The Duran Podcast - Criminalising Dissent - Glenn Greenwald, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

Criminalising Dissent - Glenn Greenwald, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Welcome to today's program. My name is Glenn Dyson. With me is Alexander Mercuris from the Duran. And we are joined today by Glenn Greenwald, one of the great journalists of our time. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for those nice words. Thanks for the invitation. I'm looking forward to our discussion. So, well, among other stories, you're very well known for publishing the Edward Snowden documents, which exposed mass surveillance of the U.S. government. But you were also leading journalists to counter the Russia Gate well, we can call it the Russia gate hoax, in which Trump was accused effectively being a Russian agent since 2016. And then you also went after the unprecedented media censorship,

especially during the Hunter Biden laptop story during the election period of 2020. And so, yes, so this will be some of our focus today because we really wanted to focus on how we went from Russiagate, which really poisoned relations. It cemented this anti-Russian mentality and introduced, I guess, a very strange acceptance and even celebration of censorship as a way of protecting democracy and really how this impacted the current war in Ukraine. And it's, again, I know it's a long story involving actual collusion between the political

class and media and the intelligence community with this consistent lying on often an absence of accountability among the journalists. So again, it was front page news for years. And then I think it was very much exposed as largely or completely fake, but then it disappeared in the memory hole. So as we're now going on to the next scandal, which is the Nord Stream and all the other narratives with Ukraine, which appears to also be fake, it's worth remembering, I guess, where all of this started. So at least it should have been more self-reflection after the truth about Russiagate emerged. But there was not. But again, that's why we have the privilege today to speak to Mr. Glenn Greenwald

as one of the few journalists who were right and vindicated in every story. So just, I guess, jumping to the first question, now that evidence is in, can we say really anything with certainty in terms of what happened in Russia gate and what lessons should we have taken from it? And do you see this as having impacted Washington's decisions during the war with what were in Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, I remember the first time I heard in earnest the attempt to suggest Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent. It was actually a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign ad that introduced the idea by asking this question

with this very ominous baritone narrator in this very kind of terrifying music playing to indicate that something was nefarious, you know, kind of the kind of innuendo, like, what is Donald Trump and the Russians? What is it that they're doing? What is that relationship? Why are they seemingly so in lockstep all the time? And as a journalist who, you know, got my start as a constitutional lawyer, not as a journalist, but always had a civil libertarian orientation. The obvious historical reference point for me, for that was McCarthyism, the McCarthy era in the United States and in the late 50s, which was really the apex of it, when Americans were constantly accused, often with no evidence or very little evidence, of being agents of Moscow, on the other side,

working for the Kremlin, all of those phrases that the Clinton campaign was weaponizing against Donald Trump. And that's considered one of the great civil libertarian scandals, like low points of the 20th century. People were fired in mass. People were driven out of the government. no due process, just all done through innuendo. And it was often a campaign weaponized against the American left by people on the right, but also the more conservative, cold warrior aspects of the Democratic Party. And I reacted almost instinctively, you know, reflexively with, I recoiled from it.

And I assumed everybody who even remotely identified as an American liberal or somebody on the left would similarly recoil to kind of what seems so obviously to be this resurrection of this ancient Cold War CIA tactic to try and imply that your adversaries are Soviet agents or disloyal or working with the Russians or Moscow. But that didn't happen. It resonated. It became a very popular theme, first among Democrats and then especially among the American media. And the concern I always had from the beginning was obviously journalistic, namely that there was never any evidence to suggest Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians to hack into the email inbox of the DNC or John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign chair. That was what originally led to all these

allegations was there was a hack. There was a hack of those emails, and they ultimately were handed to WikiLeaks who revealed them. And the idea that Donald Trump was somehow a party. participant in that or that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russians to make that happen, never made any sense to me, but also there was never any evidence for it. We just kept hearing leaks from the CIA, from the FBI to the Washington Post and the New York Times anonymously, asserting it, but never with any evidence. So my initial concern, journalistically, was there was no evidence, but my much bigger concern became what you said, which is that it had an obvious geopolitical component to it. And I didn't think that geopolitical component was incidental. I thought it was the

principal aim of this narrative, namely to start redepicting Russia, who President Obama had seen as a partner. He worked with the Russians to facilitate the Iran deal. He was often attacked President Obama was by both hawkish wings and the Democrat and the Republican Party for not confronting Russia in Syria and in Ukraine. And he always said, why would we want to make enemies of Russia? we can work with Russia. They're not a threat to us. And this immediately brought back the idea that Russia was actually a grave enemy of the United States. And when you're talking about the world's largest nuclear power, which Russia still is, the two sides still have thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear tips pointed at one of other cities using

archaic Cold War hair triggers. I thought it was very dangerous. And the two things early on that happened that indicated to me that this was genuinely dangerous was first they tried to turn General Michael Flynn into a criminal for doing nothing other than as he was the incoming national security advisor doing what every transition team does do and you would want to do, namely picking up the phone, reaching out to his counterparts in important countries like Russia, to say, look, we're looking forward to a positive relationship with you. We know there's a lot of heat now, but don't worry, we don't intend for that to contaminate the relationship.

They tried to turn that into a crime, like proof that might. Michael Flynn was also a Russian agent. They did end up prosecuting him. The FBI called him to their office, got him to say what they claim are faulty recollections of those conversations and charged him with perjury. And then they were also doing things like implying that there was something sinister about Jeff Sessions, the longtime Republican senator from Alabama, who became President Trump's Attorney General, because he had in passing had two conversations with Russian diplomats at the kind of DC events that senators go to all the time. And because he didn't remember them, they tried to act as a heat too was high. And so what they did was they criminalized the very act of talking to

Russians. Anyone everyone in Washington was petrified of even having any communications with Russia. And, you know, even though the worst enemies in the world, you see now there's a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas because Hamas and Israel, as much as they hate each other, have always had back channels of communication through Cotter, through the United Arab Emirates, through other channels. Because of course, even with your enemies, you want to make sure there's clarity of communication. When you make it so that the United States and no American diplomat, no American politician, can speak to the Russians without fear of being accused of being disloyal, which is what the climate that was created did, it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

And as much as the journalistic concerns I had about this being an evidence, free political scandal for Donald Trump, my much bigger concern was the daint, you can't trifle with the U.S. Russian relationship. It almost brought the world to the brink of, it did bring the world to the brink at least twice of a nuclear Armageddon. And to play with it that casually for partisan ends, I thought was incredibly reckless and dangerous. And the extraordinary thing, I'm glad you brought up McCarthy, because the extraordinary thing about McCarthy, the difference, the difference was that at the time McCarthyism was happening, it came in for a huge amount of opposition. There was a lot of opposition on the left to McCarthyism. And McCarthyism and McCarthy were discredited. There was a whole series,

there was the Army McCarthy hearings which destroyed his reputation. He got criticized in the Senate. There was a censure motion that passed in the Senate. And, one of the things that happened as a result of the collapse of McCarthyism and the discrediting of McCarthy is that you start to see a pendulum swing, a small pendulum swing in the United States, gradually gathers momentum towards starting to relate to the Russians. So then Khrushchev comes to the United States in 1959. He meets Eisenhower. There's a follow-up meeting with Kennedy in 1961. Then, of course, there's tensions again. There's the Berlin crisis. There's the Cuban missile crisis. But by that point, Khrushchev and Kennedy are talking to each other and doing so regularly.

They're able to work through the Cuban missile crisis. A deal is done, a real deal, one which secures peace and avoids us falling into nuclear Armageddon. And it provides the foundation. for a long period, a period which, you know, I can just remember the period of detente that we had in the 1960s, the 1970s, which was a major period of easing tensions, and of which I can say, again, from memory, I've never felt that we ever have enjoyed the same level of security since. It was the daytime period, which in some ways was the most, stable period of my lifetime because the two superpowers understood the limits, they talked to each other, they were in contact with each other at all times, they were able to contain the problems. And instead of that happening with Russiagate, Russia Gate has been examined multiple times. We've had two reports by Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General of the FBI. We've had the Mueller report. We've had the, I thought, rather weak Durham report. They've shown that the reality

behind Russia gate was exactly, as you said, that there wasn't any reality that Donald Trump was not in collusion with the Russians. And yet there's never been an accounting. There's never been a public acceptance of this. I know lots of people who still essentially accept the Russiagate narrative. And it poisons relations to this day. In fact, it's getting worse. And one sense is that a lot of the anger towards Russia that exists amongst a lot of people in the United States is because they still blame the Russians for Donald Trump's election.

So it's the US responded to McCarthyism ultimately in one way. And in with Russia again, in a. completely different way. And in the one case, there was, I don't say a positive outcome. There was no positive outcome from McCarthyism, but at least there was a positive trend in reaction. And today, we are now in a situation where the two leaders of the two most militarily powerful countries do not speak to each other. Yeah, I mean, I never in my life thought I would positively compare either McCarthyism or the Cold War to anything. But you're right, McCarthyism was, it had a certain kind of power.

People were afraid of it for a while, but institutions inside Washington began standing up to it. As you said, it was people in the military, people in the State Department, people who inside the government were saying, this is disgraceful and stood up to McCarthy in public and humiliated him. And he ended up not just disgrace, but, you know, he died prematurely from cirrhosis of the liver as a drunk. And it was kind of a metaphor for how McCarthyism was put into the dustbin of history. The reality, though, was at least, and again, I never thought I would imagine myself even saying anything remotely positive about McCarthyism was there were actually people in the United States in the wake of the New Deal, in the wake of the Soviet success in liberating.

the camps in Europe, fighting alongside the Americans and the British, of kind of this question of, well, maybe communism is a good ideology. There were communists inside the United States, and the Americans saw that ideology as a great threat. And so there was at least a kernel of truth to the fact that there were some communists around, way, way fewer than anything McCarthy suggests, never near on the level people were had their lives destroyed and were blacklisted in Hollywood and politics and media over false allegations, one after the next. Roshakit was completely fabricated from the beginning. There was never a kernel of truth to it.

They turned Robert Mueller into this kind of patron saint of probity, this kind of icon of American justice, even though he was George W. Bush's FBI director in the wake of 9-11, when Muslims were rounded up, when a lot of bad things happened from a civil libertarian perspective, liberals decided that George W. Bush's post-9-11 FBI director was the symbol of all things great. They practically turned him into a secular saint. And they unleashed him with unlimited resources, complete subpoena power, the supposed dream team of prosecutors who were incredibly aggressive and renowned for digging under every rock and knowing how to do that. And 18 months later, despite all the claims we heard from the media about how the Trump down,

family was going to be arrested, how all sorts of high-level Trump aides were going to be arrested, not on things they ended up getting charged with, like process crimes about lying during the investigation over with Paul Manafort, financial crimes that are very common on K Street, if you really were to look under the hood of what these people are doing who advocate for foreign governments and are paid. But on the core allegation that American citizens in the Trump campaign or Trump himself or his family or close his circle colluded with or concerned. inspired with the Russians to commit these crimes, these hacking crimes, not a single American to this day. Not one has ever been charged on that court allegation that formed the conspiracy theory in the

first place. Robert Mueller issued a report after those 18 months saying he found no evidence to establish that that ever happened. He didn't say there was some evidence pretty strong, but we didn't quite get to the level. He said, we cannot find evidence to establish the existence of this conspiracy. The other prong of the conspiracy, conspiracy theory that people are very eager to forget and bury because it's so humiliating was this kind of subsidiary notion that Donald Trump was acting at the behest of the Kremlin and selling out American interest to advance the interest of Russia in large part because they had sexual black male material hanging over his head, a video of him with prostitutes

in the four seasons of Moscow, all of that. This was a completely deranged conspiracy theory. American elites love to talk about how the far right relies on conspiracy theories, how the internet and Facebook and 4chan produces conspiracy theories. You will not find a more unhinged or demented conspiracy theory. And Nancy Pelosi was feeding it. This was not from the fringe. Nancy Pelosi was constantly saying, what does Donald Trump have? What does Russia and Putin have over Donald Trump sexually, personally and financially,

constantly insinuating that he was the victim of blackmail. In the meantime, Donald Trump was doing things that should have led any minimally honest journalist to immediately admit that his conspiracy theory was preposterous. He sent lethal arms to Ukraine right on the other side of the Russian border when Obama refused to do it. And Trump was obsessed with sabotaging Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that would have allowed Russia to sell cheap oil to Western Europe, crucial to Russia's future economic prosperity. So you can make an argument that Trump was directly attacking the two most vital interests that Russia has, keeping lethal arms out of Ukraine and the prosperity and existence of Nord Stream 2. Anyone looking at that rationally would have said, obviously,

this person is not a blackmail victim of Russia when he's attacking the two most central vital interests that the Kremlin has. But they were so immersed in this. And I think the bigger a lesson from this is that, well, there are two, if I could just briefly identify them. One is that it wasn't just Trump's election, but four months earlier, the voters of the UK voted to leave the EU and approved Brexit, even though European elites and British elites were telling them not to. They defied that and they did it anyway. And it was shocking that the elites saw that they no longer have control over the voting behavior of the population. and then four months later, something infinitely more traumatizing took place, which is that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton despite everyone's expectation and assurance that Hillary Clinton was going to win.

And what that did was it turned Western elites into a kind of mode of panic where they were completely petrified that they were now powerless and not without validity. They saw the proof that the populations had turned against them. And what they did was they set about to try and find a way to reimposed control over these populations, in part by saying we can no longer allow a free internet. Because a free internet, if you allow a free uncensored internet, that's too dangerous to let people talk to each other freely. And they had to invent a rationale as to why censorship was necessary. And that is a big part of where Russia gate came from, namely the Russians were this grave enemy once again.

they were manipulating our democracies through disinformation, deceiving our public and it needed to be stopped. And the way to stop it was through censorship. So this was not some trivial, inconsequential embarrassment on the part of the American media in Washington. It was a very consequential plot for them to consolidate control, seeing that they had lost it. And they used this creation of the villain in Russia in order to do it. And the second part of it is, it just is the case that American media in particular, but I think British media, you can put them into this and American political elites as well,

it's completely accountability free that culture is. I mean, when you think about the fact that the United States went to war with a country of 26 million people that invaded and attacked alongside the British under Tony Blair by convincing the public of completely false claims that Iraq had an active WMD program was in possession of nuclear weapons or was about to be, had biological and chemical weapons.

And then the secondary claim that they were in an alliance with al-Qaeda, which was crucial to convincing Americans to attack Iraq because Americans only thought about 9-11 and they needed to be convinced that this country were going to go to war with had something to do with 9-11. None of the people responsible for that falsehood. And you can debate, was it a lie? Did they really believe it in good faith and just got to run? But either way, if you make a mistake, let's assume it was just a good faith mistake, of that magnitude that destroys a country that gives rise to ISIS. Even Tony Blair said the main

effect of the invasion of Iraq was giving rise to ISIS, creating massive instability in the region that persists to this very day. You can't just move on as though you deserve your positions of power and influence. And yet all of the people, with the exception of one New York Times reporter who got scapego to Judy Miller, but everyone else besides her not only continued in the positions of power, but got promoted. I mean, Joe Biden is the president today, even though in 2002, he was one of the most vocal advocates in the Senate for invading Iraq. He probably did more to make it happen because they needed Democratic Party votes. Obviously, same thing with Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Goldberg is the head of the Atlantic, the most influential political magazine,

go down and down and down the list, and you'll find all these people who did it then. And just like then, those same exact people are back. They perpetrated all kinds of falsehoods when came to Russiagate that again, we're not inconsequential. It did things like poison the relationship between Russia and the United States, and I think, and I'm sure we'll get to it, led to this war in Ukraine, but also imposed a censorship regime on the internet, massive toxic consequences of their falsehoods. And because they're all united, because if you ask any of them, none of them will admit they got Russia gate wrong. They will insist to this very day that they told the truth about that. they, by all unifying together and holding hands and pretending they got it right, they insulate

themselves from accountability. And so they're still in control and able to do all of this. Absolutely. Can I just say on the question of censorship and on the question of people being punished for this, one individual whom I don't know, but I know people who do know him, who has been severely punished as a result of censorship, is in prison here in Britain. and that is Julian Assange. I used to work in the Royal Courts of Justice a long time ago, but I did. And I find it extraordinary

how the legal system in Britain has handled his case. Once upon a time, the media in Britain would have been very critical of everything that happened has happened in the case of Julian Assange. And I can also remember how he had an awful lot of political support,

how he had an awful lot of public support in Britain. Because of Russiagate and because of the way in which people were persuaded to believe that he was in some way involved in that from the way, you know, the Russians were involved, a lot of that support has fallen away and that has left him exposed to a lot of the things that have happened to him since. Just wanted to say that. How is it possible to explain? this lack of...

Go ahead. Sorry. I was just wondering, how is it possible to explain this lack of accountability? Because as you correctly pointed out, those who spread the fake news, they kind of floated to the top. And, you know, both politicians and journalists,

while those who are proven to get it right are nonetheless stuck with this label of suspicion of being, you know, working for the enemy. And because we see, you know, across the Trump criminal collusion, the P-Tapes, the hidden servers, the alleged hacking of the DNC, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russian bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan,

and then we come to the current conflict with the Nord Stream attack and Russia attacking its own nuclear power plant. One after another, they're all proven to be fake, and should have been obvious from the start, as you also point out, but how is it that we never reflect on the fake news and instead move on to the next one? And I'm a little bit surprised because now we see Biden and Clinton, the warning again about Russia interfering next year in the election. So are they going to play this again?

And also it seems to be getting worse because we became very worried about conspiracies and disinformation. So now we have fact checkers and content moderators. But they don't actually seem to check the actual main conspiracy theories we've had now through the last few years with this Russia gate. Instead, it seems to amplify the censorship. So how can you explain the absence of accountability as a journalist? Let me go back to the case of Julian for a second because Julian is a close friend of mine. I've known him since 2009.

I wrote about WikiLeaks. Before those big leaks happened, I kind of saw WikiLeaks emerging. I interviewed Julian and we became friends and our friendship grew over the years. And I was obviously a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks. They were a supporter of what we were doing with the Snowden reporting. WikiLeaks rescued Edward Snowden and helped him get out of the grips of American authorities by helping him get out of Hong Kong. So there's been a lot of overlap between these things. And when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published those leaks in 2010, the Iraq and Afghanistan War League showing the extent of American crimes in those wars, the corruption on the part of American allies all throughout the world, there was an enormous.

amount of support for WikiLeaks and Julian on the left, the international left, the Western left, among American liberals, kind of our traditional mainstream American supporters of the Democratic Party. The only thing that changed between that and now is that there's a perception that what Julian Assange and Wikileaks published in 2016 was harmful to Hillary Clinton in her candidacy. No suggestion that anything he published was false. no suggestion that he in some way participated in that hacking, he got what happened to me as a journalist. Edward Snowden took material that he wasn't legally permitted to take, according to the U.S. government, and gave it to me, and I published it working with the biggest news outlets in the

world. Julian Assange got the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, got the diplomatic cables from a person inside the U.S. military, not authorized to take them, but gave them to him as a journalist, and he published them, and he did the same in 2016. So the reason why there's so much support for Julian's imprisonment, and by the way, he has never been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, which he was accused of because he sought asylum, which are allowed to do with Ecuador, but the British decided to accuse him of the crime of bail jumping

because he didn't appear for his next court date because he was afraid of extradition to the U.S. He got an 11-month sentence. He served that long ago. he's in prison for years simply because the British won't let him go pending an extradition request from the United States. So he's been broken and destroyed because, as you said, they were able to connect him to Russia. The same reason, by the way, now when Edward Snowden was able to reveal to the world how much NSA spying was being done, not against terrorists, not against criminals, not against

pedophiles, but against millions and millions of innocent people, entire populations, including the American population with no warrants, no due process. He was considered a hero by people on the left, by American liberals. And now, because they've been able to try and suggest that he's a Russian agent, too, through the most cynical thing ever, which is, as we all know, he was never intending to go to Russia. He was trying to get out of Russia. Ben Rhodes and Obama official wrote a book boasting of the fact that they bullied the Cubans and said to the Cubans, if you want to deal with us to end sanctions, you better not let Edward Snowden pass through

as they had given him a safe guarantee, a state passage guarantee to do to get to Latin America where he intended to seek asylum. They boasted of the fact that they trapped him in Russia and then used the fact that he was trapped in Russia to try and smear him as a Russian agent, as though he intended to go there all along when he never intended that and he still wants to leave.

He would leave tomorrow if he could. So in both cases, they've been able to propagandize the public, that because these are Russian agents, you should hate them. They get everything they deserve. It's become this all-purpose authoritarian weapon to use. And then the question about why there's no accountability, I think we have to look at this with a little bit of subtlety, which is the reason there's no accountability inside elite corporate media

is because they all act in unison. I mean, if you were to turn on CNN or read the op-ed pages of the New York Times from 2016 until 2019, you almost saw no dissent at all to the Russia Gate narrative. No one saying there's no evidence for this. This is a crazy conspiracy theory, all the things we've been saying. This did not appear in those media outlets. They united to exclude all that. I used to go on MSNBC and all the time up until the moment that I became a Russia Gate skeptic. And then I was no longer out on after I went on once in the end of 2016. That was the last time I was in MSNBC to say, this stuff has no evidence. You should be very skeptical about this and we're not being.

So they excluded all dissent. So they created a world in which there's a closed system where everybody believes the same thing. Everybody affirms the same claims. And so there's no reason for them to admit error or hold themselves accountable because their audience doesn't know that they were wrong. Their audience wants them to be wrong. Even if their audience knew they were wrong, their audience would think they did a good thing because they were wrong for the right cause. But the issue for them and the problem for them is, is that the freedom of the internet has given birth to this entire, very rapidly growing, independent sector of media that is outside of these media corporations. And maybe, you know, 15 years ago when I got my starting journalism, it was kind of

confined to blogs. We were talking to maybe tens of thousands of people, maybe a couple hundred thousands of people. Now, as many people listen to independent media as they do to CNN, in fact, way more so, people are turned out, tuned away from those corporate media outlets. So while there's no accountability within these media corporations, if you look at polling data, the media is not even as popular as herpes. I mean, they're really held in widespread contempt by most of the population. And so they kind of can still talk to themselves. These are gigantic media corporations. I don't want to minimize the effect they have. They still do have an effect, but nowhere near the effect they had previously. So while they can continue to shield themselves and in their world and from

their audience, the population as a whole has come to see that they're liars. And we didn't even talk about one of their worst lies, which was telling everybody to ignore the Biden reporting before the 2020 election because the material from the Hunter Biden laptop was Russia. disinformation, a complete fabrication. You guys alluded to that, but we haven't dug into that. So it's just one after the next. And every time they get caught lying this way, like they're now getting caught with what was going to happen with the war in Ukraine, they're now basically admitting that Russia can't possibly beat, Ukraine can't possibly beat Russia, that Russia will have 20% of Ukraine one way or the other. Every time one of these things happens, people lose more

and more faith in those media institutions. And I consider that a very positive thing. It's one of the things about which I'm most optimistic. One of the great problems with the closed system is that debate isn't possible within it. If everybody has to agree on one particular line, then the mistakes are not going to be challenged, and in fact, they're going to compound. And that is, I would suggest, exactly what we are seeing in U.S.-Russia relations at this moment in time because anybody who has taken a critical view of U.S. Russian relations, and both Glenn and I have done so in many ways, and from different perspectives, Glenn knows Russia

much better than I do, would have been very skeptical, for example, about the whole sanctions agenda. I mean, I'm on record at the time when the sanctions were first introduced. I said that they're not going to achieve the results that some of the people predict they will. If anybody was familiar with Russian decision-making and Russian processes, they would have seen the outcome of the war in Ukraine that we have now. And it is devastating. You have spoken about the Iraq War. What is happening in Ukraine in some ways is every bit as devastating. It is not quite as dramatic.

You're not seeing cities bombed. You aren't seeing huge explosions taking place. but people are dying in the tens of thousands. And earlier today, I was watching a video in which I saw young women being conscripted, and not conscripted, they were actually in the battlefields and being killed. Now, you know, it's perhaps, if you've been completely unsentimental,

you say, well, what's the importance of that? What is the consequence of that? Why worry more about women than men? Maybe that's true, but I personally was, deeply, deeply distraught and shaken by this. And this is what happens. There was more debate, I remember. Again, my memory extends just that far. More debate at the time of Vietnam. More discussion about policy choices, about risks of decisions being made which might go wrong, more attempts to understand the concerns and worries of the other side than anything we have to do.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you completely. And the amazing thing is not just Vietnam, which I didn't live through, but have spent a lot of time studying. But what I did live through was the debate in the run-up to the war in Iraq. And because this was 18 months after this very traumatizing event of 9-11 where the United States was attacked in the way that it hadn't been since arguably Pearl Harbor, maybe worse. Because it was right in the middle of our cities. I lived in New York and I was in New York on that day. Like everybody who was there, it was really a traumatizing event. There was very little debate, very little attempt to try and resist anything that George Bush and Dick Cheney and his, their administration.

wanted. They had created this binary framework that said either you are with us or you're with the terrorists, just like the, a lot of people are doing now with this new war in Israel and Gaza, like a lot of people did with the war in Ukraine, where they said, either you support what the U.S. is doing or you're going to stand accused of being a pro-Kremlin agent, this binary framework that was very intimidating, especially in that climate. And there was famously little debate in the wake of 9-11 because of how unified Americans were behind George Bush and Dick Cheney. And yet, there was debate more so about the Iraq war even, even in the wake of 9-11 than there was about whether we should get involved in the war in Ukraine. There were very, very few people

with any kind of a public platform in Washington, in media, in academia, standing up and saying this is going to be something that we're not going to end up defending Ukrainians and Ukraine. We're going to end up destroying Ukraine and killing huge numbers of Ukrainians at the altar of our real geopolitical goal of trying to weaken Russia or harm Russia. And I think it was largely due to vengeance for their perceived role in the 2016 election and helping Donald Trump win. And the fact that with the internet and with all the things I said, the independent media, there was so much unity. I think what that shows is there's very little more potent than war propaganda. I mean, war is the worst thing that human beings can do to each other. And if you decide to manipulate what it is by only, say, showing one side of the conflict, showing one side's victims, emphasizing the perspective of one side and never the other, you villainize the other.

Vladimir Putin is just Adolf Hitler, he's, you know, trying to conquer all of Europe. It's just a savage act of aggression. You know, and I live in Brazil where there was a much more ample debate on the part of the government on the part of the population throughout Latin America. So I understand that most of the world was not trapped in this propagandistic prison. But in the United States, the land of the free, the free press and all that, it was a completely closed system. And over time, what always happens is Americans start coming to. to the realization that they've been deceived again.

And in the beginning of the war, as is true for every American war, you see 70, 80% of people on board. And then over time, it starts to a road. They start to realize that what they were promised, what happened isn't happening. And then they start turning against it. And so by the beginning of this year, the middle of this year, certainly a majority of Americans had had enough. They were saying, we don't want to keep giving money to the war in Ukraine.

It doesn't seem to be achieving anything. The front line had moved at all. And so they had to kind of manipulate the public further. They said things like, oh, don't worry. We have this incredibly potent counteroffensive that's coming. And it's going to transform the war and trying to claim that the Ukrainians were winning. And so finally they ended up resorting to this sociopathic narrative of, look, this is the greatest thing in the world. It's only the Ukrainians who are dying.

We're not dying at all. We're just paying for this. Don't worry. We're not sending our Americans to die there. were letting the Ukrainians die. And that really pulled the mask off on what this war was about. It was never about protecting Ukrainians or protecting Ukraine. They didn't care in the slightest about the Ukrainian people.

They were wanting to use the Ukrainians as pawns to lead them to believe something that was completely ridiculous, which is that they had any chance to defeat Russia on the battlefield, a much, much larger and more militarily powerful country, as is now proven. and they led Zelensky and a lot of Ukrainians to believe that led them down the Primrose path. And now 18 months later, the country is destroyed. Tens of thousands of young people have given their lives and increasingly older people who are pulled off buses and trains. People are fleeing the country to avoid being sent to the front lines where they know they're using being used as cannon fodder. And now what we're going to have after Raytheon and Boeing and Lockheed Martin got their huge paydays is that we're now going to go and rebuild you. Ukraine through reconstruction. And you have all these vultures like J.P. Morgan and BlackRock excitedly

talking on their earnings calls about all the opportunities in Ukraine. So Americans paid for the destruction of Ukraine. And now we're going to pay for its rebuilding. And at the end of the day, Russia is going to end up with roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. And there was almost a certainty. We'll never know for sure. But certainly, there was a lot of claims from people like Napali Bennett and other world leaders that early on, there was a deal to be. had that was close to being reached, where Russia wouldn't have kept 20% of Ukraine. They would have had a security buffer. There would have been some mild autonomy for the regions in eastern Ukraine that had long wanted them. They would have obviously kept Crimea. They would have had nothing more

than a guarantee that Ukraine wouldn't join NATO and Ukraine would get a security guarantee from the West. That was all that was needed to avert this horrific war. But as we know, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, in particular, intervened, didn't want a resolution to that war. And so here we are two years later. And now they're going to force Zelensky to the negotiating table in a much weaker position than he would have been in had they let him negotiate. And before they convinced him he was going to win back in February of 2022. It's interesting what you said before about criminalizing dissent because I think the way with the narrative we had for making sure there would be no dissent in the Ukraine war was really to suggest it was unprovoked invasion. in my opinion was brilliant

propaganda tactic because anyone who contested that it was unprovoked could then be accused of justifying or excusing or even legitimizing supporting the invasion and then of course it could be censored and expelled from polite society and again

this was I think was strong because it allowed peace negotiations to be then denounced as appeasement and I think you saw this throughout the war you had very extreme arguments in which why you had to be pro-Ukrainian. And if you were pro-Ukraine, you know, from 2014, you had to support the coup, even though most Ukrainians did not support it. If you're pro-Ukrainian, meant you have to

support anti-terrorist operation against Ukrainians, which was absurd. Then if you're pro-Ukrainian, you had to oppose the Minsk Agreement, even though 73% of Ukrainians voted for this peace platform in 2019. So they, I guess, also- And elected Zelensky, based on the promise to uphold Yeah, this is why it's so strange how they're able to manipulate this. And same is with this rejecting negotiations and peace proposals, which you pointed out very clearly would have saved lives and territory. But being pro-Ukraine meant you have to support rejecting this. And even this disastrous counter-offensive, and even the Ukrainian military offensive said, you know, this was a disaster. We're being pressured by NATO and the Americans.

It was bound to fail. And nonetheless, we had to support. this as well if we were going to be pro-Ukrainian, which was our only option effectively. But I guess what we see now is it was great in terms of fighting to the last Ukrainian. But now that the war is pretty much lost, I guess like you pointed out, a new narrative has to come into play. It can be, yes, we didn't lose any soldiers. We're just, you know, fighting with Ukrainians. How wonderful.

I've seen articles like this in Washington Post saying, you know, this has been a great victory for us. You know, we got the Swedes and the Finns into NATO, the Germans decoupled from the Russians, except for the Ukrainian losses. This has been a windfall, I think, the word they used. So I'm just curious how, now that they need to sit down at the table with the Russians, where is the narrative going to go? Like, what are we going to, what can we expect?

So first of all, I think what you said at the beginning, I just want to make sure we don't lose that and kind of pull that out and highlight it. which is the criminalization of dissent. At the very beginning of the war, within six to eight weeks after the Russian invasion in February 2022, the EU enacted a law that made it a crime for any platform to host Russian state media. So if you're a European citizen, you want to watch RT because you want to hear the other side, which is a very healthy thing to do. Or you want to hear Sputnik because you want to hear Russian officials and what they're saying,

just like we constantly hear from Western officials and what they're saying, you weren't allowed to. It was a crime for any platform to host any Russian state media. YouTube and Google immediately complied. My show every night that I do is on Rumble, and the reason why I went to Rumble is because they're devoted to free speech.

They issued, the French government, issued to Rumble a formal notification because Rumble did host RT. In fact, they reached out to RT and after YouTube removed them and said if you want to have a platform, You're free to put your programming on our site because we're a free speech site. We allow everything.

And RT went there and the French government said, even though Rumble has no operations in France, no, it's not a French company, that you have to immediately remove RT and Sputnik or you will not be permitted to exist in France. We will cut you off at the IP level. And as a result of Rumble's refusal to remove news outlets that the French government ordered to remove, you cannot watch Rumble in France. If you're in France, as I was two weeks ago or two and a half weeks ago when you try and go to Rumble, you'll get a notice saying this platform is not available in France due to Rumble's refusal to remove R.T. So there was this extraordinary official censorship escalation.

that has happened with every crisis we've seen from the election of Trump and Russia Gate to January 6th to COVID to the war in Ukraine. Each time one of these things happens, EU officials start insisting that security and safety require greater levels of content moderation. They have this whole new fraudulent industry funded by Pierre Omidyar and Bill Gates and George Soros. I'm sorry to sound banal, but that really are the three billionaires who are funding it. and they're often in partnership with the CIA or the MI6, and they hire these people who have called themselves disinformation experts, which is not a credential. That is not a field of discipline that actually exists. You can't go and get a PhD and become a disinformation expert. They call themselves that. And then they identify any views that diverge from the foreign policy

of Western governments as being disinformation. And the EU and the UK both now have laws, very stringent laws that punish social media platforms for allowing the spread of any views that the EU regards or the UK regards as disinformation, which they're obviously going to interpret to mean any dissent from our perspective. And so many people were removed from these platforms, big tech platforms, obviously during COVID, obviously during the 2020 election, but also because of the war in Ukraine. So it even further closed this system. We were supposedly in Ukraine to save democracy, but at the same time, we were eroding our own democratic norms and freedom of speech on the internet and elsewhere in the name of this war. The other point that you made,

I think it's an important one. I just did a show on this on Tuesday night where I watched this, there was this program, Morning Show in the United States called Morning Joe, hosted by the former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough. It's kind of like ground zero for Washington elites, especially foreign policy elites. His co-host is Mika Brzynski, who's the daughter of Zipnik Brzynski, the longtime foreign policy insider in the United States. And they get all these foreign policy elites,

and they had on Richard Haas, who for so long was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Council, Council on Foreign Relations. And they were obviously testing this new narrative. They had been feeding their public for 18 months, this maximalist view, which was, there's only one aim of this war

that we accept. It's the expulsion of Russian troops, every last Russian soldier from every inch of Ukrainian soil, even including Crimea. The idea that Russia would ever tolerate the expulsion of all Russian soldiers from every inch of Ukrainian

soil, especially Crimea, when it was so clear that they regarded this as an existential threat, was always preposterous. But that's what they told their public, not only that we demand this, but that this will happen. This is, we're going to win this war. And victory is, this way. Now, of course, the West has a new war they have to fund in Israel.

Even if they continue to do everything they were doing in Ukraine, even the Ukrainians are now acknowledging that this front line is not moving. They cannot penetrate the defensive positions of the Russians. The only one in Ukraine, apparently, who believes they can is Zelensky and his closest age are running to the Russian media, basically to say, save us from this delusional madman who keeps insisting we're going to win, like Hitler in a bunker. You know, I don't want to to compare Zelensky to Hitler, except in that very limited sense. I'm just saying like this kind of, you know, messianic view that you're destined to win against all evidence. And the reality is now sitting in that that front line is not moving. There's no way to expel the Russians from those positions.

And so there was a title on the screen of this discussion. And it was called redefining success in Ukraine. And what they were essentially claiming was, look, the Russian goal was to take a take over 100% of Ukraine, to swallow Ukraine, to eliminate it, to erase it from the map, to annex it. And we got 80% of what we wanted. There's still going to be 80% of Ukrainian control things to what we did under the control of Kiev. We're only giving them 20%. So we won. We wish it were 100% that we kept, but 80% that's a pretty good deal. They're only getting 20%. I mean, to start to believe that, to prepare the public to try and believe after they were told for two years that victory in the most absolute sense was theirs,

that the US and NATO really won is insanity. But what else are they going to do? It's a form of self-protection. And they're starting slowly to kind of condition the public to believe that keeping 80% of Ukraine was somehow a success. The disaster in Ukraine is, you know, beyond, you know, beyond. words to describe, at least I find it difficult to describe my own feelings about this, but we have to look beyond, and there is a fundamental reality, which is the situation in the world, world peace, the fact that nuclear weapons are increasing now in number, that there are no

controls over them, that there's no restraints any longer on increasing nuclear weapons arsenal, the fact that there is no diplomatic contacts between the Americans and the Russians, the fact that there is no moves to coordinate positions on international affairs. Now, people are probably not aware of this, but in Russia, strangely enough, there is a debate about these matters. And the Russians who sense that things on the battlefields in Ukraine are going their way. and we're becoming more confident because their economy has withstood the sanctions storm, are now thinking about how they're going to start to speak to the Americans once more.

I just wonder that when that happens, when they do eventually reach out, they're not going to find anybody in America and the United States, in Europe, who's prepared to speak with them. And I think that some kind of a diplomatic move from the Russians at some point over the next year or so is quite likely. But in the present atmosphere, in the United States, can you see any prospect of that getting any kind of positive reception? I don't think the West has much of a choice anymore because the, I mean, just last night, I haven't really had time to digest it. the far right won an election in the Netherlands with Dear Wilders that was inconceivable even a few weeks ago. And one of his, the planks of his platform is no more support for Ukraine.

The former prime minister of Slovakia won an election a couple of months ago, where that was a central part of his campaign, no more aid to Ukraine. There's obviously a difficulty that the Biden administration is having, getting more money passed through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives where a majority of the voting base of the Republican Party and now even the elected officials are very resistant to more funds to Ukraine. And as I said, even if the West continue to fund the war at the same level, it wouldn't really go anywhere.

There was already this incredibly alarming from the Western perspective of artillery shortage. It's like I still don't understand why all of NATO couldn't produce enough artillery to make up for the shortage and artillery that the Ukrainian suffered as compared to what the Russians had been producing in great math. We're told early on the sanctions regime is going to crush their economy, which in turn would prevent them from acquiring anymore. And the opposite happened. And now, as I said, there's a new war in the Middle East that the United States will absolutely fund until the end and is already transferring a huge amount of. weaponry to the Israelis. And so the ability for the West to continue to sustain this anywhere near the levels where it was, combined with the fact that even the Ukrainians are now acknowledging that, you know, game over, there's just nothing else to do. They don't have people left in Ukraine

to fight. That I think that's the reason we're starting to see this kind of narrative shift is because they need to prepare this population who had been led down this road to believe all sorts of things that now, of course, is not going to happen. Just like they were told and promised for months that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. were all going to be fraud-marched out of the White House by Robert Mueller. And none of that happened.

And you have to kind of, you know, find a way to tell the public, keep believing us, even though everything we had just told you didn't happen. They're going to do that again. I think the reason is because the West knows it has to change. Now, maybe you're right. Maybe sitting down in a negotiating table with Putin and signing a deal is a bridge too far. So maybe you just kind of leave the status quo as is.

You kind of leave it as this kind of stagnant, you know, war that doesn't, isn't really active. The Russians just kind of occupy this territory, but no one officially acknowledges that these regions are now autonomous. So that no one has to swallow Joe Biden at a peace deal with Zelensky and Putin. But even if that doesn't happen effectively, that's where we're going. And I, you know, think that what it's going to do, there's some hardcore believers who will continue to believe in these institutions as their bulwark against Trump, who will never be persuaded to abandon trust and faith in them because they know they're anti-Trump and that's all they care about. But for most of the population, I think this is going to be yet another kind of undermining and eroding of. of whatever trust and faith people once had in our institutions of authority. I also thought about ammunition.

I remember even from the first month of the war in March of 2022, we're told the Russians are almost out of weaponry and missiles. And now two years later, almost two years later, their army is now stronger than it was two years ago. But again, this is why I mean. There's no accountability. and still remember the people who said back then, you know, Russia has a huge industrial capacity.

You know, they can ramp up production easily. You know, they were, oh, you're a Putinist, you know, just, you know, let's, you know, who's paying you? You know, again, criminalizing any dissent. So anyway, so we seem to be running a bit out of time. Any final words from you, Alexandra, or Glenn? Well, I have to say, if we have any kind of dialogue at all, It will be in itself a good thing, I think.

And if we start having some kind of high-level meetings again, the Russians have made it absolutely clear that they are prepared to have high-level meetings. It is we who are refusing to do so. There have been no discussions between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin since their last one. I think it was in January 2021. So all of these things are happening in the world.

They're becoming very dangerous. and the US and American governments aren't talking to each other. The US and the Russian governments are talking to each other. So if we have some communication, even at the most basic level, it's better than what we've got now. So actually, Glenn, I take some relief from what you just said. Yeah, you know, one of the things I was reflecting on that both of you had emphasized in various parts of our discussion,

And it really is true. And I was thinking about it was, if you look at the presidency of every American president going back to the 50s, kind of Eisenhower and then Kennedy, you know, everyone, you can imagine, you can see the visions of their meetings, their summits with Soviet leaders. And not just Democratic presidents, but Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. You know, all those arms control treaties, all those sitting down and shaking hands and signing agreements, keeping the red phone open. This is foundational to American security and world security for decades. And the fact that after the Cold War, when Russia is a fraction of what it was in terms of the power it exerts in the world, you can't now even suggest there be negotiations between the Americans and the Russians or the West and Russia is really a scary regression in terms of the place to which we've devolved. And I do hope that one of the effects.

of all of this is that Americans will start to reconsider the need to take large countries seriously, that we can't just go around bullying countries and, you know, kicking countries around, that there are other countries that are very serious about their security. They have serious militaries. And I think this is a big lesson for the United States. Whether elites come away with that lesson is one thing, but I think a lot of Americans will be, have their perceptions affected in a positive way by it. So I really enjoyed the conversation. I would love to do it again. The hour flew by, and I really appreciate you guys asking me to come on. We're delighted to have you, and we will certainly have you back on, which will be our huge pleasure

and our honor as well. Thank you so much. It's been a great privilege. Yeah, have a great afternoon. Good talking to you guys. Bye-bye.