Glenn Greenwald returns to The Megyn Kelly Show to talk about the latest news in Brazil and the election of Jair Bolsonaro, the new president of Brazil. And why he thinks we should care about it.
00:00:00.560Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:12.140Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:15.440We've got some of our favorites back on today for a busy Tuesday show, including Glenn Greenwald.
00:00:20.940Despite being one of the most frequent guests on the show, it's been nearly six months since we've had Glenn on,
00:00:26.000and there is a reason why. We'll talk about it in a minute.
00:00:29.020But we begin with the news in America and in Brazil, and there's no person better to ask about it than Glenn.
00:00:36.080He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now host of System Update on Rumble, where he's doing—is it a nightly newscast at 7 p.m., Glenn? Is it nightly?
00:00:46.920It is nightly, and I should have listened to the people who warned me about how time-consuming that was, including probably you, but I was foolish and ignored them, and now I know.
00:00:57.140But yeah, it's nightly, Monday through Friday, 7 p.m. Eastern.
00:01:00.360Oh, that's awesome. Congrats. I love Rumble.
00:01:36.220They feel like it's a stolen election, or is it that plus the fact that they can't stand the new guy?
00:01:41.400Because here, it's like, to me, this is, like, far right to far left, and it seems hard to understand that the same country would elect both of those leaders.
00:01:59.180It's the sixth most populous country in the world.
00:02:02.500It's the second largest in the hemisphere.
00:02:05.120It has enormous oil reserves, some of the most important in the world, plus the most important environmental resource, which is the Amazon.
00:02:12.080And that's why, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were obsessed with Brazil.
00:02:16.580It's easily the most influential country in America.
00:02:20.300As for the recent politics of it, the government, Brazil, has been ruled by this, what some people consider this far left party, which is the Workers' Party created by Lula da Silva.
00:02:36.180He grew up, you know, kind of, he grew up illiterate, in great poverty, became a labor leader.
00:02:41.880So he sort of has this profile of a far leftist.
00:02:44.800And he was very far to the left, but he ran for president three times, lost three times, and realized the only way he would win and successfully govern the country is if he moderated.
00:02:54.940And he became, I wouldn't quite say, kind of an equivalent of, like, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but much more like them than, say, Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.
00:03:04.320He was the president from 2002 to 2010.
00:03:06.820And regardless of what he secretly might have wished for, no one can know that, he governed as a kind of center-left leader.
00:03:18.580The Brazilian economy, far from becoming Venezuela, exploded in growth for eight years under his presidency.
00:03:25.360It became the sixth largest country in the world.
00:03:28.620But, you know, then his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was the president for six more years.
00:03:34.820So when you have a party that's governing a country for 14 straight years, and then you have the good times and the bad times, people grow very disenchanted with it.
00:03:49.300And so there was a lot of anger toward the establishment.
00:03:54.100And Bolsonaro ended up kind of successfully exploiting that anger toward the establishment, much like Donald Trump did, by saying, I'm not from the center-left or the center-right.
00:04:13.980As for what just happened, there was definitely a similar attempt like there was in the U.S. to persuade Bolsonaro supporters that he didn't really lose the election.
00:04:25.380He lost very narrowly by two points, but that instead there was fraud.
00:04:30.160I personally haven't seen any evidence of real fraud or systemic fraud.
00:04:35.860So I think what's really going on is that, you know, especially because Bolsonaro's party in that same election had an amazing night.
00:04:43.080I mean, they won the key governorship.
00:04:45.100So if there was fraud, you know, it was only on one part of the ballot.
00:04:49.360I think Brazil's a really polarized country like the U.S. and Brazil.
00:04:53.400And a lot of the anger was because of that.
00:04:55.700Yeah, that's always like that was part of the Trump problem when he was claiming that he was, you know, denied votes in Michigan and so on.
00:05:02.420Then you'd look at places where the Republicans just crushed under Trump on the very same ballot, which really undermines the suggestion that some fix was in.
00:05:10.480And never mind the Sidney Powell stuff like it's it's in and it's being controlled from a foreign country where they're manipulating all the ballots.
00:05:16.900But, you know, only at this level and not the lower levels, whatever.
00:05:20.740So, OK, so Bolsonaro is now down in Florida recovering from he was stabbed when he ran in 2018.
00:05:28.500It's so crazy and says he has ongoing medical issues from that.
00:05:32.660People are gathering outside of his house and he's sort of a hero to a lot of people, but also a villain to others.
00:05:37.740Because is he now there's pressure from from some here in our own country, including the Biden White House, to potentially tell him to go home, to get out of here.
00:05:50.540Is it like is it going to die down and he's going to go back home and is going to end or what's the next step in this saga?
00:05:56.260Well, I mean, first of all, you know, it actually sickens me when I see American leftist and liberals mocking how how often he ends up hospitalized.
00:06:04.320I mean, when he was running for president, a gigantic knife was plunged and tore the whole thing up.
00:11:17.400So just in case you were wondering, Glenn, he takes classified documents very seriously.
00:11:21.800Yes, I, I, that's definitely what I derived as well from her commentary, which of course provokes the question if he takes documents, classified documents.
00:11:32.420So seriously, why does he appear to be strewing them about in multiple places wherever he goes?
00:11:38.640Kind of like a little, you know, troll in the desert leaving breadcrumbs for, for the little children to pick up.
00:11:46.680Um, you know, wherever he goes, they just seem to fall out of his pocket when I know you wanted to leave this issue aside.
00:11:53.480But when the whole thing happened with Trump and Mar-a-Lago, the reason I didn't take that particularly seriously is because, you know, as somebody who has spent as a journalist many years reading through enormous archives, multiple archives of top secret or secret or classified documents.
00:12:08.540I do know that everything in Washington, even most banal things get marked classified in secret because the government reflexively keeps everything they do from us is secret, which is its own problem.
00:12:19.500Nonetheless, as you pointed out, the law is the law and a lot of people have gone to prison for handling classified documents far less recklessly than Joe Biden appears to have handled them.
00:12:33.480And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We don't have two sets of law in this in this country, or at least we're not supposed to, where, you know, low level functionaries in the State Department take homework to work on it and entails the classified information.
00:12:47.980And they end up getting prosecuted or having their reputations ruined.
00:12:51.400And so there is a lot of karmic justice in this because Democrats really thought they had Trump this time.
00:12:57.860You know, you've I'm sure you've seen your audience has seen five years of clips from New York Times, op-ed writers and MSNBC and CNN hosts.
00:13:05.040The walls are closing in on Trump. He's really about to be in prison this time.
00:13:09.060And they really thought they had him this time. And then they ran into the problem, pretty big problem that Joe Biden appears to have done exactly what Donald Trump is accused of doing, only worse in the sense that it's not a one time removal, but multiple instances.
00:13:26.260And I doubt we've seen them all on top of the fact that Trump's defense, whatever you think of it, which is that as president, I have the absolute right to do anything I want, which is true, isn't available to Biden because these were when he was vice president.
00:13:39.040So I think, you know, the problem now becomes Democrats have painted themselves into a corner where they're the ones who have said that crimes of this kind are so grave that the person must go to prison because they've jeopardized our national security.
00:13:54.460So how do they have any way out, given that we know at least four instances that Biden took not just classified documents, but top secret documents about Ukraine and Iran, put them in his garage where his son, Hunter Biden, had access to them, where we know what his problems were, his money problems were.
00:14:13.300He was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. There were top secret documents about Ukraine sitting in that garage to which Hunter Biden had access.
00:14:21.060So I think the Democrats have a gigantic problem on their hands.
00:14:26.300And now you've got Democrats like Debbie Stabenow, outgoing senator from Michigan, saying, you know, the people don't really care about this.
00:14:33.260They don't care about documents and investigations.
00:14:36.180Of course, now that it's a Democrat or the top Democrat on the hot seat, get on with the people's business after, you know, the salivation on the left over those Trump Mar-a-Lago documents.
00:14:50.700They they they sent the FBI to Mar-a-Lago in the single most flamboyant way possible, like they did so many times during Russiagate when they went to go and arrest people close to Trump who are completely peaceful, who were totally willing to surrender voluntarily.
00:15:06.300You had showed no signs of resistance. They would call CNN to make sure cameras were ready when the FBI arrived, a complete abuse of, you know, the police state that we have in the United States from political ends.
00:15:17.900So overtly. And now suddenly, basically, the main critique of Democrats for five years or four years of the Trump administration and before that, the campaign was nothing but investigative.
00:15:30.080It wasn't substantive policy objections. It was Russiagate and obstruction and now classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
00:15:38.160And as you say, the minute Biden has his own scandal like that and really even worse, I think, suddenly it becomes, oh, no one cares about lawbreaking and classified material and where Biden is, you know, tossing top secret documents around.
00:15:51.640They just care about bread and butter issues. You know, the hypocrisy is stunning. And ordinarily, I wouldn't bother me. Hypocrisy in politics is, you know, as common as as as anything in politics.
00:16:03.360It's existed for as long as politics has. But what bothers me is the actual abuse of power of law enforcement agencies and the Justice Department and the FBI, which we know is being is being weaponized and politicized.
00:16:17.520That's the part that I think is truly concerning. Well, it's definitely, I think, going to the place where Trump does not get pursued and neither does Biden.
00:16:25.320I mean, I really think Biden saved Trump. And so neither of these big guys is going to get prosecuted.
00:16:30.500And, you know, as you point out, as as Andy McCarthy had a great piece on the other day, there are regular Americans who work for DOD or what have you who are looking at 10 years in prison right now for having far less classified material at their homes
00:16:46.240than Joe Biden was just found with at his. How does the DOJ turn around? How do they go in at those sentencing hearings and say Jane Smith gets 10 years?
00:16:56.620We want her 10 years in prison for the crime we're giving a complete pass to Joe Biden for.
00:17:02.840Exactly. I mean, set aside more controversial cases of, you know, huge leakers of classified material like Daniel Ellsberg deliberately delivering huge amounts of top secret documents to The New York Times or Edward Snowden doing that with me.
00:17:16.260We're Chelsea Manning and Leaky Leaks. Those are deliberate acts of what they regard as whistleblowing other people regard as crimes.
00:17:22.820I think it's very important to distinguish that from what you just said, which is the fact that there are people who have been prosecuted and who have been in prison for no deliberate transgression of the law at all.
00:17:34.340No malice whatsoever. People who took work home and inadvertently part of that work that they took home was classified material.
00:17:41.500Because, again, when we hear classified material, people think, wow, that must be nuclear secrets or troop movements.
00:17:48.040Sometimes, I mean, Megan, when I was working with the Snowden Archive, I would see things like manuals on how to get parking credentials or how CIA employees could request special meals for lunch.
00:18:02.040And they would be marked secret and classified, which means it was illegal to disclose them.
00:18:06.780The two worst instances of leaking of classified material in the last, say, 10 to 15 years was Leon Panetta leaked the most sensitive materials about how we found Osama bin Laden to the filmmakers that were filming that were making Zero Dark Thirty, the theatrical film.
00:18:25.600It was scheduled to be released weeks before the 2012 presidential election.
00:18:30.720Obama, remember, was running on the fact that he got Osama bin Laden.
00:18:34.180General Motors is alive. Osama bin Laden is dead.
00:18:36.700Leon Panetta gave them information about the identity of the SEALs, the Navy SEALs, and the technology we used to track down Osama bin Laden because he wanted to enable them to create a hagiography to glorify Barack Obama before the election.
00:18:49.600He faced no charges, even though everyone knows he leaked toxic documents.
00:18:54.940And the worst case was David Petraeus, who was also Obama's CIA director, his favorite general, who gave what's called the black book, parts of the black book, the government's most sensitive secrets to his mistress so that she could write a hagiography, a biography of him and make him look good.
00:19:12.700He got a slap on the wrist, a misdemeanor charge and a fine and never spent a day in prison.
00:19:18.380And that, I think, is what people are tired of is this two tiered system of justice where if you're powerful in Washington, if you have the right politics, you get immunized.
00:19:27.620And if you don't, you have the weight of the law come crashing down upon you.
00:19:30.980Mm hmm. And on the DOJ subject, you know, as well as I do, that Merrick Garland was leaking.
00:19:37.200His DOJ was leaking to The Washington Post and The New York Times about what was allegedly found in the Trump stash down at Mar-a-Lago.
00:19:44.460Oh, nuclear secrets. They wanted us to believe he was selling nuclear secrets to some enemy.
00:19:49.320That was the clear implication that he was some sort of double agent.
00:19:52.600I mean, it was absolutely absurd where they went with it.
00:19:54.780And there's no way that those organizations would have known any of that had they not gotten the leaks from the DOJ.
00:20:01.080So to them, he wants to make Trump look bad. He leaks.
00:20:04.260But now not only are we not going to get any information from the DOJ, even though KJP is like, go to the DOJ, go to the DOJ.
00:20:10.800But we now find out he's been silent on this since November that he was told they found the original original tranche of documents in Joe Biden's office in early November before the midterms.
00:20:22.300And he cooperated to keep it quiet. Another batch, December 20th, kept it quiet.
00:20:28.220And, you know, again, in that same Garrity piece, he raises the question of, does anybody think this would have been a huge game changer before the midterms?
00:20:36.000Probably not. But can we really say he points out the following, Glenn?
00:20:39.580Could it have cost Democrats the 310 votes in New Mexico's second congressional district that made the difference, the 1600 plus votes in Colorado, Colorado's eighth, 1800 plus votes in Connecticut's fifth or 2600 plus votes in Washington's third district?
00:20:58.760We don't know. Those are pretty tight. Maybe those are people on the fence.
00:21:02.320A lot of independents were thought to go that they were going to go Republican and they went Democrat last minute, which was unusual in a midterm election.
00:21:10.120They usually vote for the party out of power. And who knows whether this would have been the last straw, sickening, disgusting thing that would have changed the vote.
00:21:17.380We don't know. But there won't be a press inquiring as to that question.
00:21:21.200But Megan, this is why I will probably go to my grave still talking about what happened before the 2020 election with regard to the lie that was circulated by former intelligence officials and then ratified by the media and used by big tech to censor the reporting about Joe Biden, namely this complete fabrication that the Hunter Biden laptop was, quote, Russian disinformation, because whether or not it would have swung the election.
00:21:47.380And that was an extremely close election. And so had the public gotten to hear things like what Joe Biden was doing and trading on his family's name or his brother and son were doing and trading on his name in China and Ukraine in order to profit, not just themselves, but Joe Biden himself, maybe it wouldn't have had any any any any effect.
00:22:06.340We'll never know. Everyone now admits those documents on the Hunter Biden laptop were authentic.
00:22:10.380Everyone on this knew at the time those documents were authentic.
00:22:13.740I was willing to stake my career on it because I quit the intercept when they refused to let me write about it by claiming, oh, we don't know what's authentic.
00:22:19.740I knew they were authentic, just like, you know, in the same way that we've authenticated other documents.
00:22:24.620When you have the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA interfering in our domestic politics to try and generate an outcome that they prefer and avoid the one they don't prefer, that is a very grave threat to our democratic values.
00:22:39.580And that's exactly what is happening with these agencies.
00:22:43.580Well, this subject came up on the Sunday shows with Chuck Todd, who purports to be he's no Tim Russert.
00:22:50.240I mean, he purports to be that sort of fair and tough on both sides.
00:22:55.220And he had Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, a senator on his show and meet the press on Sunday.
00:23:01.760And they were talking about Hunter Biden and the investigations that are now going to take place.
00:23:08.500And Ron Johnson was having to defend himself on wanting to pursue these investigations into what Hunter Biden did under his dad's name and what benefit there was to the sitting president of the United States.
00:23:20.500Now, then, for a period of Hunter's antics, the sitting vice president or immediately post vice president about to run for president.
00:23:27.760All these things make him compromised if he was potentially in on some financial scheme with foreign countries and so on through his son.
00:23:35.180We'll never know the full extent unless we investigate.
00:23:36.980So Ron Johnson wants you and Chuck Todd was pressing him on it.
00:50:53.620Oh, who are you, right, Britt, to tell me that and then to say to her that trans woman was perfectly entitled to be there and basically too bad if you didn't like it because this is policy.
00:51:09.900I mean, this is where the rubber hits the road.
00:51:13.040This is where policies begin to truly affect people.
00:51:16.680And we've been riding on this woke train for a long time where we're saying that we'll go ahead and we'll be virtuous and we'll say that men can be women and, you know, no one gets hurt, you know, because we're just just words.
00:51:31.420But now we're realizing that words are the guardrails of society.
00:51:35.500And when you start shifting words and tearing down meanings, you recreate society.
00:51:41.100And it is what we've been saying for a long time.
00:51:44.220This is a war on women, on girls, and really on societal order.
00:51:50.160And, you know, what I wanted to point out with everything you were just saying, Megan, is that in the Y's promise to serve all, all, right, all, creating an inclusive YMCA, in their general guidelines,
00:52:04.200it says, regarding restroom and locker room accessibility, legal gender, physical genitalia, or gender expression do not dictate the use of gender segregated spaces.
00:52:16.080Trans individuals may select either locker room or restroom.
00:52:20.280Requiring someone to use a bathroom or other gendered area they do not identify with can be detrimental for a trans individual's well-being and safety and puts the YMC at risk for discrimination complaints.
00:52:33.980I read this, and I was so floored because it's so blatant.
00:52:37.620It's propping up trans individuals as the ones whose well-being could be at risk.
00:52:43.580But what about the little Rebeccas and the little five-year-olds who are in ballet and gymnastics?
00:53:31.440They're talking about safety of people who are trans.
00:53:34.020But what about the position they're putting these young ones in who don't even have the language yet to express how uncomfortable this makes them?
00:53:44.720And that's why it's time now for us to stare it in the face and decide what, as a society, our default position is going to be.
00:53:53.680You know, is our default position going to be that we're just going to do away with all societal order that we have established for years and years and years in this country where women are protected?
00:54:03.520Women have, we've gained rights that we strived for for hundreds of years.
00:54:09.600Are we going to just toss that all by the wayside now and say, well, hey, we're going to favor this new ideological cult coming in and you're just going to have to put up with a penis being out in the locker room while your five-year-old is showering.
00:54:22.540I mean, really, we're at the tipping point where we are going to have to decide and answer as a nation to this situation that we're we now find ourselves in.
00:54:31.320It's been brewing for a long time and we're at the point now where we're going to have to give an answer on what is our default position?
00:56:22.220Decide what side you want to be on and fight the battle because this is war.
00:56:26.900We are in a war and we are seeing right now the effects of policies like, you know, San Diego, out of all places, redefining what a woman is and where we're women.
00:57:13.280And even the YMCA, the YWC, whatever their response here has been to say.
00:57:18.540First, they said, OK, as part of our commitment to make sure everyone feels comfortable, we are reviewing our locker room floor plans across all facilities within our association.
00:57:29.920Guess you tell me who's going to be bounced over to the small little space without the mirror or the locker.
00:57:56.700She saw the statement as well, and she had such a great point that I think she's she's brilliant.
00:58:04.600She's a brilliant little girl and she's going to go places.
00:58:07.460But she told me that when she looked at their statement, you know, which said, oh, we're going to review our floor plans.
00:58:14.940And, you know, we apologize for the position that Rebecca was put in.
00:58:18.960It was just this lip service, you know, very monochromatic response from the YMCA, and it took international attention for it for their hand to be shown on this.
00:58:30.560But Rebecca said, and I thought it was such a good point.
00:58:32.820She said, you know, it's interesting, like the YMCA just keeps pointing to the legal aspect.
00:59:34.780They said, no, we're going to be on board plans.
00:59:36.800Yeah, they're on board and they've reminded their employees that they're not allowed to, quote, teach acceptance or hate that they are supposed to teach acceptance and not hate.
01:00:36.220So when we talk about middle ground, it's like we just keep caving and caving and caving and organizations keep caving and caving to these these policies that are built by an ideological cult that is at war with society.
01:00:48.980And no one's no one's standing up and fighting.
01:00:52.120You know, YMCA had an amazing opportunity to be that hero and they missed it.
01:01:00.460We have to comply with California law, but we want to make clear we object to this.
01:01:05.140This is wrong what they've done, like whatever.
01:01:07.320There's a way of doing this to comporting with the law without completely selling your soul and calling people like Rebecca implicitly bigots, hateful.
01:01:15.900There's nothing hateful about this young girl or her five year old little sister.
01:01:19.860But, you know, this reminds me of the thing that that happened in American Girl doll, which I did not realize is now owned by Mattel.
01:01:53.540But they're pushing this book that's educating the little girls on how like the doctor, your parents tell you what your gender is, but their parents aren't always right.
01:03:25.640And it's such a small percent of the population for them to be saying and confusing young kids with things like, quote,
01:03:31.300quote, if you haven't gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body's changes, giving you more time to think about your gender idea ideology.
01:03:41.000This is from a book called Body Image, how to love yourself, live life to the fullest and celebrate all kinds of bodies that American Girl is offering as a, quote,
01:03:48.560smart girl's guide to socially and medically transitioning from one gender to another.
01:03:54.940It's I mean, it's been a long time since I've been in that store, but I won't go back in.
01:03:58.720And if I had a younger girl, I wouldn't be taking her anywhere near the bookshelf.
01:04:03.100No, it it doesn't surprise me either that Mattel is who bought out American Girl.
01:04:10.160I mean, I remember American Girl doll when I was little.
01:04:12.240And I think there was like a Samantha that looked like me and it was all historical and I loved it.
01:04:19.380And then now to see how far they've come is just it shows you how rapid this is all happening to its maddening pace.
01:04:26.320You know, it's like you can't even keep your finger on the pulse because it's just it's everywhere and it's happening so fast.
01:04:32.180But it doesn't surprise me that it's Mattel.
01:04:33.980I remember when you said Mattel, it triggered a memory that I remember being at my local Target with my daughter.
01:04:39.480And I had to cover her eyes when we went through the doll section because there was a Mattel doll that you could change its gender.
01:04:48.280And it was the first neutral doll that was being launched and you could make it a boy or you can make it a girl.
01:04:54.480And it was on an end cap for all to see.
01:05:36.840They can't go to American Girl doll without getting this voisted upon them.
01:05:40.780They can't go to the YMCA for a little recreation without walking by a naked male penis while they're just trying to change out of their bathing suit.
01:05:47.760Like, that's why Ron DeSantis did what he did down in Florida, where he said, at least in the classroom, I'm keeping this out of the curriculum for the very young children.
01:05:59.120And the left is still freaking out about that order to this day, saying it's he's some sort of hideous bigot.
01:06:08.020Yeah, the party that was once champions for women.
01:06:10.920But remember that believe all women and, you know, women are equality.
01:06:19.800The party of the left that was supposed to be champions for women are now complicit in this blatant assault on women and attack on women and young girls.