The Charlie Kirk Show - Glenn Greenwald On The Left: Hey Idiots, It's Your Fault!

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, it's in the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Glenn Greenwald joins the program as we talk about the intel communities and the entire leviathan of the deep state against Donald Trump and, of course, Ukraine.

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00:00:44.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:46.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

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00:01:42.000 Joining us for the entire hour is the legendary Glenn Greenwald, independent journalist, host of System Update on Rumble.com.

00:01:51.000 Glenn, welcome to the program.

00:01:53.000 Glenn, your journalism has been terrific over the years and your commentary as well.

00:01:57.000 I want to get into this Pod Save America story because I think it's hilarious and delicious.

00:02:02.000 But I want to get you on the show here.

00:02:04.000 Just your reaction and takeaway.

00:02:05.000 First of...

00:02:06.000 President Trump's triumph.

00:02:08.000 The intel agencies were against him.

00:02:10.000 The apparatus of the government and the regime was against him.

00:02:13.000 And the American people spoke.

00:02:14.000 Kind of, what is your initial takeaway three weeks now removed from President Trump's comeback victory?

00:02:19.000 I thought the most important and beneficial outcome of the 2016 election when Trump won was that it had so severely undermined the leading institutions of authority, which up until that point had seemed almost invulnerable.

00:02:35.000 These were the people who controlled the flow of information, who dictated public opinion without much dissent, who controlled the policy and ideology that governed Washington, regardless of the outcome of election.

00:02:47.000 It was that D.C. bipartisan consensus.

00:02:50.000 And Trump's victory shattered so much of their sense of invulnerability because they were all united against him.

00:02:57.000 They were all guaranteeing everybody that he was going to lose.

00:03:00.000 He was completely anathema to the sort of person that they expected would and had been and would always be entering the presidency.

00:03:08.000 But I think there was almost a subconscious level, even though it damaged them, on which they wrote it off as an aberration.

00:03:14.000 2020, despite all the challenges in the world that every incumbent globally faced because of COVID, he almost won again.

00:03:21.000 And then I think this time they really devoted themselves.

00:03:25.000 They tripled and quadrupled their effort in so many different ways, calling him Hitler and a fascist and a white supremacist all the way up until the day of the election, only to realize.

00:03:36.000 And I think this is the most traumatic part for them, not just that he won, but that so many of the groups that they believe they own, block, stop and barrel, who have an entitlement to obey them, migrated in huge numbers away from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the person that they've been saying is a white supremacist.

00:03:52.000 black voters, Latino voters, non-white voters.

00:03:54.000 And I think they're finding now, starting to internalize, that Nobody listens to them.

00:04:00.000 Nobody trusts them any longer.

00:04:01.000 They have zero influence beyond the people who already agree with them.

00:04:04.000 That this kind of power over information has been decentralized because, deservedly, they've lost trust because of how often they lie.

00:04:13.000 And Trump has been, more than anything else, and there's a lot of things he's been, but he's been a disruptor of status quo institutional authority.

00:04:21.000 And I don't think there's anyone who could do anything other than celebrate that.

00:04:25.000 Without a doubt.

00:04:26.000 So that kind of is a nice segue to the Pod Save America conversation.

00:04:30.000 For people that don't know, Pod Save America is like regime-approved, sarcastic political chatter on the left, right?

00:04:36.000 It is one of the top podcasts on the planet.

00:04:39.000 It's all the former Obama bros.

00:04:41.000 They got all the guests.

00:04:42.000 They think they know so much.

00:04:43.000 They had Jen O'Malley Dillon on the program, who was kind of walking through how things happened. 1.00

00:04:50.000 I want to play some tape, but first, Glenn, just set the table for the audience.

00:04:54.000 Why did you find this conversation so illuminating?

00:04:57.000 I was just joking with your producer that in a million years, I honestly never thought I would ever be able to sit through an hour and a half of a Pod Save America episode, and yet I proved myself wrong because I could not take my eyes off of it.

00:05:10.000 These are people who all come from Obama world. 0.88

00:05:13.000 So even though Obama was a very talented candidate and won national elections, underneath Obama the whole time the Democratic Party was crumbling.

00:05:23.000 They lost governorships and state houses, and it was really a party in complete disaster, just kind of with the stench covered up by the shine of Obama.

00:05:32.000 And these people came away from that thinking that they were the greatest geniuses in all of politics, and they were the ones who exercised the most influence over Kamala's campaign.

00:05:41.000 The purpose of this episode was to convene the geniuses who ran Kamala's campaign and try and ask them, honestly, Hey, what happened?

00:05:51.000 You just raised a billion dollars, infinitely more than Trump, far more than any other candidate, and you got your asses kicked up and down every one of the swing states.

00:06:00.000 You've lost major margins in the most blue states like New York and California and New Jersey, and you even lost the popular vote.

00:06:10.000 So you would expect there to be at least some symbolic or feigned acknowledgement of error.

00:06:17.000 Here are things we probably did wrong.

00:06:19.000 Here are reasons why the electorate has rejected.

00:06:21.000 There was none of that.

00:06:22.000 It was all, we did the best campaign we could possibly have run under the limited circumstances.

00:06:28.000 There was a lot of implication that it was the voters' fault.

00:06:31.000 There was a lot of suggestions that just the structural conditions of the economy and Biden's unpopularity made it impossible to win.

00:06:39.000 And the whole time I'm thinking, whose fault is it that your candidate ended up being imposed on the public with no primary vote, no mini election within your party, someone who had been long considered to be one of the least politically talented people on the planet that They were acting like these were externalities over which they had no control when they were the ones who did it.

00:07:00.000 And how do you, Charlie, as somebody at the top of your profession, making millions of dollars, which they do off these campaigns, Walk away from one of the most devastating defeats in a long time to Donald Trump, someone they consider a Hitlerian figure and a white supremacist, and not have an iota of self-reflection or self-doubt about what they might have done to contribute to that loss.

00:07:21.000 But that's exactly what it was.

00:07:23.000 Not just of refusing to admit error, but congratulating themselves.

00:07:23.000 90 minutes.

00:07:27.000 Oh, we ran a spectacular campaign under the...

00:07:32.000 We really made people excited about her.

00:07:34.000 We lost with less margin in the swing states than we did in the other states, which proved that some of our work actually had.

00:07:40.000 I mean, I always want to watch it again because of just how simultaneously mind boggling it is, but also how revealing it is about how this rotted political class thinks.

00:07:50.000 I want to play James Carville's reaction to Kamala's staffers here.

00:07:55.000 Playcut 57. The Vice President was thinking about going on Joe Rogan's show, and a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit.

00:08:07.000 Supposedly the campaign said that that wasn't the term to effect it, but they did.

00:08:12.000 When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, Let me tell you exactly what you'd tell these people, what I would tell them. 0.58

00:08:22.000 Not only am I not interested in your f***ing opinion, I'm not even going to call you by your name.

00:08:29.000 You're 23 years old.

00:08:30.000 I don't really give a s*** what you think.

00:08:33.000 What James Carville is getting at is that they were unwilling to even go sit down with Joe Rogan.

00:08:40.000 You've been on Rogan many times, Glenn.

00:08:41.000 And the whole joke, they're like, well, how do we get a new Rogan?

00:08:44.000 Well, you guys used to have Rogan, Glenn.

00:08:47.000 Yeah, I mean, first of all, just let's recall, when we're talking about James Carville, that he wrote article after article, including in the New York Times, saying that not only did he believe Kamlo was going to win the election, but he didn't think it was going to be close, that he had no doubts about it, that he had absolute certainty about it, and maybe that was just some activism.

00:09:03.000 But that is what he said repeatedly, and he turned out to be just as wrong as anybody else.

00:09:07.000 Maybe he should be listening to people a little bit more.

00:09:09.000 I think one of the things that's so funny that people have forgotten is that for all this talk about how the left needs Joe Rogan, as you said, the left had a Joe Rogan, whose name was Joe Rogan, just in 2022, not two decades ago, four years ago, Joe Rogan said his favorite candidate was Bernie Sanders and his second favorite candidate was Tulsi Gabbard.

00:09:31.000 So Joe Rogan endorsed the most left wing socialist candidate who's viable for the presidency in decades.

00:09:39.000 This far right, you know, radicalizing into fascism voice for young men four years ago was on board with Bernie Sanders.

00:09:50.000 And one of the things that happened was when the Sanders campaign did what, of course, they should have done, which was touted Joe Rogan's endorsement in their advertisements, because those were the voters they need to attract.

00:10:01.000 They needed to undermine this view that only far leftists supported Bernie Sanders.

00:10:05.000 People in the party led by AOC were so offended that the Sanders campaign would even speak with, let alone tout the endorsement of Joe Rogan, that AOC for months refused to have anything to do with the Sanders campaign.

00:10:19.000 She stopped campaigning with them.

00:10:20.000 She accused them of promoting transphobia.

00:10:23.000 And so when you have someone like Joe Rogan, who has so many classically left-wing positions, he's probably the loudest, most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage.

00:10:32.000 People go on his show and say, we need traditional marriage.

00:10:35.000 He'll pound them for hours about why that's wrong.

00:10:38.000 So many different views like that.

00:10:40.000 He's anti-corporatist.

00:10:41.000 He's anti-war.

00:10:42.000 To take somebody like that and just malign them and attack them and exclude them and say, because there's a couple of positions where Whether trans women should be able to play in sports or young children should get experimental sex reassignment surgery, we're going to declare you far right. 1.00

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00:11:56.000 So Glenn, I want to dive now into the foreign policy portion of our discussion here.

00:12:02.000 Joe Biden seems hell-bent on sending even more and more money overseas.

00:12:06.000 He just asked for 24 billion additional dollars to be sent to Ukraine to continue this very, very dangerous vertical escalation proxy war.

00:12:15.000 Glenn, break down this latest news and the significance of the danger here during this transition period.

00:12:22.000 I honestly don't think we've ever seen anything like this.

00:12:25.000 I can't think of a historical analogy where a president whose party is resoundingly rejected in an election uses the lame duck session not for...

00:12:36.000 Anything urgent or time sensitive, but to simply pour fuel on a fire of a war that even its initial advocates have acknowledged can no longer be won.

00:12:48.000 And especially when Trump ran on a platform of resolving this war peacefully and diplomatically, Precisely because he knows Ukraine can't win. 0.67

00:12:58.000 All it's doing is resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of Ukraine that the American taxpayer will pay to rebuild. 0.89

00:13:05.000 To watch Biden not just send more money out, but authorize the use of ATACMS missiles to strike deep inside Russia when that requires the active involvement of US or NATO military and other escalatory acts seems very much designed to prevent the next administration,

00:13:21.000 the Trump administration, from fulfilling We're good to go.

00:13:50.000 Yeah, and I just, the D.C. warmongers that have been pushing this further and further towards whatever this is, and it's bad, they're now applauding, saying finally we're able to use long-range American-made missiles into the interior of Russia.

00:14:07.000 Let me ask you from your reporting, Glenn, how are the Russian politicians and the Russian people viewing this?

00:14:14.000 Because we never get the Russian side of the story in American media.

00:14:18.000 Are they viewing this as an act of aggression, as they should, by the way?

00:14:23.000 Of course.

00:14:23.000 It would be like asking would the United States view it as an act of aggression if the United States were actively collaborating with some other country, not just to provide weapons to strike inside the United States, but use its military to guide those missiles and to target using their intelligence services where they should land but use its military to guide those missiles and to target using their intelligence services

00:14:44.000 I think one of the things that has been most lost because of how lost we are in propaganda is the fact that Ukraine is the most sensitive border spot for Russia.

00:14:56.000 It's the place that was used to invade Russia twice during the 20th century in both world wars that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russian citizens.

00:15:06.000 I actually interviewed a German politician, a really interesting woman, Sarah Wagenknecht, who has long been on the left, but is a vehement opponent of German support for the war.

00:15:14.000 And she talked about the generational psychological trauma for the Russians of seeing German troops and German tanks rather rolling eastward once again into Russia toward the Russian border.

00:15:28.000 This has been something, this war that has been extremely provocative toward Russia and And the problem is that we hear that Putin is a totalitarian leader.

00:15:36.000 No one challenges him.

00:15:37.000 He has a lot of political pressure, primarily on his nationalistic right, that has been critical, believing that he's shown too much restraint about NATO involvement in Ukraine.

00:15:46.000 And he has a lot of pressure to respond very aggressively to this seriously escalatory policy of now having the U.S. and NATO directly bomb inside Russia.

00:15:57.000 Yeah, I just at some point somebody has to articulate what exactly success looks like here and just these platitudes and abstractions punishing Putin or making sure Ukraine wins.

00:16:08.000 We have a minute remaining here, Glenn.

00:16:09.000 Am I correct in saying that Russia is taking more territory as months go by and that the Ukrainians are losing more and more ground?

00:16:18.000 Is that correct?

00:16:20.000 Yeah, nobody doubts that the Russian front line is expanding westward.

00:16:23.000 Nobody doubts that Ukraine has zero chance. 0.99

00:16:25.000 The problem is NATO defined victory from the start in a very unrealistic way, expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, and the Russians would never permit that.

00:16:37.000 And now the U.S. knows that's the outcome, and they're going to have to accept the humiliation of defeat.

00:16:42.000 Including Crimea.

00:16:43.000 I mean, first of all, Crimea is rightfully Russian, okay? 0.99

00:16:47.000 It's where Russian wine comes from.

00:16:49.000 It's where their navy was centered in World War II. I mean, these people are pathologically insane.

00:16:54.000 Everyone check out Glenn's show on rumble.com.

00:16:58.000 That is rumble.com.

00:16:59.000 Glenn, I want to ask you about the changing media landscape.

00:17:03.000 It seems as if the Democrat Party, who seems they're always on, they claim to be on the cutting edge of culture, have just come to realize that more Americans are getting news from social media and podcasting.

00:17:13.000 I mean, it's hard for me to believe they were this naive, but walk me through how they got to a place where they have lost such significant ground in digital content creation and podcasting.

00:17:27.000 I mean, you're in independent media.

00:17:29.000 I've been in independent media ever since I left the media that I founded when it wouldn't let me publish negative reporting about Joe Biden before the 2020 election.

00:17:37.000 Any of us could see this coming.

00:17:39.000 The data has been so clear.

00:17:41.000 Their ratings have been in collapse and freefall.

00:17:43.000 Every poll shows that Americans trust and like.

00:17:47.000 Corporate media, almost less than like pedophiles and syphilis.

00:17:51.000 And so the trends have been clear for so long.

00:17:54.000 But when your entire self identity or entire self esteem depends upon the position and the prestige that you think it brings with inside of a collapsing institution.

00:18:08.000 I think the most traumatizing part of this election for them was, again, not just that Trump won, but that so many non-white voters, the people who they think they're the benevolent leaders of, who they think they own, who they think they have the right to have eternal support, migrated in huge numbers who they think they have the right to have eternal support, migrated in huge numbers away from their candidate to Donald Trump, despite constantly saying Trump was a Nazi, was going

00:18:34.000 Remember, the whole last week of the convention was the media claiming that Trump had a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.

00:18:41.000 They were convinced Tony Hinchcliffe's joke was going to swing the election because Puerto Ricans would rise up with Latinos led by Jennifer Lopez and Big Bunny or Bad Bunny or whoever.

00:18:50.000 And none of that happened.

00:18:53.000 And so when you think that you speak and are so foreign, so connected to a group of people who turn around and show that they don't see the world remotely the way you see it, they don't care what you see, they don't listen to what you see, this is almost too much for even them to be in denial any longer. 0.63

00:19:09.000 And that's why you see all these, oh my God, how are we going to create our own Joe Rogan?

00:19:13.000 Yeah, but is there something to the format where leftists, not liberals, struggle in long-form podcasting?

00:19:21.000 They struggle in unscripted environments?

00:19:24.000 Is there something to the new left?

00:19:26.000 And I don't mean traditional liberal values.

00:19:28.000 I mean one that has a primary focus on censorship and war and regime politics that That stays away from that sort of inquiry towards truth or long-form dialogue?

00:19:40.000 Is it the format that also doesn't fit their politics?

00:19:44.000 I definitely see what you mean.

00:19:46.000 At the same time, as somebody who has long been associated with the left, who was kind of steeped in a civil libertarianism with which the left was once most associated, you see a lot of the right-wing movements at least is shaped and led by Donald Trump.

00:20:03.000 these issues quite successfully.

00:20:04.000 The only people who talk anymore about free speech versus censorship are on the right.

00:20:07.000 The only people who talk anymore about the evils of the CIA and the FBI and the U.S. security state are people on the right, not the left.

00:20:14.000 Same with the war machine.

00:20:15.000 I don't think it's so much the topics.

00:20:18.000 I think it's the fact that there's so much forced orthodoxy within liberal left discourse that people just can't speak freely.

00:20:27.000 They're constantly afraid of their own shadows.

00:20:28.000 You saw that with Kamala Harris.

00:20:29.000 You see that with left-wing media in general.

00:20:32.000 People sense that.

00:20:33.000 If you're not someone speaking freely, if you're petrified of saying the wrong word, you seem inauthentic.

00:20:39.000 It's not a faction that anyone wants to be a And Trump came along and, you know, blew through every single taboo and limit without the slightest concern, the slightest apology.

00:20:54.000 And that opened up so much space on the right.

00:20:56.000 And I think that's what made it so much more powerful, so much more able to connect with the ordinary people that the left had had a claim on for so long.

00:21:04.000 How, I mean, the new left, I don't mean traditional liberal values.

00:21:09.000 I mean totalitarian impulses and, you know, international warmongering, values that you and I don't hold.

00:21:17.000 What I'm curious, though, is what will their next move be?

00:21:20.000 Do you see the Democrat Party liberalizing itself towards one and re-embracing a free speech dialogue expression, agree to disagree, kind of the promise of the Bill of Rights?

00:21:30.000 Or is there going to be the even further rise of this kind of woke wing?

00:21:36.000 I know I'm asking you to speculate and predict, but as a reporter, I'm sure you've thought deeply about this.

00:21:42.000 What is next for the current composition of the American Democrat Party?

00:21:46.000 I don't think it's that hard to predict.

00:21:48.000 And I also don't think that this distinction that you're drawing that has always been valid between kind of establishment liberalism and the left is really that wide anymore or even that real.

00:21:58.000 You know, the left of the 1960s protesting against the Vietnam War.

00:22:02.000 And the establishment was always a little different than Lyndon Johnson and that whole gang that pursued the Vietnam War.

00:22:08.000 Those distinctions have eroded in favor of this idea that you cannot trust ordinary people.

00:22:14.000 You can trust elites with expertise, but you can't trust ordinary people.

00:22:18.000 And this whole industry that was concocted out of nowhere, creating a fake credential of people being disinformation agents, that was all reaction to First of all, to the UK approval of Brexit, but way more so the big trauma for liberals of Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. And they concluded from that the only hope they have to continue to control people and their thoughts is to create systems to further control, censor, and manipulate public opinion through the internet more.

00:22:47.000 And I think with this crushing defeat and them being at such a loss in the wilderness to figure out how to get back, They're going to resort to increasingly authoritarian tactics that they already believe in and just kind of double and triple down on them, not just as American liberals, but with the Western left that very much believes in this also.

00:23:04.000 Yeah, and that's an important distinction is that if this current government they might not have control of, but they still control a lot of states and a lot, almost all of Europe has embraced this new orthodoxy.

00:23:17.000 It's very dangerous and pernicious.

00:23:22.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:24:23.000 I want to play Cut 60 here.

00:24:25.000 I just got this tape.

00:24:27.000 Stephanie Cutter describing how important TikTok was for Donald Trump.

00:24:32.000 And this ties into...

00:24:34.000 The whole TikTok ban that I know you spoke against and it's looming on January 19th and should we give the power to the government to ban social media apps we don't like?

00:24:43.000 Maybe this would explain why they want TikTok banned.

00:24:46.000 Playcut60.

00:24:47.000 But we have to pay attention to why people find that appealing.

00:24:54.000 And His use of TikTok in specifically reaching those younger men, I can't tell you how many friends of mine or nieces and nephews would say to me, you know, I'm getting these things from Trump all the time on TikTok.

00:25:08.000 And they're not political people.

00:25:10.000 They weren't signing up for that stuff.

00:25:12.000 But Trump was reaching them.

00:25:13.000 So there is a lot for us to learn in that.

00:25:17.000 So the main takeaway there, Glenn, is, as you know, the TikTok ban was birthed out of the October 7th situation because there were too many Americans that were getting a, let's just say, unfavorable opinion of a foreign country.

00:25:33.000 And I'm pro-Israel, and I think it's insane that you ban a social media app because Americans don't agree with you on a foreign policy issue.

00:25:40.000 Talk about the whole TikTok element, its role in this election, and this looming TikTok ban that Trump's going to have to decide on.

00:25:47.000 Well, the irony, of course, is that TikTok has always been perceived as this far-left or leftist platform, which is normal for young people to be more inclined to the left.

00:25:58.000 And the idea of banning TikTok originated with the Trump administration, a lot of Republicans in the Senate, based on this idea that it was a CCP-controlled propaganda outlet, that it was a threat to national security.

00:26:09.000 Which, as you point out, it never went anywhere.

00:26:12.000 It never got the votes until after October 7th when Democrats decided it was too pro-Palestinian, too permissive of anti-Israel criticism.

00:26:21.000 But to watch now Democrats turn around and be concerned about TikTok as some sort of right-wing propaganda outlet when all along they saw it as one of their best assets because so many people perceived it as a left-wing outlet.

00:26:36.000 You know, it's amazing, but at the end of the day, it shouldn't matter.

00:26:40.000 TikTok is an app that people voluntarily use huge numbers of people to organize to speak to one another to form communities.

00:26:46.000 And it's always their impulse now that if they identify a certain font of information that they think is harmful to their political interests.

00:26:54.000 Their instinct is not to figure out how to commandeer it or integrate into it, but how to just stop it, suppress it, make sure that it no longer can compete with the outlets of institutions that they control.

00:27:08.000 That is the prevailing left liberal instinct in the West that I think is so dangerous.

00:27:14.000 Yeah, I just...

00:27:15.000 Can we just also talk more just about the precedent of what this would allow for...

00:27:19.000 I mean, to allow the federal government to say what social media apps you can use because it's fostering opinion that we don't like?

00:27:25.000 And just so everyone understands, right now, TikTok is scheduled to be banned on January 19th almost simultaneously with Trump's inauguration.

00:27:35.000 I mean, again, this is so coordinated.

00:27:38.000 Right?

00:27:39.000 And you're seeing this firsthand in Brazil as well, if I'm not mistaken.

00:27:43.000 Oh, yeah.

00:27:43.000 I mean, in Brazil, there's an obsession and a successful one because there's no First Amendment with simply banning every single expression on social media that the predominantly centrist, left, liberal part of the government dislikes out of fear that Bolsonaro is a highly popular political figure, which he is, and if they allow free speech, he will return, which he will.

00:28:03.000 In the United States, it's a little bit more difficult just because of the First Amendment, but it's exactly the same thing.

00:28:10.000 And you're so right.

00:28:11.000 There's a constitutional prohibition on Congress passing a law about just one company.

00:28:16.000 So you can't pass a law saying TikTok is banned.

00:28:19.000 You have to pass a law saying in the event the president determines that a foreign-owned company It's been incredible to watch a lot of people who raised the free speech banner support that as well.

00:28:48.000 Yeah, and that means that a future Democrat president could ban Telegram, could ban Rumble.

00:28:55.000 I mean, it's just whatever app that you don't like, you can just give the federal government the ability to ban.

00:29:02.000 Glenn, I want to get your thoughts.

00:29:04.000 I mean...

00:29:04.000 You're never going to have a transition where you agree with every single person.

00:29:08.000 However, as somebody who has covered the intel agencies and broke the Snowden story, I would love your thoughts on Tulsi Gabbard being selected for Director of National Intelligence.

00:29:19.000 The profundity of that and the significance of someone who has been one of the most articulate, outspoken critics of American intel agencies actually potentially becoming the Director of National Intelligence.

00:29:32.000 Yeah, you almost feel like sometimes you live in a dream world where a lot of people who are paid to pay attention to politics never listen to a word Donald Trump said.

00:29:39.000 He has been railing against the abuses and the politicization.

00:29:43.000 And the corruption of the intel agencies for eight years, in part because he was a victim of it.

00:29:48.000 And he has been promising to overhaul it, to drain the swamp, which includes that.

00:29:53.000 And yet somehow a lot of people in both parties and the media thought he was going to come in and just appoint status quo preservers, like the sort of people who usually get appointed to these positions.

00:30:03.000 And they're shocked that he chose someone in Tulsi Gabbard, who is a virulent critic of The U.S. intelligence agencies of the way they've monopolized and politicized spying and abused their spying powers when his whole campaign was about putting people in charge of these agencies who would clean it out, who would drain the swamp, who would clean it from the root.

00:30:24.000 And the reason why there's so much attacks on people like her, as opposed to, say, Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik, is because they understand that she really is a radical critic of the agencies that he wants her to lead.

00:30:36.000 That's what upsets Washington more than anything because there's so many prerogatives and entitlements and profits that come from preserving these agencies as is.

00:30:46.000 The keeper of secrets.

00:30:47.000 And so, Glenn, you know how the intel world works better than anybody from a reporter perspective.

00:30:52.000 If she gets to be DNI director, what could she do there?

00:30:55.000 What can she clean up? 0.99

00:30:56.000 What can she expose?

00:30:57.000 What mandate can she fulfill? 1.00

00:31:00.000 DNI has kind of post 9-11 been a little bit of a kind of a shelf item, a little bit of an accessory.

00:31:05.000 But actually, the way it's written is an extraordinarily powerful department that is supposed to be the offensive coordinator of all intel flow into the federal government.

00:31:16.000 Right, based on the 9-11 idea that the reason it happened was because the intel agencies weren't communicating, so you needed someone at the top of it in charge.

00:31:23.000 Look, I mean, permanent power factions in Washington, the capital of the most powerful and lucrative country on the planet, don't give up power easily.

00:31:31.000 I mean, as Chuck Schumer said to Rachel Maddow, everyone in Washington knows you don't confront the intel agencies because they have six different ways to Sunday to get back at you, which I think was one of the most extraordinarily important statements.

00:31:42.000 But in this case, Tulsi Gabbard, in that position, can do a lot of good changing these agencies, even though the resistance will be immense.

00:31:49.000 Yeah, and so can we just kind of emphasize this?

00:31:52.000 If you're able to, let's just say, bring the intel agencies to heel, that could potentially prevent the next unnecessary war.

00:32:01.000 Is that a fair summary?

00:32:02.000 Is that we sometimes go into these conflicts because of faulty intelligence and misleading intel reports?

00:32:12.000 Yeah, there are two components of it.

00:32:13.000 One was the intel agencies were never supposed to spy on or be involved in American politics, and increasingly since 9-11, that's a big part of what they do, which is obviously an anti-democratic threat for so many reasons.

00:32:23.000 But the other part is they provide the intelligence to the president.

00:32:27.000 And when they want to persuade or deceive a president to involve the U.S. in a war, all they do is cook up intelligence, as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya, even in Ukraine.

00:32:38.000 And that is probably the worst, most destructive part of these intel agencies is that they deliberately lie in order to keep the endless war machine on which they depend and from which so many of them profit, continuing to be perpetrated by just constantly telling presidents and the media whatever it wants to hear to generate support publicly for these continuing to be perpetrated by just constantly telling presidents and the media whatever it wants to hear to generate support

00:33:01.000 If Tulsi Gabbard ends up getting confirmed as director of national intelligence, it'll be one of the greatest successes post 9-11 to bring trust, transparency and truth to the intel agencies since the Patriot Act.

00:33:14.000 Would you agree with that, Glenn?

00:33:15.000 30 seconds.

00:33:17.000 Yeah, if it happens, let's have a little party on your show, and we can come and celebrate, even just for a few minutes, a little champagne, because this is the kind of defeat that Washington rarely suffers, and they're on the verge of suffering it, and that's why they're in full panic mode.

00:33:31.000 I'm going to do everything I can to get Tulsi across the finish line.

00:33:34.000 It's going to be a tough fight.

00:33:35.000 Glenn, you're a great man.

00:33:36.000 Thank you.

00:33:38.000 Have Turkey for me in Brazil. 1.00

00:33:40.000 You've still got to have the Thanksgiving something down there.

00:33:44.000 I'm still American, so I have to honor it.

00:33:46.000 All right, Charlie, great seeing you.

00:33:48.000 Thanks for having me back on.

00:33:49.000 Thanks for the time.

00:33:50.000 Very generous with your time.

00:33:51.000 Thank you.

00:33:52.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:33:53.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:33:56.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 27, 2024

Glenn Greenwald On The Left: Hey Idiots, It's Your Fault!

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