The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.240 Today I'm speaking with author, journalist, and political commentator Glenn Greenwald.

00:01:15.420 We discuss the war on myths and disinformation, how a false social moralism, religious rhetoric, conceptions of safety, and false compassion have been used and misused to reshape the Western world into a good versus evil polarity.

00:01:36.080 We also explore the human need for metanarratives, the basis of morality, and the case, perhaps, for God in a world that offers nihilism and totalitarianism as stark alternatives.

00:01:50.360 All right, so I was looking today through your biography and your books and trying to figure out what we could most productively discuss, and I thought that this comment by Rachel Maddow in 2014 might be a good place to start.

00:02:07.920 She described you as the American left's most fearless political commentator, and so I have a bunch of questions about that, and the first one might be, what the hell is the American left, and do you think that that's an accurate portrayal of you?

00:02:27.420 And I'm not being smart asking that question, like, it isn't obvious to me at all how the political lines are drawn now.

00:02:37.380 I'm up in the air about it constantly.

00:02:39.840 So, were you the American left's most fearless political commentator?

00:02:45.260 Are you still, and what do you think the left is?

00:02:48.720 One thing I can tell you for certain is that that is not something she would say in 2023.

00:02:54.580 My recollection is that was actually a little bit earlier, I think it might have been 2009 or 10 at the start of the Obama administration, when I became a very vocal critic of the Obama administration.

00:03:07.340 And there weren't a lot of people who were willing to take the same critique that was being applied to George Bush and Dick Cheney regarding the war on terror and the assault on civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and apply it to Obama,

00:03:19.560 even though Obama not only continued many of those policies that he campaigned on the vow to uproot, but extended a lot of them, strengthened a lot of them.

00:03:28.960 And suddenly people on the left either lost interest in that or decided that actually it was now justifiable,

00:03:34.320 given that it was now in the hands of a benevolent leader rather than some swaggering evangelical like George Bush or this kind of caricature of capitalism like Dick Cheney.

00:03:44.480 Their views on the actual policy just switched overnight and mine did not.

00:03:48.580 One of the things, though, that I always said from the very beginning, you know, I started writing about politics in 2005.

00:03:53.300 I did so overwhelmingly as a reaction to the war on terror.

00:03:57.220 I was writing not as a journalist, but more as a constitutional lawyer.

00:04:00.460 That was more of my interest.

00:04:02.080 I was saying things like Americans detained on American soil and then detained for years without charges just based on this declaration.

00:04:09.520 They were enemy combatants with no trial, no hearing, just based on the say-so of the executive branch.

00:04:14.540 I always thought it was odd that that kind of perspective got me labeled as somebody on the left because from my perspective,

00:04:23.140 I was defending values like due process, free speech, free press.

00:04:29.600 You know, I was concerned about the erosion of civil liberties.

00:04:31.860 I never really thought of those as far-left values.

00:04:35.480 But it got interpreted as that because at the moment it took found expression as being critical of George Bush and Dick Cheney,

00:04:41.780 and the perception was only people on the left were doing that.

00:04:44.840 So I think that's where Rachel Maddow's ideas came from.

00:04:47.500 I haven't changed my views on any of those issues at all.

00:04:50.520 Now, defense of civil liberties, opposition to censorship codes is right-wing, you know, just 15 years later.

00:04:56.760 And I think a lot of times people consider me on the right, even though, as I said, my views really haven't changed.

00:05:01.820 But I think that's where that comes from.

00:05:04.400 Okay, so yeah, in 2006, you wrote,

00:05:08.100 How Would a Patriot Act Defending American Values from a President Run Amok?

00:05:13.420 And that was G.W. Bush, one of the many presidents who have run amok.

00:05:17.640 But certainly, that was what you were writing about.

00:05:20.580 Okay, so that's how you got identified initially as on the left.

00:05:23.720 Now, you started a First Amendment litigation law firm in 1996.

00:05:28.060 And I guess, so I'm kind of curious about why that was.

00:05:32.380 Why specifically concentrating on the First Amendment?

00:05:35.340 And then I'm interested in how that tangled in with your rising suspicion and apprehension about the restriction of civil liberties after 9-11.

00:05:44.580 When I got out of law school, I worked for about 18 months at one of the major Wall Street law firms and knew immediately that was not for me.

00:05:54.200 I knew from the start it wasn't for me.

00:05:56.240 I grew up pretty poor.

00:05:57.380 The lure of a big paycheck like that was something I just wanted to kind of get a taste of.

00:06:01.980 I also wanted to demystify Wall Street, you know, kind of enter it.

00:06:06.280 And at the end of the day, those firms are filled with very competent, crafty, smart lawyers.

00:06:12.480 And I knew I would learn a lot, and I did.

00:06:14.780 But 18 months was the most I could endure.

00:06:16.640 What I really wanted to do, you know, I think my childhood heroes, I was sort of steeped in the politics of the 70s and 80s.

00:06:23.800 This was the time when the ACLU was defending the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, a town of Holocaust survivors based obviously on the principle.

00:06:32.800 These were Jewish leftist lawyers at the ACLU defending obviously not the Nazi party, but the principle that marginalized groups in particular need to defend free speech.

00:06:43.840 Which I always viewed censorship as a tool of the establishment, as a tool of authority that was used to silence and suppress marginalized voices, dissidents, and the like.

00:06:56.140 And so the desire to use the tools I had gained in law school in defense of those kinds of political values, those kinds of causes, was something that was probably at the end of the day what made me go to law school more than anything else.

00:07:08.640 I certainly didn't want to defend Goldman Sachs and insurance companies the way I was doing.

00:07:13.040 And so I was able to, I think one of the very first prominent cases I took was there was this neo-Nazi leader in Illinois who was quite smart.

00:07:26.800 He went to law school, he passed the bar exam, and he applied for admission to the Illinois bar so he could practice law.

00:07:34.300 And the Illinois bar rejected his application on the grounds of moral fitness and character, which is what they used to do to communists.

00:07:42.900 In the 1950s and 60s, they were barred from practicing law on the grounds that they lacked moral fitness.

00:07:48.000 And a lot of Supreme Court cases that established these landmark First Amendment cases said you cannot bar people from professions because of their political ideology, however pernicious that ideology might be.

00:07:57.600 And so now to watch that happen from the other side, you know, kind of a left-wing or a liberal attempt to define moral character and fitness, not on whether you steal from people or whether you assault people, but whether or not you have the right political views is very disturbing to me.

00:08:14.020 So I represented him, I represented his quote-unquote church, and a couple of other cases that were designed to implant in the law, the seeds of the censorship regime, and kind of became a specialist in those kinds of cases.

00:08:27.580 So, well, a couple of comments about that.

00:08:31.680 The first is, I don't know what the situation is in the United States, but the professional colleges in Canada are increasingly taking a restrictive view of fitness to practice.

00:08:44.060 I mean, I've been subject to, I think, 13 charges, essentially, by my professional governing board.

00:08:51.580 They dropped seven of them recently, although they didn't explain why they dropped those seven and kept the other six.

00:08:56.820 But all of the other six, or almost all of them, none of which, by the way, were made by clients of mine, are a consequence of my direct criticisms of political figures.

00:09:07.880 And so I don't know what the situation is in the United States.

00:09:10.880 I know that in Canada, the professional governing boards have really taken a, what would you say, they've allowed free speech for professionals to take a back seat.

00:09:22.520 And it strikes me as extremely dangerous because I don't see exactly what the members of the general public are, how they're going to be served by therapists or physicians who are too terrified to say what they think.

00:09:36.340 And I mean, I've had dozens of physicians tell me, even more than psychologists, even though my battle is with the psychology governing board, that they're so terrified of their professional organization, that's the Ontario College of Physicians, that they won't say what they think about all sorts of things.

00:09:54.180 So I don't know, what's the situation like in the U.S. on the professional regulatory board front?

00:09:58.680 Well, in theory, it's supposed to be more difficult in the United States to do those sorts of things because of the First Amendment.

00:10:04.520 And on some level, it is mildly more difficult.

00:10:08.020 But they are really finding all kinds of ways to circumvent that.

00:10:12.160 We lost that case, for example.

00:10:13.480 I lost that case.

00:10:14.320 They did not win the right for this neo-Nazi leader to practice law, though it was basically on jurisdictional and technical grounds.

00:10:22.500 So that's oftentimes the way they'll do it is you can see these judges very ideologically motivated, especially in the United States.

00:10:29.560 Nobody wants to admit they believe in the virtues of censorship because it's inculcated in the American spirit that anything that is called censorship is kind of instinctively or reflexively wrong.

00:10:39.820 So it is a little bit – the First Amendment is a real barrier in the United States.

00:10:44.740 But I regard the kinds of trends you're describing that happen to you in the West more generally.

00:10:50.760 I know Canada is one of the worst places for it.

00:10:52.600 I used to write a lot about the hate speech laws.

00:10:55.800 I remember Mark Stein was dragged before one of those tribunals.

00:11:01.360 There was Ezra Levant as well.

00:11:03.140 And I remember back in 2007, 2008 when I was being called this leftist, I was defending them.

00:11:08.520 And a lot of people on both the left and the right I think were surprised, but I could see this coming.

00:11:12.860 And now it's so much worse.

00:11:14.900 You know, all throughout Western Europe, increasingly in North America.

00:11:19.620 I lived in Brazil for a long time as well where these censorship values are – people don't even pretend to believe in free speech even though Brazil is part of the democratic world.

00:11:28.540 And Western Europe is looking toward Brazil as a kind of laboratory for how far Brazil can go, particularly the interest is in censoring the internet.

00:11:37.220 But beyond that, you see people now being excluded from the financial services industry.

00:11:41.460 People can't open bank accounts or use PayPal or any of these mechanisms that in modern life we need to generate an income and sustain our families and pay our bills purely on ideological grounds.

00:11:55.900 There's not even a pretense, as you said.

00:11:57.420 There's no patient complaint in your case.

00:11:59.640 It's clearly designed to say you're unfit to practice psychology because of your political ideology.

00:12:06.460 And that is, to me, the most dangerous trend in the West beyond any other because that not only punishes people in unjust ways, but it also breeds a conformist society.

00:12:17.280 The message is very clear.

00:12:18.540 We're self-interested beings.

00:12:20.220 And if we see that there's a lot of rewards for espousing establishment pieties and a lot of punishments for questioning them or defying them, obviously a lot of people are going to be motivated to be as conformist as possible.

00:12:34.060 And we're going to become even more conformist as a society if that continues.

00:12:38.160 And that, I think, is a huge loss just of the human spirit, of the potential of human life to lose the right to engage in critical thinking and to question and err and to challenge.

00:12:49.300 These are the things, for me at least, that make life valuable.

00:12:52.960 Well, also, you know, when you were formulating your defense of free speech, you mentioned the fact that marginalized voices, let's say minority voices, need to be heard.

00:13:07.280 But I would extend that, too.

00:13:09.120 I mean, I think often the majority voice isn't heard and is subject to censorship.

00:13:14.000 And I think that's happening more and more often in the West.

00:13:16.540 But there's also something else, you know, because people might be leery, let's say, of your willingness to defend neo-Nazis, at least to defend their right to, you know, be as obnoxious as they generally are.

00:13:30.500 But it's also the case, as far as I can tell, and I really saw this in Canada, like back in the 1980s, we went after this guy named Ernst Zundel for hate speech.

00:13:40.960 And this was the first emergence. We like to pioneer these things in Canada, by the way.

00:13:45.100 We pioneered banking cancelling, for example, thanks to our prime minister, who basically demolished our international reputation as a consequence of that, even though Canadians don't know it yet.

00:13:54.600 But anyways, we went after this guy, Ernst Zundel, back in the 1980s on hate speech, and he was a neo-Nazi type.

00:14:00.880 And, you know, everybody was up in arms about this hard hat wearing dimwit who proclaimed that the Holocaust didn't occur and all these, you know, idiot shibboleths of the radical neo-Nazi right wing.

00:14:13.720 And he did get pilloried for what he had done, I think, by an early human rights tribunal.

00:14:22.520 And I thought at the time that that was extraordinarily unfortunate because it's, first of all, because I knew even then that persecuting someone paranoid generally is a very bad idea because you give truth to their paranoid claims that way.

00:14:37.220 And second, if you take these people, like Zundel, and you drive them underground, then you don't know what the hell they're up to.

00:14:45.940 And part of the reason that we need a culture of free speech is so that we can observe very carefully what the fringe is up to constantly and keep an eye on their machinations.

00:14:57.740 And part of the reason that that actually turns out to be useful is because most people who are highly pathological can't help telling you what they're going to do.

00:15:05.820 And so if you have a space for free dialogue, you can really keep an eye on the people who would otherwise destabilize things.

00:15:12.880 You drive them underground at your peril, as far as I'm concerned.

00:15:16.500 Yeah, precisely.

00:15:18.160 And I agree with that entirely that on pragmatic grounds, censorship makes no sense from the perspective of those censoring.

00:15:25.400 Not only because you lose the opportunity to hear what they're thinking, see what they're doing, but so often you turn these people into martyrs.

00:15:33.820 I mean, in the United States, you have the right to wear a swastika on your arm if you so choose, because the First Amendment gives you that right.

00:15:42.400 But if you do that, you're going to be laughed at.

00:15:44.560 You're going to be regarded as a joke.

00:15:46.160 You're going to be, you know, social scorn works so much better than trying to prevent people from speaking.

00:15:52.900 Social scorn isolates people.

00:15:55.180 It turns them into an object of mockery.

00:15:57.160 You try and, you know, the neo-Nazi leader that I was defending that I referenced earlier, he was a loser.

00:16:04.820 You know, he had maybe 10 followers who were all kind of various forms of sociopaths and psychotics, just kind of like aimless kids who were looking for some meaning.

00:16:14.980 These are not menacing people in the sense of gathering some movement or being strategically impressive.

00:16:19.660 So by turning them into martyrs, by making them seem like they're so much more powerful than they were, because now you have to suppress them, their power and strength grows.

00:16:28.320 That attracts people, especially younger people who see transgression as something appealing.

00:16:33.520 They, you know, I think the best thing that ever happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, was when the left started trying to prevent him from speaking on college campuses.

00:16:42.880 That's what made Milo a hero to the right.

00:16:45.260 They turned him into that.

00:16:47.520 And obviously now Milo has largely disappeared in part because he, but more so because he lost a lot of his funding from the right.

00:16:53.800 But what made him and so many others like that stronger was the attempt to silence them, the attempt to censor them.

00:17:00.540 And I look in other countries where it's illegal to question Holocaust pieties, most of Western Europe, in Brazil, I think in Canada as well.

00:17:11.000 And those people can attract a lot more followers than, for example, in the U.S. they can because everything is open in the U.S.

00:17:20.120 And the idea is, well, at least it used to be, you're free to express that view.

00:17:24.220 No one's going to try and stop you.

00:17:25.580 And social stigma, social scorn, for me, is a much stronger way of marginalizing a nefarious ideology than having a state or corporate power, you know, invoked in order to crush it.

00:17:39.660 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:17:46.560 Most of the time you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?

00:17:54.220 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.

00:17:59.340 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,

00:18:03.600 you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.

00:18:08.560 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:18:11.860 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:18:19.260 Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?

00:18:22.920 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:18:27.340 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:18:31.580 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:18:33.340 It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:18:37.620 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:18:43.680 But don't let its power fool you, ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:18:47.820 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.

00:18:50.840 Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:18:53.040 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:18:57.180 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:19:02.900 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:19:07.680 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan, and you can get an extra three months free.

00:19:14.280 Expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:19:16.180 Well, yeah, well, the other thing, too, of course, when you get that extension of state power and corporate power,

00:19:27.120 there's no telling whatsoever what direction it's eventually going to turn in.

00:19:31.400 I mean, I interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a couple of weeks ago for my podcast, and the YouTube took it down.

00:19:43.040 And this was really shocking to me, I must say.

00:19:46.360 First of all, I thought it would provoke more of a storm of outrage in the United States because you guys were obsessively concerned for three years about Russian collusion in relationship to election interference,

00:19:58.260 which all turned out, as far as I could tell, to be nothing but rubbish or very little more than that.

00:20:03.800 But here we have a large corporation, essentially Google, actively interfering with an ongoing presidential campaign by a Democrat, not by a Republican.

00:20:16.140 And yet that seemed to go by with very little notice.

00:20:19.900 And so, and this is really quite staggering to me, even though I'm already aware that the Democrats are nowhere near as terrified of the radical left as they need to be.

00:20:33.120 The fact that the censorship could already proceed to the point where it was actually a Democrat who was being censored doesn't seem to register with the Democrats who don't seem to understand that in the wrong hands,

00:20:46.160 and that could be at any moment, that power could be used precisely against them.

00:20:51.180 And so, and then one more thing, and I'll get your comments more generally on this.

00:20:55.300 I've been following the UN Twitter feed more recently, even though that's a very dismal and disheartening thing to do.

00:21:01.740 And one of the things that I see there that's really, I say, would say top of the list for appalling international globalist utopians is the fact that they're constantly prattling on about hate speech and disinformation

00:21:15.000 and enjoining the people who are following them online to be very careful about what they share and adopting this idea that a top-down centralized apparatus can be used to separate, let's say, fact from fiction,

00:21:29.080 which would be lovely if it was true, but has never been true and never will be.

00:21:33.020 And so, what do you think's accounting for this?

00:21:36.000 How do you understand the mounting pressure that's faced by this bedrock commitment to free speech?

00:21:43.640 What the hell do you think's going on?

00:21:46.540 So, first of all, I agree with you completely about Google's censoring of RFK Jr.

00:21:52.500 In a lot of, I mean, this is, you're talking about somebody not only from one of the most storied political families in the United States and not eight generations removed.

00:22:00.660 His father was the Attorney General of the United States.

00:22:02.840 His uncle was the United States President.

00:22:05.140 He spent most of his life as a mainstream environmental lawyer.

00:22:08.760 He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008.

00:22:10.520 We're not talking here about a leader of a neo-Nazi church.

00:22:13.980 We're talking about somebody who has spent his entire life in the American mainstream, who now is being silenced, doing an interview with one of the most listened-to podcast hosts in yourself,

00:22:27.800 and somebody who is polling at 20%, 20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for this person for president.

00:22:38.100 And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google, sweeps in and says,

00:22:46.260 this is something that you are not permitted to be heard.

00:22:49.600 And what happened was, what always is the tactic of censors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent simply because their emotions for that person are so high.

00:23:04.820 So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones.

00:23:11.240 And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time, Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said,

00:23:18.020 no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly or maybe not even so slowly to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored.

00:23:30.900 And by the point that you cheered the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late.

00:23:40.100 The precedent's already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application rather than the principle itself.

00:23:45.980 And that's precisely what has happened.

00:23:48.240 They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices.

00:23:53.640 Devin Nunez went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well.

00:24:00.100 One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists, who were testifying before the U.S. Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for COVID.

00:24:17.100 It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate.

00:24:19.800 Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as an excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.

00:24:30.100 So as for the question of why this is happening, I think it's twofold.

00:24:34.160 I think one is that millennials, and now Gen Z, are very much steeped in the idea that the gravest danger is not empowering centralized authority to dictate what we have to think and what we can and can't hear, but instead is the danger that comes from ideas that they dislike.

00:24:53.440 And as you said, it is true, a lot of times the ideas that are being censored are ideas held by the majority.

00:24:59.500 I still regard them, though, as marginalized ideas because what matters more than the numbers is often who's in power.

00:25:07.560 And the elite, people who are the guardians of elite discourse, have views that are increasingly at odds with the majority of the population.

00:25:15.840 And those are the views that get passed on from on high as kind of the mandated orthodoxy.

00:25:21.900 And the views held by the majority of people end up being treated as marginalized or dissident views that get silenced simply by virtue of the fact that the majority has no power and the elite has so much power.

00:25:32.140 So I think part of it is just this generational cultural sense that began with millennials, has gotten worse with Gen Z.

00:25:38.100 If you look at polling data, you see this clearly, that free speech is not really a paramount value anymore, that there are other values in their views that outweigh free speech or the right to have debate to be heard.

00:25:49.640 But I really think the accelerant to everything was the election of Donald Trump.

00:25:54.280 I think Donald Trump's election was such a gift to the American establishment because it enabled them to depict Donald Trump not as what he was, which is a continuation of the American tradition, as a symptom of the failures of the neoliberal elite, of the anger that neoliberalism has produced all around the world.

00:26:14.540 They instead depicted him as this kind of singular, unprecedented evil, this never before encountered menace and threat to all things decent, including democratic values.

00:26:25.060 And if you can convince people that they're not just engaged in ordinary political conflict, but instead kind of an existential, overarching, historic battle of good versus evil, kind of like giving it religious overtones, which is what our politics has absorbed.

00:26:41.720 On some level, everything and anything becomes justifiable in the name of prosecuting that cause.

00:26:49.920 And a lot of people got convinced that the evils of Trump and his movement were so overarching that everything had to be thrown out the window, the role of journalism, the virtue of free speech, the idea of due process.

00:27:02.380 They really believe they're confronting this insurrectionary criminal fascist movement that wants to install a white supremacist dictatorship.

00:27:10.820 This is how they think.

00:27:12.500 And if you convince enough people of that, and that is what the elite class really believes.

00:27:16.280 I don't think they're pretending to believe that.

00:27:17.660 I think they genuinely believe that.

00:27:19.360 They're constantly reinforcing each other in this sort of herd behavior.

00:27:23.180 It's not that far of a leap then to start saying things like, well, however bad censorship is or however bad disinformation is or however bad punishing people is without due process, the threat that we're combating is even worse.

00:27:35.740 And therefore, the ends justify the means.

00:27:38.540 You probably saw that Sam Harris video that went viral where he was asked about the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign that emanated from the CIA.

00:27:46.440 They just lied to the public and said that Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

00:27:50.480 It came from the CIA.

00:27:51.980 Corporate media repeated it.

00:27:53.180 Big Tech adopted it.

00:27:54.620 It was a massive scam that they perpetrated on the American public right before the 2020 election.

00:28:00.320 One of the biggest journalistic scandals, I think, in the history of our country.

00:28:03.460 And when Sam Harris was asked about that, being the kind of cogent, candid thinker he is, he essentially gave voice to the idea that I still think the evils of Trump outweigh everything, that even lying in censorship of that kind is justified in the name of the cause of stopping Trump.

00:28:21.660 And I think that has become the predominant ethos of our elite class.

00:28:25.040 And that's where the censorship support is coming from.

00:28:28.860 Do you see it as well as part of the cascade of processes that began to make themselves manifest after 9-11?

00:28:40.100 And this is partly when you got interested in the clampdown on civil liberties.

00:28:43.860 And, you know, one of the things that I observed at that time, which I don't think has gone away in the least, was the transformation of airports into micro-fascist states.

00:28:53.140 And I thought that was a really bad idea because by treating everyone like a potential perpetrator, which is exactly what's happened in the airports and has never gone away, you essentially train people to adopt that mindset because everybody goes through airports.

00:29:08.080 And once it's okay there, well, then why isn't it okay everywhere?

00:29:12.460 I mean, there's lots of buildings in the UK now where you basically have to undergo an airport-style search before you go into the building.

00:29:18.880 And, of course, you have to do that in many of the government buildings in Washington, which I also think is an appalling idea.

00:29:25.380 But so is there an additional thread that's promoting this top-down clampdown that you think is a consequence of what occurred after 9-11?

00:29:36.260 Yeah, I think it's a really important observation.

00:29:38.660 I was in Manhattan on 9-11.

00:29:40.180 I lived and worked in New York at the time.

00:29:43.460 I remember, as well as anybody, the vividness of that trauma.

00:29:46.760 It was a very traumatic event.

00:29:48.020 It was frightening.

00:29:48.800 It was terrible.

00:29:51.180 I understand that people's fears were activated in a way that made them be willing to support things they never would have supported otherwise.

00:29:58.660 I ended up supporting things that I ordinarily would have recoiled from, like most people in the United States did.

00:30:04.620 It's just that even with the war on terror, even with an attack that cataclysmic that just wiped out 3,000 lives in one of the most horrible ways imaginable, I think while the extremism that emerged from that—I remember Newt Gingrich wrote an article in 2006 advocating the First Amendment be amended to constrict free speech in the name of stopping Muslim extremism or whatever he was calling it.

00:30:31.100 Jihadism or jihadism or Sharia law.

00:30:34.280 Now, those ideas ultimately didn't go as far as they might have because the sense of what American democracy means kind of got reawakened.

00:30:48.300 And I think people did start drawing lines, and President Obama ended up winning in 2008 on a pledge to close Guantanamo and reverse the kind of more extremist measures of the war on terror, even though he did none of that.

00:31:01.200 That was what his campaign that was successful was based on.

00:31:04.480 But I think what you're saying about the airport is exactly right.

00:31:07.960 If you go look at the debates in the 90s, after the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing at the Oklahoma City courthouse that Timothy McVeigh was convicted of perpetrating, there was an attempt by the Clinton administration to usher in a lot of these same extremism measures that ended up being implemented after 9-11.

00:31:26.140 They wanted, for example, the keys to the Internet, a backdoor to all of the encryption used by the Internet.

00:31:31.860 And the Republican Party, including people like John Ashcroft, who became George Bush's attorney general in the wake of 9-11 and the champion of a lot of these civil liberties assaults, led the way and said, we're not giving the federal government the ability to read our communications, to spy on our conversations.

00:31:48.880 This is too anathema to the American way of life.

00:31:51.360 And so quickly after 9-11, the exact same faction in the Republican Party and American conservatism, traumatized by the attack on 9-11, again, for understandable reasons, but ultimately went so far in implementing what became an authoritarian mentality.

00:32:08.000 And if you go to the airport, of course, all of us now are so acclimated to it.

00:32:12.460 It seems normal.

00:32:13.740 But the idea that everybody just so dutifully takes off their shoes and takes off their belt and the climate there is you just do what you're told.

00:32:20.940 You know, it's kind of—it seems trivial, and it's the form of—it's a kind of petty authoritarianism.

00:32:26.300 No one's being in prison for it.

00:32:28.240 No one's being shot.

00:32:29.600 But what it is is it's almost more insidious because of that, because exactly as you say, it started conditioning people that in the name of safety, we need to unquestioningly obey authority, kind of submit to whatever humiliations, whatever orders we're told to do.

00:32:45.720 And to watch the American conservative movement that was so steadfast in their opposition to the idea of federal government power in the 1990s immediately turn around and start meekly taking off their shoes at airports and doing everything that they were told and going through these machines in the name of safety I think was quite transformative.

00:33:06.420 And I do think it started training Americans to accept the kinds of infringements on their autonomy in the name of safety that even just a couple of years earlier would have been unthinkable.

00:33:17.420 Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

00:33:24.660 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:33:35.520 Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.

00:33:44.000 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.

00:33:55.320 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

00:34:03.360 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

00:34:10.300 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

00:34:16.260 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

00:34:21.600 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:34:23.980 Well, you know what, I think maybe the critics on the left, I'll specify them to begin with, have always been concerned that the fundamental threats to liberty and, let's say, equality would emerge as a consequence of greed and the desire for power.

00:34:48.780 You know, and it's obviously the case that there are valid criticisms that can be levied against gigantic organizations that tilt towards regulatory capture with regards both to their greed and their desire for undeserved power.

00:35:05.080 But I think that the left has radically underestimated the threat that fear poses to liberty.

00:35:12.020 And I guess that's probably true of the right as well.

00:35:15.600 And what you're laying out is a case where the excuse for interfering with fundamental liberties is always something like a higher or is very frequently something like a compassionate concern for safety.

00:35:33.000 And so maybe it's the neo-Nazis that we have to be afraid of, or maybe it's the Muslim jihadists, or maybe it's the bloody pandemic, or maybe it's the looming environmental apocalypse.

00:35:45.040 But there's always some terrible catastrophe that's looming so intently that this is finally the time when an assault on our civil liberties can be justified.

00:35:54.080 And my sense of that is that the reason we made these rights axiomatic, or actually the reason they are axiomatic, not that we made them that way, is because there isn't any circumstances under which there's a better approach than to leave people the hell alone and to let them say what they need to say.

00:36:12.180 And that's partly because, you know, one of the things I think conservatives do extremely badly is to try to protect free speech as if it's just another freedom.

00:36:23.060 You know, it's like a hedonic freedom.

00:36:24.900 Well, of course you get to say what you want to say because you want to say it and it's, you know, you enjoy it and it's annoying not to be allowed to say it.

00:36:33.040 And that's not really the issue here at all.

00:36:34.960 The issue is that for most people, there's no difference between speaking and thinking.

00:36:42.180 So, and even for those, that small number of people who can in fact think, and that's actually quite rare, most of those people think by speaking.

00:36:54.340 They just speak internally.

00:36:56.080 I mean, you can speak, you can think in images too, but really detailed thought really requires words.

00:37:01.500 And so freedom of speech is exactly equivalent to freedom of thought.

00:37:06.880 And the reason that you think is so that you don't do stupid things carelessly, right?

00:37:13.960 So there's this great, it was Alfred North Whitehead who famously said that we think so that our thoughts can die instead of us.

00:37:21.600 And if thought is the process by which we renew our misapprehensions and adapt to the world at large and transform our institutions, if you interfere with free speech, you doom your institutions to stagnation and corruption.

00:37:37.120 And so, and so, and so then you have to say, well, if you're going to be afraid, let's say you're afraid of the coming environmental apocalypse, you might want to be equally afraid of the measures that people take to deal with that apocalypse that are going to interfere with freedom of speech.

00:37:53.020 Because that'll interfere with our ability to adapt and that'll be far worse than anything we can conjure up on the environmental front.

00:38:00.760 And so I think that's part of the reason that these rights are self-evident, right?

00:38:05.740 Is that the whole bloody game will grind to a halt if we ever allow them to be interfered with.

00:38:11.160 And that means ever.

00:38:12.240 And that basically means your neurotic catastrophe is not sufficient justification for your desire to infringe on my free speech.

00:38:20.440 I don't care what your bloody emergency is.

00:38:23.020 You know, I think this is something I've come to conceptualize better over the years, and it's very much based in the psychological dynamic you're describing.

00:38:34.740 George Orwell has this preface.

00:38:37.360 I believe it was 1984.

00:38:38.460 I don't remember the exact details now.

00:38:41.040 And originally when the book was published where this preface, that the preface was intended for, the preface ended up not being published.

00:38:47.600 It was right around the time of World War II, and it was kind of considered heretical because its argument was that we think about tyranny in these melodramatic terms.

00:39:00.400 That despotism means that if you say something against the government, armed men in black suits, black costumes show up at your house and put guns to your head and haul you off to prison.

00:39:16.840 When in reality, the much more effective kind of despotism is not the use of brute force in that way.

00:39:24.420 It's really the transformation of the mind.

00:39:27.280 The prison ends up being something that's constructed inside of your brain through extremely effective propaganda, which in turn requires that that propaganda never be questioned.

00:39:37.080 If you can control a population based on how they think, you essentially eliminate the possibility of dissent.

00:39:44.720 So you can make dissent on paper legally permissible, but anyone who does dissent will be so instantaneously marginalized because of the efficacy of propaganda that it's a much more effective way of controlling human beings because you're controlling the thoughts that they have.

00:40:03.280 And that, in turn, requires the ability to ensure you control the flow of information.

00:40:09.400 And this is the thing that I find so alarming was if you go and look at the literature in the mid-1990s about the advent of the Internet, I think people in Silicon Valley really had this libertarian ethos.

00:40:21.340 They thought they were actually producing a technology that was going to be revolutionary.

00:40:24.740 The spirit behind it was we're going to emancipate people from centralized state and corporate control.

00:40:35.100 They're going to be able to communicate.

00:40:36.840 People are going to be able to communicate with one another without relying on the mediation of giant corporations, which in turn are controllable by the state.

00:40:44.340 It was kind of this Wild West frontier, free of control, free regulation.

00:40:48.700 And when I worked with Edward Snowden and we did the Snowden reporting in 2013 in the archive that he provided to me as I began to look at it revealed that, in fact, the Internet had become the exact polar opposite.

00:41:02.100 It had become the single greatest means of coercion and control ever invented in human history because the ability to control the flow of information and to monitor what all of us are doing,

00:41:13.020 not just what we're doing in terms of where we're going, but in terms of what we're reading and what we're saying in private or what we think is in private,

00:41:20.440 and therefore what we're thinking, what kind of personality is shaping us and the ideas that are motivating us,

00:41:26.900 and then the ability that is accompanied by that knowledge to be able to then control and manipulate it creates this kind of closed propaganda system

00:41:35.640 that is infinitely more powerful than, say, having a Stasi that is able to read everybody's email,

00:41:44.460 everybody's mail in East Germany or have their neighbors report on them.

00:41:47.660 In fact, during this note in reporting, there were ex-agents of the Stasi who were saying,

00:41:52.340 this enables the state to do things we never dreamed of being able to do.

00:41:57.180 You know, when it was why, I don't know if you remember, but there was one of the reports was about how the NSA was spying on Angela Merkel at the time,

00:42:03.820 the Chancellor of Germany, she grew up in East Germany under the Stasi, behind the Iron Curtain,

00:42:08.800 and she was particularly enraged by it.

00:42:11.400 By all accounts, she called Obama in a rage and said essentially that this is what the Stasi tried to do

00:42:17.320 and technologically were kind of impeded from doing.

00:42:19.800 There were workarounds to it if you were a dissident in East Germany.

00:42:23.060 There were dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet communism,

00:42:28.660 whereas this kind of makes it impossible.

00:42:31.960 And increasingly what it's relied on is, as I was saying earlier,

00:42:35.540 I think these elites who believe that Trump is the singular evil,

00:42:39.700 that everything is justified in the name of stopping him,

00:42:41.460 I say they genuinely believe it because even people who are reasonably intelligent,

00:42:46.680 who have been educated, all of that, are very prone to propaganda.

00:42:51.320 Propaganda is a weapon that has been developed over many decades

00:42:55.500 that is designed to cater specifically to what our needs are psychologically.

00:43:01.200 It creates a reward system, a punishment system.

00:43:03.980 It's very powerful.

00:43:05.040 I think all of us probably have the experience of having been propagandized in one way or the other

00:43:09.180 where we come to realize we believe something that we've never really critically assessed,

00:43:14.000 that we've kind of just absorbed in the ethos.

00:43:16.340 I know I've had that experience many times before,

00:43:19.340 and I think that is really what the censorship regime is about.

00:43:23.580 It's not necessarily to punish dissidents, although that is part of it.

00:43:28.080 It's really to ensure that people are only getting exposed to a flow of information

00:43:33.940 that serves the interest of a small elite so that you don't have to kill and punish dissidents.

00:43:38.820 You just eliminate dissent.

00:43:40.920 And the few people who are, for whatever reason, kind of resisting it end up just so marginalized

00:43:47.060 that it doesn't matter anyway.

00:43:49.140 And on some level, it's almost better to have them

00:43:50.940 because it casts the illusion that there's still some lingering freedom.

00:43:55.020 Now, you made reference in our conversation here to the religious overtones,

00:44:01.200 let's say, that accompanied claims that Trump, for example,

00:44:05.900 was, you know, the sum of all evil and going to instantiate a white supremacist totalitarian state

00:44:11.520 that would rule to the end of time.

00:44:13.280 And you wrote a book in 2007,

00:44:16.780 A Tragic Legacy, How Good Versus Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.

00:44:20.980 So I want to delve into that for a minute and share with you some thoughts I've been developing.

00:44:25.740 And you tell me what you think about them, okay?

00:44:27.680 I'm still working this out.

00:44:28.960 But so, you know, there's a gospel phrase that you're to render unto Caesar what is Caesar

00:44:35.340 and unto God what is God's.

00:44:37.380 And the idea there that is, one of the ideas there is that there are separate conceptual

00:44:43.220 domains for different kinds of concerns.

00:44:46.680 And that the, and so the way I read that, at least in part, I'll tell you a backstory.

00:44:52.140 You know, now and then when I was working as a clinician,

00:44:54.720 I would have clients tell me things that were truly terrible,

00:44:59.300 like multi-generational murderous terrible, you know,

00:45:04.300 long family histories of hidden sexual abuse,

00:45:11.200 lies so deep that you can hardly imagine them,

00:45:13.860 way out on the pale, beyond the pale, right?

00:45:16.640 And I, for me, that was the land of good and evil.

00:45:19.520 And one of the things that would happen if I was discussing things that were deeply affecting

00:45:25.140 enough to give the people who had had the experiences post-traumatic stress disorder

00:45:30.160 is that the tenor of the conversation and the language itself would almost inevitably become

00:45:36.820 religious.

00:45:38.220 And it helped me understand that part of what religious language does is enable us to conduct

00:45:44.340 a dialogue about what's truly malevolent, right?

00:45:48.800 Beyond the political.

00:45:51.140 And so, and that made me wonder, you know, if the religious collapses so that you can no longer

00:45:57.700 render unto God what is God's, let's say, because that entire belief system disappears,

00:46:03.320 then maybe everything that should be attributed to God, so to speak, is now played out in the

00:46:10.640 political realm, is that you get a collapse of the religious into the political, and the

00:46:15.000 reason that that's a catastrophe is because then you can no longer conduct the political

00:46:19.040 as political.

00:46:20.460 It degenerates into a war of good against evil, but a very, also a very, I would say, unsophisticated

00:46:29.000 war.

00:46:29.420 So, I'll just close with this, and then you can comment if you would.

00:46:32.440 So, one of the things that happens as the Judeo-Christian corpus of, what would you say,

00:46:40.980 of conceptualization of good and evil, as it develops, the notion is, is that spiritual

00:46:47.240 battle between good and evil is something that should be conducted on an individual basis

00:46:51.720 and within, so that if you want to constrain evil, you don't search for it in the external

00:46:56.660 world, because that can make you a persecutor and an accuser.

00:47:00.440 You attempt to bind its manifestation in the confines of your own life, and that's partly

00:47:06.540 what takes it out of the political realm.

00:47:08.900 And so, if you don't do that and it collapses into the political, then you start looking for

00:47:14.100 demonic enemies everywhere to account for malevolence, and the problem with that is that it turns

00:47:19.780 you into a sensorial, self-righteous persecutor.

00:47:24.560 Now, you wrote a whole book about, you know, the good versus evil mentality destroying the Bush

00:47:32.480 presidency, and you talked about the religious overtones that are associated, for example,

00:47:36.720 with justification of censorship on the, oh my God, this is finally the apocalyptic threat

00:47:43.540 basis.

00:47:44.460 I'm curious about what you think of the conceptual scheme that I just laid forward, that we need

00:47:51.640 a language for dealing with good and evil per se, and a separate political language, and

00:47:56.600 if we don't keep those separate, well, one collapses into the other.

00:48:00.800 It doesn't disappear.

00:48:01.740 Yeah, you know, it's interesting, as I listen to that, you know, I mean, I grew up without

00:48:10.120 a lot of religion, like many people these days in the West do.

00:48:16.820 My grandparents were steeped in Judaism, but not very, you know, it wasn't very extreme.

00:48:24.580 It was more cultural, I would say, than religious.

00:48:26.540 It was my parents less so, and then by the time we got to my brother and myself, it was

00:48:32.220 almost non-existent.

00:48:35.200 And, you know, like in early adulthood, I kind of considered that a source of pride, like

00:48:39.160 so many people do.

00:48:40.340 It's a palmark of sophistication and modernity, that you've discarded these archaic conceptions,

00:48:47.400 and we're now, you know, advanced and all of that, and obviously, technologically, we

00:48:52.380 are more advanced than the generations that came before us.

00:48:55.520 But I think a lot of times with that comes a certain hubris, that because we're more

00:48:59.900 technologically advanced, it means we're more advanced in every way.

00:49:03.460 And one of the things that I have worked hard is to lose that hubris.

00:49:09.140 And I think, you know, for me, when I see people who believe in censorship, believe in

00:49:13.360 the idea that certain views are so wrong that it ought to be prohibited, to me, what's driving

00:49:18.020 that more than anything is hubris.

00:49:19.640 Because the whole history of humanity is error.

00:49:23.560 What is considered proven truth in one generation is then regarded as grievous error the next.

00:49:29.080 That's true across every field of discipline and morality and ethics.

00:49:33.080 And the idea that somehow we have escaped from that, and we are now no longer prone to

00:49:39.540 error, that we have apprehended truth that is just so absolute that no one should be even

00:49:45.340 allowed to question it.

00:49:46.680 It's just never an impulse I ever have.

00:49:49.160 And I believe in a lot of things passionately, very strongly.

00:49:52.340 It's not like I walk around doubting everything.

00:49:54.380 I just never would find the level of arrogance to believe that my convictions, even the ones

00:50:01.200 I hold most strongly, are so self-evidently and permanently true that any questioning of

00:50:06.920 them should be prohibited, barred.

00:50:09.040 And I think hubris is at the root of that.

00:50:11.940 And I think the same is true with the idea of religion.

00:50:14.760 There is a reason, I think, that human beings across millennia and across culture and across

00:50:21.800 every other conceivable line have sought out religion.

00:50:25.540 I believe it's something we need.

00:50:28.140 It's intrinsic to us, whether you want to call it religious or spiritual, however you describe

00:50:33.280 it.

00:50:33.920 It's something that is a part of us and that we're going to seek out one way or the other

00:50:37.720 because it, I believe, is a human need.

00:50:39.720 It's something I've started looking for myself as I get older.

00:50:43.120 Now that I have kids, it's something that has become a bigger part of my life.

00:50:47.200 And if you don't have that in the form that people have traditionally had it with the established

00:50:52.900 religions of Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or any of even smaller, more modern

00:51:01.900 religions like Mormonism, I think people are going to find a way to express that.

00:51:08.420 And these days, they use politics as their vehicle for it.

00:51:13.720 And that is what's so dangerous is exactly what you're describing because the fanaticism and the

00:51:19.000 faith and the righteousness that comes from that religious and spiritual expression can be

00:51:24.600 extremely dangerous if imported into politics, which isn't about, as you say, for me, this

00:51:30.940 religious and spiritual exploration is about what we do internally, how we understand ourselves

00:51:38.200 and our relationship to the universe and whether there's something bigger than ourselves and

00:51:42.300 our purpose.

00:51:43.500 It's a very introspective and personal endeavor, whereas politics is about wielding power in a

00:51:50.300 way that controls and influences the lives of other people.

00:51:54.680 And if you import this religious component into it and cease having empathy for other

00:51:59.300 people's experiences and ideas and just are always convinced that whoever is on the other

00:52:04.700 side of your tribe is intrinsically evil and you're intrinsically good, again, it's going

00:52:09.860 to devolve into that ends justify the means mentality.

00:52:13.100 And in politics, that is historically an extremely dangerous way of navigating the world.

00:52:18.220 And so do you think, so I've been talking to Douglas Murray about this topic quite extensively,

00:52:25.520 I would say, over a number of years.

00:52:27.080 And Douglas was raised in a more religious family than you were, a Christian family.

00:52:34.280 And his parents were avid church attenders, but he dispensed with all of that and toyed for a

00:52:40.480 while, even with explicit allegiance with the Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris crowd, Dennett as

00:52:50.820 well, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

00:52:52.940 But Douglas has become more convinced that the humanist endeavor cannot maintain its ethos

00:53:02.780 without it being embedded in an underlying, let's say, narrative metaphysics, which is,

00:53:08.200 for all intents and purposes, a religious framework.

00:53:11.680 And the religious framework also, you know, it always borders on the transcendent and the

00:53:18.440 unknowable.

00:53:19.120 I suppose that's a good way of thinking about it.

00:53:20.800 So Carl Jung thought, for example, that the psychoanalyst, he sort of believed that our

00:53:24.620 rationality was necessarily bounded by the domain of the dream, right?

00:53:30.620 And if you think about how we adapt to the world, we have our explicit ways of representing

00:53:34.600 the world that can be encapsulated semantically, and those would be our statable propositions.

00:53:40.440 But that's never complete, right?

00:53:42.940 And so outside of that is everything we don't know.

00:53:46.160 And from the perspective of Jung and the psychoanalysts who adopted his viewpoint, the dream was the

00:53:53.980 mediator between what we knew explicitly and what we did not yet know.

00:53:58.480 It was a buffer zone, and the transcendent characters of the dreamscape were essentially

00:54:06.060 deities and religious figures.

00:54:08.620 And that strikes me as correct.

00:54:11.380 I think that's in keeping with what we now understand about how the brain functions and

00:54:16.320 about how we process information when we first come across it as anomalists, for example.

00:54:22.620 But it does beg the question, you know, Douglass has told me pretty straightforwardly that he

00:54:28.800 thinks that any ethical system that isn't grounded in a transcendent metaphysics, whatever

00:54:35.020 that means, is going to degenerate into a propagandistic ideology.

00:54:41.280 And well, I'm wondering, like, are those thoughts that you said that you've been seeking more now

00:54:48.100 at this stage in your life than you had been previously, do those sorts of reflections ring true to you?

00:54:54.900 Or do you see a flaw in that line of reasoning?

00:54:58.740 Yeah, so this is an idea I have grappled with a lot.

00:55:02.600 I think a lot of people who pass through a kind of atheistic passage in life have had to grapple with it as well.

00:55:11.820 I remember being something even going back to studying philosophy in undergraduate school

00:55:16.540 was always a question, which is, if you believe there's nothing to life but our material existence

00:55:23.040 that is finite, that we're born and then we die and that's the end of everything, there's no greater power,

00:55:29.600 the challenge is how do you have any kind of an ethics or a morals that make any sense?

00:55:34.740 If all there is is materiality, it seems like you could justify being driven by nothing other than material gain

00:55:42.460 and no basis for any kind of ethical or moral constraints since that's what religion has typically offered.

00:55:48.760 That there's a God, that there's a morality and an ethics that they pass down.

00:55:53.340 And if you remove that, what is the basis for this ethical code or for this morality?

00:55:58.860 And I do think, I even remember when I was so sure of myself in my early 20s,

00:56:02.960 finding that an uncomfortable and difficult question because it is not an easy one to answer.

00:56:09.780 And I think as I've gotten older, I've also started viewing spirituality and religion,

00:56:16.160 and I kind of use that interchangeably, as necessary for a complete human existence.

00:56:22.520 And I know that has become the foundation for my own ethics, for my own morality,

00:56:26.920 the sense of empathy and compassion that you have for other people.

00:56:29.980 My view that that becomes a necessity to honor that, to be guided by it.

00:56:36.540 And I do really wonder how it's possible if you live your entire life without that to avoid turning to nihilism.

00:56:44.580 And I think a lot of people do turn to nihilism when Western society tells them there is nothing spiritual or religious that's valid.

00:56:51.280 And we see it in all the mental health indexes, as you know better than anyone,

00:56:55.380 in terms of the data you've studied and have talked a lot about,

00:56:58.420 just kind of a lack of purpose and higher meaning that people are left with in their lives

00:57:03.740 when you strip away everything other than material existence.

00:57:07.440 Yeah, well, the materialist atheist types, I suppose, would object,

00:57:12.060 and I try to make the argument as powerful as possible,

00:57:16.160 that just because you come up with a hypothetical, practical necessity for a certain kind of belief,

00:57:23.800 let's even call it a certain kind of delusion or illusion, right?

00:57:28.140 That that doesn't justify the hypothesis of something supernatural or transcendent.

00:57:34.860 But I would respond to that perhaps as follows.

00:57:38.140 The first is that we have some relationship with the whole and because we're a part of a larger whole

00:57:46.500 and we don't know what that relationship is, but there has to be some relationship.

00:57:51.360 And I suppose your relationship with that larger whole, you know, existence as such could be positive or negative.

00:58:00.020 And it's conceivable, at least, that that's a decision of faith, you know,

00:58:05.360 whether you're going to act in accordance with the principle that being itself is essentially good

00:58:11.420 and to try to understand from that what ethical obligations that lays on you.

00:58:17.240 But I've also been going through the biblical corpus trying to understand,

00:58:22.220 in some ways, what it means to believe in a transcendent relationship.

00:58:29.420 And so I've been writing about the story of Abraham.

00:58:32.460 So let me just tell you what I've found in that and you tell me what you think about that.

00:58:37.000 So what God is in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as something like the voice within that calls you to adventure.

00:58:46.380 So it's a proposition, right, that there is an animating spirit, that's a good way of thinking about it,

00:58:57.820 that can unite people psychologically and socially.

00:59:02.980 And that that uniting spirit, that uniting animating spirit has a canonical and immutable nature.

00:59:11.560 And one of the manifestations of that nature is the call to adventure.

00:59:15.160 And so Abraham is an old man by the time he leaves his father's tent.

00:59:19.380 But he hears a voice within beckon to him that says,

00:59:23.160 you should leave comfort and security and venture out into the world.

00:59:26.820 Now, it seems to me that we do have a voice like that, that speaks within us, so to speak.

00:59:33.560 And it's not exactly our voice personally, right?

00:59:36.360 Because it speaks to everyone.

00:59:38.440 So it can't be something that's specifically subjective.

00:59:41.560 And I think that you either listen to that voice, say, and venture out into the world

00:59:46.280 in adventure, or you don't listen to it.

00:59:49.500 And either of those choices is a choice of faith.

00:59:53.560 And so that's a little different than believing in a so-called, like, what would you say,

01:00:00.500 a hypothetical supernatural reality, right?

01:00:04.300 It's more like the decision to orient yourself according to a certain animating principle.

01:00:10.640 So in the story of Moses, I'll just develop it with one more story and then leave it.

01:00:16.520 The same spirit that calls to Abraham to embark on the adventure of his life is the spirit that calls

01:00:24.780 to Moses to free his enslaved people from tyranny.

01:00:30.940 And the hypothesis, the biblical hypothesis, is those are manifestations of the same central

01:00:36.780 animating spirit, right?

01:00:38.360 That's Yahweh in the Old Testament.

01:00:40.480 So the hypothesis there is that there's a transcendent spirit that animates humanity.

01:00:46.100 And one of its manifestations is the call to adventure.

01:00:48.680 And another one of its manifestations is the call to resist tyranny and to move out of

01:00:54.720 the domain of slavish habits.

01:00:58.840 And so it seems to me that you either believe in those propositions or you don't, but that

01:01:05.380 either choice is a choice of faith, right?

01:01:08.680 Because you could say, well, tyranny is acceptable and so is slavery.

01:01:12.700 That's a decision of faith.

01:01:14.200 Or you could say that tyranny is not acceptable and neither is slavery.

01:01:17.200 And that's a decision of faith.

01:01:18.780 And I don't see any non-faith alternative.

01:01:21.140 And the same thing applies on the adventure front.

01:01:23.740 So I don't know what you think about that, but maybe you could make some comments and

01:01:28.420 tell me, you know, how that strikes you.

01:01:31.740 It is, of course, the challenge of this conversation.

01:01:34.800 And you're absolutely right.

01:01:35.760 The fact that there are positive outcomes from believing in something, in other words,

01:01:40.440 oh, if you believe in religion, it's a lot easier to have a foundation for a moral

01:01:44.780 code, doesn't make that belief true.

01:01:47.740 There may be positive benefits from it and it could be completely false.

01:01:50.740 That, of course, is logically true.

01:01:54.360 With all of these questions, though, we're dealing with a lack of dispositive proof, even

01:02:00.020 concrete evidence, empirical evidence of the kind that we normally want when we're deciding

01:02:06.780 whether to affirm a belief.

01:02:08.160 But that's true from all sides of this perspective.

01:02:11.920 If you want to believe there's some supernatural force greater than yourself, some force of

01:02:16.940 the universe, whether it's a god or some other similar concept, of course, you cannot provide

01:02:22.160 mathematical proof or anything close to that.

01:02:24.260 But that's the same for arguing its negation.

01:02:27.500 You cannot prove the absence of it either.

01:02:29.380 And this gets back to what I was saying earlier about I think sometimes because we are technologically

01:02:36.980 advanced, we mistake that for being advanced in other ways that all of our wisdom is necessarily

01:02:44.040 superior to those who came before us.

01:02:46.900 And at the end of the analysis, I do feel a certain kind of humility when I look at the

01:02:52.120 fact that human beings for millennia across cultural lines, across religious lines, have

01:02:58.260 been seeking the same sort of fulfillment, the same sort of purpose.

01:03:02.920 Now, maybe that's just a psychological desire to believe that life can't just be the 70 or

01:03:10.600 80 or 90 years when we're on the earth and there's no purpose to it, and we all kind of deceive

01:03:15.540 ourselves into believing otherwise.

01:03:18.480 But my perceptions about all of this ultimately can only be based in my own personal experience

01:03:25.520 and the ability to connect with things that do seem very clear to me to be a spiritual

01:03:34.500 presence, a part of a whole, a transcendent force, are things that just feel very real

01:03:42.960 to me.

01:03:44.220 It didn't previously because I can't prove them rationally.

01:03:48.220 And I think in the gospel and the stories you're referencing, and there are a lot of others,

01:03:52.440 one sees a similar spirit in other religions as well.

01:03:56.440 You know, obviously, people who believe in one religion believe it's the true religion

01:04:00.000 and the rest of the religions are by definition false.

01:04:03.780 When I look at these religious doctrines that have been around for so long, I see a lot more

01:04:08.500 similarity than I do differences.

01:04:10.000 There are obviously dogmatic and doctrinal differences that are important.

01:04:13.420 I think it's all about the same human craving.

01:04:16.000 And the fact that we all want this and need this, and I think so many people come to feel

01:04:21.620 it, I think it takes a lot of arrogance to just dismiss that all the way as the byproduct

01:04:26.640 of illusion or superstition or deceit.

01:04:30.660 What changed for you?

01:04:33.760 Like, why did this turn of attitude make itself known to you?

01:04:41.080 What happened in your life?

01:04:43.760 I had a list of things when I was younger that I thought if I acquired them would make

01:04:49.840 me happy.

01:04:51.680 And it was my conception of what happiness is.

01:04:54.160 Very much derived from modern Western culture.

01:04:57.940 Tells you if you're successful in your career, if you become financially prosperous, if your work

01:05:03.980 becomes well-known, these kinds of things are the things that are going to ultimately be

01:05:08.840 fulfilling.

01:05:09.220 And the more I chased them and the more I acquired them, in a lot of ways, the less happy I became.

01:05:16.740 And my husband, I was married for 20 years.

01:05:21.520 My husband died in May this year, so just a couple of months ago, was somebody who tried

01:05:30.580 very hard to get me to be open to other ways of looking at the world, including starting

01:05:34.880 a family, adopting children from an orphanage that would not have been adopted had we not

01:05:38.880 done so.

01:05:39.880 And we did, and that opened my eyes to the fact that there's more to life than I had

01:05:44.860 previously thought.

01:05:45.720 I just became a lot more humble once you see that the way that you've been looking at the

01:05:49.720 world is incomplete or even on the wrong path.

01:05:55.040 You start believing that maybe there's things you've written off before that are things you

01:06:00.280 ought to go back and reconsider.

01:06:02.440 And then just being more open to things like meditation and spirituality, reading texts that

01:06:09.900 are derivative of Hinduism.

01:06:13.000 And then even one time, I think maybe 15 years ago, I did just sit down and read the gospel

01:06:21.120 from start to finish because it's something that you hear a lot about, that you form opinions

01:06:25.360 about.

01:06:25.840 And then when you go and actually read it, as you've obviously been doing and have done,

01:06:30.660 it is something that makes you just connect to it in a different way than if you're just

01:06:37.740 looking at it in that snide, dismissive way where a lot of us are taught to view it.

01:06:42.100 And then once I started traversing the spiritual path and then seeing that real happiness and

01:06:48.040 fulfillment lies not in material gain or fame or any of those things.

01:06:52.780 I mean, there are fulfilling things to those things, but you cannot be a complete person,

01:06:57.480 I don't think, without family and then the spiritual component and trying to understand

01:07:01.680 where you fit into this broader picture.

01:07:03.340 At least for me, that was the thing that finally enabled me to be happy, to be a complete person.

01:07:09.540 And it just started forcing me to reevaluate how I understood our place in the world and

01:07:14.300 our purpose in it.

01:07:15.640 Right.

01:07:16.120 Okay.

01:07:16.520 So we've proposed that without something, some superordinate orienting structure, let's say

01:07:26.640 that the battle between good and evil collapses into the political and that that

01:07:33.340 poses the danger of the rise of something approximating totalitarianism often justified by

01:07:40.200 demonizing your enemies, let's say, and also as a consequence of willingness to use fear

01:07:45.780 in the face of the looming apocalypse.

01:07:49.220 And you've also made the case that there's a certain hubristic pride in the censorship movement

01:07:57.500 that is a kind of intellectual pride that is predicated on the assumption that what I know

01:08:03.120 now is everything that's worth knowing and that what other people think can be easily

01:08:07.960 dispensed with.

01:08:09.140 And then the third thing we pointed to, pointing to the necessity of a metaphysics, let's say,

01:08:16.000 on the personal front, in your experience, has been that you pursued some of the things

01:08:21.360 that were more materialistic and quite successfully that you were led to believe or did believe

01:08:28.280 would produce a sense of continual fulfillment.

01:08:32.380 But what you found in your life was that some more traditional ventures like starting

01:08:37.420 a family and some striving for something transcendent made itself known as increasingly necessary as

01:08:45.080 you got older.

01:08:46.160 Is that a fair summary of where we've gone so far?

01:08:48.800 Absolutely.

01:08:49.200 Absolutely.

01:08:51.360 All right.

01:08:52.340 Well, let's leave that for the time being.

01:08:55.540 I want to return back to your line of books.

01:09:00.280 In 2008, you published a book called Great American Hypocrites, toppling the big myths of

01:09:06.080 Republican politics.

01:09:08.180 So you're going after the Republicans again.

01:09:10.720 You went after the Bush types for a good while.

01:09:13.000 And so what did you conclude when you were assessing the Republican political front?

01:09:19.380 And why did you phrase it in terms of hypocrisy?

01:09:22.760 And do you think there was more hypocrisy, for example, on the Republican side than there

01:09:26.120 was on the Democrat side?

01:09:28.100 If I'm being completely honest, and why wouldn't I be, that book is not a book that brings me

01:09:34.580 a lot of pride.

01:09:35.440 And I had actually, I had just started writing about politics in late 2005, 2006.

01:09:44.760 And I wrote these first two books that I actually am proud of.

01:09:48.720 I came from kind of a good place.

01:09:51.320 And I was a constitutional lawyer.

01:09:53.040 I moved to Brazil.

01:09:54.120 I got married to my husband, and we had to live in Brazil.

01:09:57.120 We chose to live in Brazil.

01:09:58.820 And I couldn't practice law anymore.

01:10:00.380 And I needed a way to kind of make a living out of journalism.

01:10:04.520 And at the time, writing books was the way I was doing it.

01:10:07.420 There was a lot of pressure for me.

01:10:08.380 So this book, there are some good ideas in this book.

01:10:12.260 But the book itself, the way it's framed, the title, Great American Hypocrites, Toppling

01:10:16.980 the Big Myth of Republican Party Politics, is very banal.

01:10:19.280 It's kind of trite.

01:10:20.000 It's a way more partisan treatise than anything I've written before or have written since.

01:10:25.280 But the idea was that there's a kind of iconography in Republican Party politics.

01:10:33.080 I remember when I was growing up, my father was mostly conservative, but not fanatically

01:10:37.920 political.

01:10:38.540 And he used to kind of revere this certain sort of male archetype that I think he felt was

01:10:43.720 lacking in his life, like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North.

01:10:49.600 And I think Republican Party politics has relied in a lot of ways on these archetypes, often from

01:10:55.120 people who don't really exude those virtues in their actual life, people who purport to

01:11:00.840 be very pious and yet in their private life seems not to follow that very well, people

01:11:05.980 who seek courage and strength by sending other people to war but never have been near a front

01:11:11.360 line, near a front line themselves.

01:11:13.360 They like to send other people to it and then kind of inflate their chest and feel powerful.

01:11:18.060 So there were some seeds of some substantive ideas in the book, but the editor just wanted

01:11:23.680 a kind of, they were always looking for the left and Coulter.

01:11:27.540 And I think the way that book got framed, the way they kind of forced me into this, you

01:11:30.820 know, attack the Republican Party was more a byproduct of that.

01:11:34.100 So I don't think I've ever gone back and read that book once it was done because it was just

01:11:38.120 kind of a, you know, sort of labor of necessity rather than a labor of love.

01:11:43.940 So, well, so what do you think, I mean, your comments on your book are interesting and

01:11:51.160 revealing, I suppose.

01:11:52.540 What is it that you are not particularly proud of, in your words, in relationship to that

01:12:00.260 work?

01:12:00.580 I mean, there's room on the journalistic front for criticism of political opportunists,

01:12:06.400 for example, or of entire parties for that matter.

01:12:08.680 And in some ways, in many ways, you could regard that as the appropriate purview of a

01:12:14.040 critical journalist.

01:12:14.980 So what do you think that, what do you think was wrong in your approach?

01:12:18.420 You pointed maybe to what a kind of instrumental necessity.

01:12:23.540 And what do you think it was that clouded your vision, let's say, so that you're not as

01:12:28.060 happy with that book as you might be about some of the other ones that you've produced?

01:12:31.420 I think it's just the partisan nature of it.

01:12:34.660 I think the critiques I made are by no means confined to the Republican Party.

01:12:40.180 But book publishing, especially in politics, kind of the crudest way of trying to make a

01:12:45.540 book successful from a commercial perspective is to feed a certain political camp with material

01:12:54.400 that will validate their presuppositions, will tell them that they're on the right side.

01:12:59.060 So, like I said, I do think the critiques were valid.

01:13:01.580 You know, hypocrisy of politicians also, though, is a kind of low-hanging fruit.

01:13:06.120 I think it didn't require a lot of brainpower to make that critique.

01:13:09.680 I don't think it was particularly insightful.

01:13:11.820 I do think there were some parts, as I said, that were, you know, the seeds of some interesting

01:13:15.520 psychological, it was a very psychological book about how political leaders try and create

01:13:22.140 their imagery in a way that's appealing.

01:13:24.480 It is that to confine it to a critique of the Republican Party, I think, was just a little

01:13:29.100 bit cheap.

01:13:29.740 And like I said, probably the byproduct of the commercial pressures rather than intellectual

01:13:33.420 autonomy.

01:13:34.220 That's all.

01:13:35.060 Right, right.

01:13:35.920 There's a thing fraudulent about it.

01:13:37.120 To a certain degree, you felt like you had subverted your, what, higher order critical

01:13:41.700 capacity to, like, instrumental necessity.

01:13:45.440 Let's leave that then.

01:13:46.820 Let's go to the next one.

01:13:48.440 With liberty and justice for some.

01:13:50.920 Is this a book you're more pleased with?

01:13:52.380 This was 2011.

01:13:53.600 How the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.

01:13:56.500 Okay, so now you've returned to something more like a, what would you say, an orientation

01:14:01.800 that you're, well, that you feel allowed you to remain firmly grounded while you were

01:14:09.100 writing this.

01:14:09.760 And you're looking back on this book with more pleasure than on the previous book.

01:14:14.200 Right.

01:14:14.780 This book was a more systemic critique.

01:14:17.240 It was not in any way partisan.

01:14:18.560 I think the origin of it was that, you know, the first book that I wrote in 2006, you mentioned

01:14:26.060 Howard the Patriot Act, was a legalistic critique of what I thought were some law-violating policies

01:14:36.660 enacted by the Bush and Cheney administration, often without congressional approval, sometimes

01:14:40.700 in violation of congressional statute.

01:14:43.080 I thought it was the kind of criminality that would typically be prosecuted.

01:14:47.960 And when President Obama was inaugurated, one of the first things he did was announce

01:14:51.840 this kind of amnesty for any high-level political officials or anyone at the CIA who had broken

01:14:58.040 the law as part of the war on terror.

01:14:59.660 And invoke what has now become this traditional elite-serving framework that prosecuting people

01:15:08.500 for crimes if they're from a prior administration or a prior government is too destabilizing.

01:15:14.840 We have to look forward, not backward, was the phrase that he used.

01:15:17.440 It originated in Gerald Ford's Pardon of Richard Nixon.

01:15:21.720 And what bothered me about it, there was no prosecutions of anyone on Wall Street from the 2008

01:15:26.260 financial crisis, even though lots of scholars have written about why many prosecutions would

01:15:30.380 have been viable.

01:15:31.180 That was one of the most cataclysmic events of our lifetime.

01:15:35.300 Certainly, the 2008 financial crisis, the effects lingered to this very day in terms of people's

01:15:39.500 economic stability all over the world.

01:15:41.280 A lot of it was based on fraudulent practices.

01:15:44.140 And you contrast that with the fact that the United States is the most pro-jail country on

01:15:52.300 the planet, we have 5% of the world's population, and yet 25% of prisoners on the planet are in

01:15:58.180 American prison.

01:15:58.980 We imprison people for longer periods of time for crimes that ordinarily would not be punished.

01:16:04.660 This gargantuan prison state that definitely disproportionately falls on people who are at

01:16:11.200 the lower end of the socioeconomic perspective.

01:16:13.980 And so it was kind of contrasting this idea that for elites, there's a kind of legal immunity,

01:16:18.200 and for poor people in the United States who can't afford legal counsel, who rely on incredibly

01:16:23.160 overworked public defenders and the like, people go to prison for very long periods of time,

01:16:28.480 including for nonviolent crimes that have made the United States the world's biggest jailer.

01:16:33.540 And that contrast has been disturbing to me.

01:16:36.300 And the book was largely about that.

01:16:38.640 Right.

01:16:39.080 So it sounds like a more classic left-wing take, I would say.

01:16:43.860 I'm still trying to position you politically to some degree.

01:16:46.620 I mean, not that I have a particular reason for doing so, but it's one of the questions

01:16:52.100 we've left unanswered is how you conceptualize your political stance.

01:16:56.000 I mean, that opposition to law being formulated in a manner that preferentially benefits the

01:17:03.500 wealthy, because you use socioeconomic status as the prime marker, I mean, that's a continual,

01:17:09.000 reasonable plaint from people on the left, right?

01:17:13.640 Is that the structures of power get tilted in the service of those who have the power.

01:17:20.620 And, you know, that's something that everyone should always be on the lookout for, because

01:17:24.240 just, well, if for no other reason than just because you have power right now doesn't mean

01:17:29.280 that you're going to have it, you know, in a year.

01:17:31.920 So we should all watch out on that front.

01:17:34.060 So what can you, can you walk through your, your conclusions in that book?

01:17:41.360 Like what, what did you see as the causes?

01:17:43.700 You talked a little bit about the proclivity of one administration to forgive the sins of

01:17:49.880 the previous.

01:17:50.600 You talked about the free pass that was given to people who were involved in the 2008 financial

01:17:58.380 scandal, are there other, what would you say, are there other threats to the integrity of

01:18:05.760 the law that you see as particularly germane in the U.S. at the moment?

01:18:10.100 I mean, I think, I think that book grew out of a concern that has intensified in the last

01:18:17.100 decade, that the West in general is now a society that has a larger breach than ever before between

01:18:27.980 elites on the one hand and the vast majority of people on the other.

01:18:31.440 You referenced earlier, for example, the fact that many of the views that are now considered

01:18:36.020 taboo or many of the beliefs that are considered unworthy of being aired or happen to be beliefs

01:18:41.900 that majorities of people subscribe to.

01:18:46.360 And those prohibitions are being imposed by an elite class that is so wildly at odds with

01:18:52.720 the vast majority of people over whom they're essentially ruling, which is a very destabilizing

01:18:58.580 framework for a society to have.

01:19:01.840 If you look, for example, at polling data about crime and you listen to black or Latino elites

01:19:10.200 on television or people with newspaper columns, you would think that the vast majority of non-white

01:19:15.720 people want the police defunded, want the police deconstructed, hate the police, don't want the

01:19:21.780 police in their neighborhoods.

01:19:23.200 And of course, if you look at polling data, you find the exact opposite is true.

01:19:27.320 Black people, Latinos, people of any race who live in poor communities either want the same

01:19:32.800 amount of police or more police in their neighborhood.

01:19:35.180 There's this constant breach, obviously, with gender ideology.

01:19:38.160 There's that breach with a lot of culture war issues, with the question of endless warfare,

01:19:44.100 with the question of gigantic corporations between the views of the elite class and the

01:19:49.320 views of the vast majority of people over whom they're ruling.

01:19:53.280 And historically, if you were to look at how that breach has been addressed, there's essentially

01:20:00.520 two ways you can go about trying to resolve that.

01:20:05.400 Namely, I think the election of Donald Trump, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Brexit,

01:20:12.240 the rise of a lot of these kind of populist parties are very much about the fact that huge

01:20:15.940 numbers of people feel, I think justifiably and validly, that elite ideology doesn't care

01:20:23.380 about them at all, is willing to squeeze every opportunity out of their life in order to benefit

01:20:28.320 a small minority of people. And when you have this kind of mass populist anger, traditionally,

01:20:35.440 the elites can try and appease it by kind of throwing some more crumbs to people just to keep

01:20:41.440 them just satiated enough that they're not going to go out into the street and cause political turmoil

01:20:46.700 and protest and the like. Or the society can say, you know what, let them riot. We'll just

01:20:52.240 militarize to the teeth. We'll give ourselves every kind of power and every kind of authoritarian

01:20:57.500 weapon that we need so that even if they want to riot, they'll be crushed immediately.

01:21:04.140 I think the West is choosing that latter path of no longer trying to appease people, no longer

01:21:09.960 trying to give them enough to keep them at a decent quality of life or the perception that the

01:21:16.980 system is essentially fair and instead is paramilitarizing, is becoming more authoritarianism.

01:21:22.760 I think that's what a lot of the trends in the West are about. And that book was really a way of

01:21:27.000 saying that even the law, the kind of linchpin of what is supposed to ultimately guarantee that even

01:21:32.080 though we were supposed to have material differences, the founders were capitalists, they

01:21:35.960 expected and anticipated that there would be differences in material wealth, that the law would

01:21:40.900 ultimately be the guarantor of the fairness of that inequality, that people would accept its validity

01:21:46.300 or its legitimacy because we were all operating by the same set of rules. And increasingly, the law has

01:21:52.700 become something that's the exact opposite, just yet another weapon for elites to use against people

01:21:59.740 who are powerless to keep them in line, to keep them kind of neutered and toothless. And that's really

01:22:07.060 the ethos out of which that book grew. And the fact that elites have given themselves a kind of broad

01:22:13.620 scale immunity, that our prisons and our courtrooms, our criminal courtrooms aren't for wealthy people,

01:22:18.820 aren't for powerful people, with some exceptions, but are overwhelmingly for poor people, even ones who

01:22:24.020 are addicted to drugs, committing nonviolent crimes. That was the critique of that book.

01:22:29.520 So let's segue from that into your 2014 book, That's No Place to Hide, Edward Snowden, the NSA and

01:22:36.240 the U.S. surveillance state. And so, well, that obviously developed some of the themes that you

01:22:41.380 were just discussing, which is the proclivity of the elite. And I have some questions about who you

01:22:47.600 think the elite are exactly, because that's an interesting issue. Tell me what you discovered

01:22:53.700 and what you were attempting to accomplish with No Place to Hide.

01:22:57.940 That basically told the story of the work I did with Edward Snowden. He had contacted me anonymously at the end

01:23:03.500 of 2012, saying he had access to a huge trove of top secret documents that demonstrated that the U.S.

01:23:12.640 government and its allies were engaged in a kind of ubiquitous surveillance that would shock people,

01:23:20.120 even such as myself, who had been writing about that and had long suspected that was the case.

01:23:26.620 The kind of final straw for him was when he heard James Clapper, President Obama's senior national

01:23:32.580 security official, who was the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate in early

01:23:37.600 2013. He was asked by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, does the NSA collect dossiers on millions and millions

01:23:45.380 of Americans? And James Clapper lied and said, no, sir, it does not, not wittingly. And Snowden had in his

01:23:51.840 hands the evidence because he had worked for CIA and then the NSA as a contractor. The evidence proving

01:23:58.540 that what Clapper denied the NSA was doing was, in fact, exactly what the NSA was doing, in fact,

01:24:03.360 to an extent that nobody would have suspected. The motto of the NSA was collect it all. They really

01:24:10.000 wanted to and were well on their way to converting the internet into a tool of ubiquitous surveillance,

01:24:15.240 that everything done on the internet, set on the internet by ordinary people, American citizens,

01:24:21.020 suspected of no wrongdoing. These were suspicionless. This was suspicionless surveillance,

01:24:25.020 was being collected and stored with the potential when they wanted to analyze and utilize this

01:24:30.820 information. Incredibly comprehensive pictures of our lives based on who we were speaking to,

01:24:36.900 what we were reading, the content of our communication. And so I went to Hong Kong,

01:24:42.620 met with Snowden, along with the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who filmed it. That became the film that won the

01:24:49.620 Oscar in 2015 for best documentary Citizen Four. Very kind of high drama, but I think journalistically

01:24:55.240 consequential. And to me, that's what those materials revealed was just how unaccountable

01:25:03.480 the U.S. security state had become. That this was a part of our government that was created to

01:25:08.640 operate in complete secrecy, but it was always supposed to be attached to some form of democratic

01:25:14.540 accountability. There were lots of abuses discovered in the mid-70s that were supposedly reforms done.

01:25:20.380 And yet, we have a part of our government that is now huger than ever, more powerful than ever,

01:25:25.500 operates so much in the dark that I was getting contacted when we were doing this reporting by

01:25:29.280 members of Congress who are on the Intelligence Committee in the U.S., in Great Britain, in Australia,

01:25:34.720 in Canada, saying, I had no idea any of this was taking place. And it was kind of a radicalizing

01:25:41.200 moment for me because it wasn't, for me, a book or an episode in my life that was about

01:25:47.940 surveillance and privacy, although of course it was about that, as much as it was about democracy,

01:25:53.380 the fact that these incredibly consequential choices had been undertaken about how the

01:25:59.380 government was going to utilize the internet, convert it into a system of mass, indiscriminate,

01:26:04.260 ubiquitous surveillance, with no democratic accountability of any kind, no transparency

01:26:09.720 of any kind. And it made me realize that there really is this kind of part of the government,

01:26:15.360 as Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about in 1961, before Vietnam, before the war on terror,

01:26:20.960 that essentially is the real government, is the government that is immune to elections,

01:26:25.720 that does what it wants with very little constraints. And I find it very, very alarming, very menacing.

01:26:32.360 And how do you feel about that now? I mean, do you think we're farther down the rabbit hole than

01:26:38.760 we were when you wrote that book? I mean, it's nine years later, and our technological reach has

01:26:42.960 expanded tremendously. I mean, when you're looking at the state of freedom, let's say, in the West

01:26:49.760 today, what are your observations on that front? I actually think it's worse, which might be

01:26:58.280 paradoxical because there were some benefits from this reporting. It made people aware

01:27:02.560 for the first time of not only the extent to which the US government and its allies are spying on,

01:27:09.280 again, not Al-Qaeda cells or ISIS cells, which everybody would support, but entire Western

01:27:17.060 population, including American citizens. And that awareness made it possible to take precautions

01:27:23.680 against it. So people use encryption more than they did before. Big tech companies like Facebook

01:27:29.620 and Google were pressured to demonstrate they were protecting the privacy of their users by also

01:27:35.140 using encryption. So it did construct some barriers to what the government had been doing.

01:27:40.620 But one of the interesting thing was, at the time we did this note in reporting, you're talking

01:27:44.120 2013, the fear that had once been inspired by the mention of Al-Qaeda had really worn off.

01:27:50.940 This is now 12 years after the 9-11 attack. There had been no mass casualty terrorist attacks

01:27:57.180 in the United States, anywhere near 9-11. Even the ones that had happened quickly in Madrid and in

01:28:04.000 London in the years following, those kind hadn't happened. And so there was a sense that, okay,

01:28:08.860 the war on terror has gone way too far. This is kind of an extremism that we should not tolerate.

01:28:13.860 And then very quickly, ISIS emerged in 2014 and 2015. ISIS was presented as this threat

01:28:20.380 worse than Al-Qaeda. And then 2016 and the 2016 election, suddenly Russia got kind of revitalized

01:28:27.900 as the existential threat that America and the West faces. Brexit was blamed on Russia. Trump's

01:28:32.960 election was blamed on Russia. And it reinstalled this, instilled this kind of sense that, no,

01:28:38.780 we actually like the CIA. We like the US security state. We believe it needs to kind of operate

01:28:44.360 without limits because the enemies we're facing are so great. And that was going back to what we

01:28:48.360 talked earlier about how people had been convinced to think about Trump. They also began thinking of

01:28:52.500 that about Vladimir Putin in Russia, even though American presidents from Clinton to Bush to Obama

01:28:58.200 to Trump had talked about Putin as this kind of rational figure with whom they could do business,

01:29:02.600 suddenly got converted into this, the new Hitler. And this ability of the US security state and its

01:29:09.840 allies in the media to always give people this new frightening enemy that convinces them that they

01:29:16.960 need to acquiesce to authoritarian powers is almost impressive. And the way in which American liberals

01:29:24.740 in particular, the Democratic Party started feeding on this hatred for Russia and this belief that

01:29:30.760 Vladimir Putin was this kind of Hitler-like figure along with Donald Trump, pushed them into the arms of

01:29:38.280 these agencies because they perceived correctly that these agencies were trying to sabotage the Trump

01:29:43.200 presidency. This is where Russiagate came from. It was a CIA concoction. They fed it every day to the

01:29:47.900 New York Times and the Washington Post, which gave themselves Pulitzers for it. It revitalized these

01:29:53.220 fears. And I think these agencies, and I don't just think, if you look at polling data, you'll see

01:29:58.320 they are held in higher regard than at any time since the peak of the Cold War, particularly by

01:30:05.060 adherence of the Democratic Party. I think one of the best things that Donald Trump did was usher in a kind

01:30:10.480 of skepticism about these agencies that had never previously gotten a foothold in mainstream Republican

01:30:17.080 Party politics before. But for exactly that reason, the establishment wing of politics and media and

01:30:24.180 the Democratic Party views these agencies as more benevolent than ever. And that is a really alarming

01:30:31.760 mindset.

01:30:33.180 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You tweeted, and this might be relevant. Well, it's relevant to what you just said,

01:30:39.080 but it might also be relevant to maybe what we'll close this discussion with, which is

01:30:43.480 how do you characterize this elite, let's say, that things are being done in service of? So you tweeted

01:30:51.820 out, the cultural left, meaning the part of the left focused on cultural issues rather than imperialism

01:30:58.880 or corporatism has become increasingly censorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant,

01:31:07.080 joyless, self-victimizing, trivial, and status quo perpetuating. Now, I've had the opportunity to ask

01:31:16.780 20 or 30 congressmen and senators on the Democrat side when they think the left goes too far.

01:31:25.720 And I asked Robert F. Kennedy that actually in our interview, and that was the one question he

01:31:32.200 declined to answer, saying that he wanted to put forward a vision of unity, especially on the

01:31:37.360 Democrat side, rather than disunity. You know, and fair enough, but I've been struck by the fact that

01:31:44.500 the Democrats in particular can't see the danger of their radical fringe and seem utterly unwilling or

01:31:51.920 unable to dissociate them from what I see as behind the scenes manipulators with an almost psychopathic

01:32:02.420 bent. That's the increasingly censorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant

01:32:10.060 crowd. You talked a fair bit about the elites today, you know, and the elite from the leftist

01:32:17.460 perspective has historically been those who are wealthy or who occupy higher positions on the

01:32:24.500 socioeconomic ladder. But it isn't exactly obvious that the elite on the left are characterized by

01:32:33.420 those descriptors precisely. I mean, when you're trying to conceptualize who constitutes the censorious

01:32:42.960 tyrants or this increasingly repressive force, what do you conclude? Where exactly are the enemies of

01:32:55.740 freedom, so to speak, the enemies of free speech, at least, let's say, where do you think they're

01:33:00.060 primarily located? And does this, is there a new conceptualization necessary that makes a mockery of

01:33:08.240 the old political divisions? Yeah, you know, this term elite, you're absolutely right to

01:33:14.060 interrogate this. It is, it is obviously a somewhat ambiguous term and that ambiguity sometimes allow,

01:33:20.740 allows a kind of reckless use of it. You just throw that word around, you're not really sure

01:33:24.300 exactly to whom you're referring. It almost has this kind of like, uh, melodramatic lure to it,

01:33:29.740 like, oh, we're always against the elites. Everybody we just like is the elite. And so I think it is

01:33:34.280 important to ask that question and have at least a concrete sense of who you're talking about. I think

01:33:38.960 it maybe even differs based on what kind of policy debate you're having. So maybe the elite is a little

01:33:46.260 bit different when you're talking about economic policy, where I think probably the large corporate

01:33:53.020 power cares most about economic policy and uses their weight and throws their weight around most there,

01:33:58.760 the tax code and regulation and things of that kind. Then you have a kind of foreign policy elite that

01:34:04.260 has some overlap with that, but probably is different in a way as well. And then you're

01:34:09.800 talking about the culture war, you know, the cultural kind of debates that increasingly, I think,

01:34:14.720 unfortunately have come to dominate our discourse. And in large part, it's because the left has

01:34:21.420 prioritized the culture war. If you go and watch left-wing YouTube shows, the most popular ones, or read,

01:34:28.340 or listen to left-wing podcasts, which I do, it's part of my job. And I think, you know,

01:34:33.660 it's necessary for me to kind of stay in touch with every political sector. The extent to which

01:34:40.200 the culture war generally and gender ideology and trans issues in particular received the bulk of the

01:34:45.980 attention is almost shocking to me. I mean, left-wing politics, traditionally in the 20th century,

01:34:50.800 was about opposing imperialism and militarism and corporatism and oligarchy. And now there's almost

01:34:57.680 none of that. I mean, on the left, you wouldn't even know there's a war in Ukraine. You wouldn't

01:35:02.780 even know there's a foreign policy. That is almost entirely ignored in favor of this kind of fixation

01:35:09.740 on trans issues and gender ideology. Right now, one of the longest standing and biggest left-wing

01:35:16.040 YouTube shows, The Young Turks, is in the process of being utterly decimated and canceled. And they've

01:35:22.060 had views over the years that, from a left-wing perspective, are completely anathema. But since they're

01:35:26.300 about war, they love Madeleine Albright, no one cares about that. They're being canceled because

01:35:31.820 they crossed the one line you can't cross on the left, which is questioning some of the most outer

01:35:35.900 fringes of extremism trans ideology, including whether or not biological men should be able to

01:35:42.600 compete in women's sports, whether puberty blockers are safe for children, where even in

01:35:46.320 Europe they're debating those things. And the intolerance for any kind of vibrant questioning

01:35:55.960 or dissent, even from people who say, I think trans adults should be able to live their lives

01:36:02.180 with total dignity, with full legal rights. That's nowhere near enough. You have to affirm every last

01:36:06.900 element of that agenda in order to even be deemed acceptable. It is incredibly repressive. And I think

01:36:14.540 at the end of the day, when you're talking about who the elite is, it's kind of, on the one hand,

01:36:20.020 a vague term, but it's also not that difficult to identify. It's the views that are permitted

01:36:25.220 and the views that are suppressed. And if your views are among the views that are suppressed,

01:36:30.880 that's a pretty good indication that you are not in the elite.

01:36:34.020 You seem to be making, well, you seem to be making, I would say, a two-fold categorization.

01:36:39.120 On the one hand, we have what we've always had, and it's something that always poses a threat to the

01:36:47.020 integrity of states that have to continually adapt, which is the tendency of those who have been

01:36:54.280 successful economically to bend and distort the system in a manner that supports their continued

01:37:02.280 hegemony independent of their continued productive activity. And I kind of think about that in general

01:37:09.720 as the problem of out-of-control gigantism. And you can see that on the government front just as much

01:37:15.560 as on the corporate front. You know, famously in 2008, the mantra was too big to fail. And I always

01:37:22.980 thought that the mantra should have been so big you will certainly fail. And then there's this

01:37:29.160 additional element that you point to, and you use the example of what's happening to the young Turks

01:37:33.880 at the moment on the gender front, pointing out that there's an elite that are possessed by a set of

01:37:41.900 ideological ideas that have degenerated in recent years into an almost monomaniacal fixation on

01:37:48.860 gender and identity. And then there's some unholy alliance between the two, you know, which I don't

01:37:56.620 quite understand. Although it seems to be manifesting itself. You know, it's, it's a variant perhaps of

01:38:03.660 the willingness of the coercive left, not that the right wing was like without error, error on this

01:38:12.920 front, to ally themselves, for example, with big pharma. And as you pointed out, to increasingly adopt a

01:38:20.100 positive attitude towards the very secretive and background gigantic government operations that the

01:38:27.720 left would have been historically opposed to. So I don't understand the alliance exactly, like I don't

01:38:34.160 exactly understand how the ideological possession that manifests itself as emphasis on the primacy of

01:38:40.940 group identity can be in bed with the people who are using their economic power on the regulatory

01:38:48.420 capture front. Maybe it's something like, maybe you see something like this on the ESG front, eh, is

01:38:53.380 where the, the power elite. So that would be Larry Fink and the BlackRock types are willing to use the

01:39:00.600 moralistic ideology of the radical left to hide their, what, to hide their guilt and to hide their

01:39:07.380 machinations on the power front. Is that a reasonable way of construing it? I'm so glad we're talking about

01:39:13.480 this at the end here because it's so fundamental to these changes in the political landscape.

01:39:18.340 The fact that you, for example, were censored by Google while you were interviewing RFK Jr. and have

01:39:23.900 been censored before, and people who believe what you believe on the question of trans ideology and

01:39:29.620 gender ideology are censored routinely by Google and Facebook and the pre-Elon regime of Twitter,

01:39:37.080 whereas nobody would ever be censored by big tech for being as extreme as you want to be on trans

01:39:44.240 issues, urging that 12-year-olds be given puberty blockers or that young girls get mastectomies the

01:39:52.780 minute that they decide that they're dysphoric. Obviously, no one's getting censored for being on

01:39:57.420 that side of the debate. You see the manifestation of the elite there. So suddenly you are this left-wing

01:40:02.600 culture warrior who likes to think that you're antagonistic to capital, and yet the largest and

01:40:09.400 richest corporations are completely on your side on these debates. In fact, they're your enforcers.

01:40:14.220 I noticed this for the first time right after we did the Snowden reporting in 2015, so it was about

01:40:19.660 two years after it began. The British version of the NSA, which is the GCHQ, really probably the

01:40:25.960 most extremist in this Five Eyes Alliance. They're sort of the ones that do the things that not even the NSA

01:40:30.480 will do when they can't go far enough under the law or ethics. The GCHQ steps up and does it. In

01:40:37.080 2015, they bathed their futuristic headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag, declared LGBTQ Day,

01:40:45.120 apologized for their treatment of some of the gay code breakers, including Alan Turing during World

01:40:49.560 War II, and then suddenly began embracing the left's cultural agenda. Now the CIA does it,

01:40:57.040 the FBI does it, they all celebrate Women's Day and LGBT Day, and every one of those, and corporations

01:41:03.840 obviously do it too. And therein, you can see exactly what these institutions of power perceive

01:41:09.960 as in their interest, who to side with and who not to side with. And you look at who gets censored,

01:41:16.960 you look at who corporations are endorsing, what these institutions of militarism and surveillance are,

01:41:22.480 the flags they're waving and the ones they're not waving. And it's not difficult to see

01:41:27.220 what is elite opinion and what isn't. And whether it's because it's cynical,

01:41:31.640 maybe there is part of that, like, oh, we know if we wave the rainbow flag and we're the CIA that

01:41:35.860 will get the left to embrace us more. Or whether it's just the fact that the new elite leaders in

01:41:42.140 Western institutions of authority have become true believers of these causes, probably some division

01:41:47.120 of bold. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that establishment power,

01:41:51.520 including capital, is on the side of the left in the culture war. And as a result,

01:41:56.620 they have become this kind of bullying faction that no longer really opposes large-scale financial

01:42:04.080 institutions or corporate power or militaristic power because they perceive correctly they're on

01:42:08.940 their side and they're their allies. Well, I think that's probably a good place to end.

01:42:15.060 You know, we managed to tie things together there at the end. I mean, I guess I would maybe

01:42:20.320 I'll add one more comment. You know, it struck me that the best camouflage for psychopathic

01:42:29.060 manipulators, and those are people who will do anything instrumental to advance their own narrow

01:42:34.740 self-interest, a well-documented group, let's say, on the psychometric and psychological front,

01:42:40.820 the best camouflage for assiduous instrumental self-promoters who are willing to manipulate

01:42:47.900 others, say, using fear and to accrue power to themselves, is compassion, is the guise of

01:42:54.360 compassion. You know, and what that means, too, is that corporate malfeasance can cover itself up

01:43:03.780 by allying itself with the useful idiots of the compassionate left. And I don't mean the people

01:43:12.240 who are using compassion necessarily on the left as a manipulation in and of itself. I think there

01:43:16.900 are plenty of people who do that. But the people who are naive enough to assume that a show of compassion

01:43:22.600 means the real thing. And the fact that those enablers exist, and I think the Democrats, by the

01:43:29.380 way, are rife with such people, means that the real manipulators at the levels of operating at the

01:43:36.920 levels of undeserved and untoward corporate power, governmental power for that matter, can manipulate

01:43:42.580 entire populations by claiming to be compassionate while going about their normal business, which is the

01:43:48.720 accrual of power to themselves. And I think that accounts for that unholy alliance, you know, and

01:43:54.100 that strange alliance between, because it is a strange alliance, between the left, which historically,

01:44:02.200 in its best manifestations, did provide a voice for the dispossessed, for the unholy alliance between

01:44:09.320 the modern left and the corporate and gigantic government, well, between the corporations and the

01:44:17.300 gigantic forces of government and media. So that seems to be where we're at now. And it's not obvious

01:44:24.740 how you conceptualize that or oppose it within the confines of the classic divisions between right and

01:44:32.300 left, right? It's a whole new landscape that's presenting itself to us, and it seems to require

01:44:36.480 new conceptualizations. Exactly. I mean, you know, that's why I think there's confusion sometimes about

01:44:42.640 my ideology and others' ideology. The Atlantic just called RFK Jr. the first MAGA Democrat, whereas,

01:44:50.720 you know, when RFK Jr. is critiquing a lot of the institutions that had long been the primary

01:44:58.460 targets of the left, including the U.S. security state and big pharma and the U.S. war machine.

01:45:03.940 But now that code is right wing. I also think to just add very quickly to what you said as the kind

01:45:10.580 of just to tie it all together, is I think identity politics is used very similarly to how you just

01:45:15.380 described these social justice causes and the way that they're cynically employed by these

01:45:23.100 institutions of power to give the appearance that they're on the side of the left and they become

01:45:28.340 actual allies of the left. Obviously, if you just change demographically the people who are running

01:45:33.620 these institutions so that now you have a black woman who's in general or you have a Latino man

01:45:39.140 who's the CFO of a major corporation, it casts the appearance that there's been some kind of a

01:45:44.640 radical change for those casually looking, when in reality it's just kind of the costume that they're

01:45:51.400 donning in order to continue doing exactly what they're doing and just to win new supporters.

01:45:56.360 And it's incredibly effective because ultimately so many people are satisfied with the most

01:46:01.620 superficial of changes and are willing to embrace and cheer any institutions of authority as being

01:46:08.040 their allies, even though they're continuing to do those things that they always have done when they

01:46:12.620 were once their enemies. And that is exactly what is causing this new political landscape.

01:46:17.980 Hey, well, you know, that seems like a very good place to end. So for everybody watching and

01:46:23.280 listening, I'm going to talk to Glenn for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side. We'll

01:46:28.320 conduct some investigation into the manner in which the interests that he's displayed,

01:46:35.060 fairly consistent interests really over what almost, it's a long period of time now, 30 years,

01:46:40.780 really pretty consistent interests in protection of free speech, for example. That looks like it's

01:46:46.260 your paramount concern. And then associated interests of all sorts on the political and cultural front.

01:46:51.200 So we'll delve into the genesis of those preoccupations on the Daily Wire Plus side. And

01:46:57.220 if you're inclined to go over there and have a listen or a watch, you know, that might be useful

01:47:02.460 for you and productive for us. As Glenn mentioned and I mentioned during this podcast, YouTube has

01:47:08.620 been on our case to a fairly intense degree in the last couple of months, me to some degree,

01:47:14.300 because they've censored three of my podcasts. And I suspect we'll censor a number of the other

01:47:19.700 ones that I have in the can and really have gone after a number of the people that I'm

01:47:25.720 working with or alongside of, at least at the Daily Wire Plus. So if you're inclined to throw

01:47:32.160 them some support, this is probably not such a bad time to do it. In any case, we're going to head

01:47:36.740 over there. Thank you to the film crew here in Northern Ontario for facilitating this and Glenn for

01:47:42.480 talking to me today and for sharing what you've been investigating with everybody watching and

01:47:46.680 listening. And to everyone who is watching and listening, thank you very much. And well,

01:47:51.780 we'll see you on the next podcast. Thanks, Glenn.

01:47:54.640 Thank you. Appreciate it.

391. A Prison is Being Constructed Inside Your Brain ｜ Glenn Greenwald

Summary

Transcript