The Megyn Kelly Show - Havana Syndrome and Vaccinating Young Kids, with Glenn Greenwald, David Zweig, and Marc Polymeropoulos

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00:00:45.680 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:47.640 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:57.560 Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:59.020 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:00.400 Oh, we've got a packed show for you today and a good one.

00:01:03.140 On some topics we've never discussed on this program before,

00:01:05.720 a deep dive into the supposed deep state today with voices across the spectrum.

00:01:11.320 Why is the CIA suddenly having its informants around the world go missing,

00:01:15.600 or even worse, becoming suspected double agents against the United States?

00:01:20.340 And what is Havana Syndrome, the mysterious disease said to be plaguing our diplomats

00:01:26.220 and national security forces in Cuba and many other countries for years?

00:01:31.360 Our friend Glenn Greenwald of Substack is here.

00:01:33.980 He's doubtful about this Havana Syndrome thing.

00:01:37.820 But we're also going to be joined by a former CIA official, top, top guy,

00:01:41.700 who is speaking out about having it.

00:01:44.080 And he doesn't agree with Glenn because he says he's experienced it personally.

00:01:47.920 First, though, we want to start with breaking news about COVID

00:01:50.720 and the Biden administration's plan for vaccinating 5 to 11-year-olds.

00:01:56.480 And apparently, as they tell you to stick this needle in your 5-year-old's arm,

00:02:04.420 the CDC will not be bending at all on masks for children,

00:02:10.120 vaccinated children in school.

00:02:12.020 Watch.

00:02:12.720 From FDA and recommendations from CDC,

00:02:14.940 we will be working to scale up pediatric vaccination.

00:02:18.520 That said, it will take some time.

00:02:20.140 And as I just noted, as we head into these winter months,

00:02:23.200 we know we cannot be complacent.

00:02:25.460 We also know that from previous data that schools that have had masks in place

00:02:30.580 were three and a half times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closure.

00:02:36.640 So right now, we are going to continue to

00:02:38.920 recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools.

00:02:43.300 And we will look forward to scaling up pediatric vaccination during this period of time.

00:02:47.860 It's never ending.

00:02:49.020 It's just never, it's never going to end.

00:02:52.480 David Zweig is a journalist for New York Magazine and other outlets, and he's with me.

00:02:58.060 David, even vaccinating the 5 to 11-year-olds, they're already doing it to the 12-plus.

00:03:05.560 Even that won't lead to any bending when it comes to masks.

00:03:10.740 And you heard her say right there, her purported reason is that the evidence shows

00:03:16.380 schools that have had masks in place were three and a half times less likely to have school

00:03:23.440 outbreaks requiring school closure.

00:03:26.280 You're the only one who's actually taken a look at the studies behind this claim.

00:03:30.980 We keep hearing over and over again that masks in schools prevent the spread of COVID.

00:03:36.320 And so to Rochelle Walensky, you say what?

00:03:39.980 Well, the study she's referring to has a long list of what are called confounders,

00:03:47.740 which are problems with it.

00:03:49.380 And a number, I haven't written about it yet, but a number of experts who I confer with every day,

00:03:56.040 including infectious disease people who really understand how to read these studies.

00:04:00.240 And I also reached out to a number of biostatisticians regarding this study.

00:04:07.180 And it's just not worth the weight that they're putting on it, to put it mildly.

00:04:15.260 I won't bore your listeners and viewers getting into the weeds on the study,

00:04:19.640 but I can say three and a half times is so wildly outside the realm of what you're seeing benefits

00:04:27.760 from other studies regarding masks that according to one of the infectious disease people I spoke

00:04:33.100 with, they said that instantly set off alarm bells when they saw that.

00:04:37.120 So we can sort of set that aside.

00:04:39.240 I mean, we can cherry pick 20 other places where there were masks in one district and not in the

00:04:46.220 other, and there was no difference noticeable on the benefit.

00:04:49.660 So the study she's referring to is not trustworthy, but she still throws out the number.

00:04:58.120 She noticeably does not cite the CDC's own study that you were on reporting about earlier

00:05:03.880 and reported in New York Magazine was of 90,000 kids in Georgia, which did not show masks help

00:05:11.240 stop the spread of COVID.

00:05:14.260 And so now, even with the vaccination, I mean, even with the vaccination of that would be all

00:05:20.060 school-age children if you've got five-plus vaccinated and more and more schools mandating

00:05:26.680 the vax, like we've seen in L.A. and elsewhere, my own school, for 12-plus or at least 16-plus.

00:05:33.420 I mean, you tell me whether anything is going to make any of these officials, in your view,

00:05:39.440 based on what you've seen, listen to reason.

00:05:43.280 I mean, what's interesting is I think that the frame about this debate has actually kind

00:05:49.180 of gone off the rails.

00:05:50.220 And, you know, we could debate different, the nuances and the minutiae of one study or another,

00:05:56.780 but I think we're missing the larger point.

00:05:59.260 Even if there was some marginal benefit to be found from masking in schools, the larger

00:06:05.160 question is, to what end?

00:06:07.940 Why?

00:06:08.780 And what I've continually written about and what I spoke about when I testified before Congress

00:06:14.360 is, why aren't we looking at the real-world observational evidence from Europe where it's

00:06:21.640 not 100, it's not that millions, millions of children are not wearing masks in schools?

00:06:27.200 The ECDC, which is the European version of the CDC, recommends against all primary school

00:06:35.200 kids from wearing masks.

00:06:37.000 The World Health Organization has repeatedly said, we don't think anyone under age six should

00:06:44.120 be wearing a mask.

00:06:45.260 So those facts alone, it doesn't mean that they're right and we're wrong, but at minimum,

00:06:50.620 I would like the CDC to explain why their guidance differs so dramatically from that of its counterpart,

00:06:56.980 in Europe.

00:06:58.040 So this is kind of the broader frame that I think is missing from a lot of the coverage

00:07:02.960 about this, where we're kind of arguing about one study or another.

00:07:06.440 There is not a uniform belief about the value of children wearing masks in schools when you

00:07:15.580 look at Europe versus the United States.

00:07:18.180 Has anybody been forced to answer that?

00:07:20.660 I have yet to see any of these officials pressed on the difference between what they're doing

00:07:26.320 in Europe.

00:07:26.900 I mean, I did it with Scott Gottlieb when he was on my show 10 days ago, but he didn't

00:07:31.360 have a good answer.

00:07:32.520 But Fauci, Rochelle, I'd love to see what have you seen that?

00:07:36.000 Anybody pressing them on?

00:07:37.760 Are the Europeans insane?

00:07:39.720 Do they not care about children?

00:07:42.460 Right.

00:07:42.600 So anytime I ever bring this up, the rebuttals tend to either be silence or it's something

00:07:50.500 on the other end of, well, Europe is different than here.

00:07:53.480 Denmark is not America or this country or that country or the UK.

00:07:56.900 I mean, these are children in schools.

00:07:59.460 And I've done the research, Megan.

00:08:00.860 And I've looked at the vaccination rates, the current case rates, and the overall mortality

00:08:08.780 per capita.

00:08:09.720 And they are all over the map, so to speak.

00:08:12.660 Some are above the US and some are below.

00:08:14.700 So it's not this notion that Europe has, you know, beaten the virus and they've sort of

00:08:20.220 earned the privilege of children not wearing masks in schools.

00:08:23.600 They haven't.

00:08:25.100 The cases, the vaccination rates, and the overall mortality, they're above and below.

00:08:30.540 They're all over the place.

00:08:31.980 The one unifying factor is that they're not having little kids wearing masks.

00:08:36.500 They do have different cutoff ages, depending on which country, but they're all in agreement

00:08:40.740 that at least little kids shouldn't be wearing masks.

00:08:43.380 Here in New York, where I live, the new governor put in a policy where kids all the way down

00:08:49.360 to age two are wearing masks.

00:08:51.440 I had a call yesterday with a bunch of frantic moms who have children in preschool who are

00:08:59.140 saying, who are basically apoplectic, saying, we don't know what to do.

00:09:03.400 You know, please talk to us.

00:09:05.120 We're really worried about our little kids, two-year-olds, three-year-olds wearing masks

00:09:09.240 in school.

00:09:09.780 So these are things that even if we set aside and say, hey, maybe the CDC is right, I think

00:09:16.440 as American people, we are owed an explanation, a very clear and cogent explanation why their

00:09:24.640 guidance differs so dramatically from that of their European counterpart, the CDC in Europe.

00:09:30.620 And frankly, not just on masks in children, but on natural immunity, too, because over

00:09:35.760 in Europe, they're accounting for that in a way we're not here.

00:09:39.540 I think one of the most astonishing developments has been this sort of refusal to acknowledge

00:09:47.960 the value of natural immunity.

00:09:50.100 And once again, sort of echoing a bit of the argument about masks, whether or not, you

00:09:56.100 know, there may be some marginal benefit of masks kind of is a distraction from the broader

00:10:01.000 point.

00:10:01.580 And similarly, whether there are differing studies, and there are, there's mixed evidence

00:10:07.100 about the duration of natural immunity versus the vaccine-induced immunity.

00:10:12.200 But what we know, I mean, this is kind of, you know, infectious disease, virology 101.

00:10:18.320 We know that when someone gets infected, there's a long history in most of disease science where

00:10:25.700 we know that they're going to, that's going to confer some degree of immunity.

00:10:29.760 And there's a fair amount of evidence that the immunity conferred from natural infection

00:10:34.520 is stronger than it is from vaccines.

00:10:36.960 There, of course, are also some studies that show something different.

00:10:40.280 But what I'm saying is we keep getting into the weeds of, well, maybe one's a little bit

00:10:44.540 better or not a little bit better.

00:10:45.840 We don't, we don't know the duration of the vaccine-induced immunity either.

00:10:49.160 I'm very pro-vaccine for adults.

00:10:51.640 It is, you know, that is something that I think makes sense for nearly all adults to

00:10:55.820 do.

00:10:56.140 I'm fully vaccinated, but we need to have a nuanced discussion.

00:11:01.320 Why is it?

00:11:02.120 It's embarrassing that other countries are able to say, we think vaccines are great, vaccinate

00:11:07.880 all the adults, but let's slow down and take a look at this for kids.

00:11:11.540 Let's offer only one dose to children, which some countries are doing.

00:11:15.640 Let's say only kids with underlying conditions should do it, which is what some other countries

00:11:20.700 are suggesting.

00:11:21.860 Why is it that in the US we have this, only this binary messaging and binary policies from

00:11:29.020 our CDC when there's so much more nuance in other countries?

00:11:32.420 I would like an answer for that.

00:11:33.700 Yeah, Gottlieb was suggesting, again, for our audience, former FDA commissioner, was

00:11:37.700 suggesting, well, parents should have some say when it comes to exactly how the child

00:11:41.740 gets vaccinated.

00:11:43.420 What, you know, should it be 10 micrograms or 30 micrograms?

00:11:46.860 I guess, you know, the adults, I think that's a unit microgram.

00:11:49.560 Yes.

00:11:49.840 We get 30.

00:11:51.060 Now, 5 to 11, what they're testing on the 5 to 11 year olds is 10.

00:11:55.060 And maybe, you know, like my 12 year olds then, I mean, he's in the 70s in terms of his

00:12:00.100 weight that that he should not be getting what my 200 pound husband got.

00:12:04.260 That's, you know, that's just Doug's a little under 200.

00:12:06.740 He wouldn't want him as representing that.

00:12:08.240 Anyway, my point is they you're not allowed to account for any of this.

00:12:12.460 And what Scott Gottlieb said was, oh, sure, you know, parents, they should they should

00:12:15.360 have the right to sort of say when and how much and whether it's one dose or two.

00:12:21.120 And what I was saying to him was, but they can't they cannot if you have a child in Los

00:12:25.720 Angeles school district, you're required to get two jabs.

00:12:28.440 And right now of 30 milligrams, not not 10.

00:12:32.220 Oh, OK, we have that actually here.

00:12:33.960 Take a listen.

00:12:35.000 You said you could potentially wait for the lower dose vaccine to be available.

00:12:38.560 No, they can't.

00:12:39.100 They've got to do it.

00:12:40.140 You said if your child has already had covid, one dose may be sufficient.

00:12:44.180 That's not true.

00:12:45.400 So there's different approaches that you can take in consultation with your pediatrician.

00:12:49.360 To try to address whatever concern they have.

00:12:51.520 I love I look, I appreciate you talking.

00:12:54.020 It is, too, because the parents in L.A. do not have that choice.

00:12:56.740 They've got a stick of vaccine in their 70 pound, 12 year old.

00:12:59.960 That's the same as they put in their 200 pound husband.

00:13:02.820 Right.

00:13:03.080 You're talking about one city in one part of the country.

00:13:05.200 By the time that this one is actually incorporated into the vaccine schedule, it's going to be

00:13:09.000 a long way off.

00:13:09.940 You know, California moved quickly here.

00:13:11.760 I wouldn't expect many other parts of the country to mandate vaccination.

00:13:14.960 It's happening right now.

00:13:15.980 I'm telling you right now it's happening in private schools and across the country.

00:13:18.540 It's happening in my own private school right now.

00:13:20.340 And by the way, you mentioned the flu.

00:13:21.980 They don't mandate the flu vaccine.

00:13:23.340 And that did kill more kids last year than covid.

00:13:26.320 Oh, a lot of school districts do mandate the flu vaccine, actually.

00:13:29.720 It's not a nationwide thing and it's not a school district wide thing.

00:13:33.020 And the flu vaccine's been around for a lot longer.

00:13:36.520 So what's your point?

00:13:39.700 You know, you're hearing my point very well, right?

00:13:41.660 There is no flexibility.

00:13:43.140 Right.

00:13:43.340 It's not just Los Angeles.

00:13:44.880 I read, I believe, Cambridge, Massachusetts also is mandating the vaccine.

00:13:49.040 So, you know, the dominoes.

00:13:49.860 So is my school.

00:13:50.480 My school.

00:13:51.080 I mean, it's private school, but my school is mandating it right now.

00:13:53.500 Go ahead.

00:13:54.560 Yeah.

00:13:54.940 So it's incorrect to say it's only Los Angeles.

00:13:57.460 I would say there's there's an overlap here with your your questions about natural immunity,

00:14:04.940 you know, versus vaccine, which is if this is an important question for anyone who's getting

00:14:10.680 vaccinated, but particularly for children, because the vaccine then functions as the second

00:14:16.280 exposure if you've already had covid.

00:14:20.100 And we know from the studies from the CDC itself that it's the second dose, a.k.a.

00:14:27.200 the second exposure where we're seeing a much higher incidence of myocarditis.

00:14:32.080 So this is this doesn't mean that kids shouldn't get vaccinated.

00:14:34.980 Let me be clear with what I'm saying here.

00:14:37.100 However, it does mean we should look at this very closely and get answers.

00:14:41.340 And particularly if a child already was naturally infected with covid, that is a very, very different

00:14:47.100 cost benefit calculation for vaccination, whether it's vaccine at all, whether it's one dose

00:14:52.900 or two doses or the amount in the dose.

00:14:55.660 Again, I keep emphasizing this.

00:14:57.480 There seems to be a total lack of nuance in the guidance and connected to that point.

00:15:03.280 There also are no what the term du jour is.

00:15:05.820 There are no off ramps.

00:15:07.240 Every infectious disease person and epidemiologist I've talked with over the past month, people are

00:15:13.280 pulling their hair out saying, what are the off ramps?

00:15:17.080 When can we actually unwind this thing?

00:15:19.740 And from talking to someone who's an implementation scientist who I was chatting with yesterday

00:15:23.600 and she said, look, the hardest thing to do is once you put something in place is to reel it back.

00:15:30.720 It's really challenging.

00:15:32.100 And we're seeing this play out in real time right now where we have our governmental health

00:15:38.580 agencies refusing to give very specific metrics and guidelines for when these things can be

00:15:45.360 dialed back and how they're basing it on those metrics and guidelines.

00:15:49.820 And it's like when you're waiting for the train, you know, for the subway in New York, they finally

00:15:54.440 added those signs that show the trains coming in five minutes or whatever.

00:15:58.600 People need to know what's going to happen.

00:16:01.280 This notion of like it's going to keep going on and on.

00:16:04.160 We'll figure it out.

00:16:05.360 It's not really scientific and it's not fair to American people to not have a clue about

00:16:10.100 what's happening.

00:16:10.960 Just tell us what the plan is.

00:16:12.700 It's infuriating.

00:16:13.400 I was following your Twitter feed and there was a woman who calls herself an evidence based

00:16:17.460 Boston University assistant professor.

00:16:20.440 And people go to this woman for code information on Twitter.

00:16:23.540 And she was pointing out and this is her claim.

00:16:26.320 There's an expert consensus that we should use masks.

00:16:29.000 Delta's caused record deaths of children, she writes, and young people under 50 more mask

00:16:35.020 policies help.

00:16:35.960 She wrote cities.

00:16:37.280 Oh, she cites.

00:16:38.480 Sorry, reading my own handwriting.

00:16:39.860 She cites a chart on how epidemiologists are predicting how much longer we're going to

00:16:44.940 wear masks.

00:16:45.680 And 55 percent surveyed said we're going to be in masks for one year or more.

00:16:52.700 More than a year.

00:16:54.380 I mean, I'd love to get your response.

00:16:56.320 My own response is no.

00:16:57.980 No, I won't.

00:16:58.780 I won't.

00:16:59.640 And I won't do it to my kids.

00:17:01.500 And I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.

00:17:03.460 And yet we have school districts saying, well, then get out.

00:17:07.600 Right.

00:17:07.800 So because she's just sweepingly citing some sort of science or epidemiologists, you've

00:17:14.820 got actual studies that get ignored.

00:17:17.380 The the the report that she was referring to in this tweet that you're talking about

00:17:22.060 was a was like an informal survey done by The New York Times of a bunch of epidemiologists

00:17:26.800 that just then sort of prognosticating about how long it would last.

00:17:30.420 That that's not science.

00:17:31.740 That's not how this works.

00:17:32.840 The one thing I just can't emphasize enough is be very wary when you hear people like

00:17:40.460 Ashish Jha say there is a consensus.

00:17:44.140 I don't know of any expert who is not for masking children in schools for the benefit.

00:17:49.820 Be very wary when you hear that.

00:17:52.100 All you have to do.

00:17:52.940 It's readily accessible information.

00:17:54.560 Just hop on your computer and look at all the countries throughout Europe.

00:17:58.380 Look at the advice, the recommendations from the World Health Organization and look at

00:18:02.160 it from the ECDC, the European Centers for Disease Control.

00:18:05.800 They have very different guidance than we have here in the United States.

00:18:10.160 It is demonstrably false to say that there is a consensus about the cost benefit of children

00:18:16.120 wearing masks in schools when a continent is just saying something different.

00:18:21.140 Yet our top public health experts keep claiming this over and over.

00:18:25.300 There is this solipsism of the American health community that is baffling to me and a number

00:18:30.780 of the experts who I talk with, but most of them are afraid to speak out.

00:18:33.920 I just got off the phone with one a half hour ago and I said, oh, I'm going on Megyn Kelly.

00:18:38.380 She said, don't mention my name.

00:18:40.040 And she's one of my top sources.

00:18:41.620 She is highly, highly credentialed at one of our top universities in the country and total

00:18:47.380 who is an absolute one of the top people in this field.

00:18:50.820 And she said, don't mention her name.

00:18:52.500 This is really, really important stuff that people are not aware of how much of dissent

00:18:58.340 there is within the medical community, but how afraid so many people are to speak out.

00:19:05.600 On masks in particular or more?

00:19:08.260 On everything.

00:19:09.480 But masks are such a ridiculous third rail here that they are afraid to speak out.

00:19:15.840 There are some who have courageously spoken out about it.

00:19:18.840 But Alyssa Perkins is one of them who I interviewed for one of my articles.

00:19:24.720 She's in Boston.

00:19:26.040 But there are most of them.

00:19:27.920 People just don't want to touch it.

00:19:29.500 And it's either explicit, whether you're in a university hospital, you have the director

00:19:34.700 of your department who says to you, hey, you better not talk about this.

00:19:38.260 Or I think what's more often is that it's implicit.

00:19:40.920 The notion that you are going to go against the CDC, our nation's leading disease health agency,

00:19:48.840 that's a big deal if you're a doctor.

00:19:51.160 And beyond going against the CDC, you have to think about who becomes a doctor.

00:19:56.360 Most of these people, you had to get great grades in high school.

00:19:58.920 Then you got great grades in college.

00:20:00.920 Then you went to medical school.

00:20:02.240 It's a certain type of person that, not 100%, but to a large degree, weeds out, I think,

00:20:08.300 a more independent thinking type of person.

00:20:10.540 Not that doctors aren't super smart people and aren't amazing in a million ways,

00:20:14.880 but it's a very type of mindset.

00:20:17.360 Once the group is moving towards something, it's really challenging to push back against

00:20:22.300 that, I think.

00:20:22.960 It's not, they don't really value this idea of being the minnow swimming against the stream

00:20:27.760 of everyone else.

00:20:29.740 And again, I'm on the phone with people every day at highly prestigious universities and hospitals

00:20:36.020 who really feel strongly about this, but are afraid to speak out because they've already

00:20:40.660 seen what happened.

00:20:41.420 There have been Cody Meisner, who's on the Vaccine Advisory Committee, wrote an article

00:20:46.980 questioning the masking guidance for children, and he was excoriated for it by people at his

00:20:53.440 own hospital and elsewhere.

00:20:54.800 And this is a highly credentialed pediatric infectious disease specialist.

00:20:59.060 There is just zero tolerance, it seems, for any dissent or any discussion.

00:21:05.040 And again, but we can keep pretending that something in Europe isn't happening.

00:21:09.760 It's like this weird sort of non-debate happening in our bubble, our solipsistic bubble in America.

00:21:18.760 It's just, it's baffling.

00:21:20.660 This is, I mean, it's not exactly on point, but it is reminding me of what happened to somebody

00:21:25.300 like Lisa Lippman, Lippman, the, I don't want to get her credentials wrong, but she's a

00:21:31.460 psychiatric, want to get her, anyway, she's a psychologist, I guess, at Brown University,

00:21:37.940 who wrote the study on this sort of trans craze, sweeping young girls, teen girls, and talked

00:21:45.780 about how it's a social contagion.

00:21:47.420 This is crossed over for them into a social contagion.

00:21:50.240 And man, she's gone through it.

00:21:51.400 They made her rewrite the article.

00:21:52.780 She didn't get anything wrong.

00:21:53.980 She just added in some more context.

00:21:56.040 And now I just found out recently that she's been booted.

00:21:58.740 She's gone.

00:21:59.240 I mean, slowly but surely, if you go against the grain, they'll find a way.

00:22:04.240 It may not be today, may not be tomorrow, but they'll get rid of you.

00:22:09.020 Yeah.

00:22:09.620 This is not how medicine should work.

00:22:11.760 We all know that.

00:22:13.060 There, and I want to be clear, I am not saying that Europe is correct.

00:22:18.000 I'm not saying that these other countries are correct, whether it's with their vaccine

00:22:21.440 schedules for children, whether it's with masking.

00:22:23.380 We don't even have to make that claim.

00:22:26.300 But what we do, I think, have to make a claim about, me as a journalist, and you as well,

00:22:31.060 and American citizens, what we do have to demand is an allowance for debate, particularly among

00:22:37.460 highly credentialed people who are at prestigious universities, who have the expertise in this.

00:22:43.140 They shouldn't be shouted down.

00:22:44.640 There shouldn't be calls for their head to be fired because they dare question the guidance.

00:22:50.000 Think about what happened.

00:22:50.900 The CDC recommended six feet distancing in schools.

00:22:55.160 It was only because certain states didn't go along with the CDC's guidance that there

00:23:00.500 was a study done in Massachusetts where they found that, lo and behold, three feet of distance

00:23:06.160 was no worse than six feet of distance.

00:23:08.920 Ultimately, the CDC changed its guidance after that study came out.

00:23:13.260 Had every single state gone lockstep with the CDC's guidance for six feet, who knows if it

00:23:19.560 ever would have been changed.

00:23:20.680 It was only because there was independent thinking of the health experts in certain states and of the

00:23:28.560 state policymakers where they allowed, in Massachusetts in this case, to do three feet

00:23:33.140 of distancing.

00:23:34.920 And it's the same thing with tests to stay, by the way.

00:23:37.440 This is the program where instead of quarantining kids, if there's a positive individual in the

00:23:42.180 school and in the classroom who kids are exposed to, you simply test them.

00:23:46.520 If they're negative, send them back to class.

00:23:49.220 And there's a huge study in the UK that found tests to stay was no worse than quarantining

00:23:56.560 kids.

00:23:56.940 There was no benefit of quarantining them.

00:23:59.400 So just now, recently, I think I saw something that the CDC is starting to look into tests to

00:24:04.300 stay.

00:24:04.740 But even suggesting that was considered crazy a while ago.

00:24:09.100 In fact, I corresponded with some of the health directors in New York State and in my county.

00:24:14.020 And I was basically just dismissed for even suggesting this.

00:24:17.640 So but again, this is being done in many places.

00:24:20.300 It's being done in Massachusetts.

00:24:21.940 It's being done in Europe.

00:24:23.760 And we have studies that show that it is as effective as quarantining.

00:24:29.760 So why wouldn't you do this instead of quarantining a kid?

00:24:32.620 There's there's an interesting chart you can click on from Massachusetts, and it showed

00:24:36.260 thousands and thousands of school days that were saved by doing this program instead of

00:24:41.980 quarantining kids.

00:24:43.000 So these so the three feet distancing, the test to stay, these are just two examples

00:24:47.920 where the CDC is not leading, they're following.

00:24:51.700 And it's only when states are going against the CDC and then showing the effectiveness of

00:24:58.340 what they're doing that then the CDC follows them.

00:25:00.960 That just seems kind of that shouldn't be, you know, the trajectory that shouldn't be the

00:25:05.380 And let's be honest, let's be honest, and not just states, it has to be a blue state

00:25:10.020 for them to pay attention to it.

00:25:11.360 There's no accident that that happened in Massachusetts, and they started listening.

00:25:14.740 If DeSantis had done that in Florida, do you really think that they'd reevaluate?

00:25:18.940 Exactly.

00:25:19.560 Yes, that's a very good point.

00:25:21.280 So I would just urge everyone, and particularly people in the medical community, or at least

00:25:26.560 regular people who are watching people in public health and the medical community to tolerate

00:25:33.220 isn't the right word, but to encourage dissent, encourage debate, have a discussion.

00:25:39.000 If you are confident in your decision, stop just saying, this is a consensus, everyone

00:25:44.240 thinks this.

00:25:45.200 That's not true.

00:25:46.260 We know that in Europe and in a number of countries, they're not doing things the same way we're

00:25:50.660 doing them here.

00:25:51.560 It doesn't mean they're correct, but it does mean there's not a consensus.

00:25:55.180 And it means we should encourage discussion, encourage debate.

00:25:58.980 That's across the board.

00:26:00.120 A couple little examples about the three feet versus six feet.

00:26:03.220 That's significant.

00:26:04.500 That prevented kids from being in school, that six foot guidance.

00:26:08.580 Oh yeah, not every school can take all the children and keep them six feet apart.

00:26:12.400 Exactly.

00:26:13.160 All right, I got to go, but I want to ask you quickly before we wrap it up.

00:26:17.480 We always presume in these discussions that, eh, it's a mask.

00:26:21.880 Eh, it's fine.

00:26:22.900 You know, doctors wear masks all day long.

00:26:24.640 Your kid can wear it.

00:26:25.440 He's fine.

00:26:26.660 You've actually taken a look at it.

00:26:28.920 It's not necessarily fine.

00:26:30.880 In fact, just today, just sort of a sweet moment.

00:26:33.340 My husband was dropping my boys at school.

00:26:35.280 I was taking my daughter.

00:26:36.360 But my 12-year-old, apparently the song Billy Idol, Eyes Without a Face came on.

00:26:40.380 And he said, this could be the theme of COVID.

00:26:43.100 Right?

00:26:44.020 I'm like, oh my God.

00:26:45.400 He's so right.

00:26:46.220 Eyes Without a Face.

00:26:46.920 That's what they're all experiencing.

00:26:48.380 But there are downsides to children having a mask on their face all day.

00:26:54.320 I mean, come on.

00:26:55.220 This is just empirical reality.

00:26:57.360 There's a reason why we're not wearing masks doing this interview right now.

00:27:01.340 Why the press secretary for Biden, when she steps up to the podium, she's not wearing a mask.

00:27:07.380 We human beings need to see each other's faces.

00:27:10.180 Whether or not people think masks are necessary in school is a separate discussion from this

00:27:16.160 farce of pretending that they are benign.

00:27:18.920 There's a great thing that just came out on NPR.

00:27:21.040 I think it was today where they interviewed kids.

00:27:24.420 And lo and behold, kids said, I don't like wearing a mask.

00:27:28.040 It's hard for me to breathe.

00:27:29.480 I mean, this is the notion that this is just this benign intervention and not a big deal

00:27:35.360 is farcical.

00:27:37.100 And I think people will be very embarrassed years from now pretending that that's the case.

00:27:41.900 If this was for a week, not a big deal.

00:27:44.600 A month, we could do it.

00:27:46.120 We are 18 months into this thing and we have no schedule about when it's going to end.

00:27:53.020 And when you are an American and you're, you know, metaphorically looking across the Atlantic

00:27:58.040 and you see little kids who aren't wearing masks in school.

00:28:02.020 And when you're in a place like where I live in New York, in my area and other places where

00:28:07.320 we have an extremely high vaccination rate, higher than it is in some of the countries

00:28:12.040 in Europe where they're not making kids wear masks.

00:28:14.060 You, as a thinking person, you can't help but look somewhere else and say, hmm, I'm comparing

00:28:20.560 A versus B.

00:28:22.180 You can't tell me it's a consensus and you can't pretend that something is benign.

00:28:26.920 If it was benign, we would just do it all the time and it wouldn't matter.

00:28:30.760 This is the most basic part about sort of how human beings socialize with each other.

00:28:36.440 I wear a mask for like an hour and I, on the train going to the city and I found it super

00:28:41.480 annoying.

00:28:41.780 The notion of a kid wearing it for seven hours every day, not being allowed to pull

00:28:46.680 their mask down to even take a sip of water in class.

00:28:49.920 That is a fact that happens.

00:28:52.420 That is, this is not hyperbole.

00:28:54.280 Like we've got to reel this in a little bit and demand some specific metrics about what

00:28:59.280 it's based on and when it's going to end.

00:29:01.620 Yeah.

00:29:01.880 Our kids are lectured too about how you can have a sip of water.

00:29:05.640 You have to go over to the corner to take the sip.

00:29:08.080 You have to pull your mask down and put it right back up, right back up.

00:29:10.460 The second you get the water, it's absurd.

00:29:13.220 Meanwhile, we've got people running around, you know, and soon these kids will be vaccinated

00:29:17.980 and under the exact same requirements.

00:29:21.120 Right.

00:29:21.500 You've been tweeting about our governor in New York running around, you know, celebrating

00:29:25.140 the bills without her mask on inside.

00:29:27.360 Meanwhile, she's got a much better chance of dying from covid than an unvaccinated child

00:29:31.740 does.

00:29:32.060 Even she's vaccinated, but there's no accounting for any of that reality.

00:29:35.640 And the other thing is parents might vaccinate their kids if they knew it could get the masks

00:29:40.540 off of their faces.

00:29:41.540 Right.

00:29:42.060 We might do it if we.

00:29:43.600 But now you've got Rochelle Walensky on the record saying, well, you won't.

00:29:48.040 It will provide no relief.

00:29:50.100 So what does the vaccine do?

00:29:51.360 It prevents most hospitalizations and deaths.

00:29:54.420 Well, children are next to no risk from either of those things.

00:29:58.540 So what's the incentive to get them vaccinated?

00:30:01.400 Take off the masks.

00:30:02.700 That's just been removed.

00:30:04.240 These people from a PR standpoint are complete jokes.

00:30:07.280 But from the medical perspective, they're misinforming us.

00:30:11.620 I I know.

00:30:12.500 Listen, I talk to moms all the time in New York and Connecticut and beyond, David.

00:30:15.580 We are really grateful for you.

00:30:17.520 Not everybody has the time to go read all the studies or the smarts to do the comparisons

00:30:22.220 and figure out what's happening state to state, country to country.

00:30:24.880 We rely on on guys like you who will take the time.

00:30:28.920 So even though New York magazine is not my favorite magazine, you are one of my favorite

00:30:33.160 journalists.

00:30:33.560 And I'm really grateful to them and to you for doing the work.

00:30:36.380 Thank you.

00:30:37.620 Thanks, Megan.

00:30:38.400 Thanks for that.

00:30:38.860 I run for the Atlantic, too.

00:30:40.340 So we can spread out.

00:30:43.140 Well, either way.

00:30:44.340 You're absolutely right about everything you're saying.

00:30:47.320 And I would encourage people to the information is freely available to see what's happening in

00:30:52.460 other places.

00:30:53.080 Yes, I'll do the legwork for getting into the details for everyone, though.

00:30:58.580 Thank you.

00:30:59.080 And we'll have you back.

00:31:00.460 All right.

00:31:00.680 Coming up.

00:31:01.620 What is Havana syndrome?

00:31:04.020 We'll be joined by a former CIA agent, top, top guy, by the way, who says he's experienced

00:31:08.480 severe symptoms from this mysterious disease for years.

00:31:11.880 And then Glenn Greenwald will come on later to challenge the assertions that it exists

00:31:17.060 at all.

00:31:17.480 This can be interesting.

00:31:18.240 We'll learn something.

00:31:18.800 Nature sounds actually have hidden health benefits, like calming your nervous system

00:31:26.880 and improving your cognitive abilities.

00:31:30.020 Discover more ways to see healthy living differently with Manulife at manulife.ca.

00:31:34.340 Switching gears now to Havana syndrome.

00:31:43.340 What is this?

00:31:44.380 Have you heard about this?

00:31:45.800 And what effect is it happening on our diplomats and national security agents around the world?

00:31:51.040 It's been in the news quite a bit lately, including a postponed trip by our vice president

00:31:56.360 who believed there might have been an incident of it overseas.

00:31:59.780 And so she delayed her trip.

00:32:02.340 So joining us now to discuss it is former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos, who has experienced

00:32:08.520 these symptoms, symptoms consistent with this syndrome.

00:32:11.640 And he's with me now.

00:32:12.640 Mark, hi.

00:32:13.160 How are you?

00:32:13.820 Good to be here.

00:32:14.600 Thanks.

00:32:14.940 Thanks for having me.

00:32:15.920 OK, so you were pretty high up in the CIA as far as I read.

00:32:18.880 You were you were not messing around.

00:32:20.300 Could you just give us a little bit on your credentials so people know you're not you're not a wannabe?

00:32:23.940 You're not a glomer.

00:32:25.520 Well, no, no, certainly not that.

00:32:27.120 I served for 26 years at the CIA, retired from the senior intelligence service.

00:32:31.260 My last job, I was head of clandestine operations over Europe and Eurasia.

00:32:35.440 So it was the equivalent.

00:32:36.580 I would say, you know, if you want to look at the military as a four star general.

00:32:40.080 So I was I was relatively senior.

00:32:42.080 I'll be modest here on that.

00:32:44.280 An organization where I, you know, I spent 26 years of my life.

00:32:47.680 It's kind of exciting.

00:32:50.300 I know.

00:32:51.140 I know you're here to talk about this this health thing,

00:32:53.260 but I have to say, like, just looking back in your career, it was it was was it exciting?

00:32:58.300 Was it invigorating?

00:32:59.340 Was it full of danger or was it boring and a lot of paper pushing?

00:33:03.460 Everything you just described.

00:33:04.860 I mean, you know, the secrets of, you know, being an intelligence officer and operations officer is that,

00:33:10.000 you know, there are there are periods of intense boredom and then parents of periods of total terror and excitement.

00:33:15.260 I mean, I spent most of my career in the Middle East.

00:33:17.060 I spent almost three years overseas in our war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:33:20.800 And I'll tell you that, you know, I'm very proud of my service.

00:33:23.620 I mean, I think that, you know, as we as we even as we look at the debate over Afghanistan,

00:33:26.520 I will say that, you know, in those 20 years, you know, the actions of the CIA officers,

00:33:31.220 my colleagues, you know, just like just like me, heroes really, you know, saved the lives of many Americans.

00:33:36.480 And so, you know, whether it was the you know, the streets of Baghdad or Kabul or, you know,

00:33:40.480 I was a base chief in eastern Afghanistan.

00:33:41.940 I spent lots of my time in the Middle East as well.

00:33:44.860 I'm pretty proud of what we did.

00:33:46.220 But again, you know, there's times of boredom.

00:33:47.860 There's times of excitement.

00:33:48.780 People always ask me, what's it?

00:33:49.980 What's a great trait of a CIA officer?

00:33:51.440 I say, you got to be able to type, you got to write cables.

00:33:54.000 And so maybe that's the boring part of it.

00:33:55.580 But I was.

00:33:56.120 Yeah, I was expecting vodka martini.

00:33:59.100 I don't know.

00:33:59.860 Shake it not stirred.

00:34:01.200 Car chases.

00:34:02.300 I will get into that later.

00:34:03.740 OK, so where were you?

00:34:05.760 You were 50 years old when this first started happening to you.

00:34:09.760 And you did ultimately leave the CIA because of this, these symptoms and this medical problem.

00:34:14.600 So where were you stationed and what were you doing when you first had this happen to

00:34:18.860 you?

00:34:19.880 So at the time, this was in December of 2017.

00:34:22.240 I was the deputy operational chief at that point for Europe and Eurasia.

00:34:25.960 And so I made a trip to Moscow.

00:34:27.260 It was a 10 day trip.

00:34:28.780 Something we call, you know, just frankly, to visit our ambassador, John Huntsman, who

00:34:32.580 was a seasoned diplomat or former governor of Utah.

00:34:36.000 He'd been ambassador in Beijing.

00:34:37.040 Now he's ambassador in Moscow.

00:34:38.060 And I was also there for meetings with my Russian counterparts in the security services.

00:34:42.400 And so it was kind of a fateful trip.

00:34:44.180 Certainly something I didn't, you know, expect to happen.

00:34:46.880 Again, I've been shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, many times.

00:34:50.300 But I woke up in the middle of the night at a hotel room, five star hotel room, only blocks

00:34:53.860 from the U.S. Embassy with a stunning case of vertigo, a splitting headache, tinnitus,

00:34:59.100 which is ringing in my ears.

00:35:00.860 It started this, you know, almost a four year medical journey that continues today.

00:35:03.900 I've had a headache for that entire time, even with being treated at some of the country's

00:35:08.640 best hospitals.

00:35:09.860 So something pretty significant happened to me in Moscow that December.

00:35:14.400 So you were I mean, I don't know if you were actually patient zero on this so-called Havana

00:35:19.320 syndrome.

00:35:19.680 But you were, as far as I understand, if not the first one of the very first to say this

00:35:25.240 is happening to me, which will become relevant, I think, later, because in other words, it

00:35:30.540 wasn't a suggested thing.

00:35:32.220 It wasn't in your head that there is a Savannah, I mean, a Havana syndrome and that you might

00:35:36.760 be a victim of it when this first started happening.

00:35:39.140 Is that correct?

00:35:40.640 Well, yes.

00:35:40.940 So the first case is certainly well, there's been a long first of all, the U.S. Embassy

00:35:44.660 in Moscow has been kind of bathed by the Russians and got a microwave, you know, collection

00:35:50.760 efforts for a long time.

00:35:51.960 So the Russians have done this to us, the Soviets did, you know, even in the dark days

00:35:56.620 of the Cold War.

00:35:57.440 But this is a little different.

00:35:58.480 Now, what happened in Havana in 2016, before my trip, was that there were numerous U.S.

00:36:02.920 officials, including intelligence officers, who were hit by something that was certainly

00:36:08.040 suspect.

00:36:08.560 But when I went to Moscow, I wasn't thinking of anything like this.

00:36:11.060 In fact, my trip was a routine trip.

00:36:13.300 And so when this happened to me, I didn't say, oh, my God, you know, this is what had,

00:36:18.120 you know, I had a preconceived notion that this was possible.

00:36:22.860 This was a, frankly, a boring, what we call a liaison trip.

00:36:25.560 I was there to meet Russian officials and meet our ambassador.

00:36:28.300 It wasn't operational.

00:36:29.680 So there was really no, you know, you know, no kind of suspicion in the back of my mind

00:36:33.940 before I went that anything untoward would happen.

00:36:36.200 I got it.

00:36:37.020 OK, so so I got it.

00:36:38.420 Yours, it was in Moscow.

00:36:39.640 But Havana had happened before you, Cuba.

00:36:42.540 Now, when you say that they're bathed in sort of like what you're saying is that the Russian

00:36:48.560 spy on your phone.

00:36:49.360 I mean, I went to Russia a couple of times to interview Putin and I know we didn't even

00:36:52.940 bring phones.

00:36:53.600 We had to leave our iPhones back stateside.

00:36:55.980 We just brought burner phones because we knew very well that they would see everything

00:37:00.500 on our phones.

00:37:01.300 And, you know, I was like preparing my questions for Putin sitting in a bathtub in the hotel

00:37:06.160 room so that they couldn't spy me through the, you know, a camera in the ceiling.

00:37:10.980 They couldn't.

00:37:11.400 My questions weren't on a phone.

00:37:13.980 I did find guys going through my room when I came home a couple of times.

00:37:17.340 I mean, it was just you knew it was going to happen.

00:37:19.000 You prepare for it.

00:37:19.660 So is that what you're talking about?

00:37:21.640 Yeah, so that that's what happened during the Cold War.

00:37:23.560 And then even, you know, after when when, you know, so you turn into Russia, certainly.

00:37:28.300 So what's called signals intelligence collection.

00:37:30.380 So the Russians were always trying to find out, you know, whether it was at the in the

00:37:33.700 embassy itself or at our residences or hotels with, you know, journalists visiting.

00:37:38.880 They want to find out, you know, who you're talking to.

00:37:40.720 What are you saying?

00:37:41.520 So there's collection systems.

00:37:43.400 And I think that, you know, that's the that's the question.

00:37:45.520 Is it because I read you say something like maybe they dialed it up too much.

00:37:48.920 You know, maybe it was like you stand in front of the microwave for like two hours with

00:37:53.000 it on high.

00:37:53.700 Like so maybe things just got a little dialed up and that's what's causing my neurological symptoms.

00:37:58.400 Well, sure.

00:37:59.720 And, you know, look, I have to be, you know, I am biased on this because I have been injured

00:38:04.460 and I know my colleagues have been as well.

00:38:06.380 But in terms of what this is, whether it's an actual weapon or, as you said, making a

00:38:10.220 collection system turned up, I'm you know, I'm certainly, you know, not one to kind of

00:38:15.220 make statements one way or the other.

00:38:17.100 But something certainly happened to us.

00:38:19.300 And and so I think that's the thing.

00:38:21.100 You know, as I've gone to Walter Reed's National Intrepid Center of Excellence, that's

00:38:24.300 the one of the nation's leading traumatic brain injury centers where I was diagnosed

00:38:27.700 with TBI or you talk to a neurologist from the National Institute of Health or for Johns

00:38:31.820 Hopkins.

00:38:32.140 I mean, there is pretty much consensus that something there was an exposure event that

00:38:36.120 people are suffering from.

00:38:37.620 You know what that the actual motivation of this, I think, is still up for for investigation.

00:38:42.680 And look, I think the intelligence community will come to a conclusion.

00:38:45.740 There's there's a lot of people working on this because we have to.

00:38:47.900 There's too many people are being injured.

00:38:49.760 When it when it first happened to you in Moscow, did it because I've heard people like in Cuba

00:38:53.640 say they heard like very loud crickets.

00:38:55.980 That's what it sounded like, this high pitch sort of mass sound.

00:38:59.640 Did you hear that?

00:39:01.500 No, not at all.

00:39:02.180 And in fact, you know, as I go to Walter Reed and I go, you know, and I talk to a lot of

00:39:06.200 the victims, I think that's I think that's something that happened in Cuba.

00:39:09.260 But, you know, the recent cohort, if you call it from, you know, 2017, 2019, even until

00:39:14.400 today, you know, no one has really said there was that there was any kind of sound for me.

00:39:19.380 There was not.

00:39:20.140 It was just waking up to a start.

00:39:21.880 Something happened.

00:39:22.580 And then and then this extreme vertigo and headaches.

00:39:25.460 And so for me, no, there was there was no sound.

00:39:27.720 There was no audio.

00:39:28.940 And so, look, I'm just going to, you know, as I told people, I'll explain very clearly

00:39:32.920 what happened.

00:39:33.520 And that that's what it was.

00:39:34.500 There was no sound.

00:39:35.540 What did you think was happening to you when it first?

00:39:38.080 You know, and if I had that, I would think I had some sort of a bug, I guess.

00:39:41.780 So, absolutely.

00:39:43.600 So, look, I, you know, I spent my year, you know, years of my life in foreign countries

00:39:46.840 and particularly in the third world.

00:39:48.400 Now, you know, Moscow is a developed city.

00:39:50.640 But my first, you know, as the room was spinning and I had this vertigo, my first thought was

00:39:54.800 food poisoning.

00:39:55.380 Absolutely.

00:39:56.540 Because something was really wrong.

00:39:57.820 It was it was scary.

00:39:58.680 I was I was I was definitely scared because that's not a usual sensation, especially with

00:40:02.960 the headache and the ringing in my ears.

00:40:05.100 But then I realized, you know, as as the symptoms did not subside.

00:40:08.700 And even when I got back to the States, you know, several days later and then months into

00:40:12.540 this, when I, you know, I lost my long distance vision, I had incredible brain fog and headaches

00:40:17.860 were continuing.

00:40:18.560 I knew something really serious had happened.

00:40:20.100 It wasn't just, you know, a bout of food poisoning, which would have gone away in 24

00:40:24.520 hours.

00:40:24.900 But it certainly did not.

00:40:26.820 Why would there be if this was orchestrated, you know, by someone, if it were the Russians

00:40:30.920 or somebody else, why would the victims be popping up all over the globe?

00:40:34.800 Right.

00:40:34.980 There's so many countries in which people have claimed to have been targeted and have

00:40:38.700 this now.

00:40:39.940 So, look, I can only tell you, you know, there's there's a lot of media reports on this and

00:40:43.920 certainly a lot of media interest in this, you know, but I think it's most useful for

00:40:46.980 me to tell you, you know, my my kind of recollections based on victims who I've spoken

00:40:53.100 with and a large majority of them have worked on Russia in some fashion.

00:40:57.460 Certainly that was the case with me.

00:40:58.660 That's the case, even when, you know, when we look at the victims around the globe, there

00:41:02.320 is in many of these a connection to having worked the Russian, you know, subject target

00:41:08.480 over the years.

00:41:09.660 So I think that's that's that's suspect suspect for sure.

00:41:13.280 But right.

00:41:13.900 You know, at the end of the day, there's there you know, there's there's at some point we'll

00:41:17.460 find out, you know, what adversary is doing this.

00:41:20.040 But you're right.

00:41:20.400 The motivation is is certainly certainly curious because this is, you know, it's it's something

00:41:25.100 where it's taking our our diplomats and intelligence officers kind of off the playing field.

00:41:29.660 You know, people are certainly being injured, but, you know, it's not killing them, but it's

00:41:33.300 injuring them.

00:41:33.900 And so, you know, and certainly it's something that's caused, you know, a pretty dark shadow

00:41:38.880 over over our overseas officials who really, you know, you know, are working for the United

00:41:43.640 States government, the United States for the American people in defending our country.

00:41:47.900 So we have to get to the bottom of it.

00:41:49.180 The government's saying there's some 200 victims of this alleged syndrome, and now they are

00:41:55.880 putting together that they I think they just passed a bill that will provide medical coverage

00:42:02.280 for people like you who are suffering from it.

00:42:05.620 But still, there are many people like I know you you're not Glenn's fan, but Glenn Greenwald

00:42:10.800 is going to come on.

00:42:11.420 He's a doubter, but he's not alone.

00:42:13.340 Some people say this is like psychosomatic.

00:42:16.000 It's, you know, people may genuinely think they have this, but it could be old age.

00:42:20.440 It could be.

00:42:21.040 OK, so that's what we're going to pick it up right after this break and squeeze in a

00:42:23.960 commercial, and then we'll talk more about why you think people need to know it's real.

00:42:29.060 It's not psychosomatic.

00:42:30.960 And, you know, your response to the doubters.

00:42:32.860 So stand by for that.

00:42:38.220 Now, some of the theories are that it could have been caused by a covert sonic weapon that

00:42:43.960 operated outside of the normal range of human hearing.

00:42:47.080 Then a leading theory after that became it's some sort of energy device to collect data

00:42:53.060 like we were talking about from your smartphone or your laptop.

00:42:56.980 But the concern is that it's something that the Russians or somebody else have found that

00:43:01.760 we don't know about yet.

00:43:03.240 And we don't have that's being used against our guys to sort of hobble them and get them

00:43:10.080 out of the agency like with what happened with you and that we were still operating in

00:43:16.260 the dark.

00:43:16.960 So I know you don't know.

00:43:18.400 But what what do you think if you had to put money on what it is?

00:43:21.620 So, I mean, look, all I know is that I've gone to, you know, the, you know, Walter Reed.

00:43:28.920 I've gone to National Institute of Health.

00:43:30.880 My colleagues who have gone to Johns Hopkins and University of Miami and University of

00:43:34.740 Pennsylvania.

00:43:35.060 These are the leading neurologists on the planet in terms of traumatic brain injury and every

00:43:39.420 one of them.

00:43:40.700 And again, this is based on the victims.

00:43:42.620 The doctors are saying that it's it's an exposure event has caused some type of traumatic

00:43:47.360 brain injury.

00:43:48.320 So what do they see when they look at your brain?

00:43:50.300 And what do they see?

00:43:51.680 So it depends.

00:43:52.680 So some of the MRIs show nothing.

00:43:54.860 Some they do this kind of advanced brain mapping, show something as show something which is which

00:44:01.220 is significant.

00:44:02.040 And then, of course, you have the symptoms, which, you know, you know, some people have

00:44:05.560 lost hearing.

00:44:06.180 Some people have lost eyesight.

00:44:07.800 There's vestibular issues.

00:44:09.520 Most of it is consistent with, you know, what what traumatic brain injury, mild traumatic brain

00:44:14.460 injury consists of.

00:44:17.000 And so ultimately, again, for me, something happens.

00:44:19.520 So I'm kind of past the idea that that everyone is kind of psychosomatic.

00:44:22.500 But what is it?

00:44:23.520 Look, you know, and again, this is someone I served 26 years at CIA.

00:44:26.680 So I think that at the very least, it's a it's a signals and intelligence collection

00:44:31.280 collection system that's turned up.

00:44:32.800 And then the worst, it's that they turn this into an offensive weapon.

00:44:35.660 And but look, I remain open to whatever the investigation kind of leads us to.

00:44:41.260 And so we will find out.

00:44:42.720 The intelligence community is looking very hard at this.

00:44:45.080 They are.

00:44:45.800 But I'm past the point of whether, you know, we're all kind of making it up for psychosomatic.

00:44:50.280 I mean, when doctors say.

00:44:51.380 Well, back during the Trump administration, they called it an attack.

00:44:53.680 I mean, they came right out.

00:44:54.500 The Trump administration said that our guys have been attacked.

00:44:57.020 And now since then, they've changed that and their language has become softer like an

00:45:02.180 incident.

00:45:02.500 I think that's unfortunate.

00:45:03.640 And, you know, and I think they're trying to be careful, but I don't agree with that.

00:45:06.500 I mean, you know, you know, Chris Miller, who is the acting secretary of defense in the

00:45:10.220 last two months, the Trump administration has been very clear on this.

00:45:12.780 He firmly believes this occurred.

00:45:14.840 And so, you know, so ultimately, you know, we're going to get to the bottom of it.

00:45:19.300 But but, you know, for me, I've turned into an advocate for the health care of our officers.

00:45:23.480 And so so let me ask you the question about I don't know if you would call it psychosomatic

00:45:29.840 that doctors I listen to and I listen to a very good podcast on this called unexplainable

00:45:34.120 by Vox, and they said there's something called a functional disorder that could explain

00:45:39.340 this.

00:45:40.460 They said the way a functional disorder might work is let's say you experienced vertigo

00:45:44.920 like from a virus.

00:45:46.300 It might cause so much anxiety and other trauma that the experience of that, that a chronic

00:45:53.180 brain problem would then emerge and that your brain could get locked in sort of a bad pattern

00:45:59.240 of brain fog, fatigue, headaches and so on, and that you then sort of need to retrain your

00:46:04.360 brain to take the right path.

00:46:06.280 Do you buy that?

00:46:07.600 So it's not exactly psychosomatic like, you know, you're a trauma is making your brain make

00:46:12.060 this stuff up.

00:46:12.820 It's like something did happen, but then you're sort of locked in a bad pattern.

00:46:17.060 Well, you know, I don't know, uh, you know, and, and, but you know what, if, if that's

00:46:20.500 the kind of healthcare that I need, you know, I'm up for doing anything because I still have

00:46:23.880 a darn headache, you know, after four years.

00:46:25.900 And so I've had a headache for four years and it's, you know, and, and as, as I see the

00:46:32.480 victims and I think about what I've gone through, I mean, you know, there's two parts of it.

00:46:35.940 There's the physical injuries where I still have this splitting headache every day, but it's

00:46:39.180 also a moral injury in that I had to really fight for healthcare.

00:46:41.920 So I guess my point, Megan, on this is, is, you know, at the very least, everybody needs

00:46:46.360 to be treated, uh, you know, regardless of what we think this is or not.

00:46:49.740 And by the way, you know, having a debate on this is fine, um, on, on what caused it,

00:46:53.600 but at the very least we have to get our U S U S officials who come back and report this,

00:46:58.020 we have to get them healthcare.

00:46:59.180 Well, that's true because let's say, let's go with psychosomatic.

00:47:02.480 It's very, uh, stressful.

00:47:04.160 You're it's full of anxiety provoking events.

00:47:06.980 I'm sure being a senior CA officer.

00:47:08.700 Well, that's that happened on the job.

00:47:10.900 We should be taking care of that.

00:47:12.180 We shouldn't be letting you twist in the wind with all these syndrome, these symptoms.

00:47:16.080 And so, you know, I don't believe it was psychosomatic.

00:47:18.380 I mean, again, it's, you know, that that's, that's my opinion on this, but, but healthcare

00:47:21.940 is absolutely critical.

00:47:22.900 And so, you know, going to a place like a traumatic brain injury center, whether it's at Walter

00:47:27.240 Reed or Hopkins or any deleting centers, you know, around the planet now, now they're

00:47:30.980 telling us it was an exposure event.

00:47:32.260 I'm going with what the doctors say, but at the end of the day, I just need healthcare.

00:47:35.640 I need to be able to find ways to feel better.

00:47:38.720 And that's where I I'm comfortable in an advocacy.

00:47:41.460 Listen, Mark, thank you.

00:47:43.120 Thank you for your service to our country, uh, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

00:47:46.460 And I hope you feel better.

00:47:48.080 Genuinely so much.

00:47:49.320 Thanks Megan for having me on all the best coming up.

00:47:51.940 Glenn Greenwall with a very different take on Havana syndrome and much, much more to go over

00:47:55.840 with him.

00:47:56.180 He joins me right after this quick break.

00:48:04.720 Joining me now, Glenn Greenwald.

00:48:07.120 He's a journalist and sub stack editor who has serious doubts about Havana syndrome.

00:48:11.640 He has cited that the reporting of Havana syndrome is oddly similar to Russiagate.

00:48:16.360 Um, and the Steele dossier works of fiction pushed to pin Russia as enemy number one.

00:48:22.700 So is this mass hysteria?

00:48:25.020 Hey Glenn.

00:48:25.380 So, you know, our previous guest has got actual symptoms documented by MRIs and doctors at

00:48:31.360 Hopkins and Walter Reed and elsewhere.

00:48:33.680 And, uh, he's not too, you know, insistent that we call it one thing or another or determine

00:48:40.160 its cause.

00:48:40.660 But he says that Moscow moment was a, was a before and after moment in his life.

00:48:45.220 And he hasn't gotten rid of his headache since.

00:48:47.460 Right.

00:48:47.560 So I do think we have to be careful that when we're questioning parts of the government and

00:48:53.240 media narrative or even demonstrating what is unquestionably true, which is that some of

00:48:58.220 the claims that were disseminated publicly have proven to be false, that we're not suggesting

00:49:03.960 that the actual diplomats and other personnel who are claiming to experience symptoms are

00:49:09.960 faking it, or even that they're the victims of some kind of mass hysteria.

00:49:15.060 It's very possible two things.

00:49:16.960 Number one, that they actually have neurological injuries, which many of them clearly do.

00:49:22.200 I mean, there's, they show up on MRIs and, and other examinations that neurologists and

00:49:28.280 other medical specialists administer, but that the storyline about how those injuries occurred

00:49:36.040 can nonetheless be false.

00:49:37.940 And I think that the distinction that you alluded to at the end of that, that discussion, I heard

00:49:44.260 the last part is a really important one, which is sometimes an actual physical injury that

00:49:50.700 people experience can have as its origin, something psychological.

00:49:55.340 So one of the most, I think vivid examples is people can have panic attacks.

00:50:00.360 They think they're having a heart attack.

00:50:02.220 They feel the symptoms of a heart attack.

00:50:03.960 They go to the emergency room and it turns out they just had a misguided panic response.

00:50:10.020 It doesn't mean they're faking their symptoms.

00:50:11.840 In fact, they have really acute symptoms that can be really dangerous.

00:50:15.600 They have very high blood pressure.

00:50:17.340 They can fall into a heart attack or a stroke because of that pressure.

00:50:21.400 So the symptoms are real, but the question or the origin of it is, is psychogenic.

00:50:26.400 It's if you call it psychosomatic, which has a negative connotation.

00:50:29.600 What bothers me here journalistically, I'm obviously not a medical expert.

00:50:32.820 I haven't examined these patients is that number one, the claim was asserted from the very

00:50:39.000 beginning on NBC and other places that intelligence officials know or both strongly believe that

00:50:46.340 the culprit was Russia at the time when everything was getting blamed on Russia, even though there's

00:50:52.360 no evidence for it.

00:50:53.300 And what always was so fantastical to me about this is that the idea that Russia could develop

00:51:00.060 this extraordinarily sophisticated weapon that resides outside of the scope of Western

00:51:06.660 scientific knowledge that not only they're able to weaponize without us having any idea

00:51:12.300 how it functions, but it's incredibly portable.

00:51:14.760 They can just take this new weapon around to Havana, to Austria, to South America, to Asia,

00:51:21.320 to all different places where these symptoms have been reported seems very extraordinary

00:51:29.020 to me.

00:51:30.260 And then the one thing that we know was debunked was personnel in Havana recorded what they were

00:51:36.940 hearing that caused them in the first place to believe there was a sonic weapon.

00:51:40.580 And when scientists analyze those recordings, they determine that although it seems exotic,

00:51:46.100 it's actually identical to the mating sound of crickets who are native to the Caribbean.

00:51:52.460 So the media has got so far ahead of itself.

00:51:55.660 Let me get that on because we got to hear the mating sounds of crickets.

00:51:58.480 This is soundbite number three, the sounds of Havana syndrome or crickets.

00:52:03.000 Take a listen.

00:52:10.580 Well, there you go.

00:52:15.160 Now I've now I just endangered millions of people, but that is the actual recording of

00:52:20.360 what was heard in Havana.

00:52:21.920 And yes, so that's the dispute.

00:52:23.620 Is that is that actually crickets?

00:52:25.740 Because there was at least one report that said, surprise, that actually is crickets.

00:52:30.840 Well, they mean they they have, you know, scientists who specialize in these species and

00:52:36.480 they in a very advanced way analyze with sonic instruments, very delicate sonic sonic instruments

00:52:42.740 and determine that that is the sound that the female cricket emits during mating season

00:52:48.400 to attract males in order to mate.

00:52:51.160 I mean, there's it's not like it's similar.

00:52:52.500 It's identical.

00:52:53.660 There's no question.

00:52:54.440 It just as an aside, they have it so much easier than than female humans.

00:52:57.860 It's like the makeup and the hair and the Spanx and the dress and the, you know, a cocktail

00:53:03.040 or two.

00:53:03.680 Good Lord.

00:53:04.380 All they have to do, ladies, a little screeching and they come to come running.

00:53:09.820 Although the truth is most men would come running if, you know, you did if you basically

00:53:13.740 did one key thing as a human, too.

00:53:16.680 Yeah, a little screeching would probably work for for human men as well.

00:53:19.540 But no, I mean, so that that's what, you know, I found so dubious about this from the

00:53:24.700 start. And and now you do have the State Department and the FBI that are increasingly adamant about

00:53:33.360 the fact that they simply don't believe they're not saying they haven't found evidence.

00:53:37.060 They're saying we disbelieve that these symptoms are the byproduct of some sort of sophisticated

00:53:43.820 weapon. Now you can say, well, maybe the FBI came out and said initially they said it's

00:53:48.460 mass hysteria.

00:53:49.260 They initially said this is the result of mass psychogenic illness, which is essentially

00:53:55.920 mass hysteria, like laugh contagion.

00:53:58.820 So if I start laughing hysterically, then you can't help but laugh a little and so on

00:54:03.540 and so forth. But I think they've they've softened on it a bit since then.

00:54:07.920 They have, although, you know, even Gina Haspel, who was President Trump's CIA director and a

00:54:14.380 longtime high level official in the CIA from going back to the war on terror and who is

00:54:19.500 not at all known for being dovish.

00:54:22.540 She was a very kind of aggressive hawk during the war on terror and advocate of the harsh

00:54:26.280 interrogation programs that most people like me call torture, was very skeptical of the

00:54:32.320 view that the Russian unit inside the CIA had real evidence dependent on Russia.

00:54:37.880 She actually accused them of trying to gin up hostility toward Russia as part of this overall

00:54:42.480 campaign that had been going on by concocting a narrative for which there was no evidentiary

00:54:47.000 basis. So I don't pretend that we know the answer.

00:54:51.280 But what I know for sure is that the level of certainty presented and a lot of clips we

00:54:57.400 could listen to where Russia was to blame, as they said, why we're completely baseless.

00:55:04.780 And when you add on to that, Megan, not just the kind of like, like, like low likelihood

00:55:10.340 that they would be able to do this, but also the fact that we have surveillance tentacles

00:55:14.200 in every aspect and every agency within these governments that they would be able to develop

00:55:18.800 a weapon like this and move it around the world and use it against us without any clue

00:55:23.060 on the part of the U.S.

00:55:24.000 government that they were doing it seems very, very unconvincing to me.

00:55:27.980 Mm hmm. The I mentioned earlier this podcast called Unexplainable by Vox, which took a hard

00:55:34.240 look at this and it was good. And one of the things they pointed out was that they had

00:55:38.220 a neurologist. His name is John Stone. He's at Edinburgh. And he was saying he's a neurology

00:55:45.200 professor and he was saying, I've got tons of patients who are non CIA who have this.

00:55:49.320 You know, like this is a thing. This is, again, this functional disorder. And he said, when

00:55:54.760 I listen to these descriptions, I think, oh, yeah, if you walked into my office,

00:55:57.860 as Glenn or Megan or anybody, I'd say, yes, I know what you have. It's called a functional

00:56:01.940 disorder. And it happens to non CIA just as often. So, you know, he he cast some water

00:56:09.000 on it, even though he hasn't examined any of the patients here. Here is John Stone speaking

00:56:13.780 on that podcast.

00:56:15.160 I think it is possible a lot of anxiety may be caused about the possibility of having a brain

00:56:20.540 injury from a sonic attack. And that that concern is heightening people's vigilance for events

00:56:26.760 that might be consistent with a sonic attack and then symptoms that might be consistent

00:56:31.060 with a sonic attack.

00:56:32.280 Right. So now it's like people have been primed to think it could happen to them and whether

00:56:37.480 they know that or not, it's in there. And so when something happens, you may not even

00:56:42.500 be conscious of the fact that your brain is like, ah, this is it.

00:56:46.620 Yeah. I mean, first of all, exactly. The human brain is a very powerful instrument. It can actually

00:56:51.720 create real symptoms in the body, in the brain, in the body or the mind in the body, however

00:56:57.440 you conceive of it are extremely interlinked. And oftentimes what happens mentally in our

00:57:05.020 lives affects us physically, not in imaginary ways, but in very real ways, exactly like you

00:57:10.440 just explained.

00:57:11.320 The other point I think is so worth keeping in mind always is we always like to think that

00:57:17.400 our science and our medicine is very advanced. And obviously relative to what it was 200 years

00:57:22.860 ago, it is, but relative to what it will be 200 years from now, it's extremely primitive.

00:57:27.620 There's all kinds of phenomenon that takes place medically and in the world that we can't

00:57:33.320 explain within the limits of our scientific knowledge. And as you have the world changing

00:57:38.280 so radically with new technologies, new movement, new things happening in the climate, in the weather,

00:57:43.400 in all kinds of cultural and social dynamics, I think it makes sense that there are going

00:57:50.560 to be neurological symptoms that we can't yet fully explain in terms of the origin of and

00:57:55.880 to simply leap to this like bizarre science fiction story that the Russians had invented this

00:58:03.420 like dastardly 23rd century weapon is something that appeals to like the science fiction side of

00:58:09.440 us and more disturbingly for me fit very well into the geostrategic narrative that was very popular

00:58:16.420 among the CIA and their media allies during the Trump era. But we should demand a lot of evidence

00:58:22.900 for that.

00:58:23.780 So let me ask you about that. I mean, you know, having studied up on the Russians the fair amount

00:58:27.260 before going over there, I can say they're really, really good at hacking and they're really,

00:58:30.720 really good at making nuclear weapons. But I didn't see anything about them really,

00:58:34.280 really good at making things like this, which is more of the science field and sort of 22nd century

00:58:40.240 stuff. Who knows? But the the media and the reason that you are sort of skeptical, because it really

00:58:48.580 did. This started coming out during the Trump administration. First, there was 2016. That wasn't

00:58:52.300 Trump 2017. And during his administration, we heard more and more about it. And this is just a sampling

00:58:58.120 of this particular reporter is Candelanian on MSNBC talking about the syndrome. Listen to how it's

00:59:04.740 been described by the media.

00:59:07.040 Intelligence agencies investigating attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba and China now strongly suspect

00:59:13.360 that Russia is to blame. Why do they suspect Russia now? And what's the evidence that they have?

00:59:19.460 Well, it's still partially a mystery, Chris, but they have more and more evidence, they say,

00:59:23.500 three U.S. officials tell us pointing to Russia, including communications intercepts,

00:59:28.000 that suggest that the Russian intelligence agency was involved. Now, really, there was only three

00:59:32.460 suspects from the beginning here, Russia, China and the Cubans. One of the technologies used to

00:59:37.320 injure these American spies and diplomats was some kind of microwave weapon that is so sophisticated,

00:59:42.640 the Americans don't even fully understand it. And they've been testing some kinds of aspects of

00:59:46.980 this technology. Your thoughts on him and that? Well, it's, you know, first of all, people ask me,

00:59:51.980 you know, what is the ideology of the American media? Obviously, at least now,

00:59:55.620 I may have had a different answer 20 years ago. They're very supportive of the Democratic Party,

01:00:00.740 largely because of their extreme animosity toward Trump. But the overarching loyalty they actually

01:00:05.760 have is to the security state. That's where most of their leaks come from, from the CIA,

01:00:10.960 the NSA, the FBI. That's where Russiagate came from. And that relationship, which had always been

01:00:16.140 close, became closer even more. The poster boy for that corrupt relationship is Candelanian.

01:00:22.860 In 2015, when I was at The Intercept, we FOIA'd to the CIA any communications that they had with

01:00:30.220 journalists. And they couldn't withhold it because it was with people outside the government. And they

01:00:34.160 produced a bunch of emails with journalists. And what Candelanian would do, he was at the LA Times

01:00:38.360 at that time when he was covering the CIA, is he would actually submit to them the drafts of the

01:00:43.220 articles he was going to write about the CIA before he would publish it, basically to get their

01:00:48.040 approval. His whole career is based on being a puppet for what the CIA tells him to say. So you

01:00:54.180 see in that clip, he's saying stuff that we now know isn't true. I mean, obviously, Megan, if the

01:01:01.340 U.S. government, as he claimed, had intelligence intercepts where the Russians were admitting

01:01:06.420 that they had developed a secret weapon, why would Gina Haspel and the entire top level of the U.S.

01:01:12.840 government, both under Trump and now under Biden, be acknowledging that they have no idea where this

01:01:17.980 this came from? Obviously, those intercepts didn't exist. The CIA told them they did.

01:01:22.320 And unskeptically, he went and disseminated it all over the country.

01:01:25.680 Why would the CIA want Candelanian to believe that the Russians that they had interception from the

01:01:32.720 Russians saying that they did it? Because so much the CIA obviously was had a very antagonistic

01:01:39.640 relationship with Donald Trump. The clip that I always point to is before Trump was even

01:01:44.980 inaugurated, he had gone on Twitter and mocked the CIA for getting WMDs wrong. And Chuck Schumer

01:01:50.480 went on Rachel Maddow and warned Trump. It was something that you don't usually say out loud,

01:01:55.300 but Chuck Schumer said it, that everyone in Washington knows that it's stupid to take on

01:02:00.140 the CIA, because if you take on the CIA, they have six different ways from Sunday to get back at you.

01:02:05.920 And for me, that was a major part of the Trump presidency was this antagonism between these

01:02:11.500 unelected but very powerful bureaucrats in the security state on the one hand and Trump on the

01:02:15.380 other. And a major storyline they used to undermine and sabotage his presidency was that he was in the

01:02:21.880 pocket of Vladimir Putin. And so many of the fake stories, the Russians had put bounties on the heads

01:02:27.540 of American soldiers and Trump did nothing about it. The Russians were attacking us in all sorts of

01:02:32.640 ways. And Trump was either overlooking it or sanctioning it. This was a similar story that Trump

01:02:38.360 was doing nothing as the Russians were injuring the brains of American service members and personnel

01:02:43.720 using this microwave oven. It was the kind of storyline that they used to attack him

01:02:48.400 all the time. And that was the goal of it. Aside from the fact that the CIA likes to have

01:02:54.940 and needs to have foreign enemies that the American population is afraid of, because that's where the

01:03:00.860 CIA budget and justification for greater powers always comes from is, look, there are these really

01:03:06.840 villainous foreign countries like Russia that you've been trained for decades to hate that we need to

01:03:12.180 protect you from. And that's why we need a hundred billion dollar a year budget and all of these

01:03:15.940 surveillance authorities. But that was the secondary goal. The primary one was that was their primary

01:03:20.460 tool for delegitimizing Trump. They're still out there doing it. I mean, I'm sure you saw Christopher

01:03:27.160 Steele sitting down with George Stephanopoulos last week and standing by his dossier, basically still

01:03:35.160 trying to make us believe that it's based in truth. And even, you know, the so-called P-tape,

01:03:40.940 he was standing by it saying, I believe it does exist. And ABC is putting this on and we're still

01:03:47.840 being led down the garden path of the dossier is real. Now, ABC did offer a skeptical report. It

01:03:54.900 wasn't entirely enamored with Christopher Steele. But I looked at it saying, what's he doing on my

01:03:58.980 television? He's already been discredited. This report's already been discredited. Why are we

01:04:03.160 asking him about it?

01:04:04.080 I mean, Christopher Steele is responsible for one of the most destructive and sustained media

01:04:10.420 frauds and conspiracy theories in decades. And it's fine if they're going to ask him adversarial

01:04:16.200 questions. And I know that the interview wasn't entirely friendly, but he doesn't even deserve

01:04:22.300 that platform. I mean, remember, these media corporations are claiming that the greatest threat

01:04:29.220 that the United States faces is disinformation and that it's such a grave threat that we need to

01:04:34.820 censor the internet. We need to control what people aren't allowed to say and who is and isn't allowed

01:04:41.500 to use the internet because disinformation is such a grave problem. And the people who ought to be

01:04:46.060 deciding what is true and false are these media corporations. They're our fact checkers. They're our

01:04:51.360 guardians of truth against falsity. And yet Christopher Steele is the person who shaped

01:04:57.260 the false narrative that they use for four years. It wasn't just things like the tape. It was the

01:05:02.860 whole wild conspiracy. Remember when, when Trump went to Helsinki based on like his body language,

01:05:09.160 they decided this was like proof that he was some kind of subservient vessel of Vladimir Putin.

01:05:16.280 And they called it the treason summit that they were off their rockers for four years with this Russia

01:05:21.900 stuff. And Christopher Steele, the person that they're still treating as like a reasonably

01:05:27.060 respectable, respectable source, was the first one to really inject it into our political bloodstream

01:05:35.300 using Mother Jones and Mike Isikoff and Slate. And there's one false story after the next that came out

01:05:41.940 of that. Yeah. It's like having Michael Avenatti as your interviewee and not asking him about the

01:05:48.040 absurd claims he put forward from the women he represented against Kavanaugh, like just treating

01:05:53.340 him like he's a respected authority. And these are just claims that deserve to be investigated.

01:05:57.940 You know, some are true. Some might not. No, this is a fraud. This is a fraudster who's been proven to

01:06:02.880 be a fraudster. So you only one reason to put him on and that is to to rip him, to to kill him and show

01:06:08.540 everybody what you already know. I remember and I remember all the details, but I remember when you

01:06:15.460 interviewed Alex Jones at the height of Alex's Alex Jones's influence, when you basically did

01:06:21.920 nothing in that interview except confront him on the falsities and the crazy conspiracy theories

01:06:27.300 he had been disseminating. And the media, more or less as a consensus, had decided that you had done

01:06:35.140 something wrong simply by giving him a platform, even though the interview was incredibly adversarial

01:06:40.400 and hostile and challenging based on the view that once somebody proves that they disseminate

01:06:45.660 falsehoods, they no longer should be heard from, even though Alex Jones had immense influence and

01:06:49.780 he doesn't go away because you ignore him. Christopher Steele is not even comparable to Alex Jones in

01:06:54.800 terms of the number of Christopher Steele would disappear if you didn't interview him. And yet here

01:06:59.300 they are platforming him and yes, asking him some hard questions, but still treating him as though

01:07:05.280 he's a credible source and like a lifelong intelligence agent who knows things that we

01:07:11.000 ought to be listening to. Yeah. And he's still trying to tell us that there's the so-called P-tape

01:07:15.740 of Trump. Like he wasn't out there in any way doing a mea culpa or OK, I got it wrong. It was like,

01:07:22.180 no, I'm telling you, it's still out. Oh, I mean, they love it. They ate it right up. The mainstream

01:07:26.040 went with it. It was replayed all over and over again in many outlets. OK, Glenn is staying with us.

01:07:31.280 And up next, we're going to talk about why progressive liberals, so many of them

01:07:35.060 are suddenly speaking so favorably about the CIA and the FBI. Remember when it was Fox News

01:07:40.740 defending those organizations? What is happening?

01:07:46.480 So the subject of the deep state, it's been really interesting to see the switch. We talked about this

01:07:51.600 last time or the time before about how Fox News used to be the one that was a very pro FBI,

01:07:56.280 pro CIA, pro Secret Service, all law enforcement types. And now it seems like everything's done

01:08:01.980 on 180. Fox News is more skeptical after the Trump years and the mainstream media is in love with these

01:08:08.280 organizations. Your thought on on that and on, you know, I know I'm sure you read Matt Taibbi's

01:08:14.100 sub stack where he talks about how there is a deep state and these young guns who who are, you know,

01:08:20.060 wet behind the ears and, you know, probably 22 years old who think that the CIA is full of truth

01:08:25.020 tellers who are there to protect us and we can trust them when they get a scoop or not don't

01:08:29.240 have any sort of a memory for history and don't know how they're being used. Your thoughts on all

01:08:33.900 of it? You know, it's so remarkable because I generally have laid and always have trying to

01:08:40.660 apply political labels to myself, left, right, conservative, liberal, whatever, because I think

01:08:44.840 that so often they obfuscate and keep you in a prison. But the one political label with which

01:08:49.600 I've always identified was civil libertarian, in part because my formative years politically and

01:08:55.540 philosophically came out of this identification I had with the civil liberties movement, with the

01:09:00.280 free speech movement, with the ACLU, that was very much a movement of the left. You know, a lot of the

01:09:06.440 free speech cases were written by the left wing Supreme Court justices. The free speech movement began

01:09:10.920 at Berkeley. The ACLU lawyers were Jewish leftist lawyers primarily. That was the politics with which I

01:09:16.500 identified. And one of the worst civil liberties abuses from that perspective of the 20th century

01:09:21.180 were the McCarthy hearings, which regardless of one's views on how big of a threat communism was

01:09:26.940 in the United States, people can obviously disagree on that and do. The idea of Congress and the CIA

01:09:34.440 investigating private citizens because of their political ideology and destroying their reputations

01:09:40.680 and their careers and putting them on blacklist with no due process was, in a lot of

01:09:46.440 ways, like the root of all evil from a civil liberties perspective, right? Just imposing

01:09:50.640 punishments on people with no fair process for evaluating whether they're actually guilty of

01:09:56.980 anything and in determining whether they have thought crimes, which was the McCarthy abuses for me.

01:10:03.040 And then if you look at the Cold War, the thing that the CIA would do is go around the world and

01:10:08.340 overthrow democratically elected governments that were a little bit more left than they were

01:10:12.940 comfortable with and impose using savagery and barbarism and very, you know, kind of violent

01:10:19.700 tactics, far right autocracies that would suppress the population. So the CIA and then the FBI under

01:10:27.480 J. Edgar Hoover, which kept dossiers on politicians for decades, tried to get Martin Luther King to kill

01:10:33.120 himself. Skepticism of those agencies at best was steeped in left-wing politics and formed

01:10:39.300 left liberal politics for decades. And what has happened is there are a lot of people who really

01:10:46.160 began paying attention to politics for the first time only out of fear of Trump. For them, political

01:10:51.380 history begins in 2015 when Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. And because, as we were talking

01:10:59.100 about earlier, the CIA and parts of the FBI and the security services were trying to sabotage Trump

01:11:04.860 for a lot of reasons, a lot of these liberals started looking at people like John Brennan and

01:11:09.760 James Clapper and Michael Hayden and all these, you know, CIA and FBI officials, Jim Comey, as their

01:11:16.860 allies, as the heroes who are going to save us from Trump. And it instilled in left-wing politics this

01:11:23.020 kind of reverence for the very security state agencies that have always been the greatest threat

01:11:29.100 for interfering in our democratic processes domestically and not just internationally.

01:11:34.520 And now you look at polls, Megan, and you ask people, do you trust and approve of the CIA and

01:11:40.460 the FBI? And 80% of Democrats say, yes, I approve and trust and trust in those agencies. And 20% or 12%

01:11:49.820 or 30% at most of Republicans say that they do. It's been an incredible shift because liberals who have

01:11:58.140 embraced this view that the Trump movement is kind of like this Nazi-like movement have come to believe

01:12:02.920 that the people they're fighting aren't just their political adversaries, but criminals, terrorists,

01:12:08.580 Nazis. And when you believe that, there's like no limits on what you recognize should be imposed on

01:12:14.960 the methods you can use to defeat them. And that's definitely the prevailing liberal mentality.

01:12:18.900 Mm hmm. Taibbi was saying in his sub stack that he thinks the greatest thing that ever happened to

01:12:24.160 the to the actual deep state is Donald Trump saying there is a deep state because that they could just

01:12:30.720 say boogeyman, boogeyman. Like, oh, he's crazy. Of course, he's a lunatic. He doesn't know what he's

01:12:34.800 talking about. It's you know, it's bizarre that first of all, the idea of a deep state, even though he

01:12:40.680 didn't use the phrase really originated with Dwight Eisenhower, you know, like the most conservative

01:12:46.460 figure of the 20th century. I don't mean like politically conservative, but just compartmentally,

01:12:51.180 right? Like a five star general, the person who won World War Two for the United States was a two

01:12:56.540 term Republican president in the 50s. He when he left office had 15 minutes to speak to the American

01:13:02.960 people on network television and chose to warn them about what he called the military industrial

01:13:08.780 complex, this permanent power faction, this fusion of, you know, the weapons manufacturers and the

01:13:15.140 Pentagon and the intelligence community that, in his words, were becoming more powerful than

01:13:20.400 democratically elected leaders. That's what the deep state is. And that was before the Vietnam War,

01:13:25.320 before 9-11, when obviously the powers of those agencies and the secrecy behind which they operate

01:13:31.140 grew even more. And the concept of of the deep state was something that was created that term by

01:13:37.640 left wing foreign policy scholars in academic institutions around the world. But if you ask the

01:13:43.300 standard liberal, what a deep what the deep state is, they'll say, Oh, that was a crazy conspiracy

01:13:48.680 theory that Sean Hannity invented in 2017, in order to protect Donald Trump, they've like completely

01:13:54.360 convinced huge sectors of American liberalism, that to believe that there's a deep state, which is so

01:14:01.120 foundational to understanding how American power functions is something only a crazy right wing

01:14:06.600 conspiracy theorist on Fox News or Newsmax would possibly believe, as opposed to central to left

01:14:13.440 wing scholarship and the view of Dwight Eisenhower for decades.

01:14:16.660 Mm hmm. It's interesting, because I can look back at myself on Fox News and say I was very pro law

01:14:21.380 enforcement in at the federal level and beyond, including CIA, FBI. But I forgive myself because

01:14:26.880 it was post 9-11. You know, I went through that. And you and I talked about that once before. I was just

01:14:30.660 I was, you know, a young woman who wanted the country to be safe. And I didn't want any more

01:14:36.080 9-11s on our soil. And so in those crises, you are deferential to the big state, deep state,

01:14:42.040 whatever you want to call it. But these extraordinary measures that were undertaken,

01:14:45.260 and as you get farther in time from them, then they start to look a little different. If they don't

01:14:49.460 wane, as the threat wanes a bit, you've got to ask questions. And that's that's been your genius all

01:14:56.760 along, is that you've been sort of jumping up and down. But I wonder what you think about the CIA

01:15:01.060 today and its strength and just how effective it is, because there have been reports that

01:15:06.840 we're having agents turned against us, that our sources that we've been using are being killed

01:15:13.860 at in extraordinary numbers. There was trying to remember what it came out. It was it was in the

01:15:18.900 New York Times. It got a Julian Barnes captured, killed or compromised is the name of the piece.

01:15:22.620 And they're saying that the CIA, a top American counterintelligence officials,

01:15:28.380 that they had warned every CIA station and base around the world about troubling numbers of

01:15:32.580 informants recruited from other countries to spy for us being captured or killed. I was thinking,

01:15:37.740 is that a leak? But they were basically saying that we we kind of took our eye off the ball. And now

01:15:43.100 our our adversaries in Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down our sources

01:15:48.860 and turning them. You know, I think one of the reasons that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was

01:15:55.980 so traumatizing for a lot of people, it even caused the sectors of the media who literally haven't

01:16:03.180 criticized a Democrat in five years to, you know, really unleash a lot of genuinely felt anger toward

01:16:09.600 Biden. The Biden administration wasn't necessarily because the evacuation was poorly planned,

01:16:16.180 although obviously it was. I don't think a poorly planned evacuation would generate that level of

01:16:22.260 visceral anger. I think it really was a symbol of the reality that the United States, after being the

01:16:30.840 world's sole superpower for at least three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, is clearly

01:16:36.700 starting to become weaker relative to these other large powers. And I actually thought about this for the

01:16:43.180 first time the other day about January 6th. If you look at what happened on January 6th, President Trump

01:16:50.300 convinced a large segment segment of the population, falsely in my view, but he convinced a large segment

01:16:57.000 of the population that the election had been stolen, that democracy was basically subverted, that he really

01:17:02.700 won and the Democrats stole the election. And yet, despite that, on January 6th, you had maybe seven or

01:17:11.580 800 people, extremely poorly organized, none of them brandishing a weapon, according to the FBI, not even

01:17:19.740 centrally organized, show up at the Capitol to protest. They killed nobody. Four of them got killed. They didn't

01:17:27.320 actually kill anybody. And then on the other side, you know, you're talking about the U.S. Capitol, right? Like we

01:17:33.440 talked about 9-11. That was one of the targets of the 9-11 terrorists. But that was where the plane that

01:17:38.980 landed in that crashed in Pennsylvania was supposed to go. You would think that would be an incredibly

01:17:44.460 fortified building. And yet they just marched in as though there was no security there. And it took

01:17:49.420 hours to subdue them, even though most of them weren't even violent. So both sides of that equation,

01:17:55.600 for me, kind of revealed this sort of physical weakness. You know, we have a population that

01:18:04.300 is obese. We have a military that increasingly is about much more about social values than it is the

01:18:10.880 traditional military values. And so I think what we're seeing is a country that has become a lot

01:18:18.860 weaker in the areas where it had always been strongest. And the CIA, and we saw this with General

01:18:24.080 Milley, you know, has lost focus on what its mission had always been. It still does a lot

01:18:30.500 of pernicious things. But when you're training them to make videos about, you know, I'm the first

01:18:36.500 Latina woman of my generation and using this kind of like woke language and instilling those kinds of

01:18:44.560 values into these institutions, they're going to lose their military agility and readiness when you

01:18:50.960 have intelligence and military agencies in China, Russia, Iran, and lots of other countries focused

01:18:56.000 on their traditional mission. I think you're seeing that in a lot of ways.

01:18:59.380 I'm like, we should focus less on our intersectionality and more on our sources and methods,

01:19:05.360 which apparently are not being well protected overseas. Can we talk about January 6 for a minute?

01:19:11.380 Because I, you know, I've spoken about this privately, but I was on my pal Dan Abrams show.

01:19:17.940 He's got a show on News Nation now in the evenings. And he was asking me, among other things,

01:19:23.860 about my comment that the media has grossly overplayed what happened on January 6. Not to

01:19:29.220 excuse what happened on January 6. I didn't like what happened on January 6. There's plenty to

01:19:33.140 condemn about what we saw that day. But it wasn't an insurrection. And the media said it was over and

01:19:39.880 over. It was never an insurrection legally or otherwise. And the FBI has confirmed that now.

01:19:44.340 So the comparisons to 9-11 saying that it was worse than 9-11. And Dan said, who said that?

01:19:50.620 I was like, well, how long do you have? I could go down the list. You know, George Will, Matthew Dowd,

01:19:55.660 Joy Reid. I could go on. The White House correspondent for Huffington Post on and on it goes.

01:20:01.600 But it's beyond that. It's the actual reporting of what happened that day and the painting of these

01:20:08.160 people as these insurrectionist terrorists, none of whom have been charged with anything like that.

01:20:13.820 Right. So if you where's the outrage right from the Democrats in the media, like where's the no one's

01:20:18.600 been charged with the things you're telling us they did. It's it's trespass charges. It's petty

01:20:23.420 anti-BS that they held people in solitary confinement on for a long time, unjustifiably. And the one narrative

01:20:31.240 that I know you've done great reporting on is what happened to Officer Brian Sicknick. And the media held

01:20:37.980 on to the story that he was murdered by the Trump mob that day on Capitol Hill, even when they knew

01:20:46.580 it wasn't true. They put it in the impeachment documents, even when they knew it wasn't true.

01:20:53.860 And your reporting on has been so insightful because you sort of track it minute by minute by

01:20:58.300 like the his mom that night saying, don't say this. Yeah, I heard from him tonight. You know,

01:21:03.820 like he just the the the misreporting and the unwillingness to bend. It's all part of the same

01:21:10.520 thing, Glenn. Right. Like narratives, the commitment to them, the desire to bring down Trump or anybody

01:21:16.800 associated with him. And still to this day, just to say it was bad. I don't like what happened on Capitol

01:21:22.780 Hill at all. It was disgusting. But you how dare you compare it to 9-11 is somehow controversial.

01:21:28.900 I mean, nobody likes what happened at the Capitol. No one. You know, if you're an American citizen,

01:21:35.240 you don't want to see mobs smashing windows. And, you know, some of them had like some violent intent.

01:21:45.500 Most of them, I do think, were just there exercising their lawful right to protest and got carried away

01:21:51.280 in this kind of like mob mentality. As we were talking about earlier, it can you know, we're

01:21:55.000 social animals that kind of contagion can happen. It happened on a lot of Black Lives Matter and Antifa

01:21:59.560 rallies over the summer as well. And people went with the intention to peacefully protest and

01:22:04.500 turn violent. And a lot of them became violent. I never saw that as an insurrection either,

01:22:09.660 even though a lot of those protesters were violent as well. The problem, you know, when when I went

01:22:15.420 throughout 2020, the question always was, how is this media, the U.S. media that was failing before

01:22:21.880 Trump and then found a savior in Trump? He saved most of those media outlets. What were they going

01:22:29.100 to do in the likely scenario that he lost in 2020? His polls were showing. And I gave dozens of

01:22:36.080 interviews where I said what they're going to try and do is say that, well, Trump might be gone,

01:22:40.560 but the movement he left behind is and poses an existential threat to American democracy because

01:22:47.600 they have to keep people hooked with fear and terror and high levels of emotion in order to keep

01:22:54.940 watching their programs. And that is what January 6th served to do. It made people, you know, it kept

01:23:02.560 fear levels high. It is justifying all kinds of new powers in these agencies. They gave $2 billion to the

01:23:09.720 Capitol Police five months after they were chanting defund the police in the street. The thing that's

01:23:16.740 amazing is, you know, this whole movement that erupted after 2020 was about excessive prosecution.

01:23:23.500 I'm somebody who thinks that we put more citizens in our prisons than any other country in the world.

01:23:28.160 I do think we overcharge crimes and put people into prison for longer than they should, especially

01:23:33.240 for nonviolent crimes. And yet here you have judges, Obama appointed judges, who are giving sentences

01:23:39.760 longer than the prosecutors of the Justice Department are requesting. And they're being applauded. And it all

01:23:47.980 is because they believe that the Trump movement, as I was saying earlier, are terrorists. They're not

01:23:55.220 people with whom Democrats and liberals have ideological disagreements. And you always need

01:24:01.420 the maximalist narrative in order to keep those fear levels high and to justify all the powers that

01:24:07.740 they want to use. The idea that 800, you know, Trump boomers from Facebook came close to overthrowing

01:24:16.480 the most powerful and militarized government in the history of humanity is more preposterous than the

01:24:23.560 idea that the Russians had invented some new supersonic weapon that they were deploying all

01:24:28.500 over the world without anyone knowing about it. And yet, as you say, it's not just that people are

01:24:33.220 asserting it. It's that you're not even allowed to question it or else you get accused of being,

01:24:37.500 you know, an apologist for the insurrection or even a secret sympathizer of it.

01:24:43.380 It's not totally dissimilar from the story that's been in the news this past week about the guy in

01:24:47.980 Virginia, Scott Smith, who showed up at the board meeting, the school board meeting to say,

01:24:53.040 what the hell? Because his daughter had been raped in a high school bathroom, ninth grader,

01:24:57.140 and got upset when the prince of the school, the superintendent of school stood up there and said,

01:25:02.420 there have been no sexual assaults by any transgender assailants in our bathrooms.

01:25:08.460 And you could argue whether the assailant was transgender. It was what we're told is a bisexual

01:25:13.240 young man who was wearing a skirt. That's splitting hairs. The parents are there to find out whether

01:25:18.900 anybody's been hurt in the restroom. Like that's what they want. They don't need to know the actual

01:25:24.060 gender dysphoria status of the person committing the offense. So the guy lies. The dad, who's the

01:25:31.160 dad of the victim, gets upset and the local D.A. goes after him, guns blazing. She never apparently

01:25:39.000 prosecutes cases. She she went after. She's one of these soft on crime, sort of far left people who wants

01:25:44.840 to change all the crime laws to be softer with him. She showed up personally to try to get as much of a

01:25:50.880 punishment against this dad as humanly possible. He was totally demonized by the media. Why? Because

01:25:55.320 she's not actually wanting, you know, softer crime laws. She wants to target political enemies and she

01:26:02.200 wants to go soft on anybody she thinks might show up at the at the ballot box for her or people who would

01:26:07.940 be persuaded by her soft her perceived softness towards those groups. It's political persecution

01:26:13.840 and and and the faction of American liberalism has become incredibly punitive with their political

01:26:20.300 adversaries. Look at what they're doing with people who are vaccine hesitant, talking about them like

01:26:26.340 they're murderers, basically, and celebrating the fact that they're losing their jobs in the middle of

01:26:31.480 a pandemic. Remember a year ago, people were, you know, opening their windows at 8 a.m. to applaud all the

01:26:37.180 brave frontline health care workers as they deserved when we were all staying in our homes because we

01:26:43.040 were told to. And now a year later, hundreds or thousands of them are being fired from their jobs

01:26:48.380 because they had COVID and believe natural immunity is sufficient or have doubts about

01:26:52.840 the vaccine. And liberals want them all fired. Why? Because they're questioning liberal pieties.

01:27:00.720 The January 6th committee in Congress is designed to compensate for the fact that the

01:27:06.320 Biden Justice Department isn't charging anybody with sedition or insurrection or attempting to kill

01:27:15.100 or kidnap elected officials, all the things that we heard the media claiming they were.

01:27:19.640 And so that committee is there to say we're going to fill in the gaps by finding that this was an

01:27:24.600 insurrection because we know that you need this vengeance against your political enemies, saying that the

01:27:30.540 FBI is going to start to treat parents who come to school board meetings and protesting the fact that

01:27:35.100 their kids have to wear masks or other COVID restrictions is that they're now going to be

01:27:40.440 treated as terrorists for terrorizing school board officials. When you asked me earlier about why

01:27:45.640 they love the FBI and why they love the CIA, it's because those are their tools to persecute

01:27:51.260 their political enemies, to turn them into criminals, to punish them, to make their lives as difficult

01:27:56.820 as possible in retaliation for their dissent. That's really what American liberalism has become.

01:28:02.880 It's a real problem because it doesn't matter who you put in the White House, as we've seen. I mean,

01:28:09.080 this problem was right in our faces during a Republican presidency. It's still there now under

01:28:15.460 a Democratic president and it's not going anywhere. And so knowledge is the key, right? You got to stay

01:28:21.300 informed, follow people like Glenn, read his sub stack. Taibbi's great too, can follow this program.

01:28:25.820 Um, but it's up to you because, uh, it does, this isn't one of those things like, oh, if we could

01:28:30.900 just get Biden out or Trump out or whatever, it, this is the reality, uh, Democrat or Republican

01:28:35.840 president there. Glenn Greenwald, always a pleasure. Always good to be with Megan. Thanks for having me.

01:28:40.500 Want to tell you tomorrow, we have an exclusive interview with Alison Williams, the ESPN reporter

01:28:43.980 who left her job because of the vaccine mandates. Go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly to watch the show

01:28:48.860 and we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - October 20, 2021

Havana Syndrome and Vaccinating Young Kids, with Glenn Greenwald, David Zweig, and Marc Polymeropoulos ｜ Ep. 185

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