Glenn Greenwald: Nothing Trump Did Compares to the Moral Evil of Bushs and Obamas Wars

George Bush and Dick Cheney started new Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new Wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? You go down the list, and when you look at things like the destruction of Iraq or the implementation of a torture regime, what has Donald Trump done that even remotely compares in terms of moral evil to any of that? Nothing, and yet, no, we’re supposed to treat George Bush and Barack Obama like morally upstanding statesman and Donald Trump like the literal reincarnation of Hitler. There’s no journalist who is more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Snowden revelations. Though unapologetically progressive, the 53 year old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left.

00:47 - A week before the 2020 election he quit the Intercept, the online news site he co-founded in 2014, because by his account, it refused to run a story unless he removed all sections critical of Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called “the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality” to led him being censored by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that “these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and news room.” Like a growing number of refugees from more traditional news organizations, Greenwald took his talents to Substack, a platform for independent content creators to earn revenue directly from their audiences. He wasted no time lobbing grenades, posting stories and videos with titles, like No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration was Far Worse than Trump. And The Three Greatest Dangers of Biden/Harris: Militarism, Corporatism, and Censorship, All Fueled by Indifference.

01:47 - I spoke with Greenwald via Zoom at his house in Brazil, where he lives with his husband, two children, and numerous dogs. Among other topics, we discussed what he sees as a generational fight playing at a newsrooms, the challenge identity politics poses to free expression, and whether a coalition of libertarians and progressives can effectively push non-interventionist foreign policy, lifestyle liberation, and an end to corporate subsidies during the presidency of Joe Biden. Glenn Greenwald, thanks for talking to Reason. Always happy to be with Reason. Good to see you, Nick. Yes, let’s see. Let’s start with your leaving the Intercept, which you announced less than a month ago as we’re talking. And in the piece that you wrote explaining why you left this amazing publication platform that you helped start only a few years ago, you said that you were witnessing or experiencing “The same trends of repression, censorship, and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press.

” 02:55 - So what happened? Well, some of you may recall that when I created the Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, it was at the height of the Snowden story back in 2013, I was at the Guardian at the time, and I had received a lot of support institutionally and editorially from the Guardian. But I began noticing as I worked with other media outlets to report that story, a lot of internal obstacles that I thought were quite difficult to overcome in terms of doing the kind of reporting, not just with that story, but in general, I thought needed to be done. And because Laura and I had a lot of visibility with that story, and Jeremy had done a lot of high visibility reporting of his own, including having produced a film about Obama’s war on terror called “Dirty Wars” that had received an Oscar nomination, We had a lot of leverage to create a new media outlet. And we obviously didn’t do that given that we all had very good platforms at the time to replicate what was already being done. We only left the places we were at, which were very secure, because we thought we could do something different in journalism.

04:06 - And one of the principle visions we had was that we thought the model for how journalism is often conducted inside corporate media outlets, which is this hierarchal top-down structure where editors impose, not necessarily an ideology as much as a kind of tone, so they flatten out the vibrancy and personality and voice in journalism, make everything sound the same, make everything adhere to these very rigid rules of how you can express yourself, what kind of views can be heard, with stifling journalism it was making it not just an effective, but actually quite boring. And the idea was it’s gonna be a journalism led media outlet where editors are there to help you when you need it to kind of kick the tires on stories to make sure that things are factually sound, but they’re not the bosses. They’re not the people you have to overcome who decide whether you can be heard or not. And I had written into my contract, just like I did at the Guardian and Salon, that except in very rare cases where there was a very complex original reporting, like in the Snowden story, of the Brazil reporting we did last year that I would just publish directly to the internet with no editorial intervention. And that was the model we thought we were building that I thought I was building.

05:19 - I never thought it had anything to do with ideological dogma, and certainly never fealty to any political party. .