Ep 104 | Dangerous Tech Oligarchs Who Answer to No One | Glenn Greenwald | The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 26 minutes
Words per Minute
169.48363
Summary
Glenn Greenwald is one of the best journalists alive. He s been reporting on politics for 15 years, and in that time, he s won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA. In 2014, he left the Intercept, the news outlet he founded, because he was worried about rampant bias and censorship in the media. In 2019, he became embroiled in a political controversy that reached all the way up to the new president of Brazil. He details all of it in his incredible new book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil.
Transcript
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Hey, welcome to today's podcast. It is no secret that Americans are fed up with the state of
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journalism. There is a recent Gallup poll that determined seven in 10 Americans see bias in
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media and consider it, I don't know, a problem. They think that journalists are actively trying
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to persuade people to adopt a position. I haven't noticed. At the same time, eight in 10 Americans
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believe that journalism is important for democracy. It is. It's critical, but not the way it's
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being done now. Not like this. What we're seeing is activism that hides itself behind headlines.
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If there's any hope for the survival of journalism in America, we need more people like today's guest.
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He's maybe one of five people alive actually doing the job of a journalist. And of those five,
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I would say he is one of the best and most daring, which means you're about to hear my discussion
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with the best journalist alive, or at least one of them. Maybe it will be remembered as the best
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journalist of our era. The proof of this is that corporate media has turned against him. One critic
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called him a bomb throwing media critic. Andrew Ross Sorkin implied that he should be arrested.
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He says that he says the things that make people uncomfortable, but that's what journalism is.
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And he makes people uncomfortable regardless of their politics. He's been reporting on politics for
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about 15 years now. If you remember the explosive series of articles in 2013 about Edward Snowden and
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the NSA released in the Guardian, that was him. Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on that. Pretty much the
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only Pulitzer Prize winning story that basically everyone knows about. He's since gone to gone on
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to do incredible things. In 2014, he launched the intercept because he was worried about rampant bias
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and censorship in the media. Now, how do I know this guy stands by his principles? Because last year,
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he left the intercept. The news outlet he founded because he said, it's the same bias and censorship
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that I set out to upend. I can't be a part of this. In 2011, he moved to Brazil for political reasons,
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which we'll get into. And 2019, he became embroiled in a political controversy that reached all the way
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up to the new president of Brazil. He details all of it in his incredible new book titled
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Securing Democracy, My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil. Today's podcast guest, welcome,
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Glenn Greenwald. Hey, staying healthy is tough enough, especially if you're like me and you're
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a fatty fatso and you have no self-control. We just rounded the corner on the new year and
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I, for one, have resolved to lose weight this year. And I've lost maybe 15 pounds, but it doesn't look
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Glenn, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining me.
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Yeah, it's great to talk to you again. Thank you for inviting me.
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I will tell you, you are confusing at times or have been. We live in really confusing times and
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you don't really ever know anybody's true intent until their back is up against the wall. And when
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I saw your own company, the company that you started, the intercept, and you came out against
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it and said, look, this is the same. This is the why I started this to get away from this crap. And
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you left. I was really impressed when you would call out your own business and the things that you
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have done well for a long time, but mainly recently in Brazil, what you've done is remarkable and very
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brave. Thanks. You know, with the intercept, you know, it was, it was difficult. It wasn't fun to do
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that because that was something that I had created with two of my closest friends in journalism, two
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journalists for whom I have a lot of respect at the height of the Snowden story when we had a lot of
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leverage. And the idea was to create a media outlet that would give journalists complete journalistic
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freedom and editorial independence of a kind that I always wanted and work to preserve for myself.
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The idea was to give it to other journalists. And so to have this media company to which I devoted so
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much of my energy and time, and that was important to me in terms of what I thought we were building and
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what it was going to stand for in journalism, turn around and kind of betray every single one of those
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values out of really nothing more than this petty fear that the people in their circles would accuse
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them of risking a Trump victory by doing their jobs and reporting on Joe Biden, which is kind of what
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happened to them in 2016 when we reported extensively on Hillary Clinton. And they spent four years being
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told, Oh, you help Trump win. They were petrified that that would happen again. And they were willing to
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throw everything overboard, including their basic function as journalists. In order to suppress the
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story, they even the thing that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me was about a week before
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telling me that my story didn't meet their lofty editorial standards. They published an article
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that essentially just did nothing but parrot the claim by a bunch of ex CIA officials like John Brennan,
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that the Hunter Biden documents were Russian disinformation, two lies in one phrase that it
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came from Russia and that this the documents were forged. They published that even though we were
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created to be adversarial to the intelligence community, but my story didn't meet their high
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minded journalism. So that was really something I couldn't withstand. I don't know what's happened or if
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we can ever really recover. Are there enough people in journalism now or does it have to be a total reset?
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You know, I really think that what what happened was
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journalism was really dying before Trump. Trump was kind of the sugar high that that saved them.
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And what happened was they started believing their own PR that they were that Trump was essentially the
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equivalent of of of Adolf Hitler. Antichrist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They created this this demented
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fiction and then cast themselves as the star protagonist fighting on the front lines to
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save everything good in the world and came to believe that anything was just in pursuit of that
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that battle. And I think they still are seeing themselves that way. They're continuously, you know,
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they're so disappointed that Trump has disappeared. And, you know, they've lost the trust and faith of
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the public. I mean, it's at an all time low. And no, I don't think it's coming back because they
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don't think they've done anything wrong. There's no self critique at all. I think what's going to
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happen is more independent outlets like the one that you're doing, like the place where I'm now
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writing and other places are going to continue to grow at their expense. Yeah, I will tell you
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that. Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but I was not a fan of Donald Trump before he got into
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office. And then I just watched him and I mean, in a way, begrudgingly said, OK, he's not doing the
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crazy things that I thought he was going to do. And he's actually doing some things that I never thought
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any president would do in a good way. Still hate the way he talks and, you know, the tweets and
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everything else. But you got to be honest. And when the Russian thing happened, I actually thought
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that was probably true. I thought it was actually probably true. I could see that. I mean, like the
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collusion part, you thought not just the appearance, but also the collusion part was true. Yeah, I thought
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that was probably true. But I wanted to see the facts. And when the facts didn't appear and everything
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was Nazi level, you know, Hitler gas chamber level, they lost credibility. And they actually
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it wasn't the it was the facts that drove me to say, OK, this is not true. And these guys are out to get
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them. But it actually pushed me to be a bigger supporter than I think I ever would have been
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because they were so clearly out to get this guy. It was it was like I had never seen anything like
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it. Yeah. And, you know, I found it to be a threat to democracy because what actually happened was
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whatever you think about Trump and Hillary in the 26th election and whoever you wanted to win,
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there's no question that Trump won fair and square. Right. He got you got more electoral college
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votes and under the Constitution became the legitimate president. And the reality is that many
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power senators in the United States simply never accepted that outcome because it wasn't the one
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they wanted and they felt threatened by it. And so they devoted themselves to doing everything
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they could first to preventing him from winning and then subverting his presidency once he won
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in ways that are really quite menacing to to democracy. The whole Russiagate script came from
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the CIA, which, you know, is not supposed to have any involvement in our domestic politics.
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Um, and yet because he was questioning things like the ongoing value of NATO, which was originally
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created to be a bulwark against the country that no longer exists or the regime change operation in
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Syria, which was their highest priority. Um, you know, running against the Iraq war, talking about,
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you know, the Pentagon, uh, getting weapon systems that we don't need in order to enrich lobbyists and
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Raytheon board of directors, all these things that were very threatening to real entrenched power
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centers in Washington using this partnership that they've always had throughout the cold war with,
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with the major media outlet. They just set out to destroy his presidency in a way that I found
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infinitely more menacing than whatever one might think about Donald Trump and the things that he
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was doing. Oh my gosh. I mean, the, the way they used the FISA courts. And I mean,
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if you can set out and do this to the president of the United States, the regular Joe doesn't have
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a chance, not a chance. You know, Glenn, I think when I was on your show, um, the first time you and
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I spoke, when we met, I was in Texas. I was, I think we spent most of the time talking about the
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Snowden reporting. I did with the end about the NSA. And obviously, you know, that has been a cause of
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mine for a long time is the danger posed by this enormous spying system. And when Edward Snowden
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decided to come forward after spending his life inside of these agencies, because he originally
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believed in them, he volunteered for the Iraq war, you know, he worked for the CIA, he worked for the
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NSA. He was, his father was in the coast guard. He was not a left-wing radical by any means. He donated
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money to Ron Paul. When he came forward, it was because he said, they're now turning this on the
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American people. They're now, this is no longer a, a weapon system being used against foreign
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adversaries. And, you know, I do think that the scandal of the FBI getting caught lying to the
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FISA court in order to spy on a U.S. citizen, Carter Page, who even Robert Mueller concluded
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there was no evidence to suggest he was ever a Russian agent, let alone engaging in nefarious
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conduct on behalf of the Kremlin. It was a major, major scandal. I mean, an FBI lawyer went to jail
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for, for lying or was convicted of perjury. Those kinds of abuses of power, if you inverted them,
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I mean, that was the kind of stuff that, that J. Edgar Hoover did, that Joseph McCarthy did,
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that people in the next administration did, that caused a major scandal. You know, we need to reform
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the intelligence here. I don't even think nobody even remembers that. And that's what really frightens
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me, Glenn, is that a lot of the people that were involved in some of these scandals are now back in
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the administration. It doesn't seem like there's ever going to be a report that is released or nobody's
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going to be held accountable. And you've got four years of doing nothing except making that deep state,
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if you will, even stronger. I mean, if people don't pay for their crimes,
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it teaches the next group of people that want to do crime. We can get away with it as long as we're
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on the right side of, you know, the press or whoever. Yeah. You know, it's so funny.
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I read an article in January of 2017, either days before or days after Trump's inauguration,
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the headline of which was the deep state goes to war with the elected president. And I think it was
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Rush Limbaugh who spoke about that story that week and started claiming that I was the person who had
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invented this phrase. And then liberals also thought this was like this newly invented conspiracy theory
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by the right wing, by Trump supporters. When in reality, the idea of a deep state and, you know,
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in the United States is something that thrives among political scientists. Yeah. I mean, I didn't even
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call it that. He called it the military industrial complex, but it was the same message. His message,
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he was, you know, president for eight years when the CIA was created and grew. And he had one,
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you know, he had 15 minutes to warn the country on his way out about whatever he thought they should
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know. And he said, here's what I want to warn you about. There's this permanent faction that's
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entrenching itself. That's more powerful than elected officials. That is this military industrial
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complex that's infecting every hall of academia and every hall of power. And its influence is going
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to threaten democracy. This is before the Vietnam War, before 9-11, before the gigantic growth from
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both of those and throughout the decades. It's, you know, if you don't, if you're not, if you don't
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recognize the existence of the deep state, and if you're not concerned about it, you know nothing
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about American politics and how power in the US government functions. I have to tell you, I thought the
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phrase, I was really uncomfortable at the beginning of deep state. I, you know, it implies like a star
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chamber and everything else where all you have to do is really go back and read Eisenhower. You know,
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he talked about it's going to infest in the colleges and the universities. It's going to start funding
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projects where it's not really an honest question. It's a question to further their agenda. It will
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infiltrate everything and destroy everything. That's what it is. That's what it is. I'm afraid
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that we are now at a point to where Congress and the Senate and the White House, I think really on
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whoever gets in, I think Trump was a, he was just such a cannonball or a grenade that I think he was
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blowing things up that he didn't even know he was blowing up, you know? Right. Uh, and so he was
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frightening to everybody. Um, but I wonder now if, if with the way that the corporations are getting
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involved and Glenn, I'm not a guy. I always used to think like, you know, you'd watch, uh, what was
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it? That movie with Harris of a blade runner. And you know, they'd say, Oh, I work for the corporation.
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I'll be like, stop it. Stop it. I've always been a free market guy, a capital corporation. Yeah. The,
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uh, the free market, uh, is not free. These guys have embedded themselves with Congress, with the,
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with the both political parties, with the media, we are headed for an oligarchy and I don't see a way
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out. Well, this is, you know, this to me is, is it, you're absolutely right. And it's menacing and
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alarming, but I also see an opportunity here. And this has been part of one of the primary,
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you know, projects that I feel like I've been devoting myself to, which is what you just said,
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find support on both the left and the right, which is very interesting. Right. Because if you,
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you know, the, the, the traditional division on economic debates between the right and the left
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has always been people on the right, like yourself, like you just said, I support free market economics.
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I'm a capitalist, you know, corporations are not evil. They're just entities doing business,
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buying and selling, making profit. That's the engine of American life and people on the left and,
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you know, and the government should stay out. People on the left wanted government intervention in the
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marketplace. We want government intervention to redistribute wealth on behalf of the poorest,
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on behalf of the most marginalized, because this inequality is
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of the debate. Neither model don't have free market economics. The government constantly.
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We, we missed some, you, you glitched on us for a second. Can you go back to saying that?
00:18:09.140
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So, yeah. So I was saying, you know, that's been, those are the contours of
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traditional left, right economic debate. And, and, and, and what we have now is neither of those,
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right? We don't have free market economics. The government intervenes constantly in the economy.
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That's why corporations pay lobbyists, people who get out of Congress and they enrich them to use
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their influence on their behalf. The government intervenes constantly, but they're not intervening
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on behalf of the poor. They're intervening on behalf of these gigantic corporations that have no
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allegiance to the United States. It's crony capitalism. It's not free market capitalism,
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nor is it socialism. It's, it's this kind of, it's what you said, it's oligarchy. And now the
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corporations are becoming even more overt and open about their willingness to come, become involved
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in what was always partisan disputes that they steadfastly avoided is, is really alarming,
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right? They used to always intervene in government and lawmaking processes for their own benefit. They
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would, you know, have their lobbyists negotiate for a tax break that benefited their company,
00:19:12.180
things in their self-interest. They're way beyond that now, right? They're now wanting to be the
00:19:18.000
arbiters of how many protections we can have against voting fraud. And when it spills into voter
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suppression or what proper policing policy should be things for which they have no competence, but
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their immense concentrated power enables them to throw their weight around in a way that democracy
00:19:35.100
could easily be subverted. Hey, how are you listening to this podcast right now? Are you listening to it
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at buy Raycon.com slash Glenn. It's a new, it's, it's a new government really. I mean, they're setting
00:21:11.080
up. It's, it's the most brilliant, in my opinion, if I could detach, if I was just watching this,
00:21:18.080
if this was just a thriller and I could detach my emotions from it, I would say this is brilliant.
00:21:24.180
It's a brilliant end run around the people, the constitution, all of it. And it's, and it's got
00:21:32.800
people on the right saying, uh, well, they're a private corporation, so they, you know, can do
00:21:39.020
what they know. They, I didn't elect the head of the soda pop company to tell me what our policy
00:21:47.140
should be. And it's now being, it's, it's this, uh, with a world economic forum, I don't know if
00:21:53.800
you're doing anything on the great reset, but good God, if, if that is actually happening, if this is
00:22:01.640
what's empowering these people, we, as a planet are going for a giant oligarchy and it is high tech
00:22:10.080
that is allowing them to, uh, squash anybody who's warning about it and media.
00:22:16.960
You know, I, there was, I think one of the most interesting things that has happened in the last
00:22:21.260
couple of months, three months is when Facebook and Twitter, basically all Silicon Valley platforms
00:22:29.620
united to remove the sitting president of the United States from the internet to deny him the
00:22:35.940
opportunity to communicate with hundreds of millions of people. The people who cheered that
00:22:42.020
were American journalists because paradoxically journalists who are supposed to defend principles
00:22:46.820
of free expression, free speech, and a free press are in fact, the most aggressive advocates for
00:22:52.300
internet censorship. They're the ones who agitate it for it. But the people who denounced it were world
00:22:58.700
leaders, including many who have no love loss for Donald Trump, like Angela Merkel in Germany.
00:23:05.240
And the Macron government in France, and even the president of Mexico, um, president Lopez Obrador,
00:23:11.600
who, who said in a really eloquent press conference, what we're creating is this world
00:23:16.700
government of these tech oligarchs answerable to nobody. And that's what, you know, that's what
00:23:23.240
Angela Merkel was saying too, was she was saying, look, you know, here in Germany, we do believe in
00:23:27.580
regulations on speech, but if you're going to have them, it has to be the democratic process that
00:23:32.860
decides them, the lawmakers who are elected by the people. This is not that this is unelected
00:23:38.540
overlords, oligarchs deciding who can and cannot be heard. Even the most powerful
00:23:47.080
elected leader in the. And even they were alarmed by it. The only people who were American journalists.
00:23:55.320
Uh, I apologize to the podcast listeners for the glitch, but you are actually at home and I'm going
00:24:03.880
to get into this because your new book is fascinating, like cannot put down a fascinating,
00:24:09.760
uh, what you've gone through and the reason why you're at home, uh, and you're not leaving unless you
00:24:15.080
have, you know, an armored car and a security with you. We want to get into that. Um, but I, I,
00:24:21.380
I want to just kind of sweep up some of the other things that are happening for, first of all, let
00:24:26.380
me go back to the great reset and the world economic forum. I have had, uh, phone calls from,
00:24:33.240
you know, uh, at least one of the biggest banks in, uh, America. I did one show on, uh, the great
00:24:41.380
reset and talked about how the model is the wish model is, is that you'll have a score. Everyone will
00:24:48.540
have a score. And if you're not doing the right things for ESG, um, you'll score, your score will
00:24:54.940
go down and you'll become a risk to the system and you won't be able to have banking services or
00:24:59.440
whatever. Um, they didn't correct any, they didn't want a correction on air. They didn't correct
00:25:06.660
anything that I was laying out or deny any of the documents or that some banks are now doing this
00:25:12.220
many over in France. Um, uh, and yet they wanted me to understand that they won't be nefarious.
00:25:21.840
That's, that's not, they are, they're doing this as a public service. Are you looking into the great
00:25:28.420
reset? And if you have, is this a, what are your feelings on it? Well, of course, um, first of all,
00:25:38.060
that's already being done in China, right? These kinds of, uh, you know, numeric or quantitative
00:25:45.820
evaluations of various citizens and then determining which rights they do and don't have,
00:25:49.960
it's becoming increasingly digitized. So there are no humans making these decisions. It's all done
00:25:54.360
algorithmically. And I think the China, uh, issue is so interesting because traditionally
00:26:02.300
when the United States decides who their adversaries are and who their allies are,
00:26:08.020
the power centers in the United States, the military centers and high finance are generally
00:26:14.180
on the same page. So if, you know, they want to sanction the Russians or the Iranians or the
00:26:20.840
Venezuelans, wall street doesn't really mind. The Pentagon's on board with it. In the case of China,
00:26:26.880
you have military planners who see China as this adversary, but wall street and Silicon Valley
00:26:35.380
are in bed with the Chinese. They're tied at the hip to them. And one of the things that's happening
00:26:41.260
is that the Chinese model is competing with the American model for what is going to be hegemonic
00:26:47.780
in the world. And it seems like that the Chinese model is prevailing and they have really powerful
00:26:54.200
partners in the United States. Um, you know, these, you see these, you know, NBA stars and coaches and
00:27:01.660
officials who get applauded because they're so brave because they recite liberal pieties about black
00:27:07.480
lives matter. And everyone says, Oh, they're so brave. They're all going to ask them about your
00:27:15.020
camps and, or, and they suddenly clam up and that shows you who their masters are, who's actually
00:27:21.380
controlling. And I think that that is one of the real dangers is not that China and the U S are
00:27:27.280
going to have this kind of, but that they're in. Hang on. We got it. We got to stop for a second.
00:27:33.120
If you can hang on, we got to, we got to stop because internationalized in a way that will start
00:27:39.460
to affect how we live as well. Hang on. We lost you on the last like two minutes there. Uh, horribly.
00:27:46.480
I think it's when you move. So try to do this. Okay. I will try and be, okay. Well, I will try and
00:27:54.700
be like a Edgar Bergen. Just don't move your lips. Yeah. Okay. Um, so you were saying about the, uh,
00:28:03.680
that the Chinese for years, we've been reading politicians and mainly wall street say China is
00:28:10.640
the new model. I don't want China as the, I don't want to live like Chinese do. I don't want that
00:28:16.600
model. Yeah. When Mike, when Michael Bloomberg was running for president, there were a lot of quotes
00:28:23.380
that emerged where prior to his running, they were asking him about the Chinese government.
00:28:29.040
You can find him heaping praise on them, refusing to call them a dictatorship, refusing to call them
00:28:34.700
repressive. It depends so much on the Chinese. And this is one of the, you know, nauseating ironies
00:28:44.220
of these companies like Nike and, um, banks and finance companies, putting black lives matter,
00:28:51.220
uh, images on their Instagram page and the like is that they rely on China increasingly or they move
00:29:03.080
their factories to, right? They move factories out of the United States. They move them to China,
00:29:06.360
where there's slave labor, where there's sweatshop additions, where there's child labor.
00:29:14.720
I apologize. Uh, get him. Can you dial him back up please? He is in Brazil and, uh,
00:29:24.060
I've waited a long time for this interview. The person whom you're trying to reach is currently
00:29:29.100
unavailable. Please leave a message after the beep.
00:29:33.080
Hey Glenn, it's Glenn. So that's what happened yesterday. And we decided that we would meet
00:29:45.720
again today. Uh, and after I lost contact here with our studios three or four times, uh, today for some
00:29:55.040
unknown reason, I, uh, the hour approached and I didn't think it was going to happen. I don't know if
00:30:02.980
it's the universe saying that there's two guys that are using way too many ends in their first name,
00:30:08.420
uh, or what, but Glenn Greenwald is now in a different city, uh, with, uh, high speed internet.
00:30:16.980
Welcome. Correct. Correct. No, I think the universe is just saying that for the good things in life,
00:30:22.280
you have to actually work for them. So that's right. Okay.
00:30:25.100
Our path and we overcame them. Thank you so much. Um, so we were talking about China when last we left
00:30:33.460
and the state of China and the relationship with, uh, the oligarchs here in America with the oligarchs
00:30:41.280
in China. Right. And, you know, it was interesting. Uh, there was a speech I actually covered from a given
00:30:51.160
by a Chinese, uh, a professor of high finance, somebody very connected to the Chinese communist
00:30:58.000
party. I believe it was shortly after Biden's inauguration. It might've been shortly before.
00:31:03.820
And his point was that with Trump, it was very difficult for China to exercise the kind of
00:31:11.880
influence they were accustomed to exercising in Washington. He was saying, whenever we've had a
00:31:15.860
problem in Washington in the past, we've had all these paths to be able to resolve them under
00:31:20.660
Clinton, under Obama, even with Bush and Cheney. And the problem with Trump is that he never really
00:31:26.680
was embedded with support of wall street. And that was their path in. And with Biden,
00:31:31.600
he was saying with great excitement that normalcy was going to be restored because they would now
00:31:38.500
have influence to wield again in Washington through wall street. So Glenn, but isn't that
00:31:44.280
exactly the opposite of what the American people want? I mean, say what you want about Donald Trump.
00:31:50.560
He was a massive disruptor, but it seems as though that's kind of what, uh, America needs is a real
00:31:59.340
disruption of politics and business as usual. Everybody's gotten very comfortable at the high
00:32:06.240
end and they say whatever they have to do to get elected. And then no matter which party it is,
00:32:14.720
I think we're seeing that trend throughout the democratic world, actually. Right. So the entire
00:32:19.400
elite, the neoliberal elite in, uh, the United kingdom, whereas warning everybody that Brexit would be
00:32:26.200
this unmitigated disaster. And the voters said, we don't really care what you think. In fact,
00:32:31.600
the fact that you're opposed to Brexit makes us think that it's likely something we ought to vote
00:32:35.500
for. A lot of it was just spite voting out of anger here in Brazil, where I am and just wrote a book
00:32:40.980
about for 20 years, the country was a center left government run by the workers party. And then out
00:32:46.760
of nowhere, this kind of far right authoritarian figure was elected to the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro.
00:32:51.800
Bolsonaro. And the same thing happened in the U S where it was eight years of Obama and suddenly
00:32:57.300
Trump got elected. And there were millions of Obama voters who voted for Trump, which makes no sense
00:33:03.740
to, you know, people who are political and media elites, because they can only see the world through
00:33:09.760
this stunted left, right prism. Right. To those people, it makes a lot of sense. And what did all
00:33:14.020
those people have in common? Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, even Obama, when he ran in 2008,
00:33:19.020
they were all claiming that they were going to be this outside force to come in and sort of burn
00:33:24.200
the entire system down, which is what people want more than any ideology. So I think you're,
00:33:31.240
I know you are, you're exactly right. When Obama said, and I've never heard anybody else say this,
00:33:36.480
when Obama said hope and change, I didn't like what I thought he was going to change it to,
00:33:41.580
but I was all on board for hope and change, transparency, cleaning up the swamp, doing all of that
00:33:47.440
stuff. And then he never did any of it. He became the swamp. Donald Trump, I think, has still a lot
00:33:54.620
of support because he never became one of the in people. And so all of the people in, and I think
00:34:03.780
this is happening all around the world, all the people who are not on the inner circle, they're not
00:34:08.520
one of the experts. They're just one of the people whose voice was supposed to matter, want somebody
00:34:14.620
like them and they'll forgive them for a ton, as long as they don't become one of the elites.
00:34:22.340
You know, it's so amazing because, you know, I lived in New York for 15 years through, you know,
00:34:29.040
starting in the early 1990s into the 2000s. And the persona of Donald Trump, I mean, he was a New
00:34:34.220
Yorker pure. That's where he gained his fame. And the persona of Trump always was that he was this kid
00:34:42.120
from Queens, which, you know, rich Manhattanites and old money look at with great condescension at
00:34:48.920
best. And there was always kind of this resentment on his part. You know, that's why he would go into
00:34:52.960
Manhattan and he would have to build the tallest building because he felt like he was excluded from
00:34:58.960
high society Manhattan, which he was. They looked at him as like this kind of, you know, roughy in this.
00:35:04.360
Yeah, exactly. They really look down their nose at him all the time. And with Obama, it was exactly
00:35:09.760
the opposite. Obama's path was the pure establishment path. He went to Columbia. He was the editor in
00:35:14.240
chief of the Harvard Law Review. He was always an establishment figure. He always appeased
00:35:19.080
establishment power. So when Obama got into office, he instantly integrated into the things he had promised
00:35:25.660
to destroy, you know, into high finance. Wall Street supported him overwhelmingly in 2008 against
00:35:30.640
McCain. He loved the CIA and all those, you know, kind of black site secret operate operations and
00:35:39.360
drones. He became very enamored of it. He changed nothing. Whereas Trump, to me, the closest figure
00:35:45.760
to him is Richard Nixon, who also always harbored that same kind of resentment toward coastal elites,
00:35:51.580
always felt for good reason that he was being judged and looked down upon by them. And I think
00:35:56.900
you're exactly right. That remained a huge part of Trump's appeal. Yes, he's he's he's a billionaire.
00:36:02.960
He's a very he's lived his life as a wealthy real estate mogul. But inside, he he's not invented to
00:36:09.540
the everybody. Everybody, everybody. I don't care who you are. Everyone has always wanted to be one of
00:36:17.040
the cool kids. And it doesn't matter who you are or how old you are. You still kind of want that.
00:36:23.420
And, you know, for people like me, I know I'll never be a cool kid. I'll never be in that pack.
00:36:29.480
And you kind of just go, all right, whatever. And he embraces that. I don't really care. I don't really
00:36:35.260
care. I think he does. But he appears to embrace that. I'm not at the cool kids table. I have my own table.
00:36:42.880
Yeah. You know, I'm sure you have had this experience given your trajectory. You know, you were at CNN,
00:36:51.920
you were at Fox News, you were a very highly rated host of news programs on major networks. You know,
00:36:58.380
I've had my own experience of, you know, with the Snowden story, winning a Pulitzer film that was made
00:37:03.480
about my work, won an Oscar. I was on the Oscar stage. When that happens, there are these kind of
00:37:09.280
insidious offers that get made. It's sort of an implicit unspoken deal, which is, look,
00:37:14.720
if you play ball, if you kind of get rid of this, these rough edges, this anger, this anti-establishment,
00:37:21.860
you know, sort of agitation that you're doing, there's a lot of, we'll let you in to our
00:37:26.320
glorious halls. And you have to, you know, really sit down with yourself and say,
00:37:31.940
what do I want? And they're, those are tempting. A lot of people succumb to them. We're all human.
00:37:37.340
And I think most of you are. Yeah, I think that's why I like you so much. And, and, you know,
00:37:45.100
I left CNN because I, or I mean, I'm Fox because I started to like it. And Roger Ailes said to me,
00:37:53.840
you're not leaving here. Nobody ever leaves here. And then when I was leading, leaving, he said,
00:38:00.000
you know what your problem is? You won't play the game. And I said, because it's not a game to me.
00:38:06.640
I actually believe in these things. And you do, you have to, it's so, it's, it's velvet handcuffs.
00:38:15.140
It's a, it's a golden prison that they build for you. And they'll, if you're successful,
00:38:20.640
they'll give you everything. Just don't tip over the apple cart. You can go and play your little
00:38:27.800
games, but not that far. And exactly. When I was at Fox, I was, you know, I really believed that the
00:38:35.140
average guy could just become president. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. I believed that
00:38:39.880
after working at CNN and then at Fox, I don't believe that. I believe you have to sell your soul
00:38:47.440
to the elite gatekeepers and the problem, the, the, the advantage Trump had, and I can't think of
00:38:54.400
anybody else except maybe somebody in Hollywood. Maybe, I don't know. The thing about Trump is
00:39:00.340
he was one of the gatekeepers. Not actually, he was, he was already inside the fence. He didn't
00:39:09.020
have to pass through the Rupert Murdoch's and everybody else that might say, yeah, I'll take
00:39:14.380
you. I'll help you out. He was already inside and the gatekeepers couldn't, couldn't lock him out.
00:39:20.680
Does that make sense to you? Am I right on that?
00:39:22.580
Yeah. No, no, no. I think that is really, I think that gets to the core of why Trump was such a
00:39:30.700
disruptive force to Washington, to media, to financial and military power centers. If you look
00:39:38.120
at the policies that he actually implemented, you know, just from like a pure political perspective,
00:39:42.860
they really weren't aberrational. They were, you know, pretty much a continuation with a couple of
00:39:48.880
exceptions. It was really just like the, the, the things he would say, you know, um, the, the light
00:39:56.660
that he's shown on the, shined on the reality of, of what they are, the things that he would question,
00:40:02.360
you know, I, I think like one of the most significant things was that Bill O'Reilly
00:40:06.020
interview that he, where he did in Bill O'Reilly was trying to demanding, demanding that he denounced
00:40:10.540
Putin. And when he was saying like, why should I denounce Putin? I think it's in the interest of the
00:40:14.920
United States to have a good relationship, a collaborative partnership with Russia.
00:40:18.800
They hate Islamic radicals. They want to fight Al Qaeda. They want to fight ISIS. Why should I
00:40:23.220
just pick fights with them? They have a, they're a huge nuclear power. And Bill O'Reilly said,
00:40:27.740
because he, he kills people, you know, he kills dissidents. And Trump said, oh, what, you think
00:40:33.040
we're so innocent? We have a lot of killers ourselves. Now everyone knows that's true, right?
00:40:37.560
Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of the United States knows that that's the truth,
00:40:41.840
but that's a truth that you can't have the president of the United States speaking because
00:40:46.480
it kind of, it, it subverts the mythology and the iconography that his job is to uphold. And he did
00:40:54.960
that over and over and over. It was much more stylistic and comportmental than substantive.
00:41:00.000
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Do it now. Was the, I mean, the disease that the anti-Trump disease, it became a sickness. It
00:42:36.140
really did with many members of the media. I think you just, they just went blind with their rage.
00:42:41.240
Was it that they felt responsible or was it also that he would, Trump was, um, saying the things,
00:42:51.240
I mean, for instance, Trump is in bed with Russia. He said things like that about Putin and he did
00:42:57.240
things that I'm like, why would you do? Why would you say that about Putin? Why would you stand there
00:43:01.180
with Putin on, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But he, his administration was actually tougher on Putin
00:43:06.980
than anybody in a long time. So it wasn't that he was, uh, it wasn't that he was doing anything,
00:43:15.380
but in many cases, just saying things. So was the, the, I hate Trump. I got, he's got to get out at all
00:43:22.880
costs. Is that caused because the, the press felt that they had felt a, played a role in his
00:43:29.660
getting power? Or was it also that the, the big corporations that want things to keep going on
00:43:38.120
wall street that wants things going on, uh, Washington that wants this game on both sides
00:43:43.480
of the aisle. Is it, were they also part of whipping up the press and saying, you know, you,
00:43:50.660
you don't even know how bad he is. You know, it's good. So let's just take that example.
00:43:56.360
First of all, of that narrative that really was the dominant narrative for the four years of his
00:44:01.040
presidency. And even the primary theme of the Clinton campaign before he won, which is that
00:44:06.300
he has nefarious dealings with Russia. And, you know, it's so funny. These people constantly malign
00:44:13.460
others for being conspiracy theorists. I think that was probably the principal attack on you. For
00:44:17.560
example, what was a more demented and deranged conspiracy theory than the idea that Vladimir
00:44:23.340
Putin had taken over the United States and the Kremlin had infiltrated American political
00:44:28.000
institutions because they controlled the president. That should be an act of war.
00:44:33.240
Yeah. That's an act of war. Yeah. If you really believe that, right. That, that you would,
00:44:38.160
you get you everything. You, first of all, you get rid of the compromised agent, right? You don't
00:44:42.500
do everything possible to get rid of them. And then also, yeah, you go to war. I mean,
00:44:48.020
if a country has really taken over the, that's what they were saying. And the reality of it was
00:44:54.100
exactly the opposite. Choose two, two examples in 2014, 2015, when the Russians were being coming,
00:45:02.100
threatening to the Ukrainians. And then when they annexed Crimea, there was bipartisan pressure on Obama
00:45:09.700
to send lethal arms to Ukraine. And he wouldn't and didn't. And his argument was, I don't want to
00:45:17.600
risk a confrontation with Putin over a country, Ukraine, that is a vital interest to them because
00:45:23.820
of the history that Ukraine has for Russia and the danger that it's posed. And also it's right in
00:45:29.120
their neighborhood and it's not in ours. So Obama's argument was not going to risk confrontation with
00:45:33.960
Putin over Ukraine or over Syria. That's in their vital interest, but not ours.
00:45:39.000
Trump gets in and within a year, his administration is arming the Ukrainians with lethal weapons,
00:45:44.380
way more confrontational and provocative to Putin than Obama was willing to be. The same thing with
00:45:51.020
this natural gas pipeline that the Russians built to Germany. Trump was obsessed with pressuring,
00:45:58.580
coercing, bullying the Germans out. He was Reagan. He was Reagan on that issue.
00:46:05.240
Yeah. And Glenn, what is more threatening to Russian core interest than trying to prevent this crucial
00:46:15.060
pipeline? What? I'll go I'll go a step further. What is more crucial to Putin's personal safety than the gas
00:46:25.060
industry and the oil industry in Russia? I mean, he lets that go. He's he's a marked man.
00:46:32.760
Exactly. Which Trump was directly threatening. Trump was attempting to subvert personally.
00:46:38.600
The thing with lethal arms to Ukraine, I don't know if Trump cared or not. That might have just
00:46:41.840
been something that happened despite him or without his, you know, but but that too, right? If you're
00:46:47.420
Putin, you care a lot about Ukraine. If you look at Russia history and the relationship of Russia to
00:46:52.280
Ukraine, the way that the Germans used it to destroy Russia practically in two world wars,
00:46:57.740
sending lethal arms into the Ukraine, which the Trump. So the idea, the very notion that Putin was
00:47:05.540
controlling Trump through blackmail, given the reality of Trump, what Trump was doing to Russia,
00:47:10.260
it's so deranged. It's and yet all of them in the media, with very few exceptions, latched on to this
00:47:18.280
conspiracy theory as their principal narrative of what was happening in the United States for fork.
00:47:23.380
They impeached him twice. One time over that there was an never ending investigation, constant news
00:47:29.460
stories based on this completely baseless and an insane conspiracy theory. So then you ask why that
00:47:36.300
is. And I think that it's because they regard Washington and the halls of power as theirs. And
00:47:43.660
Trump was an interloper. Everybody else who has been elected to that position, right, left, conservative,
00:47:48.340
liberal, Democrat, Republican, came in and played ball. They kind of said, OK, I know how to comport
00:47:53.640
myself. I know the pieties and orthodoxies I can't touch. I know the lines in in which I have to stay
00:47:59.420
in the ones that I can't transgress. They make it very clear. Trump is like a bull in a China shop,
00:48:05.700
right? He comes in. He doesn't he's just used to doing whatever he wants. He doesn't listen to anyone.
00:48:10.300
And he likes chaos. Yeah, he loves it. And the more people attack him, obviously,
00:48:16.360
the more obsessive and vindictive becomes in attacking the back. He has no interest in appeasing
00:48:20.560
people. And, you know, there's this one interview that, you know, to this day, I'm amazed is not
00:48:27.480
talked about, but it's not talked about because it's so important. A couple of days before Trump
00:48:32.100
was inaugurated, he had posted on Twitter, of course, an attack on the CIA. He mocked them for
00:48:37.180
having gotten weapons of mass destruction because they were leaking to the press that his election
00:48:45.240
victory was illegitimate because it was engineered by the Russians. And he knew they were doing that.
00:48:49.440
He knew why they were doing it. And so being Trump, he attacked the CIA. Chuck Schumer went on Rachel
00:48:54.300
Maddow and said, everyone in this town knows that you don't challenge or attack the CIA or the
00:49:03.300
intelligence community. Because in Chuck Schumer's words, they have six different ways until Sunday
00:49:07.820
to get back at you. Essentially saying that's the real power center is the CIA. And everyone knows
00:49:13.420
you stay on their good. This unelected group of intelligence. It's insane.
00:49:18.420
Practically in the dark. Chuck Schumer admitted the truth. And that became the story of the Trump
00:49:25.020
presidency is the media got into bed with the CIA and they were willing to say and do anything,
00:49:30.220
anything in order to destroy him. And they abandoned all journalistic ethics, all notions of truth or
00:49:39.260
anything else. They believed that they were fighting this existential battle against the new
00:49:43.940
Hitler figure. And if you really believe that you do anything in the name of winning,
00:49:49.460
So is, I mean, to me, and I, this came to me about halfway through his presidency and, and it's
00:50:03.480
maybe even three quarters where I was really, really felt it was important that he won a second
00:50:10.340
term. The impeachment happened and that was insane the way that worked. You could see all
00:50:19.440
of the intelligence agency and the corruption. I mean, we did a lot of work on that and it was
00:50:25.680
clear what was going on. And, uh, I thought he's just a hand grenade when he made that phone call.
00:50:33.800
He, there wasn't anything really wrong with that phone call. He didn't know what he was walking into
00:50:38.660
in Ukraine with, with, with using, with using that. Uh, and he, uh, was blowing down walls and people were
00:50:48.400
starting to be exposed. So they had to choke him out. And I, I really thought towards the end that he
00:50:54.480
was going to win if it, if it was fair. Um, as it turned out, he didn't win. Um, but I I'm left with,
00:51:03.220
if he can't do it, who can, well, here's the thing, you know, if you look at you, if you look
00:51:11.580
at American politics and the traditional metrics of what is favorable to an incumbent president
00:51:19.180
seeking reelection and what is unfavorable, he had every single possible circumstance lined up
00:51:25.900
against him. He was in the middle of an out of control pandemic where people were locked up in
00:51:31.460
their homes for a year. Businesses were closing all over the country. There was a huge unemployment
00:51:36.920
crisis where tens of millions of people had lost their jobs. People were without hope. They were
00:51:41.860
afraid they were separated from one another. They were unhappy. Every single metric that if you're a
00:51:47.600
president seeking reelection is everything that you don't want to see is what happened. And yet he's
00:51:54.220
still almost one with all of the establishment lined up against him. Wall street, Silicon Valley,
00:51:59.640
pouring money into Joe Biden and the DNC's coffers, the media virtually unified doing everything they
00:52:06.580
could. As we talked about already, I left my own internet, my own news outlet because they were
00:52:12.240
petrified of any reporting. The Democrats, if they want, can take solace in whatever they want to take
00:52:17.980
solace in. But if I'm a Democrat and I look at what's going on, every red light is flashing.
00:52:24.380
They won because they relied on affluent suburbanites. They've lost ground, right? A president who was a
00:52:30.620
racist, xenophobe, you know, a bigot, the new Hitler. They lost ground among African-Americans,
00:52:36.380
among Latinos, among, among people of color, among new immigrants. The Democratic Party is bleeding
00:52:43.060
support. They even managed somehow to lose seats. I know. Crazy. Given everything that was happening.
00:52:49.520
So I think that the politics that Trump and Bannon,
00:52:53.840
you know, started to formulate and kind of was the first alternative that the Republican Party had to
00:53:03.440
Reaganism, which, you know, say what you want about it. It's kind of archaic, right? It's like from the
00:53:09.420
Cold War, it's from the 1980s. This is a different era. Reagan orthodoxies don't really translate
00:53:15.300
perfectly anymore. We were talking last time about, you know, capitalism and crony capitalism. Those
00:53:21.260
were not realities. Big tech didn't exist. Correct. I think that this kind of populism and the idea
00:53:27.220
that the Democratic Party has become the party of the professional managerial class and white
00:53:32.040
affluent suburbanites and the Republican Party now in order to win needs to become the party of the
00:53:38.360
multiracial working class using populism and the like is something that a lot of really smart
00:53:44.620
politicians who intend to run in 2024 obviously are recognizing. It's become the dominant ideology
00:53:52.300
at the most popular Fox News shows. The interesting Republican politicians like Josh Hawley
00:53:58.540
and even Ted Cruz are starting to and Tom Cotton clearly are recognizing that that's the only path to
00:54:07.300
kind of subverting and uprooting these power centers that have their, you know, fists clenched in the
00:54:14.880
powers of Washington. Okay, so let me take a side note because I want to come right back to this,
00:54:19.380
but let me take a side note because you mentioned a name, Steve Bannon. I think Steve Bannon is a very
00:54:24.120
dangerous individual. I think, you know, his, his relationship with, oh gosh, what's his name in
00:54:34.040
Russia and another guy with Russian and Chinese tycoons? Yeah. Dugan. No, no, no. Alexander Dugan,
00:54:42.840
uh, uh, uh, uh, who also has, uh, connections to one of the guys in, uh, uh, Brazil there. He's very
00:54:52.200
powerful. Um, what was his name? Gosh, I can't remember. He moved to the United States. Good
00:54:57.980
friend of your president. Oh, yes. Yeah. He's like the girl of the Bolshevik movement. Yeah. So those
00:55:06.760
three are kind of cut from the same cloth on this, uh, traditionalism, capital T traditionalism,
00:55:13.740
which is extraordinarily dangerous, extraordinarily dangerous. Um, and it, I don't, I don't, do you
00:55:20.280
think Steve, I don't think Steve Bannon is a player anymore in Republican politics. I could be wrong
00:55:24.960
about that, but I think that he's very closely tied to Trump. He, you know, really did get caught
00:55:32.740
defrauding the very people that he was reporting to represent. They just stole money. He's not in
00:55:39.080
right because Trump pardoned him. Um, I don't believe that these newer, smarter, younger, more
00:55:46.720
modernized right-wing populist figures want anything to do with Steve Bannon or his scandalous
00:55:52.640
behavior. Okay. So, um, I hope, I hope you're right. Um, so let me go now back to the track
00:56:00.280
because I want to ask you about Trump. It, would he win if he ran again?
00:56:08.080
You know, it's, it's so interesting because if you pay attention to media discourse, right?
00:56:15.960
The, even asking the question seems preposterous. This is the worst president in American history.
00:56:21.000
He was impeached twice. He is so despicable that he can't even be on the internet. He's not allowed
00:56:27.960
on Facebook or Twitter or, or any Silicon Valley that that's. So you're constantly connected to
00:56:34.160
this discourse about him that immediately makes you think that the idea that he could win and be
00:56:39.940
back in the white house is unthinkable. And yet they're not the people who vote. And those people
00:56:45.340
who create that narrative have no connection to the people who vote. The people who vote see the world
00:56:50.540
in a much different way and hate those people who are in charge of elite discourse. And again,
00:56:55.900
I mean, Trump got counted out in 2016 and he won. He got counted out in 2020. And as we just discussed
00:57:02.040
with everything against him stacked up and piled high, he almost won after four years of the same
00:57:08.460
ideology, the neoliberal ideology of Joe Biden, this globalist, you know, free trade ideology that
00:57:14.420
Barack Obama embraced. And that gave rise to Trump in the first place with him out of office and being
00:57:20.100
able to blame every ill of the status quo on Biden, instead of having to accept it himself.
00:57:24.580
I think it's very possible that he could win again.
00:57:27.900
Do you think Biden would have won if it wasn't for the now admitted help from all of the corporations,
00:57:35.540
all of the media, the millions and millions of dollars that Facebook or Zuckerberg put in,
00:57:41.520
the rule changes of, I guess what I'm asking you is a question I shouldn't, we're not supposed to ask.
00:57:47.700
Do you think, and I don't, I'm not saying that even enough to change it, I don't know, but was this a fair election?
00:57:56.440
I mean, you know, American democracy isn't fair, in part because who the people who have
00:58:06.860
concentrated wealth wield enormous power. And the founders of the country were capitalists,
00:58:15.020
obviously, they weren't communists, they weren't socialists, but you can find all kinds of warnings
00:58:20.660
in the Federalist Papers and in the debates about the Constitution that if wealth inequality becomes
00:58:27.420
too severe, if wealth becomes concentrated in a tidy sliver of the population and everybody else is
00:58:33.780
captive to it, that inequality will ultimately spill over into and contaminate political equality and
00:58:40.280
political rights and corrupt the democracy and it will become an oligarchy. This is not some left-wing
00:58:45.100
20th century, you know, radical theory. This is something that the founders themselves, no radicals,
00:58:51.820
they were worried about. And I think that's what we have. And that's what makes Trump's victory in 2016
00:58:59.320
and his virtual victory in 2020 so remarkable and so stunning. And it's a reason why it sends them
00:59:06.960
into the spiral of psychosis because they rely on that system that I just described to make sure that
00:59:14.040
the power stays in their hands and it didn't work in that case. And that's why they went insane.
00:59:20.680
So the power not staying in their hands, I mean, they did this in the 1980s when they got the super
00:59:28.940
delegates because they saw what happened to Reagan and they were like, oh my gosh, somebody from the outside
00:59:33.100
that the establishment doesn't want. So they put the super delegates in. You know, they just torched Bernie Sanders
00:59:39.260
in 2016. And now it seems as though even that's not enough. We're talking about the electoral process.
00:59:50.460
We're talking now about new voting standards that, you know, they say are, you know, essential to for
00:59:58.440
everybody to vote. And, you know, their Republicans are denying water to people. It's pretty ridiculous.
01:00:04.120
Uh, they're talking now about the, um, uh, uh, end of the filibuster, uh, adding extra states and
01:00:13.180
possibly packing the Supreme court while calling it unpacking the Supreme court. It doesn't seem as
01:00:19.540
though this is the party that's moderate and not fascistic. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean,
01:00:28.160
the democratic party is a party that I view as completely repressive and not just the democratic
01:00:35.380
party, but the liberal movement that supports it. And by liberal, I mean, just to be clear,
01:00:42.400
um, I don't mean the far left, you know, the kind of left wing movement that supported Bernie Sanders.
01:00:47.740
A lot of them hate Democrats, at least as much as people on the right do. I mean,
01:00:51.640
establishment liberals of like the Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton strain,
01:00:56.620
those people, they don't believe in free speech at all. You know, I watched this hearing.
01:01:02.880
It was like the third time they've summoned tech CEOs before them to pressure and bully and threaten
01:01:09.820
them that if they don't start censoring more democratic party adversaries off the internet,
01:01:15.600
they're going to use their legislative and regulatory power to punish them. They're threatening
01:01:19.760
that explicitly. They want to silence voices. They want to use censorship to control the discourse.
01:01:25.120
They don't have to put people in prison who are dissidents in the way that we kind of,
01:01:30.960
you know, think of the caricature of tyranny, but it's just as effective. In fact, if not more so
01:01:35.740
precisely because it's subtle, they don't believe in due process. The, they, they, they find people
01:01:42.620
guilty all the time. Look at what they're doing to Matt Gates. Now I'm not saying that Gates is,
01:01:47.180
you know, not guilty. He may be guilty of everything that he's being accused of and more,
01:01:51.560
but thus far, there's been no evidence presented of any kind and they have him convicted and locked
01:01:57.220
up as a pedophile. The whole B2 movement was about destroying people based on accusations that
01:02:03.540
are unproven. They don't believe in free speech. They don't believe in due process. They don't believe
01:02:07.960
in just the standard democratic processes, including the safeguards that our founders put in,
01:02:15.180
including making sure that states that are small and rural have equal representation in the Senate,
01:02:21.260
but not the house so that they don't get trained. They want to change all of that. They want to
01:02:25.080
change all of the rules to ensure that they remain in power forever. It is a genuinely repressive and
01:02:30.580
tyrannical party and a movement that supports it. And it's the reason I become so violently alienated
01:02:35.980
from it. And are there more Democrats that are waking up and seeing this? Do you think?
01:02:43.460
Because I watch, I watch the news. I follow things and I'm like, I can't believe the Republicans fall
01:02:48.460
for so much stuff themselves. But I mean, this is, I mean, this is in, you know, Trump's size lettering
01:02:56.600
at the top of his buildings, you know, corruption, corruption, fascism, fascism. You listen to what
01:03:02.940
they're saying. You watch what they're doing and you see how they maneuver and silence people. And
01:03:07.260
I'm astounded that so many people are like, you know, at best, yawn.
01:03:15.500
Yeah, but you know, it's interesting. I mean, you mentioned Reagan and Trump's victory as outsiders.
01:03:21.940
I mean, Bernie would have been that, right? He was always viewed as this anti-establishment
01:03:27.360
outsider despised by the Democratic Party elite. And in 2016, he would have won. He would have beaten
01:03:35.520
the Clinton machine had they not cheated. And let's remember that Julian Assange is in prison
01:03:41.880
and the Biden administration is working to keep him there in part because he showed that with those
01:03:49.760
emails that he published during the 2016 campaign, the top five officials of the Democratic Party had
01:03:55.620
to resign because the corruption was so severe, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
01:03:59.820
Donna Brazile got caught cheating by handing a CNN debate question to the Clinton camp,
01:04:04.220
not to the Sanders camp. They saw all that corruption within the Democratic Party. The left did,
01:04:09.120
the real left. And then in 2020, they saw the same thing happen. Remember, Bernie won Iowa or tied in
01:04:13.720
Iowa. Won New Hampshire, destroyed everybody in Nevada. He was on his way to the nomination.
01:04:19.160
And then suddenly the Democratic establishment, Obama picked up the phone and called three or four
01:04:22.820
people. Buttigieg, Klobuchar, they all dropped out. They endorsed Joe Biden, the only one who had a
01:04:28.480
chance to win. And then Bernie was gone again. So the left saw. So then you say, well, why is the left
01:04:33.660
still willing to lend its support to a party that obviously hates them and is willing to cheat to
01:04:39.020
prevent them from winning? And that's where I think this woke ideology comes in. It's such a powerful
01:04:45.720
instrument. It's the reason why, you know, the CIA celebrates LGBT day and women's day and,
01:04:52.740
you know, black history month, even though it's the CIA that does coups and bombing campaigns and
01:04:57.240
assassinations around the world. It's why Nike was sweatshops in China can in the United States
01:05:01.860
pretend to be so devoted to human rights and equity and all of that. It's because it's a very powerful
01:05:07.780
weapon to tell people these kind of cultural questions that have nothing to do with the
01:05:14.780
distribution of power or the distribution of wealth or who wields militaristic and imperialistic
01:05:20.420
power in the world. If you only focus on these cultural issues, you'll stay on our side because
01:05:25.820
we're on the good side of those. We love trans people. We love gay people. We're totally in favor of
01:05:31.140
we hate racism and everybody on the left kind of gets focused on those things. So stay on our side
01:05:37.600
because of that. And when they do that, they're not talking about any of the questions of what is
01:05:45.000
ruling class orthodoxy? Who is it that wields real power? Who is it that's cheating? Because they're
01:05:49.880
focused on these culture war issues. And those are the things that distract everybody from kind of how
01:05:55.980
power is actually being exercised. I don't know if we said it earlier or we said it yesterday, but it is
01:06:01.280
genius. If you look at it, it's genius how this thing has been put together and how different groups
01:06:07.500
are being used and played and everybody thinks they're, I don't know, on the right side. And
01:06:13.520
I don't think anybody really understands what side they're really on, you know, including
01:06:19.480
conservatives. You don't, you don't really know who's doing what and, and how this game is being
01:06:26.480
played. And if you're being manipulated, it only makes it worse with Silicon Valley.
01:06:30.920
Yeah. You know, this is the thing though, is like, if you asked me, you know, you asked me
01:06:38.000
before, well, what is the way out of this, right? Like, is there a way out of this given all this
01:06:43.700
consolidation of power? I really think, you know, look, five years ago, eight years ago,
01:06:50.180
I was on CNN and MSNBC all the time. Now I'm banned from them. Instead I'm on Fox. You know,
01:06:57.800
I would be on every day if I didn't say no. Sometimes I get, just got done taping a Fox show.
01:07:02.160
I'm probably going to do another one, you know, on Monday. Why is that happening? It's, it's bizarre.
01:07:07.760
Like if you look at it in one way, right? Like you go and read any article about my work and it's
01:07:11.540
far left is Glenn Greenwald, far left is Glenn Greenwald. And now I'm the most frequent guest
01:07:14.820
on Tucker Carlson show. How did that happen? And I think the reason is, is because so many people
01:07:21.120
on the left and on the right, the way that those labels have traditionally been used,
01:07:25.680
have so much more in common in terms of their political views and their common enemies than
01:07:31.780
either want to recognize. And at the moment, then they're able to recognize because they're
01:07:37.720
constantly being fed these trivial and distracting stories that are designed to keep them at each
01:07:43.940
other's throat that don't really have anything to do with their lives or how power is distributed.
01:07:49.400
So if you say to me, well, what, what hope do you have? The hope that I have is exactly that,
01:07:54.800
that project of kind of eroding those old labels that don't really tell us any much anymore. You
01:08:01.020
know, I write a lot about Silicon Valley censorship and the power of big tech monopolies. Who's in
01:08:06.060
favor of that? You think people on the left love Facebook and Google and huge gigantic corporations?
01:08:11.560
Do you think people on the right do know they both hate them or free trade deals or the deep state?
01:08:17.700
And so it's some that some something has to happen to enable people who have been taught to hate each
01:08:24.820
other to come together. So I've been saying this for several years. First of all, I've tried to reach
01:08:31.260
out and it doesn't go well. It doesn't go well, usually. However, that's changing. There are a lot of
01:08:40.300
people on both sides that are now just like so sick of their own side and, you know, tried to play ball
01:08:47.120
enough and and, you know, to try to keep bringing their side along. And now it's just ridiculous.
01:08:53.680
And so I think a lot of people like you and me are starting to connect and go, look, I don't know if
01:08:59.340
we have, you know, everything in common. But my question has been to everybody that I talked to.
01:09:05.420
We used to have an unum, e pluribus unum, and that unum was the Bill of Rights. And if if you'll just
01:09:12.760
give me the Bill of Rights, I'm in. I'm in. We can do anything you want with the government. You know,
01:09:18.220
let's I say, you know, reboot the whole system. And I don't know how to do it, but I will fight with
01:09:26.060
anyone and stand with anyone who believes in the Bill of Rights. I don't know if do people on the left
01:09:33.520
now believe in the Bill of Rights, because I mean, the ACLU used to say it, but they're not really
01:09:40.400
fighting for it now. No, they have a much different agenda. You know, I think first of all, I totally
01:09:46.920
agree with you in the sense that if you don't have those core liberties, you have nothing right. Those
01:09:53.640
core liberties are designed to prevent a concentration of power and an inability to challenge it. Those
01:10:00.000
liberties have no purpose other than to ensure that the citizenry always has tools and weapons
01:10:04.900
to challenge power. If you have, you know, freedom of the press, which at the time of the Constitution
01:10:09.560
didn't mean this like credential priesthood of people called journalists. It was a rule that all
01:10:14.040
citizens use with the mimeograph machine or, you know, printing flyers to rail against the British
01:10:18.840
crown or corrupt governors and, you know, colonialists. And like, if you have those tools of free speech,
01:10:25.340
of free press, of due process, the fact that the government can't do anything to you, can't take
01:10:29.460
your life or liberty or property without providing that first, then those changes all are possible.
01:10:37.960
I mean, history teaches that. So if you are someone entrenched in power, the first thing you're going
01:10:42.580
to want to do is take away those weapons, which is exactly what's happening. And that's why I agree
01:10:47.600
with you completely. For me, that's the number one first battle, the one that matters before all
01:10:53.520
others. And anyone who is my ally on the question of whether people should be able to continue to
01:11:00.620
speak freely on the internet and in public spaces, or whether people are entitled to due process
01:11:07.900
before being assumed guilty of some terrible act, not just by the government, by the culture and the
01:11:12.860
society. That's somebody that's my ally. That's somebody I'm willing to stand with. And conversely,
01:11:17.120
no matter what other one, someone's views are on everything else, if they're opposed to those values,
01:11:21.660
those people are not my allies. Those are the people I'm currently looking to battle before
01:11:26.500
everything else. I have to tell you, the founders did it for a reason. The first amendment, you have
01:11:32.360
to be able to speak, you have to be able to come together, you have to be able to question those in
01:11:38.120
power. There's the first. The second is, you lose the first if you don't have the second, if you don't
01:11:43.260
have a way to push back on that power. And everybody laughs at the third one. But the third one is,
01:11:50.640
you can't quarter soldiers in my house. Well, that comes from a time when they could go through
01:11:56.660
your papers. Well, that's the CIA. That's what you exposed with Snowden. They are going through
01:12:04.840
things. They are listening. They are tying everything together. So your first three amendments
01:12:10.780
are almost all shot. And if we don't have those three, you don't get the rest.
01:12:19.000
Yeah. The fourth one is not doing very well either. Right. The fourth one is the one that's
01:12:22.580
supposed to protect you against unreasonable searches and seizures of your property and
01:12:26.980
your papers. And, you know, I think a lot of times people, first of all, one of the problems is
01:12:33.200
so many people's sense of history and knowledge of history begins in on January 20th, 2017.
01:12:41.360
There are millions of people in the United States who never cared about politics until these media
01:12:46.740
outlets scared them sufficiently that Trump was this orange monster coming to destroy them all.
01:12:51.840
And that fear is what engaged them. And they know nothing. They know nothing about anything that
01:12:56.900
happened prior to that. But these rights, these Bill of Rights, they can sound really abstract,
01:13:02.140
right? They were written on parchment, you know, they were and quill pens and they were written
01:13:07.460
by people who seem very distant from us. But they all they did was they they came out of really
01:13:12.980
visceral experience, right? Of having right under tyranny, the tyranny that they wage this incredibly
01:13:20.340
bloody and risky war to fight and liberated themselves from. And that project of creating a new government
01:13:25.720
was about nothing other than ensuring that it didn't happen again, or at least maximizing the
01:13:32.480
chances that the population could fight against it. Right. And I know I'm a critic of the United
01:13:38.280
States. I think it's done a lot of terrible things in the world. You know, if you asked me what the CIA
01:13:42.980
has done from 1950 until now, I'll list, you know, 100 crimes that I think are horrific. But
01:13:48.960
and many of those I will in many of those I would agree with. I mean, America has done,
01:13:54.660
you know, Winston Churchill, if you just read about him in Europe, he was great. If you read about him
01:14:00.020
from the Indian perspective, he was a monster. We all have a dual personality. It's which one
01:14:05.920
is in control and which one is growing in strength. Right. And those those but those documents,
01:14:13.200
you know, I think that those founding documents and the design of the government are genius.
01:14:17.100
Yes. You know, I don't think there's been a better design for how government functions than
01:14:21.840
the one that's refined. Yes, we've never been a perfect union. Right. And they knew that those
01:14:26.680
were aspirational documents. The whole point was to form a more perfect union to constantly evolve
01:14:31.600
and change to fulfill those values. But those founding values are ones I believe in fervently.
01:14:37.200
They're my animating principles because I don't trust human beings to exercise power without the
01:14:43.360
checks that only they can provide. And that to me is the greatest danger right now is that they are
01:14:51.020
being eroded, not just in practice, but the awareness that people have of their importance.
01:14:57.580
But you are in Brazil right now. You've just exposed the Watergate of Brazil. A huge, huge story been
01:15:09.680
extraordinarily dangerous for you. You're you don't go anywhere without an armored car and without
01:15:16.720
security. You're generally at your wherever. And if America falls, I mean, I don't know if she's the
01:15:27.020
defender of this anymore. But if where do you go if if America falls, the bad guys are really
01:15:36.880
empowered. And where do you go for freedom? Where? Where? Where? I mean, you know, I think I think,
01:15:44.320
you know, I think the problem has become that when you had nation states, right, 170 or 180 nation states,
01:15:53.440
there were different forms of government that each of them had. And there was some mobility,
01:15:57.820
you could move back and forth between them. What we have now instead is an erosion of the idea of any
01:16:05.660
kind of national identity, there's an erosion of borders, there's an erosion of nationalistic
01:16:09.980
institutions in favor of globalistic ones. And as we were talking about yesterday, when it comes to China
01:16:15.220
and the US and the hegemonic competition between them, I think the primary question then becomes which
01:16:20.560
model will prevail. I'm not even sure what the American model is anymore in that in that competition.
01:16:27.060
I'm not sure what it even means. I'm not even sure that there's such a big difference between
01:16:31.920
the American model and the Chinese model as elites want them to be agree. But I think that's the greatest
01:16:38.700
danger is the reason why people have become so opposed to globalism is because you lose, you know,
01:16:43.160
the more distant authorities are, the less control you exercise over them. Yep.
01:16:48.120
So can we spend I've got about 15 minutes? I don't know how much time you have. But I let's spend a
01:16:54.620
few minutes and just talk about Brazil and and your book. It is. I mean, it is a thriller. But to to
01:17:03.300
explain it in in just a few minutes, not reading the book, it is it's full of names that Americans have
01:17:11.680
never heard of, etc, etc. So can you take us because it is it's really remarkable. You it's it really kind
01:17:20.660
of starts with a phone call from somebody on the far left in government, right?
01:17:27.820
Yeah, you know, in that sense, it was similar to the Snowden story, right? The way a guy started the
01:17:32.080
Snowden story was I was sitting in front of my computer minding my own business. And in late 2012,
01:17:36.680
2012, I got an email from an anonymous person saying that he had a ton of documents that were
01:17:42.080
revealing. And it turned out to be Edward Snowden. And over the course of six months,
01:17:45.500
we established a relationship and I flew to Hong Kong, met him, got the documents and and did that
01:17:50.240
reporting. This is very similar. I got a call from a woman who's a very famous left-wing politician in
01:17:56.900
Brazil. She was actually the vice presidential candidate who lost to Bolsonaro in 2018, a longtime
01:18:00.900
member of Congress. And she said, Hey, I am calling because with urgency, my phone has just been hacked.
01:18:06.620
And the hacker proved to me that he had hacked my phones by showing me very sensitive conversations
01:18:11.540
I had with my closest friends, members of the Senate, members of Congress. And I was petrified.
01:18:17.920
I thought, okay, I'm the target of a blackmail campaign. But he quickly told me, no, you're not
01:18:22.760
my target. I hacked your phone to prove to you I have the capability to hack the telegram accounts,
01:18:29.020
which is like a encrypted app, like Signal or WhatsApp and others, you know, Skype, that all Brazilian
01:18:35.480
authorities use. And he said, I can hack the accounts of anyone I want using telegram. And I've
01:18:40.420
spent the last three months downloading the conversations and documents and drafts and videos
01:18:45.960
and audios and photos of the most powerful politicians in Brazil. And this archive shows
01:18:50.300
enormous amounts of corruption. And the primary target of that archive was this former judge named
01:18:59.020
Sergio Moro, who had presided over this gigantic anti-corruption probe that sent billionaires and
01:19:04.900
former presidents to prison. And by that point, he had become Bolsonaro's justice minister.
01:19:10.160
Bolsonaro had just been elected four months earlier, was riding high on this incredible
01:19:14.700
success, not just for him, but for his right wing movement that got swept into power.
01:19:18.880
And Justice Moro was now Minister Moro. Go ahead. Partly because of that corruption, right? I mean,
01:19:26.280
Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was just everybody was everybody wanted hope and change.
01:19:33.140
Precisely. And Bolsonaro, despite being a member of Congress for 30 years from the epicenter of
01:19:38.300
corruption in Rio de Janeiro, no angel. He was a very talented demagogue and successfully
01:19:43.440
branded himself as the kind of outsider that he modeled himself after Trump. Actually,
01:19:48.620
he loved the fact that the elite media circles and elite political circles hated them. The more
01:19:52.760
they attacked him, the stronger he became. But the real, you know, and this is what I think is so
01:19:58.680
relevant for the United States. I wrote the book for an international audience, not for a Brazilian one,
01:20:02.880
because of how many lessons it has for why Bolsonaro won. Right. But also, you know, what happened was in
01:20:08.220
2017, former President Lula, who was one of the giants of the latter half of the 20th century,
01:20:14.060
governed Brazil for eight years, left with an 87 percent approval rating. Brazil's economy boomed
01:20:19.060
under his governance, was getting ready to run for president again. All polls showed him way ahead
01:20:24.420
of every competitor, including Bolsonaro. And this judge, right as that was happening, convicted him
01:20:29.900
on extremely dubious corruption charges that removed him from the race that enabled Bolsonaro to
01:20:36.000
waltz to victory. He may have won anyway, but that was clearly his biggest adversary. And the first
01:20:41.300
thing Bolsonaro did upon winning was turned around and rewarded that judge by giving him the most
01:20:46.320
powerful ministry in the country, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, where they controlled
01:20:51.440
surveillance, law enforcement, financial investigation, law, you know, the federal police.
01:20:57.180
And the archive showed that that judge, the whole time when he was presiding over this
01:21:02.280
probe, including when he was finding Lula guilty, was in fact deeply corrupt. He was cheating. He was
01:21:08.460
breaking every rule. He was plotting with the prosecutors that he was supposed to be judging.
01:21:13.940
Um, and so three months after our reporting began, the Supreme Court ordered Lula freed from prison.
01:21:20.740
Just this last month, the Supreme Court reversed Lula's convictions, all of them, um, on the grounds of our
01:21:27.940
reporting showed the judge was corrupt and restored his political rights, which means now Lula is almost
01:21:32.660
certain to run against Bolsonaro in 2022. So Brazil will have the competition, the contest that it was
01:21:38.340
supposed to have in 2018, but didn't Bolsonaro versus Lula, a huge contrast in politics and ideology.
01:21:45.460
And, you know, they attacked me in every conceivable way, culminating with an attempt to criminally
01:21:49.620
charge me in early 2020 with 130 felony counts. And the Brazilian Supreme Court intervened,
01:21:55.620
said that that attempt was a violation of my free, my press freedom rights. Um, but yeah,
01:22:01.860
I mean, death threats and, uh, threats of prosecution from Bolsonaro. You had, uh, you had, uh, you had
01:22:08.500
people in media say that you should be investigated. You should be in jail. You should be investigated.
01:22:15.380
Even your children should be taken away from you. Yeah. There was a very famous, uh, journalist who
01:22:21.700
went on live television and out of nowhere, you know, my husband's a member of Congress with the left-wing
01:22:26.660
party. So he works in Brasilia, like members of Congress do work in the United States. They work in
01:22:30.900
Washington. We live together in Rio. He said, one of them is in Brasilia, you know, working in
01:22:37.620
Congress. The other one is publishing these stolen documents. What I want to know is who's taking care
01:22:43.860
of their two children. I think of my, a judge needs to investigate, you know, we adopted our children
01:22:49.220
from an orphanage four years earlier. And he went on television and said, I think their children should
01:22:54.100
be sent back to the orphanage. Um, we ended up on a show together, a television show live on the air.
01:23:00.100
And I confronted him with those comments and it got very heated and he attacked me physically
01:23:04.820
on the air, kind of tried to punch me in the face. So that was the climate for a year. And it's one of
01:23:10.820
the reasons, Glenn, why I'm so contemptuous of this whining from coddled, you know, protected,
01:23:19.780
wealthy, lone dry journalists like Jim, CNN, who think that they're in danger, as he wrote in his
01:23:26.900
book, because Trump says, I mean, they don't know danger if it ran over them on the street.
01:23:32.500
They're just, and you know, all this claims about, oh, I'm being harassed online. You know,
01:23:37.300
journalists are supposed to go to war zones. We're supposed to put our lives on the line
01:23:40.500
and confront tyranny. And they're whining about, you know, little adolescent insults and mean tweets
01:23:45.860
as though they're these traumatized victims. It sickens me for that reason.
01:23:49.780
And you know, I've been doing, I've been doing that for, I've been getting that for about 20 years
01:23:53.700
now. I don't know. I'm not whining about it. It comes with the gig, man. That's what it comes with.
01:23:59.700
And, uh, and if I hear one more of them call the other one brave for what standing with the
01:24:07.540
corporations and everyone in power. Wow. That's brave. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's so it's,
01:24:16.260
you know, they've, they've created this, this, this, this fiction is like a novel and they cast
01:24:22.180
themselves as the heroic protagonist. And that is the world they all inhabit.
01:24:26.740
Uh, I, uh, I thank you so much, uh, Glenn, for everything that you're doing. And, uh, and,
01:24:35.300
you know, we may, we may differ on things, but it's nice to know that we have the fundamental
01:24:41.380
rights in common. And if we can find more people, uh, and have open conversations, man, I'm so
01:24:47.940
blown away this week by again, uh, Facebook and others doing exactly what they did with Hunter Biden's
01:24:56.100
laptop, uh, with his BLM thing. It's, it's not about her safety. It's not about, uh,
01:25:04.740
how much money she has, or even the hypocrisy of saying she's a Marxist.
01:25:09.700
It's about where did that kind of money come from? And if you can't, if you can't,
01:25:15.300
and where did it go and where did it go? Right. And if you can't ask that question, you can't,
01:25:21.540
you can't police anything. You, you, we, there is no way to make sure that there's justice. None.
01:25:29.300
That's why I think these issues are predominant. It's why I think that the monopoly power that
01:25:35.620
Facebook and Google and Twitter and Apple and Amazon have harnessed to control and police and
01:25:41.220
increasingly censor our discourse is the greatest threat that faces us. Um, and so, yeah, like I said,
01:25:47.620
I'm always happy to talk to anybody who's like-minded or even anyone who isn't on those
01:25:52.420
issues. But, um, I do think dialogue like this is super important and I'm very appreciative for that
01:25:56.820
reason of your inviting me on. Thank you very much, Glenn. All right, Glenn. Thanks. You bet.
01:26:06.820
Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it