Nico Perrino:And eventually, you got out of law, and I had read that you spent a lot of time in conservative chat rooms at one point, saying that you believe in the clash of ideas, and that in these chat rooms your ideas were meaningfully challenged. Is this sort of “clash of ideas” thing a thread throughout your life, starting with your time in law school, moving on through your legal career and on to your time as a writer, just engager in the political dialogue?
Glenn Greenwald:Well, that was actually a really formative experience that those conservative chat rooms that were sort of like the beginning of the internet. And, I remember there was my law school roommate – you know I went to law school in New York; I had gone to college in Washington. I was just like a young, gay man in my early 20s in Washington and New York; in these east coast sophisticated cities. So, I had this kind of caricatured view of conservatives, especially social conservatives in the middle of the country. And, my law school roommate was this woman who was dating this guy whose mother was this hardcore Rush Limbaugh supporter or listener. And she went and visited their house and saw that this woman was in these chat rooms, and it was a chat room sponsored by the National Review and the Heritage Foundation. So, we went in there kind of on a lark, basically to just cause trouble and make fun of them and just have a good laugh at the expense of what we viewed as these kinds of retrograde idiots. And we did do that at first; we just caused trouble and we laughed at them, and then we started actually being drawn in because a lot of them were extremely smart and very informed, and were good debaters.
And so, I started spending a lot of time debating with them, and it started challenging a lot of my preconceptions, things that I would have assumed were just unchallengeably true. I found myself having to defend it from a pretty formidable, intellectual attack. And then, the more time I spent in there, the better I got to know them as people, and then I actually went one time. I flew to Indiana for this hotel, and it was a kind of meeting of all these – and these weren’t like National Review New York conservatives, these were like middle of the country, megachurch, Rush Limbaugh social conservatives. And just like I regarded them at first, they regarded me. They knew I was young, and a lawyer in New York, and Jewish and gay and so, a lot of those barriers broke down and we actually kind of got to like each other, and a lot of the certainty and the smugness that I had in how I regarded people like that got really broken down. And, I realized that it was so much better to force yourself to engage in these kinds of challenges. Sometimes you’ll be more fortified in the rightness of your beliefs, and other times, you’ll start questioning yourself and changing your views or at least modifying them or being open to the fact that maybe you’re wrong.
And so, yeah, everything I’ve done in my life – I’ve studied philosophy, I was on the college and high school debate team – has very much been geared toward this kind of clash of opposing ideas as the ultimate test for who’s actually right and who’s actually wrong. And I’ve learned a lot from that, I’ve evolved a great deal as a result of that. And so, anything that suppresses that or tries to eliminate it in the name of righteousness and certainty I feel really pernicious and really dangerous, and often times, a lot bigger of a threat than the bad ideas themselves that people who think that way are trying to censor.
