Ep 104 | Dangerous Tech Oligarchs Who Answer to No One | Glenn Greenwald | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Hey,

I haven't noticed.

At the same time, 8 in 10 Americans believe that journalism is important for democracy.

It is.

It's critical.

But not the way it's being done done now.

Not like this.

What we're seeing is activism that hides itself behind headlines.

If there's any hope for the survival of journalism in America,

we need more people like today's guest.

He's maybe one of five people alive actually doing the job of a journalist.

And of those five, I would say he is one of the best and most daring, which means you're about to hear my discussion with the best journalist alive, or at least one of them.

Maybe it will be remembered as the best journalist of our era.

The proof of this is that corporate media has turned against him.

One critic called him a bomb-throwing media critic.

Andrew Ross Sorkin implied that he should be arrested.

He says that he says the things that make people uncomfortable, but that's what journalism is.

And he makes people uncomfortable regardless of their politics.

He's been reporting on politics for about 15 years now.

If you remember the explosive series of articles in 2013 about Edward Snowden and the NSA released in The Guardian, that was him.

Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on that.

Pretty much the only Pulitzer Prize-winning story that basically everyone knows about.

He's since

gone on to do incredible things.

In 2014, he launched The Intercept because he was worried about rampant bias and censorship in the media.

Now, how do I know this guy stands by his principles?

Because last year, he left The Intercept,

the news outlet he founded, because he said, it's the same bias and censorship that I set out to upend.

I can't be a part of this.

In 2011, he moved to Brazil for political reasons, which we'll get into.

And in 2019, he became embroiled in a political

controversy that reached all the way up to the new president of Brazil.

He details all of it in his incredible new book titled Securing Democracy, My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil.

Today's podcast guest, welcome, Glenn Greenwald.

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Glenn, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Thank you for joining me.

Yeah, it's great to talk to you again.

Thank you for inviting me.

I will tell you,

you are confusing at times, or have been.

We live in really confusing times and you don't really ever know anybody's true intent until their back is up against the wall.

And when I saw your own company, the company that you started, The Intercept,

and you came out against it and said, look, this is the same.

This is the why I started this to get away from this crap.

And you left.

I was really impressed when you would call out your own business

and the things that you have done, well, for a long time, but mainly recently

in Brazil, what you've done is remarkable and very brave.

Thanks.

You know, with the intercept,

You know, it was difficult.

It wasn't fun to do that because that was something that I had created with two of my closest friends in journalism, two journalists for whom I have a lot of respect at the height of the Snowden story when we had a lot of leverage.

And the idea was to create a media outlet that would give journalists complete journalistic freedom and editorial independence of a kind that I always wanted and worked to preserve for myself.

The idea was to give it to other journalists.

And so to have this media company to which I devoted so much of my energy and time,

and that was important to me in terms of what I thought we were building and what it was going to stand for in journalism, turn around and kind of betray every single one of those values out of really nothing more than this petty fear that the people in their circles would accuse them of risking a Trump victory by doing their jobs and reporting on Joe Biden.

Which is kind of what happened to them in 2016 when we reported extensively on Hillary Clinton and they spent four years being told, oh, you helped Trump win.

They were petrified that that would happen again.

And they were willing to throw everything overboard, including their basic function as journalists, in order to suppress the story.

They even, the thing that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me was about a week before telling me that my story didn't meet their lofty editorial standards, they published an article that essentially just did nothing but parrot the claim by a bunch of X CIA officials like John Brennan that the Hunter Biden documents were Russian disinformation.

Two eyes in one phrase, that it came from Russia and that the documents were forged.

They published that, even though we were created to be adversarial to the intelligence community, but my story didn't meet their high-minded journalism.

So that was really something I couldn't withstand.

I don't know what's happened or if we can ever really recover.

Are there enough people in journalism now, or does it have to be a total reset?

You know, I really think that what happened was

journalism was really dying before Trump.

Trump was kind of this sugar high that saved them.

And what happened was they started believing their own PR that

Trump was essentially the equivalent of

Adolf Hitler.

Antichrist.

Yeah, yeah.

They created this demented fiction and then cast themselves as the star.

protagonists fighting on the front lines to save everything good in the world and came to believe that anything was just in pursuit of that battle.

And

I think they still are seeing themselves that way.

They're continuously, you know, they're so disappointed that Trump has disappeared.

And, you know, they've lost the trust and faith of the public.

I mean, it's at an all-time low.

And no, I don't think it's coming back because they don't think they've done anything wrong.

There's no self-critique at all.

I think what's going to happen is more independent outlets like the one that you're doing, like the place where I'm now writing and other places are going to continue to grow at their expense.

Yeah.

I will tell you that, I don't know if you know this, but but I was not a fan of Donald Trump before he got into office.

And then I just watched him, and I,

in a way, begrudgingly said, okay, he's not doing the crazy things that I thought he was going to do.

And he's actually doing some things that I never thought any president would do in a good way.

Still hate the way he talks and, you know, the tweets and everything else.

But you got to be honest.

And when the Russian thing happened, I actually thought that was probably true.

I thought it was actually probably true.

I could see that.

You mean like the collusion part?

You thought not just the appearance, but also the collusion part was true.

Yeah, I thought that was probably true.

But I wanted to see the facts.

And when the facts didn't appear and

everything

was Nazi level, you know, Hitler gas chamber level, they lost credibility and they actually,

it was the facts that drove me to say, okay, this is not true and these guys are out to get them.

But it actually pushed me to be a bigger supporter than I think I ever would have been

because they were so clearly out to get this guy.

It was like, I have never seen anything like it.

Yeah, and I found it to be...

a threat to democracy because what actually happened was whatever you think about Trump and Hillary in the 2016 election and whoever you wanted to win, there's no question that Trump won fair and square.

He got more electoral college votes and under the Constitution became the legitimate president.

And the reality is that many power centers in the United States simply never accepted that outcome because it wasn't the one they wanted and they felt threatened by it.

And so they devoted themselves to

doing everything they could first to preventing him from winning and then subverting his presidency once he won in ways that are really quite menacing to democracy.

The whole Russiagate script came from the CIA, which, you know, is not supposed to have any involvement in our domestic politics.

And yet, because he was questioning things like the ongoing value of NATO, which was originally created to be a bulwark against a country that no longer exists, or the regime change operation in Syria, which was their highest priority,

running against the Iraq war, talking about

the Pentagon

getting weapon systems that we don't need in order to enrich lobbyists and Raytheon board of directors, all these things that were very threatening to real entrenched power centers in Washington, using this partnership that they've always had throughout the Cold War with the major media outlet, they just set out to destroy his presidency in a way that I found infinitely more menacing than whatever one might think about Donald Trump and the things that he was doing.

Oh, my gosh.

I mean, the way they used the FISA courts.

And I mean, if you can set out and do this to the president of the United States, the regular Joe doesn't have a chance, not a chance.

You know, Glenn, I think when I was on your show,

the first time you and I spoke, when we met, I was in Texas.

I think we spent most of the time talking about the Snowden reporting I did about the NSA.

And obviously, you know, that has been a cause of mine for a long time is the danger posed by this enormous

spying system.

And when Edward Snowden decided to come forward after spending his life inside of these agencies, because he originally believed in them, he volunteered for the Iraq War.

You know, he worked for the CIA, he worked for the NSA, he was, his father was in the Coast Guard.

He was not a left-wing radical by any means.

He donated money to Ron Paul.

When he came forward, it was because he said, they're now turning this on the American people.

They're now, this is no longer a weapon system being used against foreign adversaries.

And, you know, I do think that the scandal of the FBI getting caught lying to the FISA court in order to spy spy on a U.S.

citizen, Carter Page, who even Robert Moeller concluded there was no evidence to suggest he was ever a Russian agent, let alone engaging in nefarious conduct on behalf of the Kremlin, is a major, major scandal.

I mean, an FBI lawyer went to jail for lying or was convicted of perjury.

Those kind of abuses of power, if you inverted them, I mean, that was the kind of stuff that J.

Edgar Hoover did, that Joseph McCarthy did, that people in the Knicks administration did, that caused a major scandal.

You know, we need to reform the intelligence here.

I don't even think nobody even remembers that.

And that's what really frightens me, Glenn, is that

a lot of the people that were involved in some of these scandals are now back in the administration.

It doesn't seem like there's ever going to be a report that is released or nobody's going to be held accountable.

And you've got four years of doing nothing except making that deep state, if you will, even stronger.

I mean, if people don't pay for their crimes,

it teaches the next group of people that want to do crime.

We can get away with it as long as we're on the right side of, you know, the press or whoever.

Yeah, you know, it's so funny.

I wrote an article in January of 2017, either days before or days after Trump's inauguration, the headline of which was, the deep state goes to war with the elected president.

And

I think it was Rush Limbaugh who spoke about that story that week and started claiming that I was the person who had invented this phrase.

And then liberals also thought this was like this newly invented conspiracy theory by the right wing, by Trump supporters, when in reality, the idea of a deep state and, you know, in the United States is something that thrives among political scientists.

Yeah, I mean, Eisenhower, I didn't even call it that.

He called it the military industrial complex, but it was the same message.

His message, he was, you know, president for eight years when the CIA was created and grew.

And he had one, you know, he had 15 minutes to warn the country on his way out about whatever he thought they should know.

And he said, here's what I want to warn you about.

There's this permanent faction that's entrenching itself that's more powerful than elected officials.

That is this military-industrial complex that's infecting every hall of academia and every hall of power.

And its influence is going to threaten democracy.

This is before the Vietnam War, before

9-11, before the gigantic growth from both of those and throughout the decades.

If you don't recognize the existence of the deep state, and if you're not concerned about it, you know nothing about American politics and how power in the U.S.

government functions.

I have to tell you, I thought the phrase, I was really uncomfortable with the beginning of deep state.

It implies like a star chamber and everything else,

where all you have to do is really go back and read Eisenhower.

You know, he talked about it's going to infest in the colleges and universities.

It's going to start funding projects where it's not really an honest question.

It's a question to further their agenda.

It will infiltrate everything and destroy everything.

That's what it is.

That's what it is.

I'm afraid that we are now at a point to where

Congress and the Senate and the White House, I think really on whoever gets in, I think Trump was a,

he was just such a cannonball or a grenade that I think he was blowing things up that he didn't even know he was blowing up, you know?

And so he was frightening to everybody.

But I wonder now if

with the way that the corporations are getting involved.

And Glenn, I'm not a guy, I always used to think like, you know, we would watch,

what was it, that movie with Harris of Blade Runner.

And, you know, they'd say, oh, I work for the corporation.

I'd be like, stop it.

Stop it.

I've always been a free market guy.

A capitalist.

The corporation.

Yeah.

The free market is not free.

These guys have embedded themselves with Congress,

with both political parties, with the media.

We are headed for an oligarchy, and I don't see a way out.

Well, this is, you know, this to me is,

you're absolutely right, and it's menacing and alarming, but I also see an opportunity here, and this has been part of one of the primary, you know, projects that I feel like I've been devoting myself to, which is

what you just said finds support on both the left and the right.

It's very interesting, right?

Because if you, you know, the traditional division on economic debates between the right and left has always been people on the right, like yourself, like you just said, I support free market economics.

I'm a capitalist.

You know, corporations are not evil, they're just entities doing business, buying and selling, making profit.

That's the engine of American life.

And people on the left, and you know, and the government should stay out.

People on the left wanted government intervention in the marketplace.

We want government intervention to redistribute wealth on behalf of the poorest, on behalf of the most marginalized, because this inequality is

the debate.

Neither model.

We don't have free market economics.

The government

constantly.

We missed some.

You glitched on us for a second.

Can you go back to saying that?

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, so yeah.

So I was saying, you know, that's been, those are the contours of traditional left-right economic debate.

And

what we have now is neither of those, right?

We don't have free market economics.

The government intervenes constantly in the economy.

That's why corporations pay lobbyists, people who get out of Congress and they enrich them to use their influence on their behalf.

The government intervenes constantly, but they're not intervening on behalf of the poor.

They're intervening on behalf of these gigantic corporations that have no allegiance to the United States.

It's crony capitalism.

It's not free market capitalism, nor is it socialism.

It's this kind of, it's what you said, it's oligarchy.

And now that corporations are becoming even more overt and open about their willingness to become involved in what was always partisan disputes that they steadfastly avoided

is really alarming, right?

They used to always intervene in government and lawmaking processes for their own benefit.

They would, you know, have their lobbyists negotiate for a tax break that benefited their company, things in their self-interest.

They're way beyond that now, right?

They're now

wanting to be the arbiters of how many protections we can have against voting fraud and when it spills into voter suppression or what proper policing policy should be, things for which they have no competence, but their immense concentrated power enables them to throw their weight around in a way that democracy could easily be subverted.

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It's a new government, really.

I mean, they're setting up, it's the most brilliant, in my opinion, if I could detach, if I was just watching this, if this was just a thriller and I could detach my emotions from it, I would say this is brilliant.

It's a brilliant end run around the people, the Constitution, all of it.

And

it's got people on the right saying,

well, they're a private corporation, so they can do what they...

No,

I didn't elect the head of the soda pop company to tell me what our policy should be.

And it's now being, it's this with the World Economic Forum.

I don't know if you're doing anything on the Great Reset, but good God, if that is actually happening, if this is what's empowering these people,

we as a planet are going for a giant oligarchy, and it is high-tech that is allowing them to squash anybody who's warning about it and media.

You know,

I think one of the most interesting things that has happened in the last couple months, three months,

is

when Facebook and Twitter, basically all Silicon Valley platforms united to remove the sitting president of the United States from the internet, to deny him the opportunity to communicate with hundreds of millions of people.

The people who cheered that were American journalists because paradoxically, journalists who are supposed to defend principles of free expression, free speech, and a free press are in fact the most aggressive advocates for internet censorship.

They're the ones who agitate it for it.

But the people who denounced it were world leaders, including many who have no love loss for Donald Trump, like Angela Merkel in Germany and the Macron government in France, and even the president of Mexico, President Lopez Obrador, who said in a really eloquent press conference, what we're creating is this world government of these tech oligarchs answerable to nobody.

And

that's what Angela Merkel was saying too, was she was saying, look, here in Germany, we do believe in regulations on speech, but if you're going to have them, it has to be the democratic process that decides them, the lawmakers who are elected by the people.

This is not that.

This is unelected overlords, oligarchs deciding who can and cannot be heard.

Even

the most powerful

elected leader in the

even they were alarmed by it.

The only people who went were American journalists.

I apologize to the podcast listeners for the glitch, but you are actually at home.

And I'm going to get into this because your new book is fascinating, like cannot put down fascinating.

What you've gone through and the reason why you're at home and you're not leaving unless you have an armored car and security with you.

We want to get into that.

But I want to just kind of sweep up some of the other things that are happening.

First of all, let me go back to the great reset in the World Economic Forum.

I have had

phone calls from

at least one of the biggest banks in America.

I did one show

on the Great Reset and talked about how the model is, the wish model is, is that you'll have a score, everyone will have a score, and if you're not doing the right things for ESG,

your score will go down and you'll become a risk to the system and you won't be able to have banking services or whatever.

They didn't correct any, they didn't want a correction on air.

They didn't correct anything that I was laying out or deny any of the documents or that some banks are now doing this, many over in France.

And yet, they wanted me to understand that they won't be nefarious.

That's not what they are.

They're doing this as a public service.

Are you looking into the great reset?

And if you have, is this a

what are your feelings on it?

Well, of course.

First of all, that's already being done in China, right?

These kind of rife,

you know, numeric or quantitative evaluations of various citizens and then determining which rights they do and don't have.

It's becoming increasingly digitized, so there are no humans making these decisions.

It's all done algorithmically.

And I think the China

issue is so interesting because traditionally, when the United States decides who their adversaries are and who their allies are, the power centers in the United States, the military centers and high finance are generally on the same page.

So if

they want to sanction the Russians or the Iranians or the Venezuelans, Wall Street doesn't really mind.

The Pentagon's on board with it.

In the case of China, you have military planners who see China as this adversary,

but Wall Street and Silicon Valley are in bed with the Chinese.

They're tied at the hip to them.

And one of the things that's happening is that the Chinese model is competing with the American model for what is going to be hegemonic in the world.

And it seems like that the Chinese model is prevailing and they have really powerful partners in the United States.

You know, these, you see these, you know, NBA stars and coaches and officials who get applauded because they're so brave, because they recite liberal pieties about Black Lives Matter.

And everyone

says, oh, they're so brave.

Wonderful.

They're all going to

ask about gigger camps or

they suddenly clam up and that shows you who their masters are, who's actually controlling.

And I think that that is one of the real dangers is not that China and the U.S.

are going to have this kind of

that they're in.

Hang on, we got to stop for a second.

If you can

hang on, we got to stop for a second.

Internationalized globalized in a way that will start to affect how we live as well.

Hang on, we lost you on the last like two minutes there horribly.

I think it's when you move.

So try to do this.

Okay,

I will try and be

like a new person.

Edgar Bergen, just don't move your lips.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you were saying about the

Chinese.

For years, we've been reading politicians and mainly Wall Street say, China is the new model.

I don't want China as the, I don't want to live like Chinese do.

I don't want that model.

Yeah,

when Michael Bloomberg was running for president, there were a lot of quotes that emerged where prior to his running, they were asking him about the Chinese government.

You can find him heaping praise on them, refusing to call them

dictatorship, refusing to call them repressive.

Right.

Depends so much on the Chinese.

And this is one of the

nauseating ironies of these companies like Nike and banks and finance companies putting Black Lives Matter

images on their Instagram page and the like is that they rely on China increasingly

or they move their factories to right they move factories out of the United States they move them to China where there's slave labor where there's sweat stop conditions where there's child labor

I apologize uh get him can you dial him back up please he is in Brazil

and

I've waited a long time for this interview the person whom you're trying to reach is currently unavailable Please leave a message after the beats.

Hey, Glenn, it's Glenn.

So that's what happened yesterday, and we decided that we would meet again today.

And after I lost contact here with our studios three or four times today for some unknown reason,

the hour approached and I didn't think it was going to happen.

I don't know if it's the universe saying that there's two guys that are using way too many N's in their first name or what.

But Glenn Greenwald is now in a different city

with high-speed internet.

Welcome, Glenn.

Correct.

Correct.

No, I think the universe is just saying that for the good things in life, you have to actually work for them.

So that's right.

Okay.

Our path, and we overcame them.

Thank you so much.

So we were talking about China when last we left and the state of China and the relationship with

the oligarchs here in America, with the oligarchs in China.

Right.

And, you know, it was interesting.

There was a speech I actually covered from a given by a Chinese

professor of high finance, somebody very connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

I believe it was shortly after Biden's inauguration.

It might have been shortly before.

And his point was that with Trump, it was very difficult for China to exercise the kind of influence they were accustomed to exercising in Washington.

He was saying, whenever we've had a problem in Washington in the past, we've had all these paths to be able to resolve them under Clinton, under Obama, even with Bush and Cheney.

And the problem with Trump is that he never really was embedded with support of Wall Street, and that was their path in.

And with Biden, he was saying with great excitement that normalcy was going to be restored because they would now have influence to wield again in Washington through Wall Street.

So, Glenn, but isn't that exactly the opposite of what the American people want?

I mean,

say what you want about Donald Trump.

He was a massive disruptor.

But it seems as though that's kind of what

America needs, is a real disruption of politics and business as usual.

Everybody's gotten very comfortable at the high end, and they say whatever they have to do to get elected.

And then no matter which party it is, they follow the same path.

I think we're seeing that trend throughout the Democratic world, actually, right?

So the entire elite, the neoliberal elite in the United Kingdom was warning everybody that Brexit would be this unmitigated disaster.

And the voters said, we don't really care what you think.

In fact, the fact that you're opposed to Brexit makes us think that it's likely something we ought to vote for.

A lot of it was just spite voting out of anger.

Here in Brazil, where I am and just wrote a book about, for 20 years, the country was a center-left government run by the Workers' Party.

And then out of nowhere, this kind of far-right authoritarian figure was elected to the president, Shija Bolsnaro.

And the same thing happened in the U.S., where it was eight years of Obama, and suddenly Trump got elected, and there were millions of Obama voters who voted for Trump, which makes no sense to

people who are political and media elites because they can only see their world through this stunted left-right prism.

But to those people, it makes a lot of sense.

And what did all those people have in common?

Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, even Obama, when he ran in 2008, they were all claiming that they were going to be this outside force to come in and sort of burn the entire system down, which is what people want more than anything, more than any ideology.

So I think you're, I know you are.

You're exactly right.

When Obama said, and I've never heard anybody else say this, when Obama said hope and change, I didn't like what I thought he was going to change it to, but I was all on board for hope and change, transparency, cleaning up the swamp, doing all of that stuff.

And then he never did any of it.

He became the swamp.

Donald Trump, I think, has still a lot of support because he never

became one of the in people.

And so all of the people in, and I think this is happening all around the world, all the people who are not on the inner circle, they're not one of the experts, they're just one of the people whose voice was supposed to matter, want somebody like them.

And they'll forgive them for a ton

as long as they don't become one of the elites.

You know, it's so amazing because, you know, I lived in New York for 15 years through, you know, starting in the early 1990s into the 2000s and the persona of Donald Trump you mean he was a New Yorker pure that's where he gained his fame

and the persona of Trump always was that he was this kid from Queens which you know rich Manhattanites and old money look at with great condescension at best.

And there was always kind of this resentment on his part.

You know, that's why he would go into Manhattan and he would have to build the tallest building because he felt like he was excluded from high society Manhattan, which he was.

They looked at him as like this kind of

ruffian.

Yeah, exactly.

They really looked down their nose at him all the time.

And with Obama, it was exactly the opposite.

Obama's path was the pure establishment path.

He went to Columbia.

He was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review.

He was always an establishment figure.

He always appeased establishment power.

So when Obama got into office, he instantly integrated into the things he had promised to destroy, you know, into high finance.

Wall Street supported him overwhelmingly in 2008 against the gain.

He loved the CIA and all those,

you know, kind of black site secret operations and drones.

He became very enamored of it.

He changed nothing.

Whereas Trump, to me, the closest figure to him is Richard Nixon, who also always harbored that same kind of resentment toward coastal elites, always felt for good reason that he was being judged and looked down upon by them.

And I think you're exactly right.

That remained a huge part of Trump's appeal.

Yes,

he's a billionaire.

He's a very, he's lived his life as a wealthy real estate mogul.

But inside,

he's not invented to the

everybody, everybody, I don't care who you are, everyone has always wanted to be one of the cool kids.

And it doesn't matter who you are or how old you are, you still kind of want that.

And, you know, for people like me, I know I'll never be a cool kid.

I'll never be in that pack.

And you kind of just go, all right, whatever.

And he embraces that.

I don't really care.

I don't really care.

I think he does, but he appears to embrace that I'm not at the cool kids' table.

I have my own table.

Yeah, you know,

I'm sure you have had this experience given your trajectory.

You know, you were at CNN, you were at Fox News, you were a very highly rated host of news programs on major networks.

You know, I've had my own experience of, you know, with the Snowden story, winning a pulitzer, a film that was made about my work, one in the Oscar.

I was on the Oscar stage.

When that happens,

there are these kind of insidious offers that get made.

It's sort of an implicit, unspoken deal, which is, look, if you play ball, if you kind of get rid of this, these rough edges, this anger, this anti-establishment, you know, sort of agitation that you're doing, there's a lot of, we'll let you in to our glorious halls.

And you have to, you know, really sit down with yourself and say, what do I want?

And those are tempting.

A lot of people succumb to them.

We're all human.

And at the same time,

you are.

I think that's why I like you so much.

And,

you know, I left CNN because I, or I mean, not Fox, because I started to like it.

And Roger Ailes said to me,

you're not leaving here.

Nobody ever leaves here.

And then when I was leaving, he said, you know what your problem is?

You won't play the game.

And I said, because it's not a game to me.

I actually believe in these things.

And you do.

You have to.

It's so, it's, it's velvet handcuffs.

It's a, it's a golden prison that they build for you.

And they'll, if you're successful, they'll give you everything.

Just don't tip over the apple cart.

You could go and play your little games, but not that far.

And Exactly.

When I was at Fox, I was, you know, I really believed that the average guy could just become president.

Mr.

Smith goes to Washington.

I believed that.

After working at CNN and then at Fox, I don't believe that.

I believe you have to sell your soul to the elite gatekeepers.

And

the advantage Trump had, and I can't think of anybody else, except maybe somebody in Hollywood, maybe, I don't know.

The thing about Trump is he was one of the gatekeepers.

Not actually, he was already inside the fence.

He didn't have to pass through the Rupert Murdochs and everybody else that might say, yeah,

I'll take you.

I'll help you out.

He was already inside, and the gatekeepers

couldn't lock him out.

Does that make sense to you?

Am I right on that?

Yeah, no, no, no.

I think that gets to the core of why Trump was such a disruptive force to Washington, to media, to financial and military power centers.

If you look at the policies that he actually implemented, you know, just from like a pure political perspective, they really weren't aberrant.

They were, you know, pretty much a continuation with a couple of exceptions.

It was really just like the

things he would say, you know,

the light that he

shined on the reality of what they are the things that he would question You know, I think like one of the most significant things was that Bill O'Reilly interview that he where he did and Bill O'Reilly was demanding demanding that he denounce Putin and when he was saying like why should I denounce Putin?

I think it's in the interest of the United States to have a good relationship a collaborative partnership with Russia.

They hate Islamic radicals.

They want to fight al-Qaeda.

They want to fight ISIS.

Why should I just pick fights with them?

They're a huge nuclear power.

And Bill O'Reilly said, because he he kills people.

You know, he kills dissidents.

And Trump said, oh, what?

You think we're so innocent?

We have a lot of killers ourselves.

Now, everyone knows that's true, right?

Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of the United States knows that that's the truth, but that's a truth that you can't have the president of the United States speaking because

it kind of

subverts the mythology and the iconography that his job is to uphold.

And he did that over and over and over.

It was much more stylistic and compartmental than substantive.

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Was Was the, I mean, the disease, the anti-Trump disease, it became a sickness.

It really did with many members of the media.

They just went blind with their rage.

Was it that they felt responsible, or was it also that

Trump was

saying the things?

I mean, for instance, Trump is in bed with Russia.

He said things like that about Putin, and he did things that I'm like,

why would you say that about Putin?

Why would you stand there with Putin on, you know, et cetera, et cetera?

But his administration was actually tougher on Putin than anybody in a long time.

So it wasn't that he wasn't that he was doing anything but in many cases just saying things.

So was the, I hate Trump, he's got to get out at all costs, is that caused because the press felt that they had

played a role in his getting power, or was it also

that

the big corporations that want things to keep going on, Wall Street that wants things going on, Washington that wants this game on both sides of the aisle?

Were they also part of whipping up the press and saying, you know,

you don't even know how bad he is?

You know,

so let's just take that example, first of all, of that narrative that really was the dominant narrative for the four years of his presidency and even the primary theme of the Clinton campaign before he won, which is that he has nefarious dealings with Russia.

And, you know, it's so funny, these people

constantly malign others for being conspiracy theorists.

I think that was probably the principal attack on you, for example.

What was a more demented and deranged conspiracy theory than the idea that Vladimir Putin had taken over the United States and the Kremlin had infiltrated American political institutions because they controlled the president through some of the people.

That should be an act of war.

Yeah, that's an act of war.

Yeah, if you really believe that, right?

That you would, you get do everything.

First of all, you get rid of the compromised agent, right?

You don't let him

commander in chief.

You do everything possible to get rid of him.

And then also, yeah, you go to war.

I mean, if a country has really taken over the instrument, that's what they were saying.

And the reality of it was exactly the opposite.

Choose two examples.

In 2014, 2015, when when the Russians were becoming threatening to the Ukrainians and then when they annexed Crimea, there was bipartisan pressure on Obama to send lethal arms to Ukraine.

And he wouldn't and didn't.

And his argument was,

I don't want to risk a confrontation with Putin over a country, Ukraine, that is of vital interest to them because of the history that Ukraine has for Russia and the danger that it's posed.

And also it's right in their neighborhood and it's not in ours.

So, Obama's argument was: I'm not going to risk confrontation with Putin over Ukraine or over Syria.

That's in their vital interest, but not ours.

Trump gets in, and within a year, his administration is arming the Ukrainians with lethal weapons.

Way more confrontational and provocative to Putin than Obama was willing to be.

The same thing with this natural gas pipeline that the Russians have built to Germany.

Trump was obsessed with pressuring, coercing, bullying the Germans out of

the camp.

He was Reagan on that issue.

Yeah,

and Glenn, what is more threatening to Russian core interests than trying to prevent this crucial pipeline?

I'll go a step further.

What is more crucial to Putin's personal safety

than the gas industry and the oil industry in Russia?

I mean, he lets that go.

He's a marked man.

Exactly, which Trump was directly threatening.

Trump was attempting to subvert.

Personally, the thing with lethal arms to Ukraine, I don't know if Trump cared or not.

That might have just been something that happened despite him or without his,

you know.

But that too, right?

If you're Putin, you care a lot about Ukraine.

If you look at Russian history and the relationship of Russia to Ukraine, the way that the Germans used it to destroy Russia practically in two world wars,

sending lethal arms into the Ukraine, which the Trump admits.

So the idea, the very notion that Putin was controlling Trump through blackmail, given the reality of Trump, what Trump was doing to Russia, it's so deranged.

And yet all of them in the media, with very few exceptions, latched on to this conspiracy theory as their principal narrative of what was happening in the United States for four.

They impeached him twice, one time over that.

There was an never-ending investigation, constant news stories based on this completely baseless and

insane conspiracy theory.

So then you ask why that is.

And I think that it's because

they regard Washington and the halls of power as theirs.

And Trump was an interloper.

Everybody else who has been elected to that position, right, left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, came in and played ball.

They kind of said, okay, I know how to comport myself.

I know the pieties and orthodoxies I can't touch.

I know the lines in which I have to stay and the ones that I can't transgress.

They make it very clear.

Trump is like a bull in a china shop, right?

He comes in.

He's just used to doing whatever he wants.

He doesn't listen to anyone.

And he likes chaos.

Yeah, he loves it.

And the more people attack him, obviously, the more obsessive and vindictive he becomes in attacking them back.

He has no interest in appeasing people.

And, you know, there's this one interview that, you know, to this day, I'm amazed is not talked about, but it's not talked about because it's so important.

A couple of days before Trump was inaugurated, he had posted on Twitter, of course, an attack on the CIA.

He mocked them for having gotten weapons of mass destruction

because they were leaking to the press that his election victory was illegitimate because it was engineered by the Russians.

And he knew they were doing that.

He knew why they were doing it.

And so being Trump, he attacked the CIA.

Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow

and said,

everyone in this town knows that you don't challenge or attack the CIA or the intelligence community because, in Chuck Schumer's words, they have six different ways Sunday to get back at you.

Essentially saying that's the real power center is the CIA.

And everyone knows you stay on their good.

This unelected group of intelligence

undemocratically in the dark.

That's what Chuck Schumer admitted that they're hidden truth.

And that became the story of the Trump presidency is the media got into bed with the CIA and they were willing to say and do anything, anything

in order to destroy him.

And they abandoned all journalistic ethics, all notions of truth, or anything else.

They believed that they were fighting this existential battle against the new Hitler figure.

And if you really believe that, you do anything in the name of winning, and that's what they did and are still doing.

So

it is.

I mean, to me, and

this

came to me about halfway through his

presidency and and it's maybe even three quarters where I was really

really felt it was important that he won a second term

the impeachment happened and that was insane the way that worked you could see all of the intelligence agency and the corruption I mean we did a lot of work on that and it was clear what was going on and I thought

he's just a hand grenade.

When he made that phone call, there wasn't anything really wrong with that phone call.

He didn't know what he was walking into in Ukraine with

using that.

And

he was blowing down walls, and people were starting to be exposed.

So they had to choke him out.

And I really thought towards the end that he was going to win if it was fair.

As it turned out, he didn't win.

But

I'm left with, if he can't do it, who can?

Well, here's the thing.

You know,

if you look at American politics from the traditional metrics of what is favorable to an incumbent president seeking re-election and what is unfavorable, he had every single possible circumstance lined up against him.

He was in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic where people were locked up in their homes for a year.

Businesses were closing all over the country.

There was a huge unemployment crisis where tens of millions of people had lost their jobs.

People were without hope.

They were afraid.

They were separated from one another.

They were unhappy.

Every single metric that if you're a president seeking reelection

is everything that you don't want to see is what happened.

And yet he still almost won with all of the establishment lined up against him.

Wall Street, Silicon Valley pouring money into Joe Biden and the DNC's coffers, the media virtually unified, doing everything they could,

as we talked about already.

I left

my own news outlet because they were petrified of any reporting.

The Democrats, if they want, can take solace in whatever they want to take solace in.

But if I'm a Democrat and I look at what's going on, every red light is flashing.

They won because they relied on affluent suburbanites.

They lost ground, right?

A president who was a racist, xenophobe, you know, a bigot, the new Hitler.

They lost ground among African Americans, among Latinos,

among people of color, among new immigrants.

The Democratic Party is bleeding support.

They even managed somehow to lose seats.

I know.

That's crazy.

Given everything that was happening.

So I think that the politics that Trump and Bannon

started to formulate and kind of was the first alternative that the Republican Party had to

Reaganism, which, you know, say what you want about it, it's kind of archaic, right?

It's like from the Cold War, it's from the 1980s.

This is a different era.

Reagan orthodoxies don't really translate perfectly anymore.

We were talking last time about, you know, capitalism and crony capitalism.

Those were not realities.

Big tech didn't exist.

Correct.

I think that this kind of populism and the idea that the Democratic Party has become the party of the professional managerial class and white affluent suburbanites, and the Republican Party now, in order to win, needs to become the party of the multiracial working class using populism and the like is something that a lot of really smart politicians who intend to run in 2024 obviously are recognizing.

It's become the dominant ideology at the most popular Fox News shows.

The interesting Republican politicians like Josh Hawley and even Ted Cruz are starting to, and Tom Cotton clearly are recognizing that that's the only path to kind of

subverting and uprooting these power centers that have their, you know, fists clenched in the powers of Washington.

Okay, so let me take a side note because I want to come right back to this, but let me take a side note because you mentioned a name, Steve Bannon.

I think Steve Bannon is a very dangerous individual.

I think, you know, his

relationship

with, oh, gosh, what's his name in Russia?

And another guy.

You mean like with Russian and Chinese tycoons?

Yeah.

Dugan.

No, no, no.

Alexander Dugan,

who also has connections to one of the guys in

Brazil there.

He's very powerful.

What was his name?

Gosh, I can't remember.

He moved to the United States.

Good friend of your president.

Oh,

Alabo de Cabalo.

Yes.

He lives in.

Yes.

Yeah.

He's like the girl of the Bolsheviki movement.

Yeah.

So those three are kind of cut from the same cloth on this traditionalism, capital T traditionalism, which is extraordinarily dangerous.

Extraordinarily dangerous.

And

I don't think Steve Bannon is a player anymore in Republican politics.

I could be wrong about that.

But I think that he's very closely tied to Trump.

He you know, really did get caught defrauding

the very people that he was reporting to represent.

They just stole money.

He's not in prison because Trump parted him.

I don't believe that these newer, smarter, younger, more modernized, right-wing populist figures want anything to do with Steve Bannon or his scandalous behavior.

Okay, so

I hope, I hope you're right.

So let me go now back to the track because I want to ask you about Trump.

Would he win if he ran again?

You know, it's so interesting because

if you pay attention to media discourse, right,

even asking the question seems preposterous.

This is the worst president in American history.

He was impeached twice.

He is so despicable that he can't even be on the internet.

He's not allowed on Facebook or Twitter or any Silicon Valley.

So you're constantly connected to this discourse about him that immediately makes you think that the idea that he could win and be back in the White House is unthinkable.

And yet they're not the people who vote.

And those people who create that narrative have no connection to the people who vote.

The people who vote see the world in a much different way and hate those people who are in charge of elite discourse.

And again, I mean, Trump got counted out in 2016 and he won.

He got counted out in 2020.

And as we just discussed, with everything against him stacked up and piled high, he almost won.

After four years of the same ideology, the neoliberal ideology of Joe Biden, this globalist, you know, free trade ideology that Barack Obama embraced and that gave rise to Trump in the first place, with him out of office and being able to blame every ill of the status quo on Biden instead of having to accept it himself, I think it's very possible that he could win again.

Do you think Biden would have won if it wasn't for the now admitted help from all of the corporations, all of the media, the millions and millions of dollars that Facebook or Zuckerberg put in, the rule changes of?

I guess what I'm asking you is a question I shouldn't, we're not supposed to ask.

Do you think, and I'm not saying that even enough to change it, I don't know, but

was this a fair election?

I mean,

you know, American democracy isn't fair, in part because

the people who have concentrated wealth wield enormous power.

And the founders of the country were capitalists, obviously.

They weren't communists, they weren't socialists, but

you can find all kinds of warnings in the Federalist Papers and in the debates about the Constitution that if wealth inequality becomes too severe, if wealth becomes concentrated in a tidy sliver of the population and everybody else is captive to it, that inequality will ultimately spill over into and contaminate political equality and political rights and corrupt the democracy and it will become an oligarchy.

This is not some left-wing 20th-century, you know, radical theory.

This is something that the founders themselves, no radicals they, were worried about.

And I think that's

what we have.

And that's what makes Trump's victory in 2016 and his virtual victory in 2020 so remarkable and so stunning.

And it's a reason why it sends them into this spiral of psychosis because they rely on that system that I just described to make sure that power stays in their hands.

And it didn't work in that case.

And that's why they went insane.

So

the power not staying in their hands, I mean, they did this in the 1980s when

they got the super delegates because they saw what happened to to Reagan and they were like, oh my gosh, somebody from the outside that the establishment doesn't want.

So they put the super delegates in.

You know, they just torched Bernie Sanders in 2016.

And now it seems as though even that's not enough.

We're talking about the electoral process.

We're talking now about new voting standards that

you know, they say

are, you know, essential for everybody to vote.

And, you know, Republicans are denying water to people.

It's pretty ridiculous.

They're talking now about the

end of the filibuster, adding extra states, and possibly packing the Supreme Court while calling it unpacking the Supreme Court.

It doesn't seem as though this is the party that's moderate and not fascistic.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

I mean, the Democratic Party

is a party that I view as completely repressive.

And not just the Democratic Party, but the liberal movement that supports it.

And by liberal, I mean,

just to be clear,

I don't mean the far left, you know, the kind of left-wing movement that supported Bernie Sanders.

A lot of that, they hate Democrats at least as much as people on the right do.

I mean establishment liberals of like the Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton strain.

Those people, they don't believe in free speech at all.

You know, I watched this hearing.

It was like the third time they've summoned tech CEOs before them to pressure and bully and threaten them that if they don't start censoring more Democratic Party adversaries off the internet, they're going to use their legislative and regulatory power to punish them.

They're threatening that explicitly.

They want to silence voices.

They want to use censorship to control the discourse.

They don't have to put people in prison who are dissidents in the way that we kind of, you know, think of the caricature of tyranny, but it's just as effective.

In fact, if not more so, precisely because it's subtle.

They don't believe in due process.

They find people guilty all the time.

Look at what they're doing to Matt Gates now.

I'm not saying Matt Gates is...

you know, not guilty.

He may be guilty of everything that he's being accused of and more.

But thus far, there's been no evidence presented of any kind, and they have him convicted and locked up as a pedophile.

The whole Me Too movement was about destroying people based on accusations that are unproven.

They don't believe in free speech.

They don't believe in due process.

They don't believe in

just the standard democratic processes, including the safeguards that our founders put in, including making sure that states that are small and rural have equal representation in the Senate, but not the House, so that they don't get trained.

They want to change all of that.

They want to change all of the rules to ensure that they remain in power forever.

It is a genuinely repressive and tyrannical party and a movement that supports it.

And it's the reason I become so violently alienated from it.

And

are there more Democrats that are waking up and seeing this, do you think?

Because

I watch the news.

I follow things and I'm like, I can't believe the Republicans fall for so much stuff for themselves.

But I mean, this is, I mean, this is in, you know, Trump's size lettering at the top of his buildings.

You know, corruption, corruption, fascism, fascism.

You listen to what they're saying, you watch what they're doing, and you see how they maneuver and silence people.

And I'm astounded that so many people are like,

you know,

at best, yawn.

Yeah, but you know, it's interesting.

I mean, you mentioned Reagan and Trump's victory as outsiders.

I mean, Bernie would have been that, right?

He was always viewed as this anti-establishment outsider, despised by the Democratic Party elite.

And in 2016, he would have won.

He would have beaten the Clinton machine had they not cheated.

And let's remember that Julian Assange is in prison, and the Biden administration is working to keep him there in part because he showed that.

With those emails that he published during the 2016 campaign, the top five officials of the Democratic Party had to resign because the corruption was so severe, including W.

Wasserman Schultz.

Donna Brazil got caught cheating by handing a CNN debate question to the Clinton camp, not to the Sanders camp.

They saw all that corruption within the Democratic Party.

The left did, the real left.

And then in 2020, they saw the same thing happen.

Remember, Bernie won Iowa or tied in Iowa, won New Hampshire, destroyed everybody in Nevada.

He was on his way to the nomination.

And then suddenly the Democratic establishment, Obama picked up the phone and called three or four people, Budigej, Klobuchar, they all dropped out.

They endorsed Joe Biden, the only one who had a chance to win.

And then Bernie was gone gone again.

So the left saw.

So then you say, well, why is the left still willing to lend its support to a party that obviously hates them and is willing to cheat to prevent them from winning?

And that's where I think this woke ideology comes in.

It's such a powerful instrument.

It's the reason why, you know, the CIA celebrates LGBT Day and Women's Day and, you know, Black History Month, even though it's the CIA that does coups and bombing campaigns and assassinations around the world.

It's why Nike with sweatshops in China can in the United States pretend to be so devoted to human rights and equity and all of that.

It's because it's a very powerful weapon to tell people these kind of cultural questions that have nothing to do with the distribution of power or the distribution of wealth or who wields militaristic and imperialistic power in the world.

If you only focus on these cultural issues, You'll stay on our side because we're on the good side of those.

We love trans people.

We love gay people.

We're totally in favor of, we hate racism.

And everybody on the left kind of gets focused on those things.

So stay on our side because of that.

And

when they do that, they're not talking about any of the questions of what is ruling class orthodoxy.

Who is it that wields real power?

Who is it that's cheating?

Because they're focused on these culture war issues.

And those are the things that distract everybody from kind of how power is actually being exercised.

I don't know if we said it earlier or we said it yesterday, yesterday, but it is genius.

If you look at it, it's genius how this thing has been put together and how different groups are being used and played.

And everybody thinks they're, I don't know, on the right side.

And I don't think anybody really understands what side they're really on, you know, including conservatives.

You don't really know who's doing what and how this game is being played and if you're being manipulated.

And it only makes it worse with Silicon Silicon Valley.

Yeah, you know, this is the thing though, is if you asked me, you know, you asked me before, well,

what is the way out of this, right?

Like, is there a way out of this given all this consolidation of power?

I really think, you know, look, five years ago, eight years ago, I was on CNN and MSNBC all the time.

Now I'm banned from them.

Instead, I'm on Fox.

You know, I would be on every day if I didn't say no sometimes.

I just got done taping a Fox show.

I'm probably going to do another one, you know, on Monday.

Why is that happening?

It's bizarre.

Like, if you look at it in one way, right?

Like, you go and read any article about my work, and it's far left as Glen Greenwald, far left as Glen Greenwald, and now I'm the most frequent guest on Tucker Carlson's show.

How did that happen?

And I think the reason is, is because

so many people on the left and on the right, the way that those labels have traditionally been used have so much more in common in terms of their political views and their common common enemies than either want to recognize and at the moment than they're able to recognize because they're constantly being fed these trivial and distracting stories that are designed to keep them at each other's throat that don't really have anything to do with their lives or how power is distributed.

So if you say to me, well, what hope do you have?

The hope that I have is exactly that, that project of kind of eroding those old labels that don't really tell us much anymore.

You know, I write a lot about Silicon Valley censorship and the power of big tech monopolies.

Who's in favor of that?

You think people on the left love Facebook and Google and huge gigantic corporations?

Do you think people on the right do though?

They both hate them.

Or free trade deals

or the deep state.

And so

something has to happen to enable people who have been taught to hate each other to come together.

So I've been saying this for several years.

First of all, I've tried to reach out and

it doesn't go well.

It doesn't go well usually.

However, that's changing.

There are a lot of people on both sides that are now just like so sick of their own side and, you know, tried to play ball enough and,

you know, to try to keep bringing their side along.

And now it's just ridiculous.

And so I think a lot of people like you and me are starting to connect and go, look, I don't know if we have everything in common, but my question has been to everybody that I talk to.

We used to have an unum, e pluribus unum, and that unum was the Bill of Rights.

And if you'll just give me the Bill of Rights, I'm in.

I'm in.

We can do anything you want with the government.

I say,

you know, reboot the whole system.

And I don't know how to do it, but I will fight with anyone and stand with anyone who believes in the Bill of Rights.

I don't know if, do people on the left now believe in the Bill of Rights?

Because, I mean, the ACLU used to say it, but they're not really fighting for it now.

No, they have a much different agenda.

You know, I think, first of all, I totally agree with you in the sense that if you don't have those core liberties, you have nothing, right?

Those core liberties are designed to prevent a concentration of power and an inability to challenge it.

Those liberties have no purpose other than to ensure that the citizenry always has tools and weapons to challenge power.

If you have freedom of the press, which at the time of the Constitution didn't mean this credentialed priesthood of people called journalists, it was a tool that all citizens use with the mimeograph machine or printing flyers to rail against the British crown or corrupt governors and

colonialists and the like.

If you have those tools of free speech, of free press, of due process, the fact that the government can't do anything to you, can't take your life or liberty or or due proportion or property without providing that first, then those

changes all are possible.

I mean, history teaches that.

So if you are someone entrenched in power, the first thing you're going to want to do is take away those weapons, which is exactly what's happening.

And that's why I agree with you completely.

For me, that's the number one first battle, the one that matters before all others.

And anyone who is my ally on the question of whether people should be able to continue to speak freely on the internet and in public spaces, or whether people are entitled to due process before being assumed guilty of some terrible act, not just by the government, by the culture and the society.

That's somebody that's my ally.

That's somebody I'm willing to stand with.

And conversely, no matter what other one, someone's views are on everything else, if they're opposed to those values, those people are not my allies.

Those are the people I'm currently looking to battle before everything else.

I have to tell you, the founders did it for a reason.

The First Amendment, you have to be able to speak.

You have to be able to come together.

You have to be able to question those in power.

There's the first.

The second is you lose the first if you don't have the second, if you don't have a way to push back on that power.

And everybody laughs at the third one, but the third one is you can't quarter soldiers

in my house.

Well, that comes from a time when they could go through your papers.

Well, that's the CIA.

That's what you exposed with Snowden.

They are going through things.

They are listening.

They are tying everything together.

So your first three amendments are almost all shot.

And if we don't have those three, you don't get the rest.

Yeah, the fourth one is not doing very well either, right?

The fourth one is the one that's supposed to protect you against unreasonable searches and seizures of your property and your papers.

And, you know, I think a lot of times people, first of all, one of the problems is

so many people's sense of history and knowledge of history begins on January 20th, 2017.

There are millions of people in the United States who never cared about politics until these media outlets scared them sufficiently that Trump was this orange monster coming to destroy them all.

And that fear is what engaged them.

And they know nothing.

They know nothing about anything that happened prior to that.

But these rights, these Bill of Rights, they can sound really abstract, right?

They were written on parchment, you know, they were in quill pens, and they were written by people who seem very distant from us.

But all they did was they came out of really visceral experience, right?

Of having

lived under tyranny, the tyranny that they waged this incredibly bloody and risky war to fight and liberated themselves from.

And that project of creating a new government was about nothing other

than

ensuring that it didn't happen again or at least maximizing the chances that the population could fight against it.

And look, I know I'm a critic of the United States.

I think it's done a lot of terrible things in the world.

You know, if you ask me what the CIA has done from 1950 until now, I'll list a hundred crimes that I think are horrific.

But

in many of those I would agree with.

I mean, America has done, you know, Winston Churchill, if you just read about him in Europe, he was great.

If you read about him from from the Indian perspective, he was a monster.

We all have a dual personality.

It's which one is in control and which one is growing in strength.

Right.

And those, but those documents, you know, I think that those founding documents and the design of the government are genius.

You know, I don't think there's been a better design for how government functions than the one that's reflected.

And yes, we've never been a perfect union, right?

And they knew that.

Those were aspirational documents.

The whole point was to form a more perfect union to constantly evolve and change to fulfill those values.

But those founding values are ones I believe in fervently.

They're my animating principles because I don't trust human beings to exercise power without the checks that only they can provide.

And that to me is the greatest danger right now: they are being eroded, not just in practice, but the awareness that people have of their importance.

But you are in Brazil right now.

You've just exposed the Watergate of Brazil.

A huge, huge story, been extraordinarily dangerous for you.

You don't go anywhere without an armored car and without security.

You're generally at your wherever.

And if America falls, I mean, I don't know if she's the defender of this anymore, but

where where do you go?

If America falls, the bad guys are really empowered.

And where do you go for freedom?

I think the problem has become that when you had nation states, right, 170 or 180 nation states, there were different forms of government that each of them had, and there was some mobility.

You could move back and forth between between them.

What we have now instead is an erosion of the idea of any kind of national identity.

There's an erosion of borders.

There's an erosion of nationalistic institutions in favor of globalistic ones.

And as we were talking about yesterday, when it comes to China and the U.S.

and the hegemonic competition between them, I think the primary question then becomes which model will prevail?

I'm not even sure what the American model is anymore

in that competition.

I'm not sure what it even means.

I'm not even sure that there's such a big difference between the American model and the Chinese model as elites want them to be.

Agreed.

But I think that's the greatest danger: the reason why people have become so opposed to globalism is because

the more distant authorities are, the less control you exercise over them.

Yep.

So can we spend, I've got about 15 minutes.

I don't know how much time you have, but

let's spend a few minutes and just talk about Brazil and your book.

It is, I mean, it is a thriller, but to explain it

in just a few minutes, not reading the book, it is

full of names that Americans have never heard of, et cetera, et cetera.

So, can you take us?

Because it is

really remarkable.

It really kind of starts with a phone call

from somebody on the far left in government, right?

Yeah, you know, in that sense, it was similar to the Snowden Snowden story, right?

The way a guy started the Snowden story was I was sitting in front of my computer minding my own business and in late 2012, I got an email from an anonymous person saying that he had a ton of documents that were revealing and it turned out to be Edward Snowden and over the course of six months we established a relationship and I flew to Hong Kong, met him, got the documents and did that reporting.

This is very similar.

I got a call from

a woman who's a very famous left-ling politician in Brazil.

She was actually the vice presidential candidate who lost to Bolsonaro in 2018, 2018, a longtime member of Congress.

And she said, Hey, I'm calling because with urgency, my phone has just been hacked.

And the hacker proved to me that he had hacked my phones by showing me very sensitive conversations I had with my closest friends, members of the Senate, members of Congress.

And I was petrified.

I thought, okay, I'm the target of a blackmail campaign.

But he quickly told me, No, you're not my target.

I hacked your phone to prove to you I have the capability to hack the Telegram accounts, which is like an encrypted app, like Signal or WhatsApp and others, you know, Skype, that all Brazilian authorities use.

And he said, I can hack the accounts of anyone I want using Telegram.

And I've spent the last three months downloading the conversations and documents and drafts and videos and audios and photos of the most powerful politicians in Brazil.

And this archive shows enormous amounts of corruption.

And the primary target of that archive was this former judge named Sergio Moro, who had presided over this gigantic anti-corruption probe that sent billionaires and former presidents to prison.

And by that point, he had become Bolsonaro's justice minister.

Bolsonaro had just been elected four months earlier, was riding high on this incredible success, not just for him, but for his right-wing movement that got swept into power.

And Justice Morocco was now Minister Moro.

Go ahead.

Partly because of that corruption, right?

I mean,

oh, yeah.

I mean,

it was just

everybody wanted hope and change.

Precisely.

And Bolsonaro, despite being a member of Congress for 30 years from the epicenter of corruption in Rio de Janeiro, no angel he was a very talented demagogue and successfully branded himself as the kind of outsider that he modeled himself after Trump, actually.

He loved the fact that the elite media circles and elite political circles hated him.

The more they attacked him, the stronger he became.

But the real, you know, and this is what I think is so relevant for the United States.

I wrote the book for an international audience, not for a Brazilian one, because of how many lessons it has for why Bolsonaro won.

But also, you know, what happened was in 2017, former President Lula, who was one of the giants of the latter half of the 20th century, governed Brazil for eight years, left with an 87% approval rating.

Brazil's economy boomed under his governance, was getting ready to run for president again.

All polls showed him way ahead of every competitor, including Bolsonaro.

And this judge, right as that was happening, convicted him on extremely dubious corruption charges.

That removed him from the race.

That enabled Bolsonaro to waltz to victory.

He may have won anyway, but that was clearly his biggest adversary.

And the first thing Bolsonaro did upon winning was turned around and rewarded that judge by giving him the most powerful ministry in the country, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, where they controlled surveillance, law enforcement, financial investigation,

the federal police.

And the archive showed that that judge, the whole time when he was presiding over this probe, including when he was finding Lula guilty, was in fact deeply corrupt.

He was cheating, he was breaking every rule, he was plotting with the prosecutors that he was supposed to be judging.

And so three months after our reporting began, the Supreme Court ordered Lula freed from prison.

Just this last month, the Supreme Court reversed Lula's convictions, all of them, on the grounds that our reporting showed the judge was corrupt and restored his his political rights, which means now Lula is almost certain to run against Bolsonaro in 2022.

So Brazil will have the competition, the contest that it was supposed to have in 2018, but didn't.

Bolsonaro versus Lula, a huge contrast in politics and ideology.

And, you know, they attacked me in every conceivable way, culminating with an attempt to criminally charge me in early 2020 with 130 felony counts.

And the Brazilian Supreme Court intervened, said that that attempt was a violation of

my press freedom rights.

But yeah, I mean death threats and threats of prosecution

from Bolsonaro.

Yeah, you had

you had people in media say that you should be investigated.

You should be in jail.

You should be investigated.

Even your children should be taken away from you.

Yeah, there was a very famous journalist who went on live television and out of nowhere.

You know, my husband's a member of Congress with the left-wing party.

So he works in Brasilia, like members of Congress do work in the United States.

They work in Washington.

We live together in Rio.

He said,

one of them is in Brasilia, you know, working in Congress.

The other one is publishing these stolen documents.

What I want to know is who's taking care of their two children?

I think a judge needs to investigate.

You know, we adopted our children from an orphanage four years earlier.

And he went on television and said, I think their children should be sent back to the orphanage.

Wow.

We ended up on a show together, a television show, live on the air.

And I confronted him with those comments, and it got very heated, and he attacked me physically on the air, kind of tried to punch me in the face.

So that was the climate for a year, and it's one of the reasons, Glenn, why I'm so

contemptuous of this whining from coddled, you know, protected, wealthy, bone-dry journalists like Jim Acosta, CNN, who think that they're in danger, as he wrote in his book, because Trump says, I mean, they don't know danger if it it ran over them on the street.

They're just, and you know, all this claims about, oh, I'm being harassed online.

You know, journalists are supposed to go to war zones.

We're supposed to put our lives on the line and confront tyranny.

And they're whining about, you know, little adolescent insults and mean tweets as though they're these traumatized victims.

It sickens me for that reason.

And, you know,

I've been doing that for, I've been getting that for about 20 years now.

I don't, I'm not whining about it.

It comes with the gig, man.

That's what it comes with.

And

if I hear one more of them call the other one brave, for what?

Standing with the corporations and everyone in power?

Wow, that's brave.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It's so,

they've created

this fiction.

It's like a novel, and they've cast themselves as the heroic protagonist.

And that is the world they all inhabit.

I thank you so much, Glenn, for everything that you're doing.

And,

you know, we may differ on things, but it's nice to know that we have the fundamental rights in common.

And if we can find more people

and have open conversations, man, I'm so blown away this week by, again,

Facebook and others doing exactly what they did with Hunter Biden's laptop with this BLM thing.

It's not about

her safety.

It's not about how much money she has or even the hypocrisy of saying she's a Marxist.

It's about where did that kind of money come from?

And

if you can't ask me,

and where did it go?

Right.

And if you can't ask that question,

you can't police anything.

There is no way to make sure that there's justice.

None.

That's why I think these issues are predominant.

It's why I think that the monopoly power that Facebook and Google and Twitter and Apple and Amazon have harnessed to control and police and increasingly censor our discourse is the greatest threat that faces us.

And so, yeah, like I said, I'm always happy to talk to anybody who's like-minded or even anyone who isn't on those issues.

But I do think dialogue like this is super important, and I'm very appreciative for that reason of your inviting me on.

Thank you very much, Glenn.

All right, Glenn, thanks.

You bet.

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