Why was a man who was legally protected from deportation sitting in one of the world’s most notorious prisons in El Salvador? This week on Just Asking Questions, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald returns to discuss a case that cuts to the heart of American constitutionalism and due process. Greenwald, known for his reporting on the National Security Agency and his founding role at The Intercept, has become one of the most consistent civil libertarian voices in politics. He joins Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller to break down how and why the Trump administration ignored a court order to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and why this defiance should concern everyone, regardless of their politics.
But this episode goes beyond one case. It’s about the creeping normalization of lawless executive power—from the misuse of antiterror labels, to the fast-growing deportation dragnet sweeping up even lawful residents, to proposed federal overhauls of speech and campus expression.
Abrego Garcia was moved from El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, to a lower security facility in Santa Ana on April 20.
Sources Referenced:
The Right is learning new political tactics. We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the “classical liberals” who forfeited all of the institutions. We’re going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready. pic.twitter.com/4EVdjZkrsf
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 17, 2025
Chapters
- 00:00 Coming up…
- 00:21 Introduction and setup
- 01:13 The Abrego Garcia case and due process violations
- 11:00 Trump’s legal defiance and the Supreme Court’s unanimous rebuke
- 17:15 Parallels to the war on terror and the misuse of the word terrorist
- 23:30 The threat to American citizens and executive overreach
- 30:00 The limits of Supreme Court enforcement and implications for democracy
- 37:20 Civil liberties, citizenship, and the universal reach of the Constitution
- 42:00 Is this a constitutional emergency? Parsing Ezra Klein’s warning
- 48:00 Free speech crackdown: protests, deportations, and political enemies
- 56:00 Activist surveillance groups and foreign influence in U.S. policy
- 01:06:30 Chris Rufo, ideological capture, and the right’s new institutional strategy
- 01:13:45 Institutional cowardice vs. backlash: What happens next?
- 01:20:00 Can civil institutions resist authoritarian pressure?
- 01:24:00 Pardoning Edward Snowden and the unpredictable nature of Trump
This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.
Zach Weissmueller: What happens when a president ignores the Supreme Court? Just asking questions. Glenn Greenwald is here today. He needs no introduction to our audience other than to note you can find his work at the System Update Rumble channel, as well as subscribing to GlennGreenwald.locals.com.
We invited him because he’s a consistent and non-partisan critic of state power. Doesn’t matter who’s president. And so that makes him the perfect guest to talk with us today about the threats we are seeing to due process, free speech, the US Constitution emanating from the Trump administration as it deports people to a Salvadoran prison, ignores court orders, cracks down on certain kinds of campus speech, and more.
Glenn, thank you for coming back on the show today.
Glenn Greenwald: Great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.
Liz Wolfe: I want to walk our viewers through what happened to a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is from El Salvador. He entered the United States illegally back in 2012. Um, but in 2019, uh, sort of soliciting his services as a day laborer, he was arrested in a Home Depot parking lot along with three other men. The police in Prince George’s County, Maryland, uh claimed that he was MS-13 affiliated. How did they know this? Because an informant told them so, allegedly, and because the men that he was arrested with were apparently confirmed gang members, uh, you know, with drugs on them, meaning a small bag of weed.
Basically, they they, you know, looked at his tattoos, his Chicago Bulls hoodie, and they’ve claimed that he’s MS-13. In the years after that arrest in 2019, Abrego Garcia married a US citizen, he fathered a child, he’s taken care of the two children that his wife has from a prior relationship. Uh, and he’s he’s a an apprentice, you know, gainfully seeking employment. And he’s basically been able to successfully convince uh an immigration judge that he is worthy of withholding of removal status, which protects him from deportation back to El Salvador because he convinced the judge that he has a credible threat of persecution back in his home country, uh, from a rival gang that was targeting his family and extorting them due to their purportedly successful pupusa business.
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador CECOT prison on March 15th. And since then, this case has garnered uh an awful lot of attention, in part because his wife is speaking out on his behalf, in part because his representative has flown down to El Salvador to uh meet with him face-to-face and get confirmation that he’s okay. And in part because the Trump administration initially admitted that it made an error, an administrative error in deporting him because this withholding of removal. But then a bunch of officials, including JD Vance within the Trump administration, have basically backtracked and said that he was in fact a violent gang member and that it is actually good that they deported him. So the Trump administration can’t really seem to get their story straight. This rose up to the level of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration needs to, and I quote, facilitate his return. Uh, you would think that the Trump administration, where President Trump had a meeting in the Oval Office with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele just last week, you would think that they would be able to work the sort of diplomatic connections that they have and be able to get this man back. But so far, they’ve played dumb. They’ve been throwing up their hands and saying they can’t really do anything even though the Supreme Court has ordered them to do so.
Glenn, why does this case disturb you so?
Glenn Greenwald: Well, I think there’s always the issue of the character of the person in in question and it really shouldn’t matter one way or the other. There are no perfect victims, there are no perfect criminals and everybody is entitled to due process, the rule of law matters whether it’s a saint or whether it’s a sociopath. It really makes no difference. I do think it’s worth noting that Abrego Garcia has been in the country since 2012 and he has never been convicted of a crime since then.
He was arrested for suspicion of being uh in the country illegally, part of an MSM MS-13 gang, but there was no evidence of that, there was no proof for it. There was a uh record that recently emerged about a domestic abuse situation with his wife, who is now standing by him. You know, very typical things, but in general, he’s been in the country for 13 years. There’s no major infractions, there’s no major charges of any kind. But let’s say that, you know, he is a really a terrible criminal that he—there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that he is part of a gang even though there isn’t. We live in a country where the Constitution is supreme and then we have the rule of law as interpreted by courts that have a lot of checks on them.
The only people who get onto the court are people selected by the president and then confirmed by the US Senate. They’re all subject to impeachment. They have all sorts of limitations on their powers, but at the end of the day, they’re the ones who decide what the limits of the Constitution are.
That’s it’s been that way in our country for 200 years. And in the case of Abrego Garcia, there was a hold court a deportation court had ordered that he not be removed pending further investigation in part because of his record of having been in the country, of having supported his American wife, of having uh been a seemingly good citizen for there being a lot of doubts about whether he was a gang member at all. And despite this hold, meaning a court had ordered the government not to remove him, the Trump administration nonetheless removed him anyway. And as you said, when they did so, they admitted they did so by accident, that ICE agents never should have picked him up because there was a court order mandating they not do so. And I think what is so important here is that when this case entered the judiciary, and by this point, they shipped him to El Salvador.
He’s now in this El Salvadoran prison, and we can get into exactly what this prison is, but basically, it’s one of the worst human rights-abusing prisons in the world. It’s intended to exploit people for slave labor, to strip them of their humanity, to deny all due process. People who go there have no access to lawyers or courts. It’s basically the most antithetical to American values, uh prison system you can possibly imagine, which is one of the reasons the government wants to our government wants to send them there. The case entered the judiciary and made its way up to the Supreme Court and it was a 9 to 0 ruling.
You know, we keep hearing these claims from Trump supporters that these were all left-wing judges. It was a 9 to 0 ruling, which means that people like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch, all the right-wing’s favorite judges, signed on to an opinion that not only said that it was uh improper for them to have removed him and and sent him to El Salvador, they said the removal was illegal. That was the word they used. And they said even the government acknowledges that his removal was illegal. They then said that because of this illegal removal, we can’t force the government to get him back because maybe the El Salvadorans really will say, we’re not giving him back unless you invade our country and we can’t order the executive to go invade a country if that’s the only way to get him back.
So, in theory, we can’t force the Trump administration to get him back, but they have to do everything they can to facilitate his release from that prison. And then not only that, not only do they have to do everything to facilitate his release from prison, they have to then demonstrate to the court, report to the court what it is that they actually did. And we watched Trump at the White House with Bukele where they both mocked the judiciary and both essentially said, of course we’re not going to try and take any steps to get him out of an El Salvadoran prison. Bukele said, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t because I’m not going to smuggle him into the United States. But the whole point is the Supreme Court said the Trump administration is supposed to facilitate his return back. Welcome him back, allow Bukele to send him back. And the realpolitik here is that El Salvador is a little country. Bukele’s national strategy is to tie himself to the United States, make himself as subservient as possible to Trump. We’re paying for each one of these people to be imprisoned.
Obviously, if we tell Bukele we want him back, then he would come back. And I understand that Trump ran on a platform of deporting people who were in the country illegally. That is a mandate democratically that he earned. Polls show that they also want that, but that doesn’t mean that you can just ignore the Constitution, violate court orders, even ignore the Supreme Court in order to achieve any of those goals. And that’s exactly what’s being done in this case.
Zach Weissmueller: And we have a little bit of, uh, sound of that meeting between Bukele and Trump last week. Uh, and I wanted to play a portion of that exchange that you just referenced, Glenn, because I I want to I want you to analyze exactly the argument that Bukele is making as to why he cannot return, uh, this prisoner to the United States. Uh, could we roll that, John?
Reporter: President Bukele, do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your administration says was mistakenly deported? The man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador?
Stephen Miller: The ruling solely stated that if this individual…
Zach Weissmueller: We’re going to hear at the top here, by the way, from Stephen Miller. Uh, and then he’ll kick it to Bukele.
Stephen Miller: At El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about per the court can only be directed to him.
A: President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him?
Nayib Bukele: Well, I get I’m supposed that suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle? How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I’m not going to do it. It’s like let me the the the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?
Zach Weissmueller: Okay, you’ve called that claim basically laughable. Uh, why?
Glenn Greenwald: Well, there’s so many parts of that that are worth commenting on. I think, first of all, Trump doesn’t read Supreme Court cases and I believe him when he said he didn’t really know what he was being asked about, which Supreme Court case he was being asked about, which case in particular that the question was about. So he asked Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller lied directly to Donald Trump in front of everybody by saying, oh, the court decided by a 9 to zero ruling in our favor saying that we don’t have to return him, that that that that the court will not require us to return him. That we won. We have the right to send him there, which is exactly the opposite of what the court said.
On top of that, Bukele saying, look, I can’t release him because in order for me to send him back to the United States, I would have to smuggle him back into the country, meaning that the United States is prohibiting him from bringing him back when of course, the whole point of the ruling is that the United States has to allow him in. In fact, the United States would go send a plane to pick him up if it wants to be in accordance with the ruling.
But I think the much broader point here, and this is what I think is worth kind of putting a top as a framework, all of the discussions of these individual cases is it reminds me so much of the central abuse of the war on terror. If if you guys, uh, you know, I don’t know if if you’re too young to have lived through that or to have remembered it. I’m too young to have lived through it. So I only know this through history books, but, um, you know, one of the the basic theory of the Bush and Cheney administration as part of the war on terror that the Obama administration then adopted and even expanded is that because we were in a war, even though it didn’t resemble any traditional war in any way. We weren’t fighting countries on a battlefield. We were killing people in their homes, in their cars, people who weren’t wearing uniforms, that essentially the executive branch had the power to do whatever it wanted as long as it labeled somebody a terrorist. It could throw somebody into prison for life, as it did in Guantanamo without any trial, without any habeas corpus hearing, without any evidence presented, without any opportunity for the person to dispute the allegations.
We could kidnap them off the streets of Europe and send them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured. We could put them in CIA black sites. The whole we could spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. And so many times, and I remember this well, when someone like myself or somebody else would object and say, well, wait a minute, how can we imprison people for life without any kind of hearing, without any evidence presented, based solely on the say so of the government. People like me would be told, why are you defending terrorists? These are terrorists. We’re not going to let terrorists out of Guantanamo. And then you would say, you’d feel like you’re crazy. You would say, no, the whole point is you don’t actually know that they’re terrorists until the government presents evidence demonstrating that they actually belong to a terrorist organization.
And it was in 2008 when the US Supreme Court decided in the case of Boumediene that the detainees in Guantanamo, even though they were non-citizens, because they were under the control of the United States in sovereign US territory, which is what the Supreme Court said Guantanamo was, have the right under the Constitution to a Habeas Corpus hearing, to at least go into court one time and contest the charges. And as it turned out, even though we were assured for eight years, oh, don’t worry, the people in Guantanamo, they don’t need trials. These are not just terrorists, these are the worst of the worst. So many of them, once they finally got into a court, were able to prove that the government’s claims were baseless, that a lot of times it was mistaken identity. Sometimes there were rewards that people vindictively collected by reporting somebody else who had nothing to do with terrorism, but being part of a—and that’s why Guantanamo is virtually empty. from a thousand people that it once had to about 30 that were left because most of them were not actually guilty of anything. That’s the reason why we have Habeas Corpus and due process is because governments, even the best-intentioned ones, will often get things wrong.
And the ideal of the American founding, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin, was we’d rather have, you know, 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person wrongly imprisoned. This is the foundation of the Bill of Rights. The whole Bill of Rights is is uh imbued with these sorts of values that are now being violated. So you see exactly the same thing happening. Bukele says, I’m not going to release a terrorist uh back into our streets, but the whole point is there’s been no evidence evidentiary hearing, there’s been no requirement of evidence presented against Orego Garcia that he is in fact part of MS-13.
And I guess the last point I just want to make is the whole you see this kind of extreme abuse of the word terrorist. I mean, terrorist was always a vague term, but at least it kind of meant the use of political violence or threat of political violence towards civilians for political change. People who are part of a drug gang are not remotely within that definition. They’re not trying to achieve political change. They’re there for profit. But we just throw this word around terrorist now and the minute you do, the whole conversation ends for so many people like, he’s a terrorist, he’s a member of a drug gang. Why are you defending him? And this is coming from a lot of conservatives who have long claimed to venerate the Constitution, to want to preserve American values. American values means we don’t have a king, we have checks and balances, we have due process before people can be punished.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, to your point about how many people who were detained uh in Guantanamo Bay, for example, uh hadn’t actually done the crimes or weren’t actually proven of the crimes that the US government alleged. I mean, this reminds me of the New York Times, which as much shit as I have given them very publicly over pretty much my entire journalistic career, has actually been doing an incredible journalistic investigation into the 238 people who were deported to or Venezuelans claimed to be Tren de Aragua members who were deported to El Salvador CSAT a few weeks ago. And this, you know, this case, these flights were central to a legal battle that played out and a lot of tension between Judge Boasberg and Donald Trump.
But it’s interesting because The New York Times basically said, okay, you know, we have 238 people who were deported. Uh, basically the Trump administration claimed wheels up, they’re, you know, out of US territory right as an order was being handed down uh from, I believe it was a district court saying, no, actually, uh they haven’t received sufficient due process and you can’t actually deport them. And the Trump administration basically said flights already in the air.
But of these 238 men, basically 32 of the men sent to El Salvador have faced serious criminal accusations or convictions in the United States or abroad. Um, these reporters also cross-checked the records of a whole bunch of countries all over Latin America. Um, you know, there’s one person with a homicide conviction in Venezuela, for example. There are some people who have done legitimately heinous crimes. Uh, there were two dozen of these men who are locked up who have only been convicted of much lower-level offenses in the United States.
You know, some of the men have issues with speeding in school zones or private property trespassing or driving an improperly registered vehicle. And still many, many, many dozens of others on this flight have no criminal offenses in the United States or elsewhere at all. So, it’s very frustrating to me how so many people are painting with such broad strokes acting as if we can deem all of these people to be violent criminals, violent gang members, violent terrorists, when actually splitting hairs is very important because we are talking about people’s fates here. But also, I really think we do a huge disservice to actual crime and actual victims of violent crime when we act like there’s MS-13 members lurking in plain sight, hiding absolutely everywhere. And I find it to be profoundly disrespectful of the Trump administration and a lot of the Maga right to call people MS-13 who actually aren’t. I want actual MS-13 members to be convicted of awful crimes and to be far away from, you know, myself and my family. But I don’t want a bunch of other people swept up in that drag net. How would you make the case to people that actually splitting hairs is super important?
Glenn Greenwald: Well, first of all, there is a non-trivial group of people who are part of the maga movement who don’t think that it’s important to split hairs. In other words, I’ve been hearing from a lot of them and I don’t mean just like random people on Twitter. I mean like a lot of senior officials in the Trump administration and pundits and journalists and the like and what, you know, one of the things that I’ve seen over the course of uh a lot of time doing work in civil liberties and the like is that once you demonize a certain group of people, you strip them of their humanity and people no longer care what happens to them without getting into the whole like merits of the war in Israel and Gaza and the like. You know, once you strip the people of Gaza of their humanity and you say, oh, these are all Hamas members, people stop caring.
They say, ‘oh, we just heard about 47 people \ who died, but, you know, they’re Hamas supporters and we don’t really care.’ That’s what happened during the war on terror, that there was an attempt to sort of say with any kind of Muslims, especially ones who are critical of the United States, these are probably terrorists and so we don’t care if they get sent to any place on earth and get tortured.
I heard it and watched it happen for many years as part of the work that I was doing then. And I think there is a sense that a lot of people have been uh convinced of that the United States is overrun as part of an invasion by 20 million basically brown people from principally from Central and South America, but also from Africa and from other parts of the world, but principally from Central and South America, and that these are essentially enemies of the United States because they’re part of an invasion that’s destroying the United States. And I think it’s very notable that Trump as part of his effort to deport whoever he wants with as few guard rails and constraints as possible has invoked the alien enemy Act, which uh as I’m sure you guys know has only been invoked three times previously in US history, the war of 1812, World War I and World War II, real wars where the United States is actually at war with with foreign nations.
And the premise of doing that is to say that having these hordes of people pouring into the United States is very similar to having say Nazi Germany invade the United States or having uh France or some foreign army invade the United States, which entitles the president to do everything with far fewer constraints than normal to just order people removed on the grounds that they’re enemies. And so when you have this constant rhetoric that our enemies are not people who come to the United States and rape and murder, which is a very small percentage of immigrants who come to the United States, including ones who enter illegally, but instead sort of just everybody in the United States who is not a uh born in the United States, who is not a citizen of the United States, who comes from the countries that we’ve a lot of people have been convinced send only the worst of the worst, it is almost impossible to convince people to care because their humanity has been stripped away as a result of this rhetoric.
Now, I do think that doesn’t necessarily represent, I can’t say if it represent the majority of say self-identified MAGA supporters or not. But I do think that and growing up in the United States, being educated in the United States, I think we are all imbued with the sense that before the government can punish us, it does have to present evidence that we’ve actually done something that merits that punishment. It’s one of the things we’re all taught distinguishes our country from most others. And I think that there is starting to to to to appear now this sort of backlash, this idea that yeah, we do want people who are in our country illegally, removed. We especially want the ones who are violent and criminal and menacing and threatening removed, but we don’t want to empower the president to just throw people into dungeons all over the world based solely on his say so.
Zach Weissmueller: The fact that it’s all being done under this national security, these national security auspices is so concerning to me and not only me, I mean, there’s this uh this remarkable opinion from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals authored by, as I understand a Reagan appointee. So not some bleeding heart, you know, San Francisco justice or something. Um, and what they write here is that if today the executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home. And what assurance shall there be that the executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? I mean, I want that to be just like a hysterical left-wing judge writing that, but it when you look at the situation, it’s hard not to see it that way when the word terrorist, as you described Glenn, is an inherently political word. Uh, and the how is the uh Trump administration going to imbue that word, what what kind of meaning is it going to imbue that word with? Are they really going to stop at the line of US citizenship uh when they’ve already crossed so many other lines? Um, and it’s not even a it’s not some abstract concern either. Like in this very meeting with Bukele on the hot mic, Trump basically admits that they want to go after people born in the United States. Uh we I think we have that clip too. Could you roll that John?
[RECORDING PLAYS]
Donald Trump: I said homegrown is the next. The homegrown. So you got to build about five more places. Yeah. All right.
[RECORDING ENDS]
Zach Weissmueller: What is stopping the administration at this point from deporting American citizens? Like how worried are you that we uh like how worried are you that we should be concerned about the deportation of political enemies?
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, just one word about that judge. Uh he’s not just some like random judge appointed in the 1980s. This is Harvey Wilkinson, who has long been considered kind of the model of a great right-wing conservative judge that they’ve always wanted more Harvey Wilkinsons on the bench and specifically he was known for and is known for a very robust defense of executive power. He kind of sees Article two powers as being very, very broad, probably far broader than most other judges anywhere in the judiciary. And so I think it was very notable and I’m sure it’s the reason why he ended up writing that opinion because the other part of that opinion was, okay, you say Orego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Like, maybe he is. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know either. Like maybe he is and maybe not, but if it’s so clear and the evidence is so dispositive, all you have to do is show it in a in a court hearing and you’ll win and he’ll be deported to to a prison, which is, you know, I think the whole point. As for the issue of whether this will extend to citizenships, you know, a lot of times these slippery slope arguments become unpersuasive to people, they sort of say, yeah, like when that happens I’ll start worrying. But as you say, this is not really speculative. First of all, in the war on terror, everything I was just describing, the very first case, when the war when 9/11 happened, when when the war on terror began, I wasn’t a journalist. I was uh a constitutional lawyer. I was working in New York. I was in Manhattan on 9/11.
So I certainly understand like how you know, traumatizing and and and the magnitude of 9/11. I don’t minimize that at all. But once certain things started happening in the United States that really I thought, maybe in my naivete would never be something that the United States we would ever seen in the United States, that’s when I started becoming much more kind of desiring to enter a more political realm rather than just practicing law on a constitutional level. And one of the cases that that alarmed me most of all was this case of Jose Padilla. I don’t know if you guys remember this, but in early 2002, so maybe just like two months, three months after the 9/11 attack, John Ashcroft gave this hastily arranged news conference in Moscow and he claimed that the United States had detected and arrested a so-called dirty bomber, somebody who had planned to import a radiological weapon into the United States to detonate uh something like a junior nuclear bomb inside the United States.
And as it turned out, the person they accused was an US-born American citizen named Jose Padilla. And he was arrested on US soil in Chicago at Chicago International Airport when he arrived into the United States and he was not charged with any crimes. The United States uh the the the president issued a decree declaring him an enemy combatant. He was disappeared into a military break for three and a half years with no charges, held incommunicado, no lawyers of any kind based on this theory that once the government calls you in in today’s parlance a terrorist, but back then an enemy combatant, you essentially lose all rights including the right to go into court and contest the accusations against you. So we’ve seen before how quickly this not only can, but does fill over into US citizenship.
And then I think you’re exactly right to point out. It wasn’t just in that clip where he was kind of whispering to Bukele because I think a lot of people know Trump very well and and sort of dismiss things he says it’s kind of trolling or joking and there was, you know, you got to build by more. He reaffirmed that several times including when journalists who heard that question him about it and then in subsequent interviews over the course of the next couple days where they asked him, does that even apply to US citizens? You could send people to El Salvador and El Salvadorian prison who are US citizens? And he said, yeah, U.S. citizens don’t have any special status.
That’s what the president of the United States said that yeah, of course we can send them there as well. And imagine, you know, as a US citizen, even if you’re convicted of a crime, you still have a whole variety of constitutional protections, right to court, right to uh lawyers, you can contest what’s being done to you in prison. You would lose all of that if you were in an El Salvadorian prison. The very idea that this is being spoken of openly, I think is what makes this not just a speculative or theoretical or abstract concern, but one that’s very concrete.
The other thing I would point out is we are of course seeing and I’m sure we’re going to talk about this, the attempt to use the power of the federal government to punish people not for committing crimes, but for their political views. Huge numbers of people who are in the United States legally, green card holders, married to American citizens, people who are PhD students, full bright scholars, people who came to the United States on student visas who are here legally, who are now being arrested, many times for not even participating in a protest, for doing things like writing an op Ed in a school newspaper critical of Israel. And the US government is using the full force of the law to come down as harshly as possible on them. Mahmoud Khalil is the first example.
And he’s in a prison in Louisiana, a state he had never been to. They purposely took him there hoping for a friendly judge. His American wife just gave birth to their first child two days ago and he asked for permission to be there with her in order to see the birth of his first child and within 23 minutes, ICE rejected the request in this kind of very vindictive way. I think what you’re seeing both in the case of this refusal to get back Orego Garcia, even though as you pointed out, the Trump administration originally admitted that he had been sent there mistakenly and illegally. And now in the case of Mahmoud Khalil or even these more dubious cases including that tough student who was uh arrested for the crime of writing an op Ed. There’s like I think the idea is that the Trump administration does not want to make a concession in any single case. Like, oh yeah, this is something somebody that we sent to El Salvador erroneously, or yes, this is actually a person who’s not a threat who were deporting because once they do that, it gives up the whole lie, the whole game that no, we’re not infallible. That we do actually make mistakes and that’s all the more reason why as the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling said, before you can deport people under the alien enemies Act, you have to at least give them the chance to have judicial review.
Liz Wolfe: What exactly happens from here? Like, does the Supreme Court just let it happen if the Trump administration continues to ignore their 90 ruling that um that it needs to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia as it appears sort of hell bent on doing. I mean, I guess officials in the administration can technically be held in contempt of court, but it’s not clear to me how that actually results in much of anything because Trump has shown uh his preference for using the pardon power uh to attempt to exonerate his political allies. I mean, truly. So what exactly happens? Like if if it looks like the wheels in my brain are sort of in overdrive, it’s because they are. Like the Supreme Court to my mind is like the thing that we have left. This mighty, mighty bullwark against abuses by the executive uh and all kinds of state power abuses. So what happens if the Trump administration just gives them the middle finger?
Glenn Greenwald: I mean, that’s by far the biggest and most important question. Because the reality of our government is that although we have three co-equal branches that are intended to check one another in all sorts of ways. It’s kind of endless, you know, conflict for for for power that would eventually create a balance of power as the founders envisioned it. It’s the executive branch with who who has all the people with the guns. Congress has a few, but not very many, as we saw on January 6th, they’re not exactly an impressive force. And the Supreme Court has essentially none.
And the way our country has always functioned is that we have accepted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as the final body that interprets the outer limits of the law and the constraints of the Constitution. And the elected branches, including the president and the executive branch have honored that voluntarily, basically. Um, you know, there’s that famous apocrypha quote from Andrew Jackson, know the Supreme Court has made its ruling, now let it enforce it.
But even then, there was a kind of compromise and an understanding that if the three branches start to disregard each other’s prerogatives, that the entire Republic breaks down, that the whole framework is envisioned by the founders can is no longer viable. And so I think on the one hand, Trump understands this because he was asked in the first month of his presidency, what would happen if the Supreme Court rules against him? Would he abide by a Supreme Court ruling or are there circumstances under which he would proclaim the ruling invalid and therefore violate it? He said, ‘no, I would never violate a Supreme Court ruling.’
I would always, of course, abide by a Supreme Court ruling. But then on the other hand, you have a Supreme Court led by John Roberts, who is uh known for being very guarded about the uh legitimacy of the court. And I think the Supreme Court is definitely not eager to rush headlong into a confrontation with the executive branch where they are essentially saying, you are now violating our court order and you are hereby required to take the following steps because that will essentially force a constitutional crisis that any rational and sane person would want to avoid.
And I think that was why when the Supreme Court ruled on this Abrego-Garcia case, what happened was the lower court, the district court had issued this very aggressive injunction that didn’t just say you have to facilitate his return, it said you have to effectuate and I forget the exact verb, but it was basically uh, yeah, effectuate, exactly, effectuate. You have to actually get him back.
Like it doesn’t matter what you have to do, you get him back in order to comply with this order. And the Supreme Court said, look, effectuate is too strong because that might actually require the courts to interfere in what is clearly the the the the the powers of the presidency under the Constitution. Like I said, like you could force the president to sanction El Salvador, you could force the president to invade El Salvador. These are clearly things the court can order the president to do. So the Supreme Court pulled back a little bit and said, we’re not going to force you to effectuate it, but we are going to force you to do everything you can to facilitate it and show us what you’ve done. Clearly, Trump, no, or Stephen Miller and who’s ever making these decisions, stuck a huge middle finger up at the Supreme Court.
Again, even this was not a five to four ruling with Kagan, Sotomayor, uh, Katanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts. This had, you know, Clarence Thomas and and Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch’s signature on it as well. And the Supreme Court for its own legitimacy is going to have to say something.
You know, maybe they’ll accept some very minimalist effort that the Trump administration can demonstrate that it expended just so that everybody can save face. But even if that happens in this particular case, even if there’s some face saving resolution for everybody, the collision course that the Trump administration is currently on with the judiciary is inevitable because the Trump administration believes that it does not have to give due process to anybody that it wants to remove from this country for any reason. And as you said, they even believe that as long as they get you out of the country, even if you’re a citizen, the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over what could happen immediately comes to an end as soon as you’re over international waters. And this is not a theory or a framework that the judiciary can accept without completely rendering itself, you know, a joke, just utterly neutered.
And I don’t know how that’s going to end. We’re definitely in the middle of a very delicate situation and I think both John Roberts and the court on the one hand and the smarter people inside the Trump administration or maybe the less extremist people in the Trump administration on the other, understand that, but right now, especially when it comes to immigration, there’s this almost like very religious type extremism that does not permit any limitation of any kind on what their agenda is. And I think that’s what’s driving so much of this. If this were any other issue, it wouldn’t be quite as inflammatory, but because it’s deportation and the expulsion of people who they believe shouldn’t be in our country, I think they think they have an absolute democratic mandate to do anything necessary to to get them out.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, it’s very frustrating advocating for due process in this case. Um, like I think all three of us are and have been because it really feels impossible to sort of get through uh to people on the other side. And I think I’m a little bit, I mean, it’s always been a little bit of an uphill battle, but I’m really shocked by how so many people are burying their heads in the sand and acting like, you know, the fact that Abrego Garcia is entitled to uh his day in court for these specific proceedings, these specific allegations, you know, people are acting like that’s uh not important. And then they’re also acting like the Supreme Court’s ruling is not important.
And they’re also acting like the fact that the Trump administration already admitted to having made an error and can’t seem to get their story straight internally. They’re also acting like that’s sort of beside the point. And at least I feel like, look, it very well could come out where Abrego Garcia is a bad guy, um, and where he is in fact deportable and where he is in fact MS-13 affiliated, but all I want is for that case to actually be made, um, in a much more complete and thorough manner in a court of law within the United States in order for the actual process, the actual procedure to be followed. Um, Ezra Klein basically. And if I if I could just interject one thing there, like, I think that point you made is so important. I mean, I think in general, if you’re somebody who advocates for civil liberties, you often find
Glenn Greenwald: Yourself targeted with a sort of vitriol because it means defending the rights of people who are charged with and might very well be guilty of some of the most heinous crimes. And then there you are standing up and saying, wait a minute, you can’t do that to these people. Even though they’re guilty of the most heinous crimes, they’re entitled to certain rights, not because you want them to have a certain kind of uh more delicate treatment, but because the entire system, all of our rights depends upon these rights being applied universally. Same thing with free speech. If you’re the one who stands up and says, yes, this person with obviously hideous views nonetheless can’t be punished for their views. They say, why are you defending a Nazi or a fascist or a racist or whatever?
These are things that happens with civil right, with civil liberties in general. I think there’s one added component here though that that needs to be addressed by anybody who wants to try and make this case, which is, I think there’s a a sense that a lot of people have and they may not even articulate it, but it but it definitely is driving a lot of their thinking, that when they think of civil liberties, you know, they’re like the first amendment or the fifth amendment right to process, the whole bill of rights, the Constitution, they think that’s for citizens.
They don’t think that’s for people who are foreign nationals. Um, people who are in the US legally, but definitely they think it’s not for people who are in the United States uh illegally. And the Supreme Court has said for 150 years and it’s such an important point, that the Bill of Rights is not this package of presents that you offer to some special group of people called US citizens. It’s an instrument for constraining what the US government can do with regard to any human beings under its control. And you know, it’s so easy to demonstrate. I keep asking my conservative friends who deny this to imagine what would have happened say in 2020, you know, here you have Jordan Peterson, he’s on US soil on a visa, but he’s not a US citizen.
He criticizes the Biden administration all the time. And then Joe Biden orders the FBI to go and murder him. You know, just go and assassinate Jordan Peterson. He’s criticizing our policies. He’s causing instability in our country. Would there really be no constitutional constraints on Joe Biden’s ability to go order Jordan Peterson murdered because as a non-citizen, Jordan Peterson has no constitutional rights in our country. Of course, everybody would instantly understand that was an abuse of constitutional limits, even though he’s a non-citizen because that does apply those those rights due to to non-citizens and even though they like Jordan Peterson and they may not like Abrego Garcia, the principle has to remain the same.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, you’re sort of referencing earlier the Jewish lawyers defending the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, the sort of famous ACLU case. Unfortunately, the ACLU has in so many ways strayed from uh their origins. But like, yeah, I mean, honestly, it’s hard for me to think of anything more American than that. You know, it’s not a very fun job trying to defend the rights of truly heinous people, but it’s fundamentally this question of like, what is it exactly that we expect state actors uh to adhere to? And this belief that the when we have these high standards that we hold them to, when we have these high expectations, that ends up doing all of us a service uh because you never know when you might be on the receiving end of that sort of abuse of state power. I want to bring us to um, I’m so sorry to bring up the New York Times multiple times in this stream. It’s really not like me. Don’t judge me too harshly. Uh, the New York Times is Ezra Klein said recently that in fact, the emergency is here. John, could you roll that?
[RECORDING PLAYS]
Ezra Klein: The emergency is here. The crisis is now. It’s not six months away. It’s not another Supreme Court ruling from happening. It is happening now. Maybe not to you, not yet. But there are others to real people whose names we know, whose stories we know. The President of the United States is disappearing people to an El Salvadoran prison for terrorists.
[RECORDING ENDS]
Liz Wolfe: Is this overheated or is this accurate?
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, it’s very melodramatic. Like The New York Times has added this kind of, you know, musical score to it. And I think one of the room. Yeah, exactly. these different camera angles. He’s dressed all in black. You know, I think um, I think one of the problems here, it’s very much a boy who cried wolf story and I kept trying to tell liberals this for the past eight years. They were calling Trump Hitler and fascist and Nazis and saying we were in a constitutional crisis, you know, basically from the minute that Trump emerged as a viable presidential candidate. And through his entire first term, he was actually quite a weak and impotent president. There were so many institutional constraints.
I think a lot of illegitimate and quite threatening ones that were uh consolidated in order to prevent him from carrying out many of the policies that he was elected to carry out. There were openly cheering generals who were subverting his military orders just simply on disagreement on policy grounds. And I ended up thinking that a lot of the the the dangers came much more from the forces that had the confederation of forces that united to stop Trump in the first term than it did from Trump himself. But all throughout that first term, they were using exactly all of this same language.
And then when Trump was running for president, same thing, you know, basically the primary theme of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the last several months was Trump is a fascist, he’s Hitler. They impeached him twice based on all sorts of exaggerated claims about what had happened in my view at least. And my concern always was that, that if you always use this overheated rhetoric, if you go immediately to 11 or to, you know, whatever number scale you’re using and use the maximalist terms of condemnation and people just at some point start tuning you out because they don’t really see that. They they people lived through four years of Trump and they didn’t feel like they were living under Adolf Hitler.
And they shouldn’t have been because they weren’t. What will happen when Trump does start doing anything or other leaders start doing things that are genuinely gravely threatening to our civil liberties. You know, I thought that a lot of what George Bush and Dick Cheney did under the war on terror were at least as threatening as a lot of what Trump is doing now. In fact, many of the theories of, you know, unitary executive power and vast Article 2 authorities whenever we’re in wartime or when it comes to national security, were pioneered and implemented by many of the people who are now Trump’s leading critics, you know, sort of the David Frums and Bill Crystals and Nicole Wallace and that whole Bush Cheney never Trump crowd that has pretended to find all of this so horrifying when in fact, they were they were the ones who were not only cheering it, but were the architects of it to begin with. So, I think it’s worth calming down a little bit.
In part, I should add as well because we’re only in the second or third full month of Trump’s presidency. He’s still very popular among Republicans and that’s the reason you’re seeing almost no Republican willingness to limit or push back against anything that he’s doing. All of this is going to start to dissipate some with all the economic instability, the concern of the stock market, the tariffs, things not getting better in the way that people were promised. You’re going to start to see Trump’s popularity erode a little bit further among Republicans.
There will be more and more Republicans willing to push back against the most extreme violations. So I don’t think it’s time for us to all set our hair on fire and just say, oh, the emergency is here, whatever that means. I am extremely concerned about a lot of what is taking place, but I’ve been extremely concerned from a civil liberty’s perspective before, and I still believe in the viability of a lot of American institutions. You’re seeing Harvard, for example, finally give Trump the finger and now suing him in court. You’re seeing some law firms do the same, some media outlets who are still confronting him in a lot of different ways, lawyers and lawsuits. So, you know, I don’t think it’s time for this kind of melodrama quite yet.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I’m personally really pissed off because I feel like I have to like give credit to like the New York Times and like Harvard right now. And like the number one thing that I don’t want to do is give credit to these institutions that have annoyed the crap out of me for a long time. But the Trump administration is forcing me to, you know, kind of mend fences a little bit.
Zach Weissmueller: It is a treacherous path forward because, you know, the the moral of the boy who cries wolf is that the wolf eventually comes and then no one’s paying attention. So, how do we overcome that problem? Or avoid, you know, being eaten by the wolf? I mean, part that’s partly the reason we want to have you here today because nobody can credibly accuse Glenn Greenwald of being Trump derangement syndrome, but you clearly are alarmed at this moment. Is that what it’s going to take is just more people who’ve been credibly calm like calling these things out as they happen? Um like is is is there any hope of like reasonably sounding the alarm without lighting your hair on fire?
Glenn Greenwald: So, I think it’s important to be strategic about how you’re trying to convince people and who you’re trying to convince. And by that, I mean that I do not have much confidence that say people on the right who are Trump supporters are ever going to care about whether in their as they would put it, all of the legalities or legal niceties are being observed when it comes to expelling people from our country that they think shouldn’t be in our country. That includes not just people who enter the country illegally, but people who are here legally, but who want to protest and you know, they they have a perception of what these college protests were.
And they think anybody who participated in those should probably are probably not good people, probably our country doesn’t benefit from having them there and and you’re just never going to convince those people to care enough that um what’s being done to them is is not adhering to the law. But I think there are other aspects of what Trump is doing that are extremely closely aligned with those sorts of abuses that you can get even people on the right to care a lot about.
And some of those things include abridgements and attacks on civil liberties and free speech that apply not to foreign nationals, but to American citizens. So I’ve have seen this this, you know, one of the things that that really did happen is, and and this is, you know, just taking a step back a little bit is, I think sometimes we forget that the Democratic Party and liberals at large really did intend to put Trump into a prison for the rest of his life. That wasn’t just something they were threatening to do as a kind of political ploy.
They really intended to do that and they were well on their way to doing that. And Trump’s essentially his only chance for avoiding life in prison was to win the election. And he was willing to do almost anything in order to make sure that that happened in a way that just from a human perspective is almost understandable. And what happened is you had a lot of people who had a lot of money, who weren’t really Trump supporters or maga adherents who kind of saw the opportunity to come in and to impose their agenda on Trump in exchange for giving him the hundreds of millions of dollars that he needed to be able to compete with and and then and and ultimately win against the Democratic Party, people like Elon Musk who, you know, swept in kind of at the last minute in order to get a lot of what he wanted.
You had people like Miriam Adelson and other people whose top priority uh is is Israel, who swept in and gave a lot of money. And one of the things that those people wanted was they have a huge concern about the fact that public opinion is starting to show that there’s a much rapidly declining level of support for Israel in the United States for a whole bunch of reasons that we could discuss. And they wanted a full-on government, yeah, there you see, I believe that’s the pupil from earlier this month, um where you see every single demographic group with the exception of Republicans above the age of 50, so basically Fox News watching Republicans, but every single other demographic group including younger Republicans, Republicans under the age of 49, having a sharp decline in the amount of support they express for Israel or a sharp increase in the amount of disapproval they express for Israel.
And this has been a great concern not just to Israel, which relies on the United States for being able to basically do what it wants in that region, but the legion of hardcore Israel supporters in the United States that often people assume is primarily American Jews and and that is part of it, but really numerically more importantly are a lot of American evangelicals, hardcore kind of just militarist who see Israel as an important ally. A very powerful faction that wants to make sure that everything that can be done to reverse this tide of Israel criticism and and the unpopularity of Israel increasing is taking place even if it means a full scale assault on core civil liberties, not of foreign nationals but of American citizens.
A lot of people don’t understand that the TikTok ban that was proposed, you know, five years ago in Trump’s last year in 2020 based on the argument that it uh made the United States vulnerable to Chinese influence lingered in Washington for years because it didn’t get enough votes in order to pass. That only got enough votes to pass after October 7th when especially Democrats became convinced that the reason there was so much young uh young people, so many young people who were turning against Israel because Tik Tok was allowing too much pro-Palestinian speech and that’s why they wanted to ban Tik Tok. The sponsors of of those bills say that’s why they got the votes. And then there’s long been a perception that the greatest threat to Israel is what’s happening on college campuses, people’s ability to organize, to boycott Israel. That’s what brought down the apartheid regime in in the apartheid regime of of South Africa in 19 in the 1980s was this boycott divestment and sanctions movement. Maybe you’re seeing now on college campuses. And almost on a weekly basis now, we’re seeing new types of censorship being imposed not to protect American citizens, but to protect this foreign country of Israel.
Just yesterday, I’m sure you guys saw, there were these insane guidelines that emanated from the National Institute of Health that said that any researchers, we’re talking here about medical researchers, health researchers, people who are investigating treatments and cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s will instantly lose all of their NIH grants and funding unless they certify that they do not participate in a boycott of Israel. They can boycott any other country in the world, they can even boycott the United States, they can boycott American states, they just can’t boycott Israel. And I think this is a main priority for a lot of people inside the Trump administration. You’re seeing a very overt effort to suppress free speech, the right of free protest, the right of free discourse in the name of this cause, and this is the kind of thing that I think can even make people on the right start to question whether what they were promised, which was a restoration of free speech, academic freedom protected from the questioning of all orthodoxies on college campuses, is being assaulted not for the America first agenda that they were promised, but for other people’s agendas that they don’t necessarily support, and they’re all tied together including these deportations because they’re all based on the same view that essentially the executive branch runs the country without any checks of any kind, including those in the Constitution.
Liz Wolfe: Turns out the resistance is actually Harvard University. But there is something really important that you’re tapping into, which is like, what’s the point of being a multi-millionaire or having a massive endowment if not to retain some of your independence, some of your ability to sort of be free of these other forces? I completely agree.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, go ahead, sorry.
Glenn Greenwald: No, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I I I’ve seen this in journalism too. Um, you know, if there are times in journalism, especially in our journalistic ecosystem where everybody has a thousand or 10,000 choices. So people can only choose to listen to shows or read magazines or read sites that they understand will always validate whatever it is that they want to be told, that if you’re somebody who isn’t willing to do that, if sometimes you’re going to alienate your own audience and some way you’re sacrificing, you know, your leadership, you may be sacrificing financially, making your your platform a little bit smaller.
And I understand why say mid-level or junior level journalists who work in big media corporations are unwilling to kind of take those stands because they might be in jeopardy. I understand why people who are just getting started don’t want to alienate their audience. But I always felt like once you have the kind of platform that I’ve been able to develop, that other people have been to develop, where you’re secure enough in your own uh kind of position where you can afford to lose 10% of your audience because they’re angry at you that you’ve taken a certain view that’s not the one that they want.
You almost have then the obligation like with all that kind of, you know, blessing or privilege or whatever you’ve amassed comes the responsibility to say, well, look, if I’m not going to be the one willing to do something, who do I expect to do it? And that’s why I found it so nauseating to watch these big law firms or these big universities know that what they were being asked to do was so debasing of their own autonomy, of the way that our society is supposed to work, but deciding that they weren’t willing to sacrifice in order to do it. And why I think it’s such a relief now that some institutions are finally finding whatever it is, that sense of conscience or just their own dignity that are preventing them from capitulating completely.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. Another interesting aspect to this that I picked up just from watching your show is that there are the methods behind how this is being done that there are actually these activist groups out there that are helping identify targets for the Trump administration to revoke green cards or visas or put on a short list for deportation. This is one of the ones you identified. It’s called the Canary Mission group. They’re they at least publicly claim credit for getting Ramesa O Turk arrested by Ice. She’s the one who authored the Op-ed at Tuft and then was like dragged off the street in broad daylight. Could you just tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned about these groups?
Glenn Greenwald: Well, it’s ironic because, you know, the main political scandal from the time that Trump got the nomination in mid-2016, basically until two or almost three years into his presidency was that we were extremely concerned about Russian interference in our politics. And now you’re hearing a lot as well from Israel supporters that we should be very concerned about the influence of Qatar and other Gulf states in our politics.
And in reality, what groups like the Canary the Canary Mission are, they’re incredibly morally despicable. What they do is, and they were created in 2015 is they go around to college campuses and they find people who express criticism of Israel, people who express criticism of Israel in classrooms, people who participate in student groups that are critical of Israel, and they create dossiers of them online with their names and all of their information that they could possibly get about them, so that, for example, if you go and you apply for a job once you’re your your you graduate college and your employer does a Google search on you, the first thing you’re going to they’re going to see is this
Canary Mission dossier that accuses you of being an anti-semite because of the fact that you’ve criticized Israel and it’s extremely well-funded. A lot of the funding comes from the Israeli government. So this is the Israeli government using funding to essentially punish people in our country inside the United States who are critical of their government. And what makes them extra despicable is that while they are dragging into the sunlight all of these people and their names and purposely trying to attach to them the stigma that they’re bigoted and racist because of the political views they have about the Middle East, they themselves are anonymous. They refuse to identify themselves. And these are the groups that are now providing the lists to the US government that the US government then starts targeting for deportation. And so often there are people who, these are not the ones who vandalized buildings, they didn’t attack or harass or menace any Jewish students. All they’re guilty of is expressing opposition either to Israel in general or to the Israeli war in Gaza in particular. And you have these groups that are like surveillance groups. They’re kind of like the Stasi that again, even some students who just express opposition to Israel in a classroom discussion end up on on these websites and it’s incredibly pernicious.
Liz Wolfe: This reminds me a little bit of the Glad accountability project which names um, you know, former guests of this show and friends of ours like Jesse Single as sort of a an enemy spreading misinformation for his uh, I don’t know, reporting on puberty blockers uh being given to children and stuff like that. Uh, it’s truly wild to me. It’s as if we’re seeing this, you know, Trump 1.0 was a, you know, in my view a very inept and clumsy administration, but it’s crazy to me that people, uh, I don’t want to say wasted breath because there were warnings in some cases about legitimate threats to civil liberties and to the economy. But I think um succumbed to a sort of apocalypticism that isn’t useful because this time around we’re actually seeing a much more organized administration, but also a much more organized sort of network of groups willing to aid and abet them. Uh and one of the people who very much comes to mind as I say that is none other than Chris Rufo, the sort of anti-woke crusader. He was basically tweeting as he frequently does. Uh also, I think a guest of the show, right Zach? We had him on a while ago. Yep. Um, unfortunately. He unfortunately has sort of justified the hardball that the right has been playing uh in order to recapture the institutions. He is basically saying the right is learning new political tactics. Uh, we’re not going to indulge the fantasies of the classical liberals, of course using snear quotes, who forfeited all of the institutions. We’re going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready. Uh, Glenn, what do you think of this outlook and the strategy?
Glenn Greenwald: Well, I mean, I think this is what Chris Rufo’s approach in general to activism is. I’ve had him on my show. I’ve talked to him a fair amount before. I think he’s a very shrewd and sophisticated operative. But at the end of the day, I think he has a very kind of craven and unprincipled view of the world, which is that the only thing that really matters is the acquisition of power.
Now, in his defense, if he were here, he would probably say that he believes that only because that’s what the left has adopted and that gives the right only one option and one choice, which is to fight along those same lines. But the problem with it is that if you actually don’t believe in any principles and if you’re only willing to do anything, if you’re willing to do anything in the name of just simply acquiring power, making sure that your ideology and your ideas are dominant within these institutions, don’t walk around then pretending that you believe in these principles that you clearly have no intention of adhering to, that you believe in free speech or you believe in, you know, pluralism or anything like that because that is not actually your agenda.
And I think this is the thing that I think gets lost sometimes as well. You know, having been somebody who uh kind of had a big breach with major parts of the left with which I was once perceived as being aligned in large part because I was so opposed to these new censorship schemes introduced primarily as reaction to Trump but also the rise of right-wing populism in large parts of the democratic world. The arguments that I was making and that a lot of conservatives were pretending to believe in was that we’re preserving the values that define the United States, that define the West that came out of the enlightenment, which is, you know, what the founders were most influenced by, the idea that we don’t have institutions decreeing to us what is true and false.
We don’t have the government dictating to academic institutions what they can and can’t teach or uh people getting punished for the views that they were that they they are expressing. And now you have many of those same people who are embracing exactly that mentality. I think one of the most egregious things the Trump administration is doing, you know, you read from the letter written I think the one that you uh highlighted was to Columbia or or to Harvard, I’m not sure what Harvard.
Yeah, Harvard. One of the thing one of the they’re two things that actually the Trump administration is doing that I don’t think have got enough attention. One is that with respect to both Columbia and Harvard, they have demanded that the Middle East Studies department, so the department that obviously teaches about Middle East conflict including Israel, be put under receivership so that the curriculum is now reviewed by some third party that has to answer to the government and satisfy the government that what is being taught, and we’re not talking here about third grade curriculum or eighth grade curriculum where of course we expect the government to review it.
We’re talking about adults, universities, that the government is supposed to now be satisfied that what is being taught aligns with the government’s values about these sorts of uh issues. But the other even more egregious thing that the Trump administration is doing is that about a decade ago, Israel created this vastly expanded definition of anti-semitism called the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. And what it’s designed to do is to make a whole variety of views about Israel essentially illegal by calling them anti-semitism. And they actually implemented them in the EU where bigoted speech is criminalized. And so if you classify certain ideas as anti-semitic, it becomes criminalized as bigoted speech. You can’t for example say that the that Israel is a racist endeavor. You can say that about any other country but not Israel.
You can’t compare Israel and what they’re doing uh in their wars to what the Nazis did, that’s completely off limits. You can’t say about a particular Jewish person that they seem to have more loyalty to Israel or care more about Israel than to their own country. These are ideas that are banned, that are off limits that can be punishable by law. And what the Trump administration is now doing is forcing these colleges and universities as a condition to receiving federal funding to implement an expanded hate speech code, a much more robust code that is based on this narrative that we have a minority group that is unsafe, that feels unsafe because of the ideas that they’re hearing, they need protection from the government, from school administrators through hate speech codes that make it illegal or punishable to express ideas that make this minority exactly the same thing that we heard from the left that the right has been viciously mocking for a decade that they are now embracing.
And to watch, you know, people like Chris Rufo pretend that this isn’t part of the agenda, that all the Trump administration is trying to do is make sure there’s no anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism in the hiring or the acceptance process when in fact, it’s much, much broader than that. That I think is what’s so disingenuous and so dangerous because even though the the there was an attempt by sort of Western liberalism to impose a censorship regime and in a lot of ways it did succeed on the internet through calling it disinformation and hate speech. What’s going on now has the full force of the United States government and the laws of the United States government behind it and that’s why I regarded it as such a serious escalation and it’s being cheered by the exact same people who spent the last decade pretending to despise and and and fear all these sorts of things.
Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, there’s this interesting transition that we’re seeing, which is like Rufo was able to plausibly sell the idea of, you know, the right being sort of underdogs in the old regime, um, sort of like underrepresented in a lot of major cultural institutions. And now, you know, perhaps they could continue to make the sort of underrepresentation in cultural institutions case. I know folks like Ichi Keenan continue to make that case. But I wonder, do you think that as the underdogs shift into wielding tons of state power and a little bit of cultural power too, do you think there will be a lot of people in the sort of Normy middle who were like, look, I was down with ending the DEI regime. That struck me as fundamentally unfair. But the thing that replaces it is something that I just can’t get on board with.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, I think it’s a really good question. Um, you know, if you look at our recent political history in the United States, it’s kind of filled with these ideas that once a certain political party finds the winning strategy, it means that they’re going to remain in power basically for forever. Um, you know, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for decades until they didn’t. Uh, Ronald Reagan won twice in in very easy fashion and then George H W Bush did too. And everyone said, oh, the Democrats are lost at sea. They’re filled with people like Michael Dukakis and these kind of like leftist losers.
And then suddenly Bill Clinton comes along and the Republicans can’t win anything. Um, you know, the same thing happened with uh with uh George Bush and it seemed like, oh, the Republican Party was in control forever. And then you got Barack Obama for the next uh eight years. I think the Republicans feel like they have the winning formula. They have their kind of grasp now on this whole group of voters that they previously couldn’t communicate with.
And that means the Democrats are relegated to powerlessness for a long time. But the reason it always changes is because human beings once they get their hands on power start engaging in behavior that creates its own backlash. They kind of get intoxicated with that power. They start believing their own infallibility. And I do think that that’s what you’re going to start to see. I also thought the right was kind of the underdog. I thought in almost every major uh institution of power in the United States, not conservatism, kind of traditional Mitt Romney or like John McCain conservatism, but right-wing populism, the kind like Donald Trump represented, was so despised that that as I said before, all institutions, you know, which is how you saw the Liz Cheneys and the Bill Crystals joining hands with the Democratic Party, united in opposition to it and the entire culture kind of expressed contempt for it.
This is now all changed. I mean, it it’s it’s Trump’s party who is controlling not only of the the White House, but also the Senate, the House, they have the majority of the Supreme Court and obviously culturally you’re seeing a huge shift as well. And once that starts to happen, that’s when these factions start over playing their hands and then that’s when the backlash happens. I think the problem with that theory, which I do think is true, is that the backlash can happen only if we have the civil liberties that allow that backlash to find expression. And that’s why we have to guard them so so rapidly.
Zach Weissmueller: Final question of the show. We ask this to every guest. What is a question you think more people should be asking?
Glenn Greenwald: Uh, I think the question that I hope that people start asking a lot more of is why is it that the United States and no other country in the world is in a posture of endless war, that we’re constantly bombing multiple other countries, we’re constantly invading multiple other countries.
It doesn’t seem to affect our lives in any positive way. It doesn’t seem to provide any benefits to us. And yet we’re constantly doing it, even though we’re told we’re going to stop, even though we’re told it was a failure, even though we were told we can’t afford it anymore. We’re constantly finding ourselves in these new military attacks. Oh, today we’re bombing Yemen. Now we may go bomb Iran. And I think and I hope people will start asking a lot more of like, who is driving this? Who’s benefiting from this? Because I know I’m not.
Zach Weissmueller: Glenn Greenwald, thanks for coming on the show.
Glenn Greenwald: Great to see you guys. Always good to talk to you.
Liz Wolfe: Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions.
Zach Weissmueller: If you want to support the show and help it grow, please like and share this episode.
Liz Wolfe: Leave a comment letting us know what you think. And if you have questions you’d like us to answer or any suggestions, you can email us at justaskingquestions@reason.com.
Zach Weissmueller: See you next time.
- Producer: John Osterhoudt
