The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program | Guests: Sen. Mike Lee, Bill O'Reilly, & Glenn Greenwald | 9/24/21

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Sen. Mike Lee joins to discuss the basic rights Americans are at risk of losing and government spending. Bill O’Reilly joins for his weekly news recap, President Biden’s plummeting popularity, Hunter Biden’s never-ending laptop story, the border crisis, and COVID mandates. Journalist Glenn Greenwald joins to discuss the Biden family emails found on Hunter's laptop and how they were suppressed by the corrupt media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. Hey, some really important information on today's podcast, information on the economy. You're not going to get anywhere else that you really need to pay attention to.

Bill O'Reilly gives us the rundown of the week, the biggest stories of the week. We talk a little bit about whether Donald Trump is going to run. again interesting stuff coming from bill o'Reilly and glen greenwald on the media and the hunter biden laptop fascinating stuff you can't get anywhere else on the podcast in just a minute and let me remind you uh ion hersey alley one of my true heroes in in life is our podcast you can find it on blazed tv.com it came out on thursday for blaze tv but it is also available on the podcast uh for wherever you get your podcast on Saturday, but don't miss it. Ion Herssey Alley on the Glenn Beck podcast.

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Join us. Please go to blaisTV.com slash Glenn. Use the promo code Glenn 25 and save 25% off your subscription right now. Mike Lee and I were talking on the phone just a couple of nights ago about the Constitution, and I asked him some questions, and I thought, you know, this is an interesting conversation. We should just have some of this on the air. Hi, Mike. How are you? Doing great, Glenn.

Good to be with you, as always. So, Mike, I was talking to you about ways to understand the Constitution, and I'm working on something to where you don't have to even read it. And I know you don't recommend that. But people have to start to understand what the government can and cannot do. And I was talking to you about we loan our rights out or we give our rights to the government to lend them so they can do the things that we can't do ourselves. for instance, police. We have the right to defend ourselves.

We have a right to stop a person from robbing us. We have a right to stop somebody from stealing our stuff. We even have a right to a citizen's arrest and holding somebody until the authorities arrive. And the authorities are using the power that we give them to then take them to trial, et cetera, et cetera. We don't have the right to string somebody up. But if we were alone and we were just a bunch of individuals with no government, we would have the right to collectively get together and judge a person, and hopefully it would be fair, and then execute the punishment. Correct or not correct? Look, all of us are born with certain natural rights, certain God-given rights, fundamental rights that guaranteed that we should have the ability to live our lives.

to have a protection of life and liberty and property. Government is there to protect those same things, to stand in for us so that we can live our lives and not have to worry constantly about protecting that which is ours. And when we bring government in, we don't give government more power than we ought naturally, morally, to have on our own over our own fellow beings. And so government is there more as a surrogate,

and security card than it is a parent. And in fact, Alexis de Tocqueville observed something like this as he was touring America in the 1830s and explaining why our revolution seemed to have taken hold and embraced liberty while the French not so much. He said, you see, when government steps into the place of a parent, it's preparing children for perpetual childhood and adolescence. parents of course are preparing their children for adulthood. But when government acts that way, it's preparing them for captivity. That's not what we can ever have. That really is what the Declaration of Independence was about.

So this is what led me to this thing that I'm working on, is Joe Biden said, it's my job to protect you. And he was talking about the virus. And I thought, no, it's not your job to protect us. It's our job, along with our doctors, and it's my responsibility. Nowhere in your job description does it say you need to protect me outside of military, you know, invasions, et cetera, et cetera. Your job is to protect my rights. And quite honestly, this is why we go to war and we're willing to die because my rights are more important than my life.

my rights that are my children's rights, that's why I'm willing to go and die in a war, because I need to preserve those rights for future generations. And that's where the government is going wrong. And any time they say the government, the government has to protect us. No, they don't. No, that usually leads to bad things. Raises an excellent point, Glenn. What he ought to be focused on is those areas where his statement happens to be true within that narrow sphere.

So, yes, it is his job to protect us as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. I wish he had been focusing on that rather than on extraneous things, and maybe the Bosch withdrawal from Afghanistan wouldn't have been so fatal. So he also has the responsibility to protect us through our border, right? He does indeed. He has a constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That is his job as the chief executive officer. of the U.S. government. He didn't do that either. And there too, the results are tragic.

You see, this is what happens with governments. When governments start focusing on the things that they're not supposed to do, they lose side of the few things they are supposed to do, and that we rely on them exclusively to do. Let me, I'd like to continue our conversation. but our rights are being destroyed left and right and we are fundamentally transforming our economy, our banking system, everything. And Mike, I don't know how you feel about, you know, some of the things about the Great Reset, but we are developing an entirely new style of government. public-private partnership.

And conservatives have always said, it's a private corporation. They can do anything. But these corporations now are far more powerful than governments. And I'm not sure which one is running which. And they are also doing the bidding. I think when Joe Biden said, I'm going to have a mandate, he was giving cover to these big corporations to do this for him because he knew he can't. That's why there's no executive order or anything coming from him on this.

You know, it's interesting regime that has arisen in modern times. They tend to use this melding of corporate power with government power. And it seems attractive to many from a distance, maybe the best of both worlds. In my view, it ends up being the worst of both worlds because you have neither accountability, nor efficiency. You end up with all sorts of horrible combinations. A lot of this seems to start, Glenn, this is counterintuitive. A lot of it seems to start when people start misapprehending the nature of rights.

When you start hearing people refer to rights as things the government must give to them, you're on the high road to bad things. Rights we have to remember are things government may not do to you. They are not things government must give to you. Say it again. Say it again. This is really important. Rights are things government may not do to you. They are not things government must give to you by taking them from someone else. Once you depart from that central premise and from the central premise that government is basically just there to make sure we don't hurt each other, take each other's stuff, or vulnerable to those who would harm us as a society from the outside, then we are on the high road toward tyranny.

well we've been on that road for a very long time yeah but we seem to be accelerating into the turn this time around yeah i uh i think so and i'm wondering where the republicans are i mean mike it is it is if if the uh is if the senate and the house are shadows of what they're supposed to be and that's an insult to shadows it is indeed And I think all the shadows all over the world are now very upset right now, that you have to us.

How dare you? And with good reason. Look, this is one of the features of consolidated power. You know, the whole purpose of the Constitution was to fulfill the promise of the declaration. It did so by framing the promise of the declaration. Now, it set up the Senate and the House to be accountable bodies, and it was there to protect the people against the dangerous accumulation of power. in the hands of the few. What's happened over time is that we've drawn more and more of this power

from the people to Washington. Within Washington, we've handed it over from the legislative branch to the executive branch, sometimes to the president himself, other times to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. And as a result, the legislative muscle of the most accountable branch starts to atrophy. That's the problem we've got with Washington. So the spending bill, I read this morning there are five senators that are Republicans that are pushing for the Republicans to pass a spending bill. Who are, I mean, I know it's Mitt Romney. Who else? Look, I'm not sure who is actually pushing to pass a spending bill. There were four of them, I believe, who didn't sign the letter saying that we wouldn't pass a continuing resolution

if that continuing resolution contained a debt ceiling increase. I'm not aware of five pushing, certainly, to spend the $3.5 trillion that Democrats want. But I will tell you this, speaking more broadly, because I'm not aware of the article you're describing here, I will say this, there is a tendency over time for people in Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike, to want to spend more of other people's money, even if they are Republicans, because they can always convince themselves that someone will benefit because of this government spending. And it's probably always true. What they neglect is that they have a constitutional and moral responsibility to make sure that they're not spending outside of what we can

afford and outside of what is constitutionally appropriate for us to spend. That's what concerns me. And that's why this $30 trillion debt load that we've got, that didn't happen on its own. In fact, say there's no bipartisanship in Washington. And as we would say in the courtroom, that assumes facts not in evidence. Because you don't get to be $30 trillion in debt without a whole lot of Republicans, agreeing with a whole lot of Democrats to spend more money than we've got. Senator Mike Lee, thank you so much for being on the phone and all of the hard work that you do. you are a true statesman and a guy who is standing true with your oath and the Constitution and Declaration,

and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. And I think I am not alone in that. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Glenn. I really appreciate it. Your listeners can follow me at leeferesnet.com. Thank you very much. Lee for Senate.

By the way, I think he is, I mean, he's got so many people coming out to run against him. It's like everybody's running. him. I don't think he has any serious challengers. They seem to be clowns, but maybe that's just me. Lee for Senate. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes. The author of, I don't even know, the 10th book in his multimillion-selling killing series, killing the mob is the latest, and Bill O'Reilly is just joining us now from Bill O'Reilly.com, where you can watch his no spin news every night at bill o'reilly.com.

All right, Bill, biggest story of the week? Biggest story of the week, I would think, would be the polling that shows at this point in history, more people would vote for Trump than Biden if they ran tomorrow. That's a pretty big turnaround, don't you think? Well, seeing that it's only been eight months, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's a spate of articles about how Democrats are panicking because they're not going to get their socialist agenda passed now. When a president starts to weaken, it's like anything else in the power circles, when opponents, they sense weakness, then they become more aggressive. And so the people who don't like Biden, and there are a lot of them,

are now saying, you know, this guy's such a screw up, and he's never going to come back. It's never going to get better. So let's bury him now. And so the people in the Democratic Party who are not real thrilled about being socialist, they now have an excuse not to pass this insane spending bill. Yeah, what's weird is those people that don't like Joe Biden and are now like empowered to do stuff Doesn't seem like any of those people are Republicans. They're still just asleep. They're just...

Look, there is an anti-Biden movement in America, and it's fairly strong, even though you don't hear it on the corrupt corporate media. So they shut that down, with the exception of Fox and Newsmax and the right-wing networks. You don't have any regular networks anymore. Isn't that interesting? It's either left wing or right wing.

You don't have any, well, hey, come over here and we'll, like, tell you what's happening in the fairest way possible. Oh, no, you can't do that. Come on. We have to take a side. Right. But the momentum, if you want to use a sports cliche, is on the side of the anti-Biden people. And even though the corporate media doesn't hate that, they hate it. What are they going to do?

You got 15,000 foreign nationals under a bridge in Rio, Texas. I mean, that's a pretty compelling photograph to show. You've got Afghanistan, we all know what happened there, and it continues to unfold as a horror. And now, you know, we have people paying a buck and a half more a gallon at the gas and paying a lot more for food. So the corporate media, and believe me, have been meetings about this. They're going, what do we do? What can we do?

So that's the big story of the week. Now, I wrote a message of the day on bill o'Reilly.com today, and I am predicting that you will see horrible new attacks on Donald Trump very soon. That's the only way they can get the attention off, the incompetence of Biden, is to trump up something, pardon upon, against the first. former president. And I expect to see it as early as next week. Wow. That goes, I assume this is because of the new poll that came out that shows Trump would win 51 41. Independent voters would overwhelmingly choose the Republican by 20 points over Joe Biden.

And Trump would win 5239 against Harris. Right. So Trump isn't dead. All right. And they got a kill them. And they'll try. I mean, you're going to see stuff. Emerge. Now, on the other side, the anti-Biden forces, they're latching on to Hunter again. So now, Hunter is, he's coming back. But Hunter is, but we have to stop framing this as a Hunter Biden thing. This is not Hunter Biden. This is about Joe. They're linking it to Joe. They're linking it. Look, there was an article yesterday, and I don't know how true it is, I mean, it looked like a lot of speculation to me, that Joe Biden dodged hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes by forming an S corporation.

Now, nobody knows what an S corporation is. But the headline was Joe Biden dies taxes. He wants to tax everybody up to the eyebrows. So what we have in America now is his fierce propaganda war on both sides. And the, corporate media, which is the most powerful entity in that propaganda war, they are desperate to keep Biden from going under. And that's why you're going to see in the next few weeks some pretty intense stuff. Well, I think it's good that you will see the intense stuff, hopefully on Biden, do you think the, do you think the Hunter Biden thing ever goes to the mainstream media?

I mean, really? Only if he's indicted. So, you know, look, if Hunter Biden is indicted, and I can't see that at a federal level. I mean, Merrick Garland is not going to do that. He's the attorney general, of course. But, you know, Hunter Biden did a lot of very shady things. There's no doubt he did.

And now there's new e-mail. on his computer that he gave some pawn shop operator. I mean, this guy is totally out of his mind, Hunter. Right? I mean, you're a computer, you walk into a computer, so it was loaded with bad stuff and you give it to some guys chewing tobacco. I mean, is that what you're doing? And so there's something here where Hunter Biden could get into formal trouble.

And once that happens, it's like the bridge and, del Rio. You can't hide that story. You can't bury the story. For eight months, ABC, NBC, CBS buried the border story. Wouldn't report. Now they have to. And now there's a new element of color because of the Haitians. So who's down there? Al Sharpton. Didn't go well. Yeah. Did Al go down when there were Hondurans? no did he go down for the Nicaragans or the El Salvador? No, but as soon as there's a Haitian,

there's that. And so now Biden's got cross currents of the Black Lives Matter, the Al Sharpton's, because of the Haitians, now they're turning on Biden a little bit.

Now, this is even worse for the New York Times and the Washington Post. They don't know what to do now, because people of color are turning on Biden. And it's from my purge, because I'm a big-picture guy, I'm like you, Beck, I'm a big-picture guy. I'm seeing a total deterioration, not only of the Biden presidency, but of the corrupt corporate media. Well, they don't know what the deuce to do.

I think it's 73% of the American public in the latest poll I saw. blamed the media for this debacle down on the border because they said that, I mean, they blamed Biden, but more of them also blamed the media because they said they never covered it until now. And if they would have covered it, we would have, we would have been forced to pay attention. Good for the folks. You know, we often talk about people not paying attention and being prisoners to their cell phones.

But I think that after a while, when the situation becomes so irredeemable, and this applies to Afghanistan and to inflation, that even the dimest among us, which would be probably Beverly Hills, Hollywood, they started to go, well, maybe we're on the wrong track here. You know, it's just good for the folks. Let me ask you about the COVID mandate. A week ago, Biden came out and said his patients is running thin. He's going to be mandating these vaccines. And then nothing happened.

Why? Because he doesn't want to get into a Supreme Court fight. So Biden can mandate federal workers. They have to take the VACs because they're employed and Biden's in charge of the federal government. So he can do that. And he's not going to lose legally. But once he starts to tell Sally in Des Moines, Iowa, that she has to be vaccinated and so to her children. Then Biden is into Supreme Court territory.

And I think that the Democrats and the progressives and the people who run Biden know they have a better than even chance of losing. Because it's unlike smallpox and measles and things like that, the vaccines, are not locked down. They will be as they get perfected, but not quite yet. And so the argument can be made that, look, you're forcing people to take a vaccine they don't want

and they're not really protected from COVID and look at all the breakthrough and crossover cases. That's enough. So Biden knows that he can't mandate and if he did, there would be rebellion like there is in Australia. You keep in an eye.

It's just like America, by the way, very similar. And there's riots. There's riots in the streets there now. Right. What the Australian government's doing. Well, the Biden administration, when he came out and said, I want mandates, the number of people that got vaccines actually has gone down pretty dramatically. So he is.

Yeah, you're in the zone now where the persuadables have been persuaded. So you've got 30 to 20. 25% of Americans who you can't persuade them. They're not going to take the Vax, unless, you know, draconian measures. I don't think. I got news for you. I don't think so. I think that by him coming out and saying, we're going to vaccine, we're going to do a Vax mandate.

And my patients are running thin. It's that day that he said that, that the vaccine, the people getting vaccine, those numbers went down. I think the harder he pushes, the more people go. So there's something wrong here. This isn't right. What's happening? You're absolutely right. That hardened the resistance and brought sympathy in some precincts to the anti-vax movement because they don't like Biden. I mean, you know, conservative people don't like Biden. But the untold story here, and I'm writing a column partially about this on Sunday, again, billow-reli.com is where I am, is that the African-American community is by far. the most anti-vax community in the United States. You've seen that reported on NBC, ABC, or CBS lately?

No. Black Lives Matter is actually screaming that New York City mandates are racist now. They're out. They're screaming. It's racist. So Black Lives Matter has now allied with the anti-vax movement. It's believable, but it's true. We have some audio on that.

Let me play the audio. All restaurant industries, the service industry, needs to wake up to the realities that these mandates are unconstitutional. That's right. We need to stand up against them. Because those that are against us thinking that we are either anti-vaccine and whether they are, I don't care. The thing is, I am pro-choice. If they want to choose to get the vaccine and if they want to deny it, they should have the choice to do so. Right.

So if you mandate and you push them out of your industries, out of your restaurants, you, my people are discriminating. It's the same as it was back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, now, has it changed? You know, he kind of sounds a little like me. I don't care if you're going to get it or not. It's not right. You should have a right to choose. Is that the Black Lives Matter spokesperson? Yes, it is.

Okay. Because he didn't idea him. I think his name is Hank Newsom. He is not related to Gavin in California. Yeah, I would love to see that family reunion if that were true, though. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. Glenn Greenwald should be joining us any minute. Let me just read some of this report.

A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last 12 months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged. The destruction by big tech monopolies of parlor at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most doubt. downloaded app in the country, the banning of the sitting president from social media, the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands. But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election by the CIA, Big Tech, the list.

liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about the then presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. October 14th and then on October 15th, 2020, the New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions. Glenn Greenwald is here to tell us all about the conclusion. Glenn, how are you? Hey, Glenn.

Great to talk to you again. Good. You sound like you're in some foreign distant land. Are you back down in Brazil or are you someplace else? Yeah, I'm in Brazil. I'm in Brazil. Hopefully the connection will be good. Yeah, it's fine.

Thank you so much for joining me. This is a story that won't go away. but it doesn't seem to ever gain any legs on the corporate media. Tell me about the campaign that happened between the CIA. Go ahead. Yeah, so when the New York Post first reported the story, as somebody who has worked many times on large archives of documents and had to stake my reputation in my career on verifying that they were genuine

before reporting them, something I did when I reported on Edward Snowden's archive about the NSA and with WikiLeaks many times and also a big story in Brazil when I got a large archive. It was obvious to me that the evidence was overwhelming that these documents were authentic. It had every indicia of authenticity that was reported by Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Caller, and others. But the rest of the media, the corporate media, ignored that evidence and tried to lead everybody to believe that the documents were formed. that they were fake. And the biggest gift they got was when the CIA, a bunch of former CIA officials like John Brennan and James Clapper,

issued a letter saying that they believed that the archive was Russian disinformation, which has two claims to it. One is it came from Russia, but the second, it's disinformation, meaning the documents are fake, and therefore you shouldn't pay attention to them. And in that letter, Glenn, the CIA operatives,

They had no evidence that it came from Russia or that the documents were fake. They just said it's kind of just our sense that this is the case. Let me read it exactly. We emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided by the New York Post or President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement. Just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. Wow. That's just your gut then. Exactly. Exactly. And what's amazing

is even they who are, you know, basically trained disinformation agents, such as the CIA and the intelligence community is constructed to do. They're not supposed to do it domestically as they did during the Trump years. But they do are, they are expected to do it internationally. They're trained liars. Even they were more honest than what the corporate media ended up using that letter for, to say these intelligence officials say definitively that this is Russian disinformation. Correct. And they, you know, you can go through every video from CNN and MSNBC and NBC and NBC News and CBS News and Washington Post, New York Times, where they just say over and over,

this is Russian disinformation. And they use that as an excuse, not even to discuss the revelations. But the worst thing of all is that Twitter and Facebook then seized on that claim to censor, censor this story from being discussed. So if you try to post a link to the New York Post reporting or other media outlets discussing it, you would get a message saying this link is prohibited. It was one of the most astounding acts of brute censorship

by this union of the intelligence community, the corporate media, and big tech right before our election that I've ever seen. So, Glenn, where does this story go from here? because these emails are coming out. We're getting more and more. They are verified. And it shows it's not a story about Hunter Biden.

It is a story about Joe Biden being corrupt to his eyeballs in things like trying to sell access to him to be able to get Libyan money released, access to the Oval Office and to Joe Biden for Mexico. Mexico and China and money being demanded for these things. This is some of the most gross corruption of our administration that has actually been able to come out and be proven. I think for me, the biggest corruption, the worst corruption, is the journalistic corruption. So the reason we're talking about this story, again, aside from the new emails about what he did in Libya, which are extremely incriminating, is because, as I said, from the beginning there was evidence and proof that these emails were authentic. The problem was they came from

right-wing outlets, and liberals have been trained to just ignore everything that comes from right-wing outlets. What we have now is a new book by a young, actually courageous reporter who deserves a lot of credit, Bench Reckinger, who works at Politico as mainstream of an outlet as a guest. Obviously, no friend of the right-wing. And in his book, which is all about investigating the Biden, he spent months. doing really deep dive reporting to try and find the proof about whether these emails, the key ones, not the like ancillary ones about Hunter Biden's personal life, which personally I don't care about.

Right. But the substantive ones about Joe Biden's deals in China and his interference in Ukraine on behalf of Burisma, which is paying a cent $50,000, the actual corruption of Joe Biden, he proved, like months of reporting that these emails are accurate. And here's the thing. if he had proven the opposite, if he had, through these months of reporting, had gathered proof that these emails were actually forged,

he would be the biggest star in American media right now. He'd be on Good Morning America and a today show and every single program. But because his reporting proved that the media lies and that these emails are authentic, he has not been on one of those shows, NPR, CNN, any of the networks. And in fact, Glenn, they won't even mention his book. they won't even acknowledge this proof that everything they told the American people for weeks is an absolute lot.

This is Russian disinformation. And in fact, these emails were authentic all on. That is how grossly corrupt our media is. Well, we'll call, Ben. I'll give him a full hour to talk about his book. So what is the solution, Glenn, for the media? Because do you think the media is ever going to? to take this on and treat this as a real story, not their part of it, but the actual corruption part.

No, I mean, that's the other thing is, you know, Ben Trekkender's book, one part of it is confirming the author just to give the emails. Most of it is about investigating the Biden, the Biden family, the way that every other first family has been investigated. The Clinton, the Obama's, the Trump's, you know, the Bush's, but we don't know very much about the Biden's. they've ignored this book, both parts of it. And I think, look, for me, I used to think that the corporate media could be reformed through criticism, through

critique, through pressure campaigns. I'm way past that point. I believe they're irredeemably corrupt. They are, they lie for, as their model, on purpose, for ideological and business ends. And so I think the solution is number one, to make

people aware as clearly as possible that they should be and the corporate media, that whatever contempt they have for it probably isn't enough. And then number two, to encourage and build independent platforms that aren't susceptible to censorship by big tax and that aren't subject to the pieties and orthodoxies of these institutions of authority that control what these other outlets have done. And in a lot of ways, they are their worst, own worst enemies. If you look at polling, the media has held in lower esteem than almost any other institution in our society.

right above, you know, like pedophiles. And they deserve that. And it's important that keep happening so people more and more realize that it's irrational to trust what they say. So can I ask you a question? You had to have thought of things like this and pondered them and maybe come up with a reason for it. Right now, gasoline is up over a dollar.

And my whole life has been in the media. And, oh, my gosh, if it's a Republican in office and gas is up, that's all we talk about. The media just covers it. Now, I understood that when the media had everybody by the nose ring and we're leading them around. However, we don't trust the media now. But if the media doesn't talk about Afghanistan, we don't talk about Afghanistan. Why is that?

And how do we break that? Yeah, you know, I do think these outlets are losing influence. If you look at, for example, the ratings of the two largest liberal outlets, CNN and MSNBC, they were already in collapse before Trump arrived. All those hosts were about to get fired because nobody was watching their shows. Trump single-handedly saved that part of the media because it gave people a desire to watch. And it enabled them to scare everybody about Trump sufficiently to make people pay attention. and with Trump gone, they're back to disappearing.

I mean, the ratings of CNN and MSNBC are humiliatingly little. I mean, they get, you know, on their best days, what, like, a mid-level YouTuber gets. Yeah. And so, and then you look at, you know, like Fox News and other outlets that challenge the liberal orthodox, including people like OAN and, you know, newsmax that are growing, but what's really growing are independent platforms, people who are on Rumble, who are on Substack, who are on YouTube events, who can teach on Twitter, people who have these dissident voices are able to shape discourse in ways that previously they never were able to do before.

And that's the thing that I think needs to be built and fortified. So is the social media, the corporate social media, are they doomed for the same kind of fate? Yeah, I mean, you know, when I, you know, the first time you and I ever talked about was I think like a year or so after I began doing the reporting from Edward Snowden about how the NSA was flying on everybody. And my cause back then was a free Internet because I always knew the Internet as one of the most important human innovations to free us from the tyranny of centralized government and corporate control. Because it would enable us to communicate with one another without their intervention. And what the third story was about and now what big tech censorship is about is this a camera. to degrade that internet from this tool of liberation into a tool of coercion.

And yeah, I do think that the kind of, you know, Silicon Valley giants, the monopolies like Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon, are obviously being increasingly controlled in terms of the things you can and can't say on there. And that's why these alternatives, like rumble, like substack, like people turning to Bitcoin and blockchain, which will decentralize control of how we communicate with one another and becoming more and more popular because what's the point of having an internet if the same corporate and state forces dictate and censor and police what we can say as always were in control beforehand. And the, I mean, the thing that always crosses my mind is there's an awful lot of money and power at stake. And that's why I can't see

the United States government, you know, letting Bitcoin and letting, social media get out of their grasps. Yeah, I mean, anytime you have a new technology, a new instrument, a new weapon, whatever you want to call it, and the internet can be described as all of those things that can actually threaten

prevailing status quo power and power centers, you're obviously going to have a war over who gets to control it. So if you look at the internet and what's been happening, for example, with privacy, while the NSA and its allies and China and Iran are always looking for ways to control the Internet to prevent dissent from circulating, you have privacy activists and technology specialists building tools like encryption in order to stay once in the head of them.

It's spending like an arms raise. Now with Bitcoin and chain, which are being championed by some of the most influential people in the world, like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. and others, it's going to be a war over that technology as well. You're going to have the state that's going to try and control it, and you're going to have people who are going to try and fortify. Just one quick, really interesting thing that I think from history that a lot of people have forgotten, after the bombing of Oklahoma City of the courthouse in Oklahoma City in 1995

that ultimately was blamed on Timothy McVeigh, the Clinton administration, this was right when the Internet was started, tried to seize on that threat and the fears generated by it. They were all on the cover of Time magazine. Every weekend, it was like weekend militias and white militias and all of that. They tried to seize on that fear to introduce legislation that barred encryption or that at least required that the government always have a back door to encryption, and they lost.

So this battle has been going on for, you know, 20 years over who's going to get to control the Internet and how it's going to be, how it's going to be functioning. And it's never going to end because that's what institutions of power to. do is they try and protect their power. Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for everything. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Appreciate it. Thanks for all the work you do.

Yeah, it was great to be with you. Thanks for asking. Look, Watt Follow is a substack. Just search for Glenn Greenwald.