Glenn Greenwald: Matt Taibbi on How “Free Speech” Turned Into a “Far Right” Slogan

How the government controls Big Tech

How liberal elites look at free speech: How ‘free speech’ all became a far-right slogan aimed solely at defeating Trump, but under the First Amendment covers a host of important issues that are active and relevant in our lives.

Video Excerpt

Glenn Greenwald: I think it’s very important to note that this isn’t so much of an anti-Trump sentiment. The fear is that people will become too populist, meaning they’ll become too independent of institutions of authority and they need to be constrained, they need to be controlled; they can’t be given too much freedom.

There are a lot of people embedded in the conservative establishment who look at the Trump movement and the populism that it’s provoking─and any kind of anti-establishment ideology, including on the left─[as their] real enemy. So it shouldn’t surprise people that traditional conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney─and it’s not surprising that some of the justices on the Supreme Court who are regarded as conservative are a lot more like Mitt Romney and Mitch Mell than they are say like Donald Trump─also view this kind of wild west on the internet as being too dangerous to permit and therefore are sympathetic to government attempts to try and put some limitations on it.

In that they share the same views as The New York Times; it happens all the time these days that the two establishment wings of both political parties find themselves much more in agreement than not. I think what that means is that left/right is not really the relevant metric any longer, it’s more are you within that establishment: Do you want to strengthen it? Do you believe in its right to control? Or do you see it as something to be subverted and something to be liberated from, and we just have the wrong vocabulary. If you’re on the outside of that establishment and see it as a threat and something to be liberated from, you now get described as being right-wing, and it’s just the wrong vernacular.

But at the end of the day I don’t really care about the labels, I care about these values.

Matt Taibbi: But you went through this with the Snowden reporting, the hostility that you got from the National Security apparatus was really aimed at the idea that the the public can’t be entitled, they’re not entitled to get even information that might upset them because there needs to be this establishment control over information: ‘There are some things that the public just can’t handle’ was the attitude that was very pervasive and you saw it even in some prominent journalists who gave you a hard time and suggested that you were an accomplice to crime and that sort of thing.

This is a clip from our show SYSTEM UPDATE, now airing every week night at 7pm ET on Rumble. Other sources are listed below.