Democrats Abandon Free Speech

Video Transcript: Plus, an interview with Matt Taibbi on his reporting of the Twitter files

GLENN GREENWALD

DEC 31

∙

PREVIEW

SAVE

Watch System Update Episode #1 here on Rumble.

Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of the debut episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Monday, December 12, 2022. As I indicated last week, we now have a service in place that will produce full transcripts of all the live shows we do – Monday through Friday, live on Rumble, at 7:00 pm ET – for our subscribers here.

We have a backlog of the first ten episodes from the first two weeks of shows that we'll post here over the next five days. We will be off from Wednesday, December 28 until Sunday, January 1. We'll be back live on Monday, January 2, 2023, and will start publishing full transcripts of every show here within the next 24 hours for those we prefer to read the program rather than watch.

We begin this episode with an examination of how free speech has fallen from the place it had always occupied in U.S. history, a universally held value, to one that half the country now aggressively rejects. We will then speak with the independent journalist at the heart of one of this year's most important stories, Matt Taibbi, and we will conclude the program with a specific look at a glaring and common conflict of interest and how a major journalistic outlet has been covering what it incessantly claims is Twitter's imminent downfall.

Monologue:

Now, while this is our debut show on Rumble, and we could not be more excited to share it with you, we have spent the last several weeks broadcasting test episodes on Locals, Rumble's community-based platform I just mentioned. During those past episodes, a common theme emerged. We are immersed in one of the most radical changes in American political life in decades, if not longer. Namely, one of the most significant and powerful factions in the United States, the Democratic Party and the left-liberals who support it, the faction that dominates Washington, Hollywood, media, academia and increasingly the largest sectors of corporate power, simply no longer believes in free speech, either as a societal value or even as a constitutional doctrine.

So many of our most recent intense political controversies are driven by their central degradation. It is the most significant dynamic driving so many of our most vitriolic debates. That is certainly what explains, for instance, the deranged, intense rage among liberal media employees over Elon Musk's vow to restore just a modicum of greater political free expression to Twitter, and even more so, their unified indignation over the reporting done by the independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, in which, whatever else you think of them, they did what journalists are supposed to do: they brought transparency to one of the nation's most powerful corporations by shining light on the internal censorship regime that had governed Twitter until very recently.

Americans disagreeing with one another is nothing new. This country has always been composed of a politically polarized citizenry. That is likely an inevitable byproduct of creating a democratic republic that guarantees core civil liberties by giving millions of people, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions, the freedom to express themselves, to organize, to petition their government for redress. You're basically ensuring intense pluralism rather than uniformity of thought. The more authoritarian a society is, the more conformity there will be. Conversely, the freer it is, the more conflict of ideas and beliefs one will encounter. That's normal and healthy to be expected. Indeed, that is the aspirational design of the United States.

I've always seen the Constitution as a psychological and sociological document as much as it is a political one. That's because its framing fundamentally relies upon…...