Niccolo Soldo interviews Glenn Greenwald

Our shelter, now in several locations, simultaneously employs homeless people and helps them exit the street while paying them to do what they most love: caring for abandoned animals. I realize, for judging a person’s worth, it’s not as noble or important as putting a rainbow flag or a #BLM hashtag in one’s Twitter bio, but we’re doing the best we can.

That is one of the many ironies of the Trump years: under the self-glorifying and unhinged banner of #Resisting fascism, American liberals marched behind and empowered war criminals, CIA and FBI goons, neocon sociopaths, the scummiest of the Bush/Cheney operatives who easily scammed them under the name “Lincoln Project,” and the long-discarded and disgraced McCarthyite script that everyone who opposes you is a Kremlin agent and a traitor. Even worse, they relied upon a union of state authority in the form of the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley monopolies, fearful of what Democrats would do when they ascended to power to systematically silence their critics and disappear them from the internet. As I’ve said before, this is the first #Resistance movement in human history that venerates secret security agencies and oligarchical power.

With trust in institutions at an all-time low, and with the political temperature set permanently to MAX, many claim that the USA is tottering and is headed towards collapse. I take the opposite view. My take is that the USA is shedding one skin and morphing into something else. The elites have never been more united despite the sniping between R and D. Time published a piece recently that detailed how the elites came together to torpedo Trump’s re-election. That in my mind shows resiliency. Add to this the 4 year long constant drumbeat of TRUMP-RUSSIA, and attach to the increasingly loud anti-China noise from the right, and we have a situation in which half the country wants revenge against Russia, while the other half want to punish China. This is an almost ideal situation for the military-industrial complex. Failures at home can be channelled into foreign policy objectives that serve the interests of the elites. And with the Biden regime re-assembling the Obama Era foreign policy team, we are well on our way to seeing what I call Turbo-America: a hyper-interventionist state that uses everything from sanctions to bombs to punish or coerce countries that fall afoul of its increasingly arbitrary rules.

In the past, the natural allies of civil libertarians were leftists (in opposing McCarthyism and the War on Terror, for instance) and libertarians. But now it is the right that is often singled out as targets of censorship and other forms of recrimination free of due process, so many on the right are re-discovering, or discovering for the first time, the necessity of these values. Ultimately, the only way these values will be preserved is if everyone across the spectrum defends them not just when they and their allies are persecuted, but in all instances — in fact, even more fervently when one’s political adversaries are targeted, because that is what elevates and enshrines these values as a sacrosanct principle rather than a weaponized tactic of convenience.

Read much more here: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-kinshasa-interviews-glenn-greenwald