so glenn greenwald i met taibi folks so by way of introduction the the i want to just sort of tell the story of how this panel happened um it arose out of almost a throwaway comment that jason made on an episode of the pod where he was talking about you know lining up speakers for this event and he said that you know he was having a hard time getting liberals and all he could find were like right wingers like uh glenn greenwald and matt taibi and in terms of just just to explain their backgrounds a
little bit you know matt used to be the they're both independent journalists who write phenomenal columns on substack and all of you should check it on subscribe and by the way they also do call-in shows on a phenomenal podcasting platform you should all check out but but matt uh was sort of like the the left-wing fire brand for populist fire brand on writing for rolling stone who back in 2009 was asking the question why the people who caused the great financial crisis why no one was going to jail and glenn you know broke the snowden
story about how the government was engaging in mass surveillance on all of us and raising questions about the infringement of our civil liberties so you know both these guys have i'd say uh you know well-established bonafides uh you know who used to be considered uh left-wing sort of liberal bonafides but now today somehow they've been read out of what you would call liberalism today and so that comment that jason made sort of i think there's so much to unpack there on how that happened what does liberalism today mean if it doesn't include you guys uh
and and so that maybe that's the place to start is trying to understand what has happened in our politics that makes you guys not liberal anymore and what is liberalism and then what is conservatism and are we even thinking about the political divide in our country the right way if left versus right doesn't really capture it anymore so that was sort of the the the starting point for this uh who wants to just react to anything i just said yeah well first of all it's of course very gratifying to realize that your attendance at a
conference is due to a throwaway line from super honored to hear that that's the reason why we were invited [Music] [Music] yeah you know it's interesting i guess we join a long list of other far-right luminaries like russell brand who has spent the last 15 years as one of the most vocal devotees to the socialist jeremy corbyn he's now also on the right and joe rogan who just 18 months ago said to millions of people that his favorite candidate running for president was bernie sanders the socialist left-wing candidate from vermont and even now elon musk
who voted for barack obama in 2012 over mitt romney and is one of the largest donors to the aclu sometimes somehow he's also on the far right so in some sense it's just become a kind of punishing label that's designed to stigmatize or demonize anybody who in any way descends from or diverges from liberal orthodoxy it's just kind of an enforcement or coercive label that has no meaning just bereft of any actual substance but i think there's a broader dynamic underneath it all which is that you know it is true that every five years ten
years what was once an issue at the forefront of our debates goes to the background and other issues go to the forefront so 10 years ago we were spending a lot of time debating things like obama's drone program or guantanamo not being closed or as you said the work matt was doing on you know derivatives and the fraud on wall street we don't talk much about that anymore we spend a lot of time now talking instead about whether the internet should be this instrument of censorship and information control um whether we should trust the u.s
security state to dictate what is and is not disinformation uh whether we should be involved in very similar kinds of proxy wars like we spent the cold war doing over places like ukraine and so in one way it's natural that political alliances shift is different issues go to the fore and alliances change as a result but i think something much more important is that liberalism itself has changed largely by virtue of donald trump because liberals as a defining view maybe as an overarching view maybe maybe democrats yeah by liberals i just mean kind of the
mainstream wing of the democratic party the way hillary you know hillary clinton calls herself progressive so again illustrating the bankruptcy of these terms but by liberals i just mean kind of like the nancy pelosi barack obama hillary clinton chuck schumer wing have come to believe that the overarching way to understand politics is that there's one primary menace and risk to the united states which is donald trump his movement in the republican party and it's not just that they have a bad ideology but that they're actual fascists trying to instill a white nationalist dictatorship and if
you actually believe that if that's something that you genuinely believe on some level it becomes rational to start embracing authoritarian uh methods of resisting that of combating that censoring um you know using due process free processes to punish people and deprive them of their liberty and i think any time a political movement gets convinced that it is no longer involved in a political debate but a historic war between pure good and pure evil it starts to turn to authoritarian tactics to win because it believes that's justified or even necessary and those authority authoritarian toxic happens
to be the ones that the left traditionally had opposed and now are embracing and i guess matt and i didn't decide that we were going to change our views of the last 30 years about these issues and that has caused this organic breach not just between us two but you know others like us and as i said anyone who finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically receives the far-right label yeah um first of all i agree with all that and um you know for me it's even funnier because uh prior to 2008 i would say
that um i was sort of like the triumph the insult comic dog of journalism uh basically my job at rolling stone was to throw off one-liners about republicans my editors almost never sent me to a democratic function because they didn't want me uh describing uh those events in in a colorful way let's put it that way so i got i got sent to a lot of events um where people like sarah palin or fred thompson or mike huckabee would be speaking i actually won a national magazine award for a column about huckabee called my favorite
nut job and um but then after 2008 uh after obama got elected they assigned me to do a story one story about uh the 2008 financial crisis essentially with the idea of explaining it in terms of people who are not financial professionals could understand so i did one story that was really about aig and we got this overwhelming response that we'd never gotten before from readers we'd never heard from before and that led to me doing eight years of work instead of one story and one of the themes that came out of that reporting was
that in the sort of post-bailout economy the wealth gap was widening and um you know i just read a statistic that said that during the obama years the bottom 99 saw their average wealth decreased by 4 900 whereas the top 1 percent saw its wealth increase by an average of 4.9 million dollars and so you know i didn't make that much that big of a deal of this in my reporting but when um 2016 came around um like in covering both the trump and sanders campaigns it was abundantly clear that this widening wealth gap and
the stress that it had placed on populations on both the left and the right was a significant factor uh in this race and when i started to write this in the context of covering trump rather than just doing the usual thing of tossing off insults about the candidate um which is easy enough to do with trump uh i started to say things like well there are reasons why he's succeeding he's attracting crowds that are not just the usual republican crowds they're former union members here they have a lot in common with the crowds who show
up at bernie sanders events and i started to notice a distinctly unpleasant reaction from people inside the business where it quickly became taboo to explain donald trump in any way other than um this is a white supremacist movement and he's appealing to you know the lowest common denominator uh through that kind of messaging now i i happen to believe that that's that was part of certainly part of what was going on but it wasn't the whole explanation but i think trump is is the dividing line of what you're talking about if if you if you
don't have if you have a nuanced explanation for donald trump um then you you can't be part of the club anymore because the uh the dominant narrative requires that he be cartoonized um you know in the same way that we used to do it with figures like saddam hussein or putin now you know we call it the hitler of the month club all right uh if you're not willing to just do that and if you try to actually explain where all these voters coming from why are they upset what went wrong that this would happen
also known as the purpose of journalism yeah exactly right which is supposed to be our job [Applause] i think both of us quickly learn that there that was not welcome and you know after trump got elected i think that that instinct to uh crowd out anyone who was interested in going there and trying to figure out what was wrong um that it caused uh 2016 you know suddenly became an apostate and by the way that includes some politicians like you know bernie sanders i think was one of the people who was very interested in examining
what happened in 2016 uh and and i think that's one of the reasons why there was such a violent reaction uh to his candidacy in both 2016 and 2020. so for me i think that's the dividing line it's not like something's changed so much with liberalism or it's it's really about trump i think and and journalism has adjusted it is you know we've gone from being people whose primary job is to be curious about why things happen um to being advocates who believe that you know certain people have to be opposed at all costs and
even if that cost is you know a little bit of the truth or a lot of it even so having ripped the empire jersey off their backs to basically stop the trump menace it seems like journalism can't now go back to even a pretense of neutrality is that so what basically has happened now i think so i think and i think you see that in in what hap what's happening with the ratings at cable stations um you know i warned about this in 2016 and i i wrote a column in the in that summer saying
that a model where basically right-wing media wrote about the evils of the democratic party and blue media wrote about the evils of the republican party um that that just wouldn't work audience wise because audiences would no longer trust either uh source to be objective and to report the facts and i think that's where we are now like we see the declining um the declining ratings of of companies like cnn and msnbc uh which were previously thought of as more kind of down the road down the middle of the road news agencies and now are thought
of as politicized and they're having a terrible trouble kind of going back because once you cross that line into politics um you can't get your reputation back as a neutral fact finder anymore yeah i think people forget what things were like before trump since he's such a you know kind of uh ubiquitous presence as matt was saying and for me i you know he also defines and is responsible for most of the changes we're discussing but back in 2015 most of these news organizations were on the brink of collapse every msnbc host was on the
verge of being fired you know a couple of months away from being fired because nobody was watching the new york times had severe financial difficulty there was talk about whether they would have to declare bankruptcy because their balance sheet was so drowning in debt and trump saved them all he saved the entire industry they all owed their jobs their second homes the ability to pay off their irs debt to donald trump because you can trace his emergence on the scene to when people started watching those programs again and what they did was they rebranded as
the resistance to donald trump and they sacrificed any even pretense of journalistic function they know if you and you just look at polling data that 95 of the people who watch msnbc and 93 of the people who read the new york times and trust it identify as democrats um so there's a completely polarized media you know one of the kind of non-media examples is the aclu there was an article in 2015 in the aclu about the aclu and the washington post that they were mass layoffs had to engage in mass layoffs of their staff because
they had no money trump gets inaugurated they start tweeting you know every day we'll see you in court mr trump and like stimulating the you know kind of g-zones of every liberal and suddenly they're drowning in money like millions and millions of dollars you know like building like the asclu you know it's always financially struggled and as a result they're completely captive now to that kind of an audience you know i have a friend i guess i had a friend um who was a host of an msnbc show and they once told me that they
don't get show by show ratings they get segment by segment ratings and ever since trump they told me the minute you put on anybody who's critical of the democratic party anyway you can just see the audience completely disappear which you can imagine a person in that position what an enforcement mechanism that is to know that they have a salary and kids and they need to pay for college and their mortgage and they know if they do anything that deviates at all from democratic party doctrine they're going to lose their audience the new york times knows
that the clu knows that and so yeah i think they're all not it's not just that they've lost their credibility and can't get it back which is absolutely true as matt said it's also that they're now captive to this kind of uh prison cell that they built for themselves chasing the sugar high that trump provided just really quickly i got to tell the story in the middle of all this phenomenon reporters were arguing about whether or not we should be covering them less because maybe we had helped him get the nomination uh you know i
covered trump's campaign and this was a a hot topic in on the bus at the time um but then it was sort of decided that now he's just making us all so much money let's just let's just go with it and uh i remember being in indianapolis when trump sewed up the um the nomination by beating crews who still had a mathematical chance of winning i guess if he had done well there but trump if you remember during that particular race accused cruz of being the zodiac killer uh which was hilarious because cruz was born
two years after the killings ended so but there was one reporter i know who who actually uh got the nerve up to ask i i believe it was i believe it was cruz's wife about about the the accusations like what do you have to say to the idea that uh you know that you know your your husband is this is a zodiac killer and he's telling me the story about this afterwards and he goes you know i felt so dirty doing it but i also felt so great so i think that's where they were they
were in that space for a long time the media the media and trump had a weird codependent relationship just in terms of trying to appeal to people out there who may not be trump fans or to get through them on this point it just seems to me that when you lose an election anytime and you lose an election as a party you need to analyze what went wrong and especially when the candidate is a complete political novice with no you know no prior experience and had so many attributes that historically were considered extreme negatives and
it seems to me that if you're just to look at what happened in 2016 trump was able to ride a few key issues all the way to the white house one was these you know foreign wars these interventions that we've had in afghanistan iraq syria libya that were disasters we hadn't gotten out of afghanistan yet but it was on its way to being a historic 20-year failure he shattered the republican party with that message no more bushes he then took the issue of trade and basically broke down the democrats blue wall and the rust belt
by basically pointing out the ways that our trade our bipartisan trade policy just like our bipartisan uh foreign you know our war policy had led to uh the de-industrialization of the of the rust belt and then he also used the immigra the issue of immigration which was sort of closely related to that idea of creating wage pressure on the working class so you would think that having rode those issues all the way to the white house that there would be some sort of reappraisal and instead it seems like what the elite did to protect itself
was create these mythologies that trump somehow got elected not because the people of the country were fed up with the way that it had been run for 20 years by both parties but rather because the russians somehow were behind it or or the country was shot through with white supremacy and that somehow explained it um and so we never really got a true uh sort of accounting or reappraisal of what trump's election meant and instead the media turned to like this hysteria this mode that we're not even out of yet your reactions to that no
i think you know it's one of the most amazing things about the 2016 election which is first of all you know in a lot of ways barack obama being this kind of once in a generation political talent papered over the the incredibly serious systemic problems the democrats had even while he was being re-elected underneath obama and all his glitter and glamour the democratic party was collapsing they were losing state houses and congressional seats and governorships all over the country and the reason for that is the anger the growing anger with the neoliberal policies that the
democratic party in the early 1990s had decided to embrace in lieu of the working-class politics for which they had always been known the kind of clintoniae pronouncement that the democratic party needs to start embracing corporate america instead of unions that it needs to move much closer to these politicist politics that says you know we're going to encourage corporate america we're going to embrace the pentagon and all of that and it radically changed the the democratic party into this party of technocracy and the elites culminating with the obama presidency and the only and what is amazing
is in 2016 the democrats lost the white house to a game show host and so you would think they would wonder why that happened as you were saying right you would think they would wonder what is it about us that caused us to lose to donald trump and instead they invented this long list of people that they decided were to blame instead vladimir putin principally wikileaks jill stein for having the audacity to continue to run for president you know a whole long list of villains essentially everybody except themselves and the people who are responsible for
it and and and i think the the most toxic narrative is the one that said the only reason trump won was because the country is radically and fundamentally racist and he capitalized on that and what's so amazing about that is there are literally millions of voters in excess of 10 million depending on how you count but definitely in excess of 10 million voters who twice voted for barack obama in 2008 and 12 and then in 2016 voted for donald trump there are increasing numbers of non-white voters all over the country moving to the republican party
under trump and voting increasingly for trump you had a larger share of black voters latino voters asian-american voters than any republican candidate and decades and those trends are only worsening and so you have this media that has no interest in and no ability to understand how the majority of people in the united states live because their lives are completely separate lived in these isolated enclaves in this kind of liberal bubble and you know just today there was this amazing uh article by rolling stone it was about what most of you have probably heard which was
this horrific uh mass murder in buffalo where an 18 year old white kid feeding on this kind of ideology of racial hatred that has become fringe but very dangerous around the west went into a store that he knew was predominantly black and shot as many people as he could killing 10 of them and then our the article by rolling stone that was published this morning was he is not a lone wolf shooter he is a mainstream republican so i think all of you should be very careful because you're currently in a country where half of
the people in this country apparently are psychotic nazis on the verge of like some sort of mass murder outbreak including huge numbers of non-white americans who are supporters of the republican party and the more you kind of immerse yourself in an instant in a set of institutional beliefs and a kind of ethos of your enclave you know just constantly hearing a belief reinforced and reinforced the more you believe it the more you're immersed in it the more immune you become to facts that negate it and so that's the reason why the media is so incurious
because they've embraced this narrative that the only reason anyone would vote for republicans the only reason anyone would vote for trump is because they're racist or their fascists or their white supremacist and it's left them completely unable to grapple with things like 10 million people voting twice for obama and then for trump or the fact is matt alluded to there were all kinds of people in 2016 who if you ask them they would say yeah i have two favorite candidates this year and you'd say who are they and they would say bernie sanders and donald
trump to a working journalist most most working journalists are pundits or political operatives that makes no sense they can't comprehend that because they see the world through this traditional left right prism that for increasing sections of the country i would argue a majority is no longer applicable is no longer how they see the world and this is so dangerous when you have this radical breach between the opinion making journalistic class and elite class on the one hand and most of the population on the other they just live completely different lives work with a completely set
of of beliefs about the world have completely different sets of interests and if you look at countries throughout history where that has happened where there's been this complete divergence between the people who hold power in the country and the rest of the country over whom they exercise that power instability at best and usually much worse things inevitably arise and i really think that's the point that we're at just quickly to um piggyback on that the one of the big stories that went uncovered and and continues to go uncovered is the transformation of the democratic electorate
um the last time i looked at this 41 of the richest 50 congressional districts in america had democrats in those seats and all of the top ten richest districts were won by democrats whereas as recently as 1992 the split was more like 50 50. you know if you if you live in an affluent suburb the overwhelming majority of the voters are there are going to be democrats now and the big divide in american politics is no longer about ideology it's significantly about income and even more education uh it's a split between people who have high
school degrees or less and people who are college educated and this is one of the reasons why donald trump was was so effusive and saying i love the poorly educated because you know they vote for him but this is a this is another taboo subject nobody likes to talk about this because it speaks to a transformation that happened in the democratic party that began i think with clinton when you know they went away from relying on unions for financial support um you know the dlc's big strategic idea was let's be more competitive on the fundraising
front by um you know being more pro-business or pro-growth that was the term that they used a lot and you know a couple of decades later what we what you end up with is a party that no longer has any real organic connection to to working people of any kind and so you know i think i think that's that's a massive factor in all of this is that in the reporting on class politics has become taboo um all you have to do is is go to a donald trump event and you can you can see
it clearly uh that the the composition of the crowds is vastly different from what you see at a democratic event and that's one of the reasons why they hated the media because they saw us as upper class representatives of the coastal elite who all live in new york la and washington which is true for the most part and you know it it got increasingly hostile as as time went on and that's why trump was scoring so many points going after us because we were symbols of the upper class and um that's another reason why i
think the the the divide is no longer neatly between left and right anymore it's it has a lot more to do with class than i never did before okay david i'm over here to your hey i know you wanted to take a question or two from the audience as we were sure yeah let's take some questions and i thought i would kick it off great discussion about the left um moving really far left and taking advantage of uh the trump bump in their ratings i'm curious you kind of left out fox news kind of mastering
and rupert murdoch they kind of created this playbook in a way and the left copied it isn't that basically how it happened they people saw wow fox media is just making so much fox news if it was making so much money by picking a side that the new york times and msnbc etc all just said you know what we might as well pick the other side and just take this playbook and get the money that's kind of what happened isn't it yeah i mean i wrote a book about this called hate inc um which yeah
that's basically basically the thesis is that fox pioneered a new way to make money in media which is sort of like the audience optimization model like you you pick a group um a demographic and then you try to dominate it by feeding it news that you know that those people are going to respond to that that was never the the way things worked before for an ordinary news agency they would they would just cover what they thought was important and you know try to do that has anybody stayed neutral matt i mean like if you
look at reuters or ap it's clear the new york times msnbc they've just gone full subscribe to us if you hate trump you know we're going to give you what you want but is there anybody in the middle still man well i think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing sub stack do well right is it's not so much that it's left or right or it's just that there's most people are not partisans most people live somewhere in the middle right and and have opinions that are all over the place and they cannot stand
turning on the television and knowing exactly what they're going to say ahead of time and so they're looking for someplace that's that's different where you have differences of opinion and that's that's why i think independent media is doing better than ever i mean the most influential person in in media even though the the part of the media never talks about him because he's not part of them is without question joe rogan he speaks to more people who are under you know 85 years old which is the cable audience than anybody on television by far and
it's because as matt just said you cannot pin him down ideologically nor is he does he have fealty to any one political faction or certainly to any political party he's just a curious person sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right and sometimes neither exactly like most americans i mean it's such a great point glenn and in fact if you were going to pin him if you just looked at how he voted he'd be a democrat and the fact that the democrats have joe rogan and elon musk having been their supporters and voting for
them for decades and they're too stupid to pull them into their party is just sure if they do the opposite they say no joe rogan we know that you love bernie sanders the most far-left candidate ever to be viable in decades but even though you love him we're going to demand that you're our enemy and call you a far-right fanatic even though you don't think you are yeah we're going to demand that bernie sanders renounce joe rogan's endorsement that's our plan for winning the election exactly i mean sacks as much as you and i go
at it with like how absolutely horrific the republican party is i mean the democrats are so incompetent to not court the two most influential people in america today joe rogan and elon musk i mean it's they're they're alienating them they're radicalizing them away from them is it's even worse i mean is there any i mean sex is just flabbergasted but is there any way glenn you can comment on this and explain what you think the democrats are thinking or are they just not thinking strategically about winning elections i you know i think i think in
addition to what you guys just talked about in terms of nbc or msnbc and cnn copying the model there has been a radical change in the composition of the republican party ideologically because of trump not because trump is some sort of like disciplined political theorist or deep thinker but because he ushered in as david was saying earlier he ran in 2016 in opposition to bush cheney foreign policy in opposition to reagan economics he railed against the power of large corporations at the expense of the working person something you never would have heard from reagan but
he also ushered in a lot of hostility toward agencies like the cia and the nsa and the fbi something that had always been the province of the left and so now you have an enormous amount of space open on the right for all kinds of views that had previously been closed and i think there's just a lot more vibrancy on the right a lot more internal debate whereas in the democratic party it's just a very much you're either with us or you're against us mindset and any deviation as we were talked about at the beginning
automatically results in them proclaiming either enemy which doesn't seem like a very effective way of doing politics to me okay let's take a quick question from the audience let's talk about elon behind his back before he joins what's your guys's take is he serious is he going to buy it and what is you know what do you think the fallout's going to be you know i don't know if he's going to buy it or not i think that i haven't really gone into the details of that but what i do think is fascinating is the
reaction uh by people in media to even the proposition that he might uh by twitter these are people who have been absolutely comfortable with you know a handful of people controlling uh you know 95 to 98 percent of the media distribution in this country you know for years now they never ever once complained about it at any time you ever complain about censorship they say oh that's not censorship that this is a private platform they can do whatever they want uh that's that's always been the response suddenly elon musk comes along and it's oh my
god the the the threat of an oligarch taking over a media platform what are we ever going to do there are columns like that in the washington post which is owned by jeff bezos i mean exactly the idea and isn't the new york times run by a family for that's not really that poor yeah five generations all right we'll take a final question from the audience so i actually agree with a lot of what's been said here and one of my questions is you know we were talking about is trump even ideologically a republican my
question is as long as one of them is winning the republicans or the democrats aren't both of them winning like do you guys have any thoughts on that okay i didn't hear the quote as long as one as long as one of them the republicans or democrats are winning are they collectively winning i guess shouldn't there be a third party i mean isn't that the issue that we're it's such a binary polarized system i think uh glenn said in the middle that we're really all more moderates that's my belief but uh just curious no it's
i mean it's a great you know i think um probably the worst media myth is that the two parties can never get along there's no more bipartisanship they're so radically different they can't agree on anything when the reality is they agree on most things this is that the only things we hear about are the times when they disagree but overwhelmingly on foreign policy on economic policy obama himself said the two parties are essentially playing within the 40-yard line so the entire rest of the playing field is basically not part of the political process because they
have the same fundamental beliefs and i think one of the reasons why trump was such a shock to the system was not because the trump administration itself was a deviation from american political tradition it wasn't but because some of the things he said like questioning nato and whether it has viability was designed to undermine that bipartisan consensus but i think in general you're right that the establishment wings of both parties are far more in agreement with one another than they are different um and i think you're also right that as long as those two wings
of each party continue to trade power the rolling cost in the united states is is very happy all right let's give it up for glenn mack thank you everybody let your winners ride rain man david said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] we need to get back [Music] i'm going on [Music]
