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Notes -
The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.
To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:
The facts go like this:
The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:
My narrative would go something like this:
I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.
It is more that one man can not be an administration, even if the appeal of Trumpism is the fantasy of change.
For all the promise of Trump changing things, at the end of the day his administration will have plenty of typical republicans. But Trump at least represents a promise. And there is some difference.
You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration. And you would be getting a different administration if people more like Pompeo, Mike Pense, etc, were the president.
I do agree with another poster that people should put more pressure on politicians like Trump who they think are supposedly on their side, when pushing counter establishment moves. But also towards other politicians of course.
While some criticism can be warranted, and Greenwald manages to usually be fair about this issue, blaming everything on Trump and doubly so focusing the blame on Trump fans is unwise, even if one isn't doing so from a lefty perspective. It lets off the hook more powerful, numerous factions like the neocons. Especially the permanent bureaucrats who don't change, or lobbyists, or the media and those that run it. It is better to focus on them, than Trump fans who are at least hopeful of a bigger change than what Trumpism probably can bring.
Trump himself isn't any sort of libertarian's dream when it comes to people like Assange and Snowden. From what I recall, he made some vague murmurs about possibly pardoning Assange at one point, but that went nowhere. Meanwhile, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, he strongly hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. Which also went nowhere, of course. But my point is that on this issue, Trump has made as many pronouncements which are more authoritarian than the typical establishment politician as he has made pronouncements that are less authoritarian than the typical establishment politician.
However, I agree that Trump has acted like slightly less of a neocon than the typical US president, although that is a low bar to clear.
Trump's own thoughts are immaterial. The behavior of institutions is moved by organized minorities, not the inner monologues of figureheads. After his surprise election, his administration was quickly captured by typical spook mouthpieces and behaved as such. No surprises.
If he is to win this time, it will be on the legs of a persecution by those same institutions and the support of Project 2025 people who, from my estimation, are absolutely woke on the spook question. I've seen some quietly repeat Moldbuggian slogans about retiring everyone from the CIA and they're specifically drawing a plan to purge the deep state instead of Trump's original total lack of steps to drain the swamp.
I don't know if that means he does anything about Assange and Snowden. I don't know if those people survive his election. I don't even know if he'll be elected. But it seems fair to say he gets a mulligan on this particular question given the situation and his staff.
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