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The Glenn Beck Program
- April 17, 2021
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
Word Count
14,657
Sentence Count
939
Misogynist Sentences
6
Hate Speech Sentences
26
Summary
Summaries are generated with
gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ
.
Transcript
Transcript is generated with
Whisper
(
turbo
).
Misogyny classification is done with
MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny
.
Hate speech classification is done with
facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target
.
00:00:00.000
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.
00:00:37.200
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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00:03:04.660
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00:03:16.180
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00:03:23.600
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00:04:21.600
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
00:06:01.220
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
00:06:47.140
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
00:07:00.300
came from Russia and that this the documents were forged. They published that even though we were
00:07:05.300
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
00:08:00.080
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
00:08:15.360
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
00:09:03.380
collusion part, you thought not just the appearance, but also the collusion part was true. Yeah, I thought
00:09:08.340
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
00:10:22.260
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
00:10:40.160
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
00:11:49.460
mine for a long time is the danger posed by this enormous spying system. And when Edward Snowden
00:11:58.080
decided to come forward after spending his life inside of these agencies, because he originally
00:12:01.960
believed in them, he volunteered for the Iraq war, you know, he worked for the CIA, he worked for the
00:12:06.620
NSA. He was, his father was in the coast guard. He was not a left-wing radical by any means. He donated
00:12:11.200
money to Ron Paul. When he came forward, it was because he said, they're now turning this on the
00:12:16.520
American people. They're now, this is no longer a, a weapon system being used against foreign
00:12:22.140
adversaries. And, you know, I do think that the scandal of the FBI getting caught lying to the
00:12:29.300
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
00:12:40.400
conduct on behalf of the Kremlin. It was a major, major scandal. I mean, an FBI lawyer went to jail
00:12:45.960
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
00:13:01.940
the intelligence here. I don't even think nobody even remembers that. And that's what really frightens
00:13:09.180
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,
00:13:29.980
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
00:13:42.260
on the right side of, you know, the press or whoever. Yeah. You know, it's so funny.
00:13:49.040
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
00:14:03.100
Rush Limbaugh who spoke about that story that week and started claiming that I was the person who had
00:14:08.580
invented this phrase. And then liberals also thought this was like this newly invented conspiracy theory
00:14:13.840
by the right wing, by Trump supporters. When in reality, the idea of a deep state and, you know,
00:14:20.340
in the United States is something that thrives among political scientists. Yeah. I mean, I didn't even
00:14:26.400
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
00:14:50.000
complex that's infecting every hall of academia and every hall of power. And its influence is going
00:14:55.500
to threaten democracy. This is before the Vietnam War, before 9-11, before the gigantic growth from
00:15:03.140
both of those and throughout the decades. It's, you know, if you don't, if you're not, if you don't
00:15:08.480
recognize the existence of the deep state, and if you're not concerned about it, you know nothing
00:15:12.040
about American politics and how power in the US government functions. I have to tell you, I thought the
00:15:17.840
phrase, I was really uncomfortable at the beginning of deep state. I, you know, it implies like a star
00:15:22.980
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
00:15:49.980
that we are now at a point to where Congress and the Senate and the White House, I think really on
00:15:59.160
whoever gets in, I think Trump was a, he was just such a cannonball or a grenade that I think he was
00:16:08.220
blowing things up that he didn't even know he was blowing up, you know? Right. Uh, and so he was
00:16:13.520
frightening to everybody. Um, but I wonder now if, if with the way that the corporations are getting
00:16:21.880
involved and Glenn, I'm not a guy. I always used to think like, you know, you'd watch, uh, what was
00:16:28.080
it? That movie with Harris of a blade runner. And you know, they'd say, Oh, I work for the corporation.
00:16:32.580
I'll be like, stop it. Stop it. I've always been a free market guy, a capital corporation. Yeah. The,
00:16:40.560
uh, the free market, uh, is not free. These guys have embedded themselves with Congress, with the,
00:16:49.380
with the both political parties, with the media, we are headed for an oligarchy and I don't see a way
00:16:56.580
out. Well, this is, you know, this to me is, is it, you're absolutely right. And it's menacing and
00:17:03.320
alarming, but I also see an opportunity here. And this has been part of one of the primary,
00:17:08.360
you know, projects that I feel like I've been devoting myself to, which is what you just said,
00:17:15.640
find support on both the left and the right, which is very interesting. Right. Because if you,
00:17:21.760
you know, the, the, the traditional division on economic debates between the right and the left
00:17:26.960
has always been people on the right, like yourself, like you just said, I support free market economics.
00:17:30.960
I'm a capitalist, you know, corporations are not evil. They're just entities doing business,
00:17:37.100
buying and selling, making profit. That's the engine of American life and people on the left and,
00:17:42.980
you know, and the government should stay out. People on the left wanted government intervention in the
00:17:47.220
marketplace. We want government intervention to redistribute wealth on behalf of the poorest,
00:17:51.240
on behalf of the most marginalized, because this inequality is
00:17:53.760
of the debate. Neither model don't have free market economics. The government constantly.
00:18:04.560
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
00:18:13.800
traditional left, right economic debate. And, and, and, and what we have now is neither of those,
00:18:20.340
right? We don't have free market economics. The government intervenes constantly in the economy.
00:18:26.240
That's why corporations pay lobbyists, people who get out of Congress and they enrich them to use
00:18:30.520
their influence on their behalf. The government intervenes constantly, but they're not intervening
00:18:34.060
on behalf of the poor. They're intervening on behalf of these gigantic corporations that have no
00:18:39.760
allegiance to the United States. It's crony capitalism. It's not free market capitalism,
00:18:43.960
nor is it socialism. It's, it's this kind of, it's what you said, it's oligarchy. And now the
00:18:49.180
corporations are becoming even more overt and open about their willingness to come, become involved
00:18:55.620
in what was always partisan disputes that they steadfastly avoided is, is really alarming,
00:19:02.320
right? They used to always intervene in government and lawmaking processes for their own benefit. They
00:19:07.340
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
00:19:23.460
suppression or what proper policing policy should be things for which they have no competence, but
00:19:29.620
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
00:19:40.920
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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,
00:32:11.220
they follow the same path.
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,
00:49:47.720
and that's what they did and are still doing.
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
01:26:12.580
can be discovered by other people.
01:26:26.820
I'll see you next time.
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