#AIS: Glenn Greenwald & Matt Taibbi discuss the new political divide, moderated by David Sacks

The moderator opens by explaining that the session grew out of a throwaway remark by Jason (the source also renders the name as "Jason Maynard") on the podcast. As the moderator tells it, Jason said he was struggling to book liberals for the event and could only find right-wingers such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. The moderator describes both as independent journalists with Substack columns.

He sketches their past: Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone in 2009, asked why nobody went to jail after the financial crisis, and Greenwald broke the story of government mass surveillance. Both were once seen as left-wing or liberal, he says, yet today they have somehow been read out of liberalism. He proposes starting with what happened to politics to make that so, what liberalism and conservatism now mean, and whether left versus right still captures the divide.

One panelist jokes that being invited because of a throwaway line is gratifying, then argues that "far right" has become a punishing label for anyone who diverges from liberal orthodoxy. As evidence he lists Russell Brand, a long-time supporter of Jeremy Corbyn by his account, Joe Rogan, who he says named Bernie Sanders his favorite candidate 18 months earlier, and Elon Musk, whom he describes as an Obama voter in 2012 and a large ACLU donor. These are his characterizations.

He calls the label an enforcement tool bereft of substance. He adds that the issues in front of the public rotate every five or ten years: a decade ago the talk was of Obama's drone program, Guantanamo not being closed and Wall Street fraud, while now it is whether the internet should be an instrument of censorship, whether to trust the US security state to define disinformation, and proxy wars like Ukraine.

He says shifting alliances are natural but a bigger change is that liberalism itself has changed because of Donald Trump. By liberals he means the mainstream Democratic wing, naming Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who he says now see Trump, his movement and the Republican party as the single overriding menace, and as actual fascists trying to install a white nationalist dictatorship.