'm like, I'm not rational. I work for him for so long and he's gone insane, in my opinion. But on this topic, you're not going to stop me from saying what I think is by accusing me of hate when I know that there isn't any hate.

I'm not motivated by some weird animus or something, some irrational dislike of anything. I'm just not going to be, that's not,

I felt like I was condemning their views, the role they were playing in the political, but so many times people who I've, you know, like viciously condemned or denounced, I ended up becoming friends with, because I never, I never wanted to, even when I'm, I think it's important as a journalist to very harshly criticize and, and, and denounce, you know, especially people with influence and power. It's one of your jobs, but it's important not to let that affect who you are, because it's so.

But all of those tasks are designed to produce the same outcome, which is happier people. So if you cease to care about people, then, like, what is the point of the?

So anything conservative or socially conservative. And I had a roommate and she started dating, uh, when I was in law school, she started dating this, this guy whose family were like Rush Limbaugh fanatics. And she would go there on the weekend and come back. And then she told me, she came back once and said, there's this forum on the internet where all the Rush Limbaugh conservatives go. It's sponsored by the national review and the heritage foundation.

It was in CompuServe. It was some like political forum. She's like, you have to go in there and just like provoke them and troll them and, you know, create all the disruption. So I did. And I started with the all malicious intent of just like angering them and like creating, like all kinds of division in there, you know, and just saying the most offensive thing is I could possibly think of.

And then, like, the more I stayed, the more I started like having debates with them and like conversations with them. And these were like hardcore social conservatives. These were not like the nice conservatives, who just believe in some conservative dogma, but then like are very like socially egalitarian. And this was like in the early nineties as well, when these debates were much different than they are now. And just my being gay, my being like a lawyer in Manhattan, these were, like, you know, very evangelical people and like the most rural parts of the country.

And then it got to the point where I had stayed there for so long and debated with them for so long and talked to them for so long that we started finding commonalities. And then they had this yearly event where everybody would go and meet in person and they invited me to go. And it was in some like suburb of Indiana, at some like Hilton. And I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to go.

And my friends were like, don't go. You're going to be killed. It's a trap. Like this, you know, this is how you're taught to perceive your other people. And I went and I spent the weekend there and everybody was so warm, so happy to see me.

I was so happy to see them. And these were the people I was taught wanted me dead. These were the people I was taught that I was supposed to hate. And it doesn't mean like I agreed with their politics anymore than I did previously or that they agreed with mine, but seeing them as like actually good human beings who have the same concerns in their lives. I know it sounds so simple, but it's such an important lesson that to learn, because our society is constantly trying to divide us.

And I think.

And we always like laugh about that. Um, but it was like my first introduction to like internet debate. It was at the time when the internet was still like segregated, with AOL or CompuServe. It was like that. it wasn't like interconnected internet.

It was like very of the incipient stages. But I went because I felt like I liked these people. And I kind of felt like they liked me. And I originally went in solely with the purpose to provoke their hatred toward me and to hate them as well. That was like why I went in and just being around them daily, half day after day, like first debating and then convert it, it like made me see their humanity and they saw mine.

I was just as anathema to them as they were to me. Um, I was openly gay, and I was a Jewish lawyer, and I was working in Manhattan. And these were like evangelical, like housewives or like businessmen in, like, you know, rural Georgia, or like Idaho. And I don't know, I guess we just discovered each other's common humanity. And it was a very transformative experience for me about how you look at other people.

What a wonderful story. Well, obviously, in you may be latent was like that priority. Other people matter more than anything.

A lot of times it's because that's what they were formed to be. That's like the byproduct and of their culture and of their upbringing. And if you had the same upbringing, maybe you would think the same things. And I think, like the people who do that for a living and keep these destructive ideologies, those people really warrant your contempt. You know, like the middle crystals of the world, the Victoria Nolans of the world, like those kind of people, the Liz Cheney's.

But ordinary people who don't pay much attention to politics, like before I started politics, you know, I was like just reading The New York Times and The Atlantic and The New Yorker, thinking I was like highly informed, like a high. And then, when I started writing a politics and have like full time to go and read original documents, not having information mediated anymore for me, I realized, like pretty rapidly, like almost everything I believed about politics was based on a fraud. It was not like my own, you know, my own process of arriving at things critically. I just was stuck with all these ideas that were not mine, that I kind of passively ingested. And that, too, was a very eye opening experience.

because, shocking. Yeah. You know, you think you're a very smart person. You think you're educated and then you realize like, wow, you're just as susceptible to propaganda as anybody. And I do think smart people are people.

I read every issue of The New Yorker from 1993 until 2017.

. Right. Me, too. Every issue. Yeah.

Yeah.

I read every single word in all of them. And then, as I got older, I realized, like, I had no fucking idea what was going on. I was actually more misled than someone who hadn't been told anything was coming out of cold. Like I was completely propagandized. I didn't even know that.

And I thought I was a free thinker. Exactly. You know,

And it was about this intercept story. Obviously they had no idea it was sitting at the next table, but they were really, what they were really saying was like, yeah, with all this Russia stuff, it's so hard to figure out what's real and what's not. Cause it's all anonymous. And it seems like it's all driven by some agenda. I was like, I almost know nobody who's paid to write about politics, who writes about journalism, who has that recognition.

And it's like by through that distance, they're able to see things so much more clearly than the people who are immersed in it.

So, um, but I don't even really want to get into Russia. I just can't resist asking you about Navalny and his death. That happened the day I left Russia, um, right before the Munich security conference. So perfect, perfect timing for you. And I'm literally on a plane going through Serbia to Geneva or wherever, you know, like I'm totally cut off.

And all of a sudden I land and my phone is just exploding, you know, Putin just killed Navalny. What was that? I mean, I actually don't have full perspective on it, just because I was so far away, but like, what was that story? Well, first of all, you, we did this on our show.

And every single one of them has said, he's an incredibly rational, restrained, trustworthy person. It was only when he had to be turned into the new Hitler did the whole thing reverse. So he is obviously rational, whatever else you want to say about him. He's very sophisticated. He's very restrained.

Actually, we can say that conclusively. Exactly. And, um, so like, why would he just suddenly, you know, tell people it's time for you to kill Navalny? Like? it never made any sense, but we were just, we were told this.

And also like, we have this, like cartoonish idea that he like, not only is manipulating every event in the West, but also every event in Russia. Like he's, must never sleep. And he must have cloned a hundred of him, given how much credit he gets for having like, manipulated and controlled every event in his country and in our countries. But it then turned out like just, you know, three weeks ago, this happened so many times before that the intelligence community admits that there's no evidence whatsoever that he participated in any way, let alone ordered or requested or wanted Navalny's death. And we obviously have the, you know, we're always told like we have everything in the Kremlin, like under this microscope of surveillance.

And you know how many times this has happened, where media outlets have made some kind of assertion. Now, Russian prisons are incredibly brutal. Like a lot of countries are, they're very, very cold. They don't get good medical care. So I have no, it's not surprising that a prisoner put in the most brutal Russian prisons would die, but that's a completely different claim than what they were saying, which was that Putin had ordered him to killed.

And I, if you look at how many times, you know, there was this like story in the New York times, exactly when Trump was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan, that the CIA planted with the New York Times, they claimed that the Russians had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers and were paying the Taliban money for every American soldier that they were killed. And then, when Liz Cheney and pro-war Democrats were working together to prevent and block Trump's desire to withdraw from Afghanistan, that was the only story they cited. They kept saying, how can we leave when the Russians are, you know, paying to, we're going to reward Russia. And then, three months later, two months later, the intelligence community has very little confidence that that even happened. That has been the story of Russiagate from the very beginning.

I mean, every single claim that came out as part of Russiagate, I mean, they, they unleashed Robert Mueller for 18 months with the dream team of prosecutors, unlimited subpoena power, unlimited amounts of money. And he then submitted a report when he was done with his investigation. that said, we could not find evidence to establish what became the core conspiracy. The whole thing that initiated the scandal that drowned our politics for three years, which was that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to break into or hack into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta. And everybody just was like, okay, I guess we'll just move on to something else.

Like the editor-in-chief of the New York Times said, we have to confront the fact that what we've let our readers to believe was going to happen, that this information was going to be discovered, these smoking guns, Robert Mueller was going to, you know, unleash it all, and everyone was going to go to prison. None of it turned out to be true. This whole story was a fraud. This was the scandal that the media drowned our politics in for three years, starting with the middle of 2016 up until.

. So again, I'm sorry to interrupt you on the way to explaining Navalny. I really want to hear that. But you just passed over one of the most interesting moments in the last 10 years, which was the hack. I don't know what was the theft of emails from the DNC and from John Podesta's Gmail account that wound up on WikiLeaks.

And the Russians were blamed for that. I thought from the first day, I don't know, but I suspected that was not true. What is true about that?

The claim about.

. The claims that led us into the Iraq War that everybody was so certain of was a complete and total lie. The thing that drives me the craziest to this day that I feel has never gotten enough attention is that when that reporting happened from the New York Post, based on the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop about what they were doing in Ukraine and China, everybody in the media united to say this was Russian disinformation, went all along, that archive was completely authentic, it had nothing to do with Russia, and it wasn't just information. So many times we're told things so definitively that end up being proven to be lies. Russia, another example.

So the question of how those documents made their way to WikiLeaks, obviously, WikiLeaks insists that they had nothing to do with the Russians and didn't get it from the Russians. Now, that may be true, and yet at the same time, the Russians say used a middleman. Yeah. So WikiLeaks might think they're telling the truth, they might actually be telling the truth, but it doesn't say that Russia wasn't involved. Their problem is that there are a lot of people who oftentimes won't say it in public, but will tell you in private, very well-connected people, that they radically disbelieve the claim that the Russians hacked it.

And the thing is, Aaron Maté is one of the best people, most knowledgeable people on this, but there really isn't a lot of evidence that the Russians did the hacking. This firm that they got is a Democratic Party propaganda firm, which is CrowdStrike. The FBI purposely hid a lot of the information that would have been necessary to examine it. I'm not saying the Russians didn't hack it, but I'm just saying conceptually, if you don't question, especially the truths that are most aggressively shoved down your throat. after everything we've seen, I think you're an extremely gullible person.

And in this case, specifically, there's also a lot of holes in that story. And I think the big problem, and this was always my problem with Russiagate from the start, was not that the Trump campaign and the Trump administration was being sabotaged by the U.S. security state with a evidence-free scandal. That did bother me, journalistically, this evidence-free assertion that dominated our politics. What bothered me much more was the real agenda, obviously, was to blame Russia for everything, to such an extent that the Americans started once again viewing Russia as this existential enemy, to the point where American diplomats couldn't speak with Russian diplomats in Washington.

Everybody was petrified of meeting with the Russian because they would be accused of being a Russian spy. You're talking about the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. And I believe there's a straight line from the Russiagate fraud, from convincing people to feed on this anti-Russian narrative, to what we're doing in Ukraine. Which is sitting on the brink of nuclear war. Which Joe Biden said has brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe than anything since the 1962 missile crisis.

And for some reason, we're willing to risk. what even Joe Biden says is this massive risk of nuclear war that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has said brought the world closer to midnight, which is extinction-level catastrophe. We're willing to risk all that? over what? I mean, it was Obama who always said we have no vital interest in Ukraine.

We obviously have no vital interest in Ukraine. And so, so much of this kind of deliberate intent to once again convince Americans that Russia was our grave enemy, was the existential threat, was interfering in our democracy, based on so many lies, had a lot of geostrategic implications and goals, as well as.

What's the truth that involved Ni's death? Did Putin kill him? I mean,

Those are very brutal conditions. It's extremely cold in those parts of Russia. Siberia? Yeah, exactly. And you're not exactly given heaters in your cells and blankets.

I'm sure he was treated very poorly. And so you can make an argument, I guess, that Russia, the Russian government, ethically is responsible for that. But what we were told was that Putin ordered it. And that was a complete and utter lie. So many of the things we were told definitively about Russia and the Russian government over the last eight or nine years, it's one of the most insane disinformation campaigns, sustained, enduring, and consequential disinformation campaigns that comes from the very people who insist that they are the sole guardians combating.

They believe that they lie on purpose for political ends. All of that is completely true. So they're turning away more and more from these media outlets. They don't trust them any longer. They're gigantic media conglomerates.

As you know, you work for one. They have a lot of influence and power, but less than they did before. And again, for me, the cause of the free internet is the reason why I moved my show to Rumble and moved everything to Rumble. It's one of the few platforms truly devoted to preserving a space of free speech on the internet, which for me is the biggest cause, because the internet and the ability to use it to challenge establishment orthodoxies, to organize against corrupt power centers, is, for me, the real cause of hope, but that only can happen if the internet is protected as a free weapon. And that's what's being assaulted.

Establishment sectors always know the greatest threat to them. They always seek to destroy it or to commandeer it. And that's what this whole fabricated disinformation expertise that appeared overnight after 2016,. like these, are the people who are the disinformation experts, these groups that are now designed to identify disinformation that gets censored, all of that is about eliminating dissent from the internet and disguising political censorship as some sort of apolitical expertise or science.

Have you ever heard her speak? Would you trust that woman to even identify the truth of anything, let alone a floating arbiter of what is true and false, to the point that what she decrees is false, gets censored? But that's the industry. What really happened is, in 2016,, you had these dual traumas to Western liberalism writ large. One was the decision of the British people to leave the EU, which was an extraordinary thing for a country to do, followed three months or four months later by Donald Trump's obviously traumatic victory over Hillary Clinton.

from a liberal perspective. I mean, like real trauma, like psychologists were saying, they've been flooded with patients who are neurotic and can't cope with reality because of their devastation that Hillary Clinton lost. That's like a real thing. And what they decided, meaning liberal Western elite, was that we could no longer afford a free internet, because when the internet is free, they can't control how people think, how they behave and how they vote. And that is when you can trace, you can follow the emergence of this extremely well-funded disinformation industry that was designed to assert an authority over controlling what information is and isn't online.

So for me, as long as a free internet continues to exist, you see this all throughout the West and the democratic world, people are abandoning their faith in institutions of authority. And that abandonment of faith and trust in institutions of authority for me is the most promising development.

actually, it turns out. And that was reaffirmed for me, but describe what.

And I think people attributed to her a lot more talent and substance because of that than she actually had. So she was never like an impressive force at all. She's a very like mindless kind of herd animal who just follows whatever dominant ideology she has to embrace in order to advance her career.

But I think her calculation was this kind of culture war calculation that if she talked about what she perceives to be these like farming values, that it was going to provoke the disgust and anger of the liberal elite and that conservatives would rise in her defense and say, no, these are the kinds of traditional values that have been lost and that the American liberal elite are to divorce from. The problem is, is that not putting bullets into the skulls of puppies in order to kill them because you hate them isn't just in a liberal elite value. One of the things that has happened is that Americans love their dogs for a lot of really interesting reasons. I think it gives people a sense of spirituality, of connection, all the things that have been lost. when, you know, when we now live in cities and work in cubicles, people crave this kind of connection.

People don't have children. They don't like across the political spectrum, and dogs open people up. Dogs have evolved to love and be loyal, trusted companions of humans and humans. to dogs. It's a very deep bond developed over thousands of years of evolution.

So there's a lot of things she could have done that might have worked in that way. But talking about how she pumped this puppy's skull full of bullets because, quote, I hated that dog is something that provoked almost universal contempt. And that was gave me a lot of optimism. And it was even a worse story. Like if you listen to her audio book, she has an audio book where she tells the whole story.

She shot the dog, but didn't kill it. She had to go back to her truck while the dog was suffering and from a wound. She had to then kill it with a second shot. She then took a goat, like minutes later that she also hated because she said it smelled and was mean, put him in the same gravel pit and murdered him. And then she tells the story that her brother and her uncle, or I think that's two close relatives said.

when she came back, we heard about this like rampage of animal slaughter that you went on. We're going to get out of here before you shoot us. And this was in her book that she read in her own voice. Like even the members of her family thought she was like a psychopath, to the point where she was being endangered. They were in danger.

They were endangered because she was off on some like murderous rampage and how she thought that that would engender any sympathy for her of any kind, rather than making her look like this deranged monster is completely beyond me. Well, she was trying to pose as some sort of.

Chickens are birds. It's instinct is to do that. Of course. And the idea that this is like common in rural America, it's shooting a bird dog. It's defamation against farmers.

I go, farmers just go around like.

And that that's a real issue.

But it's not about murdering your dogs. And then it's cruelty masquerading as strength.

And you see this in the British commentariat, where, you know, they had this empire that they've now lost. There's this like weak, broken, impotent, irrelevant, marginalized empire. And they speak about the glories and importance of war more than anybody, because it's a way that they feel strong and purposeful. And you have all these people in Washington, who constantly, whatever war is proposed, immediately embrace it. Because it's a way that they get to feel strong themselves, like compensating for the internal weakness and cowardice that they have.

I mean, if you live your whole life, and you never display moral or physical courage, you know that about yourself, it pains you. And instead of then doing something that requires courage, you instead send other people to go risk their lives in a war that you cheerlead. It's like such a psychologically warped way of finding it. It's like stolen valor. It is obviously courageous to go and fight in war for cause, but not to send other people to fight in a war for cause.

that requires no courage at all. But that is the kind of courage that in Washington, people constantly embrace in lieu of actual courage. It's really like a.

strong. People who are secure in their own strength treat everybody, as you say, compassionately. I think that extends to animals as well. How many dogs do you have? 26 at home.

And then, realizing that that was unsustainable, we then started this shelter where we have another like 200 or so. Why do you have so many dogs? It just happened. organically. I mean, both my husband and I love dogs.

We started rescuing dogs. And then, you know, I remember when we had five, we were like, no, five's our limit. And then, like, you know, someone calls up and says, oh, I just found two dogs that were hit by a car on a street and they need, you know, surgeries or they're going to die. They're suffering. And we were like, okay, let's take those, because what's the difference between five and seven?

And then you're like, it's seven. And you're like, yeah, what's the difference between seven and nine? And then that's how you get to 26 dogs. But, you know, they're all rescue dogs. They're all dogs who have been found on the street by us usually, but also by friends who were in various states of distress.

Lots of them have been abandoned. They're, like, you know, petrified and traumatized and abused. And when you have, you know, the ability of like the blessing of financial security, you can use it for pure material consumption, just buying more things, you know, trying to get another house, a private plane, whatever. Honestly, it just provides me with no happiness or satisfaction at all. It really doesn't.

It just doesn't do anything for me. And the ability to use it to help those in need, um, gives me so much more happiness and gratification. You can almost say it's like a selfish endeavor, because it just provides me a happiness that other things don't. And, you know, also like when you have a shelter, there's nothing more beautiful than connecting a dog with a family. And then hearing, like three months later, about how the dog is integrated into the family's life and seeing pictures of that dog laying on a sofa, you know, with this family, when they had been on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, like virtually dead from starvation or from disease, and you nurse them back to health.

And then you place them in a family. Like you have to figure out what are the things that actually give you meaning and purpose and happiness in life. And oftentimes are not the things that society tells us are the things we should strive after. And that was a lesson I had to learn by chasing all the things that society teaches you you're supposed to chase. And then, when I grabbed them and I thought it was going to make me happy and found it actually made me more vacant and emptier than I knew that I had to find the things that actually gave me happiness.

I think it's one of the most important lessons you can learn. How old were you when you made these realizations? I mean, I always loved dogs, like when I was young, like we had these two dogs that live next door. And I was like, get home from school. And the first thing I would do is look for them and call them and they would hang out in my house.

And I remember they just opened things up for me. And so well, but it was really like, in my late 30s and early 40s, when I had like professional success and financial stability, and none of that was, you know, my work was known. And it wasn't really providing a lot of personal happiness. And so I was like, I don't want to keep chasing after things that don't actually provide me happiness, even if society respects those, that we started being open more to the things that gave us happiness. And like, ultimately, I'll tell you this quick story, which is, I never wanted to be a father ever.

It was never part of my identity. I never thought I would be a good father. I hate imposing authority on other people. I hate telling other people what to do. And my husband's like, was always like, being a dad was his dream.

It was who he was. And he spent years like convincing, persuading, cajoling, pressuring, manipulating me to want to adopt kids, coincidentally, there'd be a couple at the next table, who he had arranged to be there. And we were talking, they had adopted kids. And when I talked about all the joys of it took years to convince me. And when I finally said yes, we miraculously found the two perfect kids in this like orphanage in northeastern Brazil.

And the transition, obviously, to our lives, couldn't have been a more radically or abruptly different. It's, like, you know, adopting a kid out of poverty in Mississippi and bringing them to, like, you know, high rise apartment in Manhattan, it's obviously everything is different. And I think the thing that helped most in the transition was soon as they got there, we were like, you have all these dogs, they had a dog at their orphanage. So they already like dogs, and we were like, pick one, and that dog is going to be your dog, you take care of it, you sleep with it. And they picked like, one of the sweetest, like most affectionate dogs in the pack.

And she became like the thing they were always hugging. And I think she did more to like, give them comfort and security and safety, being yanked out of one environment and put in a totally new one. And so the capacity for dogs to like, transform people, or, you know, you know, there's all kinds of studies about how animals can reach autistic children when nothing else can, or to even like, rehabilitate prisoners, you know, you get these like hard and violent criminals. Now they have these dog programs where they take them in, and they connect to these dogs and care for them in ways they've never done with humans before. Obviously, there's something you know, that's the reason why, if you see cruelty to animals, not just dogs, it's the thing that, like, riles people up the most on the internet.

Obviously, animals are here, they're beautiful, they're majestic. We've always hunted them and killed them for food. But we've also obviously have something in us that makes us feel an extraordinary empathy. to them. And to me, they're like the thing, one of the most beautiful things.

But yeah, you just see, and that's why I think the Christy Noem thing was such a fact because there are very few things at this point that can unite everyone in America, all Americans, independent of political ideology, or socioeconomic background or anything else. And the fact that she was so cruel to this dog created a revulsion that transcended almost every single category. She really united people in contempt for what she had done. And I found the ability of dogs to do that so fascinating.

Now-.

And I never wanted to be involved in politics, but my husband ended up as an elected official. He was first elected as a city council in Rio and then an elected member of Congress in Brazil. I started a Brazilian version of the Intercept, the Intercept Brazil. And I did a lot of reporting during the Snowden thing on Brazil. So I became very integrated into the Brazilian media.

He was obviously integrated into Brazilian politics. And so we both were part of this kind of faction that we never really wanted to be part of, but just takes you there. The most significant reporting I did was in 2019, where there was this sprawling anti-corruption probe, and the judge who was leading it became this national hero. And when Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, a big break from prior Brazilian elections were usually center-left or left-wing parties. One, he made that judge who led the anti-corruption probe the most powerful person in the country.

He was the minister of justice and national security. It was like kind of this fused position specifically for him that put the entire security service under his control. About two months into the Bolsonaro presidency, he was a judge, but he then left the judge to become part of it. And he led the probe that put Lula in jail. When Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, Lula was in prison on corruption charges that this judge, Sergio Moro, oversaw and convicted Lula, there's not a jury trial in Brazil, convicted him and then sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

I mean, Lula was a two-term president, a giant on the world stage, left office with an 86% approval rating, and they turned him into a criminal. And they arrested a lot of other people on corruption charges, like billionaires and oligarchs, in a way that a lot of people were supportive of at first, including me. Two months into the Bolsonaro presidency, I got a contact from a source who had hacked into the phones of that judge, prosecutors, the most powerful people in the country, said there was evidence of all kinds of corruption, turned it over to me, the entire file, similar to what happened with Snowden. And we were able, based on that reporting, to expose this judge as one of the most corrupt people in the country. I mean, he used corruption and illegal means to put the people he wanted to imprison, including Lula.

And so, six months after we began the reporting, Lula was let out of jail. as a result of our reporting. I became enemy number one, along with my husband, of the Bolsonaro movement. I mean, just. it's hard to overstate the level of threats we got, the attacks on our personal lives, like the fabricated stories, and then ultimately culminating in a criminal indictment that charged me with like 126 felonies as a co-conspirator with my source.

So it wasn't a game, and Bolsonaro.

I never for a moment considered leaving.

Absent some very imminent threat, I just would never do that, even if.

. You can't look yourself in the mirror. Snowden taught me that a lot. Snowden did something, and so did Julian Assange, that they knew had a serious risk of putting them in prison. Daniel Ellsberg, one of my childhood heroes, did the same.

And so that, to me, became kind of the thing that I aspire to. And the idea of running away from a threat because you're scared of something and sacrificing a cause you believe is right would just make me look at myself in a very negative way for the rest of my life. I would not want that on my conscience. I wouldn't want to think of myself that way, or my life having been formed by fleeing or by running away out of fear. So it was very trying, though, but we stayed.

And everything we did ultimately ended up having a huge effect. It changed the course of the country. I mean, Lula was out of prison. His convictions were reversed. This judge went from universally beloved hero to a hated figure.

He ended up leaving the Bolsonaro government.

So that all happened, and we were heroes of the left and hated more than anything by the Brazilian right. At the same time, when Bolsonaro was elected, there started to become this reaction to him, not just by the Brazilian left, but by the Brazilian establishment, by the Brazilian center-right, very similar to the way that in the United States, those kind of never-Trump center-right establishmentarians, all of our institutions of authority, had this extreme fear of Trump because he represented a populist uprising, this challenge to establishment power. The same thing happened in Brazil. And you had this one judge on the Supreme Court and supported by a lot of others. He was never a leftist.

He's not a leftist. He comes from this very center-right politics. He's sort of like a Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell figure.

And he became the leader of this effort to crush the Bolsonaro movement and Bolsonaro himself using extra legal means, just like we're seeing in the United States with these fabricated prosecutions of lawfare against Donald Trump. And despite the fact that there was a hero of the left and utterly hated by Bolsonaro and his movement, to the point they really tried to imprison me or deport me, I began speaking out very vocally against this judge. And one of the main tactics he used was political censorship. They started imprisoning people for questioning COVID, but particularly for defending the Bolsonaro movement. You started having exiles, like journalists and bloggers and activists fleeing the country for very good reason, to the United States, to avoid prosecution at the hands of this one judge who became completely lawless.

But he became a hero of the left because he was basically imposing authoritarianism and tyranny against Bolsonaro and his movement. And this was a guy who, because he was on the center-right, was hated by the left for years as a racist, fascist, all the things they call people when they hate them. But he became, through this consolidation of judicial power and his use of it in ways that are classically authoritarian, as a hero of the left and the number one figure of hated right. And I was the one of the only people who was not a Bolsonarista, who was not on the Bolsonaro right, to speak out. And I didn't just speak out.

I mean, I denounced it constantly. I'm a columnist of the biggest Brazilian paper. I was using my column to just attack him constantly. And he was the same kind of hero as that prior judge was, who had the anti-corruption probe, whose reporting we were able to use our reporting to expose. And so overnight, I started to become an enemy of the left and made a lot of new friends among Bolsonaristas, including the ones who were trying to imprison me just two years earlier.

And I have to say, you never really think you're going to see actual tyranny. And this was the closest I've ever gotten. We've had authoritarian things in the United States that have happened. It's what impelled me to write about journalism, the abuses of civil liberties after the war on terror in the name of terrorism. But nothing like a figure of this sort.

And this is the first time in my career as a journalist, where I ever had a fear of what would happen if I actually criticized this political figure. And you know, you're living in a repressive regime, when you feel a fear, even somebody like myself, who has a lot of protection, a lot of platform, a lot of like international notoriety, but I really did worry about what would happen if I was going to criticize him, because other people who did were punished and put into prison. And I've been doing it very vocally and loudly since. They've attacked similar people. He opened a criminal investigation into Michael Schellenberger, and the journalist who did the Brazil Twitter files, they actually opened a criminal investigation into them.

They've never done it against me, I think, again, because I have a certain kind of platform and protection, including the fact that the current president of Brazil is out of prison because of my reporting, something he's often publicly stated. The minute he got out of prison, the first person he called when he got home was me to thank me for everything I had done. So I think it's very difficult to do that. But again, like if you have that kind of platform, I think you're obligated to use it in ways that other people can't because of their fear, because if you don't, then who will? Who is the judge?

Alessandro de Moraes is his name. It's the person that Elon Musk began attacking because Rumble, which is where my show is, is no longer accessible in Brazil. unless you use a VPN. I can't watch my own show in Brazil, because if you try and access Rumble in Brazil, you'll get a thing saying this site is blocked because of how many censorship orders Rumble was getting from the Brazilian courts that they refused to comply with. And that was what Elon Musk vowed to do.

was, he said, we're getting so many unjust censorship orders that we're going to refuse to obey them, even if it means we get kicked out of Brazil. Now, he didn't follow through on that. But the fact that he made that a scandal, he talked about this judge, Alessandro de Moraes, being this kind of repressive figure, created a kind of debate that was well needed.

But Twitter didn't end up following through. They actually ended up saying, no, no, we will obey all the censorship orders in order to stay in Brazil. But this is real repression. But it's not a left wing kind of oppression. It doesn't come from Lula.

This guy is not a leftist. What he is is part of that establishment power that was fearful of and contemptuous of Bolsonaro and used authoritarian power to stop the Bolsonaro movement to protect establishment authority, very, very similar to what's happening in the United States with respect to Trump and his movement. How long can you stay there? I mean, I'm going to stay in depth. Again, my kids are teenagers.

They're now teenagers. Their life is in Brazil. They're Brazilian. They've never known any of the country. I'm not going to uproot them, to force them to live in another country.

I'm obviously not going to abandon them. They're the thing by far most important to me. And I feel like the work I'm doing is in defense of a country that I want to be free, because that's theirs. I'm not saying there's never anything that could force me to leave Brazil. if I really felt an immediate, imminent threat to my personal safety or my family's.

Who knows? But if you find yourself running away from those kind of fears,

There were obviously a lot of security risks at the time. We had to have security at our house, constantly security everywhere. we left. Same thing when I was doing the reporting that freed Lula from prison. We had constant threats to our physical safety.

I couldn't leave the house without armed guards. Neither could my husband or my kids. So, you know, I don't just walk around freely on the street because I realize that there are threats, that I'm not paranoid about them. I don't want to turn our house into a fortress. But, you know, you take precautions against them, but there's never risks that you can completely eliminate.

. My last question. Do you think this, the authoritarianism that's obviously descending on the world, is it a permanent state? Is this accelerating? Or is this just a sort of an interlude that we're going to laugh about ruefully in 10 years?

Yeah. And actually, if you're accused of inciting or defending genocide, you can be put into prison for life under this bill. I mean, this bill is shocking. I went to Canada to do events against the censorship law, not because I'm Canadian or care about Canada, because what's happening is every one of these countries is using the other as a laboratory for how far they can go. So every time one country takes another step toward consolidating control over the internet, and what can and can't be said, that shows other countries, the space that they now have to go forward as well.

It's completely interconnected. Every time the EU, or the UK, or Ireland, or Canada or Brazil, take steps forward to consolidate censorship control over the internet.

But when they start really believing that things are radically awry, that's why there's all these politicians who have nothing in common other than the fact that they promise to hate and wage war against the establishment forces that are controlling people's lives. And people want those agents of disruption and subversion in there because they know that the status quo is something that is kind of very evil and very repressive. And that sense is incredibly important to preserve.

I mean, the whole enlightenment was to overthrow monarchs and churches that had dominated intellectual life for centuries. And we've seen that over and over. And I think it's very hard to look at human history and conclude anything other than any kind of structure that is built by human beings can be warred against and torn down and replaced by other human beings. And I absolutely think that the tools are here and those are the tools we have to defend.