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

Episode Date: April 17, 2021

Have you noticed how the people who call everyone a conspiracy theorist are the biggest conspiracy theorists of all? Like the Russia Collusion conspiracy theory that the Washington elite used to discredit Trump and force him out of Washington, D.C. Or how the CIA is the real power center of American politics. Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author of the new book, “Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” is an outsider in the media because he calls out these abuses of power. For one, he agrees that the Deep State is real. Greenwald is a rare breed these days: He does actual journalism. He explains things very well, like his description of Trump’s appeal and Obama’s mystique.  He and Glenn cover so many topics: Woke corporations, Julian Assange, the #MeToo movement, Putin, Snowden, The Constitution, Big Tech censorship. Why does the Left call Greenwald right-wing but the Right calls him left-wing? For a journalist, that used to be a badge of honor. But as Greenwald points out, the journalism industry has become a Woke priesthood. So, if you want to learn about actual journalism, listen to this episode. It’s totally worth getting through a couple of technical difficulties.    Sponsors: Staying healthy is tough, especially if you have a sweet tooth. Fortunately, there’s Built Bars! They’re made with real chocolate, high in protein and low in calories and carbs, and taste exactly like a candy bar. Go to https://BuiltBar.com and use promo code “BECK15” to save 15% off your next order.]   Whether you’re catching up on your favorite news podcast, binging an audiobook, or powering through your workout with a pumped-up playlist, a pair of Raycons in your ears can make all the difference. Get 15% off your entire Raycon order at http://BuyRaycon.com/Glenn You didn’t start your business because you wanted to spend time on HR compliance. From onboarding to terminations, Bambee customize your policies to fit your business - and help you manage your employees day to day - all for just NINETY-NINE DOLLARS a month. Month-to-month, no hidden fees, cancel anytime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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enlarge our clientele to the world entire. Trouvee to puttis like our own on our own.com. Hey, welcome to today's podcast. It is no secret that Americans are fed up

with a state of journalism. There's a recent Gallup poll that determines 7 and 10 Americans see bias in media and consider it, I don't know, a problem. They think that journalists are actively trying to persuade people to adopt a position.

I haven't noticed. At the same time, eight and ten Americans believe that journalism is important for democracy. It is. It's critical, but not the way it's being done now. Not like this. What we're seeing is activism that hides itself behind headlines. If there's any hope for the survival of journalism in America, we need more people like today's guest.

he's maybe one of five people alive actually doing the job of a journalist. And of those five, I would say he is one of the best and most daring, which means you're about to hear my discussion with the best journalist alive or at least one of them. Maybe it will be remembered as the best journalist of our era. The proof of this is that corporate media has turned against him. One critic called him a bomb-throwing media critic. Andrew Ross Sorkin implied that he should be arrested. He says the things that make people uncomfortable, but that's what journalism is.

And he makes people uncomfortable regardless of their politics. He's been reporting on politics for about 15 years now. If you remember the explosive series of articles in 2013 about Edward Snowden and the NSA released in The Guardian, and that was him. Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on that, pretty much the only Pulitzer Prize winning story that basically everyone knows about. He's since gone on to do incredible things. In 2014, he launched the Intercept because he was worried about rampant bias and censorship in the media. Now, how do I know this guy stands by his principles?

Because last year, he left the Intercept. the news outlet he founded because he said it's the same bias in censorship that I set out to up-end. I can't be a part of this. In 2011, he moved to Brazil for political reasons, which we'll get into. And 2019, he became embroiled in a political controversy that reached all the way up to the new president of Brazil. He details all of it in his incredible new book titled Securing Democracy, My Fight for Press Freedom, justice in Brazil. Today's podcast guest,

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Glenn, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining me. Yeah, it's great to talk to you again. Thank you for inviting me. I will tell you, you are confusing at times or have been. We live in really confusing times and you don't really ever know anybody's true intent. until their back is up against the wall. And when I saw your own company, the company that you started, the intercept, and you came out against it and said, look, this is the same. This is the why I started this to get away from this crap. And you left.

I was really impressed when you would call out your own business. And the things that you have done, well, for a long time, but mainly recently, in Brazil, what you've done is remarkable and very brave. Thanks. You know, with The Intercept, you know, it was difficult. It wasn't fun to do that because that was something that I had created with two of my closest friends in journalism, two journalists for whom I have a lot of respect at the height of the Snowden story when we had a lot of leverage.

And the idea was to create a media outlet that would give journalists complete journalistic freedom and editorial independence of the kind that I always wanted and worked to preserve for myself. The idea was to give it to other journalists. And so to have this media company to which I devoted so much of my energy in time and that was important to me in terms of what I thought we were building and what it was going to stand for in journalism, turn around and kind of betray every single one of those values out of really nothing more than this petty fear that the people in their circles would accuse them of risking a Trump victory by doing their jobs and reporting on Joe Biden, which is kind of what happened to them in 2016 when we reported extensively on Hillary

Clinton and they spent four years being told, oh, you help Trump win. They were petrified that that would happen again and they were willing to throw everything overboard, including their basic function as journalists in order to suppress the story. They even, the thing that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me was about a week before telling me that my story didn't meet their lofty editorial standards, they published an article that essentially just did nothing but parrot the claim by a bunch of ex-CIA officials like John Brennan that the Hunter Biden documents were Russian disinformation, two lies in one phrase, that it came from Russia and that the documents were forged. They published that, even though we were created to be adversarial to the intelligence

community, but my story didn't meet their high-minded journalism. So that was really something I couldn't withstand. I don't know what's happened or if we can ever really recover. Are there enough people in journalism now, or does it have to be a total reset? You know, I really think that what happened was journalism was really dying before Trump. Trump was kind of this sugar high that saved them. And what happened was they started believing their own PR that they were, that Trump was essentially the equivalent of, of, of, of, of, of Hitler. The Antichrist. Yeah. Yeah. They created this, this demented fiction and then cast themselves as the star protagonist fighting on the front lines to save everything good in the world and came to believe that anything was just in pursuit of that,

that battle. And I think they still are seeing themselves that. way. They're continuously, you know, they're so disappointed that Trump has disappeared. And, you know, they've lost the trust and faith of the public. I mean, it's at an all-time low. And no, I don't think it's coming back because they don't think they've done anything wrong. There's no self-critique at all. I think what's going to happen is more independent outlets, like the one that you're doing, like the place where I'm now writing and other places are going to continue to grow at their expense. Yeah. I will tell you that, I don't know if you know this, but I was not a fan of Donald Trump before he got into office. And then I just

watched him and I mean in a way begrudgingly said okay he's not doing the crazy things that I thought he was going to do and he's actually doing some things that I never thought any president would do in a good way still hate the way he talks and you know the tweets and everything else but you got to be honest and when the Russian thing happened I actually thought that was probably true I thought it was actually probably true I could see that I mean like the collusion part you thought not just the interference, but also the collusion part was true. Yeah, I thought that was probably true. But I wanted to see the facts. And when the facts didn't appear and everything was Nazi level, you know, Hitler gas chamber level, they lost credibility and they actually, it wasn't the,

it was the facts that drove me to say, okay, this is not true and these guys are out to get them. but it actually pushed me to be a bigger supporter than I think I ever would have been because they were so clearly out to get this guy. It was like I had never seen anything like it. Yeah. And, you know, I found it to be a threat to democracy because what actually happened was whatever you think about Trump and Hillary in the 26th election and whoever you wanted to win, there's no question that Trump won, fair and square.

Right. He got more electoral. college votes and under the Constitution became the legitimate president. And the reality is that many power centers in the United States simply never accepted that outcome because it wasn't the one they wanted and they felt threatened by it. And so they devoted themselves to doing everything they could first to preventing him from winning and then subverting his presidency once he won. In ways that are really quite menacing to democracy, the whole Russiagate script came from the CIA, which is not supposed to have any involvement in our domestic politics. And yet, because he was questioning

things like the ongoing value of NATO, which was originally created to be a bulwark against the country that no longer exists, or the regime change operation in Syria, which was their highest priority, you know, running against the Iraq war, talking about, you know, the Pentagon, getting weapons systems that we don't need in order to win rich lobbyist and Raytheon, board of directors, all these things that were very threatening to real entrenched power centers in Washington using this partnership that they've always had throughout the Cold War with the major media outlet, they just set out to destroy his presidency in a way that I found infinitely more menacing than whatever one might think about Donald Trump and the things that he was doing.

Oh my gosh. I mean, the way they used the FISA courts and I mean, if you can set out and do this to the president of the United States. States. The regular Joe doesn't have a chance, not a chance. You know, Glenn, I think of a lot, when I was on your show, the first time you and I spoke when we met, I was in Texas, I was, I think we spent most of the time talking about the Snowden reporting I did with the NSA. And obviously, you know, that has been a cause of mine for a long time, is the danger opposed by this enormous spying system. And when Edward Snowden decided to come forward, after spending his life inside of these agencies because he originally believed in them. He volunteered for the Iraq War. You know, he worked for the CIA. He worked for the NSA. His father was in the Coast Guard.

He was not a left-wing radical by any means. He donated money to Ron Paul. When he came forward, it was because he said, they're now turning this on the American people. They're now, this is no longer a weapon system being used against foreign adversaries. And, you know, I do think that the scandal of the FBI getting caught lying to to the FISA court in order to spy on a U.S. citizen, Carter Page, who even Robert Mueller concluded there was no evidence to suggest he was ever a Russian agent, let alone engaging in nefarious conduct on behalf of the Kremlin. It was a major, major scandal. I mean, an FBI

lawyer went to jail for lying or was convicted of perjury. Those kind of abuses of power, if you inverted them, I mean, that was the kind of stuff that Jay Edgar Hoover did, that Joseph McCarthy did, that people in the next administration did, that caused a major scandal. You know, we need to reform the intelligence here. I don't even think nobody even remembers that. And that's what really frightens me, Glenn, is that a lot of the people that were involved in some of these scandals are now back in the administration. It doesn't seem like there's ever going to be a report that is released or nobody's going to be held accountable. And you've got four years of doing nothing except making that deep state, if you will, even stronger.

I mean, if people don't pay for their crimes, it teaches the next group of people that want to do crime. We can get away with it as long as we're on the right side of, you know, the press or whoever. Yeah. You know, it's so funny. I read an article in January of 2017, either days before or days after Trump's inauguration.

the headline of which was the deep state goes to war with the elected president. And I think it was Rush Limbaugh who spoke about that story that week and started claiming that I was the person who had invented this phrase. And then liberals also thought this was like this newly invented conspiracy theory by the right wing, by Trump supporters. When in reality, the idea of a deep state and, you know, in the United States is something that thrived among political scientists. I mean, I didn't even call it that. He called to the military industrial complex, but it was the same message. His message, he was, you know, president for eight years

when the CIA was created and grew. And he had one, you know, he had 15 minutes to warn the country on his way out about whatever he thought they should know. And he said, here's what I want to warn you about. There's this permanent faction that's entrenching itself that's more powerful than elected officials that is this military industrial complex

that's infecting every hall of academia and every hall of power. and its influence is going to threaten democracy. This is before the Vietnam War, before 9-11, before the gigantic growth from both of those and throughout the decade. If you don't recognize the existence of the deep state and if you're not concerned about it,

you know nothing about American politics and how power in the U.S. government functions. I have to tell you, I thought the phrase, I was really uncomfortable at the beginning of deep state. You know, it implies like a star chamber and everything else, where all you have to do is really go back and read Eisenhower. You know, he talked about it's going to infest in the colleges and the universities.

It's going to start funding projects where it's not really an honest question. It's a question to further their agenda. It will infiltrate everything and destroy everything. That's what it is. That's what it is. I'm afraid that we are now at a point to where, Congress and the Senate and the White House, I think really on whoever gets in, I think Trump was a, he was just such a cannonball or a grenade that I think he was blowing things up that he didn't

even know he was blowing up, you know? Right. And so he was frightening to everybody. But I wonder now if with the way that the corporations are getting involved. And, Glenn, I'm not a guy. I always used to think, like, you know, you'd watch, what was it, that movie with Harris of a Blade Runner. And, you know, they'd say, oh, I work for the corporation. I mean, like, stop it, stop it.

I've always been a free market guy. A capital. The corporation. Yeah. The free market is not free. These guys have embedded themselves with Congress, with the both political parties, with the, with the, both political parties, with the, media, we are headed for an oligarchy, and I don't see a way out. Well, this is, you know, this to me is, is it, you're absolutely right and it's menacing and

alarming, but I also see an opportunity here, and this has been part of one of the primary, you know, projects that I feel like I've been devoting myself to, which is what you just said, find support on both the left and the right. And the right. Very interesting, right? Because if you, you know, the traditional division on economic debates between the right and the left has always been people on the right, like yourself, like you just said, I support free market economics. I'm a capitalist. You know, corporations are not evil.

They're just entities doing business, buying and selling, making profit. That's the engine of American life. And people on the left, and, you know, and the government should stay out. People on the left wanted government intervention in the marketplace. We want government intervention to redistribute wealth on behalf of the poorest, on behalf of the most marginalized, because this inequality is the debate. Neither model. We don't have free market economics. The government intervenes constantly.

We miss some. You glitched on us for a second. Can you go back to saying that, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so yeah. So I was saying, you know, those are the contours of traditional left-right economic debate. And what we have now is not. of those, right? We don't have free market economics. The government intervenes constantly in the economy. That's why corporations pay lobbyists, people who get out of Congress and they

enrich them to use their influence on their behalf. The government intervenes constantly, but they're not intervening on behalf of the poor. They're intervening on behalf of these gigantic corporations that have no allegiance to the United States. It's crony capitalism. It's not free market capitalism, nor is it socialism. It's this kind of, it's what you said. It's oligarchy. And now the corporations are becoming even more overt and open about their willingness to become involved in what was always partisan disputes that they steadfastly avoided is really alarming, right? They used to always intervene in government and lawmaking processes for their own benefit. They would, you know, have their lobbyists negotiate for a tax break that benefited their company, things in their self-interest.

They're way beyond that now, right? They're now wanting to be the arbiters of, how many protections we can have against voting fraud and when it spills into voter suppression or what proper policing policy should be, things for which they have no competence, but their immense concentrated power enables them to throw their weight around in a way that democracy could easily be subverted. Hey, how are you listening to this podcast right now? Do you listen into it on earbuds? May I suggest the most comfortable pair, the pair that will cost you about half the price,

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Feel free to grab a pair and a spare. It's 15% off now at buy raycon.com slash Glenn. It's a new government, really. I mean, they're setting up. It's the most brilliant, in my opinion, if I could detect. if I was just watching this, if this was just a thriller, and I could detach my emotions from it, I would say this is brilliant.

It's a brilliant end run around the people, the Constitution, all of it. And it's got people on the right saying, well, they're a private corporation, so they, you know, can do what they can. No, they, I didn't elect the head of the soda pop company to tell me, what our policy should be. And it's now being, it's, it's this, uh, with a world economic forum. I don't know if you're doing anything on the great reset, but good God, if that is actually happening, if this is what's empowering these people, we as a planet are going for a giant

oligarchy and it is high tech that is allowing them to, uh, squash anybody who's warning about it. and media. You know, I think one of the most interesting things that has happened in the last couple months, three months, is when Facebook and Twitter, basically all Silicon Valley platforms united to remove the sitting president of the United States from the internet to deny him the opportunity to communicate with hundreds of millions of people. The people who cheered that were American journalists because paradoxically journalists who were supposed to do. defend principles of free expression, free speech, and a free press are in fact the most aggressive

advocates for internet censorship. They're the ones who agitate it for it. But the people who denounced it were world leaders, including many who have no love loss for Donald Trump, like Angela Merkel in Germany and the Macron government in France. And even the president of Mexico, President Lopez Obrador, who said in a really eloquent press conference, what we're creating is this world government of these tech oligarchs answerable to nobody. And that's what, you know, that's what Angela Merkel was saying too, was she was saying, look, you know, here in Germany, we do believe in regulations on speech. But if you're going to have them, it has to be the democratic process that decides them,

the lawmakers who are elected by the people. This is not that. This is unelected overlords, oligarchs deciding who can and cannot be heard, even the most powerful elected leader in the and even they were alarmed by yet. The only people who went were American journalists. I apologize to the podcast listeners for the glitch, but you are actually at home, and I'm going to get into this because your new book is

fascinating. Like, cannot put down fascinating. What you've gone through and the reason why you're at home and you're not leaving unless you have an armored car and security with you. We want to get into that. But I want to just kind of sweep up some of the other things that are happening. First of all, let me go back to the Great Reset in the World Economic Forum. I have had phone calls from, you know, at least one of the biggest banks in America.

I did one show on the Great Reset and talked about how the model is, the wish model is, is that you'll have a score everyone will have a score and if you're not doing the right things for esg um you'll your score will go down and you'll become a risk to the system and you won't be able to have banking services or whatever um they didn't correct any they didn't want a correction on air they didn't correct anything that i was laying out or deny any of the documents or that some banks are now doing this many over in france um and yet uh and yes yet they wanted me to understand that they won't be nefarious. That's not they are.

They're doing this as a public service. Are you looking into the Great Reset? And if you have, is this a, what are your feelings on it? Well, of course. First of all, that's already being done in China, right? These kind of, you know, numeric or quantitative evaluations. of various citizens and then determining which rights they do and don't have. It's becoming increasingly digitized, so there are no humans making these decisions.

It's all done algorithmically. And I think the China issue is so interesting because traditionally, when the United States decides who their adversaries are and who their allies are, the power centers in the United States, the military centers and high finance are generally on the same page. So if they want to sanction the Russians or the Iranians or the Venezuelans, Wall Street doesn't really mind, the Pentagon's on board with it. In the case of China, you have military planners who see China as this adversary, but Wall Street and Silicon Valley are in bed with the Chinese.

They're tied at the hip to them. And one of the things that's happening is that the Chinese model is competing with the American model for what is going to be hegemonic in the world. And it seems like that the Chinese model is prevailing. And they have really powerful partners in the United States.

You know, these, you see these NBA stars and coaches and officials who get applauded because they're so brave because they recite liberal pieties about black guys matter. And everyone said, oh, they're so brave. They're only going to

ask them about bigger candidates. and or protest and Hong Kong and they suddenly clam up and that shows you who their masters are who's actually controlling and I think that that is one of the real dangers is not that China and the US are going to this kind of that they're in hang on we got we got to stop for a second if you can we hang out we guys are going to become international is in a way that will start to affect how we live as well hang out we lost you on the last like two minutes horribly. I think it's when you move. So try to do this more like Charlie McCarthy.

Okay, well, I will try and be like an absolute... Edgar Bergen. Just don't move your lips. Yeah. Okay. So you were saying about the, that the Chinese, for years, we've been reading politicians and mainly Wall Street say, China is the new model. I don't want China as the, I don't want to live like China. do i don't want that model yeah when mike when michael bloomberg was running for president there were a lot of quotes that emerged where prior to his running they were asking him about the chinese government you can find him heaping praise on them refusing to call them dictatorship refusing to call them repressive right it depends so much on the chinese and this is one of the you know nauseating ironies of these companies like nike and um bank and finance companies putting Black Lives Matter,

images in their Instagram page and the like, is that they rely on China increasingly or they move their factories too, right? They move factories out of the United States. They move them to China where there's slave labor, where there's swatops, where there's child labor. I apologize. Can you dial him back?

up, please. He is in Brazil and I've waited a long time for this interview. The person whom you're trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the beats. Hey Glenn. It's Glenn.

So that's what happened yesterday and we decided that we would meet again today. And after I lost contact here with our studios three or four times, today for some unknown reason

the hour approached and I didn't think it was going to happen I don't know if it's the universe saying that there's two guys that are using way too many ends in their first name or what but Glenn Greenwald is now in a different city with high speed internet welcome Glenn correct

no I think the universe is just saying that for the good things in life you have to actually work for them. That's right. Okay. Our path and we ever came to them. Thank you so much. So we were talking about China when last we left and the state of China and the

relationship with the oligarchs here in America with the oligarchs in China. Right. And, you know, it was interesting. There was a speech I actually covered from a given by a Chinese performance. professor of high finance, somebody very connected to the Chinese Communist Party. I believe it was shortly after Biden's inauguration. It might have been shortly before. And his point was that with Trump, it was very difficult for China to exercise the kind of influence they were accustomed to exercising in Washington. He was saying, whenever we've had a problem in Washington in the past, we've had all these paths to be able to resolve them under Clinton, under Obama, even with

Bush and Cheney. And the problem with Trump is that he never really was embedded with support of Wall Street. And that was their path in. And with Biden, he was saying with great excitement that normalcy was going to be restored because they would now have influence to yield again in Washington through Wall Street. So, Glenn, but isn't that exactly the opposite of what the American people want? I mean, say what you want about Donald Trump. He was a massive disruptor. but it seems as though that's kind of what America needs is a real disruption of politics and business as usual. Everybody's gotten very comfortable at the high end and they say whatever they have to do to get elected. And then no matter which party it is, they follow the same path.

I think we're seeing that trend throughout the democratic world actually, right? So the entire elite, the neoliberal elite in the United Kingdom was warning everybody that Brexit would be this unmitigated disaster. And the voters said, we don't really care what you think. In fact, the fact that you're opposed to Brexit makes us think that it's likely something we ought to vote for. A lot of it was just spite voting out of anger here in Brazil, where I am and just wrote a book about. For 20 years, the country was a center-left government run by the Workers Party. and then out of nowhere, this kind of far-right authoritarian figure was elected to the presidency, Iyer of Bolsonaro.

And the same thing happened in the U.S. where it was eight years of Obama, and suddenly Trump got elected. And there were millions of Obama voters who voted for Trump, which makes no sense to, you know, people who are political and media elites because they can only see their world through this stunted left-right prism. Right. But to those people that makes a lot of sense. And what did all those people have in common, Brexit, Trump, also. even Obama when he ran in 2008 yes they were all claiming that they were going to be this outside force to come in and sort of burn the entire system down which is what people want

more than anything more than any ideology so um i think you're i know you are you're exactly right when obama said and i've never heard anybody else say this when obama said hope and change i didn't like what i thought he was going to change it too but i was all on board for hope and change transparency, cleaning up the swamp, doing all of that stuff. And then he never did any of it. He became the swamp. Donald Trump, I think, has still a lot of support because he never became one of the in people. And so all of the people in, and I think this is happening all around the world, all the

people who are not on the inner circle, they're not one of the experts. They're just one of the people whose voice was supposed to matter. want somebody like them and they'll forgive them for a ton as long as they don't become one of the elites. You know, it's so amazing because, you know, I lived in New York

for 15 years through, you know, starting in the early 1990s into the 2000s and the persona of Donald Trump, you mean, he was a New Yorker pure. That's where he gained his fame. And the persona of Trump always was that he was this kid from Queens which, you know, rich Manhattanites and old money look at with great condescension at best.

And there was always kind of this resentment on his part. You know, that's why he would go into Manhattan and he would have to build the tallest building because he felt like he was excluded from high society Manhattan, which he was. They looked at him as like this kind of, you know, roughy and this, yeah, exactly. They really looked down their nose at him all the time. And with Obama, it was exactly the opposite. Obama's path was the pure establishment pass. He went to Columbia.

He was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. He was always an establishment figure. He always appeased establishment power. So when Obama got into office, he instantly integrated into the things he had promised to destroy, you know, into high finance. Wall Street supported him overwhelmingly in 2008 against McCain. He loved the CIA and all those, you know, kind of black site secret operations and drones. He became very enamored of it. he changed nothing, whereas Trump, to me, the closest figure to him is Richard Nixon,

who also always harbored that same kind of resentment toward coastal elites, always felt, for good reason, that he was being judged and looked down upon by them. And I think you're exactly right. That remained a huge part of Trump's appeal. Yes, he's a billionaire. He's lived his life as a wealthy real estate mogul. But inside, he's not invented to the, everybody, everybody. I don't care who you are.

Everyone has always wanted to be one of the cool kids. And it doesn't matter who you are or how old you are, you still kind of want that. And, you know, for people like me, I know I'll never be a cool kid. I'll never be in that pack. And you kind of just go, all right, whatever. And he embraces that. I don't really care. I don't really care.

I think he does. But he appears to embrace that I'm not at the cool kids table. my own table. Yeah, you know, I'm sure you have had this experience, given your trajectory. You know, you were at CNN, you were at Fox News, you were a very highly rated host of news news programs on major networks. You know, I've had my own experience of, you know, with the Snowden story, winning a Pulitzer, a film that was made about my work, won an Oscar.

I was on the Oscar stage. When that happens, there are these kind of insidious offers that get made. It's sort of an implicit unspoken deal, which is, look, if you play ball, if you kind of get rid of this, these rough edges, this anger, this anti-establishment, you know, sort of agitation that you're doing, there's a lot of, we'll let you in to our glorious halls. And you have to, you know, really sit down with yourself and say, what do I want? And those are tempting. A lot of people succumb to them. We're all human. And at the end of the day you decide who you are.

Yeah. I think that's why. I like you so much. And, you know, I left CNN because I, or I mean, I was Fox because I started to like it. And Roger Ailes said to me, you're not leaving here. Nobody ever leaves here. And then when I was leaving, he said, you know what your problem is? You won't play the game.

And I said, because it's not a game to me. I actually believe in these things. And you do. You have to. It's so it's it's velvet handcuffs. It's a it's a golden prison that they build for you. And they'll, if you're successful, they'll give you everything. Just don't tip over the apple cart.

You could go and play your little games, but not that far. And when I was at Fox, I was, you know, I really believed that the average guy could just become president. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. I believed that. after working at CNN and then at Fox, I don't believe that. I believe you have to sell your soul to the elite gatekeepers. And the advantage Trump had, and I can't think of anybody else, except maybe somebody in Hollywood, maybe, I don't know.

The thing about Trump is he was one of the gatekeepers. Not actually, he was already inside the fence. He didn't have to pass through. the Rupert Murdox and everybody else that might say, hey, I'll take you, I'll help you out. He was already inside and the gatekeepers couldn't lock him out. Does that make sense to you? Am I right on that?

Yeah, no, no, no. I think that is really, I think that gets to the core of why Trump was such a disruptive force, to Washington, to media, to financial and military power centers. If you look at the policies that he actually, implemented, you know, just from like a pure political perspective. They really weren't aberrational. They were, you know, pretty much a continuation with a couple of exceptions.

It was really just like the things he would say, you know, the light that he's shown on the shined on the reality of what they are, the things that he would question. You know, I think like one of the most significant things with that Bill O'Reilly interview where he did and Bill O'Reilly was trying demanding, demanding. that he denounced Putin. And when he was saying, like, why should I denounce Putin? I think it's in the interest of the United States to have a good relationship,

a collaborative partnership with Russia. They hate Islamic radicals. They want to fight al-Qaeda. They want to fight ISIS. Why should I just fight with them? They're a huge nuclear power. And Bill O'Reilly said, because he kills people. You know, he kills dissidents.

And Trump said, oh, what, you think we're so innocent? We have a lot of killers ourselves. Now, everyone knows that's true, right? Anyone even completely familiar in the history of the United States? States knows that that's the truth, but that's a truth that you can't have the president of the United States speaking because it kind of, it subverts the mythology and the iconography that his job is to uphold. And he did that over and over and over. It was much more stylistic and comportmental than subsmint. Hey, if you're like me and you run your own small business,

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I mean, for instance, Trump is in bed with Russia. He said things like that about Putin. And he did things that I'm like, why would you do? Why would you say that about Putin? Why would you stand there with Putin on, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But he, his administration was actually tougher on Putin than any. in a long time so it wasn't that he was the it wasn't that he was doing anything but in many cases just saying things so was the the I hate Trump like he's got to

get out at all costs is that cause because the the press felt that they had felt a play to roll in his getting power or was it also that the the big corporations that want things to keep going on Wall Street that wants things going on, Washington that wants this game on both sides of the aisle. Is it, were they also part of whipping up the press and saying, you know, you don't even know how bad he is? You know, so let's just take that example, first of all, of that narrative that really was the dominant narrative for the four years of his presidency and even the primary theme of the Clinton campaign before he won, which is that he has nefarious dealings with Russia. Russia. And, you know, it's so funny, these people constantly malign others for being conspiracy theorists. I think that was probably the principal attack on you, for example. What was a more demented and deranged conspiracy theory than the idea that Vladimir Putin had taken over the United States and the Kremlin had infiltrated American political institutions because they controlled the president.

That should be an act of war. Yeah, that's an act of war. Yeah, if you really believe that, right, that that you would. You get you everything. First of all, you get rid of the compromised agent, right? You don't let them do everything possible to get rid of them. And then also, yeah, you go to war. I mean, if a country is really taken over the interest. But that's what they were saying. And the reality of it was exactly the opposite.

Choose two examples. In 2014, 2015, when the Russians were being coming threatening to the Ukrainians and then when they annexed Crimea, there was bipartisan. pressure on Obama to send lethal arms to Ukraine. And he wouldn't and didn't. And his argument was, I don't want to risk a confrontation with Putin over a country Ukraine that is a vital interest to them because of the history that Ukraine has for Russia and the danger that

it's posed and also it's right in their neighborhood and it's not in ours. So Obama's argument was not going to risk confrontation with Putin over Ukraine or over Syria. that's in their vital interest, but not ours. Trump gets in, and within a year, his administration is arming the Ukrainians with lethal weapons, way more confrontational and provocative to Putin than Obama was willing to be. The same thing with this natural gas pipeline that the Russians have built to Germany. Trump was obsessed with pressuring, coercing, bullying the Germans out of buying the natural gas.

He was Reagan on that issue. Yeah. And Glenn, what is more threatening to Russian core interest than trying to prevent this crucial pipeline? I'll go a step further. What is more crucial to Putin's personal safety than the gas industry and the oil industry in Russia? I mean, he lets that go. He's a marked man. Exactly, which Trump was directly threatening.

Trump was attempting to subvert personally. The thing with lethal arms to Ukraine, I don't know if Trump cared or not, that might have just been something that happened despite him or without his, you know, but that too, right? If you're Putin, you care a lot about Ukraine. If you look at Russia history and like the relationship of Russia to Ukraine, the way that the Germans used it to destroy Russia practically into world wars, sending lethal arms into the Ukraine, which the Trump had been,

the idea, the very notion that Putin was, was controlling Trump through blackmail, given the reality of what Trump was doing to Russia, it's so deranged. And yet all of them in the media, with very few exceptions, latched on to this conspiracy theory as their principal narrative of what was happening in the United States for four, they impeached him twice one time over that. There was an never ending investigation, constant news stories based on this completely baseless and an insane conspiracy theory. So then you ask why that is. And I think that it's because they regard Washington in the halls of power as theirs.

And Trump was an interloper. Everybody else who has been elected to that position, right, left, conservative, liberal government Republican, came in and played ball. They kind of said, okay, I know how to comport myself. I know the pieties and orthodoxies I can't touch. I know the lines in which I have to stay in the ones that I can't transgress. They make it very clear. Trump is like a bull in a china shop, right?

He comes in, he doesn't, he's just used to doing whatever he wants. He doesn't listen to anyone. And he likes chaos. Yeah, he loves it. And the more people attack him, obviously, the more obsessive and vindictive becomes in attacking the back. He has no interest in a piece of people. And, you know, there's this one interview that, you know, to this day, I'm amazed,

is not talked about, but it's not talked about because it's so important. A couple of days before Trump was inaugurated, he, had posted on Twitter, of course, an attack on the CIA. He mocked them for having gotten weapons of mass destruction because they were leaking to the press that his election victory was illegitimate because it was engineered by the Russians. And he knew they were doing that. He knew why they were doing it. And so being Trump, he attacked the CIA. Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow and said, everyone in this town knows that you don't challenge or attack the CIA. or the intelligence community because in Chuck Schumer's words,

they have six different ways for Sunday to get back at you. Essentially saying that's the real power center is the CIA, and everyone knows you stay on their good, this unelected group of intelligence. It's insane. In the dark, that's what Chuck Schumer admitted the hidden truth. And that became the story of the Trump presidency

as the media got into bed with the CIA, and they were willing to say and do anything, anything, in order to destroy him. And they abandon all journalistic ethics, all notions of truth or anything else. They believed that they were fighting this existential battle against the new Hitler figure. And if you really believe that,

you do anything in the name of winning. And that's what they did and are still doing. So is, I mean, to me, and this came to me about halfway through his, presidency and and it's maybe even three quarters where I was really really felt it was important that he won a second term the impeachment happened and that was insane the way that worked you could see all of the intelligence agency and the corruption I mean we did a lot of work on that and it was clear what was going on

And I thought he's just a hand grenade. When he made that phone call, there wasn't anything really wrong with that phone call. He didn't know what he was walking into in Ukraine with using that. And he was blowing down walls and people were starting to be exposed. So they had to choke him out. And I really thought towards the end that he was going to win if it was fair. as it turned out, he didn't win. But I'm left with, if he can't do it, who can?

Well, here's a thing. You know, if you look at American politics from the traditional metrics of what is favorable to an incumbent president seeking re-election and what is unfavorable, he had every single possible circumstance lined up against him. He was in the middle of an out-of-control. pandemic where people were locked up in their homes for a year. Businesses were closing all over the country. There was a huge unemployment crisis where tens of millions of people had lost their jobs. People were without hope. They were afraid. They were separated from one another.

They were unhappy. Every single metric that if you're a president seeking re-election is everything that you don't want to see is what happened. And yet he still almost won with all of the establishment lined up against him. Wall Street. Silicon Valley pouring money into Joe Biden and the DNC's coffers. The media virtually unified doing everything they could, as we talked about already, I left my own internet, my own news outlet because they were petrified of any reporting. The Democrats if they want can take solace in whatever they want to take solace in. But if I'm a Democrat and I look at what's going on, every red light is flashing.

They won because they relied on affluent suburbanites. They lost ground, right? A president who was a racist, xenophob, you know, a bigot, the new Hitler. They lost ground among African Americans, among Latinos, among people of color, among new immigrants. The Democratic Party is bleeding support. They even managed somehow to lose seats. I know. Crazy.

Given everything that was happening. So I think that the politics that Trump and Bannon, you know, started to formulate and kind of was the first alternative that the Republican Party had to Reaganism, which, you know, say what you want about it, it's kind of archaic, right? It's like from the Cold War, it's from the 1980s, is a different era. Reagan orthodoxies don't really translate perfectly anymore. We were talking last time about, you know, capitalism and crony capitalism. Those were not reality. Big tech didn't exist.

Correct. I think that this kind of populism and the idea that the idea that, The Democratic Party has become the party of the professional managerial class and white affluent suburbanites. And the Republican Party now, in order to win, needs to become the party of the multiracial working class using populism and the like is something that a lot of really smart politicians who are intent to run in 2024 obviously are recognizing. It's become the dominant ideology at the most popular Fox News shows. the interesting Republican politicians like Josh Hawley and even Ted Cruz are starting to, and Tom Cotton,

clearly are recognizing that that's the only path to kind of subverting and uprooting these power centers that have their fists clenched in the powers of Washington. Okay, so let me take a side note because I want to come right back to this, but let me take a side note because you mentioned a name Steve Bannon. I think Steve Bannon is a very dangerous individual. I think, you know, his his relationship with, oh gosh, what's his name in Russia and

another guy? What do you mean like with Russian and Chinese tycoons? Yeah. Dugan. No, no, no. Alexander Dugan, who also has connections to one of the guys in Brazil there. He's very powerful. what was his name? Gosh, I can't remember. He moved to the United States. Good friend of your president. Oh, Alabo de Kalophevogia. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, he's like the girl of the Bolshek movement. Yeah. So those three are kind of cut from the same cloth on this traditionalism, capital T, traditionalism, which is extraordinarily dangerous, extraordinarily dangerous. And it, I don't, go ahead. Do you think, Steve? I don't think Steve, I don't think Steve Bannon is a place.

anymore in Republican politics. I could be wrong about that. But I think that he's very closely tied to Trump. He, you know, really did get caught defrauding the very people that he was reporting to represent. They just stole money. He's not in place because Trump pardoned him. I don't believe that these newer, smarter, younger, more modernized, right-wing populist figures want anything to do with Steve Badden or his scandalous, behavior. Okay, so I hope. I hope you're right.

So let me go now back to the track, because I want to ask you about Trump. Would he win if he ran again? You know, it's so interesting because if you pay attention to media discourse, right, even asking the question seems preposterous. This is the worst president in American history. He was impeached twice. He is so. despicable that he can't even be on the internet.

He's not allowed on Facebook or Twitter or any Silicon Valley. So you're constantly connected to this discourse about him that immediately makes you think that the idea that he could win and be back in the White House is unthinkable. And yet they're not the people who vote. And those people who create that narrative have no connection to the people who vote. The people who vote see the world in a much different way and hate those people who are in charge of elite discourse. And again, I mean, Trump got counted out in 2016 and he won. He got counted out in 2020. And as we just discussed, with everything against him stacked up and piled high, he almost won.

After four years of the same ideology, the neoliberal ideology of Joe Biden, this globalist, you know, free trade ideology that Barack Obama embraced and that gave rise to Trump in the first place, with him out of office and being able to blame every ill of the status quo on Biden instead of having to accepted himself, I think it's very possible that he could win again. Do you think Biden would have won if it wasn't for the now admitted help from all of the corporations, all of the media, the millions and millions of dollars at Facebook, Zuckerberg put in the rule changes of, I guess what I'm asking you is a question I shouldn't, we're not supposed to ask. Do you think, and I don't, I'm not saying that even enough to change it. I don't

know. But was this a fair election? I mean, you know, American democracy isn't fair, in part because the people who have concentrated wealth wield enormous power. And the founders of the country were capitalist, obviously. They weren't communist. They weren't socialist. But you can find all kinds of warnings in the federalist papers and in the debates about the Constitution. You that if wealth inequality becomes too severe, if wealth becomes concentrated in the tidy sliver of the population and everybody else is captive to it, that inequality will ultimately spill over into and contaminate political equality

and political rights and corrupt the democracy and it will become an oligarchy. This is not some left-wing 20-century, you know, radical theory. This is something that the founders themselves, no radicals they, were worried about. And I think that's what we have. And that's what makes Trump's victory in 2016 and his virtual victory in 2020 so remarkable and so stunning. And it's a reason why it sends them into the spiral of psychosis because they rely on that system that I just described to make sure that power stays in their hands.

And it didn't work in that case. And that's why they went insane. So the power not staying in their hands. I mean, they did this in the 1980s when they got the super delegates because they saw what happened to Reagan and they were like, oh, my gosh, somebody from the outside that the establishment doesn't want. So they put the super delegates in. You know, they just torched Bernie Sanders in 2016. And now it seems as though even that's not enough, we're talking about the electoral process. process. We're talking now about new voting standards that, you know, they say are, you know,

essential to for everybody to vote and, you know, their Republicans are denying water to people. It's pretty ridiculous. They're talking now about the end of the filibuster, adding extra states and possibly packing the Supreme Court while calling it unpacking the Supreme Court. It doesn't seem as though this is the party that's moderate and not fascistic. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, the Democratic Party is a party that I view as completely repressive. And not just the Democratic Party, but the liberal movement that supports it. And by liberal, I mean, just to be clear, I don't mean the far left, you know, the kind of left-wing

movement that supported Bernie Sanders. there's a lot of that they hate Democrats, at least as much as people on the right do. I mean establishment liberals of like the Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton strain. Those people, they don't believe in free speech at all. You know, I watched this hearing. It was like the third time they've summoned tech CEOs before them to pressure and bully and threaten them that if they don't start censoring more Democratic Party adversaries off the internet, they're going to use their legislative and regulatory power to punish them.

They're threatening that explicitly. They want to silence voices. They want to use censorship to control the discourse. They don't have to put people in prison who are dissidents in the way that we kind of, you know, think of the caricature of tyranny, but it's just as effective. In fact, if not more so precisely because it's subtle. They don't believe in due process. They find people guilty all the time.

Look at what they're doing to Matt Gates now. I'm not saying that Gates is, you know, not guilty. He may be guilty of everything that he's being accused of and more. But thus far, there's been no evidence presented of any kind, and they have him convicted and locked up as a pedophile. The whole B2 movement was about destroying people based on accusations that are unproven. They don't believe in free speech. They don't believe in due process.

They don't believe in just that standard democratic processes, including the safeguards that our founders put in, including making sure that states that are small and rural have equal representation in the Senate but not the House so that they don't get trained. They want to change all of that. They want to change all of the rules to ensure that they remain in power forever. It is a genuinely repressive and tyrannical party and a movement that supports it. And it's the reason I become so violently alienated from it. And are there more Democrats that are waking up and seeing this, do you think?

because I watch the news. I follow things and I'm like, I can't believe the Republicans fall for so much stuff themselves. But I mean, this is, I mean, this is in, you know, Trump's size lettering at the top of his buildings.

You know, corruption, corruption, fascism, fascism. You listen to what they're saying. You watch what they're doing and you see how they maneuver and silence people. And I'm astounded that so many people are like, you know, At best, yawn.

Yeah, but you know, it's interesting. I mean, you mentioned Reagan and Trump's victory as outsiders. I mean, Bernie would have been that, right? He was always viewed as this anti-establishment outsider despised by the Democratic Party elite. And in 2016, he would have won. He would have beaten the Clinton machine had they not cheated. And let's remember that Julian Assange is in prison. and the Biden administration is working to keep him there,

in part because he showed that. With those emails that he published during the 2016 campaign, the top five officials of the Democratic Party had to resign because the corruption was so severe, including Walserman Schultz. Donna Brazill got caught cheating by handing a CNN debate question to the Clinton camp, not to the Sanders camp. They saw all that corruption within the Democratic Party,

the left did, the real left. And then in 2020, they saw the same thing happen. remember Bernie won Iowa or tied in Iowa. One New Hampshire destroyed everybody in Nevada. He was on his way to the nomination. And then suddenly the Democratic establishment, Obama picked up the phone and called three or four people, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, they all dropped out. They endorsed Joe Biden, the only one who had a chance to win.

And then Bernie was gone again. So the left saw. So then you say, well, why is the left still willing to lend its support to a party that obviously hates them and is willing to cheat to prevent them from winning? And that's where I think this woke ideology comes in. It's such a powerful instrument. It's the reason why the CIA celebrates LGBT Day and Women's Day and Black History Month, even though it's the CIA that does coups and bombing campaigns and assassinations around the world.

It's why Nike, with sweatshops in China, can in the United States pretend to be so devoted to human rights and equity and all of that. it's because it's a very powerful weapon to tell people these kind of cultural questions that have nothing to do with the distribution of power or the distribution of wealth or who wields militaristic and imperialistic power in the world. If you only focus on these cultural issues, you'll stay on our side because we're on the good side of those. We love trans people. We love, gay people.

We're totally in favor of we hate racism. And everybody on the left kind of gets focused on those things. So stay on our side because of that. And when they do that, they're not talking about any of the questions of what is ruling class orthodoxy. Who is it that wields real power? Who is it that's cheating? Because they're focused on these culture war issues. And those are the things that distract everybody from kind of how power is actually being exercised.

I don't know if we said it earlier or we said it yesterday, but it is genius. If you look at it, it's genius how this thing has been put together. and how different groups are being used and played, and everybody thinks they're, I don't know, on the right side. And I don't think anybody really understands what side they're really on, you know, including conservatives. You don't really know who's doing what and how this game is being played. And if you're being manipulated, it only makes it worse with Silicon Valley.

Yeah, you know, this is the thing, though, is, like, if you ask me, You know, you asked me before, well, what is the way out of this, right? Like, is there a way out of this, given all this consolidation of power? I really think, you know, look, five years ago, eight years ago, I was on CNN and MSNBC all the time. Now I'm banned from them. Instead, I'm on Fox. You know, I would be on every day if I didn't say no sometimes. I just got done taping a Fox show.

I'm probably going to do another one, you know, on Monday. Why is that happening? it's bizarre like if you look at it in one way right like you go and read any article about my work and it's far left as glengrimalt and now I'm the most frequent guest on tucker carlson's show how did that happen and i think the reason is is because so many people on the left and on the right the way that those labels have traditionally been used have so much more in common in terms of their political views and their common enemies than either want to recognize and at the moment then that the moment then they're able to recognize because they're constantly being fed these trivial and distracting

stories that are designed to keep them at each other's throat that don't really have anything to do with their lives or how power is distributed. So if you say to me, well, what hope do you have? The hope that I have is exactly that, that project of kind of eroding those old labels that don't really tell us much anymore. You know, I write a lot about Silicon Valley censorship and the power of big tech monopolies. in favor of that. You think people on the left love Facebook and Google and huge gigantic corporations? Do you think

people on the right do? No, they both hate them. Or free trade deals or the deep state. And so it's something has to happen to enable people who have been taught to hate each other to come together. So I've been saying this for several years. First of all,

I've tried to reach out and it doesn't go well. It doesn't go well. usually. However, that's changing. There are a lot of people on both sides that are now just like so sick of their own side and, you know, tried to play ball enough and, you know, to try to keep bringing their side along. And now it's just ridiculous. And so I think a lot of people like you and me are starting to connect and go, look, I don't know if we have, you know, everything in common. But my question has been to everybody that I talk to. We used to have an unum, e pluribus unum, and that unum was the Bill of Rights. And if you'll just give me the Bill of Rights, I'm in. I'm in. We can do anything you want with the government. I say, you know, reboot the whole system.

And I don't know how to do it. But I will fight with anyone and stand with anyone who believes in the Bill of Rights. I don't know if, do people on the left now believe in the Bill of Rights? Because, I mean, the ACLU used to say it, but they're not really fighting for it now. No, they have a much different agenda. You know, I think, first of all, I totally agree with you in the sense that if you don't have those core liberties, you have nothing, right? Those core liberties are designed for a concentration of power and an inability to challenge it. Those liberties have no purpose other than to ensure that the citizenry always has tools and weapons to choose.

challenge power. If you have, you know, freedom of the press, which at the time in the Constitution didn't mean this like credential priesthood of people called journalists. It was a tool that all citizens used with the mimeograph machine or, you know, printing flyers to rail against the British crown or corrupt governors and, you know, colonialists. And like, if you have those tools of free speech, a free press, of due process, the fact that the government can't do anything to you, can't take your life for liberty or due property without providing that first, then those changes all are possible. I mean, history teaches that. So if you are someone entrenched in power,

the first thing you're going to want to do is take away those weapons, which is exactly what's happening. And that's why I agree with you completely. For me, that's the number one first battle, the one that matters before all others. And anyone who is my ally on the question of whether people should be able to continue to speak freely on the internet and in public spaces, or whether people are entitled to due process before being assumed guilty of some terrible act, not just by the government, by the culture and the society, that's somebody that's my ally, that's somebody I'm willing to stand with. And conversely, no matter what other one, someone's views are on everything else, if they're opposed to those values, those people are not my allies. Those are the people

I'm currently looking to battle before everything else. I have to tell you, The founders did it for a reason. The First Amendment, you have to be able to speak. You have to be able to come together. You have to be able to question those in power. There's the first. The second is you lose the first if you don't have the second. If you don't have a way to push back on that power.

And everybody laughs at the third one, but the third one is you can't quarter soldiers in my house. Well, that comes from a time when they could go through your papers. Well, that's the CIA. That's what you exposed with Snowden. They are going through things. They are listening. They are tying everything together. So your first three amendments are almost all shot.

And if we don't have those three, you don't get the rest. Yeah, the fourth one is not doing very well either, right? The fourth one is the one that's supposed to protect you against unreasonable searches and seizures of your property. and your papers. And, you know, I think a lot of times people, first of all, one of the problems is so many people's sense of history and knowledge of history begins in on January 20th, 2017. There are millions of people in the United States who never cared about politics until these media outlets scared them sufficiently that Trump was this orange monster coming to destroy them all. And that fear is what engaged them. And they know nothing.

They know nothing about. that happened prior to that. But these rights, these Bill of Rights, they can sound really abstract, right? They were written on parchment, you know, they were, and quill pens, and they were written by people who seemed very distant from us. But all they did was they came out of really visceral experience, right? Of having, they leaped under tyranny, the tyranny that they waged this incredibly bloody and risky war to fight and liberated themselves from.

And that project of creating a new government was about nothing. other than ensuring that it didn't happen again, or at least maximizing the chances that the population could fight against it. And look, I know I'm a critic of the United States. I think it's done a lot of terrible things in the world. You know, you asked me what the CIA has done from 1950 until now. I'll list, you know, 100 crimes that I think are horrific. And many of those I will, in many of those, I would agree with.

I mean, America has done, you know, Winston Churchill, if you just read about him in Europe. He was great. If you read about him from the Indian perspective, he was a monster. We all have a dual personality. It's which one is in control and which one is growing in strength. Right. And those, those, but those documents, you know, I think that those founding documents and the design of the government are genius. Yes. You know, I don't think there's been a better design for how government functions than the one that's refined. And yes, we've never been a perfect union, right? And they knew that. Those. those were aspirational documents.

The whole point was to form a more perfect union to constantly evolve and change to fulfill those values. But those founding values are ones I believe in fervently. They're my animating principles. Because I don't trust human beings to exercise power without the checks that only they can provide. And that to me is the greatest danger right now is that they are being eroded, not just in practice,

but the awareness that people have their importance. But you are in Brazil right now. You've just exposed the watergate of Brazil. A huge, huge story. Been extraordinarily dangerous for you. You don't go anywhere without an armored car and without security. You're generally at your wherever. And if America falls, I mean, I don't know she's the defender of this anymore. But where do you go? If America falls, the bad guys are really empowered.

And where do you go for freedom? Where, where, where? You know, I think, you know, I think the problem has become that when you had nation states, right, 170 or 180 nation states, there were different forms of government that each of them had. and there was some mobility. You could move back and forth between them.

What we have now instead is an erosion of the idea of any kind of national identity. There's an erosion of borders. There's an erosion of nationalistic institutions in favor of globalistic ones. And as we were talking about yesterday when it comes to China and the U.S. and the hegemonic competition between them, I think the primary question then becomes which model will prevail. I'm not even sure what the American model is anymore in that. in that competition. I'm not sure what it even means. I'm not even sure that there's such a big difference between the American model and the Chinese model as elites want them to be.

Agreed. But I think that's the greatest danger is the reason why people have become so opposed to globalism is because the more distant authorities are, the less control you exercise over them. Yep. So can we spend, I've got about 15 minutes. I don't know how much time you have, but let's spend a few minutes and just talk about Brazil and and your book it is I mean it is a thriller but to to explain it in in just a few minutes not reading the book it is it's full of names that americans have never heard of etc etc so can you take us because it is it's really remarkable you it's it really kind of starts with a phone call from somebody on the far left in government, right?

Yeah, you know, in that sense, it was similar to the Snowden story, right? The way a guy started the Snowden story was I was sitting in front of my computer, minding my own business, in the late 2012. I got an email from an anonymous person saying that he had a ton of documents that were revealing, and it turned out to be Edward Snowden, and over the course of six months, we established a relationship, and I flew to Hong Kong, met him, got the documents, and did that reporting. This is very similar. I got a call from a woman who's a very famous left-ling politician in Brazil.

She was actually the vice presidential candidate who lost to Bolsonaro in 2018, a longtime member of Congress. And she said, hey, I'm calling because with urgency, my phone has just been hacked. And the hacker proved to me that he had hacked my phones by showing me very sensitive conversations I had with my closest friends, members of the Senate, members of Congress. And I was petrified. I thought, okay, I'm the target of a blackmail campaign. but he quickly told me, no, you're not my target. I hacked your phone to prove to you I have the capability to hack the Telegram accounts,

which is like a encrypted app, like Signal or WhatsApp and others, you know, Skype, that all Brazilian authorities use. And he said, I can hack the accounts of anyone I want using Telegram. And I've spent the last three months downloading the conversations and documents and drafts and videos and audios and photos of the most powerful politicians in Brazil. and this archive shows enormous amounts of corruption.

And the primary target of that archive was this former judge named Sergio Morrow, who had presided over this gigantic anti-corruption probe that sent billionaires and former presidents to prison. And by that point, he had become Bolsonaro's justice minister. Bolsonaro had just been elected four months earlier, was riding high on this incredible success, not just for him, but for his right-wing movement that got swept into power. and Justice Moro was now Minister Moro, go ahead.

Partly because of that corruption, right? I mean, oh yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was just everybody was, everybody wanted hope and change. Precisely. And Bolsonaro, despite being a member of Congress for 30 years from the epicenter of corruption in Rio de Janeiro, no angel he was a very talented demagogue and successfully branded himself as the kind of outsider

that he modeled himself after Trump, actually. He loved the fact that the elite media circles and elite political circles hated them, the more they attacked him, the stronger he became. But the real, you know, and this is what I think is so relevant for the United States. I wrote the book for an international audience, not for a Brazilian one, because of how many lessons it has for why Bolsonaro won. But also, you know, what happened was in 2017, former President Lula, who was one of the giants of the latter half of the 20th century, governed Brazil for eight years, left with an 87% approval rating. Brazil's economy boomed under his governance, was getting ready to run for president again. All poll showed him way ahead of every competitor, including Bolsonaro. And this judge, right as that was happening, convicted him on extremely dubious corruption charges.

That removed him from the race. That enabled Bolsonaro to waltz to victory. He may have won anyway, but that was clearly his biggest adversary. And the first thing Bolsonaro did upon winning was turned around and rewarded that judge by giving him the most powerful ministry in the country, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, where they controlled surveillance, law enforcement, financial investigation, law, you know,

the federal police. And the archive showed that that judge, the whole time when he was presiding over this probe, including when he was finding Lula guilty, was in fact deeply corrupt. He was cheating. He was breaking every rule. He was potting with the prosecutors

that he was supposed to be judging. And so three months after our reporting began, the Supreme Court ordered Lula freed from prison. Just this last month, the Supreme Court reversed Lula's convictions, all of them, on the grounds of our reporting showed the judge was corrupt and restored his political rights, which means now Lula is almost certain to run against Bolsonaro in 2022. So Brazil will have the competition, the contest that it was supposed to have in 2018, but didn't. Bolsonaro versus Lula, a huge contrast in politics and ideology. And, you know, they attacked me in every conceivable way, culminating with an attempt to criminally charge me in early 2020 with 130 felony counts and the Brazilian Supreme Court intervened, said that that attempt was a violation of my press freedom rights. But, yeah, I mean, death threats and threats of prosecution. You had, you had people in media say that you should be investigated. You should be in jail.

should be investigated. Even your children should be taken away from you. Yeah, there was a very famous journalist who went on live television and out of nowhere, you know, my husband's a member of Congress with the leftling party. So he works in Brasilia, like members of Congress do work in the United States. They work in Washington. We live together in Rio. He said, one of them is in Brazilia, you know, working in Congress. The other one is publishing these stolen documents. What I want to know was who's taking care of their two children. I think a judge needs to investigate. You know, we adopted our children from an orphanage four years earlier,

and he went on television and said, I think their children should be sent back to the orphanage. Wow. We ended up on a show together, a television show, live on the air, and I confronted him with those comments, and it got very heated, and he attacked me physically on the air, kind of tried to punch me in the face. So that was the climate for a year,

and it's one of the reasons gone why I'm so, contemptuous of this whining from coddled, you know, protected, wealthy, lone dry journalists like Jim O'Caston, CNN, who think that they're in danger, as he wrote in his book, because Trump says, I mean, they don't know danger if it ran over them on the street. They're just, and, you know, all this claims about, oh, I'm being harassed online. You know, journalists are supposed to go to war zones. We're supposed to put our lives on the line and confront tyranny, and they're whining about, you know, little adolescent insults and mean tweets as though they're these traumatized victims.

It sickens me for that reason. And, you know, I've been doing, I've been doing that for, I've been getting that for about 20 years now. I don't, I'm not whining about it. It comes with the gig, man. That's what it comes with. And, and if I hear one more of them call the other one brave, for what? Standing with the corporations and everyone in power? Wow, that's brave.

exactly exactly it's so you know they've created this this this this fiction it's like a novel and they've cast themselves yeah as the heroic protagonist and that is the world they all inhabit uh i i i thank you so much uh glen for everything that you're doing and uh and you know we may we may differ on things but it's nice to know that we have the fundamental rights and common and if we can find more people and have open conversations man I'm so blown away this week by again Facebook and others doing exactly what they did with Hunter Biden's laptop with his BLM thing it's it's not about her safety it's not about how much money she has or even the hypocrisy of saying she's a

Marxist it's about where did that kind of of money come from. And if you can't, if you can't, and where did it go? And where did it go? Right. And if you can't ask that question, you can't, you can't police anything. You, we, there is no way to make sure that there's justice. None. That's why I think these issues are predominant. It's why I think that the monopoly power that Facebook and Google and Twitter and Apple and Amazon have hardness to control and police and increasingly censor our discourse is the greatest threat that faces us. And so, yeah, like I said, I'm always happy to talk to anybody who's like-minded or even

anyone who isn't on those issues. But I do think dialogue like this is super important. And I'm very appreciative for that reason of your inviting me on. Thank you very much, Glenn. All right, Glenn, thanks. You bet. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.