TRIGGERnometry - S5： Glenn Greenwald： Why Journalism is Broken

00:00:00.000 The whole point of the media, surely, isn't it, to hold the rich and powerful to account?

00:00:07.380 That's like a nice, you know, fairy tale.

00:00:16.020 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:20.620 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:21.820 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:27.460 a brilliant guest we have for you today. He's one of America's finest and most principled

00:00:32.100 journalists, Glenn Greenwald. Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm thrilled to be here. We've

00:00:36.340 been working for a while for me to get here, and I'm glad it finally worked out, and I appreciate

00:00:40.260 the invitation. It's great to have you on the show. We're so keen to speak with you, Glenn.

00:00:45.140 We try not to focus on the day-to-day events and occurrences. I know you cover those as well,

00:00:50.120 but the question we really wanted to start with is kind of to ask you the broader question,

00:00:55.040 which is what the hell is going on with journalism?

00:00:58.880 I think that you have to begin with the premise that the Trump era radically transformed almost every aspect of American political and cultural life,

00:01:10.740 which, if you think about it, is not that difficult to understand why.

00:01:15.340 if large sectors of the society convince themselves that the person who has risen to

00:01:22.340 power in a country is really this unprecedented threat, never before seen menace to all good

00:01:29.420 things in the world, essentially, and often literally the kind of return of like a Hitler 0.72

00:01:35.400 like figure, it's going to change everything that you do in terms of how you process the

00:01:42.180 world the decisions you make the things that you come to believe aren't aren't justifiable

00:01:47.060 and i think that number one there was a lot of true believers who really did see trump in that

00:01:55.100 manner and therefore their decisions and making and behavior change very radically as a result

00:02:02.300 but i also think that they this incentive scheme arose in which the people who fed that paranoid

00:02:10.300 I believe, for the ones who are most rewarded. They were most rewarded, not just financially,

00:02:15.160 although definitely that as well, but with more attention, more positive feedback on social media.

00:02:23.440 Those are very powerful incentives for human beings to which journalists are not even close

00:02:28.900 to immune. And so once you start looking at journalism, not as this profession that's designed

00:02:36.800 to inform the public regardless of who it aggrandizes or impedes, but instead as this

00:02:44.820 kind of moral obligation to stop this profound threat where you turn yourself into just nothing

00:02:51.040 but activist by definition, obviously it's going to radically transform the work that's done under

00:02:56.940 the banner of journalism. And I think that more than anything is what happens.

00:03:00.820 And let me ask you this, because a lot of people are just having watched the last two minutes of

00:03:05.440 you talking about what's happened to the media might listen to that and think, well, Glenn is

00:03:10.520 a massive fan of Donald Trump and he's just upset that other journalists didn't love him as much as

00:03:16.140 he does. So how, you know, first of all, can you address that and also just talk to us about what

00:03:21.080 an actually a good journalist would have done in the Trump era? Yeah. So, you know, if you, I mean,

00:03:28.560 I've been in journalism for 15 years. I've been largely associated with the left, not just in the U.S., but also in Brazil, where I do a lot of work.

00:03:38.820 My husband is a member of Congress with an actual socialist party. You know, the biggest influence on my political and journalistic outlook is Noam Chomsky.

00:03:51.080 And before that, I have stone. I think it's a very hard case to make, given my views on individual issues to claim that I'm somehow some kind of a fan of Donald Trump, of course, though, of course, that's often what's asserted, though.

00:04:04.900 I don't really think anyone actually believes that. I think my real split with the kind of mainstream sector of the media and the liberal left came not because they actually think that I love Donald Trump or I'm a fan of his ideology.

00:04:17.720 I don't think anyone who's remotely sane actually thinks that the split came over the question of whether you see Trump as some kind of a radical aberration from the American political tradition or simply a cruder and almost more candid reflection of it.

00:04:36.980 And I'd say most journalists were in the former category, and I was definitely in the latter.

00:04:40.820 I see Trump way more as a symptom of American pathologies than as a cause or the prime author of them.

00:04:48.660 If I did see him like a kind of Hitler-esque figure, I would actually probably have been more willing to think and behave in the way that they did. 0.86

00:04:59.540 And here in Brazil, for example, I would never say that Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, the far-right president, is anything like a Hitler figure.

00:05:07.280 But he definitely is a greater threat to Brazilian democracy than Trump ever was to American democracy for a whole bunch of reasons,

00:05:13.740 principally leading with the fact that Brazilian democracy is only 35 years old, not 235 years old.

00:05:20.260 Half the population lived under an actual military dictatorship, and therefore its institutions are much more fragile.

00:05:25.760 I always knew that in the U.S. there were these, you know, kind of permanent power centers like the intelligence community, the military industrial complex, Wall Street, whose existence is solely about preserving status quo, stability and power.

00:05:41.540 And Trump was never near strong enough to meaningfully challenge them.

00:05:45.540 The most he ever did was kind of tweet some crazy things. But if you look at the actual conduct of his government, it very much resembled what came before him and what has come after him as well.

00:05:58.060 So I think the primary split in how I see Trump isn't about whether I like him or not. It's about how much of a subversive force I thought he was in American politics.

00:06:10.340 And I actually thought the ways in which he was subversive and disruptive were largely positive.

00:06:15.580 But most of what he did was just kind of continue through negligence, if nothing else, how America has been conducting itself basically since the end of World War II, and especially when it became the only superpower with the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:06:31.640 And Glenn, it seems to me that the media has just abandoned nuance.

00:06:36.060 They're not interested in nuance, whether they're talking about Trump, whether they're talking about Biden.

00:06:41.540 We saw that with the election of Biden.

00:06:43.920 What happened to balanced journalism, which analyzed both sides of the argument?

00:06:49.320 Well, as I said, you know, look, if I actually believed that U.S. democracy was imperiled by a singular leader and the movement behind him,

00:07:01.140 and he had designs to impose what we had always talked about as some kind of a fascist

00:07:08.660 government or regime that was going to put an end to democratic institutions and democratic values,

00:07:16.260 I would probably be willing to do things to fight that even under the guise of journalism

00:07:22.040 that under normal circumstances I'd be unwilling to do because I would probably decide that the

00:07:27.800 threat and the moral imperative to stop it is so great that it outweighs the norms and duties of

00:07:36.620 the profession of journalism. So I think that once you begin operating from this premise

00:07:43.400 that you're on the front lines fighting a fascistic takeover of your country, which is

00:07:49.980 really what many of them either pretend to believe or in fact believe. I think the line

00:07:55.080 between those two things eventually blurs. Because if you pretend to believe something

00:08:00.000 long enough, you ultimately start believing it. If you really do believe that, then journalistic

00:08:07.180 norms, why would, I mean, it would be almost immoral to be constrained by those, right? Because

00:08:12.000 you're talking about wording off fascism. So I think that delusion, you know, beginning with

00:08:21.420 the the, you know, contrived conspiracy theory that Putin had infiltrated American institutions

00:08:29.100 like straight out of the 1950s, like the CIA labs of the 1950s, that the Kremlin had contaminated 0.69

00:08:35.540 American political life and converted people into clandestine agents at the highest levels of

00:08:41.100 government into then believing that Trump was like a couple of days from just like putting

00:08:46.280 racial minorities into camps when you work yourself up into that kind of frenzied mania 0.98

00:08:52.740 then i think it's almost rational to start behaving the way that they behave which is

00:08:57.600 not caring if what you're saying is true or false not caring if you adhere to any kind of

00:09:03.100 journalistic ethics or norms doing everything you can even if it means lying and publishing

00:09:07.720 falsehoods to stop this fascistic threat which is why i say i believe the crucial split is over who

00:09:13.480 sees Trump that way and who doesn't. And what effect does that have on society, Glenn,

00:09:19.160 when the media are trying to essentially push a narrative? They're not there to investigate,

00:09:24.260 to challenge, and then to report back. What effect does that have on society? But let's be fair,

00:09:30.620 because America leads the world on this, on the globe as a whole.

00:09:34.760 Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating to me that corporate media outlets and the employees who work for them love incessantly to talk about the dangers of fake news and disinformation.

00:09:50.200 And they love to lament the fact that people now turn away from them and no longer believe them and believe the sources of information that they regard as inferior to them or less reliable than they are.

00:10:03.620 And in the course of lamenting this pathology, which is a genuine problem, you need a society, if it's going to be healthy, a democracy, it's going to be healthy to have sources of information that most people in this society, even if they have different ideologies, can more or less trust to tell them what's going on in the world.

00:10:24.100 And if you lose that, you lose a really important stabilizing force and ability for people to even have shared perceptions of the facts and reality.

00:10:35.580 In all the discussions about how that's happening and how bad it is, they almost never stop and ask the question, why has that happened?

00:10:45.080 because the answer is they play a central role in why people have lost faith and trust in those

00:10:53.240 institutions of journalism that have long been regarded as legitimate by most people they

00:10:59.460 were the ones who sold the country the lies that led to the invasion of iraq they were the ones who 0.95

00:11:05.720 glorified the people who brought us the 2008 financial crisis from which people continue to

00:11:11.660 suffered to this very day. And people are not dumb. They understood, they saw for themselves 0.88

00:11:16.780 that the media was willing to do and say anything to stop Donald Trump. And once you have this

00:11:22.780 series of episodes that justifiably and validly cause a huge portion of the population to no

00:11:30.000 longer place their faith and trust in established corporate media institutions, of course they're

00:11:35.620 going to start looking elsewhere for their news. And I do regard that as genuinely tragic, even

00:11:42.620 though I believe the people who are doing that are acting appropriately. I also don't trust those

00:11:48.680 institutions. I regard it, though, as damaging, because I do think a healthy society needs

00:11:56.300 a kind of group of institutions you can rely on and trust. And part of my project is not to try

00:12:05.540 and destroy these institutions, but to try and rebuild faith and trust in journalism by showing

00:12:11.400 that it can still be done in a way that it can inspire confidence among people who have differing

00:12:17.440 religious values, political beliefs, ideologies, and the like.

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00:12:50.660 and get in touch today. And Glenn, what would you say to those people who go, look, here's

00:12:56.580 the reality. The media have always been lying to us. They've always been trying to pull the

00:13:00.720 wool over our eyes. It's just now in 2016, in the age of the internet, we are able to see it for

00:13:06.740 ourselves. There's definitely validity to that argument. As you probably know, before I became

00:13:16.280 a journalist, I was working as a lawyer, a constitutional lawyer, and I started writing

00:13:20.960 about politics at the end of 2005. I just created a kind of free blog on what was called Blogspot

00:13:27.740 at the time, this free blogging platform from Google, in large part because I was looking at

00:13:35.820 the developments in the wake of 9-11 and the war on terror and felt that the media was not only

00:13:43.800 ignoring really crucial assaults on civil liberties, but often was lying about what was

00:13:49.560 taking place. And the more I looked, you know, it was the first time I paid attention as a full-time

00:13:56.160 job to politics and journalism as opposed to law, the more I began realizing that this has been a

00:14:03.180 long-standing problem. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA partnered with all of the major

00:14:10.520 corporate institutions, media institutions in the United States to disseminate propaganda.

00:14:14.960 They would engineer coups and they would have Time Magazine or the New York Times call it,

00:14:19.500 you know, a popular revolution or, you know, blow against tyranny. Conversely, when they had

00:14:27.700 democratically elected leaders they didn't like, they would have those media outlets call them

00:14:31.580 tyrants and then hail the replacements who were anointed by the U.S. with no votes as protectors

00:14:38.780 of democracy. So this closeness between the security state and large standing corporate

00:14:45.920 media outlets has been going on again since the security state was created at the end of world

00:14:51.140 war ii and as i said that's the reason why it wasn't right-wing media outlets that helped the

00:14:59.280 bush administration sell the country on the iraq war it was the liberal outlets like the new york

00:15:04.700 times and the new yorker and the atlantic and nbc news because those institutions despite being more

00:15:12.400 liberal on cultural issues were completely inextricably linked with and deferential to

00:15:17.880 the government. And that created all kinds of deceit and propaganda. So it isn't that it's a

00:15:24.440 new problem at all. I've been writing about it long before anyone dreamed that Donald Trump could

00:15:30.160 be president. Obviously, many other people before me were doing the same. I think that what happened

00:15:36.960 in the trump administration is that all of that went on to steroids um you know at the very least

00:15:43.380 even though the media often propagandized on questions of safe foreign policy and barely

00:15:47.840 ever questioned the security state when it came to the kind of day-to-day trivial warfare between

00:15:54.120 the two primary political parties the republicans and democrats they would at least make an effort

00:15:58.440 to have a pretense of objectivity between the two parties not to favor one or the other

00:16:04.320 And that, I think, is more than anything what that that one kind of notion of fairness that they were clinging to.

00:16:13.180 Ultimately, even that got destroyed. So they just became open propaganda arms of the Democratic Party and engaged in open warfare against the Republican Party, all in the name of stopping Donald Trump.

00:16:25.760 And I think that is what that's what took what was already clearly a systemic problem, but made it a much, much greater problem and a more visible problem than ever before.

00:16:37.520 So, Glenn, what about now, though? Because, look, they got what they wanted.

00:16:41.320 The Joe Biden is president. The Democrats are free to do almost whatever they want.

00:16:48.160 You know, the kids the kids are still in cages, but they don't have to cover it and all of that.

00:16:52.920 They're not cages anymore. They're detention facilities.

00:16:55.760 That's correct. Of course they are. And so why are their brains still broken? They got Trump out.

00:17:01.780 Why can't they just relax and start reporting the truth now?

00:17:05.000 Well, for one thing, if you look at what has happened to them, a lot of people forget that

00:17:12.280 before Trump came down that golden escalator with Melania in 2015 and announced that he was

00:17:17.820 running for president, most of these media outlets were on the verge of complete financial ruin.

00:17:23.740 You can go back and find, for example, in articles in 2014 and 2015 that MSNBC was on the verge of firing its entire primetime lineup with the exception of Rachel Maddow because nobody was watching their shows.

00:17:36.920 And The New York Times, people really doubted whether they were going to actually be able to have a sustainable financial model.

00:17:43.880 Trump saved almost the entire media industry single-handedly.

00:17:47.780 Ratings went through the roof.

00:17:51.580 Enormous numbers of books were sold.

00:17:53.380 people got very rich off, you know, activism and warnings over Donald Trump. The ACLU was laying

00:17:59.860 off its entire workforce basically in the Obama years. No one wanted the ACLU suing Obama on the

00:18:05.580 grounds that he was acting unconstitutionally. But then soon as, you know, they positioned

00:18:09.720 themselves as the primary opponent to Trump, they're drowning in money. So they don't want,

00:18:15.260 he's a cash cow. So they don't want to, you know, go back to just talking. No one wants to hear

00:18:19.740 about Joe Biden. And that's why their audience is disappearing. And it's disappearing very quickly.

00:18:26.820 So they're just desperate, you know, trying to kind of pump life into this corpse that is the

00:18:32.620 Trump presidency. But people know he's gone. And so it's not working. It is true that even though

00:18:39.240 Trump is no longer in power, there is his movement that still has some degree of influence. I mean,

00:18:46.660 there's members of Congress and the Senate who still espouses ideology. One of them is going to

00:18:52.660 be the Republican nominee almost certainly in 2024 if Trump himself, as they're hoping and

00:18:57.980 preying on their knees on a daily basis, runs again himself in 2024. So part of it is just the

00:19:06.080 profit model. They need the villain, the scary monster, right? It's like, you know, if you have

00:19:12.160 the game of thrones you can't kill off cersei the queen because who are you going to hate and

00:19:17.340 care about and be angry towards that's kind of what trump is for these media outlets so they

00:19:22.320 need to kind of prop them up and keep them alive and and convince themselves that the threat is

00:19:26.120 still there but also i think some of them again do genuinely believe that there's this fascist

00:19:31.980 movement lurking in the united states ready to take over at any moment and the hysteria and

00:19:37.060 mania and paranoia and delusions and psychological and anxiety disorders that govern their brains

00:19:42.400 and have since 2016 really haven't gone anywhere.

00:19:46.960 And so you listen to them and it does sound like they think it's 2018,

00:19:50.400 in part because they want it to be and need it to be,

00:19:53.060 but also in part because they still believe that it really is.

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00:21:00.340 but glenn doesn't that mean that we have a media that is no longer fit for purpose

00:21:05.540 the whole point of the media surely isn't it to hold the rich and powerful to account

00:21:09.760 that's a that's not like a nice you know fairy tale i mean you know again look like the reality

00:21:18.440 is the the media like you know 30 years ago when we talked about the media we were only talking

00:21:25.280 about gigantic corporations that could afford, you know, cameras and studios and satellites and

00:21:32.760 network fees, or families that had long owned printing presses and gigantic newsrooms that

00:21:40.080 employed hundreds, if not thousands of reporters and editors and the like. So obviously, it's long

00:21:46.480 been the wealthy and powerful that have controlled and owned the media. And so the media has largely

00:21:51.700 served the purpose for the last, say, 30 to 40 years of serving the interest of power centers.

00:21:58.640 Before that, if you go back kind of before the corporatization of the media, which for me began

00:22:04.320 in, say, the 50s and 60s, for the first half of the 20th century, journalism really was this,

00:22:10.100 like, outsider profession. They mostly came from working class backgrounds. They didn't make much

00:22:17.680 money. They were big union activists. They all had labor, you know, they all had newspaper guilds

00:22:25.060 and they felt like outsiders. They didn't go to school with the powerful and rich people

00:22:31.980 they were covering. They hated those people. Like they had the outsider mentality. And it

00:22:36.400 really started changing when television became popular and we started having multimillionaire

00:22:40.660 news anchors and people aspiring to be rich and famous in journalism. And suddenly they were in

00:22:45.460 the same social circles as the rich and powerful. And then the owners of those outlets were corporate

00:22:51.640 conglomerates who obviously don't want any disruptions to the status quo and prevailing

00:22:56.820 ruling class. And so I think it became much more an agent of preservation of power. I think the

00:23:03.700 internet, though, is potentially a genuine threat to that hegemonic order. And it's the reason why

00:23:11.840 whenever an independent outlet starts to succeed the way first social media did twitter youtube

00:23:20.240 facebook they instantly started agitating for controls on those platforms don't let people

00:23:27.600 say this kick them off if they say that and now that there are other outlets that are

00:23:33.400 specifically created to avoid the kind of captivity to censorship demands that

00:23:39.180 big tech monopolies have succumbed to, they are obviously waging war against any of those that

00:23:46.520 start to have an influence. You saw that yesterday with the news that I and seven or eight other

00:23:51.360 people, including former presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, went to Rumble,

00:23:55.740 a kind of YouTube competitor that is designed to ensure free speech, unlike YouTube does.

00:24:00.960 Same when I quit The Intercept and went to Substack and started having a big audience there.

00:24:05.860 any platform that they can't control that is used that that is empowered by the internet so you

00:24:12.560 don't need any more gigantic printing press to reach hundreds of thousands of millions of people

00:24:16.740 you just need an internet connection um even to produce television shows now basically you can

00:24:22.820 do that with the technology as we're doing right this moment you know that's why they're waging so

00:24:28.680 much such a war of you know defamation and smear campaigns because they do believe correctly

00:24:37.000 that the internet is finally fulfilling its purpose of providing a way for human beings

00:24:43.300 to emancipate themselves from the from control of centralized media and political power and that

00:24:50.680 for me is you know the most important war there is I see the snow work I did with Edward Snowden

00:24:55.300 in 2013 about whether we're going to have a free internet or the internet will be a weapon of

00:25:00.580 coercion and control. And I obviously see that as the same cause now in fighting against online

00:25:05.760 censorship. And Glenn, just coming back, because one of the things we've addressed with the

00:25:10.580 mainstream media is obviously the bias, and that's been a big factor in the last few years.

00:25:15.360 But it seems to me like there's also another thing that has happened, and I don't know whether

00:25:19.160 they're related or not. Tell me what you think about this, which is the media has not only been

00:25:24.480 slanted or elements of it have been, but it's also lost its explanatory power. Even if you watch a

00:25:31.440 relatively objective reporting on, say, like we're in London, right? And a few minutes walk from here

00:25:38.000 a few years ago, a terrorist stabbed a number of people to death on London Bridge. Now, if you

00:25:44.240 watched a report about that, you would almost certainly not understand what motivated him,

00:25:50.040 Who were the people who supported him? What drove him to do it? Where he came from? What the movement that he represents is like, it doesn't give you the context that's sufficient to actually understand what's going on. How is that? Is that something that's always been there? Or is that a new development as well?

00:26:07.280 Yeah, I absolutely think that that is becoming the way that journalists behave is that they see that they kind of look like I think that elite liberal culture, by which I just mean, say, the highly educated professional classes who tend to congregate in large cities and and capitals, obviously in your country in London and in the United States, New York and Washington and San Francisco and Los Angeles do genuinely see themselves.

00:26:37.280 as this kind of class of nobles,

00:26:43.600 you know, this kind of enlightened class

00:26:46.220 who cannot trust the rabble 1.00

00:26:50.760 to make good decisions on their own,

00:26:54.160 that you can't just give them information

00:26:55.840 and leave it to them to decide.

00:26:57.260 For example, that terrorist attack

00:26:58.500 that you're talking about,

00:26:59.500 you can describe what the motives were, right?

00:27:02.360 It was, I don't know all the details

00:27:04.720 of the case you're describing,

00:27:06.120 And so just using this hypothetically, you could say it's the person who did this attack is a Muslim. 0.98

00:27:13.080 He's a Muslim extremist. He's an extremist, both in his religious convictions and in his political convictions. 0.96

00:27:19.300 He did it partly because he hates the permissive social mores of the United Kingdom and Western culture.

00:27:26.500 he also did it in part because of anger at his perception that western countries are interfering

00:27:33.400 in the muslim part of the world by propping up dictators and bombing innocent men women and 1.00

00:27:38.640 children and then you leave it to the public to decide how to evaluate that is the threat that

00:27:45.120 this religion has not gone through reformation and therefore is actually a threat in and of

00:27:51.000 itself islam is it that they don't they're not compatible with western values and can't integrate 1.00

00:27:58.740 or assimilate or is it that we're actually sowing the seeds of our own attacks through

00:28:05.060 the constant attempt to try and control and interfere in and invade and they're part of

00:28:10.240 the world and take their resources and that it's what the cia calls blowback it's probably a

00:28:15.600 combination of all those things in different cases and then you can evaluate what policies

00:28:19.600 do I want to support to stop that? What do I think? But the journalist class doesn't trust

00:28:24.100 people to make those decisions for themselves because they see them as primitive and ignorant, 0.97

00:28:30.000 tragodites, and therefore need to be led and guided to how to think. And sometimes that means 0.95

00:28:37.220 deceiving them. One of the most interesting things, I think, is the admissions on at least

00:28:43.180 two occasions over the last year during the COVID pandemic by Dr. Fauci, the lead scientist in the

00:28:49.120 united states that at least on two occasions he purposely misled the country thinking it was for

00:28:55.000 everyone's own good not to know the truth once when he told everybody not to wear masks um

00:29:00.520 presumably because he wanted to make sure that masks were for health care professionals and so

00:29:07.980 instead of admitting the truth he told them masks don't work and then who knows how many people went

00:29:13.760 out onto the street without masks and picked up covid and died but then on another occasion he

00:29:19.600 admitted even more clearly when he was always asked what percentage of the population needs

00:29:23.940 to be infected for us to reach herd immunity he admitted that he lied based on polling data about

00:29:29.700 what the country was willing to hear that he lowered it to 65 when he really believed it was

00:29:35.100 75 or 80 because he didn't think people were ready to hear the truth that is the mentality of somebody

00:29:41.420 who believes that they are so enlightened that their lies are noble lies and i think this has

00:29:47.320 become a common uh view of the educated classes in western democracies and the thing is when you

00:29:56.060 have contempt for people and you condescend to them and you show them that you believe that

00:30:01.920 they're ignorant and inferior they know that they feel that and the only reaction that that will 0.86

00:30:09.240 produce in any healthy human being is to make those people who are being judged that way feel 0.99

00:30:15.100 contempt for the authorities and institutions of power who are expressing that for them. And I

00:30:22.140 think you see this over and over and over. I know here in Brazil, a big reason why Bolsonaro was

00:30:28.460 elected in a country that four consecutive elections had elected a center-left or even

00:30:34.040 left-wing party the workers party of lula de soba was because the institutions that they hate kept

00:30:40.060 telling them they couldn't do it i think following british politics a big reason why brexit passed

00:30:45.820 is because the mavens of elite liberal discourse the oxbridge crowd in london were telling them 0.95

00:30:54.080 you can't vote for brexit and it was a big fuck you and they said i'm gonna vote for brexit 0.94

00:30:59.620 Obviously, the election of Trump has similar overtones. 0.97

00:31:03.120 A lot of people who twice voted for Obama voted for Trump.

00:31:06.780 Obviously, something was going on there besides ideology.

00:31:10.120 So I think this kind of contempt that the elite class has for those that they regard as inferior to them is driving a huge part of these dynamics.

00:31:21.000 And you say it's driving a huge part of these dynamics, Glenn.

00:31:24.360 It almost seems like the same parallel thing is happening with the left, particularly the left political parties. Labor in our countries, Democrats in yours.

00:31:35.800 Yeah, I think, you know, you see this dynamic playing out in particularly liberal precincts, because in the United States, the Democratic Party went from being the party of labor and workers and minorities as it was primarily constituted in the 50s, 60s and 70s and into the 80s.

00:32:02.480 And then with Bill Clinton, he had an explicit project to remake the Democratic Party into a party that would serve corporate interests so that they weren't outspent any longer by the Republican Party, so that the power centers weren't opposed to them.

00:32:18.740 A very similar trajectory with the Labour Party, obviously under Tony Blair.

00:32:22.940 I'm nodding vigorously as you say that, Glenn. I was just thinking that sounds exactly like Tony Blair here in the UK.

00:32:28.440 I mean, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are, you know, in my view, political twins. And, you know, the victories that each of them had as unniably skilled politicians, you know, made people think that that was the only path that that should be taken.

00:32:42.760 And it turned out, you know, at least in the U.S., that that kind of politics drove the working class out of the precincts of the Democratic Party.

00:32:55.080 And obviously, labor currently has a huge difficulty, even with the incredibly charismatic and earthly Sir Keir Starmer winning in northern industrialized, you know, working class constituencies for the same reason that if you make this party, the reason why Joe Biden won, people don't really understand this.

00:33:19.120 You know, for all the talk about how Trump is like a white nationalist and a racist and hates Latinos, his percentage of the vote among racial minorities, especially Latinos, increased significantly, increased in 2016 as compared to previous Republican nominees, but then increased even more in 2020.

00:33:39.860 The reason Donald Trump lost and Joe Biden won, barely, is because a lot of wealthy suburbanites, white professional college educated suburbanites who had long voted Republican, kind of a Mitt Romney type Republican, found Donald Trump too crude and voted for Joe Biden.

00:33:59.060 So the Democrats became even more of this like professionalized, you know, highly educated, mid to upper class party. And I think you see the same thing happening, you know, to the Labor Party.

00:34:14.760 They have no way out of, you know, the alienation that they have bred among working class voters.

00:34:21.200 And so they're just kind of trying to desperately lean into a strategy that says, well, we'll just, you know, make ourselves more amenable to the kind of people who have traditionally voted for Tories.

00:34:30.700 And it's failing in the UK and it's failing in the United States because you cannot win as a party that is, you know, viewed as an elitist party.

00:34:42.460 And I think both the Starmer wing, the Blairites of Labour and the Clintonites and the Liberals and Obamas and Bidens of the Democratic Party are both perceived that way correctly and accurately.

00:34:55.280 and it's amazing

00:34:58.520 and I'd never put the two together

00:35:00.020 what happened to the media

00:35:01.380 and what happened to the left

00:35:02.920 do you think there's any way back

00:35:04.880 for either the political institution

00:35:07.780 of the left

00:35:09.020 and the media itself

00:35:11.040 do you think there's any way

00:35:12.080 to save these two political

00:35:13.600 the movement and the media

00:35:15.860 or do you think we need to start again

00:35:18.200 we need to abolish these things

00:35:20.100 or let them crumble

00:35:21.660 and rebuild as it were

00:35:25.280 You know, I think the problem is that it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle because in the United States, what has happened is, you know, in 2016, there was an impressive left-wing movement for the first time in, I would say, several decades in the United States.

00:35:44.040 It wasn't a hard left movement, but it was a left-ish movement that coalesced around Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of it came from the fact that the 2008 financial crisis and the neoliberal policies of the Democratic Party had caused an entire generation of people to lose all hope for the future.

00:36:05.080 they live with their parents until they're 30 or older in larger percentages than at any time since

00:36:10.920 the great depression um they can't get married until they're in their mid-30s and even then

00:36:17.520 with great difficulty both parents have to work outside the house it's very hard to raise a child

00:36:22.000 that way um and they're angry and they became kind of you know amenable for the first time to

00:36:29.260 a kind of left-wing politics that railed against big finance globalism big tech wall street and

00:36:38.100 bernie sanders came very close to beating hillary clinton in 2016 had the dnc not cheated

00:36:44.340 in the ways that wikileaks revealed he probably would have beaten her which is you know he started

00:36:51.760 off as this very obscure, old Brooklyn Jew who wasn't even a member of the Democratic Party.

00:37:00.040 Obviously, no one thought he could get anywhere close to taking down the mammoth Clinton machine

00:37:05.500 that was funded by billionaires and had demonstrated this huge centralized power

00:37:10.200 for decades. It was almost invulnerable, and yet he almost beat her. And that was a kind of sign

00:37:15.680 that left-wing politics could really revitalize um and then obviously the victory by people like

00:37:22.380 alexander ocasio-cortez against the long-term democratic kind of standard you know backroom

00:37:28.700 lobbyist funded politician fed that perception but then what happened was the fear that

00:37:36.180 contaminated the left over donald trump made the left rush into the arms of the democratic party

00:37:42.940 So there's almost no distance any longer between the Democrats and the left.

00:37:48.220 I see a lot of that, at least with kind of I mean, I would say like one of the most prominent left wing, you know, voices in the UK is let's like say Owen Jones, someone who has like a decent sized platform.

00:38:02.080 And at the end of the day, you know, even if it's this like Blairite candidate as the one who just ran Joe Cox's sister, there he is saying, no matter what, you have to vote for labor.

00:38:13.120 You have to vote labor, even though what's amazing to me about that is the Democratic Party has made clear that it despises the American left.

00:38:22.080 It humiliated Bernie Sanders.

00:38:23.940 It has humiliated AOC.

00:38:25.580 They just humiliated Bernie Sanders totally gratuitously when one of his closest allies ran for Congress.

00:38:30.920 and for no reason other than a desire to show how much they hate the left they intervened in that

00:38:35.500 race and poured millions and millions of dollars into helping her opponent win and they succeeded 1.00

00:38:40.980 just like the blairite link of the labor party made very clear that they would rather sabotage

00:38:47.380 jeremy corbyn and lose to theresa may or boris johnson than win with jeremy corbyn no matter how

00:38:54.020 much the laborites or the democrats show that they despise the left and are going to spit in

00:39:00.640 their face at every chance they get, both the British left and the American left remain

00:39:05.200 incredibly subservient.

00:39:06.880 It's almost like a very uncomfortable S&M ritual to watch.

00:39:09.760 Like the more they're humiliated and the more contempt is shown for them, the more submissive

00:39:15.280 they get.

00:39:16.440 So I barely see like a left wing movement in the UK or the US separate and apart from

00:39:22.980 the establishment Labour Party or the Democratic Party.

00:39:27.200 And I also see the media getting worse.

00:39:29.340 So that's why the only thing that interests me are creating new platforms and new institutions that are constituted by other ways of thinking about the world beyond traditional liberal versus conservative or left versus right ideological categories that to me are becoming increasingly archaic and ossified.

00:39:55.420 I just think rebuilding competing institutions is the only prospect that is a cause for any optimism at all.

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00:41:47.480 it's interesting that you make that point because one of the of the things that we should all

00:41:53.780 acknowledge i suppose is you've built obviously a very successful career as an independent journalist

00:41:58.860 now your sub stack is huge you've got a huge following on twitter etc etc you're now on rumble

00:42:03.820 and we ourselves you know we're we're doing very well with our show on youtube and elsewhere

00:42:08.180 as kind of independent journalists stroke commentators all three of us

00:42:12.000 But there is something to be said for big media corporations, their ability to do investigative journalism by employing lots of people to sift through billions of pages of documents and things like that.

00:42:26.240 Like, we do need some form of corporate media, don't we?

00:42:31.580 Well, yes and no.

00:42:34.120 So you're right.

00:42:35.460 I mean, I've always maintained my status as an independent journalist, but in the most important reporting I've done in my career, I've worked with large institutions.

00:42:47.240 I probably wouldn't have been able to do the Snowden reporting had I not been able to lure The Guardian into doing it with me.

00:42:54.680 I needed the teams of editors and fact checkers and lawyers and money that only a big institution like that could provide.

00:43:03.700 I couldn't have reported on a gigantic archive of that technical complexity alone I probably would

00:43:10.340 have been prosecuted had I just been off on my own I think a big reason why Julian Assange is in

00:43:14.680 prison and I'm not is because he hasn't ever really aligned himself that way with large

00:43:21.560 corporate institutions when I did my reporting here in Brazil um over the last couple of years

00:43:27.940 that ended up freeing Lula da Silva and, you know, ushering in a lot of changes in Brazilian

00:43:34.360 politics and a lot of reform. Not only did I have the Intercept Brazil that I had created that was

00:43:39.560 funded by a billionaire, I also ended up partnering on purpose with the largest newspaper in Brazil

00:43:44.620 and also the largest news weekly in Brazil. Because not only did I need the financial resources that

00:43:50.760 they can provide, the, you know, expertise that journalists have that I don't have,

00:43:55.480 um technologists to work with you to decipher the material but then also you know kind of the army

00:44:02.380 of lawyers and and and voices you need if you're going to battle the government they absolutely

00:44:07.760 agree with you you do need resources and institutional power in order to do that kind

00:44:13.660 of reporting and that's why i say i i don't my you know my mission my project is not to

00:44:20.880 destroy the model of media. I believe in journalism a lot. But it's only worthwhile

00:44:29.220 if it's actually fulfilling its function. And so what I've always tried to do is balance

00:44:34.020 that independence that you talked about with kind of looking at those institutions as something that

00:44:40.200 I use and exploit rather than kind of submit myself to. You know, I worked with The Guardian

00:44:50.120 in and then left um and i always kept control of the archive and never gave it to them um i did

00:44:56.520 similar things at the brazil reporting so i think it's a balance um but i also think that the more

00:45:02.200 people lose faith and trust in the media the more possible it's going to become to build independent

00:45:08.340 alternatives that do have real funding whether because the public supports it so much that you

00:45:15.100 can generate enough revenue to build it into a real institution you can attract funders who

00:45:20.920 also see the same things that we're talking about and have a lot of resources all of which i think

00:45:26.320 are possible so creating a new space in media i think is is crucial but you're right it's it can't

00:45:32.500 just be you know some youtubers over here monetizing their audience and making a nice living

00:45:38.240 or a single substacker over here who's living well.

00:45:42.420 You do sometimes need large teams

00:45:45.340 in order to take on powerful institutions.

00:45:48.260 And let me just push back on the idea

00:45:50.460 about people creating content for themselves,

00:45:54.600 building these new institutions, as it were.

00:45:57.480 Let's look at the example of Parler.

00:46:00.080 Let's look at what the powers that be did to Parler.

00:46:02.560 They essentially pulled the plug.

00:46:04.820 I mean, they can do that to any of us.

00:46:06.360 we're all in you know we're all at the behest of big tech yeah i mean that is a crucial question

00:46:14.160 um i actually you know it's funny i was on fox last night and i made the point that i think the

00:46:20.300 destruction of parlor is one of the most overlooked stories of the last year if not the single most

00:46:25.140 overlooked in terms of what it really showed the only thing i would compare it to is the decision

00:46:30.240 by facebook and twitter to ban any reporting on the hunter biden archive in the week absolutely

00:46:35.660 That was absolutely extraordinary. But that got some attention. The destruction of Parler happened so quickly and it was in the wake of the January 6th riot that a lot of people overlooked it.

00:46:45.700 But what people forget is that, you know, after January 6th, when Facebook and Twitter removed Donald Trump from the Internet, basically, even as world leaders objected, including world leaders who never had any good things to say about Trump, Angela Merkel found it alarming.

00:47:04.520 Emmanuel Macron did too. The president of Mexico was very eloquent in denouncing the dangers.

00:47:11.600 People migrated to Parler because they wanted a place where you could be free of that

00:47:17.620 just ability of big tech to zap even the elected president of the most powerful country in the

00:47:22.680 world off the internet. It's incredibly chilling. And Parler became such a success that it was the

00:47:30.100 single most downloaded app on Apple and Google Play stores, more than Facebook, more than

00:47:35.780 Instagram, more than TikTok, more than anything. It was the most popular app that people were

00:47:42.980 downloading and using. And AOC and a bunch of other Democratic politicians went on to Twitter

00:47:48.940 and said, Google and Apple, how can you allow a platform like this that is enabling insurrection

00:47:59.040 and right-wing violence on your stores.

00:48:02.280 And then obviously, knowing that the Democratic Party

00:48:05.520 was about to take over all branches of government,

00:48:07.860 when Apple and Google heard that, they responded.

00:48:10.740 They kicked Parler off their store

00:48:12.300 so you couldn't download it anymore.

00:48:14.260 And then AOC went back on Twitter and said,

00:48:16.140 thank you, Apple and Google.

00:48:17.120 Now, what about you, Amazon?

00:48:18.220 Why are you still hosting Parler on your web service?

00:48:21.860 And then Amazon did what Google and Apple did,

00:48:23.700 which was obeyed the demand and kicked Parler off.

00:48:25.880 And within 48 hours, this union of big tech monopolies and the Democratic Party destroyed the most single popular app that people were using to communicate with one another on the planet.

00:48:37.840 So the question you ask is a very important one. And all I can tell you is that obviously, alternative outlets like Substack, like Rumble, like others like that have watched that and realized that they need to come up with technical solutions to insulate themselves from those kind of attacks.

00:48:59.280 So they're not dependent on Amazon and Apple and Google, that they can build their own technological infrastructure that immunizes them from the ability of outside forces to destroy them if they get too powerful and too successful the way Parler did.

00:49:14.200 Obviously, there are a lot of people like Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter.

00:49:19.320 Long may he reign, Glenn.

00:49:20.460 Long may he reign, especially because he has now become probably the single most important voice advocating for the need for blockchain and crypto technologies, which will decentralize everything, turn them into protocols so that you can no longer, even if you want to, pull down content because people are using their own personal protocols that aren't dependent on anyone else.

00:49:46.260 I think that's a little ways away. It has its own questions and problems, but absolutely technological solutions to prevent the kind of thing we saw with Parler, but also with the censorship of the Hunter Biden reporting are of the highest and most urgent priority.

00:50:02.320 Glenn, I wasn't going to ask you this, but I think I ought to.

00:50:06.660 Do you think that, because I couldn't get, I couldn't get why people weren't getting,

00:50:11.000 you're the first person I've ever heard say what you've just said, which is what I said.

00:50:15.580 The moment, the morning that Hunter Biden's story was treated in the way that it was treated,

00:50:21.020 I walked into this very room and I said to the guys here, this is the biggest story of the year.

00:50:25.340 And everybody, them and everybody else kind of looked at me like, what are you talking about?

00:50:30.560 was that election interference in your opinion i mean a zillion times more than whatever they

00:50:37.240 claim russia did i mean think about it this reporting came from the oldest newspaper

00:50:44.800 in the united states the new york post founded by one of the founding fathers of the united

00:50:50.040 states alexander hamilton and yes it's murdoch-owned and yes it's you know tabloid-ish

00:50:56.980 but it also is a real newspaper and those documents were absolutely authentic yeah what

00:51:02.400 bothered me the most was the way they justified the way big tech justified i mean if you try

00:51:10.620 when i say ban i mean ban like if you try to post a link to those stories on twitter it wouldn't let

00:51:17.580 you it would just say that's an invalid link even if you wanted to dm somebody and speak privately

00:51:22.260 to them and show it to them. You couldn't even post it there. Facebook announced through a

00:51:27.520 Democratic Party operative who had spent 20 years working for Democratic Party politicians

00:51:32.020 and then went to Facebook. That's incredibly who they got to announce that they were going to

00:51:37.180 algorithmically suppress the story pending what they said was going to be a fact check to make

00:51:41.880 sure the documents were genuine. Of course, that fact check never came because the documents were.

00:51:45.660 So Facebook blocked the story from spreading Twitter, banned it completely. I think the reason

00:51:50.980 that um there wasn't a greater reaction is because the dominant sector of the media completely

00:51:58.780 supported that censorship which is mind-blowing i mean imagine if you're an authoritarian leader

00:52:07.900 of a country or you're an authoritarian oligarch and someone says to you like obviously it can't

00:52:14.760 happen but what would like if a genie came and granted you like one wish what would be your

00:52:19.600 greatest wish. You would say, my greatest wish is that journalists wouldn't oppose me, but would

00:52:25.420 instead become the leading advocates for authoritarianism and censorship, right? Like,

00:52:31.360 of course, that would never happen. Journalists would never become the leading advocates of

00:52:34.660 censorship by their nature. They don't want censorship. But somehow in the United States,

00:52:39.860 that's exactly what has happened. Journalists are by far the primary and most vocal and

00:52:45.000 relentless advocates and agitators for big tech censorship and they were thrilled that that

00:52:51.140 reporting was censored because they were petrified about Donald Trump winning the election and all

00:52:55.020 they cared about was making sure he loses even if it meant doing censoring and suppressing

00:53:00.460 legitimate reporting but what people also forget is the way that all got justified was that 50

00:53:06.560 former members of the intelligence community including former directors of the CIA

00:53:11.400 invented out of thin air the lie that those documents were the byproduct of Russian

00:53:20.040 disinformation. So that phrase, Russian disinformation, had two claims to it. Number

00:53:24.320 one, that those documents came from the Russians. And number two, that they were fake, that they

00:53:29.360 were inauthentic, forged. Both of those claims were absolute lies. But every media outlet,

00:53:36.880 including the intercept which i co-founded in 2014 to challenge the intelligence community not

00:53:43.820 to serve them published that lie that these documents were a russian disinformation to

00:53:49.800 justify not covering them and that was the uh so it wasn't just that big tech interfered in the

00:53:55.020 election it was that the cia did as well interfered in our domestic politics and prevented who knows

00:54:02.160 how many millions of people from hearing about you know obviously it's no one cares if under

00:54:07.420 biden is a drug addict or hiring prostitutes but the stories that were relevant were the fact that

00:54:12.820 he was pursuing deals in places like the ukraine in ukraine and china that the document suggests 0.51

00:54:18.820 included his father in profit participation deals which obviously raised real ethical questions

00:54:24.800 about the presidential front runner in a really close election it is a very high likelihood we'll

00:54:30.800 never be able to prove it, that suppressing that story by the millions swung the outcome of the

00:54:37.700 election. And it was a joint effort by the CIA, the liberal sector of the media and big tech

00:54:43.780 that was the coalition of power that engaged in brute censorship in order to manipulate the

00:54:50.500 outcome of the election. As I said, a zillion times more worrisome than whatever they claim

00:54:55.440 russia did even if you accept everything they say about russia was true right so glenn we've got this

00:55:02.640 problem with big tech how do you solve it do you think that we should be treated as monopolies and

00:55:08.040 effectively broken up i do um they are clearly monopolies i don't think twitter is a monopoly

00:55:15.580 but facebook google apple and amazon those four companies in particular are classic monopolies in

00:55:22.240 violation of antitrust laws i'm actually there is a subcommittee in congress um called the house

00:55:31.100 subcommittee on antitrust and uh other things i forget but they have jurisdiction over that

00:55:36.520 question and it's obviously led by the democrats since they're the majority party and they issued

00:55:41.040 a very impressive scholarly and comprehensive 450 page report saying concluding that these

00:55:49.160 four companies are classic monopolies a violation of the antitrust laws and proposing a series of

00:55:54.020 measures including breaking them up the problem is these companies are so rich that they fund

00:56:00.240 both parties that they haven't been able to generate the support necessary to do that and

00:56:06.500 what's particularly bothersome is you have all these you know right-wing politicians like

00:56:10.640 republican house members who love to go on fox news or oan or newsmax or social media

00:56:16.640 and denounce big tech and say big tech tyranny and all of that.

00:56:22.160 But at the end of the day, they're getting funded by the lobbyists for those companies.

00:56:26.360 They talk a big game, but they won't support these measures to break up these companies.

00:56:33.120 There are some Republicans who are now doing it.

00:56:35.460 They just got past the point where they believe democracy can withstand this manipulation.

00:56:41.160 So hopefully, and part of my project, is to try and bring the right and the left together

00:56:45.880 in their common hatred for these companies.

00:56:49.620 And that's what antitrust laws are for

00:56:51.780 because that's the only way you can deal with monopolies

00:56:53.860 by definition is you can't compete with them.

00:56:56.180 That's what makes them a monopoly.

00:56:58.600 I agree with you, Glenn. 1.00

00:56:59.960 And look, this is why this stupid left versus right game 1.00

00:57:03.700 is so fruitless and pointless 1.00

00:57:05.120 because we're ignoring the real issue,

00:57:07.080 which is essentially the big tech companies now,

00:57:10.180 to a large extent, decide who gets elected.

00:57:12.240 And that should worry us a lot more

00:57:13.820 than Jeremy Corbyn's giving money away

00:57:16.720 or Boris Johnson delivering

00:57:18.840 or not delivering Brexit or whatever else.

00:57:20.960 No, we could talk for hours,

00:57:22.120 but we've got to let you go.

00:57:23.720 So before we do a couple of questions

00:57:25.420 for our local supporters,

00:57:26.940 let us ask you our final question,

00:57:28.580 which is, as always,

00:57:29.640 what is the one thing we're not talking about

00:57:31.480 that we really should be?

00:57:35.620 You know, I knew you were going to ask that

00:57:36.980 because I've seen you ask that before.

00:57:39.580 So I should have had an answer ready

00:57:41.660 so I didn't have to do all this stammering

00:57:43.340 stuttering that I'm so obviously doing right now to give myself time to think about what the answer

00:57:47.940 might want to be. You know, I think that when, at least when it comes to U.S. politics and

00:57:56.080 also even British politics that tends to be a part of this, one of the things that seems to find

00:58:02.920 ongoing bipartisan consensus is the idea that these Western powers, NATO powers,

00:58:08.900 should continue to play this role in the world of operating these gigantic militaries and trying

00:58:16.800 to control the rest of the world through these gigantic expenditures that, as I said earlier,

00:58:21.760 often are what lead to people hating our countries and our governments. We bomb places, we kill them. 0.99

00:58:27.820 And with Afghanistan now unraveling and people realizing that 20 years of occupation of Afghanistan

00:58:33.200 at huge expense to the countries that did it, including yours and mine, basically accomplished

00:58:41.200 nothing as the Taliban now just take over the country as though none of it ever happened. 0.94

00:58:46.660 And it does seem to be the kind of policy that evades any kind of debate because it is supported

00:58:54.540 by both the establishment wings of, say, in your country, labor and conservative party and in the

00:59:00.740 United States, the Republican and Democrats. So I think it's time, you know, China just produced 1.00

00:59:05.460 this kind of trolling, mocking video about how they only spent $800 billion to create this

00:59:13.080 incredibly efficient, comprehensive, high speed rail system that obviously serves the Chinese.

00:59:20.560 You can go travel immense distances from one city to another in a very short period of time.

00:59:26.160 and it's very environmentally friendly as well,

00:59:29.600 while the US spent trillions of dollars

00:59:31.880 in a 20-year war in Afghanistan

00:59:33.640 and a 10-year war in Iraq

00:59:35.280 that produced no benefits for the American people.

00:59:38.080 And I think those kinds of debates

00:59:40.320 are ones that we probably should be having a lot more of.

00:59:44.120 Glenn, it has been an absolute pleasure.

00:59:46.560 If people want to find you online,

00:59:47.980 where would be the best place for that?

00:59:50.720 I write at Substack,

00:59:52.000 so you can find me there doing my journalism.

00:59:54.000 Obviously, I'm an active user of Twitter.

00:59:56.160 um and then i just this week uh have moved my video platform to rumble um because it's a free

01:00:04.460 speech platform and you can find my video journalism there fantastic glenn thanks so much

01:00:09.640 for coming on we're going to do a couple of quick questions for locals in the second but in the

01:00:13.600 meantime thank you all for tuning in watching and listening we'll see you very soon with another

01:00:18.040 brilliant episode like this one or raw show all of them go out 7 p.m uk time which is 2 p.m eastern

01:00:23.620 Take care and see you soon, guys.

TRIGGERnometry - August 25, 2021

S5： Glenn Greenwald： Why Journalism is Broken

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