00:00:21.820And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:27.460a brilliant guest we have for you today. He's one of America's finest and most principled
00:00:32.100journalists, Glenn Greenwald. Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm thrilled to be here. We've
00:00:36.340been working for a while for me to get here, and I'm glad it finally worked out, and I appreciate
00:00:40.260the invitation. It's great to have you on the show. We're so keen to speak with you, Glenn.
00:00:45.140We try not to focus on the day-to-day events and occurrences. I know you cover those as well,
00:00:50.120but the question we really wanted to start with is kind of to ask you the broader question,
00:00:55.040which is what the hell is going on with journalism?
00:00:58.880I think that you have to begin with the premise that the Trump era radically transformed almost every aspect of American political and cultural life,
00:01:10.740which, if you think about it, is not that difficult to understand why.
00:01:15.340if large sectors of the society convince themselves that the person who has risen to
00:01:22.340power in a country is really this unprecedented threat, never before seen menace to all good
00:01:29.420things in the world, essentially, and often literally the kind of return of like a Hitler
00:01:35.400like figure, it's going to change everything that you do in terms of how you process the
00:01:42.180world the decisions you make the things that you come to believe aren't aren't justifiable
00:01:47.060and i think that number one there was a lot of true believers who really did see trump in that
00:01:55.100manner and therefore their decisions and making and behavior change very radically as a result
00:02:02.300but i also think that they this incentive scheme arose in which the people who fed that paranoid
00:02:10.300I believe, for the ones who are most rewarded. They were most rewarded, not just financially,
00:02:15.160although definitely that as well, but with more attention, more positive feedback on social media.
00:02:23.440Those are very powerful incentives for human beings to which journalists are not even close
00:02:28.900to immune. And so once you start looking at journalism, not as this profession that's designed
00:02:36.800to inform the public regardless of who it aggrandizes or impedes, but instead as this
00:02:44.820kind of moral obligation to stop this profound threat where you turn yourself into just nothing
00:02:51.040but activist by definition, obviously it's going to radically transform the work that's done under
00:02:56.940the banner of journalism. And I think that more than anything is what happens.
00:03:00.820And let me ask you this, because a lot of people are just having watched the last two minutes of
00:03:05.440you talking about what's happened to the media might listen to that and think, well, Glenn is
00:03:10.520a massive fan of Donald Trump and he's just upset that other journalists didn't love him as much as
00:03:16.140he does. So how, you know, first of all, can you address that and also just talk to us about what
00:03:21.080an actually a good journalist would have done in the Trump era? Yeah. So, you know, if you, I mean,
00:03:28.560I'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.
00:03:38.820My 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.
00:03:51.080And 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.
00:04:04.900I 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.
00:04:17.720I 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.
00:04:36.980And I'd say most journalists were in the former category, and I was definitely in the latter.
00:04:40.820I see Trump way more as a symptom of American pathologies than as a cause or the prime author of them.
00:04:48.660If 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.
00:04:59.540And 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.
00:05:07.280But he definitely is a greater threat to Brazilian democracy than Trump ever was to American democracy for a whole bunch of reasons,
00:05:13.740principally leading with the fact that Brazilian democracy is only 35 years old, not 235 years old.
00:05:20.260Half the population lived under an actual military dictatorship, and therefore its institutions are much more fragile.
00:05:25.760I 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.
00:05:41.540And Trump was never near strong enough to meaningfully challenge them.
00:05:45.540The 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.
00:05:58.060So 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.
00:06:10.340And I actually thought the ways in which he was subversive and disruptive were largely positive.
00:06:15.580But 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.
00:06:31.640And Glenn, it seems to me that the media has just abandoned nuance.
00:06:36.060They're not interested in nuance, whether they're talking about Trump, whether they're talking about Biden.
00:06:41.540We saw that with the election of Biden.
00:06:43.920What happened to balanced journalism, which analyzed both sides of the argument?
00:06:49.320Well, 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,
00:07:01.140and he had designs to impose what we had always talked about as some kind of a fascist
00:07:08.660government or regime that was going to put an end to democratic institutions and democratic values,
00:07:16.260I would probably be willing to do things to fight that even under the guise of journalism
00:07:22.040that under normal circumstances I'd be unwilling to do because I would probably decide that the
00:07:27.800threat and the moral imperative to stop it is so great that it outweighs the norms and duties of
00:07:36.620the profession of journalism. So I think that once you begin operating from this premise
00:07:43.400that you're on the front lines fighting a fascistic takeover of your country, which is
00:07:49.980really what many of them either pretend to believe or in fact believe. I think the line
00:07:55.080between those two things eventually blurs. Because if you pretend to believe something
00:08:00.000long enough, you ultimately start believing it. If you really do believe that, then journalistic
00:08:07.180norms, why would, I mean, it would be almost immoral to be constrained by those, right? Because
00:08:12.000you're talking about wording off fascism. So I think that delusion, you know, beginning with
00:08:21.420the the, you know, contrived conspiracy theory that Putin had infiltrated American institutions
00:08:29.100like straight out of the 1950s, like the CIA labs of the 1950s, that the Kremlin had contaminated
00:08:35.540American political life and converted people into clandestine agents at the highest levels of
00:08:41.100government into then believing that Trump was like a couple of days from just like putting
00:08:46.280racial minorities into camps when you work yourself up into that kind of frenzied mania
00:08:52.740then i think it's almost rational to start behaving the way that they behave which is
00:08:57.600not caring if what you're saying is true or false not caring if you adhere to any kind of
00:09:03.100journalistic ethics or norms doing everything you can even if it means lying and publishing
00:09:07.720falsehoods to stop this fascistic threat which is why i say i believe the crucial split is over who
00:09:13.480sees Trump that way and who doesn't. And what effect does that have on society, Glenn,
00:09:19.160when the media are trying to essentially push a narrative? They're not there to investigate,
00:09:24.260to challenge, and then to report back. What effect does that have on society? But let's be fair,
00:09:30.620because America leads the world on this, on the globe as a whole.
00:09:34.760Yeah, 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.
00:09:50.200And 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.
00:10:03.620And 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.
00:10:24.100And 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.
00:10:35.580In 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?
00:10:45.080because the answer is they play a central role in why people have lost faith and trust in those
00:10:53.240institutions of journalism that have long been regarded as legitimate by most people they
00:10:59.460were the ones who sold the country the lies that led to the invasion of iraq they were the ones who
00:11:05.720glorified the people who brought us the 2008 financial crisis from which people continue to
00:11:11.660suffered to this very day. And people are not dumb. They understood, they saw for themselves
00:11:16.780that the media was willing to do and say anything to stop Donald Trump. And once you have this
00:11:22.780series of episodes that justifiably and validly cause a huge portion of the population to no
00:11:30.000longer place their faith and trust in established corporate media institutions, of course they're
00:11:35.620going to start looking elsewhere for their news. And I do regard that as genuinely tragic, even
00:11:42.620though I believe the people who are doing that are acting appropriately. I also don't trust those
00:11:48.680institutions. I regard it, though, as damaging, because I do think a healthy society needs
00:11:56.300a kind of group of institutions you can rely on and trust. And part of my project is not to try
00:12:05.540and destroy these institutions, but to try and rebuild faith and trust in journalism by showing
00:12:11.400that it can still be done in a way that it can inspire confidence among people who have differing
00:12:17.440religious values, political beliefs, ideologies, and the like.
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00:12:50.660and get in touch today. And Glenn, what would you say to those people who go, look, here's
00:12:56.580the reality. The media have always been lying to us. They've always been trying to pull the
00:13:00.720wool over our eyes. It's just now in 2016, in the age of the internet, we are able to see it for
00:13:06.740ourselves. There's definitely validity to that argument. As you probably know, before I became
00:13:16.280a journalist, I was working as a lawyer, a constitutional lawyer, and I started writing
00:13:20.960about politics at the end of 2005. I just created a kind of free blog on what was called Blogspot
00:13:27.740at the time, this free blogging platform from Google, in large part because I was looking at
00:13:35.820the developments in the wake of 9-11 and the war on terror and felt that the media was not only
00:13:43.800ignoring really crucial assaults on civil liberties, but often was lying about what was
00:13:49.560taking place. And the more I looked, you know, it was the first time I paid attention as a full-time
00:13:56.160job to politics and journalism as opposed to law, the more I began realizing that this has been a
00:14:03.180long-standing problem. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA partnered with all of the major
00:14:10.520corporate institutions, media institutions in the United States to disseminate propaganda.
00:14:14.960They would engineer coups and they would have Time Magazine or the New York Times call it,
00:14:19.500you know, a popular revolution or, you know, blow against tyranny. Conversely, when they had
00:14:27.700democratically elected leaders they didn't like, they would have those media outlets call them
00:14:31.580tyrants and then hail the replacements who were anointed by the U.S. with no votes as protectors
00:14:38.780of democracy. So this closeness between the security state and large standing corporate
00:14:45.920media outlets has been going on again since the security state was created at the end of world
00:14:51.140war ii and as i said that's the reason why it wasn't right-wing media outlets that helped the
00:14:59.280bush administration sell the country on the iraq war it was the liberal outlets like the new york
00:15:04.700times and the new yorker and the atlantic and nbc news because those institutions despite being more
00:15:12.400liberal on cultural issues were completely inextricably linked with and deferential to
00:15:17.880the government. And that created all kinds of deceit and propaganda. So it isn't that it's a
00:15:24.440new problem at all. I've been writing about it long before anyone dreamed that Donald Trump could
00:15:30.160be president. Obviously, many other people before me were doing the same. I think that what happened
00:15:36.960in the trump administration is that all of that went on to steroids um you know at the very least
00:15:43.380even though the media often propagandized on questions of safe foreign policy and barely
00:15:47.840ever questioned the security state when it came to the kind of day-to-day trivial warfare between
00:15:54.120the two primary political parties the republicans and democrats they would at least make an effort
00:15:58.440to have a pretense of objectivity between the two parties not to favor one or the other
00:16:04.320And that, I think, is more than anything what that that one kind of notion of fairness that they were clinging to.
00:16:13.180Ultimately, 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.
00:16:25.760And 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.
00:16:37.520So, Glenn, what about now, though? Because, look, they got what they wanted.
00:16:41.320The Joe Biden is president. The Democrats are free to do almost whatever they want.
00:16:48.160You know, the kids the kids are still in cages, but they don't have to cover it and all of that.
00:16:52.920They're not cages anymore. They're detention facilities.
00:16:55.760That's correct. Of course they are. And so why are their brains still broken? They got Trump out.
00:17:01.780Why can't they just relax and start reporting the truth now?
00:17:05.000Well, for one thing, if you look at what has happened to them, a lot of people forget that
00:17:12.280before Trump came down that golden escalator with Melania in 2015 and announced that he was
00:17:17.820running for president, most of these media outlets were on the verge of complete financial ruin.
00:17:23.740You 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.
00:17:36.920And The New York Times, people really doubted whether they were going to actually be able to have a sustainable financial model.
00:17:43.880Trump saved almost the entire media industry single-handedly.
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00:20:55.020that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy, and censorship.
00:21:00.340but glenn doesn't that mean that we have a media that is no longer fit for purpose
00:21:05.540the whole point of the media surely isn't it to hold the rich and powerful to account
00:21:09.760that's a that's not like a nice you know fairy tale i mean you know again look like the reality
00:21:18.440is the the media like you know 30 years ago when we talked about the media we were only talking
00:21:25.280about gigantic corporations that could afford, you know, cameras and studios and satellites and
00:21:32.760network fees, or families that had long owned printing presses and gigantic newsrooms that
00:21:40.080employed hundreds, if not thousands of reporters and editors and the like. So obviously, it's long
00:21:46.480been the wealthy and powerful that have controlled and owned the media. And so the media has largely
00:21:51.700served the purpose for the last, say, 30 to 40 years of serving the interest of power centers.
00:21:58.640Before that, if you go back kind of before the corporatization of the media, which for me began
00:22:04.320in, say, the 50s and 60s, for the first half of the 20th century, journalism really was this,
00:22:10.100like, outsider profession. They mostly came from working class backgrounds. They didn't make much
00:22:17.680money. They were big union activists. They all had labor, you know, they all had newspaper guilds
00:22:25.060and they felt like outsiders. They didn't go to school with the powerful and rich people
00:22:31.980they were covering. They hated those people. Like they had the outsider mentality. And it
00:22:36.400really started changing when television became popular and we started having multimillionaire
00:22:40.660news anchors and people aspiring to be rich and famous in journalism. And suddenly they were in
00:22:45.460the same social circles as the rich and powerful. And then the owners of those outlets were corporate
00:22:51.640conglomerates who obviously don't want any disruptions to the status quo and prevailing
00:22:56.820ruling class. And so I think it became much more an agent of preservation of power. I think the
00:23:03.700internet, though, is potentially a genuine threat to that hegemonic order. And it's the reason why
00:23:11.840whenever an independent outlet starts to succeed the way first social media did twitter youtube
00:23:20.240facebook they instantly started agitating for controls on those platforms don't let people
00:23:27.600say this kick them off if they say that and now that there are other outlets that are
00:23:33.400specifically created to avoid the kind of captivity to censorship demands that
00:23:39.180big tech monopolies have succumbed to, they are obviously waging war against any of those that
00:23:46.520start to have an influence. You saw that yesterday with the news that I and seven or eight other
00:23:51.360people, including former presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, went to Rumble,
00:23:55.740a kind of YouTube competitor that is designed to ensure free speech, unlike YouTube does.
00:24:00.960Same when I quit The Intercept and went to Substack and started having a big audience there.
00:24:05.860any platform that they can't control that is used that that is empowered by the internet so you
00:24:12.560don't need any more gigantic printing press to reach hundreds of thousands of millions of people
00:24:16.740you just need an internet connection um even to produce television shows now basically you can
00:24:22.820do that with the technology as we're doing right this moment you know that's why they're waging so
00:24:28.680much such a war of you know defamation and smear campaigns because they do believe correctly
00:24:37.000that the internet is finally fulfilling its purpose of providing a way for human beings
00:24:43.300to emancipate themselves from the from control of centralized media and political power and that
00:24:50.680for me is you know the most important war there is I see the snow work I did with Edward Snowden
00:24:55.300in 2013 about whether we're going to have a free internet or the internet will be a weapon of
00:25:00.580coercion and control. And I obviously see that as the same cause now in fighting against online
00:25:05.760censorship. And Glenn, just coming back, because one of the things we've addressed with the
00:25:10.580mainstream media is obviously the bias, and that's been a big factor in the last few years.
00:25:15.360But it seems to me like there's also another thing that has happened, and I don't know whether
00:25:19.160they're related or not. Tell me what you think about this, which is the media has not only been
00:25:24.480slanted or elements of it have been, but it's also lost its explanatory power. Even if you watch a
00:25:31.440relatively objective reporting on, say, like we're in London, right? And a few minutes walk from here
00:25:38.000a few years ago, a terrorist stabbed a number of people to death on London Bridge. Now, if you
00:25:44.240watched a report about that, you would almost certainly not understand what motivated him,
00:25:50.040Who 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?
00:26:07.280Yeah, 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.
00:27:06.120And so just using this hypothetically, you could say it's the person who did this attack is a Muslim.
00:27:13.080He's a Muslim extremist. He's an extremist, both in his religious convictions and in his political convictions.
00:27:19.300He did it partly because he hates the permissive social mores of the United Kingdom and Western culture.
00:27:26.500he also did it in part because of anger at his perception that western countries are interfering
00:27:33.400in the muslim part of the world by propping up dictators and bombing innocent men women and
00:27:38.640children and then you leave it to the public to decide how to evaluate that is the threat that
00:27:45.120this religion has not gone through reformation and therefore is actually a threat in and of
00:27:51.000itself islam is it that they don't they're not compatible with western values and can't integrate
00:27:58.740or assimilate or is it that we're actually sowing the seeds of our own attacks through
00:28:05.060the constant attempt to try and control and interfere in and invade and they're part of
00:28:10.240the world and take their resources and that it's what the cia calls blowback it's probably a
00:28:15.600combination of all those things in different cases and then you can evaluate what policies
00:28:19.600do I want to support to stop that? What do I think? But the journalist class doesn't trust
00:28:24.100people to make those decisions for themselves because they see them as primitive and ignorant,
00:28:30.000tragodites, and therefore need to be led and guided to how to think. And sometimes that means
00:28:37.220deceiving them. One of the most interesting things, I think, is the admissions on at least
00:28:43.180two occasions over the last year during the COVID pandemic by Dr. Fauci, the lead scientist in the
00:28:49.120united states that at least on two occasions he purposely misled the country thinking it was for
00:28:55.000everyone's own good not to know the truth once when he told everybody not to wear masks um
00:29:00.520presumably because he wanted to make sure that masks were for health care professionals and so
00:29:07.980instead of admitting the truth he told them masks don't work and then who knows how many people went
00:29:13.760out onto the street without masks and picked up covid and died but then on another occasion he
00:29:19.600admitted even more clearly when he was always asked what percentage of the population needs
00:29:23.940to be infected for us to reach herd immunity he admitted that he lied based on polling data about
00:29:29.700what the country was willing to hear that he lowered it to 65 when he really believed it was
00:29:35.10075 or 80 because he didn't think people were ready to hear the truth that is the mentality of somebody
00:29:41.420who believes that they are so enlightened that their lies are noble lies and i think this has
00:29:47.320become a common uh view of the educated classes in western democracies and the thing is when you
00:29:56.060have contempt for people and you condescend to them and you show them that you believe that
00:30:01.920they're ignorant and inferior they know that they feel that and the only reaction that that will
00:30:09.240produce in any healthy human being is to make those people who are being judged that way feel
00:30:15.100contempt for the authorities and institutions of power who are expressing that for them. And I
00:30:22.140think you see this over and over and over. I know here in Brazil, a big reason why Bolsonaro was
00:30:28.460elected in a country that four consecutive elections had elected a center-left or even
00:30:34.040left-wing party the workers party of lula de soba was because the institutions that they hate kept
00:30:40.060telling them they couldn't do it i think following british politics a big reason why brexit passed
00:30:45.820is because the mavens of elite liberal discourse the oxbridge crowd in london were telling them
00:30:54.080you can't vote for brexit and it was a big fuck you and they said i'm gonna vote for brexit
00:30:59.620Obviously, the election of Trump has similar overtones.
00:31:03.120A lot of people who twice voted for Obama voted for Trump.
00:31:06.780Obviously, something was going on there besides ideology.
00:31:10.120So 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.
00:31:21.000And you say it's driving a huge part of these dynamics, Glenn.
00:31:24.360It almost seems like the same parallel thing is happening with the left, particularly the left political parties. Labor in our countries, Democrats in yours.
00:31:35.800Yeah, 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.
00:32:02.480And 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.
00:32:18.740A very similar trajectory with the Labour Party, obviously under Tony Blair.
00:32:22.940I'm nodding vigorously as you say that, Glenn. I was just thinking that sounds exactly like Tony Blair here in the UK.
00:32:28.440I 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.
00:32:42.760And 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.
00:32:55.080And 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.
00:33:19.120You 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.
00:33:39.860The 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.
00:33:59.060So 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.
00:34:14.760They have no way out of, you know, the alienation that they have bred among working class voters.
00:34:21.200And 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.
00:34:30.700And 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.
00:34:42.460And 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.
00:35:25.280You 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.
00:35:44.040It 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.
00:36:05.080they live with their parents until they're 30 or older in larger percentages than at any time since
00:36:10.920the great depression um they can't get married until they're in their mid-30s and even then
00:36:17.520with great difficulty both parents have to work outside the house it's very hard to raise a child
00:36:22.000that way um and they're angry and they became kind of you know amenable for the first time to
00:36:29.260a kind of left-wing politics that railed against big finance globalism big tech wall street and
00:36:38.100bernie sanders came very close to beating hillary clinton in 2016 had the dnc not cheated
00:36:44.340in the ways that wikileaks revealed he probably would have beaten her which is you know he started
00:36:51.760off as this very obscure, old Brooklyn Jew who wasn't even a member of the Democratic Party.
00:37:00.040Obviously, no one thought he could get anywhere close to taking down the mammoth Clinton machine
00:37:05.500that was funded by billionaires and had demonstrated this huge centralized power
00:37:10.200for decades. It was almost invulnerable, and yet he almost beat her. And that was a kind of sign
00:37:15.680that left-wing politics could really revitalize um and then obviously the victory by people like
00:37:22.380alexander ocasio-cortez against the long-term democratic kind of standard you know backroom
00:37:28.700lobbyist funded politician fed that perception but then what happened was the fear that
00:37:36.180contaminated the left over donald trump made the left rush into the arms of the democratic party
00:37:42.940So there's almost no distance any longer between the Democrats and the left.
00:37:48.220I 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.
00:38:02.080And 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.
00:38:13.120You 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.
00:39:16.440So I barely see like a left wing movement in the UK or the US separate and apart from
00:39:22.980the establishment Labour Party or the Democratic Party.
00:39:27.200And I also see the media getting worse.
00:39:29.340So 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.
00:39:55.420I just think rebuilding competing institutions is the only prospect that is a cause for any optimism at all.
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00:41:47.480it's interesting that you make that point because one of the of the things that we should all
00:41:53.780acknowledge i suppose is you've built obviously a very successful career as an independent journalist
00:41:58.860now your sub stack is huge you've got a huge following on twitter etc etc you're now on rumble
00:42:03.820and we ourselves you know we're we're doing very well with our show on youtube and elsewhere
00:42:08.180as kind of independent journalists stroke commentators all three of us
00:42:12.000But 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.
00:42:26.240Like, we do need some form of corporate media, don't we?
00:42:35.460I 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.
00:42:47.240I 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.
00:42:54.680I needed the teams of editors and fact checkers and lawyers and money that only a big institution like that could provide.
00:43:03.700I couldn't have reported on a gigantic archive of that technical complexity alone I probably would
00:43:10.340have been prosecuted had I just been off on my own I think a big reason why Julian Assange is in
00:43:14.680prison and I'm not is because he hasn't ever really aligned himself that way with large
00:43:21.560corporate institutions when I did my reporting here in Brazil um over the last couple of years
00:43:27.940that ended up freeing Lula da Silva and, you know, ushering in a lot of changes in Brazilian
00:43:34.360politics and a lot of reform. Not only did I have the Intercept Brazil that I had created that was
00:43:39.560funded by a billionaire, I also ended up partnering on purpose with the largest newspaper in Brazil
00:43:44.620and also the largest news weekly in Brazil. Because not only did I need the financial resources that
00:43:50.760they can provide, the, you know, expertise that journalists have that I don't have,
00:43:55.480um technologists to work with you to decipher the material but then also you know kind of the army
00:44:02.380of lawyers and and and voices you need if you're going to battle the government they absolutely
00:44:07.760agree with you you do need resources and institutional power in order to do that kind
00:44:13.660of reporting and that's why i say i i don't my you know my mission my project is not to
00:44:20.880destroy the model of media. I believe in journalism a lot. But it's only worthwhile
00:44:29.220if it's actually fulfilling its function. And so what I've always tried to do is balance
00:44:34.020that independence that you talked about with kind of looking at those institutions as something that
00:44:40.200I use and exploit rather than kind of submit myself to. You know, I worked with The Guardian
00:44:50.120in and then left um and i always kept control of the archive and never gave it to them um i did
00:44:56.520similar things at the brazil reporting so i think it's a balance um but i also think that the more
00:45:02.200people lose faith and trust in the media the more possible it's going to become to build independent
00:45:08.340alternatives that do have real funding whether because the public supports it so much that you
00:45:15.100can generate enough revenue to build it into a real institution you can attract funders who
00:45:20.920also see the same things that we're talking about and have a lot of resources all of which i think
00:45:26.320are possible so creating a new space in media i think is is crucial but you're right it's it can't
00:45:32.500just be you know some youtubers over here monetizing their audience and making a nice living
00:45:38.240or a single substacker over here who's living well.
00:46:04.820I mean, they can do that to any of us.
00:46:06.360we're all in you know we're all at the behest of big tech yeah i mean that is a crucial question
00:46:14.160um i actually you know it's funny i was on fox last night and i made the point that i think the
00:46:20.300destruction of parlor is one of the most overlooked stories of the last year if not the single most
00:46:25.140overlooked in terms of what it really showed the only thing i would compare it to is the decision
00:46:30.240by facebook and twitter to ban any reporting on the hunter biden archive in the week absolutely
00:46:35.660That 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.
00:46:45.700But 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.
00:47:04.520Emmanuel Macron did too. The president of Mexico was very eloquent in denouncing the dangers.
00:47:11.600People migrated to Parler because they wanted a place where you could be free of that
00:47:17.620just ability of big tech to zap even the elected president of the most powerful country in the
00:47:22.680world off the internet. It's incredibly chilling. And Parler became such a success that it was the
00:47:30.100single most downloaded app on Apple and Google Play stores, more than Facebook, more than
00:47:35.780Instagram, more than TikTok, more than anything. It was the most popular app that people were
00:47:42.980downloading and using. And AOC and a bunch of other Democratic politicians went on to Twitter
00:47:48.940and said, Google and Apple, how can you allow a platform like this that is enabling insurrection
00:47:59.040and right-wing violence on your stores.
00:48:02.280And then obviously, knowing that the Democratic Party
00:48:05.520was about to take over all branches of government,
00:48:07.860when Apple and Google heard that, they responded.
00:48:18.220Why are you still hosting Parler on your web service?
00:48:21.860And then Amazon did what Google and Apple did,
00:48:23.700which was obeyed the demand and kicked Parler off.
00:48:25.880And 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.
00:48:37.840So 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.
00:48:59.280So 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.
00:49:14.200Obviously, there are a lot of people like Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter.
00:49:20.460Long 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.
00:49:46.260I 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.
00:50:02.320Glenn, I wasn't going to ask you this, but I think I ought to.
00:50:06.660Do you think that, because I couldn't get, I couldn't get why people weren't getting,
00:50:11.000you're the first person I've ever heard say what you've just said, which is what I said.
00:50:15.580The moment, the morning that Hunter Biden's story was treated in the way that it was treated,
00:50:21.020I walked into this very room and I said to the guys here, this is the biggest story of the year.
00:50:25.340And everybody, them and everybody else kind of looked at me like, what are you talking about?
00:50:30.560was that election interference in your opinion i mean a zillion times more than whatever they
00:50:37.240claim russia did i mean think about it this reporting came from the oldest newspaper
00:50:44.800in the united states the new york post founded by one of the founding fathers of the united
00:50:50.040states alexander hamilton and yes it's murdoch-owned and yes it's you know tabloid-ish
00:50:56.980but it also is a real newspaper and those documents were absolutely authentic yeah what
00:51:02.400bothered me the most was the way they justified the way big tech justified i mean if you try
00:51:10.620when i say ban i mean ban like if you try to post a link to those stories on twitter it wouldn't let
00:51:17.580you it would just say that's an invalid link even if you wanted to dm somebody and speak privately
00:51:22.260to them and show it to them. You couldn't even post it there. Facebook announced through a
00:51:27.520Democratic Party operative who had spent 20 years working for Democratic Party politicians
00:51:32.020and then went to Facebook. That's incredibly who they got to announce that they were going to
00:51:37.180algorithmically suppress the story pending what they said was going to be a fact check to make
00:51:41.880sure the documents were genuine. Of course, that fact check never came because the documents were.
00:51:45.660So Facebook blocked the story from spreading Twitter, banned it completely. I think the reason
00:51:50.980that um there wasn't a greater reaction is because the dominant sector of the media completely
00:51:58.780supported that censorship which is mind-blowing i mean imagine if you're an authoritarian leader
00:52:07.900of a country or you're an authoritarian oligarch and someone says to you like obviously it can't
00:52:14.760happen but what would like if a genie came and granted you like one wish what would be your
00:52:19.600greatest wish. You would say, my greatest wish is that journalists wouldn't oppose me, but would
00:52:25.420instead become the leading advocates for authoritarianism and censorship, right? Like,
00:52:31.360of course, that would never happen. Journalists would never become the leading advocates of
00:52:34.660censorship by their nature. They don't want censorship. But somehow in the United States,
00:52:39.860that's exactly what has happened. Journalists are by far the primary and most vocal and
00:52:45.000relentless advocates and agitators for big tech censorship and they were thrilled that that
00:52:51.140reporting was censored because they were petrified about Donald Trump winning the election and all
00:52:55.020they cared about was making sure he loses even if it meant doing censoring and suppressing
00:53:00.460legitimate reporting but what people also forget is the way that all got justified was that 50
00:53:06.560former members of the intelligence community including former directors of the CIA
00:53:11.400invented out of thin air the lie that those documents were the byproduct of Russian
00:53:20.040disinformation. So that phrase, Russian disinformation, had two claims to it. Number
00:53:24.320one, that those documents came from the Russians. And number two, that they were fake, that they
00:53:29.360were inauthentic, forged. Both of those claims were absolute lies. But every media outlet,
00:53:36.880including the intercept which i co-founded in 2014 to challenge the intelligence community not
00:53:43.820to serve them published that lie that these documents were a russian disinformation to
00:53:49.800justify not covering them and that was the uh so it wasn't just that big tech interfered in the
00:53:55.020election it was that the cia did as well interfered in our domestic politics and prevented who knows
00:54:02.160how many millions of people from hearing about you know obviously it's no one cares if under
00:54:07.420biden is a drug addict or hiring prostitutes but the stories that were relevant were the fact that
00:54:12.820he was pursuing deals in places like the ukraine in ukraine and china that the document suggests
00:54:18.820included his father in profit participation deals which obviously raised real ethical questions
00:54:24.800about the presidential front runner in a really close election it is a very high likelihood we'll
00:54:30.800never be able to prove it, that suppressing that story by the millions swung the outcome of the
00:54:37.700election. And it was a joint effort by the CIA, the liberal sector of the media and big tech
00:54:43.780that was the coalition of power that engaged in brute censorship in order to manipulate the
00:54:50.500outcome of the election. As I said, a zillion times more worrisome than whatever they claim
00:54:55.440russia did even if you accept everything they say about russia was true right so glenn we've got this
00:55:02.640problem with big tech how do you solve it do you think that we should be treated as monopolies and
00:55:08.040effectively broken up i do um they are clearly monopolies i don't think twitter is a monopoly
00:55:15.580but facebook google apple and amazon those four companies in particular are classic monopolies in
00:55:22.240violation of antitrust laws i'm actually there is a subcommittee in congress um called the house
00:55:31.100subcommittee on antitrust and uh other things i forget but they have jurisdiction over that
00:55:36.520question and it's obviously led by the democrats since they're the majority party and they issued
00:55:41.040a very impressive scholarly and comprehensive 450 page report saying concluding that these
00:55:49.160four companies are classic monopolies a violation of the antitrust laws and proposing a series of
00:55:54.020measures including breaking them up the problem is these companies are so rich that they fund
00:56:00.240both parties that they haven't been able to generate the support necessary to do that and
00:56:06.500what's particularly bothersome is you have all these you know right-wing politicians like
00:56:10.640republican house members who love to go on fox news or oan or newsmax or social media
00:56:16.640and denounce big tech and say big tech tyranny and all of that.
00:56:22.160But at the end of the day, they're getting funded by the lobbyists for those companies.
00:56:26.360They talk a big game, but they won't support these measures to break up these companies.
00:56:33.120There are some Republicans who are now doing it.
00:56:35.460They just got past the point where they believe democracy can withstand this manipulation.
00:56:41.160So hopefully, and part of my project, is to try and bring the right and the left together
00:56:45.880in their common hatred for these companies.
00:56:49.620And that's what antitrust laws are for
00:56:51.780because that's the only way you can deal with monopolies
00:56:53.860by definition is you can't compete with them.