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Conversations with Coleman
Power and Hypocrisy with Glenn Greenwald [S2 Ep.22]
01:20:18
Before I get to my guest today, I have two announcements. The first is that there's limited edition merchandise is available for fans of the show! You can check that out at Colemanhughes.org. My second announcement today is about my interview with Michael Shellenberger from a few weeks back. It seems that Michael made some very misleading or outright false claims about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Specifically, he said that climate change did not contribute to the intensity of wildfires in California and Australia. It was a surprising claim to me at the time, but I didn't push back in the moment. Although in retrospect, I should have because it turns out this is not the consensus of the climate science community. Some of his other claims, including that we're not in a sixth mass extinction are at the very least far more controversial than he indicated. So to rectify this, I'm going to get a mainstream climate scientist on the show very soon, and...
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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Before I get to my guest today, I have two announcements. The first is that there's limited edition merch available for fans of the show. There are a few different T shirts and a mask, so you can check that out@colemanhughes.org My second announcement today is about my interview with Michael Shellenberger from a few weeks back. It seems that Michael made some very misleading or outright false claims about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Specifically, he said that climate change did not contribute to the intensity of wildfires in California and Australia. This was a surprising claim to me at the time, but I didn't push back in the moment, although in retrospect I should have, because it turns out this is not the consensus of the climate science community. And some of his other claims, including that we're not in a sixth mass extinction, are at the very least far more controversial than he indicated. So to rectify this, I'm going to get a mainstream climate scientist on the show very soon and cover all of these topics in detail. So my guest today is Glenn Greenwald. Glenn probably needs no introduction as he's among the most famous journalists in the world. In this interview we talk about the philosophical through line in his career as a journalist. We talk about free speech. We talk about the surprising similarities between George Bush's war on Islamic terror and Joe Biden's war on white supremacist terror. We talk about false accusations of racism. We talk about Glenn's experience raising mixed race kids in Brazil. We talk about the danger posed by elites who don't realize they live in a bubble. We talk about President Biden's race based policy for pandemic aid. And Glenn gives his advice to young journalists. So without further ado, Glenn Greenwald Glenn Greenwald, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [03:07]
A
Hey Coleman, it's great to be with you. I've been watching you for a while and I'm happy to talk to you.
- [03:12]
B
All right, so a lot of places we could start here. But I think one of my questions, and probably many people's questions about your career in general, is the uniqueness and seeming incoherence of it relative to the two party discourse that we see in the predominant in the mainstream media. People look at your career and they say you were defending the free speech rights of even Nazis in the 90s. And then in the 2000s, you were at the forefront of the concern about our privacy rights being infringed by the US Security state and on into the Obama administration, and then, you know, and then in 2016. And since then, you've been one of the foremost critics of the mainstream media consensus around issues such as the collusion, alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. And you've been on different sides of these issues, and at different points, you seem to be in either one party's camp or the other on various issues, which is just not what many people are used to. And so my question is, what's the common thread in Glenn Greenwald's career? What is the thing, the concern, philosophically, that sort of connects all of the various positions you've taken?
- [04:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, and it's a little difficult and complex to answer, in part because it spans a long time. Right. I was a constitutional lawyer for 10 years or more. You alluded to some of my work doing that. And then I've been a journalist for 15 years covering a lot of different issues, and the political landscape has shifted as well. And I found the question interesting in your use of the word incoherent, because incoherent is how I actually see the two party discourse. Right. You said incoherent in respect to the two party discourse. I actually think what's incoherent is the two party discourse in the sense that it constantly shifts and has no values, no fixed convictions or beliefs. It's always moving based on whatever serves the interest of that faction at any given moment. And so if you are somebody who kind of fixes yourself to a principle or to a conviction as opposed to a faction or a partisan dogma, it's going to seem like you're the one shifting, when in reality, what shifting is it is that landscape and you're actually just simply sitting in place. Now, that doesn't mean that I've been this avatar, perfect consistency, over 15 years in that time that I've been writing about politics. Certainly I'VE changed some views. I've evolved on how I think of things. And because the political landscape also transforms, necessarily your own views transform as well. But I think certainly you can identify certain consistent principles that shape my work. One is a belief in free speech, obviously something I devoted myself to as a lawyer and then also a journalist. And not just free speech. And like the technical, narrow, legal and constitutional sense that the state can't imprison you or fine you for political opinions that you express, but also in the broader cultural sense of free speech as a value, meaning people should be free to express ideas and to question orthodoxies and pieties without any kind of punishment, whether it's being removed from social media platforms or losing other kinds of privileges. And then I would say the same about due process. Obviously, due process was a major concern of mine in my critiques, my early critiques of a war on terror, the idea that the government could imprison you without charges in Guantanamo or kidnap you off the streets of Europe and ship you to Egypt or Syria for torture, put you in a CIA black site. So due process is certainly a fixed value of mine, but again, not only in the strict legal and constitutional sense, but also in the cultural sense that I try and oppose mob justice or kind of popular attempts to find someone guilty without there being sufficient evidence or some kind of something resembling fair process. So those are the kinds of fixed values. Those aren't the only ones, but those are just examples of how I think my principles are illustrated. And then I think beyond the principles, there's just kind of an ethos in journalism, which is I've always tried to. You know, I started writing about politics in part to focus on issues that I thought were getting insufficient attention from political and media elite circles. So I didn't start writing about politics to criticize the Iraq war because that was already being done. I started writing about politics to highlight the dangers of what I thought were these civil liberties incursions with Article 2 powers formulated by Bush and Cheney and those kind of extremist lawyers in the administration like John Ashcroft and John Yoo and David Addington. And so I've always tried to use my platform to focus on things that other people aren't focusing on. And that kind of morphed into a belief that I also need to question the things that I think are receiving insufficient scrutiny, which doesn't mean being a reflexive contrarian and automatically denouncing whatever most people believe, because I think that's just as bad as being a mindless conformist. But it does mean, you know, being willing to subject things that a lot of other people have decided should be shielded from further critical evaluation to questioning and doubt and skepticism. And I think that's oftentimes how I play my best role. And sometimes that does mean that you're favoring one side over the other, and sometimes it means you're favoring the other instead. And I think that's the point is I try really hard never to be captive to any one particular, certainly political party or even political ideology or power faction.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah, I remember the point you make about the parties having no real principles was driven home to me, and I think a lot of people, truly, for the first time in my Life, and I'm 25, so this was perhaps not the first major reversal in my life, but certainly the first one that made an impression that I was old enough to truly appreciate was the reversal of the parties on Russia and on foreign intervention, especially in the Middle East. If you had told me when I was 10 or 12 that by 2016, one party would become Russia hawks, like the Democrats would become Russia hawks, the Republicans would be arguing we should get out of the Middle east, at least partly, I would have told you there's no way you're crazy. But that's because at the time I wouldn't have appreciated the extent to which, especially on matters like foreign policy, parties really don't have principles. Free speech is another issue on which parties tend not to have principles and tend to be swayed by whatever's convenient at the time. On the other hand, there are some domestic issues that the left and the right seems to be roughly on the same side of over decades, having to do with the social concerns of their main constituencies. But I do think that this is one of the things that has marked you apart as a critic and opinion writer and journalist is that is your perception that the two parties are not so different, and your critique of the sort of corporate media, that's what, as a reader, has made you refreshing to me, I guess. Am I right to identify that another of the common threads in your career is a distrust of the use of state power, in particular by the. Whichever party is ruling at the time.
- [11:07]
A
Yeah, for sure. I mean, for one thing, I think that the role of journalism, you know, and it's ironic that although I don't. Not a classic journalist, I wasn't trained as a journalist. I didn't start my career as a journalist. I feel like sometimes I am more devoted to the safeguarding of old school journalistic principles than a lot of more traditional journalists are, because for me, that is one of the principal attributes of why journalism is important in a democracy. Right. It's not important just arbitrarily, because we've decided it is. It's important because it's supposed to be an adversarial force to state power and official proclamations. It's not supposed to be a handmaiden to it. It's not supposed to be an ally of it. It's supposed to be one of the, in Madisonian terms, factions pushing back on state power. So that absolutely is embedded in the ethos of how I see journalism. And it was always how I saw journalism when I was young. The kind of defining moments for me of how I thought about journalism were probably two events, one being Danny Alsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which proved that the US Government had been lying for years about the Vietnam War for years. Like, they ended up lying in a lot of ways about Iraq. And the Nixon administration tried to prevent publication. And the New York Times went to court and sued the Nixon administration and went to the Supreme Court and won the right to publish those top secret documents. They tried to imprison Ellsberg. For it was a very adversarial moment between the media on the one hand and the government on the other. And then the kind of film and book, all the President's Men, that told the saga of the Watergate investigation, led by Washington Post reporters, young Washington Post reporters that took down an administration and one of the most powerful figures of the 20th century and Richard Nixon, one of the shrewdest and most politically adept. So that was always how I understood journalism. When I went into journalism, that was what I was chasing, was that idea that it was supposed to be a force opposing the government. And it was at a time I started writing about politics in 2005, when the relationship between the government and the press was incredibly deferential. It was after 9, 11, it was the New York Times that helped sell the war in Iraq. The press wouldn't even call what the government was doing torture on the grounds that the US Government denied it was, and it wasn't up to the press to contradict the government. So it was a very deferential and in my view, excessively cozy relationship that I think has continued to this day. So being adversarial to the government is absolutely part of not just what I see as a journalist should do, but also as a citizen. But I'll tell you, it's interesting that you use 2016. It just shows how much younger you are than I am. Just I think six or seven years separates us or so. But my first memory, which is very similar to the one that you described, was not 2016, which I think was exactly illustrating the dynamic you said. But it was actually in 2008. A lot of people have forgotten that when I started writing about politics, because I was critiquing George Bush and Dick Cheney, I was perceived as this liberal or leftist. And I was beloved by the very people who most hate me now, which are like hardcore partisan Democrats, not even the left partisan Democrats. They're the ones who built my platform. They're the reason I have an audience. I started blogging in 2005. It was kind of a late entry. There were a lot of big blogs already then. There was an idea that you couldn't really enter. But because I was writing harsh but informed critiques using my legal expertise about these executive power theories, all the big liberal journalists and bloggers and media outlets would say, oh, go read Glenn Greenwald. And they're the ones who built my audience. And I took seriously. The Democrats claim to be vehemently opposed on principle to these war on terror policies of indefinite detention of rendition of Guantanamo, of NSA spying without a warrant. Because I was really the first time I started paying attention to politics. I was working on my law practice. I wasn't really interested in politics in the 90s when it was kind of low stakes after the fall of the Soviet Union and with the Clinton scandals like Monica Lewinsky and Paula, I just didn't find partisan politics very interesting. So I believe the Democrats were sincere because it was so vehement, was their rhetoric in opposition to Bush and Cheney's war on terror policy. And then when Barack Obama won in 2008 and very early on in 2009, began replicating and embracing and in some instances expanding the very war on terror policies that the Democrats generally and Obama specifically had spent years denouncing. I was shocked. And I continued to critique Obama in the same way I had been critiquing Bush and Cheney, because they were the same policies and there was never any choice. And that alienated a lot of my readers who got converted from fans or supporters into adversaries and enemies who kind of abandoned that view. And that's when I realized, and maybe it was naive of me not to have realized it earlier, what you said you realized in 2016, which is that the parties simply adopt whatever positions they need to serve their interest at the moment, even if it's directly contrary to the one that they were advocating just a year earlier when they were out of power. Just like a word on Russia, because I think it's so interesting what you said. I'm really glad you perceive it that way. There's two fascinating things about russiagate and how it kind of shaped my positioning in the Trump era. One is that whenever people try and put labels on me or put me in a political camp, the only one I really accept is civil libertarian. And so if you're a civil libertarian, that comes out of this kind of ethos, like I was describing, of revering Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and the old school ACLU that defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and Skokie, that kind of political sensibility that really I identified with most. The most horrifying event of the 20th century, or one of them was the McCarthy era, which was about nothing other than claiming that the Kremlin had infiltrated American institutions, accusing everybody of being an agent of Moscow, claiming that the Russians were this existential threat. And that was a script to which I just instinctively repelled. And when that script emerged in 2016 as part of the Clinton campaign with those dark, nefarious commercials like what are the Russians have with Donald Trump? And people started claiming that Jill Stein was a Russian agent and Donald Trump was and WikiLeaks was, and anyone who was opposed to the Democratic Party just, I couldn't believe that large parts of American liberalism and the left had kind of dusted off and excavated this crusty script from the Cold War that was used by, like William Buckley in the old Cold War right against American liberals for so long. But the other really interesting thing about it, Coleman, more recently, is that for eight years, Obama was vilified by both political parties for being insufficiently confrontational with Putin. That kind of wing of the Republican Party, like, kind of the neocon hawkish wing like McCain and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio constantly were accusing him of being too meek to confront Putin in Syria or to send lethal arms to Ukraine. And even that was a Hillary Clinton position, that she should have been confronting Putin in Ukraine, in Syria. And Obama's view, and you probably remember the 2012 election, they mock Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was like this existential threat or the greatest geopolitical threat, saying that was a relic of the Cold War. And I agreed it with Obama, but all the way through 2016, Obama was saying, you're insane to think we should go confront Russia in places of vital interest to them, but not to us. Like Ukraine and Syria, Russia is not a threat to us. They're at most like a weak regional power there. Their economy is smaller than Italy's. Confronting Russia is madness, given that they still have this huge nuclear arsenal. We should cooperate with Russia, and he did cooperate with Putin to attack what they got regarded as terrorist groups in Syria to do the Iran deal. And so when the Democrats did this 180 degree turnaround on Russia in order to help Hillary in the campaign, and then in order to sustain this four year conspiracy theory that the Russians had taken over control of the United States through blackmail of Trump, they didn't even acknowledge or recognize that it was a complete abandonment of everything Obama had spent eight years saying about Russia. And so I can understand completely why for you looking at politics intensely for the first time, that was such an eye opening moment for you. Had that been the first time I was paying attention to politics, it would have taught me the same lesson, the way that Obama's continuation of the war on terror did in 2008.
- [19:59]
B
You have this piece you wrote sometime in the past month or two about the succession of scary villains from the Bush era to today that have been used to provoke fear and allow the expansion of federal power. We're talking about Islamic terror in the aughts and Russia starting in 2016 and now domestic white supremacist terror under Biden and the similarity of the policies now being advocated by Biden and those advocated 5, 10, 12 years ago to fight Islamic terror. So can you talk a little bit about that?
- [20:38]
A
Yeah. So obviously the Cold war relied for 50 years on a singular villain, which was communism. And you can agree that it was really the existential threat it was presented as, or you can think it was exaggerated. But what's indisputable is it was the centerpiece of American power. Everything that America did in the world, overthrowing government, supporting right wing dictators, supporting genocide, engineering coups, all kinds of crimes with the CIA was done in the name of defeating this, you know, working central villain. And so having a villain has been crucial to American power since at least the end of World War II. And then when the Soviet Union fell and was no longer this global threat to export communism, and that villain was lost. There was about a decade, as I was saying, under Clinton, it was supposed to result in peace dividends where we could dismantle the security state that had been erected in the name of communism. And yet none of it happened. We kept the military just as big, we kept the security state just as big. There was that iconic moment when Madeleine Albright wanted to intervene in the war in Yugoslavia and Colin Powell was adamantly opposed on the grounds that we have no interest in intervening in the war in Yugoslavia. And Madeleine Albright said, well, what's the point of having this enormous military if you're not going to use it? So even when there was no villain in the 90s, nothing got dismantled. Because governments, once they have power, bureaucracies, once they have billions of dollars in budget, don't give them away. They keep them, even if the pretext is gone. So once George Bush was elected and he got elected on a promise to have a more humble foreign policy, he actually ran to Clinton and Gore's left in 2000 by saying, we're involving ourselves in too many conflicts. It was very similar to what Trump ran on in 2016. Anti interventionist kind of view that has always had a home in the Republican Party going back to World War I and World War II. And there were people on the right opposed to involvement in either conflict. 911 obviously happened in Al Qaeda and Islamic radicalism became the new villain that communism had been. And it maybe lasted a decade. I would say after six or seven or eight years, when there was no more mass casualty attacks of the size of al Qaeda of 9 11, people started losing their fear of Al Qaeda. They weren't really as preoccupied with it as they had been. There was a poll showed people wanted to get out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan, a kind of rejuvenation of this idea that we shouldn't be an endless war. And then all of a sudden we were able to do the Snowden reporting in 2013 and 2014 and show mass spying on the part of the NSA. And there was huge sentiment, polls were showing overwhelmingly that people wanted to roll back the nsa, that people wanted to roll back the security state that had been implemented after 911 because they no longer really feared Al Qaeda. And then as you said, suddenly Al Qaeda kind of got replaced by isis. That became like the new scary threat for a couple years. And then ISIS was replaced by Russia in 2016, that for four years became the thing we were all supposed to fear was Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. And now in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, which they want to call insurrection to make it more historically momentous, there's an idea that now the gravest threat and the intelligent community is saying this, our domestic extremists or white supremacy, white supremacist terrorists. And so, because I don't think people, I don't think Putin ever really worked as a villain. It worked to scare liberals who watch cable news. But I don't think most people woke up and worried about what the Kremlin was doing, because it doesn't really affect their lives. So I think domestic terrorism is now taking center stage. And you see the Biden administration talking about launching a domestic war on terror modeled almost completely after the first war on terror. That prompted me to get involved in politics to the point where the legislation that they want to enact is this very short law sponsored by Adam Schiff, a very hawkish Democrat, that does nothing more than take the current war on terror legislation that allows the government to do a whole variety of things to anyone that they designate as a foreign terrorist organization and just amend the law very simply to add or domestic. So foreign or domestic terrorist organizations, they've already, even without this law, begun increasing FBI surveillance, FBI monitoring. They're very aggressively prosecuting anyone involved in January 6th, including people who use no violence, who just kind of are guilty at most of, like, misdemeanor trespassing. They're depicting this domestic movement as on par as a threat, as Al Qaeda was in the wake of 9 11. They're comparing 16 to 9 11, and you can just see it doesn't mean these threats aren't real. All these threats are real. Right. Russia is an adversary of the United States. There really was a 911 attack that showed Islamic radicalism can do damage. There really was a communist threat in the Cold War. There really are some domestic extremists now in the United States. The question is, do you allow an inflation or an exaggeration of that threat in order to put the population in sufficient fear that induces them to acquiesce to any power assertions the government has? And I think that's the model, not necessarily conspiratorially, but just like by reflex, that the US Security state uses to get people to constantly give them more money and give them more power and justify their existence.
- [26:16]
B
Yeah. I learned from reading that piece that Biden called white supremacist terror. I think this is an exact quote, the most lethal threat to the homeland today, which is. Which seems delusional to me.
- [26:30]
A
And I think, well, and Coleman, he emphasized explicitly, he said, worse than Al Qaeda, worse than isis, worse than Russia. And he said it's the intelligence community that says that.
- [26:41]
B
Right. So I feel like the instinct behind this line of thinking, for me, at least the way I would phrase it, is that anytime there is a real threat, there is always an incentive to Exaggerate it. And it's an irresistible incentive on the part of people in power. And so we have to be allowed to criticize the overreaction to real threats so that the reaction to threats doesn't become worse than the disease. It's a systematic tendency. It's not an accident that every time there's a threat, the party in power tends to exaggerate it. Right. This is a feature of. I would say, probably a feature of human psychology, not just of our politics. But it's not a bug, and it's something that we have to be aware of. I'm curious. This is one of the questions I got from Twitter when I said I was having you on my podcast. Is there any influence of George Orwell in your writing? Because if so, it seems like this would be the point on which it's there.
- [27:48]
A
Oh, for sure. I think, you know, Orwell is one of the most brilliant writers and political observers of the 20th century. I think if you aren't influenced by Orwell, it's very difficult to understand contemporary political propaganda, which in turn makes it very difficult to understand contemporary politics in advanced democracies. I think the thing that you said is something that relates very much to one of the things that Orwell was probably a pioneer in observing, which is you alluded to fear, and you said you think it's part of human psychology. I think it's a crucial point. Fear is a really important part of our psyche. Without fear, we would not have survived as a species. We need fear. Fear is crucial to our survival. If there's something lurking near me that's about to kill me, or if there's some fatal disease that can end my life, I need to be scared of it. I need to be worried about it. I need to want to take precautions against it. I need. I want to make sure that other people or the government of the society are protecting me from it as well. We organize tribes based on that for thousands of years. That's embedded in our DNA. But like any other human instinct, it can be manipulated, and then it can turn into a disorder. Right. I mean, there's such things as anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders are when people have fears of things that they don't need to fear, or they have so much fear of things that may be rational to fear, but they have so much fear of it that they become paralyzed in life and they can no longer function rationally. And governments know that. Governments know how to manipulate their citizenry, and fear is a really potent factor. And Orwell spoke a lot about how language can be used to constantly elevate fear levels in a way that I think is absolutely fundamental. And I think the problem has become that everything ends up being binary. It's so bizarre to me in this kind of trajectory that you alluded to in the first question, which is in opposing the war on terror and the policies that I believed were infringing constitutional values, it was necessary for me to argue that the threat of Islamic extremism was being exaggerated, which didn't mean that I thought it was non existent. It just meant that I thought it was being deliberately exaggerated, or that the measures that were being taken in its name were unnecessary and excessive, or that the cost of those measures outweighed the dangers that were being invoked to justify them. And I often got accused of being an apologist for Islamic terror or somebody who didn't appreciate the dangers of Islamic radicalism as a result of doing that, even though I wasn't arguing it was nonexistent. I was trying to escape this binary framework of saying either it's this existential threat that we have to completely reorganize society to protect ourselves against, or it's something that doesn't really exist. And I see exactly the same debate taking place now. So if you start to wonder and worry and question whether January 6 is being described in hyperbolic and melodramatic terms is just like the shortest insurrection in all of human history, like an insurrection that was waged by about 700 Gen X and boomers from Facebook pages of pro Trump sites that got put down in three hours, that killed nobody. Only four of them were killed, two by dropping dead of a heart attack. Suddenly you're an apologist for domestic terrorism or you're a sympathizer of the American right. It's exactly the same rhetorical dynamic as was used by a lot of people, neocons and people on the right against those of us who were critics of the first war on terror. And I think very much that this kind of enemy framework that Orwell was particularly focused on, right, we're at war with East Asia. We've always been at war with Eurasia. And you know, when a year ago they were our allies, reveals so much still about how all of this war rhetoric and how all of this fear mongering operates.
- [31:54]
B
You know, it's interesting, it just occurred to me, a few years ago I wrote a piece, I think it was called the Racism treadmill, like a 3,000 word essay. And I used the phrase war on racism in all caps to try to Motivate the same point that people are now being manipulated by their fear of racism and white supremacy. I would say in my memory, ever since around 2014, there's been a strain of this, but it's only grown where it's either you think racism and white supremacy is the number one threat facing the nation about which we have to fundamentally reorganize society, or you're saying racism doesn't exist. And this is actually probably the most common criticism I've gotten for my writing and speaking is, oh, Coleman is that guy who thinks racism doesn't exist. And it's amazing because not only do I not think that, I've told stories on this podcast of me being a victim of racism in certain cases, right? Like this could not be any more. It's really exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. It is a real thing. But there is this huge incentive to exaggerate it and a pretty large taboo certainly on the left, about criticizing any aspect of the exaggeration, about pointing out the exaggeration. And it's incredibly infuriating when you're trying to make that point. And it simply gets reduced to this binary.
- [33:33]
A
Well, so I'll just tell you this experience I had just this last week that was so fascinating to me about exactly this topic. So, as you might know, I live in Brazil, which is a country like the United States, where racism has played a big role and still does in shaping the society and the history. It was the last country to end slavery, did so 25 or 30 years after the United States. I'm married to a left wing member of Congress who is black. We adopted two children who are brown. The oldest one is by appearance black. He's mixed race. And I was with my son, my oldest son, who's now 13, in the mall about a week ago. And I was walking about 10 paces behind him and he was with his cousin who's 16 and also black, maybe like 10 paces in front of me. And my son was wearing this like sweatshirt with a hood over his head. And it's very common in Brazil. One of the ways that racial conflict often manifests is in these kind of like bourgeois upper middle class malls where security will persecute and follow very aggressively anyone they perceive as who lives in the favela or who doesn't belong based on their appearance. And I've never noticed it before with my kids when they're with me, but because they weren't really with me, they looked like they were alone. I saw the security guard start to Follow them. And they call on the walkie talkie to another security guard who then came around the corner. And they walked up to my son and said, you need to take your that hood off. And he was like, why? And they said, because there's a rule that you can't wear a hood in the mall. And then I heard that, then I walked over there and I said, that's not a fucking rule. That's utter bullshit. And I told him to keep the hood on, and he did. And then we just like went on our way. And so afterward I talked to him about it and he was agitated and kind of angry, not like enraged, but just a little bit upset that he just felt like it was unjust. So I asked him like, why do you think that happened? And he kept saying, I think it happened because I was wearing, because of my clothes. I was wearing like a hoodie. And to a lot of people that looks like you don't belong in that kind of an environment. And I said, well, do you think that it had to like, race was a factor? And he was like, what do you mean? I said, well, like you were a white kid and had blonde hair. Do you think that same thing would have happened? He kind of thought about it and he was like, it's hard to say. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it was a factor, maybe it wasn't. I was incredibly angry about it, but I was trying very hard to not put him into this position that naturally he wasn't in of feeling so victimized that he would look at society as his enemy. And I found it so interesting that his reaction was to kind of evaluate it from a much more nuanced perspective than I had. I was like, that's racism. And he was looking at it from different ways that he could have altered and changed the perception. And one of the reasons why I become so violently opposed to this obsessive focus on race as an all purpose explainer in our discourse is because I don't want my kids to grow up in a world where they see themselves and they see their relationship to the world as being exclusively or primarily or overwhelmingly defined by race. Because I don't think it is. And I think what is really happening with this obsession is we are just absolutely racially Balkanizing ourselves in ways that organically and naturally we wouldn't. I think we would, on our left, to our own devices, relate to each other in a much more humanistic way. Which isn't to say racism would disappear, but it wouldn't be the predominant attributes shaping and defining us. And I really worry that racism is being injected into the bloodstream of Western culture in the name of combating it.
- [37:47]
B
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- [41:34]
A
Yeah, I think two things about that. One is, it is interesting when you adopt children, the experience is a little bit different, especially if you adopt older children, as my husband and I did. We adopted them when they were 10 and 8. Then if you have them biologically, or you adopt them as infants, because they kind of come to you with a certain amount of socialization and certain things already formed that you haven't instilled in them. And my kids were. They lost their parents in really terrible ways when they were very young. So they grew up in a shelter of orphans or kids who were in a similar situation from a very early age. And that shelter was in northeastern Brazil. And it was very racially diverse. I remember when we visited the first time, it was one of the first things that called my attention was how racially diverse it was. And so once we adopted them and brought them back, we had a lot of cosmopolitan social workers and psychologists who were more liberal or left, as well as other couples we knew who had adopted children, who lived in Rio de Janeiro with a sophisticated city, and therefore more culturally left as well, who were encouraging us to have discussions with them about race, gender, sexual orientation. There are books that you give them to teach them about that. And they definitely left the shelter with certain conceptions about gender and sexual orientation that were, you know, kind of sexist about the traditional roles of boys and girls. Northeastern Brazil tends to be very conservative. It's very religious. They kind of absorb that. Also sexual orientation as well. For sure, they. They. There was a lot of homophobia. The idea that two men could be married was something that was foreign to them. That took a little socializing. But I noticed really early on the issues of race, if you tried to sit down with them and talk to them about race or racism, which I felt like it was our obligation to do because, you know, they're not white and all that. I noticed that it was almost as if it was completely foreign to them. Like, the idea of judging people by their race, given how they had grown up, was something that really hadn't occurred to them. No one taught them to do that. No one instructed them to do it. The kids they were around were every race imaginable. They're mixed race. So they really didn't see the world that way. And that was very eye opening for me because I had always thought that we naturally look at differences amongst each other and notice them and care about them because of the tribalism that we were discussing earlier, that we had organized ourselves by tribes in order to survive. And I really started questioning that when I saw how my kids thought about race or actually hadn't thought about race, despite, you know, their experience or because of their experience. That's one thing. And the other thing, you know, I think that there's a huge difference between elite discourse on these questions and the discourse of everybody else. You know, like, if you look at the controversies of the last couple of weeks where race is concerned, it involved things like whether Napoleon Jones, one of the richest and most powerful and influential and privileged journalists from the United States, should get tenure at the University of North Carolina, as opposed to, like, the eight other schools that have now offered her tenure, or whether the tennis player Naomi Osaka, who made $55 million last year, should be obligated, like every other player, to talk to the press as a condition for participating in very lucrative tournaments. I think there's this, like, very strong disconnect between how race and gender and sexual orientation is talked about on the elite level and how everybody else experiences it. I mean, I grew up kind of like you, in a very diverse neighborhood, a working class neighborhood, raised by a single mother. And I had this experience. You know, I went. My mother died in at the end of 2019, and before she did, I took my kids to see her, and she wanted me to go into her work office. Her office. It was like a kind of blue collar office. You know, it wasn't a factory. It was like she worked at a company that sold airline parts, and it was like kind of like the home office of that company. It was like blue collar, you know, and she was always telling me about the political arguments that they would have. And I walked in and it was like a very diverse office. Like, the guy who is her friend who sat next to her was like a Jamaican immigrant who worships Trump. And my mother hated Trump. And, you know, it was just like a very politically vibrant discussion. And I walked in and, you know, she wanted to kind of show me off. They had watched me from Fox and stuff and TV and Snowden, and I started participating in and listening to their discussion. And as somebody who is connected to the mores of elite discourse, they started like, Making jokes about each other's ethnicity and race and religion and age and gender that were shocking to me. It was like. My reaction was like, you can't say that. That's unacceptable. That's not allowed. And for them, the way they argued and spoke and, like, understood one another was so different in terms of its sensibility and ethos than the framework that elites who are African American, gay, Latino women try to impose on everybody else. I think that there's a huge cleavage, a huge gap between elite discourse on the one hand, and how everyone else experiences things on the other.
- [47:12]
B
Yeah, this is. I really couldn't agree more with that last point. I don't think it's said often enough that the biggest difference on sort of the orientation, the proper orientation towards racism, the biggest difference might not be between black people and white people, or even Democrats and Republicans, but sort of between elites and everybody else. And that might seem shocking because if you are an elite, like I am, and like any other human being in the world, you're only noticing really what's in your own bubble. And then you look at the cleavages within the elite, well, then you're going to see big differences between, you know, Democrat elites and Republican elites. And it's going to seem like that's the biggest division. But that's really a function of not being able to. Of being in a social bubble, which, again, is not anyone's fault. But it just. I mean, there's one example of this I thought was really shocking and telling, which is last year when California put a Prop 16 on the ballot, which would have overturned the ban on affirmative action that's been active for over 20 years there. So it would have reinstituted affirmative action in state institutions, colleges, government jobs, and so forth. And on the side of affirmative action was all of these huge corporations. Facebook, Twitter, Uber Lyft, Yelp, United, Wells Fargo and so forth. Several major California sports teams. On the side of keeping racial preferences banned, there was no major corporations. There was just mom and pop shops and so forth. And when it was put to a vote, racial preferences were shot down by over 2 million votes. Right. And we're not talking about a vote where the white people in California had one opinion and the people of color had a different opinion. We're talking about a majority POC state to begin with, a state that's gone Democrat in every presidential election for the past three decades. So it's also not really a red versus blue thing. And every majority Latino county in the state voted against affirmative action here. So to me, the biggest difference or the thing that stood out to me the most was the extent to which every single corporation was against the will of the public, which in this case was majority people of color. Right. So what this tells me is that the sensibilities of the elite are that colorblind policy is wrong, whereas the sensibilities of the public tend to be more warm towards colorblind policy and then also less condemning of the kind of good faith racial jokes that people make amongst friends. As you point out, that's exactly the same experience I've had with friends that are, that I have that are not part of the elite, is that you can make jokes in good faith. And there's an understanding that I don't hate you, but there's that like it's really the antithesis of cancel culture. And again, if you're, if you're in a social bubble, this is just something you're not going to recognize. And I think part of the danger of what's happening now is a lot of people with, you know, sort of blue check mark Twitter, people with cultural power are too deeply ensconced in social bubbles to realize the extent to which the sensibilities that dominate in those elite social bubbles are not the sensibilities of the entire nation, regardless of race. And so you've got to be concerned about enforcing those sensibilities on the nation when they're really not widely subscribed.
- [51:15]
A
Yeah, you know, I think, I mean, I think there's an example that seems kind of trivial, but it's so vivid that it's worth focusing on, which is this attempt to force everybody to refer to Latinos not as Latinos the way most Latinos refer to themselves as, but as Latinx. I don't even know how you pronounce it. Right. So you remove the O and insert the X to make it gender neutral. And you know, in some circles this is virtually obligatory. Like if you don't, if you don't use that word, it means you're, I don't know, harboring some kind of bigotry or transphobia or being, you know, you have a failure of inclusiveness. But you, they, they've done polls, at least one where they've asked, you know, the broader population about this word and like, no one's ever heard of it. And the few people who have hate it is not a word they use. Yeah, this like elite discourse taking place over here that has all of these rules and mores designed to coerce people and control them that are completely unknown to and foreign to pretty much everybody else outside of elite discourse. And, you know, I think one of the ways to think about this is for me, the primary division in America is not race or gender or sexual orientation, but class. That, to me, shapes your experience far more than any of those other categories. Which, again, is not to put yourself in the binary of saying that. When I say that, it means that I don't think racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia are non existent or that they aren't factors in how people experience life. Of course they are. What I mean, though, is that I think class is the bigger element. And the reason there's such a de emphasis on class in elite discourse is obvious, which is that by virtue of the fact that people are part of elite culture, they've already kind of elevated themselves in a class way. But also, there's not nearly as much class latitude in the United States as there once was, or there's certainly not very much. And especially in journalism, which is kind of the controller or police of how discourse occurs on the national level, on the level of national media, there's such a disproportionate representation of people who come from rich families, rich neighborhoods, Ivy League private schools. Actually, since I left the Intercept in October of 2020, realize that if I were to list like the 20th richest people I've ever met in my life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because I work at the Intercept. Other people who work at the Intercept, like journalists or editors, who just come from the richest families on the planet. And so if you are in a culture that values victimization and marginalization and that assigns power and clout based on marginalized status, it's not in the interest of people who have class advantages to have class be the primary metric because they'll lose out. They instead want to ensure that everybody else looks at the world through the prism that advantages them. Where if you're a woman or you're African American or Latino or gay or lesbian or transgender, you're then the marginalized one, the one who is owed things, the one who's owed deference, that has power in the discourse such that, say, a gay person from a family headed by a Goldman Sachs partner who went to Harvard and Yale is supposed to be more marginalized than, say, a straight white, out of work coal miner in West Virginia. And it's not just that it's misguided and distorting of reality to think of it that way. It's actually about power. It's about transferring marginalization and oppression from people whose lives are actually defined and shaped by it to people whose lives are actually much more powerful. There was an interesting example, I don't know, like three or four or five months ago, the very controversial front page reporter for the New York Times, the most powerful and influential newspaper in the West, Taylor Lorenz, had her work criticized by me and by others because she had essentially gotten major stories wrong, falsely accused people of saying things they didn't actually say, like major, major errors. And in response to that criticism, she went on to Twitter and said, my life has been ruined by all of these attacks. And in elite discourse, it made sense to see her as a victim. She's a woman, she's a journalist, and therefore she's kind of like one of the primary victim groups. But if you just take a step back and remove yourself from the very narrow lens of myopic lens of elite discourse, she's somebody who went. She was, she's an extremely rich family in Connecticut. She was educated at a Swiss boarding school, and she currently works for the most powerful newspaper on the planet where she publishes front page articles and has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of social media followers. She makes a lot of money by every metric that most people use to judge a good life or a bad life. Her life is fantastic. But in the context of elite culture, she becomes one of the most sympathetic, victimized figures. That makes sense only within this metric that they've created that is extremely self serving and designed to elevate their experiences at the expense of everybody else's who doesn't have the power to shape discourse and create the rules that everybody has to adhere to.
- [57:28]
B
Yeah, I again, couldn't agree more. Certainly based on my experience as a black person at Columbia University, where I graduated a year ago, it's just, it could not be more crystal clear the extent to which so many people of color, LGBTQ people and so forth, that really had no disadvantages in life, were nevertheless benefiting from a culture that put a primacy on a very superficial kind of victimhood. Not even real victimhood, just membership in this category. And it seemed, it was so clear to me my whole life, that class was so important. And this actually connects to my opinion about the word Latinx. So I'm half Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican on my mom's side. And she grew up in the South Bronx in the 70s when that was synonymous with crime and chaos and so forth. And she came from a very poor background. And so we would visit my Bronx Puerto Rican family all the time as a kid and I learned Spanish through having to talk to my grandmother and so forth. And I remember when I went to Colombia in 2015 or 2016, I for the first time heard this word Latinx, which, as a pretty good Spanish speaker at the time, sounded completely, not only like not a Spanish word, but a word that actually couldn't exist, given the logic of the Spanish language. Is it like a bastardization and anglicization of the language? And I was meeting these kids that were using this word that I felt probably had far less contact with the actual Hispanic community, saying, well, this is what Hispanics are demanding now. And I'm thinking to myself, I just visited my Grandma and my seven, like, my 15 cousins in the Bronx last week. Nobody's using this word. If I brought up this word to them, they would fucking laugh at me. And so I do think that really highlights the extent to which social bubbles are very thick and people have to be made aware of them, or else we. I mean, this is. It's an issue that has big consequences for the country because the more you are an elite and ensconced in elite bubbles and not prodded to think about the extent to which your elite sensibilities are not representative of the country, the more you run into this problem of the public simply not trusting the elites at all. And this is another, I think, big theme in your recent writing is trust in the media is just steadily going down, sort of has been since probably the 70s. And this can also lead to just policies that seem to make no sense to the majority of people in a democracy where it's supposed to be that the policies are sort of driven by what the people want. And another recent example you wrote about was the Biden Coronavirus relief bill that was ruled unconstitutional, but was proposed to have racial preferences to determine which restaurants got relief. So can you talk a little bit about why you chose to write about that?
- [61:04]
A
Yeah. So that was a really interesting case. I felt like it was really incredibly vivid, kind of vignette into a lot of these disputes and conflicts we're talking about. So the Coronavirus Bill relief bill that was enacted in March had a provision in it that provided relief to restaurants, basically smaller restaurants that had been suffering, obviously, because of lockdowns and isolation and the like. And in the. I'm just trying to recall the policy details because they were important in the bill. I think it was something like several billion dollars allocated to this fund, $29 billion. Make that in this bill. What it did was it required that the Small Business Administration administrate and oversee the program of allocating grants and relief payments to small business owners who were restaurant owners. And it provided that there should be a 21 day period where the first 21 days, the only people who are permitted to actually have their applications considered are people who are restaurants where at least 51% or more is owned by someone from a minority group with a history of oppression. And so the Small Business Administration used their regulations that define what groups are minority groups with the history of oppression. And it meant that if you're African American or Latino or from certain Asian countries, then you qualify. But if you are from certain Middle Eastern countries, then you don't. And the appellate court that decided this lawsuit, it was brought by, and that was, this is another really interesting aspect was the lawsuit was brought by a restaurant where 50 it was owned by a married couple that had been struggling to meet its payroll or to pay its rent and was in danger of going out of business. So it applied for one of these Small Business Administration payments on the very first day that the process was open. And it was owned by a married couple. 50, 50. The husband is white and the wife is Latina. So if she had owned 51% instead of 50%, they would have been eligible to be considered within that first 21 day period. But because 50% was owned by a white person, they had to go back to the very back of the line. And the SBA was barred from even considering their application until the ones that had the special racial based privilege were first considered. And they were obviously worried that the fund was going to be exhausted before that 21 day period ended. And they got to them because they actually desperately needed the money. They weren't just suing for fun, they really needed that payment for their restaurant to survive. And the appellate court, in a 2 to 1 decision ruled that it was unconstitutional to decide who gets relief and who doesn't based on what race or ethnicity they belong to. A seemingly very uncontroversial proposition that you just look at the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause and you would think would become an automatic result that every citizen is entitled to equal protection under the law and was designed to prohibit discriminating and deciding who gets what based on their race. But it was a 2 to 1 decision. The majority opinion was written by a judge who is the son of Indian immigrants. His parents are both from India. They immigrated to the United States. He was born in the United States. And he gave this really powerful analogy, which is India is one of the countries considered a minority group with historical oppression, But Afghanistan is not. So he said, imagine two childhood friends. One is from India, one is Afghanistan. They both have stores, restaurants in the same area. They're both suffering for the same reason, namely COVID lockdowns. They both go to apply for this loan for this relief, and the person from India gets to go to the front of the line and gets the payment, but the person from Afghanistan has to go to the back of the line because the law doesn't consider him to be part of, for whatever reason, this minority group that is entitled to priority. And he essentially said that there's few things worse than a government can do. Then start dividing and divvying up people by race and determining who gets what benefits based on that. And the reason I thought it was so interesting was because it's so often talked about this question, say, like in elite settings of affirmative action at Yale or private schools. But these are just like working class people. Why would you want to take a white working class couple struggling to pay their bills and put them to the back of the line along with people who are from the wrong countries simply based on their race, and deny them relief to survive in a way that other people get? So in addition to being unconstitutional, the judge observe that this is a really dangerous thing to start doing. It's going to breed resentment. It's going to Balkanize the country in a way that we were describing earlier. To the extent that you want to encourage and foster people to not necessarily ignore their racial differences, but to come together despite them, what could you do to inflame racial divisions more than saying that this race and this ethnicity gets these benefits, but those go to the back of the line and don't. And so I just found it to be a very interesting opinion. The dissent was written by an African American judge who was appointed by President Obama. And she did a great job of conveying the strongest argument in defense of the view that it is constitutional, which is, namely, that those groups clearly from the data, have been historically oppressed, and therefore the state has an interest in rectifying that historical oppression by kind of balancing the scales in their favor. And I just found that the way the case played out, the skill and sophistication of each judge's argument to be really worthy of consideration, given all the debates about race and equity and preferences and divisions that we're having in this country.
- [67:30]
B
Yeah, I think this debate is mirrored in all kinds of aspects of society right now. Obviously it becomes more poignant during a crisis when people are literally going out of business. But in principle, this is sort of something we have to decide as a nation. Are we going to use race as a proxy for disadvantage, or are we going to use class as a proxy for disadvantage? To me, it seems like if we had nobody's tax returns, if we had no information that gave us a signal on how much need somebody has at the moment, it could make sense in such a situation to use race as a proxy for disadvantage, just because there would be no better alternative. And so it might make sense as a way to cancel out the effects of historical oppression and current racial bias to have racial preferences. But it seems to me like the moment you have a better proxy for disadvantage, whether that's knowing someone's income, it could even be knowing the, you know, the level of crime in their neighborhood. It could be any number of things. The moment you have that better proxy, you have a moral obligation to use the best proxy that you have. And in most cases, I think that there is a better proxy for disadvantaged. I mean, listen, I'm a black small business owner, okay? My podcast is a small business, and I'm the business owner. There are thousands, many, many thousands of black people in this country that don't need any help, that are doing quite well. And the question is, what proxy can we use to motivate public policy that best captures what we should care about in trying to help people? And to me, it's always been clear that class is going to be the better metric there, or if you're talking about a disaster relief fund, then some kind of measure of how badly a restaurant is suffering, for instance, rather than race. So I take one strong side of that argument, and it's one that I think we're going to be having as a nation for a very long time.
- [69:58]
A
I mean, I think what's really interesting and important about this is you were alluding earlier to these values of corporate power centers like Wall street and Silicon Valley and the like, which are very, very hospitable to these new kind of woke themes on race. They, you know, they're very outspoken in defense of Black Lives Matter. There's been CIA videos that people have been mocking about celebrating the gender diversity and sexual orientation of their workforce, because they. What they recognize is that in no way is any of that a threat to their economic power. So they're more than happy to make their workforce more diverse, to have their human resources managers more empowered to fire people because of things that they say. It's one of the ironies, I think, of this post George Floyd movement that has swept into every corporation and newsroom and every aspect of our culture, which is that it's kind of dressed up as this revolutionary movement of liberation, when in reality what it's really doing in a lot of ways is empowering corporate power centers and human resources managers to punish and discipline and fire and control their workforce even more than ever. And I think what has happened is there's this recognition on both the right and the left. It's one of the things in which I'm most interested is these kind of common grievances and goals that people on the right and the left who are told that they're enemies and should be a part actually share, which is, I think, this kind of inequality, class based inequality that comes from corporatism, the control of our politics by these gigantic multinational corporations that don't have the interest at heart of anybody other than a small international or global elite. The way that the two parties are kind of aligned on the level of the establishment wings of both parties, they serve the same donors, they serve the same lobbyists. What is the way out of that? And I think the way out of that is what a lot more Republicans right now are talking about than Democrats, which is a multiracial working class coalition. I think the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 was really interesting because it was actually starting to put something like that together. A lot of people were supporters of the Bernie Sanders movement who weren't classic Democrats or progressives or people on the left. He had a lot of votes from rural parts of the state, from people who don't identify with any party because he was so focused on class and the rights of workers and Amazon warehouse factory workers and people who work at Walmart and the oppression that they're suffering from their miserable work conditions that appeal to everybody, regardless of race. I think that's what people think about when they wake up. And now you see, obviously Donald Trump tried to speak to that and even those smarter kind of right wing populists like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, people like that are very much talking in those terms as well. In fact, I think right after the election, Josh Hawley went on Twitter and someone had said the future of the Republican Party is no longer economic power centers, the highly educated. It's a multiracial working class coalition. And he kind of said, duh, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. And I think that one of the things that's happening is elite discourse by design is encouraging people to hate each other. So you have A black working class person over here. You have a white working class person over here. The white person is encouraged to look at the black working class person as a threat, as a criminal, as something lacking in virtue. The black working class person is taught to look at the white working class person as a racist. I'm not sure those lessons are actually sinking in. I don't think that's how people see each other outside of elite class. But I think that's what our elite discourse is designed to do, is keep them divided. Because the more you conquer them and the more you divide them, the more easily they can be controlled. I think for any kind of real change, organizing based on class rather than race or sexual orientation or gender or any of those other things that are more favored in the elite is by far the more promising path. But I also think that that's a big reason why elites prefer this discourse that in some ways is designed to villainize those people. So if trust and faith on the part of the public is collapsing in media, media outlets don't say, what is it that we've done to lose the trust and faith? They'll say, oh, those people are racist, they're primitive, they're uneducated, they're stupid, they're easily manipulated. Elite discourse is always about demonizing people who are outside of it. So why did Hillary Clinton lose? It's not because the Democratic Party pursued policies of globalism or free trade that wrecked communities and shipped out jobs by the millions. It's because people are the same people who voted for Obama in many cases are racist or retrograde or troglodytes, and therefore Donald Trump appealed to them. And I think if you want to figure out how to cure a lot of social ills, centering and prioritizing class so that multiracial working class coalitions are possible is something that in a lot of ways will promote the real political agenda of both, at least the populist parts of the right and the left.
- [75:39]
B
Okay, so final question. What advice would you have to a young journalist or political writer that's just coming up right now in this environment and wants to be the next Glenn Greenwald or something like that, or the next Coleman Hughes?
- [75:57]
A
Well, so I would say a few things. One is, I think if you decide that you want to do journalism or be involved in politics in some way, presumably there's something that you're passionate about that's driving you to want to do that. And if you enter any kind of institution, media institution or political institution, everything about it will be Designed to suffocate that passion, because passion is dangerous. Passion is something that makes control more difficult. So I think it's extremely important to always be very self aware about what your animating impulse is for wanting to do this work. And maybe you make compromises along the way to get forward or to have a platform, but it's always really crucial to guard with your life that original animating passion and not let it be extinguished. The other thing I would say is in the kind of media ecosystem that now exists, the premium is on people who are doing and saying things that are unique and different and thought provoking, as opposed to just replicating what media institutions, mainstream media institutions are producing, because people don't trust those institutions, as we just said. And so finding a way to make yourself unique is really important. And for me, that doesn't mean looking for ways to be contrarian or to say anything shocking, because that will be recognized as very kind of cheap very quickly. What it means to me is finding three or four things in which you're extremely interested in and excited about and just developing a very deep expertise in those things. Like if you notice, I barely at any one time, I only talk about or focus on a very small number of topics at once because I try really hard only to write about things or to try and claim my readers time and attention if I feel like I have something unique to say that's actually nutritious. So I think making yourself like a specialist, developing really deep expert knowledge by doing that work is really crucial. And then finally, I think one of the reasons that I think there's so much cause for optimism in how media and politics are developing is more than ever, technology is enabling. Finally the promise of the Internet is being fulfilled. Independent voices to sustain themselves. So if you want to get into journalism and develop a large audience, you don't need to go work at the New York Times anymore or try and get a job at NBC. You can go on to social media and say smart things and, you know, find your own voice and build an audience that way and then bring that audience with you to platforms that are designed to let you do that, like Patreon or YouTube or Substack. And I think that in order for journalism not to be a job, not to be a grind, not to be a career, but to be a passion, I like always see journalism not as an end in itself, like art or poetry, but like as a tool to affect the society in ways you think are beneficial. It's vital that you are always pursuing your independence making sure that you're maximizing your freedom and minimizing the constraints that are being imposed on you. Because ultimately, what will determine if you're successful is how genuine and authentic your voice is, how much people trust that what you're telling them is not necessarily what they want to hear, but is actually what you really believe. I think that's what people are craving more than anything. And I think people who are thriving and succeeding right now are the people who are able to do that. And I think that's a really encouraging sign.
- [79:41]
B
That's great advice. So thank you so much, Glenn, for coming on my show. I hope to have you back again sometime.
- [79:48]
A
Yeah, I'm definitely going to invite myself back shortly. I really enjoyed talking to you, the great work you're doing. It was a pleasure speaking to you.
- [79:55]
B
Same.
- [79:56]
A
Okay, bye. Bye.
- [79:57]
B
All right, bye. If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, colemanhughes. Org, and to subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.