The Tim Dillon Show - 259 - Independence Day with Glenn Greenwald

Starting point is 00:00:00 Glenn Greenwald, one of the seven journalists, I believe I said there were seven journalists left. I may be exaggerating that number, but you are one of them. Thank you for talking to us. I appreciate it from your beautiful mountainside, uh, Casita and I don't know in Brazil. I'm on, I'm unsure. Um, I wanted to, that's so multi-lingual. Yeah. Well, I try. I wanted to talk to you, um, first kind of a broad general question. Are you surprised at how controversial you've become over the last 12 months? Is it, is it shocking to you how many people are angry at you and how often they're angry? Not exactly. I mean, I do tend to have a very slightly polarizing personality and it's kind

Starting point is 00:00:53 of in that way for a long time. So making people angry is in totally new to me. I've been doing that more or less since I started writing about politics and even before when I was practicing on Manhattan and even before that when I was just a, an obnoxious kid. But I think what has happened is because of this perception, it's not the reality, but the perception that I have removed myself from one faction and placed myself into another would generally inspires the most intense anger and hatred are not people who are just against you from the start, but people who you believe have become traitors to the cause or heretics to the religion. And there's a lot of people who are looking at me that way and are really

Starting point is 00:01:46 angry. It's kind of like a sense of betrayal. And I think that's part of what is being generated. But I also think it's, you know, I mean, I don't want to act like I'm some innocent victim. I mean, I also, especially since I left the intercept and found this kind of, you know, complete freedom and independence have been waging my own little war on a dominant sector of the media. And it's only natural to expect that they're going to wage war back on me. So I feel like it's kind of a two-sided battle. And it's not just me standing there all alone and innocent being, you know, attacked. What in your estimation has changed? The media held a lot of water for George W. Bush. Well, can you kill them? I'm kidding. I mean, I

Starting point is 00:02:33 hate, I mean, animals are so I know he loves dogs, but it's just, it's, it's, I mean, it's amazing that these people with the dogs all the time, dogs, you have to, hey, you have to take it on the right way. Tim, they're very, they're as excited as I am about your show. I was actually supposed to be on Rogan tomorrow and I had to cancel that. So they're a little upset about that as well. Who is that? Does he have a podcast? Go ahead. Anyway, I've Rogan. Oh yeah, the guy for fear factor. Anyway, um, what has happened in your estimation with mainstream media, because they did hold a lot of water for George W. Bush. They seem to always, uh, covet their position, coddling people in

Starting point is 00:03:13 power. This is my, my view of it as a comedian. And I look at them and I say they like to be close to power. They depend, they depend on scoops and they depend on access for stories. And I've watched, you know, I, it's amazing in my own short, little meaningless life. I have watched Ann Coulter go from let's invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity too. We shouldn't be, uh, doing anything. We have to be America first and take care of our own. And I've watched Rachel Maddow go from, um, we should not be, uh, you know, using the military as a tool, uh, of, uh, foreign intervention to we need to be using the military. It's everybody's flip flop. Values seem to be nothing. And

Starting point is 00:03:58 the only thing that seems to matter is this raw lust for viewers or for power. What has changed in this last, you know, five years? So the attribute of the media that you identified at the start of that question, which was this kind of deference to power has been there for a long time. It's probably more than anything else. What caused me to stop practicing law and start writing about politics in 2005 was my observation that the media had become extremely deferential to Bush and Cheney and the war on terror. As you said, it was a bipartisan war on terror. There was very little descent tolerated, no questioning. And there were all these kinds of vital issues, especially attacks

Starting point is 00:04:38 on civil liberties being waged in the name of, uh, fighting terrorism that I thought were very disturbing grave that very few people are covering. And I started writing about politics in order to do that. And noticed, of course, that the media was deferential to the CIA, the security state that goes back to the cold war as well. So I don't think, I still think that's a huge pathology in media, but I don't think it's new. I think what's new is what happened during the Trump years, which is in a lot of ways, Donald Trump just broke the brains of huge numbers, huge sectors of American society. Think about it. If you actually believe and you tell yourself every day and the people that you work with and listen to and who are around you are also affirming

Starting point is 00:05:21 this list of really disturbing conspiracies, like the Kremlin has taken over the United States and is controlling the levers of power using sexual and financial blackmail over the White House, that Donald Trump is like this hilarious Hitlerian figure who's ushering in fascism and is an existential threat to America. If you actually start believing all those things and saying them every day, you're going to go fucking crazy. And not only are you going to go fucking crazy, but you're going to start to conclude that a whole variety of things that previously were unthinkable to you because they're unethical or way outside of what the role is of the profession that you've chosen now become not only acceptable, but urgent. So the idea that you have to do anything

Starting point is 00:06:06 and say anything in order to stop this uniquely insidious figure, you have to align with the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, the agencies devoted to killing Donald Trump, you have to, or undermining Donald Trump, you have to reunite with the neocons and Bush Cheney scumbags because they're also against Donald Trump. It radically reshaped the worldview of financial elites, media elites, political elites, and Donald Trump became this singular figure through which everybody or almost everybody understood the world. And that's what I think accounts for those reversals that you were just alluding to. What about Trump was if Jeb Bush had won, I don't think we would have had this. So what about Trump was the catalyst for such a widespread mental breakdown? Was it that

Starting point is 00:07:00 he was vulgar and crass? Was it that so many people had told themselves he wasn't going to win? Was it that he defeated potentially the first woman president? What about him specifically sent people down that rabbit hole? Yeah, so I think it was all of those things that you just mentioned, but I do think the primary one is that just compartmentally, Trump was such a radical deviation from what we've come to expect from the face of American power. If you actually look at what the Trump administration did, there's almost nothing that it did that is radical from the perspective of the American political tradition. There was very little convergence between the things he was saying

Starting point is 00:07:44 and tweeting that made people so upset and the things that the United States government was actually doing because the whole point of the US government in the post-World War II order is to function outside of the constraints of democratic accountability. They've insulated themselves from elections. It doesn't matter who wins. There's no way to change who they are unless you devote yourself in a very devoted fashion to undermining them, which is way beyond Trump's confidence or desire. He had the attention span of a gnat. He was interested in using the office just to vindicate petty personal grievances, not to radically transform the country, which had its value. What American presidents really are expected to do more than anything is to be

Starting point is 00:08:34 a deceitful, prettifying symbol on the horrors of American power, American capitalism, and American imperialism. They're supposed to be these erudite, lofty, noble figures like Obama and even like Bush was, and he's evangelical incarnation to put a pretty face on what the United States is. Trump not only was incapable of doing that, he's just a Bulgarian. He's spent his life in, you know, as a billionaire or a quasi-billionaire in New York. He's a thrice married gambling tycoon. I mean, this is not the person you'd want representing your team. Right. But not only do they have no ability to do it, but he also had no desire to do it. You know, I think like one of the most telling moments was early on, he did an interview

Starting point is 00:09:23 with Bill O'Reilly on Fox and Bill O'Reilly said, you seem really positive and enthusiastic about Putin. What, like, how can you feel so positive about Putin when he kills journalists and dissidents? And Trump said, what, you don't think we have our killers? He killed a lot of people here too. Yeah, his quote, we kill a lot of people here too. Yeah. Right. And it's usually the thing that makes everybody angriest is when you tell the forbidden truth, when everybody knows that that's true. But the American president is the last person who's supposed to say that, right? They're supposed to uphold images of American exceptionalism. So I think it was just the upset that at Brino, he just kind of like defecated on the White House.

Starting point is 00:10:07 He like vandalized the noble corridors of power that stand for American exceptionalism. And I think that more than anything is what got them so upset, along with the uncertainty that, you know, it kind of fucked with everybody's expectations. The New York Times is saying there was a 97% chance that Hillary Clinton was going to be elected. She's like a, you know, inside member of the royal court and has been for decades. There was the historical aspect of the first woman president, all those other things you said that also caused it. But he was just such an unpredictable tornado, you know, sweeping through Washington, where they all, their power and their certainty and their money and their livelihoods are all based,

Starting point is 00:10:49 that it was just like an earthquake that never stopped. And that's why it upset them. Why didn't they kill them, right? Because they killed JFK, they kill certain people, certain people they don't kill, they control. Why would they not in this case kill him? I mean, maybe they can't anymore. In the sixties, they used to kill everybody. Now that Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther, I mean, you can go through them, right? Malcolm X. I mean, they just kill a lot of people, right? Now, I guess they couldn't do that in this case. He won the presidency. So do you think when you had James Brennan and Clapper and all these people that were working to, you know, undermine his presidency seemingly from before he was even inaugurated,

Starting point is 00:11:36 do you think, would you say that was sort of a, am I going too far to say that that was kind of a soft coup? Were they trying to manufacture intelligence that got the president impeached and potentially removed? Was this based on anything real? Was it paranoia? I mean, I've read The Steel dossier and I've read some of Jane Mayer's reporting and I used to like Jane Mayer a lot. Like she wrote a great book about torture called The Dark Side. And I think she's written some really good stuff. She wrote about the Koch family, but some of her reporting on the Russia stuff seemed a little paranoid. What do you think that was when you look at Russia Gate, you look at the inception of it, where did it come from? Is this paranoia or was this

Starting point is 00:12:20 a coordinated attempt to remove a guy who was elected from office? Well, you know, it's interesting where filming, where we're taping this on, on the 50th birthday of Julian Assange, who was president. And you might, yes, you might say like, well, why don't they just kill him? Because he has been, you know, probably the single most effective person in terms of spilling Western secrets in the last generation. And the reason is, is because they didn't have to, they just neutralized him. They locked away an foreign embassy for eight years, and now they have them in a high security prison in the UK, never having charged him with any or convicted him of any crime, but just he's been in prison for a decade. That's how I look at Trump

Starting point is 00:13:03 as well. He was really a weak president to him. Like he dominated the news, but they did a great job with this concocted Russia Gate scandal that really engulfed his presidency for four years. He got impeached twice. I mean, the second time was because of the January 6th stuff. But, you know, the first impeachment grew out of Russia Gate, but it paralyzed the administration forever. They were under investigation from the start. And that all came out of the CIA and the FBI. And, you know, like, it's not like it was completely concocted. I mean, I know this is shocking to a lot of people, but countries do interfere in each other's domestic politics, the United States, more so than anybody. So yeah, the Russians wanted to fuck with

Starting point is 00:13:50 the election, just like the Iranians did, just like the Ukrainians did on behalf of Hillary Clinton. And, you know, there were some meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russians that ordinarily would have just faded into the woodwork and the context of like billions of dollars poured into the election. Some Russian bots on Twitter and Facebook were like an infinitesimal, barely detectable presence. So they took this tiny little grain of truth and they exploded it into this completely manufactured, but quite dangerous conspiracy theory because it ratcheted up tensions between the world's two largest nuclear powers. And then you had these media outlets who, as I said before, were convinced that it was their solemn duty, no longer to do journalism, but to stop Trump,

Starting point is 00:14:37 which are two very different things. And they just started getting fed by the CIA, like they have been for decades, this just carousel of leaks designed to harm Trump. And they just were publishing it without any critical analysis at all. So when you say like, why did they kill Trump? Like they didn't need to kill Trump. They got most of what they wanted despite Trump. Why couldn't they control, the way that John Brennan kind of controlled Obama, it was a very close relationship, and got Obama, I think we were in seven wars and we had a huge drone war. Why were they not able to do that with Trump? Was it mainly personality? Did they, they felt that they had to neutralize him with Russia? Why would they not just,

Starting point is 00:15:22 he seems like a guy that loves adulation. He seems like a guy could, was there no other way that they could have, you know, exacted influence on him besides, you know, dragging the country through this two year somewhat ridiculous thing? So part of it, I do think is personality. If you look at how Obama has navigated through life, he's always been an institutionalist. He always appeased institutional power. He was very adept at making people feel like they connected to him, that they were doing something subversive and important when in reality all he was doing was a grandizing institutions of authority. That's who Obama was. So he came into office with this huge army behind him saying he was going to change Washington. He had no interest in doing that. So

Starting point is 00:16:06 it was very easy to kind of mold Obama and integrate him into this existing permanent power center. He didn't really resist. He kind of liked that. He found it appealing. So, you know, and he got those like cerebral generals like David Petraeus and love like special forces and like covert operations more than full scale invasions. So, you know, they were very happy with Obama. I think it's two things with Trump. One is, I do think like his personality, you know, if you look at how Trump has always lived his life, I lived in New York 15 years when Trump was, you know, just like a celebrity billionaire real estate logo always on page six or whatever, you know, he was born in Queens. We always had like this huge inferiority complex.

Starting point is 00:16:50 He always felt justifiably like the Manhattan establishment looked down their noses at him because of how he spoke his outer borough demeanor. And that's why he was building those huge, you know, penises in the middle of Manhattan to show that like he wanted to live above them all. He like always had an inferiority complex, much like Richard Nixon did. And so when you have this inferiority complex, it breeds this like resentment. And when you're resentful toward institutions, you're really not looking for them to like you. You actually feel this hostility towards them because you know that they look down upon you. That's one thing. But I think the bigger part of it was the CIA and FBI's maneuvering against Trump began prior to his inauguration.

Starting point is 00:17:34 It happened throughout the 2016 campaign. That was when Russia gate was born in order to help Hillary. They were openly cheering for Hillary. But the last two prior CIA directors, Michael Hayden under George Bush, Michael Morrell under Obama, so one Republican, one Democrat, both essentially endorsed Hillary and the New York Times and the Washington Post, both accused Trump of being a Russian agent. So this narrative came from the CIA and Trump knew that they were trying to sabotage him from winning. So as soon as he won, the first thing he did was he turned around and fucked the CIA. And then like, remember, one of the first things that they did was James Comey went to, you know, the Trump Tower and briefed Trump on the Steele dossier knowing that

Starting point is 00:18:15 that would then justify news outlets covering it. And that was before he was even inaugurated. So he was at war with them from the start and they were at war with him. And I think like one of the most telling exchanges, people should go Google this if they haven't seen it because it's like a Rosetta Stone for how American politics works. Trump being Trump, when he saw that the CIA was trying to blame Russia for his victory, which he felt, you know, like it was kind of undermining or delegitimizing what he had achieved. So he was very angry about it, started going on Twitter and mocking them for getting a rock wrong. Like why the fuck should we believe the CIA when they say Russia did it? When they're the idiots, he told us that weapons of mass destruction

Starting point is 00:18:54 is not that weapons of mass destruction. Again, things that American presidents don't say that are nonetheless true. And I think it was like three days before Trump was inaugurated, Chuck Schumer, the senior Democrat in Washington went on the Rachel Maddow show. And she asked him about these tweets that Trump was, she was very upset because she loves the CIA. She's very upset that Trump would like demean, you know, the brave men and women at the CIA who keep us safe. And she asked Schumer about it. Schumer said, leaving aside the morality of it, he thinks he's a hard-nosed businessman. But even for a hard-nosed, just as a hard-nosed businessman, it's such a stupid thing what he's doing because everyone in Washington knows

Starting point is 00:19:33 that if you fuck with the CIA, they have six different ways to Sunday to get back at you. And that's what they're going to do to him. He foretold the entire, as you said, soft. Like he openly admitted what you're not supposed to acknowledge. Most people don't really know what the CIA is or what they do. I mean, my listeners do. And, you know, I think it's, most people think the CIA goes around, you know, keeping terrorists from flying planes into buildings, which I'm sure it is a percentage of their job. But from my understanding, the CIA is a kind of the enforcement arm of the larger, whatever you want to call it, whether it's the military industrial complex. Some people have said

Starting point is 00:20:17 it's, you know, they use the word deep state. Basically, these unelected power factions in Washington that are made up of this revolving door of corporatists and lobbyists and defense contractors and people that are involved in the extraction of natural resources and, you know, high-level people in banking and high-level people in tech. And the CIA is sort of, you know, their muscle, so to speak. They're the agency that's able to kind of pave the way for them to do the things that they want to do. Am I wrong in my conception of what the CIA does and what their function is, you know, maybe their primary function? No, it's pretty accurate. I mean, you know, I like if anyone ever asked me what books should I read

Starting point is 00:21:03 to understand American politics, I always encourage them to read any history of post-world war, post-world war two national security state like the devil's chessboard. Yeah, it's an amazing book, you know, because it's the other one that's good is are you there, Vodka? It's me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler, where she lays out the role of nation states in the post-Cold War paradigm. Chelsea Handler is my favorite foreign relations scholar, so anything you read by Chelsea Handler. She knows more about espionage. For someone that's spent as long as she did drinking morgaritas, she knows a lot about Russian politics and a lot about espionage. And I commit, as do many people in my business. Many people who've spent their

Starting point is 00:21:46 lives talking about their penises on stage are very good at counter espionage. I had no idea. Counterintelligence. They're very good at it. You know, God bless them. Do you look at that as somebody, you know, you participate in the country and you see Hollywood and you know what's going on. I mean, I tend to think it is because Trump was kind of a creation of Hollywood and they felt like, like you said in the beginning, when you turn your back on someone, when it comes from within, it's much harder to accept than when someone's always been outside of that sphere. But Trump is a creation of Hollywood. He was a Hollywood star, the biggest reality TV show of his era, you know. But when you see people doing your job, you're a foreign affairs

Starting point is 00:22:27 correspondent to, you know, or an investigative reporter, whatever you want to call yourself. When you see people doing that on Twitter, who have zero credentials and they are, you know, actors, actresses, comedians, even some people calling themselves journalists, you have taken real risks. Like you live in Brazil because of the stories you've broken. What do you, how do you deal with that? Does that enrage you? Do you think that's funny? Well, you know, it's, what's interesting is I think I started, I think I was trying to remember the trajectory of like my awareness of you and how I came to know who you were. And I think it was probably like, I don't know, maybe six months ago is probably from the Joe Rogan show.

Starting point is 00:23:12 I'm not really sure. And then he just started like populating my social media feed, like this grilling weed that was just everywhere. I couldn't get away from it. And I remember watching, I was like, oh my God, I didn't know there were like comedians who were still funny. I thought they were just all like Jimmy Kimball, who, you know, like called Jared Kushner an asshole or like Stephen Colbert, who like talk about how Donald Trump sucks Vladimir Putin's penis, like just sort of like a slightly more crude version of Nancy Pelosi. Like that basically has become what mainstream comedy the United States is now. It's complete. It's not only not funny, it's pathetic. It's like all fear driven. It's like just trapped in these, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:51 like the most stale and primitive orthodoxies. So I think that it isn't just comedy, but like every aspect of culture, you see it with films now, you see it with art, with everything, that it has all become kind of corrupted and contaminated by the Trump years in a way that very few people have been able to escape. And yeah, watching any Hollywood, you know, like escapist thing, like an award show or whatever, you're going to hear the same shit that you hear from resistance imbeciles on Twitter. Like there's no escape from it any longer. It just subsumed everything. Now, when you, Julia Sange has been in captivity for about, or he's been held hostage for 10 years, I think about 10 years. And he's been psychologically

Starting point is 00:24:43 tortured and perhaps physically tortured. We don't know. No one is calling this out. No major media that I've seen has really been defending Julian Assange. We know all the reasons for that. We've listed them in this program already. Is there any hope for Julian Assange? Is there any way that he's released or has he been so broken at this point that, you know, even if he was released, it's like they've, they've kind of accomplished what they were looking to do. Um, I don't know for sure. I'm the last time I saw Julian was in 2018 or 2019 when I went to London and spent three straight days with him in the embassy. And he at that time was very lucid, very cogent, like in good spirits. Um, but that was before he was in prison. He was still at the

Starting point is 00:25:37 embassy, although he was looking very valid. I mean, you know, he hasn't been outside in 10 years, right? Like even prisoners in horrible American jails get to walk around in the sun for like a half an hour, an hour a day. Julian hasn't, he literally hasn't touched the sun or seen the sun in 10 years. He probably now has in prison, maybe a little bit, but when he was at the embassy, he was confined to a room and a half almost for a full decade. So he was, his health was suffering. Um, he couldn't exercise. He had no son, which is a necessity. You know, I, the thing that angers me the most about the whole situation is, you know, as much as the media hates me, when I was doing this, known in reporting, like in 2013 and 2014, and the Obama administration was

Starting point is 00:26:25 getting very threatening. I couldn't leave Brazil for like a year. Most of the media was on my side and like defended me. Why? Because I was kind of at one foot in their world, right? Like I was at the Guardian, one of the oldest newspapers in the West. And then in 2019 and 2020, when I did this investigative reporting in Brazil that culminated in the indictment by the Brazilian government of me, the attempt to criminally prosecute me as Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, had threatened to do for months. Most of the American media, almost all of the American media in fact, manifested in my defense, like the New York Times published editorials, you know, denouncing it with Julian is completely different because he's never really had even one foot

Starting point is 00:27:06 in that media click. And they spent five years flamboyantly marching around, like crancing around as defenders of press freedom, because Trump would like save some juvenile insult about Jim Acosta or post some like mean thing about Chuck Todd or Wolf Blitzer. And they would act like the First Amendment was imperiled. And here you have an actual grave threat to press freedom, the indictment that has been unsealed that the Biden administration is now pursuing. If it is, if it succeeds, it will criminalize investigative journalism, the relationship that in fact, when the Bolsonaro government tried to criminally prosecute me in 2020, they use that as their model. They, the theory that the US government is using against Assange is the one that the far right

Starting point is 00:27:55 government in Brazil tried to use against me, saying that my relationship with my source had crossed a line from passive receipt of information into an active role in the conspiracy to steal the information that I was reporting, which is exactly what they're using against Assange. So just out of self interest, you would think American journalists who pretended for five years to be so devoted to defending press freedom when it came to mean tweets about like blown dry CNN douchebags would be protesting and demanding Biden drop the prosecution, but they're not. They either don't know about it. They don't care about it or they're cheering it because they're infantile. And what really, what it really is about him is just it's pure

Starting point is 00:28:36 professional jealousy. Julian Assange has broken more big stories in the last decade than all of those corporate media drones combined. So he is what they pretend to be. And his existence kind of holds up a mirror showing what they really are. Like, why isn't the CIA and the FBI and the NSA devoted to imprisoning like Wolf Blitzer and Jim Acosta or like New York Times reporters, it's cause they're not fucking threats to anybody, their service. So the fact that they're doing it to Julian demonstrates who the real danger is. Who are the, when you look at the politicians like AOC and people like that, or whether it was Bernie Sanders or, you know, the woman with the brain injury. It's forgets Marjorie Taylor Greene. Who are the, who are the people

Starting point is 00:29:27 that you, and I don't know that she has a brain injury. I'm speculating that she has some form of autoimmune disorder, but it is entertaining and I have no problem with it. I think middle-aged women should go off a little bit. And that's a disagreement I've had. I think women, after they can't have children, should get a little flighty and nuts, you know, and a little offensive. Quite honestly, I, I like believe that. What do you think's happened to gay people? Let's talk about that for a minute because it's not fun anymore. It's moralism. I have to tell people how to live. It's very hard for me to take balls out of my mouth and then tell people how to live. I don't feel like it's my job. I like going to Florida and eating shrimp, but now people want

Starting point is 00:30:07 me to go to libraries and talk to children and help them realize who they are. It's not my job and I don't care. So what, what is this? It used to be kind of fun and now it's become this really office politics, bureaucratic, uh, you know, very, uh, language driven, kind of like, it's weird and strange and I don't understand it and I don't like it. It's really sad. Like whatever is shitty and cringy and repressive and weak about liberal politics, it finds it's like lowest point. Like it's Zenith in gay institutional politics, which is really sad because like we're basically the same age. I think you're like five or 10 years older than I am. Obviously. How old are you? When, what? How old are you?

Starting point is 00:30:57 27. How old are you? 16. So you're wrong. Yeah. So you're right. I stand corrected. So like I'm a little older than you. Yes. You know, you know, like when gay politics was subversive by necessity, radical, yes. Interesting. Yeah. And like Larry Kramer and like AIDS activism. And you're solving to a degree as well. Yeah. I mean, Andrew Sullivan was kind of like ironically the sort of like kind of be the Catholic conservative conservative. That's why I like, uh, Caitlyn Jenner, you need someone, you need someone in the community that just really likes the country club.

Starting point is 00:31:39 Yeah. Well, and you also want like diversity, right? Like that's the whole point of a liberation movement is not to be constrained in captivity, but to be free and your expression of whatever you do. But what it, but ultimately like the politics from a radical and interesting, you know, we kind of went from like Larry Kramer to fucking Pete Buttigieg, you know, that's like for neither trajectory, but also the, the, what's really happened for me, like in terms of the, you know, you're talking about the reversals before on like foreign policy and imperialism with Rachel Maddow and culture or whatever. It's also taken place culturally. You know, when I was growing up, the people who wanted to control private behavior and culture

Starting point is 00:32:23 was the right, you know, like Jerry Falwell and the moral majority. And like the trans aggression came from the left, like Sinead O'Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. And so the left always was the culturally transgressive movement of liberation. It came out of the sixties obviously as well, like the summer of love, right? And like hippies and all of that, the free speech movement as well. This is completely reversed. The cultural left in the United States has a longer list of rules for how you can date, how you can fuck, how you can like feel sexual attraction for somebody than the fucking Pope has with his encyclicals. Like all this like formula for who you can date in ages and like

Starting point is 00:33:08 what you have to do and they want to control everything. Everything is abuse. Everything is harassment. It is, it's like watching this mirror image where they have all become this like highly repressive movement that is unrecognizable to me except with reference to what the evangelical and Christian right was in the 1980s, right? It's all become and even the pushback to the pushback is boring. I don't like I'm like also it's like, you know, trans women weight lifters. I mean, I know that's an issue, but I can't care about that on either side. I just don't care about the Olympics. And I don't care about anyone man or woman who competes in the Olympics. And I'm not saying it's not a nice thing to do, but I just personally, I don't care. I find the Olympics to

Starting point is 00:33:57 be sort of a large waste of time for me personally. I know that other people attach meaning to it. And that's fine. But for me, I don't care at all. If you know, I don't care that, you know, but, but it has gotten to this very weird point. There's just exhaustive all of it's exhaustive. The left is the right is exhaustive. It you just get to a point where nothing is new. We have the same conversations in a circular pattern over and over again. That's why Trump was sort of exciting because at least there were, there was this, there were these new conversations happening. Now they were all insane. The people with QAnon were clearly lost their minds and Russia gate as well. What do you make of, of, of how we come out of this pandemic? How do you

Starting point is 00:34:44 think personal freedoms and, and, and kind of this alliance we see now between big tech and big pharma and health policy and, and these very powerful wealthy people like Bill Gates, how do we emerge from this pandemic? Do we emerge much like we the same as before? Or are we now kind of on the road to a technocracy where decisions about your own body, decisions about your own health, decisions about all kinds of things, sexual freedoms are all going to be somehow strongly suggested and or enforced by government policy. And I think the, the COVID pandemic is clearly the most transformative event of our lives. You know, the only thing that probably competes with it is the 9-11 attack, but I would say

Starting point is 00:35:43 it, it's probably going to be much more enduring and consequential because it operates on so many other levels. You know, I remember going back to like March or April of 2020 when the lockdowns first began and we were all socially isolated and told we couldn't leave our homes and all those celebrities were saying stay at home. The idea at the time was people have forgotten this. You just have to do that for a few weeks. The idea is you have to flatten the curve, right? Like you have to prevent the healthcare system from being overburdened and collapsing. So you want to make sure the COVID cases kind of stream out in a way that's manageable. So you just stay home for a few weeks, maybe a couple months and then that will enable the healthcare system to

Starting point is 00:36:24 gain its footing. And then, but then of course, like the lockdowns quickly turned into something much more protracted than that. And then back in, you know, March and April of 2020, it was obvious to me, there was like a taboo, you know, like Trump was saying, and I think Boris Johnson was as well, before he almost died of COVID, that look, you know, yeah, we want to make sure people don't get COVID, but like locking people in their homes for months at a time is going to have its own huge cost. It's going to destroy the economy, right? Which makes people sick. It shortens people's lifespan. It causes people to be depressed. It causes mental health illness. There was already huge increases in mental health pathology in the

Starting point is 00:37:08 West. Every indicia of like suicide, depression, anxiety disorders, addiction, alcoholism, everyone was already skyrocketing before the pandemic happened. So then you take everybody and you kind of exacerbate all of the deprivations that modern society is imposing on people, the lack of connectivity, the lack of purpose. We don't have like churches anymore or synagogues or labor unions or like we all live in these tiny little isolated hovels, right? Where we were with really unfulfilling jobs. That's what's causing these mental health pathologies. People can't get married until they're like 40. If they get married at all, they have to live with their parents. So this exacerbated everything. And I interviewed

Starting point is 00:37:53 two mental health experts, Johan Hari and Andrew Solomon, and they both said this refusal to take into account the cost on the other side of the ledger from lockdown's isolation and the like is mind-boggling because probably it's going to be at least as significant as the number of deaths or debilitating effects from COVID. And no one wanted to hear that. You weren't allowed to do anything other than singularly focus on the danger of COVID. And it reminded me a lot of like the first few years after 9-11. You know, the reason why mostly I began writing was because there was this obsession on safetyism. Like, oh my God, we're so scared of terrorists. We're ready to dismantle our entire system of government and our culture and our constitutional order in order to protect

Starting point is 00:38:41 against it. When the whole time, even at the height of terrorist activity in like 2002-2003, the chances that you're going to die of a terrorist attack if you were an American was less than literally the chance that you would die by getting hit by lightning or like going out to dinner and eating some contaminated food and dying of it. It was always radically exaggerated. But by forcing everybody, by scaring the shit out of everybody basically, it turned Americans into this like completely submissive, acquiescent population. So that conservatives who like four years earlier were like, don't come into our land. You know, we're going to use our guns to, you know, we're like meekly taking off their fucking shoes at airports and doing whatever they were told.

Starting point is 00:39:22 You saw this like compliance that came from this collective fear. And exactly the same thing happened with COVID, but so much worse. Not only did people just stay at home for a year, like my kids, you know, missed an entire year of school, like think about what that's going to do to, you know, hundreds of millions of kids around the world. But also, Tim, you know, I think what it really did is it centralized power in the hands of already, you know, basically, omnipotent institutions of authority so that you are no longer allowed to even question the pronouncements of Fauci or the World Health Organization, or you would be banned from the internet. And everybody was happy with that. Everybody was fine with that, even though they proved so often to be wrong. And then

Starting point is 00:40:08 you had these corporate giants like Amazon and Google and, you know, Walmart that consolidated their power so much more as small businesses just died everywhere. And so now the whole country is like a country of serfs and renters who work for like a handful of tiny corporations with no competition. Everybody's enslaved to these like monopolistic authorities and has been trained to obey authority more than ever because they've been convinced that it's the only way they can survive. So politically, culturally, psychologically, and in every other way, I think the enduring effects of this are going to be much deeper and much longer than people realize right now. You ever look back at events like 9-11 where we took 15 pages or 17 pages out of the 9-11

Starting point is 00:40:59 Commission report to protect Saudi Arabia and things like that. And we, you know, people on the 9-11 Commission have said that it was set up to fail and Bush and Cheney would only testify in a closed session together sitting next to each other. Do you think there's anything more that we should know about that day? And I'm not suggesting that it was like this, you know, a massive conspiracy, but is there something, do you think later on down the line, we will find out things about that day that surprise us or enlighten us to a degree? I mean, you know, I think you kind of have to pick and choose your battles as like a public person, right? There's certain things that you fight for and then there are things you say, I'm going to leave that alone, right? Because we

Starting point is 00:41:48 all like find that energy and whatever. But here's what I will say is that why is it? Someone tell me why it is. I've been asking this question for years and no one has an answer that 60 years after the assassination of John Kennedy, 60 years, most of the files in the CIA about that event are still classified. Like we, even though everyone involved is dead, what conceivable rationale is there for continuing to conceal that? And you go back throughout, you know, all those assassinations that you mentioned about the sixties, even into the fifties, there are things, the reason is, is because this permanent national security state that you had asked me about earlier that got constructed in the wake of the U.S. victory in World War II, and that was designed to at least

Starting point is 00:42:41 nominally combat communism and the Soviet Union, which also became strengthened after its victory in World War II, that it has done so many things to that would shock people if they learned about it, that it would shatter the foundations of people's confidence and trust in current institutions today, even though all those people are along dead. So I don't put anything past the U.S. government in all of these big events. You know, there are like, why don't we know whether the FBI had informants in the three groups they claim are behind the January six riot, the three percenters, the oath keepers and the proud boys. It's inconceivable that they did it. Right. Of course they were monitoring those groups. We know that the leader of the proud boys had

Starting point is 00:43:33 already served as an informant to the FBI. These questions, just nobody wants the answers to these questions because once you start digging too deep into those questions, it becomes impossible to function almost. You have to and me and Joe talked about it. Yeah. Me and Rogan talked about it where we said, you look at even these, you know, Antifa riots, you saw cop cars that were just left there. You saw pallets of bricks on the side of the road. Like it did seem like, you know, with the Capitol riot, you saw a cop opening the gate to let people in. It does seem like at the very least, there are forces that want these things to happen, that want chaos, that want these things to descend quickly into chaos and that the result of that will be people that are more compliant.

Starting point is 00:44:19 And you look at that. And even with, you know, the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI knew who these two guys were and Russian intelligence said, we told you who they were. Then the FBI came out, admitted we knew who they were. They were allowed to travel back and forth to Dagestan. You know, so there is this idea that they were potential informants. They also went and like interviewed one of the closest friends and killed them. And killed them. Like anyone, they were like six of them and they invented some bullshit story about why they did that. Yeah. Which is probably they just didn't want him talking. And they just whacked them, just got rid of them. It's like a mafia state. Yeah. And I mean, you know, you look at, you know, if you look at the,

Starting point is 00:45:01 what are the effects of January six? The effects of January six are that the Capitol police got $2 billion more because the Democrats voted to give them more. There's a new domestic war on terror. There's a new war on terror. The same one that we had for the last 20 years after 9 11, but this time directed inward domestically, quote, domestic extremists, all of those agencies, right? Like who else scares Americans? Putin doesn't scare Americans. ISIS is gone. Al Qaeda is old. They're all like old villains on their last legs. You need new righty threats in order to justify the continuous growth and bureaucratic power and budgets of these institutions. And now you have it. You have right wing extremists, white supremacists,

Starting point is 00:45:49 whatever you want to call them, very similar. Do you know, people forget that like after the Oklahoma city bombing in 1995, which also has its own questions. Yeah, I knew and all that immediately arose a very similar narrative. Like on the cover of every magazine, Time Magazine, Newsweek, it was like white supremacist militias are this huge danger. And this is when the internet was first starting to emerge as a real force in American life. And the Clinton administration's primary demand in the wake of Oklahoma city was to have backdoor access to all encryption so that nobody could ever use the internet to communicate in a way that was off limits or out of reach from the US government. Each one of these incidents always strengthens

Starting point is 00:46:35 the power centers that are constantly involved in some way. And you could just write it off and say, maybe they're just incompetent. They just kind of know in advance about all of them, but they don't figure out what's going on. They don't know how to stop it. Or you can like look at the history of what these institutions actually do and take a more jaded view of what's more likely. Right. That some of these events are being actively encouraged because of the consequences and who they benefit. Are people like AOC, do you think she gets, and I already kind of see it happening where she gets folded into kind of the mainstream of American political culture and then just kind of becomes everybody's favorite girl boss?

Starting point is 00:47:18 She, you know, it's funny when she was running against Joe Crowley in that primary in 2018, but no one who knew who she was, one of my colleagues at the Intercept, Ryan Grimm, who like has his pulse on his finger on the pulse of like the left wing of Democratic politics, the left wing flank. I remember he like emailed me and he said, Hey, you know, there's this candidate. I think you're really going to love her. And you know, she could really use your voice like supporting her. And I went looked and I was like, she was saying all this like radical stuff. And it was during the war with Israel and Gaza, like one of the 10,000 wars, but it was an outbreak of violence at the time and the Israelis

Starting point is 00:48:01 were shooting Gazans at the border just over a fence, like just randomly shooting at them. And she went on Twitter running for Congress in New York and said, it's time that my party, the Democratic party, stop overlooking the human rights abuses of Israel. And I was like, all right, she sounds good. Right. So I interviewed her. And if you go and watch that interview that I did with her, it went viral at the time. Like that's when people started really knowing who she was. You won't recognize her. Like it's a completely unrecognizable person, the person that I interviewed and then championed from the person that she's become. And it reminds me, you know, like, I was friends with all those MSNBC hosts. I used to be very good friends with Rachel Maddow,

Starting point is 00:48:44 like when she was on Air America. And then even when she first got her MSNBC show, same with Chris Hayes. And in 2011, Chris Hayes wrote a book before he got his MSNBC show called Twilight of the Elites. And the main thesis of the book is that elite America has failed. It has no more claim, valid claim to authority. And his argument was this concept he called cognitive capture, which is that elite institutions have become so perfectly constructed that anyone who enters them and immerses themselves in them, inevitably, not likely or usually, but inevitably will become co-opted by them. No matter how well-intentioned you are when you enter them, no matter how resistant you think you are to their pieties, the reward system that they

Starting point is 00:49:32 have, it's like a perfectly constructed psychological fuck of your brain that no human being can resist. It's just been perfected over so long. And I remember I asked Chris in that interview that I did with him, well, you're about to go have an MSNBC show. What are you doing to repair yourself to inoculate yourself against this? And he's like, I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. And you can see the effects of the fact that he was telling the truth. So you put AOC in Washington and you tell her, hey, you want to be on this committee that'll give you a lot of social media viral moments where you get to snap at some banking executive or whatever. We'll put you on that committee as long as you shut the fuck up about the attacks

Starting point is 00:50:19 you're doing on Nancy Pelosi and our donors. And as long as you've, I'll tell you, this is actually what has changed my view. My husband is a congressman here in Brazil. He ran for city council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and won and then ran for the federal congress 2018. Now he's a congressman. So I see it from the inside. What happens? He was raised in this really poor slum in Rio de Janeiro. So friends lived there. Exactly. Exactly. Very good. There's people that aren't worldly, but I am and every now and then I want to let people know. Do you ever, by the way, I'm going to let you continue, but have you ever encountered the Brazilian wandering spider there, Phoenitius Phara? Yes, we lived in this kind of forest area of Rio on the top of a mountain and

Starting point is 00:51:12 frequently those things are fucking terrifying. It would enter our house and I would have to call somebody who was not my husband or myself to go kill them. All right, continue with the congress. So anyway, so he grew up in a favela. He like, he like actually, you know, he like enter politics because he actually cares. It's cute. He like, seriously, he doesn't think of it as a career. He like really wants to help people's lives improve or whatever. So he'll have like a bill that will like allocate like, I don't know, like say a million dollars to build some community center in the like favela. So these kids who are like eight and 10 have things to do and don't get recruited into drug gangs, like actual things that will help people. And then he'll go to the like

Starting point is 00:51:57 the scumbag leaders of the congress who control what gets on the floor and I'll be like, can you help me get this, you know, bill on the floor and they'll say to him, yeah, we'll let your bill come up for a vote and we'll even like make sure it passes. But we need you to make sure that you and your faction vote for this corrupt giveaway to our funders and lobbyists. Like we'll do a deal. You vote for this. And then you're suddenly in the position of like, do I stand on principle? You know, and just say, go fuck yourself and then get nothing for the people who sent me there to help improve their lives. And I get to feel good about myself, but do nothing. Or do I make that compromise? And then like the more you make that compromise, the more you get sucked into that

Starting point is 00:52:41 system. And before you know it, you no longer distinguish between what's really the compromise and what's not. What's the way around it? It just seems like human nature is kind of inherently flawed. And then no matter what system you set up, you're going to have something like this. You know, I mean, you could get public money out of politics. I mean, good luck. That seems like a good idea. But I mean, then you'll just have, you know, the Epstein and the just laying, you'll have like, there'll always be kind of ways, there'll always be things people want that they can have that are provided to them. There's some illicit and they'll always be controlled. You know, when you look at the Epstein situation, how many elected officials are blackmailed, bribed, owned,

Starting point is 00:53:22 controlled, you know, with sex, with drugs, with things that they did, cheating on taxes, businesses they had years ago, like how much, how big of a scope do you think that is? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, right? That's one of the things that never got investigated because of his unfortunate and tragic suicide in prison. Yes. And, you know, I think, you know, human nature, if you just look at history, like human nature is a really ugly thing. Right. And so it's almost impossible to construct a politics or human institutions that aren't plagued by these kinds of pathologies. On the other hand, we do as humans also have this kind of capacity for compassion and empathy because we're political and social animals, we do have

Starting point is 00:54:15 a kind of better side that can be appealed to. So I don't know, I've kind of come to the conclusion that what humans really do need is leadership, like strong, charismatic people who they follow, who are going to be imperfect, who are going to do dirty deals because that's just the nature of how you wield power, but who just on balance are going to make things somewhat better. And I think that's the most of what you can ask for and hope for. Yeah, it's a very rationalist view. Do you like Brazil? Will you stay? Oh, yeah. Like the first time I ever came here, I got here like at night, I woke up the next morning, I was in Rio with my partner at the time and I told him, I was like after we walked around for two hours, I said, I seriously like am concerned

Starting point is 00:55:07 that anytime we have an opportunity to travel, I'm never going to want to see any other part of the world. I'm always going to want to come back here. It just like spoke to me at like resonated with my soul. And now like, you know, we have a life here, like my husband has a political career. We have two sons who are both Brazilian, very Brazilian. And yeah, I love it as much as I ever have. It's like, it's just a very vibrant, fascinating, eclectic, like culturally, like really innovative country. Like there's really nothing else like it. It's like Austin. No, that's a joke for my listeners. But we're in a dump. We're leaving. Joe Rogan convinced us to move here to a swamp. Have you ever gone to the Amazon? Is that that podcaster? He's a fear factor

Starting point is 00:55:58 guy. He told us to move here and then we came here and it's like there's like two restaurants and they suck. Everyone's tech people. They don't even, it's like tech people. They don't care about culture. They're just eating like macadamia nuts and sitting there in their estates trying to figure out how to choke the remaining freedoms we have out of us. And they don't care. And they, you know, they did it to the Bay Area where it's like, you know, it's just kind of a boring, you know, who cares and the cities all go to shit because the resources are sucked out and you know, given to condo developers so they can build, you know, you know, high rises with floating bathtubs. And then you have all these problems. What do you, what do you

Starting point is 00:56:38 make of like, have you been to the Amazon? The Amazon is always fascinated me. I've always wanted to go there. I mean, I haven't spent, you know, lots of time there in a way that like I can say anything meaningful about it, besides what you read about it. I mean, I've been there twice for a couple of events. But yeah, like it's just the kind of, it's like what it makes you realize is that, you know, there, there are people who live in the Amazon who are tribes that have no contact with the outside world. They're just very pristine and, and, and detached from the matrix. I saw one of them on TikTok. Where is, now are these people just completely, and they'll be killed, right? With diseases because they have no immunity.

Starting point is 00:57:26 Well, I mean COVID started entering because one of the things the Bolsonaro government is doing, one of the ways Bolsonaro won was he got funded by the like lumber industry and agri-businesses that want to cut down the entire Amazon and sell it all off for profit. So they're constantly invading the Amazon. They don't give a shit about the indigenous people who live there. And they did, they, like one of the things they did was bring COVID to a lot of those indigenous tribes that, as you say, don't really have, they have no healthcare system and they really don't have much of an immunity because they've been inbred for so long not to need it because they're not exposed to tons of bacteria and viruses like the way we are. So they had a much higher death rate.

Starting point is 00:58:09 A lot of these tribes did from COVID than non-indigenous people. Yeah. And that's unfortunate. Are you planning on making any trips to the United States? Are you going to, are you working on a new book? Are you, what's the next phase? What's the next thing for you? Are you going to start a podcast to build a social media empire? Are you going to be an influencer? Where do you think the next journey takes you? Well, I'm doing some modeling, obviously. That's always been a big part of what I've done. And I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I've seen you at shoots. Yes. No, well, I was, like I said, I was, I was supposed to be in Austin literally today. We would have taken you for dinner and

Starting point is 00:58:51 proven how bad it was. I know. Yeah. Yeah. That would have been great. But I'm going to be, I just had to cancel for logistical reasons that are too boring and annoying to go into, but I'm going to be there a little bit. Yeah. I'm going to start traveling again. I don't miss traveling. You know, I'm, I'm, my sub-stack has, has, you know, excited me. It's been a big success. And I'm, I'm also going to, there's like, I'm really interested in the only things I'm interested in are things that exist outside the binary, like outside the matrix that outside of that, like dreary left, right fighting. Those are the only things I listened to. Those are the only things I'm interested in. They're the only places I'm going. The reason why I go on Tucker Carlson

Starting point is 00:59:28 show is because I feel like that is an example of like something that's politically and ideologically heterodox. It's why I think Joe's show has been successful. Yeah. You know, and, you know, Crystal and Saga, that whole world, that's where I assisted. So I'm going to, I'm about to actually go to a new platform. I'm going to stay on sub-stack, but I'm going to do a kind of new video platform that's not YouTube that I'm going to announce soon where I'm going to do a bunch of like video programming and bring some people with me. We're going to do a bunch of interesting stuff. Yeah. So it's just, it's so funny because when I left the intercept, I did it very precipitously. It was the thing I created. I was there for seven years and it provided me a ton of security

Starting point is 01:00:09 and I like quit in 24 hours with no planning. And it was just the best fucking thing that ever happened, like just the emancipation, not just like, not no longer need to be captive to an institution, but just psychologically. You know, like there's never a moment anymore when I think maybe I can't say this, maybe I can't talk about this because of the need to appease that world because I've just not only cut myself off from that world, but then burned it down to the ground as I left. So yeah, I mean, I'm just very excited by, you know, the opportunity that there's like a growing ecosystem of people who want to do interesting things. Yes. And I just want to keep being part of that.

Starting point is 01:00:50 Well, you're, you're, you're welcome here anytime. Joe loves you and we'll, you know, that's an open invitation. Like people like you are very important. They're rare. And for me, as a comedian, funny is always found in the gray areas in the, the, you know, the non-binary, whatever you were saying, the non-heterodox, not in the non-binary, that's actually they, they don't love funny over there. But I mean, in the political non-binary in the, in the, in the spaces between things, because I think that's where you get the greater truths, right? I think the, the goal of any comedian or journalist is to like hit a harder truth than the one that's right there for the taking. I think the one that's right there for the taking

Starting point is 01:01:30 is shallow. And if you're good at what you do, you're trying to reach for that deeper thing. But where can people follow you if they want to support your sub-stack? Yeah. So it's just that we've been trying to get Katie Herzog, unsuccessfully deep platform from sub-stack because she called me a fat goon and I've written letters and we want her off every social media. Katie Herzog, who's America's final lesbian, the last lesbian that we have, but that's hate speech. Fat goon is hate speech. All right, continue. I'm going to get her, I'm going to get, I'm going to get her kicked off for you. Thank you. She actually, she actually got me trending on Twitter for 48 hours as a

Starting point is 01:02:11 transphobe because she wrote an article about how lesbians are disappearing because they're all becoming trans men. And I cited that in connection with my discussion of this new Gallup poll showing that like everyone in the universe now identifies as like clear and unbiased. None of them are gay. None of them are having sex with anyone. It's primarily online. It's amazing. They're like obsessed with sexual identity and yet despise sex. It's like the most asexualized movement, even though it's all constructed around sexual identity. I know. And we love Katie. We do love her. We love Katie. We think she's she got me like trending. She didn't fucking trend. I trended.

Starting point is 01:02:51 I was only just citing her article. Anyway, so I'm totally behind whatever anti-Katy hers are. You have, I will help with that. And ever I can, I want to be platformer. I want to like ruin her life really. So people can find me at greenwell.substack.com obviously on Twitter. I'm going to be on the Tim Dillon show. I'm just going to let myself on periodically. I think I pretty much did invite myself on this time. Yeah. So I'll be around. Yes. Say, say hello to my friend. Ida is such a huge Glenn Greenwald fan. She's so upset that you're gay. She would move to Brazil and live with you. So just shout out Ida say, Ida Tavacoli. She's Persian. She's always talking about the Iranian

Starting point is 01:03:31 Revolution. So if you could shout her out, that would be very, very cool for her. Just say hello, Ida. There you go. See, there it is. There it is. And what are these dogs just before I let you go? I mean, why don't you put the collars on them that they stuns them and shocks them and shakes them or drug them? I would sooner put a shock collar on you, Joe, than I would on, I mean, Tim, than I would on them. I've paid good money to have a shock collar put on me. I know I say that because I heard you liked it. Yeah. The only reason I would do Glenn Greenwald at substack. Go find him. Very good. We appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much for doing this. Good talking to you, Tim. Thank you.

The Tim Dillon Show - 259 - Independence Day with Glenn Greenwald

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