Grubstakers - Episode 213: The Coming Domestic War on Terror feat. Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

For our first episode of 2021 we're joined by the one and only Glenn Greenwald to discuss the January 6th riots at the DC Capitol Building and what the media reaction to them can tell us. In particular we focus on the long term plan to codify "domestic terrorism" as a federal crime and speak about why it is so disturbing to see so many embracing war on terror rhetoric to describe Trump supporters. Glenn has extensive and well known experience reporting on the global war on terror and he walks us through some of the most egregious examples of what we can expect to see as President-elect Biden and many in Congress call for bringing that war to the homeland. Also we make a hail mary plea for the pardons of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and other deserving recipients. You can find Glenn's substack here: https://greenwald.substack.com/

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance I get to be a complete red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future's always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

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My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined today by my fellow Antifa capital building mega protest infiltrators. Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwog. And first of all, Happy New Year. This is our first SoundCloud episode of the new year, and we wanted to open 2021 with a special episode talking a bit about what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th, what's going on with the national security state, and the possibility of a new domestic war on terror. And with us, we have the best guest you could have for such a discussion. We have the man famous for starting a new podcast with Ben Mora called Ben and Glenn After Hours.

Glenn Greenwald is with us. Glenn, thank you for being here and Happy New Year. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I just need to correct the introduction, though. I don't think I'm the best guest for these topics. I think you could have just ended it as the best guest, period. But other than that. And my first question for you, Glenn, I wanted to ask you just kind of first of all, how are you doing after having witnessed an event that has overtaken 9-11 as the most horrific terrorist attack in our nation's history?

Well, I was very that day was particularly traumatic for me because hours went by and we hadn't heard from aoc what was on my mind was the same thing that was on the world's mind which is is she okay and you know five hours later six hours later she came onto twitter and her first words were i'm okay and you know at first i was, of course you're fucking okay. Everyone's okay. No one was injured in the Congress. No one was wondering that. But then I realized, well, no, you know what? She's always in danger. She's always vulnerable. It's always important to know her status. So once that was done, I felt a little bit better. But of course, I'm still reeling from the trauma of seeing the Temple of Democracy desecrated. I mean, Nancy Pelosi's desk had someone's feet put on them, like a plebeian's feet put on them. She will never get that out. And yeah, I'm angry like all Americans and I want vengeance and I want war. I think we have Representative Pat Fallon to thank for AOC's safety, who posted on Facebook a lengthy blow-by-blow account of how he defended the Capitol, including a picture of him holding a broken off hand sanitizer stand with his tie untied,

ready to fight the protesters? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. I mean, one of the reasons, obviously, the events were depicted in the melodramatic and exaggerated way that they were is precisely because the people who felt victimized are the people who have the most power in shaping discourse, not just politicians, but also journalists. National media figures work in that building all the time. They're friends with these house members and senators and and all their aides. That's who they get their information from. That's who tells them what to publish. And so I don't want to make complete light of it. I'm sure it was a little bit scary with that kind of unexpected disorder. But we went months, four

months, five months during the summer protest after George Floyd with small business owners having their stores burned down, people having their neighborhoods, you know, and not rich people, but poor people, you know, invaded by out of town activists. They were frightened. They were scared. They were upset. And we were told that that didn't matter, that property damage makes no difference. congress had to spend a couple of hours hiding in an office none of them was injured has become this kind of you know unparalleled trauma and tragedy because they're so self-centered that they shape even the news to uh accommodate their own feelings well i saw somebody on twitter pointed out that not even on 9-11 was the U.S. Capitol building damaged. So obviously this wouldn't have happened if we had Dick Cheney there to give the shoot down order. One of the most interesting perspectives on this I've seen is that because the United States military is more or less the force behind global capital, having people storm the capital,

different capital, looks very bad for, I guess, the power projected by global capital. And that's why they're cracking down so hard. And that's why they're making such a big deal about it is that it's embarrassing the global enforcement arm of the world market. I think you're absolutely right. I think that aside from what is probably the kind of more superficial or trivial, but nonetheless real reason that I described about why it was described that way, which is the fact that journalists and politicians were at the center of it. I think the more important reason shaping how this is being talked about is what you just said. It's humiliating to the United States

that 20 years after 9-11, when we were supposed to, I mean, the Capitol was a target, as Sean said, of the 9-11 hijackers, supposedly, that, you know, this wasn't a case where 10,000 people trained for months and shot their way into the Capitol. They, like, killed guards standing outside,

and they just kind of, like, invaded, right? Then you said, well, it was just, like, an insurrection, an armed insurrection, but we got rid of them. This is, like, 90% of the people, at least, have no idea why they were even going to the Capitol. They thought they were just protesting outside and the crowd just started like waltzing in and they kind of just went with it.

They had no plan. They didn't intend anything. And the fact that it can be breached, that building so easily by basically a bunch of like obese people from, you know, places that are looked upon as being primitive and unsophisticated and unimportant and powerless. I think you're right. One of the things on which the United States relies is this perception that you can never challenge it because they're so militarized and so powerful that no matter how much you arm yourself, no matter how organized you are, you're going to get crushed if you challenge them. And this really destroyed that mythology. I mean, everybody just watched these people

with very little force or planning just invade at will, put their feet on the speaker's podium and carried it out smiling. So I think you're absolutely right that the the reason people are traumatized is because it's such a blow to the projection of american power talk about the security state not living up to its name where it has physical security failing in such a very obvious way and like i mean the upshot of it was not particularly great but i mean it really just disrupted thing for like four hours and then it went back to normal but still right but but imagine right like if you're you know somebody who has more nefarious motives and a greater capacity to do damage i mean if you're al Al Qaeda or some non-state actor looking to do real damage, I think you do look at that and say, well, if those people with no planning and very little power

could do something that significant, imagine what could be done with real planning and real fire power. I think that's the point. Right. And just to kind of recap some of what happened on January 6th, as we've kind of mentioned here, the group of pro-Trump Stop the Steal protesters overwhelmed Capitol Police and entered the U.S. Capitol building. There have been five confirmed deaths, including one Capitol Police officer and one unarmed woman who was shot and killed by either the Secret Service or Capitol Police. But good news, the FBI has arrested the man who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk. He has been hit with three federal charges. So, you know, I wouldn't have been able to sleep unless the guy who had rifled through Nancy Pelosi's junk mail was doing a decade in a Colorado Supermax.

Him and Podium Guy deserve pardons. One weird facet of this is that my cousin, who was really into Pokemon well into his 20s, possibly 30s, was part of... I don't think he went into the Capitol, but he was there as part of the protest. Oh, yeah? I mean, I don't think he went into the Capitol, but he was there as part of the protest. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think we should take note of that, though, that this kind of amazing reversal of mentality and perspective and rhetoric, because we did hear all throughout the summer

that the police were these racist and fascist forces, that we ought to defund them, that we ought to abolish prisons, that the police state is this evil force, all of which I'm reasonably sympathetic to in some version. And then you have people who entered this building kind of loitered in it, and suddenly it was, this property damage is horrific. They broke windows in the Capitol. They stole a piece of Nancy Pelosi's mail. And you have Antifa people trying to dox them to help the FBI arrest them and charge them with terrorism. And I do think that what it reveals is underlying this liberal movement and this liberal mentality really is an extraordinarily authoritarian,

and one might even say fascist mindset that is more than willing and eager to empower the police and aid the FBI and demand harsh punishments when it comes to their political adversaries. And I think you're seeing that in almost a consensus of reaction. Yeah, throughout the Trump administration, I've gotten the impression that huge sections of the American populace, way more than anyone would care to admit, would be happily willing to accept a dictatorship as long as that dictator is their dictator working for them. There's no question about that. There's no question.

I mean, look at how many liberals are thrilled that the Trump Justice Department is prosecuting and trying to extradite Julian Assange, not for anything he did in connection with the 2016 election but because of the publication of classified material in 2010 that revealed war crimes on the part of the u.s military intelligence services and other allied governments and the reason they want to see him in prison the reason they hope he dies in prison and and they don't care and they're willing to side with the trump justice department and the cia in cheering that on is because of the 2016 election because they perceive that julian assange helped defeat hillary clinton and anyone who helps defeat a

democrat deserves to be in prison that is the operative mindset at play not just there but in all of the festivities surrounding the censorship of right-wing voices by tech giants, the instantaneous desire to declare a new war on terror, that domestic terrorists are now the greatest threat to U.S. security, that we have to, you know, kind of initiate a new, or this is not coming from right-wing factions. This is coming from American liberalism, from establishment liberalism and their new partners, which are, you know, neocons and the kind of Bush-Cheney operatives who checked out of Trump, the Trump movement. And for similar reasons that we were just talking about, which is why this is such an embarrassing event, because it exposed the fat underbelly of the U.S. power. They're embarrassed by Trump. That's why they hate him because he is so either incapable or unwilling, I think probably both, to prettify the reality of the U.S. role in the world,

which is extremely important. And so just like they're angry about this invasion of the Capitol because it makes the U.S. look bad, that's why they hate Trump, too, because he makes the U.S. look bad, not because of anything he does or believes. So that coalition, kind of establishment liberalism, Bush-Cheney operatives and neocons, the intelligence community, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, that's a very potent ruling coalition. That is the coalition that now has power. I think they're bent on basically making the United States a one-party, you know, subject to one-party rule. They really don't think that there should be anyone on the right who challenges them. And they're okay with people on the left pretending to challenge them as long as they snap into line at the end, which the left usually does behind that faction. So I think to call it authoritarianism is almost an understatement.

They really believe in their own righteousness. They believe they're fighting fascism and Hitler, especially now in white supremacy, and that therefore any measures undertaken in the name of that war, just like the right believed in 2002 and 2003 when they thought they were fighting what they called Islamofascism. It's exactly the same mentality and exactly the same impulses driving it. Now, it seems like you guys are all opposed to police murdering unarmed Capitol building protesters and putting them in prison for multiple decades. But perhaps this headline from the Daily Mail will change your mind. Quote, mega mob rioters smeared their own feces throughout the Capitol and, quote,

tracked brown footprints in several hallways during violent siege. Credit where credit is due. Alex Patak called that before it happened. When they were storming the Capitol, he said, now is the time to take a shit on the Senate floor. But, you know, people who disrespect our temple of democracy can't get away with that. Yeah. This is what, you know, by the way, this is what they always do when the New York Times turned on Julian Assange in 2011 after exploiting him to publish the documents that he obtained and provided them about the Iraq War and Afghanistan war and other precincts of criminality and corruption around the world. Bill Keller,

the then executive director, executive editor of the New York times published an article basically saying Assange is disgusting, like physically and, and disgusting in terms of his hygiene, not morally. And talked about how it's like, he doesn't wash his socks to the point where they get crusty and like fall below his ankles and then when the ecuadorians were seeking to justify his

expulsion because they had been sufficiently bribed and bullied by the us and the uk and spain they started leaking things like he's filthy and dirty he doesn't flush the toilet he doesn't shower he makes the embassy smell here's a very common tactic to use when you want to demonize somebody. You just kind of turn them into people who are gross. But isn't it amazing though? Is it not amazing that there was a woman who was completely unarmed and unthreatening and she was shot in the neck point blank by an officer, an armed officer of the state and and killed instantly and very few people give a shit that that had happened after months and months and months of talking about police violence and police abuse because she has the wrong politics they're happy

to see her lying on the floor dead there's a i don't know if you guys saw there was like this tweet storm by um what is that asshole's name he won jeopardy a few times arthur something two arthur two he had like he had this like four or five tweet uh you know essay about this woman who was killed that sounded like it was right out of mine comp he was like i'm so thrilled that she's now been turned into food for worms. When a bullet enters a Nazi's neck, there's no skin or blood there. It's just evil and poison and she's subhuman. I mean, it really sounded like an essay out of Mein Kampf. Arthur, you have to ask your genocidal fantasies in the form of a question. But yeah, and that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about today, Glenn, is unsurprisingly, Joe Biden, when he heard about the brown footprints tracked through the Capitol building, declared this an act of domestic terrorism. Some of our best CIA agents, also known as Democratic Congress people, are saying

the new threat is domestic terrorism. And Glenn, you've written a piece on your substack called Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath, where you say, quote, the same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied, often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it, to the threat posed by, quote, domestic white supremacist terrorists, the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. Kind of what do you see coming from all of this, and what are your concerns? You know, it's interesting. I think one of the things I've been realizing over the past few weeks is that you start to see things as you get older, you start realizing that having lived through a historical event is so crucial for understanding what's taking place currently. Because when you've lived through

an actual event, you don't have to go and do the work of reading history books. You remember what took place. And I remember all the time, I was always fascinated by the fact that my grandparents, you know, would tell me about the depression of 1929, not from having studied it, but from having lived through it, from having been, you know, members of family, a family that lost everything in the depression and ended up in bread lines and the like. They lived through World War I. They lived through World War II. And so their knowledge of it is just like, it's native, it's organic. And one of the things I realized this week is that 9-11 is now so long ago, relatively speaking, that if you're 35 years

old, you are 15 years old at the time 9-11 happened, which means that you probably weren't paying attention very much to it. You weren't really processing its meaning. You probably don't have very clear memories of what the political climate was like. If you're 30, you are 10 years old, which means you definitely don't. And if you're under 30, it's essentially like it didn't happen. That's a huge portion of the population that has no real vibrant firsthand political memory of 9-11. I do. I was living in Manhattan at the time that it happened and, you know, was working as a constitutional lawyer. And it's the change in the climate that happened after 9-11, more than anything, the change in the political climate, the way things became so repressive, the way dissent became treated as heresy is really more than anything what propelled me to start writing about politics and stop practicing law. And for the next decade, I devoted myself to concerns about the excesses being engaged in in the name of fighting foreign terrorism. So I know all the tactics because they were all directed at me. One of them is if you express concerns about

excessive reactions or abuse of power in the name of fighting foreign terrorists, the thing you're going to get accused of first and foremost is being sympathetic to them. You're going to be called pro-terrorist if you're not willing to endorse anything and everything that's unleashed in the name of defeating them. When in reality, you might find them, everybody's reprehensible, but you're concerned about the broadening definition or the abuse of power that's being implemented by exploiting that fear rather than actually combating it. And if you look at the way this climate immediately consecrated in the aftermath of the breach of the Capitol, it was exactly the same thing. I can't tell you how many times in the last four days or five days I've been accused of being sympathetic to or supportive of white supremacist terrorists or right-wing violence because I'm raising concerns about what is

planning on being done to our civil liberties in terms of surveillance and infiltration. I mean, they're talking about things like infiltrating political factions that they regard as threatening, subjecting them to surveillance, rewriting laws to make it easier to detain them and to prosecute them and to charge them with conspiracies. All things that if you look at history

are incredibly, I mean, it's bad enough to have a war on terror directed outward. Obviously, it's been devastating and homicidal and even genocidal at times. To direct it inward and say that our greatest threat are domestic enemies, that the enemy is from within, that raises a whole new set of dangers. Especially when there's this consensus immediately united behind it because of the intensity of the emotion. And it's a very similar process as what happened after 9-11. Yeah. And just quoting from the Wall Street Journal, Joe Biden said, quote, don't dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists,

domestic terrorists. It's that basic. It's that simple. And again, from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them. And this is kind of important, as Americans especially should understand. Federal law in the U.S. currently defines domestic terrorism as dangerous and illegal acts intended to coerce a population or influence the government. And while it can be charged in some states, there is no generic federal crime of domestic terrorism. And going all the way back to the 90s,

there have been various proposals to make domestic terrorism a federal crime. And kind of what got you into writing politics, Glenn, is some of the abuses you witnessed with this war on terror initially under the Bush administration. So I guess, what are kind of what we would expect a law against domestic terrorism to be used to do and how would it warp our justice system? Well, to begin with, let's ask what that term even means, terrorism. One of the reasons why it never got incorporated into domestic law is because it doesn't actually, it's not a term that has any precise meaning. So if you look at other crimes, you know, blackmail, it means that you threaten to do something unlawful to somebody or even just damaging unless they pay you money or bribery, which is when a public official exercises their power in exchange for receiving something of benefit. Those are very clearly defined crimes, which you have to have. Otherwise you just can have abuse. In fact, it can be a due process violation. If you make something a crime, that's so vague that it doesn't really provide notice of it one of the things that used to really um provoke my

indignation about the war on terror was just beginning with the way that the word terrorism is used and how inconsistent it is so for example you have is have Israeli troops occupying the West Bank and for a long time Gaza in a way that the UN has declared illegal. And whatever else is true, it's not their territory. You have military troops on foreign land. And if a Palestinian attacks not civilians, but occupying troops of this foreign army, that gets called terrorism. Or even if you advocate that. So obviously, if a foreign army invaded the United States and Americans engage in violence against those invading troops, nobody would think that was terrorism. But Palestinians get called terrorists for attacking Israeli soldiers occupying their land.

There were people in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, who were Afghan, who were called terrorists because they attacked U.S. troops occupying their country. There was, in fact, the youngest person ever charged as a war criminal who was put into Guantanamo at the age of 15. It was Canadian in origin, but in citizenry, but Afghan in origin, and was in Afghanistan, who threw a grenade and injured two American troops, was put in Guantanamo on the grounds that that was terrorism, killing or attacking military troops on your own soil. But at the same time, when the United States invades Iraq and says, we're going to kill so many people recklessly and indiscriminately that we're going to put them in shock and awe, kind of classic terrorism. Nobody would ever call it that.

And the reason is there's a scholar at NYU. His name is Remy Berlin. You guys should absolutely look him up in his writing. I've interviewed him several times. He got his PhD in the origins of the word terrorism. It really wasn't a word that existed. It kind of existed colloquially, like the US used to call the North Vietnamese terrorists. Again, people fighting a US military in their own country. But the term itself got kind of codified legally because Israeli leaders and American leaders needed a way to delegitimize and render illegal Palestinian violence against the occupation and needed some way to distinguish the violence being done by Palestinians that they wanted to delegitimize and the violence that is routinely done by the US and Israel and its allies. And they kind of invented this term that said,

if you target, you have to be, in order to engage in terrorism, you have to be a non-state actor. They just arbitrarily created this distinction. But still, when you apply it to the citizenry, the term has absolutely no meaning. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, once you describe somebody not as a criminal but a terrorist, and remember when John Kerry ran for president in 2004, one of the arguments that he made that was considered this huge faux pas that he had to apologize for was he was criticizing the access of the war on terror, and he was asked, what is it that should be done then to these muslims who want to do violence and he said i don't think we should treat this as a war i think we should just treat it as a crime we should have law enforcement

investigate and punish people who blow things up the way you do any other murderers which of course is exactly what makes sense you don't need to call it some other crime like terrorism it's already a crime to murder and you don't have to initiate a war against some intangible act or idea. You can just prosecute it the way that you prosecute it. But this is exactly what is now insufficient, right? So you can say, look, if somebody trespasses, even the guy who stole one of her fucking letters, Nancy Pelosi's letters, it's a federal felony to steal mail.

You can go to prison for five years. There's plenty of crimes on the books in the United States. The last thing the United States needs is more criminal offenses and more federal felonies. The reason they want to do this is because they want the tools to crush their political opposition so that you call Trump supporters not our opposition, but criminals and terrorists, and then you can treat them that way. That's what this is all about. Opposition doesn't necessarily mean Republicans, just people who are a threat to the status quo. Right, which is what makes leftist support for all of this so fucking moronic, right? So like, as I was saying before, if you're the kind of leftist who at the end of the day always ends up on the side of Chuck Schumer and Neera Tanden and the DNC, but along the way you kind of go kicking and screaming and

using pseudo edgy rhetoric and the posture of radicalism to pretend that you're only doing it reluctantly. But as long as you snap into line at the end of the day, they don't care about that. And that's a good chunk of American leftism, are very compliant, very well-behaved people at the end of the day. No one's concerned about them. But if you're the kind of leftist who's an actual dissident, who wants to actually impede what they're doing, who doesn't intend to snap into line at the end of

the day, but wants to create movements designed to oppose them in a very effective and frightening way, they're going to look at you exactly the same way as they look at their enemies on the right. They don't care if it's the right or the left. Anyone who is on the margins, anyone who is a dissident from the prevailing neoliberal order is going to be viewed as an enemy and all of these tools are going to apply equally thwart domestic uprisings or uprisings of Afghani citizens against US control there or something. But I feel like it could be extended to the Democratic Party in that there's going to be dissidents no matter what, but they're trying to convert dissidents into the other kind that you says eventually just at the end of the day they're going to side with chuck schumer etc what like what what would you say we could do to get people to like notice that the democratic party though is like sort of a tool for care

insurgency and like to get them to stop converting people over from dissidents to just i agree with chuck schumer at the end of the day people well. Well, first of all, let me just say, you know, I think it's not difficult to tell who's a real dissident and who isn't. You just look at the treatment the person is receiving. So if you look, for example, at supporters of Bernie Sanders, who kind of followed him one way or the other into ultimately lending support to Joe Biden, or at least not actively urging people to oppose Biden or abstain from the election, those people aren't considered a threat by anybody. They're not being kicked off Twitter.

They're not being de-platformed anywhere. They can say whatever they want. No one considers them a threat. Or if you look at these journalists like at MSNBC and CNN, like Chris Hayes or Jim Acosta or whatever, you know, they go on the air and they like rant and rave about Trump and the Republicans. No one gives the slightest shit because everyone knows they're not impeding anything. They're just talking to an already converted audience. No one else cares what they're saying. They're not bothering anybody. They don't, you know, threaten anyone. And so they, you know, make millions of dollars a year.

No one, they don't, they're not, they're like zillions of miles away from being criminally charged. Notwithstanding Jim Acosta's book entitled, what is it called? A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth or something like that. With like a picture of him

pointing, you know, like menacingly at Trump. No one gives the slightest fuck for those people, right? And the reason you know they're not real dissidents is they're totally free to do anything. But then look at Julian Assange, right? Who actually fucked with the US power because he exposed their

secrets. Where is he? He's in prison. Look at Edward Snowden who did the same. He's in exile in Russia secrets where is he he's in prison look at edward snowden who did the same he's in exile in russia they want to put him in prison um so that's the way that you can tell who is a dissident who isn't but then you know to your question i think the big problem is you know neoliberalism is a very shrewd ideology. They're very adept at co-opting anything

that might end up being oppositional. Look at how fast they got on board with the Black Lives Matter movement. Every fucking corporation, every think tank throughout the spectrum were you know posting black lives matters logos and giving money they immediately got on board with it and

they co-opted it and they diffused it they said we're on your side you don't have to be angry at us we're with you we're against those racists um same thing you know with with the whole fight against whatever, racism or homophobia. You have the GCHQ, probably the most odious surveillance agency in the world, but British counterparts at the NSA that literally every year now bathes itself once a year in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate LGBT Day. And you have the CIA that does the same with like Women's Day and Bisexual Awareness Day. And like Raytheon has, you know, like gender diversity programs.

They co-opt all that really quickly. And one of the things that they did was, I do think that the kind of left wing, left of the Democratic Party, soft socialist movement of 2016 that almost torpedoed Hillary Clinton and got Bernie Sanders as the nominee, he would have been the nominee had the DNC not cheated. I do think they were worried about that for a while. But what they did was with the election of Trump was they instantly distracted attention away from their own

neoliberal evil and said, you may hate us and you, fine, you have your reasons, but we're not Hitler. We're not fascists. We're not white supremacists. You have to defeat them first and to do that, you have to get behind

us. Same with the CIA. The CIA said, we know you don't like the CIA. No one likes the CIA, but we're the bulwark against Trumpism. So you have all these leftists who bought into that. I saw a bunch of ones who used to be like, stick their chest out and say, fuck the Democratic Party, burn down the DNC. I see what their slogan is. It's what's the good of defeating neoliberalism if we lose to fascism?

Meaning our first order of business has to be to defeat the fascism. That in turn requires us to ally with and partner with it. You're never going to defeat fascism because there's too many people who have an interest in propping it up. Media outlets, do you know that on the day of that Capitol breach, CNN had their largest audience ever in history, larger than the presidential elections, larger than fucking 9-11 or the invasion of Iraq. These cable networks and these media outlets and these security state agencies are the biggest beneficiaries

of scaring people about the emergence of a white supremacist fascist movement. And so to answer your question, until you convince people that, number one, that threat is being inflated precisely in order to manipulate them, to render them no longer an effective opponent of the Democratic Party, but instead just kind of a subservient vassal. And that number two, uniting with the Democratic Party is not going to vanquish any of those pathologies. I mean, the reality is that capitalism and neoliberalism, they're not interested in white supremacy. They don't give a shit. They don't want an all white managerial force. They're perfectly happy to have women and warmongers and African-American and Latino hedge fund managers and predatory capitalists. They're interested in capital. And if it comes in the form of diversity, they don't give a shit. They're not

white supremacists. And this idea that the way you combat white supremacy is by joining neoliberalism is so blatantly manipulative and huge parts of the left are falling for that. So I think there's a lot of work to be done on the propaganda front in order to liberate these people from their delusion that by lining behind the Democratic Party and the FBI and the Justice Department and tech companies, they're waging a battle, a brave battle against fascism. Yeah, it was one of the interesting or one of the things, you know, with the Tuesday's elections where everyone was celebrating, oh, the Democrats are now going to control the Senate. So that means anything is I mean, my takeaway from that is they're just going to go back to playing the filibuster game where they say, oh, Mitch McConnell's filibustering again. We can't pass anything. And it's just another. Or Joe Manchin or some concern.

They used to use Joe Lieberman for that. Now they're just going to use Joe Manchin for that. Right, right. Yeah, you were talking I saw an interview with you somewhere else where you're talking about vote rotating, how Democrats will have, if not Joe Manchin, you know, someone defect to be like the lone dissenter to torpedo a bill that, you know, they want to look like they're supporting, but they don't want to. to actually get passed. And so there'll be a different Democrat every time that one of these votes comes up so that people don't have a specific target. Exactly. I wrote an article about this

and I think it was like 2011. I called it villain rotation. And it came out of, when I first started writing about politics, I actually, I hadn't been paying that much attention to politics. So my knowledge base about politics came from, you know, like living in Manhattan. I like read the New York times every morning before I went to work. And I'd like had a subscription to the Atlantic

and the New Yorker and I'd like read it on the weekends. Of course, I read it like somewhat with a critical eye, but politics is like very part-time for me. And so I didn't really have the ability to do the work you need to do to really kind of deprogram yourself from that propaganda. And it was only once I started being able to pay attention to politics full-time and read primary documents instead of mainstream journalist summaries of them, did I start realizing how the whole edifice was built on mythologies and lies. But it took me a while to get there. So for the first couple of years when I was writing about politics, I would watch some bill be presented to say, grant Guantanamo detainees one right of

habeas corpus, one opportunity to argue before a court that they're being imprisoned unjustly because they had none or to institute a law that would make it a crime for the cia to continue to torture and every time the democrats would say or like censor or punish george bush and dick cheney for having broken the law and how they spied on American citizens without warrants required by the law under the FISA law. Every time I would watch these bills come up, I thought, okay, the Democrats are unified. They all are against us. They're going to pass this bill. And especially that happened in 2006 when they took over the House promising to defund the Iraq war if they did. And then they just watched one bill after the next fail

because 85% or 90% of the Democrats would vote for it and they would get just enough members in their caucus to vote no along with the Republicans for it to fail. And they'd be like, oh shit, we just fell short two votes. We just fell short by four. And they would always rotate them so that you could never kind of grab, you know, like there were a few, like the kind of really the red state ones, like Mary Landra from Louisiana and a couple of the Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas. And they always

had Joe Lieberman. But other than that, they would just constantly rotate them. Like one time it would be Dianne Feinstein. The next time it would be Chuck Schumer. The next time it would be this person and that person. It's absolutely what they do they love to like and they're going to do that with the two thousand dollar checks right they they they ran in georgia promising that if you vote for ossoff and wornock you're going to get a two thousand dollar check and it was not even like 72 hours before they're like oh shoot joe mansion's against it like they didn't fucking check that first before they ran a whole campaign promising it um and you know like by the way the new satan josh hawley worked with bernie sanders he was the one with bernie sanders who's the reason that was even on the table for trump to grab

so you have josh hawley totally in favor of it so they're going to just need to get some other democrat who's going to say yeah i just feel like with deficits and the debt, we can't afford it right now. That is absolutely their tactic. They're very good at marketing themselves and their brand in one way, and then making sure that their donors and their corporate lobbyists who actually control them always get their way by pretending that they tried and just darn it, gosh, darn it. We're like the little train that could, we keep trying and trying and trying, and we just don't quite make it up the hill. And I do think when we talk about a Biden administration engaging in austerity in a recession, I think that very much links to a domestic war on terrorism. Because if you're expecting bread riots and, you know, people

protesting against, let's say they make Prop 22 from California national, and they end the 40-hour work week, and they end the minimum wage law by making everybody work on slavery apps, you can expect violent protests. You can expect bread riots. And if you have a law that says, that's terrorism, and you're doing 10 years in a supermax, and we have no due process standards, I mean, this is a great way to crack down on dissent if you are going to do economic austerity. I think the two things are absolutely linked. Incredibly important point. I actually, as you guys might know, my life in the end of 2019 into 2020 was upended by this source that I got in Brazil who gave me this massive archive, bigger

even than the Snowden Archive. And I spent a year and some months reporting on it and kind of was at war with the Bolsonaro government. And I just finished a book about it. And before that all happened, I was under contract to write a book, which I'm still under contract to now write about exactly what you just said, Sean, which is essentially what had happened is they created this war and terror framework that was originally projected outward, right? It was for Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen and Afghanistan in the Middle East. That was a framework that said we can do things like imprison people without charges. We can surveil them. We can det detain them we can kidnap them and put them into underground facilities that was the framework of the new war on terror they had to create these theories to

justify all that like the idea of a floating prison in the middle of the ocean where there's no due process of any kind you can be kept there forever it's still open there are people who have been there 20 years now floating in the the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of money, charged with no crime, let alone convicted. And so all these new theories, along with things like drone surveillance, which then turned into drone assassination, once drones were armed, the book was going to be and still is going to be about how what's really now being done is that that war on terror is being brought home. It's now going to turn domestic. And the reason it's going to turn domestic is because the level of wealth inequality and income inequality

and the denial of people's minimal economic future, especially after the 2008 financial crisis from which the West still hasn't recovered. But even prior to that, with the destruction of factory towns because of free trade and NAFTA and all that, basically, if you look at history, when you have a population that is suffering and deprived, there are two options, more or less,

that the ruling class can opt for in order to address it. One is you can just appease them by throwing them enough crumbs to prevent them from rioting, right? It's kind of like what happened that $600, you can kind of think of it in that amount as what's the minimum we have to pay the plebs to prevent them from like literally rioting, just like they'll be angry though. But like they won't starve to death. They'll like be able to get by on beans and rice. And like,

okay, we'll, we'll pay them $600. But in general, the ruling class in this transnational oligarchy is so greedy that they don't even want to do that. I mean, just look at the massive increase in wealth and the part of the billionaire class in the pandemic. It's

fucking obscene. That should be creating mass riots and revolutions. So that's one option is just appease them. Like John Rockefeller and Henry Ford used to like drive through the streets in their car and throw dollar bills to people just to like at least curry some favor and they used to be afraid like you know millionaires at the time that now it's billionaires used to keep yachts off the coast with like safe foals of valuable because they thought there might be a socialist revolution they would have to flee they were actually afraid of that that fear was healthy now what they're doing, the other option though, is to say, you know what, fuck them. Let's just militarize so extremely

that if there's any uprising of any kind, we'll just fucking crush them. That's the path that Western elites have opted for. It's a similar framework that, you know, Gulf state oligarchs and autocracies use. Go to Qatar or go to the United Arab Emirates or to Saudi Arabia, and obviously there's no dissent possible, notwithstanding the fact that you have these opulent palaces a block away from starving people. They just can't. The state has armed itself too much. So I think that this terrorism law is not just about crushing conservatives. I think it's about entrenching the ruling class and giving it the tools domestically to destroy anybody who becomes their opponent on any level, including uprisings that are driven by economic deprivation. very good documentary i think from 2016 called do not resist um that covered the ferguson protests

but also covered the militarization of the police and it was kind of a canary in the coal mine um showing how a lot of iraq surplus uh vehicles um were just being given you know in mass to police departments uh you know kind of to lay the groundwork for increased crackdowns should the shit hit the fan like it is now. That actually makes the that makes the storming all the more funny to me, since it was a breakdown in physical security by the security state in a way that doesn't necessarily jive with what you had been led to believe. What we've seen literally happened with militarized police. Yeah. And again, I was looking at some of your old writings and speeches, Glenn, and I just wanted to give two instructive examples that you've talked about that some listeners might be aware of. But I think when we talk about more of the kind of things we're going to be doing to protect the sanctity of Nancy Pelosi's desk,

people should be aware of this if you're not, especially if you're a U.S. citizen. Glenn, you've talked about the case of Jose Padilla as part of what got you into politics. He is a U.S. citizen who was arrested on U.S. soil in 2002 and simply designated an enemy combatant by President George W. Bush, put in a military brig in South Carolina for three and a half years, never charged with any crime in that time, barred from all communication, including with attorneys. And then you had Barack Obama go even farther. He puts Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, on a kill list, a CIA kill list, in 2010, kills him with a drone in 2011, never charged with any crime, never did anything except exercise his First Amendment rights. And then two weeks later, they blow up his 16-year-old son, also a U.S. citizen, murder him in cold blood. And so, Glenn, I guess my question is, when you oppose doing more of that, why are you supporting President Trump? And white supremacy, not just President Trump, but white supremacy as well. Yeah. You

know, think about how alarming that was. And just to add to the Anwar al-Awlaki case, not only did President Obama work, okay, first of all, the Democratic Party is opposed in almost every instance, and you opposed in almost every instance, and you might even say every instance, to the death penalty. It doesn't matter how gruesome the murder is, how unrepentant the criminal is, they oppose the death penalty.

There were just two executions on the federal level. One in particular was an incredibly hardened criminal who frequently sexually assaulted, brutally sexually assaulted his young daughter and then murdered her in the most grotesque manner possible. And yet liberals were overwhelmingly opposed to the death penalty in that case, as was I. But in the case of Milwaukee,ama ordered him assassinated by the special forces that he loves by drone attacks that he pioneered and not only did they never charge him with the crime before ordering him murdered let alone give him an opportunity to present evidence in court

before they killed him it was known that he had been put on the kill list. That leaked and that was discussed and reported. It took a while for them to find him and kill him. And in that interim, from the time that it leaked that he was on the kill list, that Obama had put him on the kill list in order to murder him, until the time that he was actually killed, the ACLU commenced a lawsuit in court seeking an injunction from a federal judge in joining the u.s government for murdering their client his parents had retained the aclu so it was essentially a lawsuit brought in the name of his parents in joining the murder of his son unless and until the u.s government discloses some kind

of evidence to to prove that he actually has committed a crime worthy of death. And the Obama administration went in and said, this case is so secretive that you, the judge, have no right even to adjudicate it. We have the right of a state secret privilege here where we don't even have to justify it. We're telling you without showing you that in order to respond to this or explain why we want to kill this person, it would risk revealing so many devastating secrets that national security could not survive. The judge accepted it and threw the lawsuit out and said, I'm not ruling on the merits. I'm simply saying that the government has the right to secrecy, and therefore I have no grounds for adjudicating this, and then went and killed him. So it wasn't

just that the government killed him without charging. They resisted the obligation to have to prove evidence in a court and the court accepted that. So now you have these precedents that you can detain somebody for, and what happened in that case of Padilla, and you're right, that was, because for me, you know, back then, especially, I just always thought there were a couple lines. I didn't pay much attention to politics, but I always thought like, as long as there's a couple lines that don't get crossed, I feel like we can all live with like swings within the political pendulum.

And one of those lines was the US government can't just round citizens up and throw them into a prison without giving them a lawyer and due process and having to charge them with a crime and trial and all the due process protections the constitution affords. And this was a case where they just did exactly that. Like the one thing that you thought you would never see in the United States. He was a US born US citizen at Chicago international O'Hare airport, who was in prison for three and a half years, and not only in prison with no due process, but cut off from the outside world, as you said, because he was designated a terrorist. And they brought it to the Supreme Court,

and the Supreme Court was going to rule on it. And then right before the Supreme Court was going to rule on it, the Bush administration finally charged him with crimes, much lesser crimes than the ones with which he had originally been, of he had been accused to prevent the supreme court from ruling on it so you have these precedents that say that if the government deems you a terrorist not proves in court that you're a terrorist but just accuses you of being one it can as the result of george bush imprison you in communicado with the entire world, no lawyers, nothing. And in the case of Obama, can actually order you murdered as long as you're in a place where they can't get to you. But legally, there's no reason to confine that power there. They should be able to do that anywhere.

And so when you're talking about initiating a campaign, a war against domestic terrorists, presumably all of those same powers should apply. It shouldn't matter if these are foreign terrorists or domestic terrorists when it comes to applying those powers to U.S. citizens. Right. And what I really want people to understand is agencies like FBI, DHS, CIA, NSA, these are all, they have institutional interests. You know, whether or not you like the term deep state, they have long-term interests that go from Republican to Democratic president. So I kind of think of it as like- Sean, that's an anti-Semitic term. Well, that's exactly the thing, Andy, is I kind of think of this as like the bird of the national security state. You know, you have the left and the right wing, and you get the right wing on

board to take away the due process by just going Muslims, Muslims, Muslims, and then you get the left wing on board by just going Nazis, Nazis, Nazis. So, you know, we have Joe Biden coming in. We expect this domestic war on terror will be targeted against white nationalists or Nazis, or even more broadly, anti-Semitic groups, and kind of how you can do that. And of course, you know, people don't even, on the left, a lot of them just kind of shut down all critical thinking. As soon as you say Nazis, they just say, hey, go get the Nazis, put the bullets in the Nazis and all that. But kind of what you would imagine is that they will maybe use this QAnon stuff to say, anybody who belongs to QAnon is a domestic terrorist. And then, oh, suddenly,

if you're kind of wondering, hey, why was Bill Clinton getting a massage from that girl with Jeffrey Epstein? Well, you belong to a QAnon group now, buddy. You're a domestic terrorist. But, you know, I think we can all agree that we just need to unleash the FBI and the DHS against domestic white supremacist Trump supporters so they can rack up a new series of wild successes like Waco and Ruby Rich. Yeah, the thing that is so amazing is like, I feel like, you know, during the war on terror,

especially before, I mean, first of all, liberals are not exactly resistant to the idea of saying, let's unleash all these powers when you just say Muslims, Muslims, Muslims. Maybe that appeals moderately more to the, mildly more to the right, but liberals were fully on board with that. I mean, I was, you know, I spent a lot of years arguing with liberals about Obama's war on terror powers, and I heard all of that. You know, these are dangerous terrorists. These are Muslim radicals. What do you think we should do? Just send them flowers and, them flowers and all that stuff that I used to hear from the right. I started hearing from

liberals once it was Obama doing it. But I think the point you're making is crucial that, again, and it goes back to the discussion we had earlier, which is when you have the fact that there's no real concrete definition of terrorist or terrorism means that who is accused of terrorists is going to is very amorphous very elastic they can expand very easily for example it began as when you know the authorization to use military force was enacted on september 14 three days after the 9-11 attack with one dissenting vote in the entire congress. The idea was, obviously, this means that you can use force against Al-Qaeda and whoever it is that's determined to have done this attack. Now, in a very short period of time, very short period of time, they were going to use that

against Iraq. If the Senate hadn't approved a separate authorization to use military force to invade Iraq, they were just going to invade Iraq anyway, using that original AUMF. And it got to the point where even groups like Hezbollah and Hamas were deemed to be terrorists, even though Hezbollah exists to protect Lebanon against incursions from Israel. They have nothing to do with the United States, nor does Hamas, which exists to fight Israeli occupation. And so it just started expanding to the point where even groups that didn't even exist at the time of the 9-11 attack, let alone had no role in it, like ISIS, but even other ones, kind of offshoots of Al-Qaeda, they just started bombing them and saying, well, they're terrorists and we have the broad-based right to kill whoever we deem to be

terrorists. And that's exactly what's going to happen here. Exactly what's going to happen here. I mean, even those guys who went into the Capitol, to think of them, to call those guys terrorists when at best it was like a protest that kind of got out of control, but it was zero intention, certainly on the part of the vast majority of them, to do anything other than just kind of like vent grievance for a while. And it's kind of went into the Capitol because everybody else was. If you're already calling those people terrorists, people who haven't blown anything up, who didn't shoot anyone, perhaps a gut shot, think how quickly that term is going to extend, as you said, to anyone on the internet

engaging. Remember, during the war on terror, there were young Muslims. The FBI would send informants into mosques or into universities, and they would target 21 or 22-year-old Muslim kids. And what they would do is they would try and provoke them into saying something that was just extreme enough that they would become part of the fake conspiracy that the FBI had created so that they could then charge them with being part of the conspiracy. So you would get some kid in a mosque, 21, showing off bombastically saying, yeah, fuck the US government. They're killing us all the time. I don't understand why we can't kill them. And that would be deemed sufficient to declare them a co-conspirator

in whatever plot the FBI manufactured, even though they never agreed to be part of a plot to blow up a bridge or whatever. And then they would get sent to Terre Haute where they're in prison for 25 years under the conditions that the British judge just said are so inhumane that they can't send Julian Assange to because he would end up committing suicide. They're called

special administrative measures, SAMs, where you can't have communication with the outside world. You can't call anybody except once a month. You're in isolation 23 and a half hours a day. These are the kinds of things that get done to people branded as terrorists, even ones who never engage in violence or intended to. So you can imagine how quickly this is going to expand out those operations the fbi would hire like coked up con men to uh go to mosques and be like hey yeah so america sucks right and then you know use that as evidence more or less like i think one of them got arrested recently um for yeah being a con man and it came out that he was uh used by the fbi to kind of trick children or teenagers into um

you know saying something that could be construed as terrorist yeah they would they would target on purpose young muslims who had you know severe autism or learning disabilities or mental health problems. And they're just going to do exactly that same tactic, but they're going to send it, you know, informants into like a group of 22 year old white meth heads in like Idaho or, you know, Montana and get them jacked up on methamphetamines. And, you know, they'll start saying stuff. And then you have your conspiracy that MSNBC can spend a week scaring the shit out of all their liberal wine moms about and keeping them hooked on fear and adrenaline.

And it's fucking insane with the internet because you can just imagine them doing this to fly over country, and you just find any group in fly over country that is trying to fight back or trying to make things better for themselves and oh hey just look through their entire social media post history and look you found a homophobic joke somewhere oh they're a nazi so their due rights disappear you know you can just very easily compile evidence based on what people post online to just convince idiots that this person is a threat. This person is a Nazi, a white nationalist, whatever else. And that means all of their due process rights have to be taken away. And obviously they were only fighting for genocidal Nazi takeover, not for their own economic interest. You can also see kind of the logic of, you know, labeling people terrorists for storming the Capitol be very easily extended to

say a group of disaffected workers storming Uber headquarters. And then, you know, suddenly that's disrupting, you know, great American company that's terrorism. Well, yes,

for sure. First of all, you know, Well, yes, you are killing our women and children and dropping bombs indiscriminately. So we don't know how else to stop you from doing that, except by letting you have a taste of the same violence you're bringing to the rest of the world. When the accused Times Square bomber, which is one of the big terrorism cases, who was going to detonate a bomb in Times Square, when he was arrested and he confessed to doing that, this federal judge said to him at his sentencing hearing, look, I understand that you have grievances with US foreign policy, but how can you in good conscience plant a bomb that you know is going to detonate and kill women

and children, innocent people who aren't responsible for those? She was acting as though only the most monstrous person would think that way. And he said, are you kidding? You think the bombs that you're sending to Pakistan and Afghanistan and Somalia and Yemen are discriminating between terrorists and innocent women? You're doing exactly that, that you're acting like is so inhumane and monstrous to do. And there was correspondence that he had and that others had in the lead up to those attacks where they would be talking to just their friends, not in court, where they would be saying, I'm so tortured. I don't know what else to do anymore. These bombs,

they just keep bombing us. How do we stop the blood from flowing except doing something like this. And I would often argue that these terror attacks that are being directed at the US need to be understood in terms of their motive. Like why do people want to do violence to the US? The answer is because of the violence the US is doing to the rest of the world. And it was kind of taboo to say that, but if I knew that, obviously, U.S. policy planners know that. The CIA has a term for that, blowback, which is they know if they overthrow a government somewhere, if they bomb a particular country, there's a good chance it's going to blow back that violence to the United States or to its interests or to its allies. Everybody knows that. That's very basic human nature. And yet they kept doing it. And I think I came to conclude that they kind of kept doing it precisely because they knew it was perpetuating this cycle. The war on terror was very beneficial, very profitable and very beneficial to all kinds of power centers. So once the threat of terrorism disappears,

that cash cow goes away only by ensuring that terrorism continues and there's another terrorist attack or a plot that you can break up, which is why they would manufacture them, right? They would create them so that they could break them up and then announce that they did to keep people thinking that it's still a big, big, big fear, but they also got to provoke them.

I think the same thing is going to happen here. Think about it. You're, you know, like a real Trump supporter for better, for worse. You believe the election was stolen. You believe in some of those QAnon theories, or at least like you're attached to it as your kind of community and a pandemic gives you like a sense of meaning and purpose, even if you're doing it a little ironically with some self-knowledge, but whatever it is, you've identified with this faction. This faction is now being completely humiliated.

I mean, look what they're doing to Trump. He's going to be gone in 13 days. They want to impeach him again to basically say, you better be a good boy for the next two weeks. You better not pardon Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or,

you know, any of your, you know, associates anymore, or we're going to remove you from office. So he's going to be completely cocked. He was already kind of cocked when he did that video, right? He was like, I can, I, you know, these people gave up their lives or willing to for Trump.

And then he came and said, these people are monstrous. I want to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. It's Lynn. That word has a white supremacist connotation. I know exactly. Well, I'm, I think we've established that I'm pro white supremacist. So of course I'm going to use the jargon of a pro white supremacist.

So that's what, that's what's going to happen. If you won't, if you take away every outlet that a person has to work, to express themselves on social media, to organize, to protest, if you call that terrorism, if you crush it, if you silence them,

what do you think is going to happen to that anger and that sense of grievance? It's going to manifest in violence. And so they're provoking the terrorism that they claim to want to wage war against. Yeah, and I think, again, people should understand when we talk about this war on terror, people should know that what we've essentially done is designated entire countries and said that any man or male, I should say, between the ages of 16 and 70 who is killed in this country, we just call them an enemy combatant just because they were a male between 16 and 70. It's not a big leap to go from, you know, Pakistan to just fly over country. It's not like liberals who live on the coast give that much of a shit about flyover

country. And suddenly you have a situation where if the police kill, you know, a white man in his 20s, or, you know, whoever else who happened to own guns, well, we just say, oh, he was a terrorist, he was a white nationalist terrorist. And like you were saying, Glenn, you're provoking that blowback. But, you know, and something I think that is very disturbing, and I made this point online, is this woman who was shot and killed by the police at the Capitol, this unarmed white woman was shot and killed by the police. And we've actually created a weird rhetorical situation where I think the Capitol police got better press by killing that woman than by not killing her, because so much of our dialogue is based around the racism of the police, of course, with, you know, a lot of foundation. But if they're just killing white people, I mean, that's actually an argument if the police are just going and, you know, shooting quote unquote white nationalists or just basically poor white people

dead. I think that is something where they are not going to face serious political blowback for that from the usual liberal left coastal urban quarter. Yeah. I mean, did you hear, I don't know, but I mean,

I'm asking this like literally, did you guys hear a single liberal or a leftist object to, or even raise questions about the justifiability of shooting that woman in the neck at point blank range? I don't think I saw a single person who objected to that or expressed concerns about it. And I think you're right. I even found myself doing that, you know, when they were saying, like the Democrats have this utter bullshit Orwellian claim that's the reverse reality,

that those white protesters in the Capitol got treated better than the Black Lives Matters protesters who spent months burning down businesses and other things in various cities. And I found myself saying to refute that claim, what do you mean? They shot that woman in the fucking neck at point blank range. Almost like that was a positive, right? Like it was a point of credit in the column of the Capitol Police. And you're right.

It is creating that incentive. The other thing I think is so interesting is if you look at a lot of the footage, needless to say, a lot of those officers, the Capitol Police officers, were not white. They were African-American, they were Latino. It's always the case, right? Like the white nationalist racist police force. And then you look at the videos of the people they're fighting

and they're often fighting African-American police officers to say nothing of the fact that the overwhelming majority of most of those Black Lives Matters protests and certainly the Antifa protests over the summer were composed not of African-Americans, did get a lot, they did, were the targets of a lot of police brutality, for sure, but they also had carte blanche, I mean, they took over fucking blocks in Seattle and Portland for weeks at a time, and they just said, this is ours, this is our autonomous zone, you don't have the right, and they weren't shot, they weren't arrested, they weren't anything, they were, they were left alone, so what this is is i think you're right sean like an attempt to create maybe it's not even an attempt maybe it's unwitting

but it's creating this incentive where the police are going to now say if we're confronting white people we need to kill them to avoid that accusation i think it's also the reason why the fbi is overcharging these people as well right like? Like the ones who just trespassed, who put their fucking feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk. Multiple felony counts in federal court that is such overzealous prosecution, but they need to do that in order to say, look, we're treating them harshly. Right, you can just imagine like

the police changing absolutely nothing, but some McKinsey consultant coming in and saying, no, when they call you racist, just say, hey, look, we're disproportionately killing white people now. Like we're killing just as many black and Latino people, but we have doubled the number of white people we're killing. So you can't call us racist. There's no racism here in our police department. You know, Glenn, the thing you mentioned about how the politicians, almost like a WWE, have to choose who's a heel and a baby face in terms of who votes for being for and opposed the laws and stuff. It seems to me that even in the case of white supremacists and the Black Lives Matter movements, there's a lot of all the world's a stage and I want to appear to be supportive or against something based on my ideology. So the question I have is that, like, do you think most of the people that are for or against a cause are acting that way to appease someone above them like an employer or their family or friends?

Yeah, I mean, I think social media has really fostered a strong incentive to larp and to play act you know like i've been a critic of antifa for a long time on the grounds that when they proclaim themselves bravely confronting fascism you'll notice that they don't ever actually confront the real centers of fascist power. They're not trying to take down the Pentagon. They have no interest in the CIA. They're not sabotaging Goldman Sachs or Amazon or Uber headquarters. They don't pick formidable targets.

They pick very easy, low-hanging fruit, like 30 losers who wear Nazi armbands, as though those people are actual meaningful outliers of fascist power instead of a completely marginalized and hated and not able to use the internet and not even employable. So they do that because they want to feel as though they're bravely standing against fascism without actually taking the real risks that would be entailed by going and confronting the actual institutions of fascist power. And you can go down the list and just see that happening over and over where people associate themselves with a cause because social media rewards that with clout. Because if you want to work in journalism in particular, with jobs disappearing, the last thing you can afford is to have an off-key note on anything.

So you're very carefully orchestrating what it is that you're saying and what you're showing about your beliefs so that editors who are going to be in a position to hire aren't going to throw your application immediately in the garbage can because you had a tweet that deviates from mobile orthodoxy. So yeah, I think that is, especially in the age of social media, where we're instantly adjudged and evaluated and punished or rewarded based on our beliefs with retweets and likes and followers or with, you know, pile-ons and ratios and unfollows and blocks. We're all, you know, we're built to be social creatures. We're political animals. None of us is immune from those powerful incentives and social media amplifies them to such an extent that you really have to work hard not to let it dominate your choices.

And even if you do, it's that you won't always succeed. Yeah, my second question for you is that like you know, like we've talked about, the people that stormed the Capitol was a tiny minority of the entire group of people who were a part of that protest. right wing or the white supremacist protesters are being abused by police or they don't immediately go oh this is fucked up maybe those people that were protesting over the summer that uh there should be a defunding of the police or abolishing of prisons may have been on to something there seems to be a odd disconnect between people that have right-wing conservative ideologies and questioning authority even when it's fucking them over well i did think it was interesting that a very substantial portion those are sean's dogs sorry you know i think i think one of the things that was really interesting is that um the vast majority of conservatives even though this is a conservative cause, expressed what I think is authentic and genuine indignation over these protesters.

Because conservatives are still institutionalists at the end of the day. They love America. institutionalists at the end of the day they love america they think you know the capital is a temple of democracy that inspire makes us better than china and iran and all the they believe all that bullshit mythology and not only that but they also believe in obeying the law they're they're they're very much authoritarians and in terms of law and order like if the congress says you can't trespass, you don't fucking trespass. And if you do, you get what you deserve.

Right? That's very much like the standard conservative right-wing mentality. Now, I think there's a strain of the right, and this is probably why Trump ended up getting the Republican nomination, if it weren't true, he wouldn't have, that has become kind of anti-authoritarian and transgressive right they believe the system itself is corrupted that these institutions merit no respect but the kind of like jeb bush marco rubio even like ted cruz and then obviously

everything inward like mitt romney and mitch mccon, they're genuinely offended that, you know, people would disobey authority and march through this beautiful, you know, testament to American greatness. And what I think you see now is that that mentality is indistinguishable from liberal mentality as well. I mean, obviously, central to left-wing politics for decades has been the idea that, you know, you burn your fucking draft card, you let your hair grow long if you're a man because you're told that you're not supposed to,

that whole kind of hippie mentality. You march and you protest, you know, the Chicago 7, you make a mockery of fucking courts the way Avi Hoff hoffman did it was a really important part of left-wing politics it's like deeply anti-authoritarian i remember you know in the 80s what big controversy happened when schneid o'connor hosted uh sean's gonna get all excited now saturday night live and at the end she took a picture of the pope and like ripped it in half and i was like the right

was indignant about this and the left supported it now you know you would the left and and liberals especially but also parts of the left are just as like respectful and deferential to authority and institutional power as the right is which is why you see this kind of like unity of outrage over what these protesters did that I think is not contrived. I think it's actually genuine. Hold on a second, Glenn. Are you saying that radical leftists should not cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation? The J. Edgar Hoover Federal Bureau of Investigation. That is still the name of the actual headquarters where they were. Last thing I wanted to say just regarding

the domestic war on terror, I did get hit up by somebody who claimed to work the name of the actual headquarters where they were. Last thing I wanted to say just regarding the domestic war on terror. I did get hit up by somebody who claimed to work for one of the spooky alphabet agencies, and they said they were a fan of the podcast, so I think they're credible. But this person said that there's a long-term plan to federalize all law enforcement in the United States, like literally give the FBI jurisdiction in every single issue. And this is part of what we mean when we say domestic war on terror. Alphabet, you mean a federal agency, not Google? Yes. Yes. I mean, one of the people who do the movie Sicario. But so what I just wanted to say is you can kind of find this in public documents.

Americans might know the FBI currently has a 93 percent conviction rate. If they get a law against domestic terror, that's going up to 99 percent. Like there's no due process there. You're going to be fucked if they come after you. And, you know, Wesley, Wesley Yang asked a great question on Twitter, which is, everybody who wants this law against domestic terror should be asked, what is not currently illegal that you want to make illegal? Because you can go to these congressional hearings and you will hear FBI people say things to the extent of these various dissident or extremist groups, whatever you want to call them. A lot of them are very careful not to break the law. And they say we can't go after them because they're not breaking the law. So when we say law against domestic terror, I'm sorry, it's not being paranoid.

This is quite literally a law against domestic political dissent. This is how it's going to be used. And you can even just go back through the history. The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 didn't become law. A watered down version did. This was introduced by a guy named Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and sponsored in the House by a guy named Representative Charles Schumer of New York. Schiff, a Democratic congressman, introduced the Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act. And in 2019, the FBI Agents Association demanded members of Congress codify domestic terrorism as a federal crime. So you can just see how this has been building for so long. And just the fact that what they want is they feel they don't currently have the tools to go after domestic groups that are not breaking laws.

And so this will be used the same way it was in the fucking Soviet Union. If you are a dissident, you will be charged with terrorism, being a terrorist. I mean, look, this is such a remarkable reality, which is not six years ago, but six months ago, the most significant news event was the outbreak of these protests around not just the United States, but the West, denouncing police, denouncing harsh punishment for crimes, denouncing the abuse of police power. And as the Democrats and liberals were doing that, marching in the name of those values, they were simultaneously working to empower the author of the fucking 1994 crime bill and the architect of the U.S. prison state more than anyone else in the United States Senate,

running with a woman who had spent her career as a prosecutor, notorious for harsh and overzealous prosecutions, even for nonviolent crimes, obviously falling on the backs disproportionately of minorities, and who has now nominated as attorney general a judge, Merrick Garland, who is most known for creating new legal theories to side in almost every case with the police and with the federal law enforcement agencies.

He almost never rejects an argument from the federal government, from the FBI, from the DOJ, from the DEA, from the ATF. That's what he's known for. And so this is where you see the fraud that is the Democratic Party and liberal politics in America that on the one hand they spent the year branding themselves as opponents of police and prisons and the criminal justice system, and then on the other, now empowered, not just ordinary, but extraordinary devotees of the very theories that have caused the United States to be the biggest prison system in the world. The dominant strain in American liberalism,

the dominant strain in the Democratic Party is authoritarianism. And there is no question that they are now going to use this massive mandate that they have. They want to obliterate the remnants of the Trump movement. Look what they're doing to Josh Hawley. Like three weeks after he just partnered with Bernie Sanders to get direct payments to Americans, he's been so demonized that Simon & Schuster had to cancel their book contract with him. And he's turning overnight into satan they don't want any opposition of any meaningful kind on their right um and they know they don't really have much on their left they want to turn everything into a

one-party state and one of the ways they intend to accomplish that is by criminalizing dissent as sean just said that's why for so long i I've been resistant to the idea that Biden was the lesser of two evils, not because I think Trump is a better person or that Trump's ideas are better, but because the ultimate metric for determining which the lesser of two evils is, is not what's in their heart or what they believe, but what they're capable of actually doing in the world. And it was always, you know, Trump was, whatever else you want to say about him, an incredibly weak politician for so many reasons.

Biden is not going to be weak, not because he's some master strategist, but because the entire media, the bipartisan establishment class, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, are all unified behind him in what he wants to do. And he's going to be able to roll over the bipartisan establishment class, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, are all unified behind him and what he wants to do. And he's going to be able to roll over

whatever little resistance that they have. And that's why I've never been convinced that Biden was the lesser of two evils that the Democrats are, because I think you're going to see a lot of damage done over the next two years, three years, four years, to economic security and basic civil liberties

that probably would have been impossible under Trump. And, you know, again, I four years to economic security and basic civil liberties, that probably would have been impossible. And, you know, again, I just want to give one example from the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, which didn't become law, but again, sponsored by Joseph Biden of Delaware. One provision that civil liberties groups objected to that you might see come back is that it would have made a person liable for contributing to an organization deemed by the president to be involved in terrorism, even if the donation was for a non-terrorist activity. This is, I'm quoting from the New York Times. So a civil liberties group at the time pointed out that this would have made people criminally liable for donating to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. So once again, Glenn, how dare you go

on Tucker Carlson to talk about these sorts of things? We just need to accept whatever the president calls a terrorist and put people in jail for donating to those groups. Yeah. And just if you object, just hope and pray that one day Rachel Maddow and Wolf Blitzer will decide that you deserve to be heard on air. And if they don't, you have the moral obligation to stay off television. You know, one of the worst cases, one of the worst abuses of the early war on terror was when they did exactly what you just described. There was this charity called the Holy Land Foundation based in Texas, and it was the biggest Muslim American charity in the United States. And wealthy Muslims or middle-class Muslims would donate because one of the things they did was they would help Palestinians and help people in war-torn areas in the Middle East who were predominantly Muslim,

rebuild their homes or improve their society. And what the Bush Justice Department did was they said that some of the money that the Holy Land Foundation was sending to the Middle East was ending up in charities connected to Hamas. And even though these charities connected to Hamas were actually engaged in charitable activities, improving schools, rebuilding homes that were bulldozed by the Israelis. The mere fact that Hamas had been designated a terrorist organization meant that sending any money of any kind meant that you were supporters of terrorism. And the executives of Holy Land Foundation, who are very well established in their community, well respected for years in Dallas, got prosecuted terrorism laws. And they're still in prison.

They were sentenced to 15, 20, 25 years in prison because they were accused of, and then convicted of aiding terrorism. there was a, uh, there was a university of South Florida professor, um,

who, uh, Sammy, uh, uh, Alari, who was like a really respected Palestinian American. He like actually met George Bush in the Oval Office,

who got charged as well for terrorism because of writings that he published that got construed as advocating donations to terrorism-linked charities in the Middle East. And I met him, I interviewed him. He was ultimately confined to 10 years of home prison and then expelled, exiled from the United States permanently. Even though his children still live here, they all go to college, they're doctors and lawyers. I remember him one time telling me I got accused of being a terrorist and sentenced to 10 years in prison, even though I was in the fucking Oval Office, I could have picked up a pencil off the Resolute desk and stabbed George Bush in the heart with a pencil or in the eye with a pencil.

I was that close to him as a president. So there's precedent. What you're talking about doesn't need much speculation. If you're talking about applying the same framework of the war on terror domestically, which is exactly what they're doing, you can just look to the abuses that happened under the war on terror to know that's going to happen domestically here as well. Before we go, first of all, I want to thank you so much for being on our show. I'm a big fan of your work and honored to have you here. And I do have to ask you, what is your favorite Oliver Stone movie?

Well, I guess I'm supposed to say it was the one that included me. Although, like, that was the creepiest experience ever, watching that film. He arranged for a screening, and I watched it in a theater alone before it was released in Brazil with my assistant and it was

like one of the most unpleasant two hours of my life. Not because the film wasn't good, it was okay, but just because it was fucking bizarre and uncomfortable watching someone else pretend to be you. So that definitely is not the film. You know i have to say like the thing

that ruined oliver stone's career um before that film i became kind of friendly with him and you know he was hated forever in hollywood the problem was that his films were so successful they made enormous sums of money he won three os Oscars. I mean, he was the premier director in Hollywood throughout the late 70s and dominated the 80s. And into the 90s, they were desperate to get rid of him because of his politics. He was friends with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Hollywood has a reputation for being left-wing.

I've been to Hollywood political parties before. They're basically all like Deborah Messing, you know, or like Alyssa Milano. That's Hollywood liberalism. And so Oliver was always, you know, like viewed as a crazy person. And so when he did JFK, you know, that's like the third rail of american politics is questioning the official story of of the assassination which is why it is shocking that 60 fucking years later 60 years later all

those documents connected with the assassination are still are most of them are still classified and trump has been threatening to declassify them and i guarantee you he never will because they probably have told him that if you did we will instantly destroy you so that film if you go and read what was said about that film contemporaneously with its release i mean they talked about him like he was the biggest piece of shit um and then so that film did okay financially but nowhere near what did. And I think the next film he made was Nixon, and that was a box office flop. And that's what great to talk to you, and it's so enlightening. And this episode should be out before January 20th, so I just want to say my final plea in the event that President Trump hears this,

please pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, but if you won't do that, please pardon every single person who rioted in the Capitol and also the militia members who tried to kidnap Governor Whitmer, because it doesn't make me any less of a leftist to say that those were cool crimes. But more importantly, they're going to start cracking down on bread riots just the same as they crack down on everything else that they deem, quote unquote, domestic terrorism. So, you know, we should fight this tooth and nail every step of the way, every way possible

to prevent that from happening. And thank you, Glenn. Any last thing you would like to say to the people and where can they find you? Well, I'm just wondering whether you've given up hope for your vision that Trump will declare martial law and instantly arrest Hillary Clinton and then decapitate her and just play her head on the pike is that something that we can give i will say i'm already planning on uh january 21st when biden has been sworn in i will make another tweet about i've just wagered another two hundred thousand dollar bet on trump winning the election and still being president So you got to trust the plan, Glenn. All right.

I will put my faith. Yeah. Where can people find you? On Substack, on Twitter, and on the White Power Hour on Fox News. Sponsored by GE. Yes. It's funny. Where can people find Glenn Greenwald

with one million Twitter followers? If anybody is not aware where to find Glenn Greenwald, he can tell them now. But thank you so much, Glenn. This has been great. All right, guys. Good talking to you.

Bye-bye.