TRIGGERnometry - S5: Glenn Greenwald: Why Journalism is Broken

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author and lawyer. He is perhaps best known for his work with Edward Snowden whereby he published a series of reports exposing details of American and British global surveillance programmes. This work contributed to The Guardian and The Washington Post winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Andrew Doyle here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873619472 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/​​​  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​​​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The whole point of the meter, surely, isn't it, to hold the rich and powerful to account? Yeah, that's a nice, you know, fairy tale. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A brilliant guest we have for you today. He's one of America's finest and most principal journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm thrilled to be here. We've been working for a while for me to get here, and I'm glad it finally worked out, and I appreciate the invitation. It's great to have you on the show. We're so keen to speak with you, Glenn. We try not to focus on the day-to-day events and occurrences. I know you cover those as well, but the question we really wanted to start with is kind of to ask you the broader question, which is what the hell is going on with journalism? I think that you have to begin with the premise that the Trump era radically transformed almost every aspect of American political and cultural life, which if you think about it,

is not that difficult to understand why if large sectors of the society convince themselves that the person who has risen to power in a country is really this unprecedented threat, never before seen menace to all good things in the world, essentially and often literally the kind of return of like a Hitler-like figure. It's going to change everything that you do in terms of how you process the world, the decisions you make, the things that you come to believe aren't justifiable. And I think that, number one, there was a lot of true believers who really did see Trump in that manner and therefore their decisions

and making and behavior change very radically as a result. But I also think that this incentive scheme arose in which the people who fed that paranoid belief were the ones who were most rewarded. They were most rewarded, not just financially, although definitely that as well, but with more attention, more positive feedback on social media, those are very powerful incentives for human beings to which journalists are not even close to immune.

And so once you start looking at journalism, not as this profession that's designed to inform the public, regardless of who it aggrandizes or impedes, but instead as this kind of moral obligation to stop this profound threat where you turn yourself into just nothing but activist by definition. obviously it's going to radically transform the work that's done under the banner of journalism. And I think that more than anything is what happened. And let me ask you this, because a lot of people just having watched the last two minutes of you talking about what's happened to the media, might listen to that and think, well, Glenn is a massive fan of Donald Trump and he's just upset that other journalists didn't

love him as much as he does. So how, you know, first of all, can you address that and also just talk to us about And actually a good journalist would have done in the Trump era. Yeah. So, you know, if you, I mean, I've been in journalism for 15 years. I've been largely associated with the left, not just in the U.S., but also in Brazil, where I do a lot of work. My husband is a member of Congress with an actual socialist party. You know, the biggest influence of my political and journalistic outlook is Noam Trump.

And before that, I have Stone. I think it's a very hard case to make, given my views on individual issues to claim that I'm somehow some kind of a fan of Donald Trump, of course, that's often what's asserted, though I don't really think anyone actually believes that. I think my real split with the kind of mainstream sector of the media and the liberal left came not because they actually think that I love Donald Trump or I'm a fan of his ideology. I don't think anyone who's remotely saying actually thinks that. The split came over the question of whether you see Trump as some kind of a radical aberration from the American political tradition or simply a cruder and almost more candid reflection of it.

And I'd say most journalists were in the former category and I was definitely in the latter. I see Trump way more as a symptom of American pathologies than as a cause or the prime author. of them. If I did see him like a kind of Hitler-esque figure, I would actually probably have been more willing to think and behave in the way that they did. Here in Brazil, for example, I would never say to the Jaya Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, the far-right president, is anything like a Hitler figure. But he definitely is a greater threat to Brazilian democracy than Trump ever was to American democracy for a whole bunch of reasons, principally leading with the fact that Brazilian democracy is only 35 years old, not 235 years old, half the population lived under an actual military

dictatorship, and therefore its institutions are much more fragile. I always knew that in the U.S., there were these, you know, kind of permanent power centers like the intelligence community, the military industrial complex, Wall Street, whose existence is solely about preserving status quo stability and power, and Trump was never near strong enough to meaningfully challenged them. The most he ever did was kind of tweet some crazy things. But if you look at the actual conduct of his government, it very much resembled what came before him and what it has come after him as well. So I think the primary split in how I see Trump isn't about whether I like him or not. It's about how much of a subversive force I thought he was in American politics. And I actually

thought the ways in which he was subversive and disruptive were largely positive. But most of what he did was just kind of continue through negligence of nothing else, how America has been conducting itself basically since the end of World War II, and especially when it became the only superpower with the fall of the Soviet Union. And Glenn, it seems to me that the media has just abandoned nuance. They don't, they don't interested in nuance whether they're talking about Trump, where they're talking about Biden. We saw that with the election of Biden. What happened to balance journalism,

which analyzed both sides of the argument? Well, as I said, you know, look, if I actually believed that U.S. democracy was imperiled by a singular leader and the movement behind him, and he had designs to impose what we had always talked about as some kind of a fascist government,

or regime that was going to put an end to democratic institutions and democratic values, I would probably be willing to do things to fight that, even under the guise of journalism, that under normal circumstances I'd be unwilling to do because I would probably decide that the threat and the moral imperative to stop it is so great that it outweighs the norms and duties of the profession of journalism. So I think that once you begin operating from this premise that you're on the front lines fighting a fascistic takeover of your country, which is really what many of them either pretend to believe or in fact believe.

I think the line between those two things eventually blurs because if you pretend to believe something long enough, you ultimately start believing it. If you really do believe that, then journalistic norms, why would you? you mean, it would be almost immoral to be constrained by those, right? Because you're talking about wording off fascism. So I think that delusion, you know, beginning with the, you know, contrived conspiracy theory that Putin had infiltrated American institutions, like straight out of the 1950s, like the CIA labs of the 1950s, that the Kremlin had contaminated American in political life and converted people into clandestine agents at the highest levels of government

into then believing that Trump was like a couple of days from just like putting racial minorities into camps. When you work yourself up into that kind of frenzied mania, then I think it's almost rational to start behaving the way that they behave, which is not caring if what you're saying is true or false, not caring if you adhere to any kind of journalistic ethics or norms, doing everything you can, even if it means lying and publishing falsehoods, to stop this fascistic threat, which is why I say, I believe the crucial split is over who sees Trump that way and who doesn't. And what effect does that have on society, Glenn?

When the media are trying to essentially push a narrative, they're not there to investigate, to challenge, and then to report back. What effect does that have on society? But let's be fair, because America leads the world on this, on the globe as a whole. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating to me that corporate media outlets and the employees who work for them love incessantly to talk about the dangers of fake news and disinformation. And they love to lament the fact that people now turn away from them and no longer believe them and believe the sources of information that they regard is inferior to them or less reliable than they are. And in the course of lamenting this pathology, which is a genuine problem, you need a society, if it's going to be healthy, a democracy, it's going to be healthy to have sources of information that most people in the society, even if they have different ideologies, can more or less trust to tell them what's going on in the world. And if you lose that, you lose a really important stabilizing force and ability for people to even have shared perceptions of the facts. in reality. In all the discussions about how that's happening and how bad it is, they almost

never stop and ask the question, why has that happened? Because the answer is they play a central role in why people have lost faith and trust in those institutions of journalism that had long been regarded as legitimate by most people. They were the ones who sold the country, the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq. They were the ones who glorified the people who brought us the 2008 financial crisis from which people continue to suffer to this very day. And people are not dumb. They understood.

They saw for themselves that the media was willing to do and say anything to stop Donald Trump. And once you have this series of episodes that justifiably and validly cause a huge portion of the population to no longer place their faith and trust in established corporate media institutions, of course they're going to start looking elsewhere for their news. And I do regard that as genuinely tragic, even though I believe the people who are doing that are acting appropriately. I also don't trust those institutions. I regard it, though, as as damaging because I do think a healthy society needs a kind of group of

institutions you can rely on in trust. And part of my project is not to try and destroy these institutions, but to try and rebuild faith and trust in journalism by showing that it can still be done in a way that it can inspire confidence among people who have differing religious values, political beliefs, ideologies, and the like. And Glenn, what would you say to those people who go, look, here's a reality. The media have always been lying to us. They've always been trying to pull the wool over our eyes. It's just now in 2016, in the age of the internet, we are able to see it for ourselves. There's definitely validity to that argument. You know, I, as you know, you probably know, before I became a journalist, I was working as a lawyer, a constitutional

lawyer, and I started writing about politics at the end of 2005. I just created a kind of free blog. on what was called Blog Spot at the time, this free blogging platform from Google, in large part because I was looking at the developments in the wake of 9-11 and the War on Terror and felt that the media was not only ignoring really crucial assaults on civil liberties, but often was lying about what was taking place.

And the more I looked, you know, it was the first time I paid attention as a full-time job to politics and journalism as opposed to law, the more I began realizing that this has been a long-standing problem. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA partnered with all of the major corporate institutions, media institutions in the United States to disseminate propaganda. They would engineer coups and they would have Time Magazine or the New York Times call it, you know, a popular revolution or a, you know, blow against tyranny.

Conversely, when they had democratically elected leaders that didn't like, they would have those media outlets call them tyrants and then hail the replacements who were anointed by the U.S. with no votes as protectors of democracy. So this closeness between the security state and large standing corporate media outlets has been going on again since the security state was created at the end of World War II. And as I said, that's the reason why it was. wasn't right-wing media outlets that helped the Bush administration sell the country on the Iraq War. It was the liberal outlets like the New York Times and the New Yorker in the Atlantic and NBC News because those institutions, despite being more liberal on cultural issues, were completely

inextricably linked with and deferential to the government. And that created all kinds of deceit and propaganda. So it isn't that it's a new problem at all. I've been writing about it long before anyone dreamed that Donald Trump could be president. Obviously, many other people before me were doing the same. I think that what happened in the Trump administration is that all of that went on to steroids. You know, at the very least, even though the media often propagandized on questions of, say, foreign policy and barely ever questioned the security state, when it came to the kind of day-to-day trivial warfare between the two primary political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, they would at least make an effort to have a pretense of objectivity between the two

parties, not to favor one or the other. And that, I think, is more than anything what, that one kind of notion of fairness that they were clinging to, ultimately even that got destroyed. So they just became open propaganda arms of the Democratic Party and, engaged in open warfare against the Republican Party, all in the name of stopping Donald Trump. And I think that is what took, that's what took what was already, clearly a systemic problem, but made it a much, much greater problem and a more visible problem than ever before. So, Glenn, what about now, though? Because look, they got what they wanted, the Joe Biden as president, the Democrats are, you know, free to do almost whatever they want. You know, the kids, the kids are still in cages, but they don't have

to cover it and all of that. They're not cages anymore. Their detention facilities. That's correct. Of course they are. And so why are their brains still broken? They got Trump out. Why can't they just relax and start reporting the truth now?

Well, for one thing, if you look at what has happened to them, a lot of people forget that before Trump came down that golden escalator with Melania in 2015 and announced that he was running for president. most of these media outlets were on the verge of complete financial ruin. You can go back and find, for example, in articles in 2014 and 2015, that MSNBC was on the verge of firing its entire prime time lineup with the acceptance of racial matter because nobody was watching their shows. And the New York Times, people really doubted

whether they were going to actually be able to have a sustainable financial model. Trump saved almost the entire media industry single-handedly. ratings went through the roof. Enormous numbers of books were sold. People got very rich off, you know, activism and warnings over Donald Trump. The ACLU was laying off its entire workforce, basically, in the Obama years. No one wanted the ACLU suing Obama on the grounds that he was acting unconstitutionally. But then soon as, you know, they position themselves as the primary opponent to Trump, they're drowning in money.

So they don't want, he's a cash cow. So they don't want to go back to just talking. No one wants to hear about Joe Biden. And that's why their audience is disappearing. And it's disappearing very quickly. So they're just desperate, you know, trying to kind of pump life into this corpse that is the Trump presidency. But people know he's gone. And so it's not working.

It is true that even though Trump is no longer in power, there is his movement that still has some degree of influence. I mean, there's members of Congress in the Senate who still espouses ideology. One of them is going to be their Republican nominee, almost certainly in 2024, if Trump himself, as they're hoping and praying on their knees on a daily basis, runs again himself in 2024. So part of it is just the profit model. They need the villain, the scary monster, right? It's like, you know, if you have the Game of Thrones, you can't kill off Ceres,

the queen because who are you going to hate and care about and be angry towards? That's kind of what Trump is for these media outlets. So they need to kind of prop them up and keep them alive and convince themselves that the threat is still there. But also I think some of them, again, do genuinely believe that there's this fascist movement lurking in the United States ready to take over at any moment. And the hysteria and mania and paranoia and delusions and psychological and anxiety disorders that govern their brains and have since 2016, really haven't got anywhere. And so you listen to them and it does sound like they think it's 2018, in part because they want it to be and need it to be,

but also in part because they still believe that it really is. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name, registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be council culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies. Eno's a bit about that. So will you in a second.

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have a media that is no longer fit for purpose? The whole point of the media, surely, isn't it, to hold the rich and powerful to account? Yeah, that's all right. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's It's not like a nice, you know, fairy tale. I mean, you know, again, look, like the reality is the media, like, you know, 30 years ago when we talked about the media, we were only talking about gigantic corporations that it could afford, you know, cameras and studios and satellites and network fees or families that had long owned printing presses and gigantic newsrooms that employed hundreds, if not thousands of reporters and editors and the, and the last. So obviously, it's long been the wealthy and powerful that have controlled and owned the media. And so the media has largely served the purpose for the last, say, 30 to 40 years of serving the interest of power centers. Before that, if you go back kind of before the corporatization of the media, which for me began in, say, the 50s and 60s, for the first half of the 20th century, journalism really was this like outsider profession. they mostly came from working class backgrounds.

They didn't make much money. They were big union activists. They all had labor, you know, they all had newspaper guilds. And they felt like outsiders. They didn't go to school with the powerful and rich people they were covering. They hated those people. Like they had the outsider mentality.

And it really started changing when television became popular. And we started having multimillionaire news anchors and people aspiring to be rich and famous in journalism. And suddenly they were in the same social circles as the rich and powerful. And then the owners of those outlets were corporate conglomerates who obviously don't want any disruptions to the status quo and prevailing ruling class. And so I think it became much more an agent of preservation of power.

I think the internet, though, is potentially a genuine threat to that hegemonic order. And it's the reason why whenever an independent outlet starts to succeed, the way first social media did, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, they instantly started agitating for controls on those platforms. Don't let people say this, kick them off if they say that. And now that there are other outlets that are specifically created to avoid the kind of captivity to censorship demands that big tech monopolies have succumbed to,

they are obviously waging war against any of those that start to have an influence. You saw that yesterday with the news that I and seven or eight other people, including former presidential candidate and Congresswoman Tulsafebred, went to Rumble, a kind of YouTube competitor that is designed to ensure free speech unlike YouTube does. Same when I quit the intercept and went to substack and started having a big audience there.

Any platform that they can't control, that is used, that is empowered by the internet. So you don't need anymore a gigantic printing press to reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people. You just need an internet connection. Even to produce television shows now, basically, you can do that with the technology as we're doing right this moment.

You know, that's why they're waging so much, such a war of, you know, defamation and smear campaigns because they do believe correctly that the internet is finding, fulfilling its purpose of providing a way for human beings to emancipate themselves from control of centralized media and political power. And that for me is, you know, the most important war there is. I see the snowed work I did by the Edward Snowden in 2013 about whether we're going to have a free internet or the internet will be a weapon of coercion and control. And I obviously

see that as the same cause now in fighting against online censorship. And Glenn, just coming back, because one of the things we've addressed with the mainstream media is obviously the bias, and that's been a big factor in the last few years. But it seems to me like there's also another thing that has happened, and I don't know whether they're related or not. Tell me what you think about this, which is the media has not only been slanted or elements of it have been, but it's also lost its explanatory power.

Even if you watch a relatively objective reporting on, say, like, we're in London, right? and a few minutes walk from here a few years ago, a terrorist stabbed a number of people to death on London Bridge. Now, if you watched a report about that, you would almost certainly not understand what motivated him, who were the people who supported him, what drove him to do it, where he came from,

what the movement that he represents is. Like, it doesn't give you the context that's sufficient to actually understand what's going on. How is that? Is that something that's always been there, or is that a new development as well? Yeah, I absolutely think that that is becoming the way that journalists behave, is that they see, that they kind of look, like, I think that elite liberal culture, by which I just mean, say, the highly educated professional classes

who tend to congregate in large cities and capitals, obviously in your country in London and in the United States, New York, and Washington and San Francisco, in Los Angeles do genuinely see themselves as this kind of class of nobles, you know, this kind of enlightened class who cannot trust the rabble to make good decisions on their own, that you can't just give them information and leave it to them to decide. For example, that terrorist attack that you're talking about, you can describe what the motives were, Right? It was, I don't, I don't know all the details of the case you're describing. So just using this hypothetically, you could say it's this person who did this attack is a Muslim. He's a Muslim extremist. He's an extremist, both in his religious convictions and in his political convictions. He did it partly because he hates the permissive social mores of the United Kingdom and Western culture. He also did it in part because of anger at his perception that Western.

countries are interfering in the Muslim part of the world by propping up dictators and bombing innocent men, women, and children. And then you leave it to the public to decide how to evaluate that. Is the threat that this religion has not gone through reformation and therefore is actually a threat in end of itself, Islam? Is it that they don't, they're not compatible with Western values and can't integrate or assimilate? Or is it that we're actually sowing the seeds of our own attacks through the constant attempt to try and control and interfere in and invade their part of the world and take their resources and that it's what the CIA calls blowback. It's probably a combination of all of those things in different cases.

And then you can evaluate what policies do I want to support to stop that. What do I think? But the journalist class doesn't trust people to make those decisions for themselves because they see them as primitive and ignorant, travidites. And they, therefore need to be led and guided to how to think. And sometimes that means deceiving them. One of the most, you know, interesting things, I think, is the admissions on at least two occasions over the last year during the COVID pandemic by Dr. Fauci, the lead scientist in the United States, that at least on two occasions, he purposely misled the country, thinking it was for everyone's own good not to know the truth once when he told everybody not to wear masks,

presumably because he wanted to make sure that masks were for health care professionals. And so instead of admitting the truth, he told them masks don't work. And then who knows how many people went out onto the street without masks and picked up COVID and died. But then on another occasion, he admitted even more clearly when he was always asked what percentage of the population needs to be infected for us to reach herd immunity. he admitted that he lied based on polling data about what the country was willing to hear, that he lowered it to 65% when he really believed it was 75 or 80 because he didn't think people were ready to hear the truth. That is the mentality of somebody who believes that they are so enlightened that their lies are

noble lies. And I think this has become a common view of the educated classes in Western democracies. And the thing is, when you have contempt for people and you condescend to them and you show them that you believe that they're ignorant and inferior, they know that, they feel that. And the only reaction that that will produce in any healthy human being is to make those people who are being judged that way feel contempt for the authorities and institutions of power who are expressing that for them. And I think you see this over and over and over. I know here in Brazil, a big reason why Bolsonaro was elected in a country that four consecutive elections had elected a center left or even left wing party, the Workers Party of Lua de Sova, was because the institutions that they hate kept telling them they couldn't do it. I think following British politics, a big reason why Brexit passed is because the mavens of elite liberal discourse. the Oxbridge crowd in London were telling them, you can't vote for Brexit. And it was a big fuck you. And they said, I'm going to vote for Brexit. Obviously, the election of Trump has similar overtones. A lot of people who twice voted for Obama voted for Trump. Obviously, something was going on there besides ideology. So I think this kind of contempt that the elite class has for those that they regard is inferior to them is driving a huge part of these dynamics.

And you say it's driving a huge part of these dynamics, Glenn. It almost seems like the same parallel thing is happening with the left, and particularly the left political parties. Labor in our countries, Democrats in yours. Yeah, I think, you know, you see this dynamic playing out in particularly liberal precincts because in the United States, the Democratic Party went from being, the party of labor and workers and minorities as it was primarily constituted in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and into the 80s. And then with Bill Clinton, he had an explicit project to remake the Democratic Party

into a party that would serve corporate interests so that they weren't outspent any longer by the Republican party so that the power centers weren't opposed to them. A very similar trajectory with the Labor Party, under Tony Blair. I'm nodding vigorously, as you say that, Glenn. I was just thinking that sounds exactly like Tony Blair here in the UK. I mean, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are, you know, in my view, political twins. And, you know, the victories that each of them had as unknowably skilled politicians, you know, made people think that that was the only path that that should be taken.

And it turned out, you know, at least in the U.S., that that kind of politics drove the working class out of the precincts of the Democratic Party. And obviously, Labor currently has a huge difficulty, even with the incredibly charismatic and earthly Cirque or Starmer, you know, winning in Northern industrialized, you know, working class constituencies for the same reason that if you make this party,

the reason why Joe Biden won, people don't really understand this, you know, for all the talk about how Trump is like a white nationalist and a racist and hates Latinos. His percentage of the vote among racial minorities, especially Latinos, increased significantly. It increased in 2016 as compared to previous Republican on the knees, but then increased even more in 2020. The reason Donald Trump lost and Joe Biden won, barely, is because a lot of wealthy suburbanites,

white professional college-educated suburbanites who had long-voted Republican, kind of a Mitt Romney-type Republican, found Donald Trump to crude and voted for Joe Biden. So the Democrats became even more of this like professionalized, you know, highly educated mid-to-uperclass party. And I think you see the same thing happening, you know, to the Labor Party. They have no way out of, you know, the only nation that they have. bread among working class voters. And so they're just kind of trying to desperately lean into a strategy that says, well, we'll just, you know, make ourselves more amenable to the kind of people

who have traditionally voted for Tories. And it's failing in the UK and it's failing in in the United States because you cannot win as a party that is, you know, viewed as an elitist party. And I think both the Starmer Wing, the Blairites of Labor, and the Clintonites and the liberals and Obamas and Bidens of the Democratic Party are both perceived that way correctly and accurately. And it's amazing. And I'd never put the two together at what happened to the media and what happened to the left.

Do you think there's any way back for either the political institution of the left and the media itself? Do you think there's any way to save these two political, the movement and the media, or do you think we need to start again? We need to abolish these things or let them crumble and rebuild, as it were? You know, I think the problem is that it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Because in the United States, what has happened is, you know, in 2016, there was an impressive left-laying movement for the first time in, I would say, several decades in the United States. It wasn't a hard left movement, but it was a left-ish movement that coalesced around Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of it came from the fact that the 2008 financial crisis and the neoliberal

policies of the Democratic Party had caused an entire generation of people to lose all hope for the future. They live with their parents until they're 30 or, older and larger percentages than any time since the Great Depression. They can't get married until they're in their mid-30s. And even then with great difficulty, both parents have to work outside the house. It's very hard to raise a child that way. And they're angry. And they became kind of amenable for the first time to a kind of left-wing politics

that railed against big finance, globalism, big tack, Wall Street. and Bernie Sanders came very close to beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. Had the DNC not cheated in the ways that WikiLeaks revealed, he probably would have beaten her, which is, you know, he started off as this, you know, very obscure old Brooklyn Jew who wasn't even a member of the Democratic Party. Obviously, no one thought he could get anywhere close to taking down the mammoth Clinton machine that was funded by,

billionaires and had demonstrated this huge centralized power for decades, was almost invulnerable, and yet he almost beat her. And that was a kind of sign that left-ling politics could really revitalize. And then obviously the victory by people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez against the long-term democratic kind of standard, you know, backroom lobbyist-funded politician, fed that perception. But then what happened was the fear that contaminated. the left over Donald Trump made the left rush into the arms of the Democratic Party.

So there's almost no distance any longer between the Democrats and the left. I see a lot of that, at least with kind of, I mean, I would say like one of the most prominent left-wing, you know, voices in the UK is, let's like say Owen Jones, someone who has like a decent-sized platform. And at the end of the day, you know, even if it's this like Blairite candidate, as the one who just ran, Joe Cox's sister. There he is saying, no matter what, you have to vote for labor. You have to vote labor. Even though what's amazing to me about that is the Democratic Party has made clear that it despises the American left. It humiliated Bernie Sanders. It has humiliated AOC. They just humiliated Bernie Sanders totally gratuitously when one of his closest allies ran for Congress.

And for no reason other than a desire to show how much they hate the left. They intervened in that race and poured millions and millions of of dollars into helping her opponent win and they succeeded. Just like the Blair-ightling of the Labor Party made very clear that they would rather sabotage Jeremy Corbyn and lose to Theresa May or Boris Johnson and win with Jeremy Corby, no matter how much the Laborites or the Democrats show that they despise the left and are going to spit in their face and every chance they get, both the British left and the American left remain incredibly subservient. almost like a very uncomfortable S&M ritual to watch.

Like the more they're humiliated, the more contempt is shown for them, the more submissive they get. So I barely see like a left-wing movement in the UK or the U.S. separate and apart from the labor, establishment labor party or the Democratic Party. And I also see the media getting worse. So that's why the only thing that interests me are creating new platforms and institutions that are constituted by other ways of thinking about the world beyond traditional, liberal versus conservative or left versus right, ideological categories that to me are becoming increasingly archaic and ossified.

I just think rebuilding competing institutions is the only prospect that is a cause for any optimism at all. Hey, Constantine, are you crypto-curious? I told you, this sort of behavior is illegal in my country. If you've thought about entering the world of cryptocurrency, but it felt a little too overwhelmed, Coinbase makes learning to buy and sell simple. Coinbase is a trusted and easy-to-use platform to buy, sell and spend cryptocurrencies. They support the most popular digital currencies on the world.

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at Coinbase.com forward slash trigger. sign up at coinbase.com forward slash trigger for five euros in free Bitcoin. This offer is for a limited time only. So be sure to sign up today. That's coinbase.com forward slash trigger if you're real man. It's interesting that you make that point because one of the things that we should all acknowledge, I suppose, is you've built obviously a very successful career as an independent journalist.

Now your substack is huge. You've got a huge following on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. You're now on Rumble. And we ourselves, you know, we're, we were doing very well with our show on YouTube and elsewhere as kind of independent journalist stroke commentators all three of us. But there is something to be said for big media corporations, their ability to do investigative journalism by employing lots of people to sift through billions of pages of documents and

things like that. Like we do need some form of corporate media, don't we? Well, yes and no. So you're right. I mean, I've always maintained my status as an independent journalist, but in the most important reporting I've done in my career, I've worked with large institutions. I probably wouldn't have been able to do this note in reporting had I not been able to lure the guardian into doing it with me. I needed the teams of editors and fact checkers and lawyers and money that only a big institution like that could provide. I couldn't have reported on a gigantic archive of that technical complexity alone.

I probably would have been prosecuted had I just been off on my own. I think a big reason why Julian Assange is in prison and I'm not is because he hasn't ever really aligned himself that way with large corporate institutions. When I did my reporting here in Brazil over the last couple of years that ended up freeing Lula de Silva and, you know, ushering in a lot of changes. in Brazilian politics and a lot of reform, not only did I have the intercept Brazil that I had created that was funded by a billionaire, I also ended up partnering on purpose with the largest newspaper in Brazil

and also the largest news weekly in Brazil, because not only did I need the financial resources that they can provide, the expertise that journalists have that I don't have, technologists to work with you, to decipher the material, but then also kind of the army of lawyers and voices you need, if you're going to battle the government,

they absolutely agree with you. You do need resources and institutional power in order to do that kind of reporting. And that's why I say I don't, you know, my mission, my project is not to destroy the model of media. I believe in journalism, a lot. But it's only worthwhile if it's actually fulfilling its function. And so what I've always tried to do,

was balance that independence that you talked about with kind of looking at those institutions as something that I use and exploit rather than kind of submit myself to. You know, I worked with The Guardian and then left, and I always kept control of the archive and never gave it to them. I did similar things at the Brazil reporting.

So I think it's a balance, but I also think that the more people lose faith and trust in the media, the more possible it's going to become to build independent alternatives that do have real funding, whether because the public supports it so much that you can generate enough revenue to build it into a real institution. You can attract funders who also see the same things that we're talking about and have a lot of resources, all of which I think are possible. So creating a new space in media, I think is crucial, but you're right. It can't just B, you know, some YouTubers over here monetizing their audience and making a nice living

or a single substacker over here who's living well, you do sometimes need large teams in order to take on powerful institutions. And let me just push back on the idea about, you know, people creating content from themselves, building these new institutions, as it were. Let's look at the example of parlor. Let's look at what the powers that B did to parlor. essentially pulled the plug. I mean, they can do that to any of us. We're all in, you know, we're all at the behest of big tech. Yeah, I mean, that is a crucial question. I actually,

you know, it's funny, I was on Fox last night and I made the point that I think the destruction of parlor is one of the most overlooked stories of the last year, if not the single most overlooked in terms of what it really showed. The only thing I would compare it to is the decision by Facebook and Twitter to ban any reporting on the Hunter Biden archive in the week's evening. That was absolutely extraordinary. But that got some attention. The destruction of parlor happened so quickly, and it was in the wake of the January 6th riot that a lot of people overlooked it.

But what people forget is that, you know, after January 6th, when Facebook and Twitter removed Donald Trump from the internet, basically, even as world leaders objected, including world leaders who never had any good things to say about Trump, Angula Merkel, found it alarming. Emmanuel Macron did too. The president of Mexico was very eloquent in denouncing the dangers. People migrated to Parlor because they wanted a place where you could be free of that, just ability of big tech, just zap. Even the elected president of the most powerful country in the world off the internet. It's incredibly chilling. And Parlor became such a success. that it was the single most downloaded app on Apple and Google PlayStores,

more than Facebook, more than Instagram, more than TikTok, more than anything. It was the most popular app that people were downloading and using. And AOC and a bunch of other Democratic politicians went on to Twitter and said, Google and Apple, how can you allow a platform like this that is enabling insurrection, and right-wing violence on your stores. And then obviously, knowing that the Democratic Party was about to take over all branches of government, when Apple and Google heard that, they responded.

They kicked Parlor off their store, so you couldn't download it anymore. And then AOC went back on Twitter and said, thank you, Apple and Google. Now, what about you, Amazon? Why are you still hosting Parlor on your web service? And then Amazon did what Google and Apple did, which was obeyed the demand and kicked Parlor off.

And within 48 hours, this union, of big tech monopolies and the Democratic Party destroyed the most single popular app that people were using to communicate with one another on the planet. So the question you ask is a very important one. And all I can tell you is that obviously alternative outlets like substack, like rumble, like others like that, have watched that and realized that they need to come up with technical solutions to insulate themselves from those kind of attacks. So they're not dependent on Amazon and Apple and Google, that they can build their own technological infrastructure that immunizes them from the ability of outside forces to destroy them if they

get too powerful and too successful the way Parlor did. Obviously, there are a lot of people like Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter. Long may he rain, Glenn. Long may he rain, especially because he has now become powerful. probably the single most important voice advocating for the need for blockchain and crypto technologies, which will decentralize everything, turn them into protocols so that you can no longer, even if you want to, pull down content because people are using their own personal protocols that aren't dependent on anyone else. I think that's a little ways away. It has its own

questions and problems, but absolutely technological solutions to prevent the kind of thing we saw with Parlor, but also with the censorship of the Hunter Biden reporting are of the highest and most urgent priority. Glenn, I wasn't going to ask you this, but I think I ought to. Do you think that, because I couldn't get, I couldn't get why people weren't getting, you're the first person I've ever heard say what you've just said, which is what I said. The moment, the morning, the morning that Hunter Biden's story was treated in the way that it was treated, I walked into this very room and I said to the guys here, this is the biggest story of the year. This is the biggest story of the year. And everybody, them and everybody else kind of looked at me like, what are you talking about?

Was that election interference, in your opinion? I mean, a zillion times more than whatever they claim Russia did. I mean, think about it. This reporting came from the oldest newspaper in the United States, the New York Post, founded by one of the founding fathers of the United States, Alexander Hamilton. And yes, it's Murdoch. Donne. And yes, it's, It's tabloid-ish, but it also is a real newspaper. And those documents were absolutely authentic. What bothered me the most was the way they justified, the way big tech justified.

I mean, if you try to, when I say ban, I mean ban. Like if you tried to post a link to those stories on Twitter, it wouldn't let you. It would just say that's an invalid link. Even if you wanted to DM somebody and speak privately to them and show it to them, you couldn't even post it there. Facebook announced through a Democratic Party operative who had spent 20 years working for Democratic Party politicians and then went to Facebook.

That's incredibly who they got to announce that they were going to algorithmically suppress the story pending what they said was going to be a fact check to make sure the documents were genuine. Of course, that fact check never came because the documents were. So Facebook blocked the story from a spreading Twitter band it completely. I think the reason that there wasn't a greater reaction

is because the dominant sector of the media completely supported that censorship, which is mind-blowing. I mean, imagine, if you're an authoritarian leader of a country or you're an authoritarian oligarch, and someone says to you, like, obviously, it can't happen, but what would, like, if a genie came

and granted you, like, one wish, what would be your greatest wish? you would say my greatest wish is that journalists wouldn't oppose me, but would instead become the leading advocates for authoritarianism and censorship. Right. Like, of course, that would ever happen. Journalists would never become the leading advocates of censorship. By their nature, they don't want censorship.

But somehow in the United States, that's exactly what has happened. Journalists are by far the primary and most vocal and relentless advocates and agitators for big tech censorship. And they were thrilled that that reporting was censored because they were petrified about Donald Trump winning the election and all they cared about was making sure he loses, even if it meant doing censoring and suppressing legitimate reporting. But what people also forget is the way that all got justified

was that 50 former members of the intelligence community, including former directors of the CIA, invented out of thin air, the lie, that those documents were, for the byproduct of Russian disinformation. So that phrase, Russian disinformation, had two claims to it. Number one, that those documents came from the Russians. And number two, that they were fake, that they were inauthentic, forged.

Both of those claims were absolute lies. But every media outlet, including the Intercept, which I co-founded in 2014, to challenge the intelligence community, not to serve them, published that lie, that these documents were a Russian disinformation to justify not covering them. And that was the – so it wasn't just that big tech interfered in the election. It was that the CIA did as well, interfered in our domestic politics and prevented, who knows how many millions of people from hearing about – you know, obviously it's no one cares

of Hunter Biden as a drug addict or hiring prostitutes. But the stories that were relevant were the fact that he was pursuing deals in places like in Ukraine and Ukraine and China. that the document suggests included his father in profit participation deals, which obviously raised real ethical questions about the presidential frontrunner. In a really close election, it is a very high likelihood we'll never be able to prove it that suppressing that story by the millions swung the outcome of the election. And it was a joint effort by the CIA, the liberal sector of the media and big tech.

That was the coalition of power that engaged in brute censorship in order to manipulate the outcome of the election. As I said, a zillion times more worrisome than whatever they claim Russia did, even if you accept everything they say about Russia was true. Right. So, Glenn, we've got this problem with big tech. How do you solve it? Do you think that they should be treated as monopolies and effectively broken up? I do. They are clearly monopolies.

I don't think Twitter is a monopoly, but Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, those four companies in particular, are classic monopolies in violation of antitrust laws. I'm actually, there is a subcommittee in Congress called the House Subcommittee on Antitrust and other things I forget, but they have jurisdiction over that question. And it's obviously led by the Democrats, since they're the majority party. and they issued a very impressive, scholarly, and comprehensive 450-page report saying, concluding that these four companies are classic monopolies of violation of the antitrust laws and proposing a series of measures, including breaking them up. The problem is these companies are so rich that they fund both parties that they haven't been able to generate the support necessary to do that. And what's particularly bothersome is you have all these, you know, right-wing politicians like Republican House members who love to go on Fox News or OAN or Newsmax or social media and denounce big tech and say big tech tyranny and all of that. But at the end of the day, they're getting funded by the lobbyists for those companies. They talk a big game, but they won't support these measures to break up these companies.

There are some Republicans who are now doing it. They just got past the point where they believed democracy can withstand this manipulation. So hopefully, and part of my project, is to try and bring the right and the left together in their common hatred for these companies. And that's what antitrust laws are for because that's the only way you can deal with monopolies by definition is you can't compete with them. It doesn't make them a monopoly. I agree with you, Glenn.

And look, this is why the stupid left versus right game is so fruitless and pointless, we're ignoring the real issue, which is essentially the big tech companies now, to a large extent, decide who gets elected. And that should worry us a lot more than Jeremy Corbyn's giving money away or Boris Johnson delivering or not delivering Brexit or whatever else. Though we could talk for hours, but we've got to let you go. So before we do a couple of questions for our local supporters, let us ask you our final question, which is, as always, what is the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? You know, I knew you were going to ask that because I've seen you ask that before.

So I should have had an answer ready. So I didn't have to do all this stammering and stuttering that I'm so obviously doing right now to give myself time to think about what the answer might want to be. You know, I think that when at least when it comes to U.S. politics and also even British politics that tends to be a part of this. one of the things that seems to find ongoing bipartisan consensus is the idea that these Western powers, NATO powers, should continue to play this role in the world of operating these gigantic militaries and trying to control the rest of the world through these gigantic expenditures that, as I said earlier, often are what lead to people hating our countries and our governments. We bomb places, we kill them. And with Afghanistan now unraveling and people realizing that 20 years of occupation of Afghanistan, at huge expense to the countries that did it, including yours and mine, basically accomplished nothing. As the Taliban, I'll just take over the country as though it, as though none of it ever happened.

And it does seem to be the kind of policy that evades any kind of debate because it is supported by both the establishment wings of, say, in your country, country, labor, and conservative party and in the United States, through Republican and Democrats. So I think it's time, you know, China just produced this kind of trolling, mocking video about how they only spent $800 billion to create this incredibly efficient, comprehensive, high-speed rail system that obviously serves the Chinese. You can go travel immense distances from one city to another in a very short period of time. And it's very important. environmentally friendly as well, while the U.S. spent trillions of dollars in a 20-year war in Afghanistan and the 10-year war in Iraq that produced no benefits for the American people. And I think

those kinds of debates are ones that, you know, we probably should be having a lot more of. Glenn, it has been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find you online, where would be the best place for that? I rate at Substack, so you can find me there doing my journalism. Obviously, I'm an active user of Twitter. and then I just this week have moved my video platform to Rumble because it's a free speech platform and you can find my video journalism there. Fantastic, Glenn. Thanks so much for coming on.

We're going to do a couple of quick questions for locals in the second, but in the meantime, thank you all for tuning in, watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time, which is 2 p.m. Eastern. Take care. See you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button

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