The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 391. A Prison is Being Constructed Inside Your Brain | Glenn Greenwald

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Dr. Jordan B Peterson sits down with author, journalist, and political commentator Glenn Greenwald. They discuss the war on information: how social moralism, religious rhetoric, conceptual safety, and false compassion have been used and propagandized to reshape the western world into a good versus bad, red versus blue polarity. They also explore the human need for meta narratives, the basis of morality, and the case for God in a world that offers nihilism. ​​Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, author, and former constitutional law attorney. His original hit blog was a springboard into writing for Salon and the Guardian with a focus on national security issues. In 2013, he published the now iconic Snowden documents detailing global government surveillance by the U.S. and British governments. In 2019 Greenwald again broke leaked documents, this time for “Operation Car Wash,” which shone a spotlight on the corruption of the Brazilian judicial system. He would later detail his work in a series of books such as Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil and No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. - Links - For Glenn Greenwald: On X https://twitter.com/ggreenwald?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Watch System Update on youtube https://www.youtube.com/@GlennGreenwald 

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with author, journalist, and political commentator Glenn Greenwald. We discuss the war on myths and disinformation, how a false social moralism, religious rhetoric, conceptions of safety and false compassion have been used and misused to reshape the Western world into a good versus evil polarity. We also explore the human need for meta-narratives, the basis of morality, and the case, perhaps, for God, in a world that offers nihilism and totalitarianism as stark alternatives. All right, so I was looking today through your biography

and your books and trying to figure out what we could most productively discuss and discuss. And I thought that this comment by Rachel Maddow in 2014 might be a good place to start. She described you in theory as the American left's most fearless political commentator. And so I have a bunch of questions about that. And the first one might be, what the hell is the American left?

And do you think that that's an accurate portrayal of you? And I'm not being smart asking that question. Like, it isn't obvious to me at all how the political lines are drawn now. I'm up in the air about it constantly. So, were you the American left's most fearless political commentator, are you still and what do you think the left is? One thing I can tell you for certain is that that is not something she would say in 2023. My recollection is that was actually a little bit earlier. I think it might have been 2009 or 10 at the start of the Obama administration when I became a very vocal critic of the Obama administration. And there weren't a lot of people who were willing to take the same

critique that was being applied to George Bush and Dick Cheney regarding the war on terror and the assault on civil liberties. And the name of the war on terror and apply it to Obama, even though Obama not only continued many of those policies that he campaigned on the battle to uproot, but extended a lot of them, strengthened a lot of them. And suddenly people on the left had their lost interest in that or decided that actually it was now justifiable, given that it was now in the hands of a benevolent leader, rather than some swaggering evangelical, like George Bush or this kind of caricature of capitalism like Dick Cheney, their views on

the actual policy just switched overnight and mine did not. One of the things though that I always said from the very beginning, I started writing about politics in 2005, I did so overwhelmingly as a reaction to the war on terror. I was writing not as a journalist, but more as a constitutional lawyer. That was more of my interest. I was saying things like Americans detained on American soil and then detained for years without charges just based on this declaration. They were enemy combatants with no trial, no hearing just based on the say so of the executive branch.

I always thought it was odd that that kind of perspective got me labeled as somebody on the left because from my perspective, I was defending values like due process, free speech, free press. You know, it was concerned about the erosion of civil liberties. I never really thought of those as far left values, but it got interpreted as that because at the moment, it took found expression as that because at the moment it took found expression as being critical of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the perception was only people on the left were doing that. So I think it's where Rachel Maddow's ideas came from.

I haven't changed my views on any of those issues at all. Now defensive civil liberties, opposition to censorship codes is right wing, just 15 years later, and I think a lot of times people consider me on the right, even though as I said, my views really haven years later. And I think a lot of times people consider me on the right, even though, as I said, my views really haven't changed. But I think that's where that comes from. Okay, so yeah, in 2006, you wrote, how would a Patriot Act defending American values from a president run a mock? And that was GW Bush, one of the many presidents who've run a mock. But certainly, that was what you were writing about. Okay, so that's how you got identified initially as on the left.

Now, you started a First Amendment litigation law firm in 1996. And I guess, so I'm kind of curious about why that was, why specifically concentrating on the First Amendment. And then I'm interested in how that tangled in with your rising suspicion and apprehension about the restriction of civil liberties after 9-11. When I get out of law school, I work for about 18 months at one of the major of Wall Street law firms and knew immediately that was not for me. I knew from the start it wasn't for me. I grew up pretty poor. The lure of a big paycheck like that was something I just wanted to kind of get a taste of.

I also wanted to demystify Wall Street, you know, kind of enter it. And at the end of the day, those firms are filled with very competent, crafty, smart lawyers. And I knew I would learn a lot and I did. But 18 months was the most I could endure. What I really wanted to do, you know, I think my childhood heroes, I was sort of steeped in the politics of the 70s and 80s. This was the time when the ACLU was defending the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, a town of Holocaust survivors, based obviously on the principle.

These were Jewish leftists lawyers at the ACLU defending obviously not the Nazi party, but the principle that marginalized groups in particular need to defend free speech. I always viewed censorship as a tool of the establishment, as a tool of authority that was used to silence and suppress marginalized voices, dissidents, and the like. And so the desire to use the tools I had made in law school in defense of those kinds of political values, those kinds of causes was something that was probably at the end of the day what made me go to law school more than anything else. I certainly didn't want to defend Goldman Sachs and insurance companies the way I was doing. And so I was able to,

I think one of the very first prominent cases I took was there was this neo-Nazi leader in Illinois who was quite smart. He went to law school, he passed the bar exam, and he applied for admission to the Illinois Bar, so he could practice law. The Illinois Bar rejected his application on the grounds of moral fitness and character, which is what they used to do to communist in the 1950s and 60s. They were barred from practicing all the grounds that they lacked moral fitness and a lot of Supreme Court cases that established these landmark first amendment cases said, you

cannot bar people from professions because of their political ideology. However, punished that ideology might be. And so now to watch that happen from the other side, you know, kind of a left wing or a liberal attempt to define moral character and fitness, not on whether you steal from people or whether you assault people, but whether or not you have the right political views

is very disturbing to me. So I represented him. I represented his quote-unquote church in a couple of other cases that were designed to implant to the law, the seeds of the censorship regime and kind of became a specialist in those kinds of cases. So well, a couple of comments about that. The first is, I don't know what the situation is in the United States, but the professional colleges in Canada are increasingly taking a restrictive view of fitness to practice. I mean, I've been subject to, I think, 13

charges, essentially, by my professional governing board. They dropped seven of them recently, although they didn't explain why they dropped those seven and kept the other six. But all of the other six are almost all of them, none of which, by the way, were made by clients of mine are a consequence of my direct criticisms of political figures. And so I don't know what the situation is in the United States. I know that in Canada, the professional governing boards have really taken a, what would you say? They've allowed free speech for professionals to take a back seat and it strikes me as extremely dangerous because I don't see

exactly what the members of the general public are, how they're going to be served by therapists or physicians who are too terrified to say what they think. And I mean, I've had dozens of physicians tell me, even more than psychologists, even though my battles with the psychology governing board, that they're so terrified of their professional organization, that's the Ontario College of Physicians, that they won't say what they think about all sorts of things. So I don't know what's the situation like in the US on the professional regulatory board front?

Well, in theory, it's supposed to be more difficult in the United States to do those sorts of things because of the First Amendment. And on some level, it is mildly more difficult. But they are really finding all kinds of ways to circumvent that. We lost that case, for example. I lost that case. They did not win the right for this new Nazi leader to practice law, though it was basically on jurisdictional and technical grounds. So that's oftentimes the way they'll do it is you can see these judges very ideological motivated, especially in the United States. Nobody wants to admit they believe in the virtues of censorship because it's inculcated in

the American spirit that anything that is called censorship is kind of instinctively or flexibly wrong. So it is a little bit, the first amendment isn't real barrier in that in states, but I regard the kinds of trends you're describing that happen to you in the West more generally. I know Canada is one of the worst places for it. I used to write a lot about the hate speech laws. I remember Mark Stein was dragged before one of those tribunals. There was Ezra Lavon as well. And I remember back in 2007-2008 when I was being called this leftist, I was defending them. And a lot of people on both the left and the right, I think, were

surprised, but I could see this coming. And now it's so much worse. All throughout Western Europe, increasingly in North America, I lived in Brazil for a long time as well, where these censorship values are, people don't even pretend to believe in free speech, even though Brazil is part of the democratic world. And Western Europe is looking toward Brazil as a kind of laboratory for how far Brazil can go, particularly the interest is in censoring the internet. But beyond that, you see people now being excluded from the financial services industry. People can't open bank accounts

or use PayPal or any of these mechanisms that in modern life we need to generate an income and sustain our families and pay our bills purely on ideological grounds. There's not even a pretense as you said. There's no patient complaint in your case. It's clearly designed to say you're unfit to practice psychology because of your political ideology.

And that is to me, the most dangerous trend in the West beyond any other. Because that not only punishes people in unjust ways, but it also breeds a conformist society. The message is very clear. We're self-interested beings. And if we see that there's a lot of rewards for espousing establishment pities and a lot of punishments for questioning them or defying them, obviously a lot of people

are going to be motivated to be as conformist as possible and we're going to become even more conformist as a society of that continues in. That I think is a huge loss, just of the human spirit of the potential of human life to lose the right to engage in critical thinking and to question and air and to challenge. These are the things for me, at least,

that make light valuable. Well, also, you know, you, when you were formulating your defensive of free speech, you mentioned the fact that marginalized voices, let's say minority voices need to be heard, but I would extend that too. I mean, I think often the majority voice isn't heard and is subject to censorship,

and I think that's happening more and more often in the West. And, but there's also something else, you know, because people's also something else, because people might be leery, let's say, of your willingness to defend neo-nautzes, at least to defend their right to be as obnoxious as they generally are. But it's also the case, as far as I can tell,

and I really saw this in Canada, like back in the 1980s, we went after this guy named Ernst Zundel for hate speech. And this was the first emergence. We like to pioneer these things in Canada, by the way. We pioneered banking counseling, for example, thanks to our prime minister, and who basically demolished our international reputation as a consequence of that, even though Canadians don't know it yet. Anyways, we went after this guy, Ernst Zundel back in the 1980s, on hate speech, and he was a neo-Nazi type. And, you know, everybody was up in arms about this hard hat wearing

dimwit, who proclaimed that the Holocaust did no current all these, you know, idiot shibbolists of the radical neo-Nazi right wing. And he did get pilloried for what he had done, I think, by an early human rights tribunal. And I thought at the time that that was extraordinarily unfortunate because it's, first of all, because I knew even then that persecuting someone paranoid generally is a very bad idea, because you give truth to their paranoid claims that way. And second, if you take these people like Sondal and you drive them underground, then you don't know what the hell they're up to. And part of the reason that we need a culture of free speech is so that

we can observe very carefully what the fringe is up to constantly and keep an eye on their machinations. And part of the reason that that actually turns out to be useful is because most people who are highly pathological can't help telling you what they're going to do. And so if you have a space for free dialogue, you can read a keep an eye

on the people who would otherwise destabilize things. You drive them underground at your peril as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, precisely, now I agree with that entirely that on pragmatic grounds, censorship makes no sense from the perspective of those censoring, not only because you lose the opportunity to hear what they're thinking, see what they're doing, but so often you turn these people into martyrs.

I mean, in the United States, you have the right to wear a swastika on your arm if you so choose, because the First Amendment gives you that right. But if you do that, you're going to be laughed at. You're going to be regarded as a joke. You're going to be social scorn works so much better than trying to prevent people from speaking. Social scorn isolates people. It turns them into an object of mockery.

You try and, you know, the neo-Nazi leader that I was defending that I referenced earlier, he was a loser. You know, he had maybe 10 tholts who were all kind of various forms of sociopaths and psychotics, just kind of like aimless kids who were looking for some meaning. These are not menacing people in the sense of gathering some movement or being strategically in prison. By turning them into martyrs, by making them seem like they're so much more powerful than they were because now you have to suppress them,

their power and strength grows that attracts people, especially younger people who see transgression as something appealing. They, I think the best thing that ever happened to Milo Unopolis, for example, was when the left started trying to prevent him from speaking on college campuses. That's what made Milo a hero to the right.

They turned him into that. And obviously, now Milo has largely disappeared in part because he lost a lot of his funding from the right. But what made him and so many others like that, stronger was the attempt to silence them, the attempt to censor them. And I'd look in other countries where it's illegal to question Holocaust Piety's most of Western Europe in Brazil, I think in Canada as well. And those people can attract a lot more followers than, for example, in the US they can, because everything is example in the US they can because everything is open in the US and the idea is, well, at least you used to be, you're free to express that view,

no one's going to try and stop you. And social stigma, social scorn for me is a much stronger way of marginalizing a nefarious ideology than having the state or corporate power, you know, invoked in order to, to, to crouch it. Well, yeah, well, the other thing too, of course, when you get that extension of state power and corporate power, there's no telling whatsoever what direction it's eventually going to turn in. I mean, I, I interviewed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a couple of weeks ago for my podcast, and the YouTube took it down. And this was really shocking to me. I must say, first of all, I thought it would provoke more of a storm about rage in the United States, because you guys were obsessively concerned for three years about Russian collusion in relationship to election interference, which all turned out as far as I could tell to be nothing but rubbish or very little more than that, but

here we have a large corporation essentially Google actively interfering with an ongoing presidential campaign by a Democrat, not by a Republican, and yet by a Democrat, not by a Republican, and yet that seemed to go by with very little notice. This is really quite staggering to me, even though I'm already aware that the Democrats are nowhere near as terrified as the radical left as they need to be. The fact that the censorship could already proceed to the point where it was actually a Democrat who was being censored doesn't seem to register with the Democrats who don't seem to understand that in the wrong hands and that could be at any moment, that power could be used precisely against them. And so, and then one more thing, and I'll get your comments more generally on this, I've been following the UN Twitter feed more recently, even though that's very dismal

and disheartening thing to do. And one of the things that I see there that's really, I say, would say top of the list for appalling international globalist utopians is the fact that they're constantly prattling on about hate speech and disinformation and joining the people who are following them online to be very careful about what they share. And adopting this idea that a top-down centralized apparatus can be used to separate, let's say, fact from fiction, which would be lovely if it was true, but has never been true and never will be. And so, what do you think is accounting for this? How do you understand the mounting

pressure that's faced by this bedrock commitment to free speech? What the hell do you think is going on? So first of all, I agree with you completely about Google censoring a bar of K-Junior. In a lot of, I mean, this is, you're talking about somebody, not only from one of the most storied political families in the United States, and not talking about somebody, not only from one of the most storied political families in the United States, and not eight generations removed. His father was the attorney general of the United States, his uncle was the United States president.

He spent most of his life as a mainstream environmental lawyer. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008. We're not talking here about a leader of a neo-Nazi church. We're talking about somebody who has spent his entire life in the American mainstream, who now is being silenced, doing an interview with one of the most listened to podcast hosts in yourself. And somebody who is pulling at 20%, 20% of Democratic party voters say they intend to vote for this person for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, this is something that you are not permitted to be heard. And what happened

was what always is the tactic of censors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be de-platformed in this collusive effort by SolarCon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Tio was on the board of Facebook at the time, Mark and Jason in SolarCon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably

think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheered the precedent in the first instance because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities. It will be too late. The precedent's already implemented and then you're left to just bicker about its application rather than the principle itself. And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunez went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy

of Ivermactin and other alternative medication for COVID. It was a Senate hearing. A hearing in the United States Senate, Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well. So as for the question of why this is happening, I think it's twofold. I think one is that millennials and now Gen Z are very much steeped in the idea that the gravesteinger is not empowering centralized authority to dictate what we have to think of what we can and can't hear, but instead is the danger that comes from ideas that they

dislike. And as you said, it is true. A lot of times the ideas that are being censored are ideas held by the majority. I still regard them though as marginalized ideas because what matters more than the numbers is often who's in power. And the elite, people who are the guardians of elite discourse have views that are increasingly at odds with the majority of the population. And those are the views that get passed on as from on high as kind of the mandated orthodoxy. And the views helped by the majority of people end up being treated as marginalized or disinvused to get sign language simply by virtue of the fact that the majority has no power and the

elite has so much power. So I think part of it is just this generational cultural sense that began with millennials has gotten worse with Gen Z. If you look at Paul and Dada, you see this clearly, that free speech is not really a paramount value anymore, that there are other values in their views that outweigh free speech or the right to have debate be heard. But I really think the excelorant to everything was the election of Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump's election was such a gift to the American establishment because it enabled them to depict Donald Trump, not as what he was, which is a continuation of the American tradition as a symptom of the failures of the neoliberal elite, of the anger

that neoliberalism has produced all around the world. They instead depicted him as this kind of singular, unprecedented evil. This never before encountered menace and threat to all things decent, including democratic values. And if you can convince people that they're not just engaged in ordinary political conflict, but instead kind of an existential overarching historic battle of good versus evil, kind of like giving it religious overtones, which is what our politics has absorbed. On some level, everything in anything becomes justifiable in the name of prosecuting that cause. And a lot of people got convinced

that the evils of Trump and his movement were so overarching that everything had to be thrown out the window. Then, bro, of journalism, the virtue of free speech, the idea of due process. They really believe they're confronting this insurrectionary criminal fascist movement that wants to install white supremacist dictatorship. This is how they think. And if you convince enough people of that, and that is what the elite class really believe, I don't think they're pretending to believe that. I think they genuinely believe that.

They're constantly reinforcing each other in this sort of her behavior. It's not that far of a leap then to start saying things like, well, however bad censorship is, or however bad disinformation is, or however bad, punishing people is without due process, the threat that we're combating is even worse, and therefore the means justify

the means. You probably saw that Sam Harris video that went viral. He was asked about the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign that emanated from the CIA. They just lied to the public and said that Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. It came from the CIA, corporate media repeated it, big-tack adopted it. It was a massive scam that they perpetrated on the American public right before the 2020 election. One of the biggest journalistic scandals I think in the history of our country, and when

Sam Harris, I was asked about that being the kind of cogent candidate thinker he is, he essentially gave voice to the idea that I still think the evils of Trump outweigh everything that even lying in censorship of that kind is justified in theils of Trump outweigh everything that even lying in censorship of that kind is justified in the name of the cause of stopping Trump. And I think that has become the predominant ethos of our elite class. And that's where the censorship support is coming from. Do you see it as well as part of the cascade of processes that began to make themselves manifest after 9-11.

And this is partly when you got interested in the clamp down on civil liberties. And you know, one of the things that I observed at that time, which I don't think has gone away in the least, was the transformation of airports into micro-fascist states. And I thought that was a really bad idea, because by treating everyone like a potential perpetrator, which is exactly what's happened in the airports and has never gone away, you essentially train people to adopt that mindset because everybody goes through airports. And once it's okay there, well, then why isn't it okay everywhere? I mean, there's lots of buildings in the UK now where you basically have to undergo an airport style search before you go into the building.

And of course, you have to do that in many of the government buildings in Washington, which also think is an appalling idea. But so, is there an additional thread that's promoting this top-down, clamp-down that do you think is a consequence of what occurred after 9-11? Yeah, I think it's a really important observation. I was in Manhattan on 9-11. I lived and worked in New York at the time. I remember as well as anybody, the vividness of that.

Trauma, it was a very traumatic event. It was frightening. It was terrible. I understand that people's fears were activated in a way that made them be willing to support things. They never would have supported otherwise. I ended up supporting things that I ordinarily would have recoiled from, like most people in the United States did. It's just that even with the war on Terry, even with an attack that kind of cosmic that

just wiped out 3,000 lives and one of the most horrible ways imaginable, I think while the extremism that emerged from that, I remember New King Richard an article in 2006 advocating the First Amendment be amended to constrict free speech in the name of stopping Muslim extremism or whatever he was calling it, um, jihadism or shureo'ah. Those ideas ultimately didn't go as far as they might have because the sense of what American democracy means kind of got reawakened. And I think people did start drawing lines and President Obama ended up winning in 2008 on a pledge to close one Tana Moe and reverse the kind of

more extremist measures of the war and terror, even though we didn't none of that. That was what his campaign that was successful was based on, but I think what you're saying about the airport is exactly right. If you go look at the debates in the 90s, after

the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing at the Oklahoma City courthouse that Timothy McVeigh was convicted of perpetrating. There was an attempt by the Clinton administration to usher in a lot of these same extremism measures that ended up being implemented after 9-11. They wanted, for example, the keys to the internet, a back door to all of the encryption used by the internet.

And the Republican Party, including people like John Ashcroff, who became George Bush's attorney general and the wake of 9-11 and the champion of a lot of these civil liberties assaults, led the way and said, we're not giving the federal government the ability to read our communications, to spy on our conversations. This is too anathema to the American way of life. And so quickly after 9-11, the exact same faction in the Republican Party and American conservatism traumatized by the attack on 9-11. And again, for understandable reasons, but ultimately went so far in implementing what became an authoritarian mentality.

And if you go to the airport, of course, all of us now are so acclimated to it. It seems normal. But the idea that everybody just so dutifully takes off their shoes and takes off their belt, and the climate there is you just do it, you're told. It seems trivial, and it's the form of it's a kind of petty authoritarianism. No one's being in prison for it, no one's being shot. But what it is is almost more insidious because of that, because exactly as you say, it started conditioning people, that in the name of safety, we need to unquestioningly obey authority, kind of submit to whatever humiliations, whatever

orders were told to do. And to watch the American conservative movement that was so steadfast in their opposition to the idea of federal government power in the 1990s, immediately turn around and start meekly taking off their shoes at airports and doing everything that they were told and going to these machines. In the name of safety, I think was quite transformative. And I do think it started training Americans to accept the kinds of infringements on their autonomy and the name of safety that even just a couple of years earlier would have been unthinkable. Well, you know, I think maybe the critics on the left all specify them to begin with

have always been concerned that the fundamental threats to liberty and, let's say, equality would emerge as a consequence of greed and the desire for power. And it's obviously the case that there are valid criticisms that can be levied against gigantic organizations that tilt towards regulatory capture with regards both to their greed and their desire for undeserved power. But I think that the left has radically underestimated the threat that fear poses to liberty. And I guess that's probably true of the right as well. And what you're laying out is a case where the excuse for interfering with fundamental liberties is always something like a higher or is very frequently something like a compassionate concern for safety.

And so maybe it's the neo-nazis that we have to be afraid of or maybe it's the Muslim jihadists or maybe it's the bloody pandemic or maybe it's the looming environmental apocalypse. But there's always some terrible catastrophe that's looming so intently that this is finally the time when an assault on our civil liberties can be justified. And my sense of that is that the reason we made these rights axiomatic, or actually the reason they are axiomatic, not that we made them that way, is because there isn't any circumstances under which there's a better approach than to leave people, the hell alone, to let them say what they need to say.

And that's partly because, you know, one of the things I think conservatives do extremely badly is to try to protect free speech as if it's just another freedom. You know, it's like a hedonic freedom. Well, of course, you get to say what you want to say because you want to say it and it's just another freedom. You know, it's like a hedonic freedom. Well, of course, you get to say what you want to say because you want to say it and it's, you know, you enjoy it and it's annoying not to be allowed to say it. And that's not really the issue here at all. The issue is that for most people, there's no difference between speaking and thinking.

So, and even for those, that small number of people who can, in fact, think, and that's actually quite rare, most of those people think by speaking, they just speak internally. I mean, you can speak, you can think in images too, but really detailed thought really requires words. And so, freedom of speech is exactly equivalent to freedom of thought. And the reason that you think is so that you don't do stupid things carelessly, right? So there's this great, was Alfred North Whitehead who famously said that we think so that our thoughts can die instead of us. And if thought is the process by which we renew our misapprehensions and adapt to the

world at large and transform our institutions, if you interfere with free speech, you do your institutions to stagnation and corruption. And so, and so, and so then you have to say, well, if you're going to be afraid, let's say you're afraid of the coming environmental apocalypse, you might want to be equally afraid of the measures that people take to deal with that apocalypse that are going to interfere with freedom of speech because that'll interfere with our ability to adapt. And that'll be far worse than anything we can conjure up on the environmental front. And so I think that's part of the reason that these rights are self-evident, right? Is that the whole bloody game will grind to a halt if we ever allow them to be interfered

with, and that means ever. And that basically means your neurotic catastrophe is not sufficient justification for your desire to infringe on my free speech. I don't care what your bloody emergency is. You know, I think this is something I've come to conceptualize better over the years, and it's very much based in the psychological dynamic you're describing. George Orbal has this preface. I believe it was in 1994.

I mean, I don't remember the exact details now. And originally when the book was published where the preface was intended for, the preface ended up not being published. It was right around the time of World War II, and it was kind of considered heretical because its argument was that we think about tyranny in these melodramatic terms that that that's what it means that if you say something against the government, armed men in black suits, you're black costumes show up at your house and put guns to your head and haul you off to prison. When in reality, the much more effective kind of despatism is not the use of brute force in that way. It's really the transformation of the mind.

The prison ends up being something that's constructed inside of your brain through extremely effective propaganda, which in turn requires that propaganda never be questioned. If you can control a population based on how they think, you essentially eliminate the possibility of dissent. So you can make dissent on paper legally permissible, but anyone who does dissent will be so instantaneously marginalized because of the efficacy of propaganda that it's a much more effective way of controlling human beings because you're controlling the thoughts that they have. And that in turn requires the ability to ensure you control the flow of information.

And this is the thing that I find so alarming was if you go and look at the literature in the mid 1990s about the advent of the internet, I think people in Silicon Valley really had this libertarian ethos. They thought they were actually producing a technology that was going to be revolutionary. The spirit behind it was we're going to emancipate people from centralized state and corporate control. They're going to be able to communicate, people are going to be able to communicate with one another without relying on the mediation of giant corporations, which in turn are

controllable by this state. It was kind of this Wild West frontier free of control, free regulation. And when I worked with Edward Snowden and we did this Snowden reporting in 2013 and the archive that he provided to me as I began to look at it, revealed that in fact, the internet had become the exact polar opposite. It had become the single greatest means of coercion and control ever invented in human history because the ability to control the flow of information and to monitor whatever, whatever what all of us are doing, not just what we're doing in terms of where we're going, but in terms of what we're reading and what we're saying in private or what we think is in private

and therefore what we're thinking, what kind of personality is shaping us and the ideas that are motivating us and the ability that are motivating us and then the ability that that is accompanied by that knowledge to be able to then control and manipulate it creates this kind of closed propaganda system that is infinitely more powerful than say having a stossi that is able to read everybody's email and e- mail in East Germany or have their neighbors reporting them. In fact, during this note in reporting, there were ex agents of the Stasi who were saying this enables the state to do things.

We never dreamed of being able to do. You know, when it was why, I don't know if you remember, but there was one of the reports was about how the NSA was spying on Angle a Merkel at the time, the chancellor of Germany. She grew up in East Germany under the Stasi behind the Iron Curtain, and she was particularly enraged by it. By all accounts, she called Obama in a rage and said essentially that this is what the Stasi tried to do, and technologically, we're kind of impeded from doing. There were workarounds to it, if you were a dissident in East Germany.

There were dissidents in behind the Iron Curtain in communist, Soviet communism, whereas this kind of makes it impossible. And increasingly what it's relied on is, as I was saying earlier, I think these elites who believe that Trump is the senior evil, that everything is justified in the name of stopping him. I say they genuinely believe it, because even people who are reasonably intelligent, who have been educated, all of that, are very prone to propaganda. Propaganda is a weapon that has been developed over many decades that is designed to cater

specifically to what our needs are psychologically. It creates a reward system, a punishment system. It's very powerful. I think all of us probably have the experience of having a propagandized. And one way or the other, when we come to realize we believe something that we've never really critically assessed,

that we've kind of just absorbed in the ethos. I know I've had that experience many times before. And I think that is really what the censorship regime is about. It's not necessarily to punish dissidents, although that is part of it. It's really to ensure that people are only getting exposed to a flow of information that serves the interest of a small elite so that you don't have to kill and punish dissidents. You just eliminate dissent, and the few people who are, for whatever reason, kind of resisting

it end up just so marginalized that it doesn't matter anyway and on some level it's almost better to have them because it casts the illusion that there's still some lingering freedom. Now, you you made reference in our conversation here to the religious overtones, let's say that accompanied claims that Trump, for example, was the sum of all evil and going to instantiate a white supremacist totalitarian state that would rule to the end of time. And you wrote a book in 2007, a tragic legacy, how good versus evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency.

So I want to delve into that for a minute and share with you some thoughts I've been developing. And you tell me what you think about them. I'm still working this out. So there's a gospel phrase that you're to render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is God's. And the idea there that is one of the ideas there is that there are separate conceptual domains for different kinds of concerns. And so the way I read that, at least in part, I'll tell you a backstory. Now and then when I was working as a clinician, I would have clients tell me things that were truly terrible,

like multi-generational, murderous terrible, long family histories of hidden sexual abuse lies so deep that you can hardly imagine them way out on the pale, beyond the pale, right? And I, for me, that was the land of good evil. And one of the things that would happen if I was discussing things that were deeply affecting enough to give the people who had had the experiences post-traumatic stress disorder, is that the tenor of the conversation and the language itself would almost inevitably become religious. And it helped me understand that part of what religious language does is it enable us

to conduct a dialogue about what's truly malevolent, right? Beyond the political. And so, and that may be wonder, you know, if the religious collapses so that you can no longer render unto God, what is God's, let's say, because that entire belief system disappears, then maybe the, maybe everything that should be attributed to God, so to speak, is now played out in the political realm, is that you get a collapse of the religious into the political. And the reason that that's a catastrophe is because then you can no longer conduct the political as political. It degenerates into a war of good against evil, but a very, also a very, I would say, unsophisticated war.

So I'll just close with this and then you can comment if you would. So one of the things that happens as the Judeo-Christian corpus of, what would you say, of conceptualization of good and evil, as it develops, the notion is, is that spiritual battle between good and evil is something that should be conducted on an individual basis and within. So that if you want to constrain evil, you don't search for it in the external world because that can make you a persecutor and an accuser. You attempt to bind its manifestation in the confines of your own life. And that's partly what takes it out

of the political realm. And so if you don't do that and it collapses into the political, then you start looking for demonic enemies everywhere to account for malevolence. And the problem with that is that it turns you into a sensorial self-righteous persecutor. and sorry self-righteous persecutor. Now, you wrote a whole book about, you know, the good versus evil mentality destroying the Bush presidency. And you talked about the religious overtones that are associated, for example,

with justification of censorship on the, oh my God, this is finally the apocalyptic threat basis. Like, I'm curious about what you think of the conceptual scheme that I just played forward, that we need a language for dealing with good and evil per se and a separate political language. And if we don't keep those separate, well, one collapses into the other. It doesn't disappear. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I, as I listen to that, you know, I mean, I grew

up without a lot of religion. Like many people these days in the West do. My grandparents were steeped in Judaism, but not very, you know, it's not, it wasn't very extreme. It was more cultural, I would say, than religious my parents less so, and then by the time we got to my brother and myself, it was almost nonexistent. And in early adulthood, I kind of considered that a source of pride. Like so many people do with some palm mark of sophistication and modernity that you've discarded these archaic conceptions and we're now advanced and all of that.

And obviously, technologically, we are more advanced than the generations that came before us. But I think a lot of times what that comes as a certain hubris, that because we're more technologically advanced, it means we're more advanced in every way. And one of the things that I have worked hard is to lose that hubris. And I think, you know, for me, when I see people who believe in censorship, believe in the idea that certain views are so wrong, they let it ought to be prohibited. To me, what's driving them more than anything is hubris, because the whole history of humanity

is error. What is considered proven truth in one generation is then regarded as grievous error the next. That's true across every field of discipline and morality and ethics. And the idea that somehow we have escaped from that and we are now no longer prone to error that we have apprehended truth that is just so absolute that no one should be even allowed to question it. It's just never an impulse I ever have. And I believe in a lot of things passionately, very strongly. It's not like a walk around doubting everything.

I just never would find the level of arrogance to believe that my convictions, even the ones I hold most strongly, are so self-evidently and permanently true that any questioning of them should be prohibited, barred. And I think hubris is at the root of that. I think the same is true with the idea of religion. There is a reason, I think, that human beings across millennia and across culture and across every other conceivable line have sought out religion. I believe it's something we need. It's intrinsic to us, whether you want to call it religious or spiritual.

However you describe it, it's something that is a part of us and that we're going to seek out one way or the other because I believe is a human need. It's something I've started looking for myself as I get older. Now that I have kids,

it's something that has become a bigger part of my life. And if you don't have that in the form that people have traditionally had it with the established religions of Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or any of even smaller you know more more modern religions like Mormonism, I think people are going to find a way to express that. And these days, they use politics as their vehicle for it. And that is what's so dangerous, is exactly what you're describing, because the fanaticism and the faith and the righteousness that comes from that religious and spiritual expression can be extremely dangerous if imported into politics, which isn't about, as you say, for me, this religious and spiritual exploration is about

what we do internally, how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the universe and whether there's something bigger than ourselves and our purpose. It's a very introspective than ourselves and our purpose. It's a very introspective and personal endeavor, whereas politics is about wielding power in a way that controls and influences the lives of other people. And if you import this religious component into it and cease having empathy for other people's experiences

and ideas and just are always convinced that whoever is on the other side of your tribe is intrinsically evil and you're intrinsically good. Again, it's going to the moment that ends justified the means, mentality, and in politics that is historically an extremely dangerous way of navigating the world. So do you think, so I've been talking to Douglas Murray about this topic. Quite extensively, I would say over a number of years, and Douglas was raised in a more religious family than you were, a Christian family. And his parents were avid church attenders, but he dispensed with all of that and toyed for a while, even with

with explicit allegiance with the, you know, with the Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, crowd, Danette as well, the forehorsement of the apocalypse. But Douglas has become more convinced that the humanist endeavor cannot maintain its ethos without it being embedded in an underlying, let's say, narrative metaphysics, which is for all intents and purposes, a religious framework. And the religious framework also, you know, it always borders on the transcendent and the

unknowable, I suppose that's a good way of thinking about it. So Carl Jung thought, for example, that the psychoanalyst, he sort of believed that our rationality was necessarily bounded by the domain of the dream. If you think about how we adapt to the world, we have our explicit ways of representing the world that can be encapsulated semantically, and those would be our stateable propositions. But that's never complete. And so outside of that is everything we don't know. And from the perspective of Jung and the psychoanalysts who adopted his viewpoint, the dream was the mediator between what we knew

explicitly and what we did not yet know. It was a buffer zone. And the transcendent characters of the dreamscape were essentially deities and religious figures. And that strikes me as correct. I think that's in keeping with what we now understand about how the brain functions and about how we process information when we first come across it as a normalist, for example. But it does beg the question. You know, Douglas has told me pretty straightforwardly that he thinks that any ethical system that isn't grounded in a transcendent metaphysics, whatever that means, is going to degenerate into a propagandistic ideology.

And well, I'm wondering like, are those thoughts that you said that you've been seeking more now at this stage in your life than you had been previously? Do those sorts of reflections ring true to you? Or do you see a flaw in that line of reasoning? Yes, so this is an idea that I have grappled with a lot. I think a lot of people who passed through a kind of atheist-day passage in life have had to grapple with it as well. I remember being something even going back to studying philosophy and undergraduate

school was always a question which is if you believe there's nothing to life but our material existence that is finite, that we're born and then we die and that's the end of everything. There's no greater power. The challenge is how do you have any kind of an ethics or a morals that make any sense? If all there is is materiality, it seems like you could justify being driven by nothing other than material gain and no basis for any kind of ethical or moral constraints, and that's what religion has typically offered. That there's a God, that there's a morality and an ethics that they pass down. And if you remove that, what is the basis for this ethical code or for this morality?

And I do think, I even remember when I was so sure of myself, my early 20s, being finding that a uncomfortable and difficult question because it is not an easy one to answer. And I think as I've gotten older, I've also started viewing spirituality and religion. And I kind of use that interchangeably as necessary for a complete human existence. And I know that has become the foundation for my own ethics, for my own morality, the sense of empathy and compassion that you have for other people, my view that that becomes a necessity to honor that, to be guided by it. And I do really wonder how it's possible if you live your entire life without that to avoid turning to nihilism.

I think a lot of people do turn to nihilism. When Western society tells them there is nothing spiritual religious, that's valid. And we see it in all the mental health indexes, as you know better than anyone, in terms of the data you've studied and talked a lot about, just the kind of lack of purpose

and higher meaning that people are left with in their lives when you strip away everything other than material existence. Yeah, well, the materialist, atheist types, I suppose, would object and I try to make the argument as powerful as possible, that just because you come up with a hypothetical, practical necessity for a certain kind of belief, let's even call it a certain kind of delusion or illusion, right? That that doesn't justify the hypothesis of something

supernatural or transcendent, but I would respond to that perhaps as follows the first is that we have some relationship with the whole and because we're a part of a larger whole and we don't know what that relationship is, but there has to be some relationship. And I suppose your relationship with that larger whole, existence as such could be positive or negative and it's conceivable at least that that's a decision of faith, whether you're going to act in accordance with the principle that being itself is essentially good and to try to understand from that what ethical obligations that lays on you. But I've also been going through the biblical corpus trying to understand

in some ways what it means to believe in a transcendent relationship. And so I've been writing about the story of Abraham. So let me just tell you what I've found in that and you tell me what you think about that. So what God is in the story of Abraham is conceptualized is something like the voice within that calls you to adventure. So it's a proposition, right, that there is a, an animating spirit, that's a good way of thinking about it, that can unite people psychologically and socially, and that that uniting spirit, that uniting animating spirit has a canonical and immutable nature. And one of the manifestations of that nature is the call to

adventure. And so Abraham is an old man by the time he leaves his father's tent, but he hears a voice within back into him that says, you should leave comfort and security and venture out into the world. Now, it seems to me that we do have a voice like that that speaks within us, so to speak, and it's not exactly our voice personally, right? Because it speaks to everyone, so it can't be something that's specifically subjective. And I think that you either listen to that voice,

say, and venture out into the world in adventure, or you don't listen to it, and either of those choices is a choice of faith. And so that's a little different than believing in a so-called, like what would you say, a hypothetical supernatural reality, right? It's more like the decision to orient yourself according to a certain animating principle. So in the story of Moses, I'll just develop it with one more story and then leave it.

The same spirit that calls to Abraham to embark on the adventure of his life is the spirit that calls to Moses to free his enslaved people from tyranny. And the hypothesis, the biblical hypothesis, those are manifestations of the same central animating spirit, like that's Yahweh and the Old Testament. So the hypothesis there is that there's a transcendent spirit that animates humanity.

And one of its manifestations is the call to adventure. And another one of its manifestations is the call to resist tyranny and to move out of what the domain of slave ish habits. And so it seems to me that you either believe in those propositions or you don't, but that either choice is a choice of faith, right? Because you could say, well, tyranny is acceptable. And so with slavery, that's a decision of faith. Or you could say that tyranny is not acceptable and neither is slavery. And that's a decision of faith. And I don't see any non-faith alternative. And the same thing applies on the adventure front. So I don't know what you think about

that. But maybe you could make some comments and tell me, you know, how that strikes you. It is, of course, the challenge of this conversation, and you're absolutely right, the fact that there are positive outcomes from believing something. In other words, if you believe in religion, it's a lot easier to have a foundation for a moral code, doesn't make that believe true. There may be positive benefits from it, and it could be completely false. That, of course, is logically true. We're all with all these questions, though, we're dealing with a lack of

dispositive proof, even concrete evidence, empirical evidence, some kind that we normally want when we're deciding whether to affirm a belief, but that's true from all sides of this perspective. If you want to believe there's some supernatural force greater than yourself, some force of the universe, whether it's a god or some other similar concept, of course you cannot provide mathematical proof or anything close to that, but that's the same for arguing it's negation. You cannot prove the absence of it either.

And this gets back to what I was saying earlier about, I think sometimes because we are technologically advanced, we mistake that for being advanced in other ways that all of our wisdom is necessarily superior to those who came before us. And at the end of the analysis, I do feel a certain kind of humility when I look at the fact that human beings for millennia across cultural lines, across religious lines have been

seeking the same sort of fulfillment, the same sort of purpose. Now, maybe that's just a psychological desire to believe that life can't just be the 70 or 80 or 90 years when we're on the earth and there's no purpose to it. And we all kind of deceive ourselves into believing otherwise. But my perceptions about all of this ultimately is it can only be based in my own personal experience. And the ability to connect with things that do seem very clear to me to be a spiritual presence, a part of a whole, a transcendent force,

are things that just feel very real to me, didn't previously, because I can't prove them rationally. And I think in the gospel and the stories are referencing, and there are a lot of others, one sees a similar spirit in other religions as well. You know, obviously people who believe in one religion believe it's the true religion and the rest of the religions are thigh definition false. When I book at these religious doctrine that had been around for so long, I see a lot more similarity than I do differences

or are obviously dogmatic and dog-triangle differences that are important. I think it's all about the same human craving. And the fact that we all want this and need this, and I think so many people come to feel it, I think it takes a lot of arrogance just to dismiss that all the way as the byproduct

of illusion or superstition or deceit. What changed? Good. What changed for you? Like, why did you start? Why did this? Why did this turn of attitude make itself known to you? What happened in your life? I had a list of things when I was younger, I thought if I acquired them would make me happy. And it was my conception of what happiness is very much derived from modern Western culture. Tells you if you're successful in your career, if you become financially prosperous, if your work becomes well known, these kinds of things are the things that are going to ultimately be fulfilling. potentially prosperous if your work becomes well known.

These kinds of things are the things that are going to ultimately be fulfilling. And the more I chase them and the more I acquired them, in a lot of ways, the less happy I became. And my husband, I was married for 20 years, my husband died in May this year, so just a couple of months ago, was somebody who tried very hard to get me to be open to other ways of looking at the world, including starting a family, adopting children from an orphanage that would not have been adopted. Had we not done so, and we did, in that open my eyes to the fact that there's more to life than I had previously thought. I just became a lot more humble. Once you see that the fact that there's more to life than I had previously thought. I just became a lot more humble once you once you see that the way that you've been looking at the world is incomplete or even on the wrong path. You start believing that maybe there's things

you've written off before that are things you ought to go back and reconsider. And then just being more open to things like meditation and spirituality, reading, text that are derivative of Hinduism. And then even, you know, one time, I think maybe 15 years ago, I did just start down, sit down and read the gospel from start to finish because it's something that you hear a lot about, that you form opinions about, and then when you go and actually read it, as you've obviously been doing and not have done, it is something that makes you just connect to it in a different way than if you're just looking at it and that's not dismissive way where a lot of us are taught

to view it. And then once I started traversing the spiritual path and then seeing that real happiness and fulfillment lies not in material gain or fame or any of those things. I mean, there are fulfilling things to those things, but you cannot be a complete person. I don't think without family and then the spiritual component and trying to understand where you fit into this broader picture. At least for me, that was the thing that I'm able to be happy to be a complete person. And it just started forcing me to reevaluate

how I understood our place in the world and our purpose in it. Right. Okay. So, so we've proposed that without something, some superordinate orienting structure, let's say, that the battle between good and evil collapses into the political, and that that poses the danger of the rise of something approximating totalitarianism often justified by demonizing your enemies, let's say, and also, as a consequence of willingness to use fear in the face of the

looming apocalypse. And you've also made the case that there's a certain heuberistic pride in the censorship movement that is a kind of intellectual pride that is predicated on the assumption that what I know now is everything that's worth knowing and that what other people think can be easily dispensed with. And then the third thing we pointed to pointing to the necessity of a metaphysics, let's say, on the personal front in your experience has been that you pursued some of the things that were more materialistic and quite successfully, that you were led to believe or did believe would produce a sense of continual fulfillment. But what you found in your life was that some more

traditional ventures like starting a family and some striving for something transcendent made itself known as increasingly necessary as you got older. Is that a fair summary of where we've gone so far? Absolutely. All right, well, let's leave that for the time being. I want to return back to your line of books. In 2008, you published a book called Great American Hypocrits,

Topling the Big big myths of Republican politics. So you're going after the Republicans again, you went after the Bush types for a good while. And so what did you conclude when you were assessing the Republican political front? And why did you phrase it in terms of hypocrisy? And do you think there was more hypocrisy, for example, on the Republican side than there was on the Democrat side? If I'm being completely honest, and why wouldn't I be, that book is not a book that brings me a lot of pride. I had actually, I had just started writing about politics in 2000, late 2005, 2006, and I wrote these first two books that actually am proud of.

I came from kind of a good place. And I was a constitutional lawyer. I moved to Brazil. I got married to my husband and we had to live in Brazil. We chose to live in Brazil. And I can practice law anymore. And I need a way to kind of make a living out of journalism. And at the time writing books was the way I was doing it.

There's a lot of pressure for me. So this book, there are some good ideas in this book, but the book itself, the way it's framed, the title, great American Hipper, Chris Topling, Topling the Biggest, the Republican Party politics, it's very banal. It's kind of tried. It's way more partisan treat us than anything I've written before, or written since. treat us than anything I've written before or written since. But the idea was that the, there's a kind of iconography in Republican Party politics. I remember when I was growing up, my father was mostly conservative, but not fanatically political. And he used to kind of rever this certain sort of male archetype that I think he felt was lacking in his life, like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, all over North.

And I think Republican Party politics has relied in a lot of ways on these archetypes, often from people who don't really exude those virtues in their actual life. People who purport to be very pious and yet in their private life seems not to follow that very well. People who seek courage and strength by sending other people to war, but never had been near a frontline, near a frontline themselves. They like to send other people to it and then kind of inflate their chest and feel powerful. So there were some seeds of some substantive ideas in the book, but the editor just wanted

a kind of, they were always looking for the left-hand culture. And I think the way that book got freeing the way they kind of forced me into this, you know, attack the Republican Party was more a byproduct of that. So I don't think I've ever gotten back and read that book once it was done because it was just kind of a, you know, sort of labor necessity rather than a labor of love. So, well, so what do you think? I mean, your comments on your book are interesting and revealing, I suppose. What is it that you are not particularly proud of in your words in relationship to that work? I mean, there's room on the journalistic front for criticism of political opportunists, for example, or of entire parties for that matter. And in some ways, in many ways, you could regard that as the appropriate purview of a critical journalist. So what do you think that what do you think was wrong in your

approach? You pointed maybe to what a kind of instrumental necessity. And what do you think it was that clouded your vision, let's say, so that you're not as happy with that book as you might be about some of the other ones that you've produced? I think it's just the partisan nature of it. I think the critiques I made are by no means can find the Republican Party. But book publishing, especially in politics, kind of the crudest way of trying to make a book successful from a commercial perspective is to feed a certain political camp with material that will validate their presuppositions, will tell them that they're on the right side.

So I guess that I do think the critiques were valid. Hypocrisy of politicians also, though, is of kind of low-hanging fruit. I think it didn't require a lot of brain power to make that critique. I don't think it was particularly insightful. I do think there were some parts, as I said, that were the seeds of some interesting psychological, it was a very psychological book about how political leaders try and create their imagery in a way that's appealing. This is to confine it to a critique of their Republican Party, I think was just a little

bit cheap. And like I said, probably the byproduct of commercial pressures rather than intellectual autonomy. That's all. Right, right. So it's just starting to agree you felt like you had subverted your what higher order critical capacity to like instrumental necessity. Let's leave that then. Let's go to the next one with Liberty and Justice for some.

Is this a book you're more pleased with? This was 2011. How the laws used to destroy equality and protect the powerful. Okay, so now you've returned to something more like, what would you say, an orientation that you're, that you're well, that you feel allowed you to remain firmly grounded while you were writing this.

And you're looking back on this book with more pleasure than on the previous book. Right. This book was a more systemic critique. It was not in any way part is in. I think the origin of it was that, you know, the first book that I wrote in 2006, you mentioned Howard of Patriot Act, was a legalistic critique of what I thought were some law violating policies enacted by the Bush and Cheney administration, often without congressional approval, sometimes in violation of congressional statute. I thought it was the kind of criminality that would typically be prosecuted. And when President Obama was inaugurated, one of the first things he did was announce this kind of amnesty for any high level political officials or anyone at the

CIA who had broken the law as part of the war on terror. And invoke what has now become this traditional elite serving framework that prosecuting people for crimes there from a prior administration or a prior government is too destabilizing. We have to look forward. Not backward was the phrase that he used it originated in Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. And what bothered me about it, there was no prosecutions of anyone on Wall Street from the 2008 financial crisis, even though lots of scholars have written about why many prosecutions would have been viable. That was one of the most cataclysmic events of our lifetime.

Certainly the 2008 financial crisis affects linger to this very day in terms of people's economic stability over the world. A lot of it was based on fraudulent practices. And you can trust that with the fact the United States is the most pro jail country on the planet. We have 5% of the world's population. And yet 25% of prisoners on the planet are an American prison. We imprison people for longer periods of time,

for crimes that ordinarily would not be punished. This gargantuan prison state that definitely disproportionately falls on. People who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic perspective. And so it was kind of contrasting this idea that for elites, there's a kind of legal immunity. And for poor people in the United States who can't afford a legal counsel who rely on incredibly overworked public defenders in the lake. People go to prison for very long periods of time, including for non-violent crimes that have made the United States the world's biggest jowler. And that contrast has been disturbing to me. And the book was largely

about that. Right, so that's a, it sounds like a more classic left wing take, I would say, I'm still trying to position you politically to some degree. I mean, I have a particular reason for doing so, but I, it's one of the questions we've left on answered is how you conceptualize your political stance. I mean, that, that opposition to law being formulated in a manner that preferentially benefits the wealthy because you use socioeconomic status as the prime marker. And that's a continual, reasonable, plant from people on the left, right? Is that the structures of power get tilted in the service of those who have the power? And that's something that

everyone should always be on look out for because just, well, if for no other reason, then just because you have power right now doesn't mean that you're going to have it, you know, in a year. So we should all watch out on that front. So what can you walk through your conclusions in that book? Like, what did you see as the causes? You talked a little bit about the proclivity of one administration to forgive the sins of the previous. You talked about the free past that was given to people who were involved in the 2008 financial scandal.

Are there other, what would you say? Are there other threats to the integrity of the law that you see as particularly germane in the US at the moment? I mean, I think that book grew out of a concern that has intensified in the last decade that the West in general is now a society that has a larger breach than ever before between elites on the one hand and the vast majority of people on the other. You referenced earlier, for example, the fact that many of the views that are now considered taboo or many of the beliefs that are considered unworthy of being aired are happy to be beliefs

that majorities of people subscribe to. And those prohibitions are being imposed by an elite class that is so wildly at odds with the vast majority of people over whom they're essentially ruling, which is a very destabilizing framework for a society to have. If you look, for example, at pulling data about crime and you listen to black or Latino elites on television or people with newspaper columns, you would think that the vast majority of non-white people want the police, defunded, want the police, deconstructed, hate the police, don't want the police in their neighborhoods. And of course, if you look at pulling data, you find the exact opposite is true.

Black people, Latinos, people, any of any race who live in poorer communities either want the same amount of police or more police in their neighborhood, there's this constant breach. Obviously with gender ideology, there's that breach with a lot of culture war issues, with the question of endless warfare, with the question of gigantic corporations between the views of the elite class and the views of the vast majority of people over whom they're ruling. And historically, if you were to look at how that breach has been addressed, there's essentially

two ways you can go about trying to resolve that. Namely, I think the election of Donald Trump, the election of Javier Bolsonaro in Brazil, Brexit, the rise of a lot of these kind of populist parties are very much about the fact that huge numbers of people feel, I think, justifiably and validly, that elite ideology doesn't care about them at all, is willing to squeeze every opportunity out of their life in order to benefit a small minority of people. And when you have this kind of mass populist anger, traditionally, the elites can try and appease it

by kind of throwing some more crumbs to people, just to keep them just seceded enough that they're not gonna go out into the street and cause political turmoil and protest on the lake. Or this society can say, you know what, let them riot, we'll just militarize to the teeth, we'll give ourselves every kind of power and every kind of authoritarian weapon that we need, so that even if they want to riot, they'll be crushed immediately. I think the West is choosing that latter path of no longer trying to appease people, no longer trying to give them enough to keep them at a decent quality of life or the perception

that the system is essentially fair. And instead, paramilitarizing is becoming more authoritarianism. I think that's what a lot of the trends in the West are about. And that book was really a way of saying that even the law, the kind of a linchpin of what is supposed to ultimately guarantee that even though we're supposed to have material differences, the founders for capitalists, they expected and anticipated that there would be differences in material wealth, then the law would ultimately be the guarantor of the fairness of that inequality, that people would accept its validity or its

legitimacy because we were all operating by the same set of rules. And increasingly, the law has become something that's the exact opposite, just yet another weapon for elites to use against people who are powerless to keep them in line, to keep them kind of neutered and cuteless. And that's really the ethos out of which that book grew. And the fact that elites have given themselves a kind of broad scale immunity that our prisons and our courtrooms or criminal courtrooms aren't for wealthy people, aren't for powerful people with some exceptions, but are overwhelmingly for poor people even once you are addicted

drugs committing nonviolent crimes. That was the critique of that book. So, let's segue from that into your 2014 book. That's no place to hide. Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US surveillance state. And so, well, that obviously develops some of the themes that you were just discussing, which is the proclivity of the elite. And I have some questions about who you think the elite are exactly, because that's an interesting issue. Tell me what you discovered and what you were attempting to accomplish with no place to hide. That basically told the story of the work I did with Edward Snowden. He had contacted me anonymously at the end of 2012,

He had contacted me anonymously at the end of 2012, saying he had access to a huge trove of top secret documents that demonstrated that the US government and its allies were engaged in a kind of ubiquitous surveillance that would shock people, even such as myself, who had been writing about that and belongs suspected. That was the case. The kind of final straw for him was when he heard James Clapper, President Obama, Senior National Security official, who was the Director of National Intelligence, testified before the Senate in early 2013. He was asked by Senator Ron Wyden-Naborgon, does the NSA collect dossiers on millions and

millions of Americans in James Clapper Alight and said, no sir, it does not, not wittingly. And Snowden had his hands, the evidence because he had worked for CIA and then the NSA as a contractor. The evidence proving that when Clapper denied the NSA was doing was in fact exactly what the NSA was doing. In fact, to an extent that nobody would have suspected. The model of the NSA was collected all.

They really wanted to, and were well on their way to converting the internet into a tool of ubiquitous surveillance, that everything done on the internet, set on the internet by ordinary people, American citizens suspected of no wrong doing these, were suspicionless, this was suspicionless surveillance, was being collected and stored with the potential when they wanted to analyze and utilize this information.

Incredibly comprehensive pictures of our lives based on who we were speaking to, what we were reading, the content of our communication, and so I went to Hong Kong that was snowed in along with the filmmaker or a poitress who filmed it, that became the film that won the Oscar in 2015 for Best Documentary Citizen 4. It was a very kind of high drama, but I think journalistically consequential. And to me, that's what those materials revealed was just how unaccountable the US security state had become. That this was a part

of our government that was created to operating complete secrecy, but it was always supposed to be attached to some form of democratic accountability. There were lots of abuses discovered in the mid 70s that were supposedly reforms done, and yet we have a part of our government that is now hugeer than ever, more powerful than ever, operates so much in the dark that I was getting contacted when we were doing this reporting by members of Congress who are on the intelligence committee in the US, in Great Britain, in Australia,

in Canada, saying I had no idea any of this was taking place. And it was kind of a broad-acquising moment for me because it wasn't for me a book or an episode in my life that was about surveillance and privacy, although of course it was about that. As much as it was about democracy, the fact that these incredibly consequential choices had been undertaken about how the government was

going to utilize the internet, converted it into a system of mass indiscriminate ubiquitous surveillance with no democratic accountability of any kind, no transparency of any kind. And it made me realize that there really is this kind of part of the government is Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about in 1961, before Vietnam, before the war on terror, that essentially is the real government, is the government that is immune to elections, that does what it wants with very little constraints. And I find it very, very alarming, very menacing. And, well, how do you feel about that now? I mean, do you think we're farther down the

rabbit hole than we were when you wrote that book? I mean, it's nine years later, and our technological reach is expanded tremendously. I mean, when you're looking at the state of freedom, let's say, in the West today, what are your observations on that front? I actually think it's worse, which might be paradoxical because there were some benefits from this reporting. It may be people wear for the first time of not only the extent to which the US government and its allies are spying on, again, not al Qaeda cells or ISIS cells, which everybody would support, but entire Western population, including the American studies ends. And that awareness made it possible to take precautions against it.

So people are using encryption more than they did before, big tech companies like Facebook and Google were pressured to demonstrate they were protecting the privacy of their users by also using encryption. So it did construct some barriers to what the government had been doing. But one of the interesting thing was at the time we did this known and reporting, we're talking 2013, the fear that had once been inspired by the mention of al-Qaeda had really worn off. This is now 12 years after the 9-11 attack. There had been no mass casualty, terrorist attacks in the United States, anywhere near 9-11. Even the ones that had happened quickly in Madrid and in London in their years following

those kinds had't happened. And so there was a sense that okay, the warren terror has gotten way too far. This is kind of an extremism that we should not tolerate. And then very quickly, ISIS emerged in 2014, 2015, ISIS was presented as the threat worse than al-Qaeda. And then 2016 and 2016 elections suddenly Russia got kind of revitalized as the existential threat that America and the West faces. Brexit was blamed on Russia.

Trump's election was blamed on Russia. And it reinstalled this instilled this kind of sense that no, we actually like the CIA. We like the US security state. We believe it needs to kind of operate without limits because the enemies were facing are so great. Now, it was going back to what we talked earlier about how people had been convinced to think about Trump. They also began thinking about Vladimir Putin in Russia, even though American presidents

from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump had talked about Putin. This is kind of rational figure with whom they could do business. Suddenly got converted into this, the new Hitler. And this ability of the US security state and its allies and the media to always give people this new frightening enemy that convinces them that they need to acquiesce to authoritarian powers is almost impressive. And the way in which American liberals, in particular, the Democratic party started feeding on this hatred for Russia and dispoly. Meet that Vladimir Putin was this kind of Hitler-like figure, along with Donald Trump, pushed them into the arms of these agencies because they perceived correctly that these agencies were trying to

sabotage the Trump presidency. This is where Russia came from. It was a CIA concoction. They fed it every day to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which gave themselves pollers for it. It revitalized his fears. And I think these agencies, and I don't just think if you look at polling data, you'll see they are held in higher regard than in any time since the peak of the Cold War, particularly

by adherence of the Democratic Party. I think one of the best things that Donald Trump did was usher in a kind of skepticism about these agencies that had never previously gotten a foothold in mainstream Republican Party politics before. But for exactly that reason, the establishment wing of politics and media and the Democratic Party views this agency, these agencies as more benevolent than ever. And that is a really alarming mindset. You tweeted, and this might be relevant, well, it's relevant to what you just said, but it might also be relevant to maybe what will close this discussion with, which is how do you characterize this elite, let's say that things are being done in service of.

So you tweeted out the cultural left, meaning the part of the left focused on cultural issues rather than imperialism or corporatism, has become increasingly sensorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant, joyless, self-victimizing, trivial, and status quo perpetuating. Now, I've had the opportunity to ask 20 or 30 congressmen and senators on the Democrat side when they think the left goes too far.

And I asked Robert F F Kennedy that actually in our interview, and that was the one question he declined to answer, saying that he wanted to put forward a vision of unity, especially on the Democrat side, rather than disunity, you know, unfair enough, but I'd been struck by the fact that the Democrats in particular can't see the danger of their radical fringe and seem utterly unwilling or unable to dissociate them from what I see as behind the mean, by behind the scenes, manipulators with an almost psychopathic bent. That's the increasingly sensorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant crowd. You talk to Farabit about the elites today, you know, and the elite from the leftist perspective is historically being those who are wealthy or who occupy higher positions on the socio-economic ladder.

But it isn't exactly obvious that the elite on the left are characterized by those descriptors precisely. I mean, when you're trying to conceptualize who constitutes the sensorious tyrants or this increasingly repressive force, what do you conclude? Where exactly are the enemies of freedom, so to speak, the enemies of free speech, at least, let's say, where do you think they're primarily located? And does this, is there a new conceptualization necessary that makes a mockery of the old political divisions?

Yeah, you know, this term elite, you're absolutely right to interrogate this. It is, it is obviously a somewhat ambiguous term. And that ambiguity sometimes allows a kind of reckless use of it. You just throw that word around. You're not really sure exactly to whom you're referring. It almost has this kind of of melodramatic lure to it. Like, go, we're always against the elites. Everybody we just like is the elite. And so I think it is important to ask that question and have at least a concrete sense of who you're talking about.

I think it maybe even differs based on what kind of policy debate you're having. So maybe the elite is a little bit different when you're talking about economic policy where I think probably the large corporate power cares most about economic policy and uses their weight and throws their weight around most there, the tax code and regulation and things of that kind.

Then you have a kind of foreign policy elite that has some overlap with that, but probably is different in a way as well. And then you type out the culture war, the cultural kind of debates that increasingly, I think, unfortunately, have come to dominate our discourse. And in large part, it's because the left has prioritized the culture war. If you go and watch left-wing YouTube shows, the most popular ones, or read, or listen to the left-wing podcasts, which I do, it's part of my job, and I think it's

necessary for me to kind of stay in touch with every political sector, the extent to which the culture word generally and gender ideology and trans issues in particular receive the bulk of the attention is almost shocking to me. I mean, left wing politics, traditionally in the 20th century, was about opposing imperialism and militarism and corporatism and oligarchy. And now there's almost none of that. I mean, on the left, you wouldn't even know there's a war in Ukraine.

You wouldn't even know there's a foreign policy. That is almost entirely ignored. In favor of this kind of fixation on trans issues and gender ideology right now, one of the longest standing and biggest left-wing YouTube shows The Young Turks is in the process of being utterly decimated and canceled. And they've had views over the years that from a left-wing perspective are completely an anthem of the business they're about war, they love Madeline Albright. No one cares about that. They're being canceled because they cross the one line you can't cross on the left, which is questioning some of the most outer fringes of extremism, trans ideology, including whether or not biological men should be able to compete in women's sports, whether puberty

bockers are safe for children, works even in Northern Europe, they're debating those things. And the intolerance for any kind of vibrant questioning or dissent, even from people who say, I think trans adults should be able to live their lives with total dignity, with full legal rights. That's nowhere near enough. You have to affirm every last element of that agenda in order to even be deemed acceptable. It is incredibly repressive. And I think at the end of the day, when you're talking about who the elite is, it's kind

of on the one hand a vague term, but it's also not that difficult to identify who's, it's the views that are permitted and the views that are suppressed. And if your views are among the views that are suppressed, that's a pretty good indication that you are not in the elite. You seem to be making, well, you seem to be making, I would say, a two-fold categorization on the one hand. We have what we've always had, and it's something that always poses a threat to the integrity of states that have to continually adapt, which is the tendency of those who have been successful economically to bend and distort the system in a manner that supports their continued hegemony independent of their continued product of activity. And I kind

of think about that in general as the problem of out of control, gigantism. And you can see that on the government front, just as much as on the corporate front, you know, famously in 2008, the mantra was too big to fail. And I always thought that the mantra should have been so big, you will certainly fail. And then there's this additional element that you point to and use the example of what's happening to the young Turks at the moment on the gender front pointing out that there's an elite that are possessed by a set of ideological ideas that have degenerated in recent years into an almost monomonial fixation on gender and identity.

And then there's some unholy alliance between the two, which I don't quite understand, although it seems to be manifesting itself. It's a variant, perhaps, of the willingness of the coercive left, not that the right wing was, like, without error, error on this front, to ally themselves, for example, with Big Pharma. And as you pointed out, to increasingly adopt a positive attitude towards the very secretive and background gigantic government operations that the left would have been historically opposed to. So I don't understand the alliance exactly,

like I don't exactly understand how the ideological possession that manifests itself as emphasis on the primacy of group identity can be in bed with the people who are using their economic power on the regulatory capture front. Maybe it's something like, maybe you see something like this on the ESG front, is where the the power elite, so that would be Larry Fink and the BlackRock types are willing to use the moralistic ideology of the radical left to hide their what to hide their guilt and to hide their machinations on the

power front. Is that a reasonable way of construing it? I'm so glad we're talking about this at the end here because it's so fundamental to these changes in the political landscape. The fact that you, for example, were censored by Google while you're interviewing RFK Jr. And have been censored before and people who believe we believe on the question of trans ideology and gender ideology are censored routinely by Google and Facebook and the pre-Elon regime of Twitter, whereas nobody would ever be censored by Big Tech for being as extreme as he want to be on trans issues, urging that 12 year olds be given puberty blockers or that young girls get mastectomies, the minute that they decide that they're just foric. Obviously, no one's getting censored for being on that side of the debate.

You see the manifestation immediately. There so suddenly you are this left-wing culture warrior who likes to think that you're antagonistic to capital, and yet the largest and richest corporations are completely on your side on these debates. In fact, they're your enforcers. Yeah. I noticed this for the first time, right after we did the Snowden reporting in 2015, so it was about two years after I began, the British version of the NSA, which is the GCHQ, really probably the most extremist in this five eyes alliance, they're sort of the NSA, which is the GCHQ, really probably the most extremist

in this five eyes alliance, they're sort of the ones that do the things that not even the NSA will do when they can't go far enough under the law or ethics. The GCHQ steps up and do it, does it? In 2015, they bathed their futuristic headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag, declared LGBT Q-Day, apologized for their treatment of some of the game group breakers, including Alan Turnin during World War II, and then suddenly began embracing the left's cultural agenda. Now the CIA does it, the FBI does it, they all celebrate Women's Day and LGBTQ day and

every one of the corporations obviously do it too. And therein you can see exactly what these institutions of power perceive as in their interests, who decide what and who not to side with. And you look at who gets censored, you look at who corporations are endorsing, what these institutions of militarism and surveillance are, the flags they're waving and the ones they're not waving. And it's not difficult to see what is a lead opinion and what isn't. And whether it's because it's cynical, maybe there is part of that.

Like oh, we know if we wave the rainbow flag and we're the CIA that will get the left to embrace us more. Or whether it's just the fact that the new elite leaders in Western institution of authority have become true believers of these causes. Probably some division of both. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is that establishment power, including capital, is on the side of the left in the culture war. And as a result, they have become this kind of bullying faction that no longer really

opposes large scale financial institutions or corporate power or militaristic power because they perceive correctly there on their side and their allies. Well, I think that's probably a good place to end. We managed to tie things together there at the end. I mean, I guess I would maybe allow to add one more comment. It struck me that the best camouflage for psychopathic manipulators, those are people who will do anything instrumental to advance their own narrow self-interest, a well-documented group, let's say, on the psychometric and psychological front, the best camouflage for

asidious instrumental self-prom promoters who are willing to manipulate others, say, using fear and to accrue power to themselves is compassion, is the guys of compassion. You know, and what that means, too, is that the corporate malfeasance can cover itself up by allying itself with the useful idiots of the compassionate left. And I don't mean the people who are using compassion necessarily on the left as a manipulation in and of itself. I think there are plenty of people who do that, but the people who are not even enough

to assume that a show of compassion means the real thing. And the fact that those enablers exist, and I think the Democrats, by the way, are right with such people, means that the real manipulators, at the levels of operating at the levels of undeserved and untoward corporate power, governmental power for that matter, can manipulate entire populations by claiming to be compassionate, well going about their normal business, which is the accrual of power to themselves. And I think that accounts for that unholy alliance, you know, and that strange alliance between,

because it is a strange alliance, between the left, which historically in its best manifestations did provide a voice for the dispossessed, for the unholy alliance between the modern left and the corporate and gigantic government, well between the corporations and the gigantic forces of government and media. So that seems to be where we're at now. And it's not obvious how you conceptualize that or oppose it within the confines of the classic divisions between right and left, right? It's a whole new landscape that's presenting itself to us, and it seems to require new conceptualizations. Exactly. I mean, you know, that's why I think there's confusion sometimes about my ideology and others ideology. The Atlantic just called RFK

Jr. the first Democrat, whereas when RFK Jr. is critiquing a lot of the institutions that had long been the primary targets of the left, including the US security state and Big Farma and the US War Machine. But now that code is right, wing. I also think to just add very quickly to what you said as the kind of just to tie it all together is I think identity politics is very similarly to how you just describe these social justice causes and the way that they're cynically employed by these institutes and the power to give the appearance that they're on the side of the left, and they become actual allies of the left. Obviously, if you just change,

demographically, the people who are running these institutions, so that now you have a black woman who's in general, or you have a Latino man who's the CFO of a major corporation, it casts the appearance that there's been some kind of a radical change for those of casually looking. When in reality, it's just kind of the costume that they're dawning in order to continue doing exactly what they're doing. And just to win new supporters, and it's incredibly effective because ultimately so many people are satisfied with the most superficial of changes and are willing to embrace and cheer any institutions of authority as being their allies, even though they're continuing to do those things that

they always have done when they were once their enemies. And that is exactly what is causing this new political landscape. Hey, well, you know, that seems like a very good place to end. So for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Glenn

for another half an hour on the daily wire plus side will conduct some investigation into the manner in which the interests that he's displayed fairly consistent interests really over what almost it's a long period of time now 30 years really pretty consistent interests in protection of free speech, for example, that looks like it's your paramount concern and then associated interests of all sorts on the political and cultural front. So we'll delve into the genesis of those preoccupations

on the daily wire plus side. And if you're inclined to go over there and have a listen or a watch, that might be useful for you. And productive for us, as Glenn mentioned, and I mentioned during this podcast, YouTube has been on our case to a fairly intense degree in the last couple of months, me to some degree,

because they've censored three of my podcasts. And I suspect we'll censor a number of the other ones that I have in the can. And really, gone after a number of the people that I'm working with or alongside of at least at the daily wire plus. So if you're inclined to throw them some support, this is probably not such a bad time to do it.

In any case, we're going to head over there. Thank you to the film crew here in Northern Ontario for facilitating this and Glenn for talking to me today and for sharing what you've been investigating with everybody watching and listening. And to everyone who is watching and listening, thank you very much. And, uh, well, we'll see you on the next podcast. Thanks, Glenn. Thank you. Appreciate it. you