Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Greenwald join me to talk about whether Donald Trump will run for president in 2020. Mike Lee and I talk about the Constitution and why we should all learn to understand what the government can and cannot do.
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00:00:07.420Bill O'Reilly gives us the rundown of the week, the biggest stories of the week.
00:00:11.760We talk a little bit about whether Donald Trump is going to run again.
00:00:15.480Interesting stuff coming from Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Greenwald on the media and the Hunter Biden laptop.
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00:01:51.680Mike Lee and I were talking on the phone just a couple of nights ago about the Constitution,
00:01:56.960and I asked him some questions, and I thought, you know, this is an interesting conversation.
00:02:01.600We should just have some of this on the air. Hi, Mike. How are you?
00:02:05.020Doing great, Glenn. Good to be with you as always.
00:02:07.340So, Mike, I was talking to you about ways to understand the Constitution,
00:02:14.820and I'm working on something to where you don't have to even read it,
00:28:01.940A severe escalation of the war on a free Internet and free discourse has taken place over the last 12 months.
00:28:11.400Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged.
00:28:15.920The destruction by big tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time.
00:28:23.700That it was the most downloaded app in the country.
00:28:27.540The banning of the sitting president from social media.
00:28:31.200The increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.
00:28:43.960But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election by the CIA, big tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about the then presidential frontrunner Joe Biden.
00:29:06.580October 14th and then on October 15th, 2020, the New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions.
00:29:23.820Glenn Greenwald is here to tell us all about the conclusion.
00:30:07.780Yeah. So when the New York Post first reported the story as somebody who has worked many times on large archives of documents and had to stake my reputation in my career on verifying that they were genuine before reporting them.
00:30:24.180Something I did when I reported on Edward Snowden's archive about the NSA and with WikiLeaks many times and also a big story in Brazil when I got a large archive.
00:30:33.520And it was obvious to me that the evidence was overwhelming that these documents were authentic.
00:30:37.900It had every indicia of authenticity that was reported by Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Caller and others.
00:30:44.560But the rest of the media, the corporate media, ignored that evidence and tried to lead everybody to believe that the documents were forged, that they were fake.
00:30:55.300And the biggest gift they got was when the CIA, a bunch of former CIA officials like John Brennan and James Clapper issued a letter saying that they believed that the archive was Russian disinformation, which has two claims to it.
00:31:11.960One is it came from Russia, but the second, it's disinformation, meaning the documents are fake, and therefore you shouldn't pay attention to them.
00:31:19.340And in that letter, Glenn, the CIA operatives admitted they had no evidence that it came from Russia or that the documents were fake.
00:31:28.840They just said it's kind of just our sense that this is the case.
00:31:35.140We emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided by the New York Post or President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.
00:31:48.440Just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
00:31:59.160Exactly, exactly, and what's amazing is even they who are, you know, basically trained disinformation agents, such as the CIA and the intelligence community is constructed to do, they're not supposed to do it domestically, as they did during the Trump years, but they do, or they're expected to do it internationally, as they're trained liars.
00:32:18.540Even they were more honest than what the corporate media ended up using that letter for, which was to say, these intelligence officials say definitively that this is Russian disinformation.
00:32:31.200And they, you know, you can go through every video from CNN and MSNBC and NBC News and CBS News and The Washington Post, New York Times, where they just say over and over, this is Russian disinformation.
00:32:42.580And they use that as an excuse not even to discuss the revelations, but the worst thing of all is that Twitter and Facebook then seized on that claim to censor, censor this story from being discussed.
00:32:57.860So if you try to post a link to the New York Post reporting or other media outlets discussing it, you would get a message saying this link is prohibited.
00:33:06.400It was one of the most astounding acts of brute censorship by this union of the of the intelligence community, the corporate media and big tech right before our election that I've ever seen.
00:33:17.980So so, Glenn, where does this story go from here?
00:33:20.880Because these these emails are coming out.
00:33:27.740And it shows it's not a story about Hunter Biden.
00:33:31.140It is a story about Joe Biden being corrupt to his eyeballs in things like trying to sell access to him to be able to get Libyan money released, access to the Oval Office and to Joe Biden for Mexico and China and money being demanded for these things.
00:33:55.300This is this is this is some of the most gross corruption of our administration that has actually been able to come out and be proven.
00:34:06.200I think for me, the biggest corruption, the worst corruption is the journalistic corruption.
00:34:11.500So the reason we're talking about this story again, aside from the new emails about what he did in Libya, which are extremely incriminating, is because, as I said, from the beginning, there was evidence and proof that these emails were authentic.
00:34:25.300The problem was they came from right wing outlets and liberals have been trained to just ignore everything that comes from right wing outlets.
00:34:33.700What we have now is a new book by a young, actually courageous reporter who deserves a lot of credit, Ben Treckinger, who works at Politico as mainstream of an outlet as it gets.
00:34:44.460Obviously, no friend of the right wing.
00:34:46.200Right. And in his book, which is all about investigating the Biden, he spent months doing a really deep dive reporting to try and find the proof about whether these emails, the key ones, not the like ancillary ones about Hunter Biden's personal life, which personally I don't care about.
00:35:02.600But the substantive ones about Joe Biden's deals in China and his interference in Ukraine on behalf of Burisma, which is paying his son $50,000, the actual corruption of Joe Biden, he proved with months of reporting that these emails are accurate.
00:35:18.140And here's the thing. If he had proven the opposite, if he had, through these months of reporting, had gathered proof that these emails were actually forged, he would be the biggest star in American media right now.
00:35:30.140He'd be on Good Morning America and the Today Show and every single program.
00:35:34.020But because his reporting proved that the media lies and that these emails are authentic, he has not been on one of those shows, NPR, CNN, any of the networks.
00:35:44.400And in fact, Glenn, they won't even mention his book.
00:35:48.700They won't even acknowledge this proof that everything they told the American people for weeks is an absolute lie.
00:35:55.680This is Russian disinformation. And in fact, these emails were authentic all along.
00:36:00.180That is how grotesquely corrupt our media is.
00:36:04.380Well, we'll call Ben. I'll give him a full hour to talk about his about his book.
00:36:10.980So what is the solution, Glenn, for the media?
00:36:15.000Because do you think the media is ever going to take this on and treat this as a real story?
00:36:21.960Not their part of it, but the but the actual corruption part.
00:36:26.940No, I mean, that's the other thing is, you know, Ben Treckinger's book.
00:36:31.920One part of it is confirming the authenticity of the emails.
00:36:35.580Most of it is about investigating the Biden family the way that every other first family has been investigated.
00:36:42.400The Clintons, the Obamas, the Trumps, you know, the Bushes.
00:36:47.620But we don't know very much about the Bidens.
00:36:49.960And so they've ignored this book, both parts of it.
00:36:52.200And I think, look, for me, I used to think that the corporate media could be reformed through criticism, through critique, through pressure campaigns.
00:37:06.900They are they lie for as their model on purpose for ideological and business ends.
00:37:12.560And so I think the solution is, number one, to make people aware as clearly as possible that they should keep and despise the corporate media, that whatever contempt they have for it probably isn't enough.
00:37:26.400And then, number two, to encourage and build independent platforms that aren't susceptible to censorship by big tax and that aren't subject to the pieties and orthodoxies of these institutions of authority that control what these other outlets have done.
00:37:43.140And in a lot of ways, they are their own worst enemies.
00:37:45.700If you look at polling, the media is held in lower esteem than almost any other institution in our society, like right above, you know, like pedophiles.
00:38:40.360Yeah, you know, I do think these outlets are losing influence.
00:38:47.500If you look at, for example, the ratings of the two largest liberal outlets, CNN and MSNBC, they were already in collapse before Trump arrived.
00:39:00.400All those hosts were about to get fired because nobody was watching their shows.
00:39:05.320Trump single-handedly saved that part of the media because it gave people a desire to watch.
00:39:11.840And it enabled them to scare everybody about Trump sufficiently to make people pay attention.
00:39:17.200And with Trump gone, they're back to disappearing.
00:39:20.120I mean, the ratings of CNN and MSNBC are humiliatingly little.
00:39:24.480I mean, they get, you know, on their best days, what like a mid-level YouTuber gets.
00:39:30.940And so, and then you look at, you know, like Fox News and other outlets that challenge the liberal orthodoxies and putting even like OAN and, you know, these maps that are growing.
00:39:39.500But what's really growing are independent platforms, people who are on Rumble, who are on Substack, who are on YouTube even, who can keep on Twitter.
00:39:48.900People who have these dissonant voices are able to shape discourse in ways that previously they never were able to do before.
00:39:56.440And that's the thing that I think needs to be built and fortified.
00:40:00.640So is the social media, the corporate social media, are they doomed for the same kind of fate?
00:40:13.720I mean, you know, when I, you know, the first time you and I ever talked along was I think like a year or so after I began doing the reporting from Edward Snowden about how the NSA was spying on everybody.
00:40:24.260And my cause back then was a free internet because I always viewed the internet as one of the most important human innovations to free us from the tyranny of centralized government and corporate control.
00:40:36.740Because it would enable us to communicate with one another without their intervention.
00:40:41.040And what the certain story was about and now what big tech censorship is about is this attempt to degrade that internet from this tool of liberation into a tool of coercion.
00:40:52.320And, yeah, I do think that the kind of, you know, Silicon Valley giants, the monopolies like Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are obviously being increasingly controlled in terms of the things you can and can't say on there.
00:41:06.300And that's why these alternatives like Grumble, like Substack, like people turning to Bitcoin and blockchain, which will decentralize control of how we communicate with one another, are becoming more and more popular.
00:41:20.240Because what's the point of having an internet if the same corporate and state forces dictate and censor and police what we can say, as always, we're in control beforehand.
00:41:31.340And the, I mean, the thing that always crosses my mind is there's an awful lot of money and power at stake.
00:41:39.800And that's why I can't see the United States government, you know, letting Bitcoin and letting social media get out of their grasps.
00:41:52.260Yeah, I mean, anytime you have a new technology, a new instrument, a new weapon, whatever you want to call it,
00:41:59.560and the internet can be described as all of those things, that can actually threaten prevailing status quo power and power centers.
00:42:10.020You're obviously going to have a war over who gets to control it.
00:42:14.040So if you look at the internet and what's been happening, for example, with privacy,
00:42:18.700while the NSA and its allies and China and Iran are always looking for ways to control the internet to prevent the scent from circulating,
00:42:28.040you have privacy activists and technology specialists building tools like encryption in order to stay one step ahead of them.