Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so pleased that you're coming right now because I need someone smarter than I am to explain the connection that I feel but can't quite articulate. And it's this. So the Free Press, run by Barry Weiss and financed by others, of course, um, just put out a video defending flock cameras. And rather than playing it, you can find it on the internet. I'm just going to read you the description. The headline, and here's what it is. Ever feel like you're being watched? This is the Free Press headline. You might be right, but Flock safety cameras aren't interested in you unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good. And it's like literally Soviet propaganda, you know. If you got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. As long as your, you know, soul is right with the party, you're, you're okay. Don't worry about The panopticon. So this is obviously disgusting, it's anti-American, it's totalitarian, but it's also not that surprising coming from the neocon oracle known as the free press. I can't quite explain why that's not surprising to me. Why is their support of flock cameras consistent with their support of, say, the war with Iran?
Well, let's remember, it was about 12, 13 years ago that we started the Snowden reporting. That really was the first meaningful, broad-based reporting that showed that the goal of the US government was to create an absolutely ubiquitous surveillance state that monitored, collected, stored highly invasive and revealing information, not about terror suspects or potential pedophiles, but about every single one of us. A, a ubiquitous surveillance state is how they described it internally and what it was. And obviously it had all sorts of connections to the military into foreign policy goals. In fact, it, its basis was in the NSA, which is a, uh, key part of the Defense Department, of the military planning unit, the U.S. security state. And all along, they also had a very close, really indispensable partnership with Silicon Valley, with the largest tech companies. In fact, one of the earliest stories we did was about how the tech companies were just handing over en masse whatever information the NSA wanted without warrants or anything else, because those companies need to keep a good relationship with the government because That's where they get most of their largest contracts from. There's really no separation between the private and public sector, but the companies and the, the sector that is most financially interested in this surveillance state are the people in Silicon Valley, the people who, for example, are, are running Palantir and have gotten unimaginably wealthy, multi, multi-billionaire wealth from helping not only to create a surveillance state, but then merging it with the US military.
And this is what the Israelis, of course, set up in, in Gaza. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of people, one of the loudest ones being Charlie Kirk, were so incredulous that October 7th could happen. And the Israeli government just had no idea that it was coming because they have Gaza under one of the most extreme surveillance systems ever to exist in all of human history. And a lot of the reporting we did was about the partnership between the NSA and, and the Israelis and the amount of just raw intelligence the NSA turns over about American citizens to the Israeli government. So you have all these component parts, Peter Thiel and Palantir and Alex Karp, Andreessen Horowitz, that has invested in a lot of these, these AI surveillance companies, also invested in Palantir, also a major investor in the free press. And this is all part of the same group that, as you say, is inextricably linked not just to building a domestic surveillance state, but also a foreign policy that is very neocon in nature, very warmongering in nature. They all wanted the war in Iran. They all love and worship and revere Israel.
And of course, it is in the interest of people who wield the greatest power to find out and know as much about that as they can as their domestic population, because that gives them the greatest control. And that's always been what the surveillance state is about.
But the irony of it is just— is inescapable. I mean, we're fighting these wars abroad so we can be free here in the United States. We're fighting tyrants on behalf of freedom and democracy. And that's basically what we're doing. I mean, there's no one really making the argument that Iran was a physical threat to the United States. I mean, the fringe Mark Levin types do, but no, most people would not make that case. They would say this is a tyranny. They're killing their own people. They're throwing gays off the roof. They're shooting protesters. And because— and same with China, same with North Korea, same with Russia— because they allow their own citizens no freedom, we have to kill their governments. But those same people making that argument are now endorsing tyranny and authoritarianism at home. So it's like, what could possibly be the justification for their foreign policy?
You know, as somebody who has really had to immerse myself in U.S. war propaganda and just war propaganda generally, as somebody who has opposed pretty much every war that the United States has fought over the last, say, 25 years, there are a lot of things about war propaganda that I think are universal, that aren't that surprising. It's a very effective science. It's been developed over decades, really centuries, using multiple fields of discipline and anthropology and psychology and psychiatry. It's a very precise science. It's not surprising that it works, but sometimes there are things that are so brazen about it that even my respect for the efficacy of propaganda makes me shocked that it does work. And one of the things that I find most shocking is this idea that the United States goes to war against the tyrannical and dictatorial governments of the world because we want to free the oppressed people and bring them freedom and democracy. When, if you know anything about American history, our history is exactly the opposite. We spent so many decades overthrowing democratically elected leaders and imposing on those countries some of the most brutal military dictatorships ever known in human history, including, of course, in Iran and countless other places.
Right now, our closest allies that Trump loves most are the most brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, the, the Egyptians all over the world. That has always been our goal. And anyone who believed— there was actually an article last week in The New York Times about how these idiotic Iranian exiles who, you know, have lived for decades in London and Toronto and Chicago and L.A. somehow got held up as the voice of the Iranian people who were saying, please, please come and bomb our country, we want you to free us, now are saying, oh my God, we're so disillusioned. It turns out Trump really wasn't interested in freeing the Iranian people, nor was Netanyahu. They were fighting the war solely for their own interests, and they were willing to kill as many of us as possible. In order to advance that goal. And it's like, oh, that just occurred to you, that, that— so yes, there— if you were to believe that neocons and the like and their war propaganda about how they want to free the oppressed people of the world were actually real, you would then find it oddly contradictory that they're imposing this tyrannical surveillance state at home.
But if you understand, which I think most reasonably perceptive people do, that spreading freedom and democracy have nothing to do with why we fight wars. In fact, if anything, we're more interested in undercutting freedom and democracy. We prefer dictatorships at our service who control their countries and suppress their populations for us. Then it makes all the sense in the world that those same people would want to maintain as much of a grip on the domestic population as they do on the rest of the world. And nothing— there is nothing— this is, I think, the other point, Tucker. You know, when we were doing the Stone reporting, and people really understood, oh wow, it turns out that our government really was converting what we were told was this very liberatory, emancipatory technology, which was the internet. They were actually converting it into its exact opposite, the most coercive and potent means of human control ever in human history. I remember when we did one story about, uh, the ubiquity of, of the ability to spy people from the Stasi, like who were actually in the Stasi in East Germany, came out and expressed this kind of envy.
And they were like, oh wow, we never dreamed of being able to have powers that were this significant. And one of the big responses was, well, look, you know, the NSA tried to encourage people to think this. All the other corporations did as well. You don't need privacy. Privacy is for losers and criminals. It's for pedophiles and terrorists. And if you don't have anything to hide, then why do you need privacy? And of course, every single person has something to hide. We all do things in secret and in private that we wouldn't do in public. Every single one of us has that division in our lives. It's very healthy. It's kind of fundamental to how human beings operate. And a surveillance state— nothing gives greater tyrannical power to a centralized power than the ability to surveil and monitor and know what people are doing at all times. And to see Barry Weiss and the Free Press Justifying it, cheering it, making it seem all benign is exactly what you would expect of people who have that as their goal.
And not just benign, not just, you know, harmless and nonthreatening, but they've actually taken it, I think, a step beyond that. And they're scolding anyone who wants privacy. And by the way, these are all pro-choice people who believe Griswold v. Connecticut, the '67 decision that gave us the right to privacy, is really important. But you don't actually get the privacy. But So just to restate the headline, it says if they're not interested in you unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good. So basically, if you're worried about flock cameras, you're up to no good. You're a thief. You're a kidnapper. I mean, like, they're, they're yelling at us for caring.
Well, what they're trying to do is to essentially say that if you are somebody who craves privacy in your life, who wants to have areas of your life that are free of government or corporate monitoring and scrutiny, then essentially you're admitting that you do things that are wrong. In fact, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, for many years, that's, that's actually one time what, what exactly what he said when people were raising questions about the invasiveness of Google and how it's creating this, this dragnet of ubiquitous surveillance. He said, well, why don't you think about it this way? If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know about it, maybe you should stop doing it. Maybe that's something that you ought not to be doing. As though the mere fact that human beings crave privacy in any realm at any point in our lives for any purpose suggests that we are somehow bad people because we want to hide things. And the only reason to hide things is if you're a pedophile or otherwise engaged in dangerous conduct that you shouldn't be engaged in. And ultimately, I think you're right. That is the most pernicious and sinister part of this, which is to start trying to convince people that anybody who actually cares about privacy cares about privacy only because they're doing things that you should want the government to know about because they're probably really bad and dangerous people.
And I just, I think sometimes we forget like how un-American that is. You know what, when I went to law school and like, you know, you study the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and the layout of it, I remember being kind of amazed. Like it really struck me how the founders had this debate and they purposely imposed restrictions on police power, on state power, Knowing that it would make it easier for violent criminals, rapists, pedophiles to often escape and to do some more. At least, like, the police would be able to catch so many more criminals if they could just barge into your home at any time or search whatever it is that they wanted. Privacy is so foundational to, you know, the state can't just come into your home and use your house to quarter their soldiers. This is all the value of privacy that pervades every part of the Bill of Rights. And what it means to be American and the idea that you should give up your privacy, that only bad people care about privacy, could not be any more anti-American in its ethos.
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I'm going to listen. I don't whip around and scream at the person for complaining. And yet again and again and again, you see this impulse from our leaders, particularly the ones who are pushing the war in Iran, the neocons, that suggest deep contempt for the American population. And you saw it in the last 10 days in the debate over food inflation. Rather than just make the argument that, no, you know, the numbers aren't real, your lived experience is imaginary, it doesn't actually cost more to eat than it did 5 years ago, you're making it up in your mind, you're crazy. They've been scolding people, like yelling at them, like, you know, how dare you complain about a $20 burrito? You're not doing it right. What is that?
You know, this is— I mean, this is one of the things that I think we've gotten away from so severely, and maybe it was too gradual and it kind of like the, the, the frog in the, the boiling water metaphor. But the whole idea of why Congress was supposed to approve wars was because war is something that by necessity affects every single person in very fundamental ways. I mean, there was an assumption even though it proved not to be true, that obviously in times of war you're going to have to pay more taxes because someone has to pay for the war. They didn't know that we were just going to create this fiat system of money and borrow, you know, trillions from China. But anyway, that was their assumption. But it would also affect, you know, the country in every single other way. Your sons and your sons would be endangered because they were the ones who would have to go fight. And so it needed buy-in from the American people. And the way to do that was to ensure that The only way the president could start a war is if the American people, through their Congress, approved.
We just completely got rid of that. That, that no longer exists. It's like we just rewrote the Constitution. And even though there hasn't been a declaration of war, typically political leaders have wanted the buy-in of the American people before starting a war. That was what the whole 18-month campaign of what turned out to be lies, but still, it was an 18-month PR campaign by George Bush and Dick Cheney and the rest. To convince Americans why we needed to go and invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. They thought it was important that Americans got on board, and they did. Two-thirds or more of Americans favored the war in Iraq at the time that it began. That does not exist anymore. There was no campaign of any kind, no pretense of caring about the American population thought when trying to sell this war in Iran that basically came out of nowhere. Polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly were opposed to it, and they've only gotten more opposed And the, the, the, the reaction is, who cares? Who cares what the American people think? Who cares if they think it's not worth it to pay more gas prices and more at the supermarket when they're already facing economic difficulties?
Too bad for them. They need to shut up and accept it and take it because our goals are more important. It's a— it's such an overtly contemptuous message, as you say, that is being sent by our elite. And then these are the same people who turn around and wonder why Americans are so disgusted by elite institutions that they're willing to vote for anybody left, right, socialist, you know, far right, whatever you call them, that they see are radically opposing the establishment and, and the people in power because they have very good reasons, so many good reasons to hate them.
So you're describing a political system that's becoming legitimately volatile. You know, people who had no chance at all, who were truly fringe and ideas that were truly fringe, including some that I personally have, and articulate a lot are now much more mainstream. So that, that suggests that like the system is changing really fast in a way that is good in some ways, but also kind of scary in other ways. And that's exactly why you don't, as you said, embark on a massive project like a war without the buy-in of the public, right? Because it could hurt you. But these people didn't even flinch. And on a bipartisan level, I mean, Trump did it. But, you know, it was a, there were Democrats, Democratic leaders were for it also. So why aren't they afraid? And still are. Why aren't they afraid?
Okay. So this is where I think this gets back to your first question. And this is what I think ultimately, I almost wrote a book on this once actually. I was about to write a book on it when I met someone named Edward Snowden. That kind of derailed me for a few years. Um, I remember I, I, growing up, I didn't know any rich people. And one of the very first few rich people I really met or ever talked to was right when I started my blog early on. I had this guy who was like a major high-level mathematician at one of the most lucrative hedge funds, making enormous sums of money. And I remember after the 2008 financial crisis, you know, I was doing a lot of reading about oligarchs in the past and how frightened they were of the public. Like, the greatest fear that, that the very wealthy had in America were of— was of a populist uprising. And that was how FDR was able to sell them on the New Deal, was look, you may not like the New Deal, but if we don't make these people's lives better in some way, you know, you can say goodbye to the whole capitalist system.
And they used to have yachts where they had safes full of their jewels because they thought any moment they were going to, you know, have a kind of Bolshevik revolution. And that's why, like, John Rockefeller and Henry Ford used to ride down the street handing money out. That's where philanthropy came from, to convince Americans to know they were good people because they were scared. And I remember after the financial crisis, I said, you know, it really seems like the elite class has completely lost its fear. Like the greed that drove the financial crisis. And then the insistence that all the money be used to bail out the richest people who caused it and let everybody else drown, like the entire middle class with foreclosures and mortgages and all of that signals a kind of utter indifference to— like that fear is gone. And I think one of the— and one of the things he says is, yeah, I think it's absolutely gone. And I think the reason it's gone is because they believe that the police state that they've constructed is enough to keep them safe no matter how angry the peasants are. And I think that is a lot of where this surveillance state comes from.
Like, you— if you have this massive wealth inequality, there are two ways to, I think, maintain it. One is to placate the public, the majority, just enough so that they don't really feel like it's worth it to go risk their lives and wage violence and a revolution because they're at least minimally fed. They have a enough of a decent life of just above the subsistence level. But if you're not going to do that, the alternative is just paramilitarize the society, build huge walls behind which all the rich live, uh, give extreme authorities, uh, of violence and, and surveillance to the police forces that you fund and construct that are there really to protect that system and to protect you. And I think so much of this mass surveillance and everything else is that the recognition that that is the path that has been chosen. And, you know, I mean, I guess the French elite thought that they were safe behind the walls of Versailles. And to some extent, you can probably make yourself pretty safe. But at some point, if you keep creating this kind of complete loss of faith and trust in institutions of authority and a belief, a very well-grounded belief that the suffering that people have in their lives is due to those in power, not left, right, not Democrat versus Republican, not pro or anti-abortion or pro and anti-trans or whatever, but based on what is being done with the distribution of power and wealth.
I don't think that even the greatest amount of paramilitarization and surveillance will be enough to stop it. But that is definitely the goal. And it's tied into their ability to go around having wars and not care if people are supportive of it or angry about it because they just believe, you know, Peter Thiel believes he can build his own private island and, and have Palantir surveil everybody, and he'll always know whatever threats are emerging. And I think that is a— that is the mentality that they have opted for.
I've always thought that pharma played a role in this. It is not simply surveilling and threatening people into obedience, but it's also changing the nature of people through benzodiazepines and SSRIs and, you know, just the whole cornucopia of sort of suppressive drugs that are just handed out. You can get them online. Without ever seeing a doctor. And that seems like an instrument of social policy to me, of social control.
Yeah, I think marijuana is part of that as well. I mean, I'm definitely somebody who believes in the legalization of marijuana just because it gives the state way too much power to criminalize it. But the fact that so many people are ingesting so many substances that are being given to them, fed to them, recommended to them, promoted to them, that are basically designed to just almost create a zombie state.
Yeah.
Like sometimes anxiety is good. Yes. Anger is good. These are the things that, yes, you know, are, are, are drivers of, of us wanting better lives. And if you sandpaper all the edges off of humanity and just turn them into kind of like doped up, narcoticized, you know, people who are willing to accept any, everything and anything and just kind of be content with it. That is, I mean, it's very dystopian. It sounds very dystopian, but it's also in a large, to a large extent, if you know people in your life, which you probably do, who are taking large amount of antidepressants or Xanax or any of these medications, marijuana too, to put themselves constantly in a state of tranquility and acceptance and, and submission. You can see the effects of it in their daily lives, but also on this kind of macro level that is very, very beneficial to people in power. You want a population that's content and happy.
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Visit dutch.com/tucker, use the code Tucker for $50 off. Truly, Dutch is real. It works. We did a lot of research into this, used it before recommending it. Dutch.com/tucker. So, but can you expand? I, I snorted in agreement, but I would— if you wouldn't mind just explaining a little more precisely your point that anxiety can be good, because I do think Americans are trained to see pain in general, but specifically anxiety is like the last thing you ever want to deal with. You should do whatever it takes to avoid ever feeling anxious. Why do you disagree? Why do you think it can be helpful?
All of these human emotions that we have, all of these human instincts that we have, these are fundamental to our survival. They're the reason why natural selection has produced human beings that are capable of feeling all these things and who do react in these ways to all of these events, because these are the sentiments and feelings that maximize your chance of survival and not just survival, but you're thriving and you're prospering and your ability to find happiness. And, you know, it's sort of like fear. Nobody likes feeling fear, but I'm really glad that I have the ability to feel fear if something actually dangerous is nearby, because then I'll either protect myself from it or I'll try and flee, or I'll try and do things to save myself. If I just took pills that constantly eliminated my sense of fear, I might feel better day to day, but it would also drastically impede the capabilities that I have that are fundamental to my being a human being who can survive and thrive in the world. And the same is true of anxiety. Anxiety is what tells us there's something wrong. You know, anxiety tells us there's things that are going on that are not as they should be.
This is one of the most— this is what drives intellectual achievement. It's what drives social and political change and revolutions. If you are willing to just take medication every day in order to drown that out or suffocate it or kill it, You're taking away one of the most important, valuable drivers that you have as a human being, and you'll just kind of stagnate. You may be happier in the sense that people who perceive nothing are happy. You know, if you perceive nothing, if you just limit what you know to a very small number of things, you might be kind of that ignorance is bliss kind of formula. Yeah, there is a level of happiness to it, but it's very shallow. It's very superficial. And ultimately it's designed to make you accept things that really you ought not to accept, ought not to feel good about, ought not to be happy about.
It also reframes reality in a way that's very dishonest. So basically, therapy culture tells you it's on you. Like, you've got this trauma that you're carrying around with you, all of which, you know, there's truth in all of that, by the way. I don't— I'm not dismissing it. But like, big picture, a lot of Americans are really unhappy because the system is working against them. The system that they did not create, into which they were born, which has changed a lot over the past 30 years. It is bad for you. The way we're living is bad for you, and that's the result of decisions that others made. But when you get prescribed SSRIs or benzos, what is the therapist really saying? Like, your real problems are internal? It's like, yeah, I've got internal problems, but I don't know, a $20 burrito and a lifetime of debt— other people decided to create that system, and it's hurting me. So do you see what I'm saying? You kind of like shift the blame from the guilty to yourself.
Yeah. I mean, you do want all the tools as an individual that you can acquire to kind of combat external forces and to keep yourself from— because sometimes those, those, those human instincts can become excessive or off-kilter. You know, fear is good, but paranoia isn't. Of course, anxiety is good. But, you know, like crippling anxiety is, is a disorder. So it's not as though those things can't go wrong. And you want to always like turn them up to 10 and maximize them. And sometimes those things can help, you know, individuals who are struggling with some sort of disorder, you know, get themselves in order. But in general, and, you know, this was, this is, you know, this has become, you know, such a common anecdote now when, when, when Trump won in 2016, which is very shocking to most people, but to especially liberals. To, to liberals, you know, in every city and every, every part of the country. Therapists reported that they had so many patients seeking out therapy as a way of dealing with Trump's victory that they couldn't even accommodate, you know, a portion of them. During COVID people basically went insane, and they should have, because the conditions in which we were forced to live were so completely divergent from what human beings need.
Just the minimum things you need of interactivity and going outside and, you know, just normal human life, that those kinds of things are, are positive reactions. Those are the kinds of things that make you angry and say, no, we're not going to accept this. But you're right. In our culture, we've been told that if we're dissatisfied with something, if we're angry about something, if we feel anxious about something, you go and take a pill for it or you go and fix it. And sometimes it shouldn't be fixed. Sometimes you feel those things because you should feel those things. And, you know, again, I mean, there's from the 1950s and 1940s, there's, you know, books by Orwell and Huxley and all these kind of dystopian books about what to them was the future, but to us is our present, based on the idea that we were essentially going to be, uh, just kept in this constant state of chemical or entertainment distraction, uh, tranquility, in a way that would allow those in power to exploit us as much as they want because we've turned off those, those, those reactions that are, are so vital to resisting it.
Why is distraction bad? You, you mentioned, it's so interesting you mentioned distraction, which is a tool of control, but it's also a source of suffering. What, what, what role does distraction play?
Well, it's interesting. I mean, I don't think distraction as an, in an absolute sense is bad. I think distraction sometimes can be a positive. You know, you go in, you watch some sporting event with your family or you watch some— yep, good film or read a good book, you know, you're in a way part of what its value is, is it, it takes you away from your reality and puts you into a different reality. So I don't think if, if, if managed and limited, it's, it's necessarily a bad thing. But distraction has— is, is very addictive. I mean, we have companies that build products that are designed to do nothing but to addict you to the distraction that they provide. I, I mean, I still think one of the most amazing articles was a— by the New York Times interviewed a bunch of parents, uh, who work for Silicon Valley companies, and they were always saying, I would never ever allow my kids to use the products that I'm creating for kids because I know what they're designed to do, which is to completely distort and trap their brain into this never-ending need for just constant stimulation that has nothing to do with the real world.
This—
they're designed to be addictive like cigarettes were, or All other kinds of substances were, and if you can just keep people continuously distracted, meaning not focused on reality, then the people who are focused on reality have a gigantic advantage, which is that they can do anything that they want. And very few people will pay attention and you just feed them enough propaganda, you feed them enough justification and, and they're more eager to get back to that, that distraction, which really becomes an addiction.
Well, you certainly see it in the country since February 28th, the day that the war with Iran started and kind of the certain precipitous decline of the United States began. Obviously, there's kind of no way out without a readjustment downward in our living of standard of living. We know that's going to happen, and yet people don't seem as agitated about it as you might have expected. At the beginning. And most interesting of all, there have been almost no protests, anti-war protests. And having seen a lot of anti-war protests in my life, I'm baffled. This is the most significant war that we have fought, I would argue, since the Second World War, in that it'll change balance of power globally, and there are no protests. What is going on?
Well, I think If you look at what has sparked anti-war protests in the past, it basically requires some visceral interaction with the war that makes people horrified and sickened by what's happening. The Vietnam War protests were almost certainly induced primarily by the fact that huge numbers of coffins and body bags were coming back to the United States on a very regular basis. And so people's neighbors and communities and people who they went to school with or who worked with all had kids who were going over to the jungles of Vietnam and coming back dead. Um, but it was also, you know, one of the first really televised wars. I mean, it wasn't televised in the sense that the first Iraq War was, the Gulf War, or the wars now are, but it was still— there was enough of a, you know, with, with the, the reporting that was done on some of the massacres by the US military and the amount of death that was taking place. So people felt that in their neighborhoods. They felt it in their communities. There was no way to avoid it. And then even wars that have sparked antiwar protests more recently that didn't involve American troops coming back home, like the US-funded and armed Israeli destruction of Gaza, was one where every single day people were seeing the most horrific carnage.
You know, babies having their limbs blown apart, entire families being incinerated in tents, even though they were completely defenseless. Basically the most horrific things you could possibly think of. And I think anyone with a basic moral conscience, knowing that their government was paying for it, that their money was being used for it, that their government's forces were being diplomatically and militarily harnessed to, to participate in it and to protect it, felt this kind of immediacy, this visceral disgust that also caused them to protest. We don't really have that, either of those, in Iran. The number of American deaths have been relatively limited by virtue of the fact that Trump has not ordered ground troops into Iran. At the same time, we've gotten very little visual idea of how many people who are civilians have been killed in Iran. The very first day, we know that we killed 165 schoolgirls, the very people we claimed we were going to war to liberate by just dropping a gigantic missile on their school. And then a second missile when people showed up to help them. The notorious double strike missiles that the Israelis used constantly in Gaza. So it's not like this war has been free of atrocities and the like, but I think it's been kept hidden enough.
We don't know the names of Iranian victims. We don't really get a full glimpse of, of it. And at the same time, given the few number of people who are fighting the war, the fact that not many of them are coming back dead, I think it's been enough to just kind of numb people and make them think, well, this isn't really something that's affecting me directly, even though I'm paying more. I think there's a, there's a pretty high trigger for when people are going to go out into the street and actually protest. I should also add, Tucker, this is something to consider as well, is the protest movement that occurred on American campuses about the war in Gaza did not just peter out. Those were crushed. They were crushed through a combination of police violence, but especially essentially the criminalization of those protests. Many of those protesters got expelled. A lot of them got deported. They made very, very clear— the government did— that they regarded protests against government policy, even though it's one of our most foundational rights that's protected by the Constitution, as something that was going to be crushed through the use of police force and state punishments of all kinds.
And when you create a climate where people know if they protest the government's war policies, there's a good chance they're going to suffer personally, I think you raise the bar by design even higher for when people are willing to go out into the streets.
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But there really— there's no coverage of the war in Iran, or for that matter, coverage of the war against Russia from Russia's perspective. So when the first Gulf War broke out in the winter of '90 and '91, CNN famously was there in Baghdad as the United States began its barrage of Baghdad. And you could watch it live on television. That's been true for every war. It was even true in Afghanistan to some extent, in Iraq. But this war, are there— how many American network correspondents are in Tehran right now? How many are in Moscow covering that side?
I, it, it does seem intentional, like the propaganda is founded on lack of information that I think, I mean, I think this is so crucial that the easiest way to prevent public outrage about public policy or public behavior that deserves outrage is simply to hide it. You know, I did a lot of reporting on the atrocities inside factory farms, the way factory food is produced through the torture and slaughter of billions of animals. And not, not just their slaughter, but their actual horrific torture, but also the grotesque public health conditions in which this food is— these animals are kept that contaminate the food pile, the risk of epidemics from antibiotics, etc., etc. And so one of the ways this industry purposely ensures that nobody gets outraged by it is to cover it up. They actually got used their control of state legislatures in all of the farming states to pass what are called ag-gag laws that made it a criminal offense for anybody to go get a job inside a factory farm and then film what was taking place, which was basically the way, the only way that we ever got to a glimpse of what was happening there.
They criminalized it. Eventually courts overturned it as the obvious, prohibition violation of the First Amendment that it was. But that was their goal, was to say, Okay, we're going to use barbarism and savagery, but as long as we prevent the public from knowing about it, there's— they can't care because they will never see it. That has been very much the case with war. I remember one time, I don't remember this, but in 2015 there was this kind of like lone gunman attack on the parliament, the Canadian parliament in Ottawa. And it turned out the guy, even though he was Muslim, was mostly just psychologically ill, had a long history of psychiatric illness, and he killed One young guard who stood outside the parliament and nobody else. And that guy became kind of an icon in Canada. I was there the whole week. They, you know, had marches in his name. They interviewed all his family members. And so there was a sense of, wow, our society has really suffered the loss of this, you know, valuable, precious human life, which it has. When have you ever heard the name of one of our victims from all the countries that we bomb?
And have been bombing for 25 years, all throughout the war on terror, all— always now, all these bombs that drop, these drones that have dropped on wedding parties, they're all just dehumanized. They're all kind of just swept under the rug. Did you hear of any of the families of the 165 schoolgirls who were killed on the first day of the war in Iran? No. That's a very deliberate strategy to make sure that Americans don't think about and don't focus on the amount of carnage and suffering and bloodshed that our military is causing against innocent people because that is the only way that you can get populations to accept these constant wars is if you don't let them realize what actually it entails. And I think the reason Gaza was an exception was because so many people in Gaza had so many cameras in their hand and were uploading and had allies who could upload the actual carnage and the actual inhumanity that was taking place every day. And people couldn't avoid it. But they made a lot of efforts to try and prevent that from being seen as well. That was what the ban of TikTok was ultimately about, was it was not a fear of China because that had been around forever.
The idea that we have to ban TikTok because the Chinese have too much power and that went nowhere. The only time the TikTok ban picked up enough steam and got votes in both parties in support of the Biden White House was when the ADL came out and said the reason young people are being turned against Israel in the war in Gaza is because there's too many of these videos circulating on TikTok. And that's when the government intervened and said, we can't allow TikTok to become this uncontrolled realm of free speech because it, it contaminates our youth with the things we don't want them to know. And that's why they took it out of the hands of ByteDance and basically put it in the hands of Marc Andreessen and Larry Ellison and people like that.
How bitterly ironic that it was a Chinese-owned company that was bringing too much free speech into the United States.
Yeah, well, I mean, that is one of the issues is for no one thinks China is a beacon of free speech, especially when it comes to their own people. That's for for sure. But in a way, they were the only outlet that the US government couldn't fully control, right? Like during COVID the US government had no problem whatsoever cracking down on any debates about the origins of COVID about the efficacies of the mask or social distancing or school lockdowns and its advisability. They were easily able to censor it because they had basic control over all of the American big tech platforms because those big tech platforms need the US government for all their defense contracts, all the other contracts they get with the CIA and the Pentagon, they're never going to be adversarial to the US government. ByteDance didn't really have that vested interest in the United States government and didn't need to obey the US government censorship orders. And so, as you say, ironically, it was one of the only vestiges of a large platform that American— that the American government couldn't censor. And that is why it had to be taken out of their hands, not because Americans wanted to make sure we were free of Chinese repression.
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Everything on the site, 30% off. That's brooklynbedding.com, promo code Tucker, 30% off site-wide all summer. My, my concern about the censorship that just covers all the main facts of these two wars in progress in Russia and Iran is that obviously it hardens us to the effects of our— what our policies, uh, actually do. But it also makes it hard to make wise decisions because you have no idea the other side's perspective. So for example, I keep including at dinner last night running into people who sincerely believe that Ukraine is winning the war against Russia and who have no idea that the United States is actually fighting that war. NATO, but our proxy NATO. But we're— the CIA is allowing all the targeting to take place and we're running Ukraine. But they don't know.
I don't—
no one seems to know that. And they seem— so it seems like a feedback loop, like we're winning, or Ukraine is winning amazingly, and Russia is going to surrender at any moment now and give back the Donbas. That if you really believe that, And it's not true, of course, but if you believe that, you're likely to do really dumb things that could— well, God knows where they could wind up. Do you see that happening?
Oh, I mean, the— what I'm sure you've had this experience, but sometimes I see things that happen that actually shock and amaze me and don't fully understand why it doesn't produce more shock and indignation in other people. And so I just— everywhere I go, I just try and bring it up and just remind people, hey, remember when that happened? Hoping that one day people will understand like how not just alarming it is on its own, but how reflective it is of how severely our discourse is controlled. One of them was when young people on TikTok discovered the Bin Laden letter and started passing it around, and they bullied The Guardian into taking that document off of its site so the links no longer worked. And they got TikTok to ban any discussion of the Bin Laden letter because a bunch of young people were like, wait a minute, I never knew before that this is why people said there was so much hatred toward the United States, the Middle East, because we sanctioned Iraq and killed 100,000— hundreds of thousands of children. Put, you know, our military on their most sacred soil in Saudi Arabia, but also have been funding Israel in the middle of the region in all this aggression.
I always thought it was because what we were told, like these Muslims hated women walking around in bikinis and hated the fact that we vote. And they were shocked to discover this history that they had never been told. And immediately the attempt was take it off the Guardian website so that there's nowhere they can read that, that letter, and then, make TikTok shut down the hashtag. But, and I, that's one of the examples that, that I always bring up. But the other one is right after the, Russian invasion of Ukraine in, February of 2022, the EU Parliament quickly enacted a law that made it a criminal offense to platform any Russian state media. So if you're an adult citizen of the Netherlands or Spain or wherever, And you want to hear the Russian side of the story, or you want to hear what Russia is saying about why they, uh, decided to do this or what's actually happening. You can't because it's a crime now to platform Russian state media. European citizens were not allowed to hear it. And when I was at Rumble, they came to Rumble and said, the French government did and said, you have RT and Sputnik that you allow on your site and you need to take those down because EU law doesn't permit the dissemination of those media outlets in our in our countries.
And when Rumble said no, they banned all of Rumble at the IP level. So Rumble was not available in France. That's how rigorously enforced it was. Now, even at the height of the Cold War, you could go to The New York Times and Khrushchev would come to the United States and give a speech, and they would print the full text of the speech. He would be interviewed. We would always hear from Soviet leaders. The Soviet Union— Richard Nixon would go to the Soviet Union. He would go on national television and talk about the virtues of capitalism and freedom and the like. This is a level of censorship so extreme that it shocks me that people tolerate. But the reason for it is, is because if you actually hear the perspective of the Russians— and I know you did this, and I have gone to Russia and have interviewed Russian officials because I do want to hear what they're saying. I do want to hear the perspective of the other side in a war. But it's become almost like treasonous. You know, this climate has been created where you're not supposed to listen to them. And any journalist who publish it or talk about it are somehow traitors to the country or, or accused of being on the payroll of propagandists simply for reporting what their perspective is, not just what our government officials want you to know.
And it is, you know, nothing is— nothing makes propagandizing a population easier than if you get to just banish the population from hearing any alternative views.
What do you think the purpose of this is? What's the goal in the war against Russia? What's the endgame? I mean, I'll just say in one sense, from my perspective, it's the biggest country in the world. It's a civilization as well as a nation state, and it has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. So you're probably not going to defeat Russia, right? Let's just start there. But do they not know that, or what is the plan here?
You know, I, I have to confess, I— this is— I've never had a clear answer. I've never gotten a clear answer. I've never settled on a clear explanation for why the US, national security state has so much deep animosity toward Russia and wants to destroy it. And because this goes back way before Russiagate, it's one of the reasons why I hated Russiagate so much, not just because it was a scandal with no evidence, but because I thought it was dangerous in the extreme to start feeding Americans again on this idea that the gravest threat to our democracy the existential threat happens to be the country with the largest nuclear stockpile that we've all been trained for generations to hate and fear. I just knew that that was not just dangerous, but very purposeful. And if you go back even to, you know, 2010, 2011, Hillary Clinton at the State Department was absolutely obsessed with undermining and subverting Russia. She was openly funding in the name of, of course, democracy, anti-Putin opposition groups. A lot of the protests that appeared on the streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and other places were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy under Hillary Clinton's orders.
All kinds of covert operations. When Hillary Clinton wrote her book Hard Choices, when she left the Obama administration, the only real topic on which she clearly criticized Obama was what she thought was his refusal to, quote unquote, confront Russia, both in Syria and in Ukraine. And there has been this, you know, and neocons— I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg did this. Interview with Obama when he was on his way out about what the so-called Obama Doctrine. And Jeffrey Goldberg, as much as he reveres Obama, was indignant and asking him, why didn't you— why did you let, let Russia annex Crimea? And why didn't you do more to stop Russia when it came to Ukraine or Syria? And Obama said— and if you go back and read this, you're going to have a kind of different view of Obama— he said, everybody in this town loves to beat their chest and talk about how we're going to go to war and we're going to you know, take— not allow this and stand up to this. And he said, we don't have any vital interest in Ukraine. We never have and we never will. And Russia will always have— look at Ukraine right on its border, one of the most vulnerable parts of its border, as a vital interest for obvious reasons.
The same way Mexico and Canada are always going to be a vital interest to us. And we're never going to— they're always going to have escalatory dominance there. And if anyone in this town wants to stand up and say, we should go to war with Russia, risk war with Russia over who governs various provinces in the Donbas, then let them actually say it. But to me, that's kind of insane. And it's just odd because that was 2016, and it was just a couple of months later when the entire Democratic Party became utterly fixated on the grave threat posed by Russia. And, you know, I'll just tell you this quick story, Tucker, that I find that always sticks with me. It's so interesting. Uh, when I went to Russia one time, I think it was like the second or third time after working with Snowden. There was a time when Snowden was trapped inside the international airport, and the US government didn't want anything more in the world than to get their hands on Snowden. And he was in Russian custody, but inside the airport because Russia hadn't let him in and he couldn't, and he couldn't leave.
They were offering the Russians everything that the Russians wanted. You may have all these Russian fugitives. We'll hand them over to you. And the Russians refused. And I thought for sure Snowden was going to be handed over to the, to the, to the US, given what a high priority it was for the US. And when I went to Russia, I asked, like, there was such an obvious deal there to be made. Why, why wasn't the deal made? And what I was told was, in part, it's because Russia has— the Russian identity has always been about offering free haven to those oppressed and persecuted in the West, and they seeking refuge in Russia. Is kind of fundamental to Russia. And so if Putin turned Snowden over to the US, it would be seen as anti-Russian— would be— I know a lot of people in the US think he's this totalitarian leader who doesn't have to care about Russian public opinion. Of course, that's an absurd fairy tale. And they said he probably just would provoke so much outrage that nothing would be really worth it. But they said the real reason is, is that so often the US and Russia end up not being able to do deals that are so obviously in both besides rational self-interest, because there's like this DNA, generationally cultivated hatred within the military and intelligence establishments of both countries that still believe the other is this existential enemy long after the Cold War is over, that just almost like inertia drive each country to want to harm the other.
So I don't know why, Tucker. I mean, it seems to me like the US and Russia could do a lot of business. It did do a lot of business under Obama. They helped negotiate the Iran deal. They were fundamental in fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS alongside the US in Syria with Assad. And for some reason, people in the national security state, for all kinds of— I'll tell you one quick part of it too. Uh, you know, a lot of the most hawkish neocons in the United States are people who are refugees, Jewish refugees from, from the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and every part of— composite part of the Soviet Union. And Russia, when it was the USSR, was considered pretty hostile toward Israel. And so a lot of people who feel alignment with Israel, who are loyal to Israel, have long looked at Russia, the Russians, the Soviets, as being one of their worst enemies because they were adversarial to Israel. They often were aligned with the Arabs in the Middle East. And I think a lot of it is that residual kind of cultural, uh, allegiance that these people continue to harbor even once they come and become American and, and start working in the US national security state.
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I mean, these are American-born people. They're not from—
they're American—
Soviet Moldova or wherever.
Yeah, no, but their families are from there, you know. It's— I mean, Marco Rubio is an American-born American, but his parents come, come from Cuba. And if you grew up in an immigrant home— I didn't, but I know plenty of people who did. My grandparents were— two of my grandparents were immigrants. You hear and then develop a kind of affinity for the worldview that looks at that country, that country of origin, as a very special country to which you owe some kind of an allegiance. And so you don't have to come from that country, although some of them do. But, you know, I think one of the reasons why Marco Rubio is so eager to rule Cuba, which he absolutely is and is on the verge of doing, is because that was the lifelong dream of his parents and his extended family and community. Was that the United States government, the power of it, would be used to fix what they always regarded as their country, the one to which they always planned to go back to once it was fixed. And that's now what Marco Rubio is going to do. And the fact that he sees the world through this Cuban immigrant experience obviously is a major role in that.
I think that's true for a lot of different groups, including people who were Soviet Jews or whose families became refugees from, from Soviet Russia.
Why the fixation on—
I don't know, you tell me what you think is—
I, I think there's something. I, I don't know. First of all, I don't know the answer, but I do know, because I've listened very carefully as someone who's been agnostic on Russia my entire life, I never had strong feelings about it ever. Um, but I've listened carefully to people describe it in Washington at the policymaking level, and you always get this sense that they feel And sometimes they even just say it, that they have a right to control what happens in Russia. And I've always been confused by that. Where does that right come from? It's like, it's almost like an ownership. Like it, it was ours and this guy called Putin showed up and like took it over and he's illegitimate. And from my American perspective, I'm like, I don't know, whatever you think of Putin, but it's not my country. He was elected. He is very popular. No one can dispute that. All polls show that Putin is way more popular than Trump or any American leader has ever been. Since Teddy Roosevelt. So it's like, I don't— where do you get this feeling that you have a right to control what happens in this country?
But I have always noticed that a lot of these people seem to feel they have that right.
Well, there's a, you know, one of the— I mean, I, I still think Russiagate, of all the moral panics that we had, you know, like AOC yesterday called wokeism quote unquote crazy, um, even they're being forced now to acknowledge that was some insane moral panic. I was just trying to laugh it off like it was just some fun zany trivial thing that went a little awry as opposed to this deeply repressive McCarthyite, you know, bloodthirsty campaign to destroy people's lives for the slightest deviation or thought crimes. But in any event, that was one. COVID was one. We've had a lot of these. And I still think Russiagate was probably among the most deranged, and especially the one that got the most buy-in. And when people started saying with a straight face, oh, this is the Russians trying to interfere in our sacred democracy, as though that was something that only the Russians do, that this is some kind of unprecedented crime. There's a, there's a, a Time magazine cover story from 1992 or 1993 where they have on the COVID Uncle Sam and then two, like, prominent Clinton-adjacent political advisors and a big picture of Boris Yeltsin.
And I forget exactly what the headline is, but it's something like, how Americans helped Boris Yeltsin win. And it was basically an armada of Americans, political consultants and strategists and the like, going over and creating the brand of Boris Yeltsin so that we could kind of control the privatization process and every other aspect of Russian public life, which is one of the absolute worst moments for Russians in all of their history. And they've had a lot of terrible moments. But that post-Gorbachev, post-Cold War privatization Yeltsin era, Russia was absolutely sickening and atrocious in terms of the suffering that it brought. And Americans were boasting of the role that they played, the central role they played in causing all that to happen so that they could have basically an American puppet, which is born— yeah, Boris Yeltsin at the helm of Russia. And I think you're right that when Putin came in, and this is so often what drives American foreign policy, is obviously has nothing to do with whether a country is or a leader is democratic or repressive. We love more than anything pro-American dictators. The more savage, the better. The thing we can't abide, the things that causes us to want to overthrow countries and governments and do coups and the like, is when we can't control a particular leader.
We had the war in Libya once Gaddafi wanted to use revenues from oil reserves to fund his own people instead of sending all that foreign capital out while his country lived in poverty and misery. That's typically what happens. And Putin very much represented this kind of nationalistic figure who wasn't hostile at all to the West. But also wanted to preserve his own country's traditions and especially its sovereignty.
Well, I think that's really worth saying. I mean, Putin, on the spectrum of Russian politics, is firmly on the moderate side. I mean, yes, right. And pro-European in his early career, was in Europe, in East Germany as a KGB officer, famously speaks German. I mean, he's tried to join NATO. So this idea that, like, he is a Russian nationalist who hates the West on principle or for ideological reasons or whatever is totally insane. And I do think we're going to see someone like that lead Russia next. There's no doubt in my mind. But where did that— why the fixation on lying to us about who Putin is and what that system is? It seems crazy to me.
I mean, this is what the US government does and its allied media. Institutions do when they want to demonize a foreign leader to justify a war. I mean, I, you know, the, the Democratic Party and not just, you know, say like the Chuck Schumer wing of the Democratic Party, but AOC, Ilhan Omar, the whole squad, like every as far left as you can go to the far center right as you can go, were unanimous from the start in wanting to take hundreds of billions of dollars that they claim they really want to use to improve the material lives of American citizens at home. And they wanted to send it to the coffers of Raytheon and Boeing and Palantir in order to fuel the NATO war that does not save Ukraine. It sacrifices Ukraine for the geostrategic goal of weakening Russia. Not a single Democrat dissented. I think now there was recently some exchange where Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee said something, accused some neocon, uh, member of the Senate with whom they were arguing online. Well, you're the one who pay for the bombs that are dropping on, on these people. And he reminded them, no, you're at— you, you also voted to send the money to, to buy those bombs for, for Ukraine.
And I think some of them are starting to have a little bit of second thoughts once they see just how this war is escalating. It's still very dangerous, but that is when you can create a kind of demonized single-headed figure. And it's always based on this lie that, uh, he's an absolute autocrat. There's— you just make the country personalized into that leader. It's a very standard neocon pro-war propaganda technique. It's like, I don't know if you remember, but back in 2008, 2010, we were constantly told that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler. You know, there's been so many new Hitlers since and before, you know, he served two constitutional terms, walked out of office peacefully. No one has ever heard of him again until recently, when apparently the Israelis were trying to, like, reinstall him as the new leader. Of Iran, like the new Hitler. And of course, you know, Saddam, all these people we were once aligned with, did business with, suddenly become overnight, you know, this wild caricature of— if you go back and look at what every American leader has said who dealt with Vladimir Putin, going back to Bill Clinton and George Bush and Obama, they always said he's a very rational, trustworthy, you know, calculating leader.
You can do agreements with him. And again, both Bush and Obama worked closely with Putin in all sorts of ways. And then suddenly, when it was time to fuel a war and to redemonize Russia, suddenly became Putin is this madman unlike anything we've seen since Hitler. You know, overnight the narrative changes and so many people succumb to it. And that is one of the main prongs of war propaganda, is just to demonize these other political leaders.
So if, if AOC is describing wokeness as, you know, excessive or trying to make it, you know, laugh it off, or I saw that she said yesterday that, calling for the abolition of police. That's just something you say during a pandemic. I mean, just kind of joking around. It's just a Halloween costume she wore for a day and discarded. If she's talking like that, she's running for president, obviously.
What—
how would you evaluate her politics? Like, if you're trying to understand, particularly for someone like me who's not a lifelong Democrat, who is she and how different is she from, say, Nancy Pelosi? Or Chuck Schumer or Steny Hoyer or just, you know, the Democratic leadership?
I think the person who understood much earlier than almost anybody else who AOC was is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie Taylor Greene, even before, you know, what kind of became her eye-opening and awakening and transformation, used to always object to this notion that AOC was some kind of radical. Some kind of like threat to establishment status quo dogma. And she would always say, AOC is not a radical. AOC is a fraud. She's a partisan hack. She's there to put a kind of happier face for younger people, to commandeer and steer them into the Democratic Party and make them feel as though they're joining a party that isn't really Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden's party or Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton's party. It's like a nicer, more socialistic, kind of softer, younger, hipper version. And in that way, she kind of becomes the Democratic Party's principal tool. There's nothing in AOC's life remotely that suggests any kind of anti-establishment or radical impulses of any kind. You know, she got lucky. She ran against one of these kind of guys who, even though he is extremely powerful within D.C., you know, spends all his time in the backrooms.
Yeah.
With lobbyists writing the laws, which is Joe Crowley, who is going to be the successor to Nancy Pelosi. He's the kind of guy that never goes on any shows. No one in his district knows him, doesn't know his name, hasn't seen him. He has nothing to do with his district except he, like, nominally represents it. So because she took out a member of, of, of the Democratic establishment and was nominally part of the DSA, her branding was that that suited her, that she was this very radical figure. She's anything but that. To me, she already has morphed into Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi used to at one time be considered, you know, far too to the left from San Francisco. And then all she did was she actually became extremely hawkish. Nancy Pelosi made this very provocative visit to Taiwan to treat the Taiwanese. It was almost like a state visit. It was very provocative to the Chinese against what the Biden administration was willing to do. She was an absolute hawk on Israel and Iran and pretty much everything else. She was— few people served corporate power and corporate interests more than Nancy Pelosi. AOC is well on her way to being that.
And we've seen it. So, I mean, I could give you a thousand examples, but suffice to say that that's who she really is.
The DSA is ascendant, obviously, and DSA candidates are starting to win in primaries, famously New York 3-1. Um, are there DSA-led protests against the war with Russia? Because it seems to me if you were like actually against the establishment, there's no bigger establishment project than the war against Russia. It's been ongoing, as you just said, for 30 years. And it enriches Raytheon and Boeing and the rest of the defense contractors. So like, if you were a radical political party, you'd start by opposing that. Are they?
Well, some are. I'll tell you this interesting thing. You know, when, when I start— first started really kind of connecting to and immersing myself in critiques of foreign policy and, and U.S. oligarchy and the like, You know, the models that I used were kind of what you might now call the old left, like the ACLU, civil liberties.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, even Noam Chomsky, who was like, just, you know, who thought that the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex were the greatest evil. When was the last time you heard anybody associated on the left with any kind of platform like Bernie Sanders or AOC talk about the evils of the CIA or the NSA?
Oh, they endorsed Abigail Spanberger. As the CIA literally takes over the Commonwealth of Virginia. Exactly. At least.
And of the Democratic Party. Yeah. And the reason is in so many ways because Russiagate was a— basically it was a hoax that emanated from the CIA and the FBI. And those people became the allies of the Democratic Party against Trump. And they aligned with, with those, with those people. Just to give you a very quick little anecdote into that, when Matt Taibbi went to testify about the Twitter files that showed this constant, endless coercive pressure from the Biden administration on big tech, including Twitter, to censor COVID dissidents. They had this guy, Collin Allred, who was a— he was a Democratic congressman from Texas who said, you know, you should take off your tinfoil hat and realize that maybe the good folks of the CIA and the FBI are censoring not for any nefarious purposes, but because they want to keep you safe. It was like, that's— the Democratic Party is now the one that tells you that you should be grateful for CIA censorship because all they want to do is just help the good people stay safe. And that's what the Democratic Party has become. And that's why there was basically no opposition to the— you know, they were told Russia was what put Trump in office, that, that Russia was the absolute aggressor, and this was— these were war crimes similar to the worst wars you can imagine.
They all got just overnight convinced to, to want to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the, uh, arms industry. One of the candidates who won in New York, D'Arlese Chevalier, who was actually who was actually one of the least likely to win. She ran against that 8-year incumbent who was the head of the House Progressive Hispanic Caucus, and she won. She was actually somebody who has a history of saying, we're not going to support this NATO war. Why are we spending all this money to keep the— to fund, you know, the NATO war against, against Russia that's sacrificing Ukrainians? I was so happy to finally find someone on the left.
Wow.
Reconnected to that. Old. And, you know, she kind of quickly has downplayed it because Ukraine remains a religion on the left. So there is some of that more positive radicalism among some of these DSA candidates. The problem, though, Tucker, you see this with Trump and the MAGA movement, and you've definitely seen it with a lot of these supposedly radical candidates who, who, uh, became adjacent to the Democratic Party, is you can think that you're taking over these parties in order to, like, commandeer them and their power to change their dogma to yours, but infinitely more likely for so many reasons is that it will commandeer you and it will suck you in and it will severely limit— even if you have radical ideas or impulses or outside of the norm or anti-establishment thoughts, will severely limit your ability to advocate them and to impose them.
That is the most bracing fact, and I'm glad you said that. But I'm also sort of sorry you said that because it's so depressing. Do you see— I mean, is there anywhere? And I almost hate to use the word radical because I think this is also reasonable and pro-human. Like, don't fight wars if you don't have to. Don't lie to your own population. These are not radical. They should be like foundational beliefs. But anyway, they're radical in this context of our politics. Do you see any movement, actual reform movement rising out of the betrayal of MAGA and the corruption of everyone else?
I mean, the problem is, is that our system of government has been constantly fortified each decade to make it harder and harder to exist outside of the duopoly. And the reason is obvious, that all politicians are either members of the Republican or Democratic Party, and one of their most common interests is to make sure that you only have the Democratic and Republican Party, and that it's virtually impossible for anyone to compete in a meaningful way with it. And so every law that gets passed, every time there's election laws rewritten, every time it's in the direction of making it increasingly more difficult for any kind of independent party or movement, a third party that wants to remain independent of both parties to have any meaningful success. I have to say, you know, there are countries like in Europe, in South America, including in Brazil, that have a multi-party system. Um, Brazil has something like 26 parties, for example, represented in, in the Congress. But even in the Democratic world, things are starting to get polarized as well between whether it's the populist and the populist right or the populist right and the establishment left, because people are just living on this politics of fear.
Like, you don't have to like who you support as long as they're less scary than the alternative. So that's kind of a cultural norm that has been developed and imposed that further strengthens this, this difficulty. At the same time, like everything we've been talking about throughout this entire discussion, is about the fact that Americans are, you know, and this is for me what led to not just election of Trump, by the way, but actually Obama as well. More than anything else is these were figures so unlikely in the past and became possible only because people wanted unlikely figures. They wanted the figures that didn't look like they came from the establishment. They've come more and more to hate with good reason every year. And that is creating an instability which, as you said before, can be scary because instability can lead to things that are even worse than what you're rebelling against in the first place. But instability also entails a lot of opportunity. And I can't tell you exactly how or when, but we are getting to the point, I think, where people are who never before would have considered it are going to be much more open to identifying with movements or even kind of campaigns or parties that are not connected to or identifying as Republican or Democrat.
We've seen ones in the past that have worked, like Ross Perot. Of course, he was a billionaire, which is maybe what you need, but he had a very successful third-party candidacy based on the support by both Clinton and Bush 41 for free trade that, as he very presciently warned, would deindustrialize the country, suck out all jobs. And, you know, you've seen that before, but I think we've never been more ripe for it because both parties are hated and the system itself is hated. And I think people are craving a credible alternative. It's just hard to create a credible alternative given all the barriers that have been deliberately erected.
But something is coming. You feel that?
For sure. I mean, no doubt. How can it not? I mean, this is, you know, the biggest myth, the biggest lie of our political system is that the two political parties can't agree on anything. They're always at each other's throats. It's always so polarized. The reality is, is that the two political parties agree on 90%. At least, of major policy issues. The only time the media covers it is in those very few cases when they disagree, and it casts the appearance that they're always disagreeing. Obama himself, when, you know, they used to use this very vitriolic language against him, like John Boehner and the House Republicans, he would always say in private, we all know it's theater. We're all playing within the 40-yard line. The, you know, the two 40-yard lines. That's the reality of the two political parties in the United States. This myth that there's these vast fundamental differences between the two parties is crucial to giving you the sense that you have this wild freedom, that everything is just so free-spirited and, and, and, and nothing is controlled or limited, when in reality there's lockdown on most policy debates because both parties are fully on board because they serve the same donor classes, they serve the same interests.
And that is— I think more and more people are realizing that and I mean, if the fact that we elected Donald Trump twice, for me, pretty much proves that anything is possible.
Uh, you, you have this amazing ability to crystallize and explain things I've suspected or believed, but better than I ever could. Just really the smartest. Glenn Greenwald, thank you very much for that.
Always great to talk to you, Dunker.
Thanks.
Why is Bari Weiss promoting Flock cameras? Glenn Greenwald on neocon support for totalitarianism.
(00:00) Why Is Bari Weiss and the Free Press Pushing Pro-Flock Camera Propaganda?
(16:21) The Establishment Should Be Afraid of the People
(20:47) Big Pharma's Zombification of Americans
(40:38) The Targeting of TikTok and the Dangerous Feedback Loop
(1:04:24) Will AOC Run for President?
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of System Update, available on YouTube and your favorite podcast players. His work can be found at greenwald.substack.com.
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