August 7, 2025 • 51 mins
Journalist Glenn Greenwald discusses how Trump 2.0 is avoiding the infiltration that hampered his first term; the growing disdain toward the U.S. being tied at the hip with every decision Israel makes, including Netanyahu’s plan to fully occupy Gaza - a burden the American Taxpayer will carry. Greenwald says there is a full frontal assault on Free Speech in the name of protecting Israel, and Netanyahu’s true legacy will be dividing the American political Right and Left. Greenwald, an early voice exposing the Russia Hoax, says the CIA & FBI fed the media lies, but MSM was so frothing at the mouth for RussiaGate that it didn’t even question it. This endless propaganda demonizing Putin was the real prelude to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine, under the guise of a “defense of democracy”. Greenwald answers the question: Is Brazil a dictatorship?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Now it's time for the Anchorman Podcast with Matt Yeats
and Dan Ball. Welcome back to another episode of our
show Anchorman, and I am joined today by a real
expert in what's going on around the world. Glenn Greenwald
(00:27):
is one of the original founders of The Intercept and
now is the host of System Update on Rumble. Glenn,
thank you so much for joining me. I want to
cover what's going on in a lot of different places,
but really I wanted to begin with how you view
just the Trump doctrine as we encounter it in this
second term, because it does feel like it has a
(00:48):
different energy than we had in Trump one, with people
like Mattis and Tillerson having a real large role in
the shaping of that policy. Now it seems very you know,
Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessant, Donald Trump, you know, it's economic
engagement deriven, But how would you describe I guess that difference,
(01:12):
and then the Trump foreign policy doctrine as we encounter
it in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, there's no question that the Trump administration in its
current iteration two point zero is very different in a
lot of ways than the first iteration. I think there
are a lot of ways in which that's a good thing.
I heard from the Trump campaign, people close to the
Trump circle all throughout twenty twenty four and into the
transition that they believe and I totally agree that one
(01:39):
of the big problems with the first administration was that
so many people had infiltrated it, had contaminated it. Who
pretended to be on board with the America First ideology,
but in fact we're swret enemies to it, and we're
really there to undermine and subvert everything he was doing.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
And I think they got away with that.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Because he was very new to Washington, he had never
been in an elected office before. A lot of people
surrounding him didn't really understand Washington, maybe as well as
they should have.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Me.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
He was rolling on Jared.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Kushner and his daughter, and I think they did in
a lot of ways subvert what he was doing, and
they were determined not to let that happen again. And
they clearly came in prepared to ensure that Trump is
the leader of the administration, he gives the orders and
people carry it out. They selected people who were willing
to do that, so we actually have an elected president
who's making decisions for the executive branch, which I personally
(02:24):
think is good.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
I think it's pretty dangerous.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
When you have you know, generals and other national security
officials just going off on their own doing what they
want and even violating orders of the president. I think
the problem at is that, you know, the reason I
was so interested in the Trump campaign beginning in twenty sixteen,
despite it causing a lot of kind of rifts with
a lot of former viewers and readers of mine, was
(02:47):
because of the American verst ideology, which I took seriously,
the idea that, look, it's time to prioritize American citizens
and their interests, which should be pretty basic, but it
hasn't been, which means, you know, battling big corporate power,
big banks, big multinational corporations, re instilling the notion that
we have an industry in the United.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
States, that we have jobs in the United States.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
But also that we're not going to go to war
for or continue to finance the wars of foreign countries.
I mean, this was so central for me, at least
in terms of what the promise of the Trump ideology
has been. In so many ways, we're seeing so many
violations of that particularly in foreign policy, but also it's
spilling over in a lot of ways into domestic policy
(03:29):
free speech as well.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
And there was the moment when he wins the South
Carolina primary back in twenty sixteen, where the veil is
pulled back on this theory that Republican operatives and Republican
candidates have been told that you have to support this
Liz Cheney version of foreign policy in order to have
any credibility. Otherwise you're an outcast, you're someone that is
(03:54):
derided regularly. And Trump stood up and called George W.
Bush a war criminal and walked in and won South Carolina.
And that was that, And it was a remarkable reshaping.
But one of the reasons that condition you described of
the of infiltration occurred is this highly intricate credentialing system
(04:14):
that interventionists have developed in Washington, D C. And I
never understood it until I got there and really started
to pay attention. But so much money is spent on
these think tanks to get people, you know, vice President
of Public Policy for Eurasia titles and to endow professorships
where people could say, oh, there I was at you know,
(04:36):
Georgetown or some other you know that the School of
Foreign Service and developed this lecturing credential, and when you
weigh that against the life experiences of a lot of
people who are foreign policy realists, it gets challenging. And
that what weighed heavily on the first Trump term. I
think people saw through that really effectively on a lot
(04:59):
of fronts this go around, but it is a condition
we still encounter. What do you think the antidote is
to that? There are all these like you know, Wilson
Center type entities that do such a good job credentialing,
but if someone thinks thoughtfully about maybe wanting to reserve
(05:19):
America's focus to America's interests, they don't get those opportunities.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, that's why it's so important and so interesting to
speak to somebody who was in the kind of battles
of Washington as you were, and got there with a
certain set of ideas about how Washington works and then
actually saw the real way that it works and will
just speak openly about it. It's not that common. I think,
the whole world of think tanks, it's so opaque and
mysterious to most Americans. Never think about think tanks, don't
(05:46):
really care about think tanks. When it's such a crucial
part of the incentive scheme in Washington. I remember when
Nikki Haley resigned from the Trump administration as the US
Ambassador to the United Nations in the first Trump term,
and she got extremely rich in the immediate aftermath of that,
made something like eight million dollars, paid off a lot
(06:08):
of debt she was in, and we investigated, like other
journalists did, to find out how she was making that money,
and one of the major ways was that she got
hired by think tanks who are funded massively by huge
pro Israel interests, pro war interest the kind of people
who just want who get appointed and too key positions,
whether it's the Democratic Party the Republican Party, they have
(06:30):
kind of a shadow government, and so it's a two
way system. On the one hand, they do a very
good job because of how much money they have in
being able to sort of attract the people who seem
to Washington lotmakers or White House officials like they're the
real experts and they're only there because of their shared ideology,
the sort of bipartisan concentives that they believe in. And
then there's also a second incentive, which is you know
(06:52):
that if you leave government or you leave Congress, as
long as you did your service and serve that agenda,
there's all kinds of sending cures waiting for you where
you can get very rich by doing that. And you know,
I think, on the one hand, there's all this progress
that has been made in breaking this you know, decades
long bipartisan consensus that has been so detrimental to our country.
(07:15):
The rise of independent media has obviously been crucial. The
fact that there are all kinds of members of Congress
now on both the left and the right, who are
deviating from it and making the case for it. There's
obviously a left and right anti establishment feur of the
kind that I don't think we have seen for decades
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The problem, though, and it's.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
So true, is if like you look at Washington, the
two parties in Congress still basically work more or less
the same way. They're really not responsive to these changes
in public opinion. And that's because what official Washington has
is this kind of luck in system to force people
to serve the agenda of money the interested in Washington
and really not very much listen to or care about
the actual constituents who elected them.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, it is a binary test. Are you willing to
go along with the grift? And if you're willing to
go along with the grift, then that presents in a
variety of forms. You're willing to go say that bills
do things that they don't actually do. You're able to
kind of like falsely avoid blame on things like spending.
You're able to take these just bogus intel briefings they
(08:19):
give you and then walk out acting like you've seen
the Rosetta stone. And if folks go along with that,
you're right. There's a very lucrative incentive structure. One member
told me, who had played the game and got a
sweet gig, that being a fella with a think tank
as a member as a former member of Congress was
just like being a congressman. But you make four times
(08:41):
the money because you have a big staff that's paid for.
You get all your travel expenses paid, You go around
giving interesting speeches to people who want to hear you talk,
You give media interviews, and instead of making you know,
bucks seventy two, you can make like six hundred thousand bucks,
and so many of them do. And then what that
means is those folks own them in the short term.
(09:02):
And I'll put it this plainly, if you did not
have defense contractors, the interests of foreign governments and a
select group of fortune one hundred corporate interests, think tanks
wouldn't even be a thing. You wouldn't even know about them,
you would never never hear about them. But now they
are providing this Fox credentialism and also a lot of
(09:25):
grasstops imagery around support for US intervention in a variety
of these conflicts. So the first one I want to
talk to you about, obviously, is in Gaza, where Israel
is now saying they want to occupy Gaza, which is
the most predictable thing after the way they have waged
this war. But is it wrong, Glenn, that there's a
part of me that's like, you know what, you guys
(09:47):
want to go be an occupying force, take the baton
and freaking run with it, because we have endured that,
and in the early odds in Iraq and Afghanist Dan
to tragic consequences, even Russia got the he Gat Assyria.
You add Iran pulling back from some of their proxy forces.
So if Israel wants to go the neighborhood Crime Watch
(10:08):
of Gaza City, like the Block Captain of Gaza. Won't
they kind of get their punishment just from the nature
of that experience or is it going to have to
come with all of this shame over the atrocities that
people have witnessed.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, well, first of all, I think there's a big question.
I mean, I would look at it differently perhaps if
it weren't for the fact that the United States government
and therefore American workers and American tax players are going
to pay for the whole thing. You know, we send
four billion dollars a year minimum automatic to Israel, and
then the deal negotiated by President Obama on his way
out in twenty sixteen with net Yahoo it's a ten
year deal, so it's going to be up for renewal
(10:46):
in twenty twenty six I'm sure that number is going
to increase. But then on top of that, we send
billions and.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Billions and billions more.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
We send seventeen billion dollars extra every time Israel decides
they want a new war, And on top of that,
we deploy our own military assets and put our service
members in harm's way in that region to protect Israel
as well from the anger that they're provoking, and so
we The cost the United States and American tax players
is so massive, and if they go and occupy Gaza,
(11:12):
they can't do that without us paying for it, and
of course we're going to end up paying for it.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Trump is pretty much made that clear. Now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Having said that, I think it is interesting to note
that the most vocal opponents of this new plan to
go and occupy Gaza, and it's really not a new
plan if you listen to Israeli leaders from the start
after October seventh, Bake, the hostages and dismantling Hamasis were pretexts.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
That's their WMD. They're nine to eleven attack.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
The real goal that they always had was they want
they a lot of them believe in in the idea
that Gaza in the West Bank belonged to is really
even though the entire international community is against that. The
US government's position for decades has been we wanted to
state solution. That's no longer a possibility. They want to
move those people in Gaza out, the Palestinians and the
(11:56):
Muslims and the Arab Christians and replace them with Jews.
If Israeli Jews that are going to rule that that
region as well as annex the West Bank then was
always the plan. But the interesting thing is it's the IDF,
you know, like the generals and the IDF officials who
are saying, if we go in and occupy Gaza, it's
gonna first of all, it's going to be a death trap,
(12:17):
you can by it. But there's still amaster there, there's
armed people there. They're obviously going to fight at guerrilla
war like we saw in a Rock, and they're gonna
have to deal with that for years.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And then on top of that, there's no plan.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Like what are you going to do with the people
that there's still well, there was two point two million
people when this began, maybe there's one point eight one
point nine million l So you're right, if they do that,
they're going to be probably harming themselves. But the thing
that I worry about, Matt, is that, you know, they
have demonstrated that they have no regard for life of
the people in Gaza. They don't see Gozins or Palestinians
(12:49):
more broadly as human. The number of death and the
starvation has demonstrated that. And obviously if they go in
and occupy, it's going to entail massive amounts of more death.
They're going to just be killing randomly because they are
going to be in danger. IDF soldiers and they're already
fighting multiple front wars for several years now. Huge numbers
of them have PTSD, a lot of them won't go
(13:12):
back to fighting. It's an army that has really been
put through the ringer. And to ask them now to
govern Gaza the way the United States other governed you know,
Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle and all the places in
Iraq for all those years, You're right, I mean that
is not in Israel's interest, But I worry more about
the impact on the United States and Americans as well.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
The way those funding battles work in Congress is just
debasing for so many of these folks who represent districts
that are poor, that need their Congress member to care
about them, and the way we do this with some
of these touchdown international issues. Glenn, like I was shocked,
Like there was a time period where every week we
(13:55):
had to pass another resolution about the Wigers. And I
don't mean to, like, you know so say that their
plight is not a meaningful one, but just failed like
incessant and then with Israel. There was a time period
where almost every day we were passing a different version
of a condemnation of the BDS movement. And I don't know,
(14:15):
I'm not a fan of the BDS movement. I don't
want to participate in it. But did Mike Huckabee become
the leader of it when they tried to shut down
the Zionist Christian tours? Because I saw these statements from
Mike Huckabee where they're shutting down the Zionist Christian tours
over with this Jewish supremacy ideology, and he says that
the way he's going to react is that Christians should
(14:38):
no longer plan to Israel, they should boycott their plan
to Israel, that American donors should stop funding groups in Israel,
so divest, and then he was gonna withhold sanction or
he was going to sanction by withholding the visas of
people in Israel who wanted to come to the United States.
So like, what chapter of the book are we in
when Israel loses Mike Huckaby.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Well, and also you know, the Israeli military murdered an
American citizen in the West Bank, as they do with
quite a lot of frequency, and Mike hut could Be
actually denounced that vehemently and called it a terror stact,
which obviously is a word that typically only gets applied
to Israel's enemies and not to Israel. It was really
the settlers who did the murders, but the IDEAF is
(15:23):
there to back them up, and there's no accountability. But
the thing is, Matt like, this is what I think is.
I'm kind of amazed at what I'm seeing, even though
on the in one way, I also don't find it
surprising because of everything we're discussing. This is a movement,
the Trump movement, that decided to call itself America First,
(15:44):
and the argument was that we have been financing and
funding and arming wars all over the globe that really
don't have anything to do with us, and as a result,
we need to reprioritize how we work in Washington so
that the American people and their communities that are falling apart,
and they're in our industry that has been you know,
de industrialized all throughout the country, and fentanyl and immigrants
(16:07):
and all the problems that is making are making the
United States fall apart, we need to focus on that
instead and now you have the summer recess in Congress,
which well we can get into why if you want.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
There's the recess.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
I'm sure you've covered this, but I don't know if
you saw. You probably did, but like thirty members of
the TUCUS, you know, usually usually the summer recess is
the idea of it is you go back to your district,
since none of them barely have anything to do with
their districts, so it's like one time they get to
go back touch the ground. There. They have clown hall meetings,
they hear from their constituents about what they're thinking, about
(16:43):
what they want. It's sometimes even raucous because people are
upset and that's an important thing for them to go to.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Here.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
They got on a plane on an apac organized and
paid for journey to Israel, and that's how they're spending
their recess. It's like and there's statistics that show that
members of Congress make pilgrimage to Israel more than every
country in Europe and Africa combined.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
They're constantly in Israel.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And you know, I think we're also getting to the
point now where a lot of people are starting to ask, like,
wait a minute, we were promised America. First, Why is
every politician that I'm listening to constantly in Israel the
leadership pushes you.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
I'll tell you why. I went on that Apec trip.
I went on subsequent trips, and there is an actual
downward pressure from the leadership and even the committee chairs,
Like if you're on the Foreign Affairs Committee, if you're
on the Armed Services Committee, if you're on the Intelligence Committee,
there's like an expectation that you go there and some
sort of like Congressional hodge. And I remember being at
(17:47):
the I'll never go back. I was at the King
David Hotel and I rolled back to my room unexpectedly
when the rest of the group was still on some
planned activity, and there's some dude in my room. I'm like,
hey man, what are you doing here? And he acted
like he was associated with the hotel and taking an
inventory but had no clipboard. And so yeah, there's a
lot of reasons why they want members of Congress over there,
(18:11):
and it is ideologically to steep them in this notion
that the protection of Israel is of great import to
people in America, but it's really not that important of voters.
And that is becoming more clear on the right and left.
So we've talked about the actual policy, let's just get
into the raw politics. I maintain that the true legacy
(18:33):
of Netanyahu is that during his control of Israel, he
has successfully made this a politically divisive issue on the
American right and left. And like when I was grown up,
it was a pretty bipartisan thing to have people generally
supportive of a friendly relationship between the United States and
the only democracy democracy in the region. And now on
(18:56):
the left it is a major issue in primaries. Do
you think it will be on the right? And like,
are we are we in the cycle where in twenty
twenty eight, maybe on the Republican stage, maybe on the
Democrat stage, maybe both. Like you're going to see definitively
anti Israel candidates running for presidents saying, nominate me to
(19:18):
lead this party and I won't make us subservience to Israel,
and nobody else on the stage will say that, like
it has.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
To happen, that it has to happen.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
I mean, I'd like to see what happens if anybody
who says that actually gets close to the presidency in
the United States. They're going to be a lot of
very powerful interests who are going to be very frightened
if that happens. But the reason why I say this
has to happen is because the point out that your
reference is extremely clear. Every single demographic group in the
United States have now as a majority views Israel unfavorably,
(19:54):
except for Conservatives over the age of fifty or Republicans
over the age of fifty, which are there's still clinging
onto this sort of you know, they've been indoctrinated going
back to the Cold War about Israel. But young conservatives
in particular are the steep downward is very, very.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Steep.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
It's very the incline downward. And you're obviously seeing major
major voices in the conservative movement, in the Trump movement,
Marjorie Taylor Green being one, you being another, Carlton Canie Owen,
Steve Bannon.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
I could go on and on and on.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
You've had people at the Daili wire now, like when
the Israeli has attacked a Catholic church, you know, on purpose,
saying wait a minute, like I'm going to get off
this train now. So there's only so long that you
can sustain a gigantic breach in public opinion. On the
one hand and what the members of Congress do, and
especially in a primary, if you have growing sentiments that
(20:48):
I wouldn't even call it anti Israel.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I would call it more.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Like opposed to the idea that we're supposed to be
tied at the hip to this foreign country. And you know,
younger conservatives have not been steep in this. Israel really
hasn't been talked about for the last ten fifteen years.
This is really the first time a lot of people
are getting a look not just as Israel, but at us,
how the US serves Israel.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
And it's really a shocking thing.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
People are watching babies blown up every day, baby starving,
and the israelis doing what they're doing in gods, but
also bombing Lebanon and Yemen in Syria and then cajoling
US into helping them bomb Ran. It seems like it's
the only thing that the DC class talks about. And
as a Jew, I actually do worry about how this
is going to spark anti Semitism in the sense that
(21:34):
people are going to be start to wondering, like, why
is our government so controlled, why is it so dedicated
to this, to this one country. And also I just
want to say Matt because in some ways this is
the most important thing to me. As you know, I
was very vocal and denouncing big tech censorship, Biden administration censorship.
I absolutely supported the lawsuit to sue the Biden administration
to bring it to the Supreme Court. That it was
(21:54):
a full frontal assault in the First Amendment to co
coerce and threaten big tech companies to remove the scenter
COVID Ukraine the twenty twenty election. It's why I'm at
rumble because they're free speech platform. But what we're seeing
now is a full frontal assault on free speech in
defense of Israel. I mean, the Trump administration is demanding
a radical expansion of hate speech codes to wildly expand
(22:18):
what anti Semitism is under this new definition called the
International Holocaust Remembrance AC so that that definition.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Is boss campuses.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
That definition is totally bonkers. That definition you.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Cannot You're barred from You're barred from saying, listen, this
is your bard. Okay, this is a Trump presidency that
was devoted to restoring free speech and opposing censorship.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
You are now barred from.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Saying that you think that what the Israelis are doing
in Gaza is similar to what the Germans did in
World War Two. You can say that about any other country.
You can impair the United States government to Nazism. You
can compare any other stinct that you any other country
you want on the earth, just you cannot say it
about Israel. You cannot say that you think Israel is
(23:00):
an intrinsically racist endeavor because it's built on the idea
of Jewish supremacy. You can call the United States racist
because it, you know, genocided Native Americans or whatever, slavery.
You're free to say that about your own country. You
just can't say that about this or China. You can
say it about Iran, Peru, Indonesia, whoever you want, just
not about Israel. And you can also not say that
(23:21):
you believe that the Bible teaches that the Jews played
a major role in the death of Christ, which is
a teaching that many, many Christians for two centuries now
have believed.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
I'm not saying you have to agree with any of
those views. But how can you be banned punished? How
can this be off limit?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
You'll be fired if you're on the faculty, you'll be expelled,
if you're a student.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
For expressing any of those views.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
There's a stranglehold on free speech in the name of
this foreign country, not even to protect our own people,
but in the name of protecting this foreign country.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
When I was trying to get senators to vote to
confirm me, they were giving me heat on this because
I voted against some adherents in the House to this
definition for those reasons you just laid out, Not because
I want to give any comfort to the anti Semites,
but because in that we've just gone through what we've
gone through with the Biden administration, where they get an
(24:09):
inch and take a mile on censorship. And you look
at a definition like that and it's almost memish. You're like, Oh,
how many products made in Israel do I need to
have in my house to like prove that I have
not a boycotter? What is a sufficient amount of Lamb's
blood to pay on the door with my allegiance to Israel?
(24:31):
And I'm sitting here getting grilled by the senator on this,
who ultimately said they would have voted to confirm me.
But I'm thinking to myself, who is having you asked
these questions? Like you from some Midwestern state where this
can't be like central to what your constituents want in
an attorney general, but it is so in the forefront
of their mind. And I'll conclude our discussion on the
(24:52):
Israel thing with this. You can't have this kind of
a disconnect where the political representatives are so beholden to
an ideology or any viewpoint that is becoming increasingly toxic
to the body politic at an exponential rate. This system
will not allow that to hold, and you will start
to see people emerge and say, vote for me because
(25:15):
I will not betray you in this way. And when
that happens, I think that, like Lynn said, some really
powerful people are going to be pretty nervous about it.
One of my other favorite things to talk about is
the Russia hoax. I really feel like I peaked during
the Russia hoax. And I remember those days where Paul
Ryan and Trey Goudi were telling us to trust Robert Muller.
We should just hope Donald Trump hadn't committed any crimes.
(25:39):
And if people just started to ask kind of basic
questions about the Russia hoax, like well, where where did
this dossier come from? And how are the how are
the mechanisms of intelligence collection being validated. If you ask
those questions, it was like you're Vladimir Putin's lawyer, You're
a trader to the country. And now, I mean, I
(26:00):
think history is going to reflect on this and say,
you had this batch of people in the Obama administration
that were very dedicated to the Russia hoax, you know,
before and after they ever found the first fact that
could have been tied to it, and then you know
you you had a reckoning thereafter, where during the Trump
administration some people who hadn't spoken up previously feel like
(26:21):
they've got enough of a yellow brick road to have
their views platformed with their criticism of that effort. I
think that's kind of how it washes. But what's just
crazy is the way those of us who ask questions
were were vilified, like you were among those voices. How
do you bring the new revelations into perspective?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
For I think the new revelations are helpful to make
people who still have residual doubts about whether Russia Gate
was a gigantic fraud and hoax perpetrated by the CIA
and the FIODO of manipulator elections. It's now a little
bit easier to convince more people that there's no doubt
that that's exactly what happened, That the CIA and the
FBI manufactured a complete lie and then fed it to
(27:06):
the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News,
and they gave themselves polishers for it and celebrated themselves,
and it led to a special counsel. But you know, Matt,
the thing is, like you could tell from the beginning,
the whole thing was a fraud.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
It never made any sense. Why would the Kremlin have
to conspire with Donald Trump and his campaign officials to
hack into the DNC and Podesta's email in order to
give them to WikiLeaks and have stuff that's incriminating about
Hillary Clinton be published? Would they? Why couldn't they just
do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
There was also never any proof that Putin ordered it,
that he did it in order to help get Donald Trump,
who I could nobody thought Donald Trump was gonna was
gonna had a chance against Hillary Clinton. And so there
was all this huge evidentiary evidentiary holes in it from
the start. On top of which the way the story
was being presented at the American public is exactly how
so many lies got disseminated to the public. So many
(27:56):
other times, the CIA and the FBI whisper to their
favorite servants of the Washington Post of the New York Times,
demanding anonymity, which they then get the things they want
the American people to hear. The Washington Post, the New
York Times, NBC News, they all go around repeating it,
and especially because they were so unified in their hatred
of Trump, they were absolutely determined to have this be
the thing that destroys him. And no evidence is needed
(28:20):
by any of these so called journalists when journalistic skepticism
of the CIA in the FBI is as foundational to
being a journalist as you can possibly get, they had
none of it. And it wasn't just this time, so
many other times as well. But you know, the other thing, Matt,
is that like the whole conspiracy, the whole conspiracy theory
from the start was basically composed of two claims. One
that Trump officials conspired, colluded and collaborated with the Kremlin
(28:45):
to break into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta.
And then the other one was even more important, I think,
to this conspiracy theory, was that Vatim red Potin had
blackmail power over Donald Trump sexually, financially, personally, as Nancy
Pelosi would always say, and as a result, if Donald
Trump got elected, it would basically be Putin who was
running our country? Okay, that was the core conspiracy theory.
(29:07):
Trump gets into office and the two policies that he
implements toward Russia are Number one, to flood Ukraine with
lethal offensive arms, which Obama didn't want to do, but
Trump was pressured to do it to prove he wasn't
a Russian agent. He flooded Ukraine with offensive arms, like
the most threatening thing you could do to Russia. And
then number two, he set out to destroy Nordstream two,
which was the basis of future Russian economic prosperity. It
(29:30):
enabled them to sell cheap natural gas to Germany and
then to Europe. And Trump told Europe, if you keep
buying gas through nord Stream too from Russia, we're not
going to pay for your defense. You have to buy
it from us. Why should we pay? So basically, Trump
attack the national security of Russia and the financial prosperity
of Russia, and not one journalist ever stop to think, Ah,
how do I reconcile with the claim that he's captive
(29:52):
to Russia, that he's controlled by Russia. And finally, I
will just say that on this core conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Of you know that Trump or his son, or his family,
or his.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Key campaign officials conspire with the Russians, they set out
they on leashed Robert Mueller, who they said was the
greatest and most honorable prosecutor ever do exist. He had
a so called dream team of prosecutors, unlimited resources, unlimited
subpoena power. They unleash them for eighteen months. It drowned
our politics in this conspiracy theory. He comes back, closes
investigation without indicting even one American for collaborating with Russia,
(30:25):
and then writes a report saying I looked, but I
did not find EDNY ambience establishing this link between the
Russians and Trump in order to interfere in the twenty
six US and to this day, if you go and
ask the New York Times, the Washington Post them, and
I'll people say, no, this wasn't debunk This is absolutely true.
And they're running cover now to try and claim that
Toulsi's documents that she released that she declassified, even though
(30:46):
they obviously fortify the fact that it's a hoax. No, no,
you're misreading them, they're fake whatever. They're so invested in
this fraud that they perpetrated. So yeah, I think the
disclosures help. But Russia Gate really is and was religion
to the corporate media into liberal America, and I don't
ever see that being really changed.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Well. And the media played their role in information laundering
because they're not going to be critical of what they're
fed if they're just so hungry to be fed anything.
Right there, there's an ecosystem where they're all there frothing
for information from these Intel officials, who, by the way,
a bunch of whom they want to go work for
these media companies afterwards, so that incentives they did. They did, Yes,
(31:28):
they did.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
It is the exact same dynamic we just described on
the think tanks and members of Congress with the Intel
officials and then the frothing media entities that are engaged
in this in this information spin up and what like
regular folks that are upset about this one. And I
was like, wow, you know, when someone getting thrown in jail,
which is very challenging prosecutorial decision, you got to make
based on the likelihood of a conviction and what for
(31:52):
you to get kind of the actualization where more people
do in fact acknowledge what this was, even if at
the time they were bamboozled. You have to have a narrator,
and that narrator can't be Director Gabbard as good a
job as she's done, like you have to have the
person on the inside explaining how this occurred. And based
(32:15):
on the documents that CIA Director Ratcliffe and Dni Gabbard
have released, those people do exist because they keep referencing
these career folks. But if we have to hear that narrator,
like forget the bloodlust of whether you want to see
people behind bars? Is that better done in a courtroom
or in a congressional hearing? If we think about how
(32:38):
both have been used to create a historical reckoning, where
does Glenn Greenwald want to see the best narration we
have of the worst features of this hoax?
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Any perfect world, which is not the world we live in.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
If you are inside the national security state of the
intelligence community and you purposely abuse the basically unlimited powers
that they have to interfere in an American election to
manipulate the electorate to try and get your colleague Hillary
Clinton elected to the presidency and destroy the Trump campaign
in the Trump presidency. I do think those ought to
be crimes that are held people are held accounted for
(33:15):
it legally. The problem is we've created so many barriers.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
And impunities and immunities for people who work in the
intelligence community. Who I mean.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I thought, you know, Bush officials should have been prosecuted
for authorizing warrantless spying on American citizen and violation for
the law, but everyone agreed, no, no, we can't do
anything like that, or for torture. There's so many different
layers of protections that these people have, and there's statute
limitations issues. So I agree that it's both unlikely and
the problem is if you didn't have an extremely strong
case legally or factually, you risk vindicating these people if
(33:49):
you can't overcome the gigantic kerdle of reasonable doubt in
order to get a conviction, and that would end up
having the opposite effect. So I agree with you totally.
The way to do this is to get people the
Republicans control of Congress, get people who are both the wrongdoers,
but then also people inside these agencies who will tell
the story of what they understand, what they know, and
(34:10):
that will bring a lot more public attention to.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
It as well. And to that I agree with you totally.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Someone credible needs to be sitting in those chairs with
the cameras on explaining to the American people why they
were deceived and why this deception was accomplished through incredible
abuse of these powers.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
That is the cathartic moment we need. And I sometimes
debate the role that the Russia hoaks played in the
conflict that we currently find ourselves in Ukraine in this
proxy war, and I think NATO expansion without a real
vision for NATO in the modern times, is a contributing
(34:52):
factor to what we're observing. And I also think that
just when the Afghanistan war wound down, there was a
place that the money launch and weapons launderers needed another
ecosystem to go in and habit. And I do kind
of think the winding down of Afghanistan and the winding
up of our involvement in Ukraine or linked. But others
have made the argument to me, and I don't know
(35:13):
that I agree with this, but that what the Russia
hoax did to kind of position Vladimir Putin as this
villain trying to manipulate our elections somehow led us to
this moment where we're more involved than we otherwise would be.
Where do you fall on that one?
Speaker 3 (35:32):
I absolutely believe that.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I from the very beginning, my concern with Russia Gate
as a journalist was that it was a evidence free,
baseless scandal.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
So obviously a journalist, I'm looking at this and saying
this is false. That was my concern.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
My bigger concern, just as I kind of an American,
a citizen of the world, whatever, is that there were
a lot of people inside the of administration, people like
Victoria Newlin and definitely Hillary Clinton, who believed that Russia
needed to be confronted far more aggressively than Obama was
willing to confront them.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
He didn't confront them in Syria.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
He didn't confront them, you know, with the twenty fourteen
annexation of Ukrainian He got criticized by the Hillary Clintons
and Victoria Nuance of the world for not having done that.
And they were determined to significantly raise the antagonism and
hatred level among American people toward Russia by telling them
you know what, the reason you got Donald Trump is
(36:23):
because of Vladimir Putin. He wants to end our democracy.
He's a thug, he's a tyrant. And basically, you know,
when Mike Flynn got prosecuted for doing nothing other than
picking up the phone and calling his counterpart in Russia
to basically say, hey, we'd like to reset the relationship.
You know, don't worry about these sanctions we're going to have,
We're going to try and have a better relationship. People
became petrified of even talking to the Russians. Communication got
(36:45):
cut off, and the United States and Russia are still
the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. We have,
you know, thousands of intracontin kept continental ballistic missiles that
our nuclear tempt aimed at each other's cities on hair
trigger warnings to go to war again Russia, which is
basically what we're doing in Ukraine, is incredibly dangerous. But
I absolutely believe that one of the main reasons the
(37:06):
public got on board to do it was because this
endless propaganda about Vladimir Putin and Russia Gate and him
taking over our democracy, and a lot of Republicans believe
that as well as you know, you worked with them.
They were hardcore on funding the war in Ukraine. It
wasn't just Democrats, and I think that was very much
in the air, this idea that he got demonized, Russia
(37:27):
got demonized. We had fifteen twenty years a president saying
Putin is a shrewd rational person, he acted in his
self interest. You can do a deal with him and
trust him. And then overnight it became no, actually, he's
the gravest danger to the United States. And a lot
of older Americans still think of Russias and then from
the Cold War, and that propaganda really worked, and I
do believe that's a major factor while we got into
this now four year war with no end in sight.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
In Russia and Ukraine, it really has shifted though. I
remember when they initially did the sanctions package for Belarus
and Russia, there were only three men who voted against
that on the Republican side, you know, Thomas Massey, Marjorie
Taylor Green and myself. And we went from that moment
the kind of low water mark of opposition to US
(38:12):
involvement in this conflict to like, by the time I
left Glenn, half the Republican conference in every vote on
this conflict was voting against continued US investment and involvement.
And I don't even know that these boomers in Congress
came to that position out of anything other than political necessity,
(38:33):
because you had a lot of Republican primary voters out
there who couldn't point to Ukraine on a map, didn't care.
But they saw the inflationary effect of this. They saw,
like you said, a country around them that was getting
worse in terms of their own quality of life. And
there was fatigue after Afghanistan and Iraq in Syria, and
(38:53):
so I think that the worm has really turned on that.
And what you don't hear more also is like that
this is what we have to do in the front
lines of democracy. That was what always got me when,
like you know, Biden or whomever, Jake Sullivan would puff up,
oh for democracy. They canceled their presidential elections. They're trans
(39:15):
they're lifting people off the streets and forcing them to fight.
They're making elements of faith and media and political opposition illegal.
And I'm thinking of if this is the front lines
of democracy. And now I see that US policy is
to have the fifty percent tariff on India as a
(39:36):
secondary sanction to because they bought stuff from Russia. So now,
in defense of democracies that don't hold elections that cancel
the rights of media and opposition groups, we are literally
creating an economic sanction against the biggest democracy in the world.
Is that lost on everyone, Glenn.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
That's incredibly a huge geo stretching apart India's. I mean,
it is shocking, but you know, I think one thing
that is important is you are right that a lot
of Republicans turned against it. There were maybe six dozen
people on the first funding bill in the House Republican
caucus who voted against it, you being one of them, obviously,
(40:19):
and I think eleven Republican Senators, and then that opposition grew.
One of the things that I think is worth noting,
and I think one major reason that had happened was
at the time Tucker Carlson was in the eight o'clock
spot on Fox News. He was by far the most
popular and watched cable news host in the country, and
pretty much every night he was on TV ranting and
raving about the stupidity and how nonsensical it is that
(40:39):
we're sending billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, when
obviously it's a war about who governs various provinces in
eastern Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
It has no bearing on the United States.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
And I remember when Tucker got fired from Fox, and
I think part of it was that a lot of Republicans,
your colleagues ran to like Axios and Politico anonymously and Settle.
We're so happy that Hunger got fired because he now
it's so much easier for us to fund the war
in Ukraine like we want to.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
He was the one of many people, but he in
particular making it. It's so difficult.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
But you know, then again here we are where it's
now seven months into the Trump presidency. I do absolutely
believe that Trump wanted to and continues to want to
end the war. And I do think that he's frustrated
that Russia won't take his his directions to stop because
Russia invested. You know, they've lost hundreds of thousands of
young Russian men, They've spent massive amounts of money, they've
(41:32):
paid prices and sanctions and stuff, and they believe they
have an existential national security interest in creating a buffer
between themselves and NATO and themselves in the West, and
they're not going to just stop because Trump tells them to.
It's too important to Russia. But the current position is,
and you never know if it's just Trump negotiating or not.
It's like, we're going to continue to fund Ukraine because
(41:52):
we have to help them in this war. But I
do think that's going to be a lot less than
it was before. And a big part of that is
and this is what we began by talking about the
America Verst ideology was very much about this, like stop
funding the wars of foreign countries, and I do think
Trump and a lot of people in the White House
in Congress very much want to stop it when it
comes to Ukraine. They just don't apply the same mentality
(42:13):
to Israel. But I think it was so important to
get that message out there about Ukraine, like we need
to stop sending all our money.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
To these foreign wars.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
It's breaking their country, because that has helped with every
instance where we're doing that. I think Trump was politically
pressured not to bomb Iran for more than one night
because he knew that his own base would revolt. These
are all good things, these are all important and positive things,
and so it just needs to keep being pushed like
we shouldn't send any more to money to Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
It's a feudal war. They're going to lose.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
The reality is Russia is much bigger and more powerful,
and that's just the reality, and we're just throwing But
also just one quick point, which is that the time
that elapsed between our leaving Afghanistan and the war in
Ukraine beginning was about eight months.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
So the whole military scout boy Scott to take a
little break, got to breathe a little bit, and right
away there was these huge contracts falling in again for
all their missiles and weapons and tanks and everything to
send the Ukraine. It's obviously not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
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Matt promo code Matt ten. There is one other area
of the world I want to discuss with you, Glenn,
and it's one you cover closely. I've been covering it.
It's what's happening in Brazil. And for those who don't know,
(44:16):
Glenn was really one of the original reporters who showcased
the corruption of the Lula administration and probably one of
the reasons why Lula had to face some consequences as
a result of his conduct. But now you have Bolsonaro
as this re emergent. I guess he never really went away,
but certainly the popular support for Bolsonaro is palpable and noticeable.
(44:43):
They want to arrest him. They now the United States
has issued sanctions against Justice Moris, the individual who's kind
of acting like the dictator of Brazil. But at the
same time, Lula seems to be more popular than ever
because the retaliatory economic consequences that were applied to the
(45:04):
whole country seem to have constituted some sort of base
for Lula. So you have covered this extensively, what's going
on in Brazil.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah, just to.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
Quickly clarify that I did reporting in twenty nineteen and
twenty twenty about corruption inside the prosecutorial office that put
Ula in jail, and then the Supreme Court used my
reporting to let out of jail. But then I did
your reporting. Last year, we got this huge leak of
documents from Arice's office, the Supreme Court judge that has
been censoring, imprisoning political opponents, putting them in exile, that
(45:37):
showed massive abuses of power, Like we had documents. It
came right from his chambers by a very brave whistleblower,
and we were able to show things like he would
wake up one day and say I want that magazine closed.
Go find some evidence that would justify closing it. They
would come back and they would say we looked everywhere
that it doesn't seem like they did anything, and it
was like a right link pro Bowlsnaro magazine or a website.
(45:57):
And he would then send a message back saying creative.
This is a person. I can't overstate what a tyrant
he is. It's really like kind of a mental illness
at this point, like he's so invested in his own
righteousness and also in the determination to prove that his
power is without limits that he's he's actually quite maniacal.
(46:19):
And there's a lot of people, including Lula. Yes, you're right,
they got some benefits because Lula raised the sovereignty flag.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Like no one tells us what to do.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Brazilians decide what Brazilians do, and of course that's going
to create some positive feelings towards Lullid. It's like when
any country gets attacked from an outside country, they unify
behind their leader. The problem is is that these tariffs
and these sanctions are going to harm Brazil's economy very severely,
and fourteen and fifteen months from now, when Lula runs
(46:48):
for reelection. Bolsnaro is barred from running, but we'll see
who runs against. When people are suffering economically, when they've
lost huge numbers of jobs because of tariffs and sanctions,
and when you know, the economy starts crashing, no one's
going to remember, oh yeah, I remember that Trump put
sanctions or tariffs. They're going to blame the government. And
Lula really wants to find a way out of this
(47:13):
conflict with the United States and negotiated deal because he
knows it's going to make He's going to put him
in trouble. The problem is that Reich is a freak
and a maniac, and he doesn't want a deal. He
wants to blow up any deal. And so even you
know every time they do something the tariffs are sanctions,
he goes further. He is now at the point where
he's ordering an American social media company, Rumble to censor
American citizens inside the United States for ordering them to
(47:36):
turn over data about American citizens of the United States
and threatening Rumble with massive fines if they don't comply,
which of course they're not going to. He's deliberately provoking
the United States, the United States government to show that
he doesn't care, and you know, I was at first
a little bit doubtful, even though I do think right
is a maniac, Like what why should the United States
(47:58):
be interfering in Brazilian politics? It's punishing a judge because
he's internally repressive. But I do think it becomes justified
when that censorship, when those punishments start getting directed at
of American companies, American citizens, even legal residents of the
United States, which he's been doing for months now. And
you know, it's kind of like Ukrainian and Russia in
(48:18):
one sense. You can decide who you think is the
just party, but at the end of the day, Russia
is so much more powerful than Ukraine that they're going
to win. The United States is infinitely more powerful than
Brazil with the dollar as the reserve currency, and Brazil
can keep trying to pretend that they're willing to fight
the United States, well, will get a little popularity. He's
raising the banner of sovereignty. But at the end of
(48:39):
the day, this is a major crisis, a major problem
in Brazil. We don't talk about in the United States
because it really doesn't affect the United States, but in Brazil,
it's by far and away the most talked about issue
is the conflict of the United States.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
So they're going to have to find ways out of that.
This persecution, the bulscenario is going to have to end.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
The censorship regie is going to have to end, because
if not, I know for sure that the United States government,
the executive branch, tends to continue to intends to continue
to crush Brazil.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
The more defiant they become.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
How long until we can accurately call Brazil a dictatorship.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
I am very careful about, you know, words like that,
But at the same time, I'll just tell you you know,
there are huge numbers of all Star supporters, journalists, elected
members of Congress, senators, bloggers, activists who are either in
prison because of my rights, Who's ordered them in prison?
(49:35):
They're all banned from the Internet and censored. Huge numbers
of them are in exile. And when they go into exile,
when they leave Brazil, he tries to put them on
the Interpol list, he tries to extradate them. The United States,
even under Joe Biden, refuse his extradition requests because the
United States said, no, these are political crimes, these are
(49:55):
crimes of speech, we don't extradit for that, there's some
in Spain. The Spanish government all so told Mo Rees
we're not extraditing, and then in retaliation, he actually released
a drug dealer that Spain wants extradited. Kind of his punishment,
he asked Interpol to put bols and art supporters on
the list. Interpaul said, this is not appropriate. These are
enough the kind of crimes that we're here to do
(50:16):
to govern, and everybody I know in Brazil is afraid
of him, is afraid.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Of speaking out against him.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
I mean, I do it because I feel like I
have a lot of extra protection being American, having a
big profile internationally, and some of the people do it too.
But when you get to that point where people are
genuinely petrified of criticizing government official, and for good reason
that you wanked up in jail, you want up having
your life destroyed. He freezes people's bank accounts, their assets,
and there's so many people in exile. You do get
(50:45):
to the point where I think you can say Brazil
is under a judicial tyranny or judicial dictatorship, even though
I'm very hesitant to use words like that, but it's
we're getting to the point if we're not already there
where it's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Glenn Greenwald. He is the host of System Update on Rumble,
someone I follow closely. When he speaks about matters of
the world and access to information, I always get a
lot smarter every time we have a chance to chat
and greatly appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
It's always great to see Matt. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Take care
Now it's time for the Anchorman Podcast with Matt Yeats
and Dan Ball. Welcome back to another episode of our
show Anchorman, and I am joined today by a real
expert in what's going on around the world. Glenn Greenwald
(00:27):
is one of the original founders of The Intercept and
now is the host of System Update on Rumble. Glenn,
thank you so much for joining me. I want to
cover what's going on in a lot of different places,
but really I wanted to begin with how you view
just the Trump doctrine as we encounter it in this
second term, because it does feel like it has a
(00:48):
different energy than we had in Trump one, with people
like Mattis and Tillerson having a real large role in
the shaping of that policy. Now it seems very you know,
Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessant, Donald Trump, you know, it's economic
engagement deriven, But how would you describe I guess that difference,
(01:12):
and then the Trump foreign policy doctrine as we encounter
it in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, there's no question that the Trump administration in its
current iteration two point zero is very different in a
lot of ways than the first iteration. I think there
are a lot of ways in which that's a good thing.
I heard from the Trump campaign, people close to the
Trump circle all throughout twenty twenty four and into the
transition that they believe and I totally agree that one
(01:39):
of the big problems with the first administration was that
so many people had infiltrated it, had contaminated it. Who
pretended to be on board with the America First ideology,
but in fact we're swret enemies to it, and we're
really there to undermine and subvert everything he was doing.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
And I think they got away with that.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Because he was very new to Washington, he had never
been in an elected office before. A lot of people
surrounding him didn't really understand Washington, maybe as well as
they should have.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Me.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
He was rolling on Jared.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Kushner and his daughter, and I think they did in
a lot of ways subvert what he was doing, and
they were determined not to let that happen again. And
they clearly came in prepared to ensure that Trump is
the leader of the administration, he gives the orders and
people carry it out. They selected people who were willing
to do that, so we actually have an elected president
who's making decisions for the executive branch, which I personally
(02:24):
think is good.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
I think it's pretty dangerous.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
When you have you know, generals and other national security
officials just going off on their own doing what they
want and even violating orders of the president. I think
the problem at is that, you know, the reason I
was so interested in the Trump campaign beginning in twenty sixteen,
despite it causing a lot of kind of rifts with
a lot of former viewers and readers of mine, was
(02:47):
because of the American verst ideology, which I took seriously,
the idea that, look, it's time to prioritize American citizens
and their interests, which should be pretty basic, but it
hasn't been, which means, you know, battling big corporate power,
big banks, big multinational corporations, re instilling the notion that
we have an industry in the United.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
States, that we have jobs in the United States.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
But also that we're not going to go to war
for or continue to finance the wars of foreign countries.
I mean, this was so central for me, at least
in terms of what the promise of the Trump ideology
has been. In so many ways, we're seeing so many
violations of that particularly in foreign policy, but also it's
spilling over in a lot of ways into domestic policy
(03:29):
free speech as well.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
And there was the moment when he wins the South
Carolina primary back in twenty sixteen, where the veil is
pulled back on this theory that Republican operatives and Republican
candidates have been told that you have to support this
Liz Cheney version of foreign policy in order to have
any credibility. Otherwise you're an outcast, you're someone that is
(03:54):
derided regularly. And Trump stood up and called George W.
Bush a war criminal and walked in and won South Carolina.
And that was that, And it was a remarkable reshaping.
But one of the reasons that condition you described of
the of infiltration occurred is this highly intricate credentialing system
(04:14):
that interventionists have developed in Washington, D C. And I
never understood it until I got there and really started
to pay attention. But so much money is spent on
these think tanks to get people, you know, vice President
of Public Policy for Eurasia titles and to endow professorships
where people could say, oh, there I was at you know,
(04:36):
Georgetown or some other you know that the School of
Foreign Service and developed this lecturing credential, and when you
weigh that against the life experiences of a lot of
people who are foreign policy realists, it gets challenging. And
that what weighed heavily on the first Trump term. I
think people saw through that really effectively on a lot
(04:59):
of fronts this go around, but it is a condition
we still encounter. What do you think the antidote is
to that? There are all these like you know, Wilson
Center type entities that do such a good job credentialing,
but if someone thinks thoughtfully about maybe wanting to reserve
(05:19):
America's focus to America's interests, they don't get those opportunities.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, that's why it's so important and so interesting to
speak to somebody who was in the kind of battles
of Washington as you were, and got there with a
certain set of ideas about how Washington works and then
actually saw the real way that it works and will
just speak openly about it. It's not that common. I think,
the whole world of think tanks, it's so opaque and
mysterious to most Americans. Never think about think tanks, don't
(05:46):
really care about think tanks. When it's such a crucial
part of the incentive scheme in Washington. I remember when
Nikki Haley resigned from the Trump administration as the US
Ambassador to the United Nations in the first Trump term,
and she got extremely rich in the immediate aftermath of that,
made something like eight million dollars, paid off a lot
(06:08):
of debt she was in, and we investigated, like other
journalists did, to find out how she was making that money,
and one of the major ways was that she got
hired by think tanks who are funded massively by huge
pro Israel interests, pro war interest the kind of people
who just want who get appointed and too key positions,
whether it's the Democratic Party the Republican Party, they have
(06:30):
kind of a shadow government, and so it's a two
way system. On the one hand, they do a very
good job because of how much money they have in
being able to sort of attract the people who seem
to Washington lotmakers or White House officials like they're the
real experts and they're only there because of their shared ideology,
the sort of bipartisan concentives that they believe in. And
then there's also a second incentive, which is you know
(06:52):
that if you leave government or you leave Congress, as
long as you did your service and serve that agenda,
there's all kinds of sending cures waiting for you where
you can get very rich by doing that. And you know,
I think, on the one hand, there's all this progress
that has been made in breaking this you know, decades
long bipartisan consensus that has been so detrimental to our country.
(07:15):
The rise of independent media has obviously been crucial. The
fact that there are all kinds of members of Congress
now on both the left and the right, who are
deviating from it and making the case for it. There's
obviously a left and right anti establishment feur of the
kind that I don't think we have seen for decades
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The problem, though, and it's.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
So true, is if like you look at Washington, the
two parties in Congress still basically work more or less
the same way. They're really not responsive to these changes
in public opinion. And that's because what official Washington has
is this kind of luck in system to force people
to serve the agenda of money the interested in Washington
and really not very much listen to or care about
the actual constituents who elected them.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, it is a binary test. Are you willing to
go along with the grift? And if you're willing to
go along with the grift, then that presents in a
variety of forms. You're willing to go say that bills
do things that they don't actually do. You're able to
kind of like falsely avoid blame on things like spending.
You're able to take these just bogus intel briefings they
(08:19):
give you and then walk out acting like you've seen
the Rosetta stone. And if folks go along with that,
you're right. There's a very lucrative incentive structure. One member
told me, who had played the game and got a
sweet gig, that being a fella with a think tank
as a member as a former member of Congress was
just like being a congressman. But you make four times
(08:41):
the money because you have a big staff that's paid for.
You get all your travel expenses paid, You go around
giving interesting speeches to people who want to hear you talk,
You give media interviews, and instead of making you know,
bucks seventy two, you can make like six hundred thousand bucks,
and so many of them do. And then what that
means is those folks own them in the short term.
(09:02):
And I'll put it this plainly, if you did not
have defense contractors, the interests of foreign governments and a
select group of fortune one hundred corporate interests, think tanks
wouldn't even be a thing. You wouldn't even know about them,
you would never never hear about them. But now they
are providing this Fox credentialism and also a lot of
(09:25):
grasstops imagery around support for US intervention in a variety
of these conflicts. So the first one I want to
talk to you about, obviously, is in Gaza, where Israel
is now saying they want to occupy Gaza, which is
the most predictable thing after the way they have waged
this war. But is it wrong, Glenn, that there's a
part of me that's like, you know what, you guys
(09:47):
want to go be an occupying force, take the baton
and freaking run with it, because we have endured that,
and in the early odds in Iraq and Afghanist Dan
to tragic consequences, even Russia got the he Gat Assyria.
You add Iran pulling back from some of their proxy forces.
So if Israel wants to go the neighborhood Crime Watch
(10:08):
of Gaza City, like the Block Captain of Gaza. Won't
they kind of get their punishment just from the nature
of that experience or is it going to have to
come with all of this shame over the atrocities that
people have witnessed.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, well, first of all, I think there's a big question.
I mean, I would look at it differently perhaps if
it weren't for the fact that the United States government
and therefore American workers and American tax players are going
to pay for the whole thing. You know, we send
four billion dollars a year minimum automatic to Israel, and
then the deal negotiated by President Obama on his way
out in twenty sixteen with net Yahoo it's a ten
year deal, so it's going to be up for renewal
(10:46):
in twenty twenty six I'm sure that number is going
to increase. But then on top of that, we send
billions and.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Billions and billions more.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
We send seventeen billion dollars extra every time Israel decides
they want a new war, And on top of that,
we deploy our own military assets and put our service
members in harm's way in that region to protect Israel
as well from the anger that they're provoking, and so
we The cost the United States and American tax players
is so massive, and if they go and occupy Gaza,
(11:12):
they can't do that without us paying for it, and
of course we're going to end up paying for it.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Trump is pretty much made that clear. Now.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Having said that, I think it is interesting to note
that the most vocal opponents of this new plan to
go and occupy Gaza, and it's really not a new
plan if you listen to Israeli leaders from the start
after October seventh, Bake, the hostages and dismantling Hamasis were pretexts.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
That's their WMD. They're nine to eleven attack.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
The real goal that they always had was they want
they a lot of them believe in in the idea
that Gaza in the West Bank belonged to is really
even though the entire international community is against that. The
US government's position for decades has been we wanted to
state solution. That's no longer a possibility. They want to
move those people in Gaza out, the Palestinians and the
(11:56):
Muslims and the Arab Christians and replace them with Jews.
If Israeli Jews that are going to rule that that
region as well as annex the West Bank then was
always the plan. But the interesting thing is it's the IDF,
you know, like the generals and the IDF officials who
are saying, if we go in and occupy Gaza, it's
gonna first of all, it's going to be a death trap,
(12:17):
you can by it. But there's still amaster there, there's
armed people there. They're obviously going to fight at guerrilla
war like we saw in a Rock, and they're gonna
have to deal with that for years.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
And then on top of that, there's no plan.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Like what are you going to do with the people
that there's still well, there was two point two million
people when this began, maybe there's one point eight one
point nine million l So you're right, if they do that,
they're going to be probably harming themselves. But the thing
that I worry about, Matt, is that, you know, they
have demonstrated that they have no regard for life of
the people in Gaza. They don't see Gozins or Palestinians
(12:49):
more broadly as human. The number of death and the
starvation has demonstrated that. And obviously if they go in
and occupy, it's going to entail massive amounts of more death.
They're going to just be killing randomly because they are
going to be in danger. IDF soldiers and they're already
fighting multiple front wars for several years now. Huge numbers
of them have PTSD, a lot of them won't go
(13:12):
back to fighting. It's an army that has really been
put through the ringer. And to ask them now to
govern Gaza the way the United States other governed you know,
Fallujah and the Sunni Triangle and all the places in
Iraq for all those years, You're right, I mean that
is not in Israel's interest, But I worry more about
the impact on the United States and Americans as well.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
The way those funding battles work in Congress is just
debasing for so many of these folks who represent districts
that are poor, that need their Congress member to care
about them, and the way we do this with some
of these touchdown international issues. Glenn, like I was shocked,
Like there was a time period where every week we
(13:55):
had to pass another resolution about the Wigers. And I
don't mean to, like, you know so say that their
plight is not a meaningful one, but just failed like
incessant and then with Israel. There was a time period
where almost every day we were passing a different version
of a condemnation of the BDS movement. And I don't know,
(14:15):
I'm not a fan of the BDS movement. I don't
want to participate in it. But did Mike Huckabee become
the leader of it when they tried to shut down
the Zionist Christian tours? Because I saw these statements from
Mike Huckabee where they're shutting down the Zionist Christian tours
over with this Jewish supremacy ideology, and he says that
the way he's going to react is that Christians should
(14:38):
no longer plan to Israel, they should boycott their plan
to Israel, that American donors should stop funding groups in Israel,
so divest, and then he was gonna withhold sanction or
he was going to sanction by withholding the visas of
people in Israel who wanted to come to the United States.
So like, what chapter of the book are we in
when Israel loses Mike Huckaby.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Well, and also you know, the Israeli military murdered an
American citizen in the West Bank, as they do with
quite a lot of frequency, and Mike hut could Be
actually denounced that vehemently and called it a terror stact,
which obviously is a word that typically only gets applied
to Israel's enemies and not to Israel. It was really
the settlers who did the murders, but the IDEAF is
(15:23):
there to back them up, and there's no accountability. But
the thing is, Matt like, this is what I think is.
I'm kind of amazed at what I'm seeing, even though
on the in one way, I also don't find it
surprising because of everything we're discussing. This is a movement,
the Trump movement, that decided to call itself America First,
(15:44):
and the argument was that we have been financing and
funding and arming wars all over the globe that really
don't have anything to do with us, and as a result,
we need to reprioritize how we work in Washington so
that the American people and their communities that are falling apart,
and they're in our industry that has been you know,
de industrialized all throughout the country, and fentanyl and immigrants
(16:07):
and all the problems that is making are making the
United States fall apart, we need to focus on that
instead and now you have the summer recess in Congress,
which well we can get into why if you want.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
There's the recess.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
I'm sure you've covered this, but I don't know if
you saw. You probably did, but like thirty members of
the TUCUS, you know, usually usually the summer recess is
the idea of it is you go back to your district,
since none of them barely have anything to do with
their districts, so it's like one time they get to
go back touch the ground. There. They have clown hall meetings,
they hear from their constituents about what they're thinking, about
(16:43):
what they want. It's sometimes even raucous because people are
upset and that's an important thing for them to go to.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Here.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
They got on a plane on an apac organized and
paid for journey to Israel, and that's how they're spending
their recess. It's like and there's statistics that show that
members of Congress make pilgrimage to Israel more than every
country in Europe and Africa combined.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
They're constantly in Israel.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And you know, I think we're also getting to the
point now where a lot of people are starting to ask, like,
wait a minute, we were promised America. First, Why is
every politician that I'm listening to constantly in Israel the
leadership pushes you.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
I'll tell you why. I went on that Apec trip.
I went on subsequent trips, and there is an actual
downward pressure from the leadership and even the committee chairs,
Like if you're on the Foreign Affairs Committee, if you're
on the Armed Services Committee, if you're on the Intelligence Committee,
there's like an expectation that you go there and some
sort of like Congressional hodge. And I remember being at
(17:47):
the I'll never go back. I was at the King
David Hotel and I rolled back to my room unexpectedly
when the rest of the group was still on some
planned activity, and there's some dude in my room. I'm like,
hey man, what are you doing here? And he acted
like he was associated with the hotel and taking an
inventory but had no clipboard. And so yeah, there's a
lot of reasons why they want members of Congress over there,
(18:11):
and it is ideologically to steep them in this notion
that the protection of Israel is of great import to
people in America, but it's really not that important of voters.
And that is becoming more clear on the right and left.
So we've talked about the actual policy, let's just get
into the raw politics. I maintain that the true legacy
(18:33):
of Netanyahu is that during his control of Israel, he
has successfully made this a politically divisive issue on the
American right and left. And like when I was grown up,
it was a pretty bipartisan thing to have people generally
supportive of a friendly relationship between the United States and
the only democracy democracy in the region. And now on
(18:56):
the left it is a major issue in primaries. Do
you think it will be on the right? And like,
are we are we in the cycle where in twenty
twenty eight, maybe on the Republican stage, maybe on the
Democrat stage, maybe both. Like you're going to see definitively
anti Israel candidates running for presidents saying, nominate me to
(19:18):
lead this party and I won't make us subservience to Israel,
and nobody else on the stage will say that, like
it has.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
To happen, that it has to happen.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
I mean, I'd like to see what happens if anybody
who says that actually gets close to the presidency in
the United States. They're going to be a lot of
very powerful interests who are going to be very frightened
if that happens. But the reason why I say this
has to happen is because the point out that your
reference is extremely clear. Every single demographic group in the
United States have now as a majority views Israel unfavorably,
(19:54):
except for Conservatives over the age of fifty or Republicans
over the age of fifty, which are there's still clinging
onto this sort of you know, they've been indoctrinated going
back to the Cold War about Israel. But young conservatives
in particular are the steep downward is very, very.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Steep.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
It's very the incline downward. And you're obviously seeing major
major voices in the conservative movement, in the Trump movement,
Marjorie Taylor Green being one, you being another, Carlton Canie Owen,
Steve Bannon.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
I could go on and on and on.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
You've had people at the Daili wire now, like when
the Israeli has attacked a Catholic church, you know, on purpose,
saying wait a minute, like I'm going to get off
this train now. So there's only so long that you
can sustain a gigantic breach in public opinion. On the
one hand and what the members of Congress do, and
especially in a primary, if you have growing sentiments that
(20:48):
I wouldn't even call it anti Israel.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
I would call it more.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Like opposed to the idea that we're supposed to be
tied at the hip to this foreign country. And you know,
younger conservatives have not been steep in this. Israel really
hasn't been talked about for the last ten fifteen years.
This is really the first time a lot of people
are getting a look not just as Israel, but at us,
how the US serves Israel.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
And it's really a shocking thing.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
People are watching babies blown up every day, baby starving,
and the israelis doing what they're doing in gods, but
also bombing Lebanon and Yemen in Syria and then cajoling
US into helping them bomb Ran. It seems like it's
the only thing that the DC class talks about. And
as a Jew, I actually do worry about how this
is going to spark anti Semitism in the sense that
(21:34):
people are going to be start to wondering, like, why
is our government so controlled, why is it so dedicated
to this, to this one country. And also I just
want to say Matt because in some ways this is
the most important thing to me. As you know, I
was very vocal and denouncing big tech censorship, Biden administration censorship.
I absolutely supported the lawsuit to sue the Biden administration
to bring it to the Supreme Court. That it was
(21:54):
a full frontal assault in the First Amendment to co
coerce and threaten big tech companies to remove the scenter
COVID Ukraine the twenty twenty election. It's why I'm at
rumble because they're free speech platform. But what we're seeing
now is a full frontal assault on free speech in
defense of Israel. I mean, the Trump administration is demanding
a radical expansion of hate speech codes to wildly expand
(22:18):
what anti Semitism is under this new definition called the
International Holocaust Remembrance AC so that that definition.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Is boss campuses.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
That definition is totally bonkers. That definition you.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Cannot You're barred from You're barred from saying, listen, this
is your bard. Okay, this is a Trump presidency that
was devoted to restoring free speech and opposing censorship.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
You are now barred from.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Saying that you think that what the Israelis are doing
in Gaza is similar to what the Germans did in
World War Two. You can say that about any other country.
You can impair the United States government to Nazism. You
can compare any other stinct that you any other country
you want on the earth, just you cannot say it
about Israel. You cannot say that you think Israel is
(23:00):
an intrinsically racist endeavor because it's built on the idea
of Jewish supremacy. You can call the United States racist
because it, you know, genocided Native Americans or whatever, slavery.
You're free to say that about your own country. You
just can't say that about this or China. You can
say it about Iran, Peru, Indonesia, whoever you want, just
not about Israel. And you can also not say that
(23:21):
you believe that the Bible teaches that the Jews played
a major role in the death of Christ, which is
a teaching that many, many Christians for two centuries now
have believed.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
I'm not saying you have to agree with any of
those views. But how can you be banned punished? How
can this be off limit?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
You'll be fired if you're on the faculty, you'll be expelled,
if you're a student.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
For expressing any of those views.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
There's a stranglehold on free speech in the name of
this foreign country, not even to protect our own people,
but in the name of protecting this foreign country.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
When I was trying to get senators to vote to
confirm me, they were giving me heat on this because
I voted against some adherents in the House to this
definition for those reasons you just laid out, Not because
I want to give any comfort to the anti Semites,
but because in that we've just gone through what we've
gone through with the Biden administration, where they get an
(24:09):
inch and take a mile on censorship. And you look
at a definition like that and it's almost memish. You're like, Oh,
how many products made in Israel do I need to
have in my house to like prove that I have
not a boycotter? What is a sufficient amount of Lamb's
blood to pay on the door with my allegiance to Israel?
(24:31):
And I'm sitting here getting grilled by the senator on this,
who ultimately said they would have voted to confirm me.
But I'm thinking to myself, who is having you asked
these questions? Like you from some Midwestern state where this
can't be like central to what your constituents want in
an attorney general, but it is so in the forefront
of their mind. And I'll conclude our discussion on the
(24:52):
Israel thing with this. You can't have this kind of
a disconnect where the political representatives are so beholden to
an ideology or any viewpoint that is becoming increasingly toxic
to the body politic at an exponential rate. This system
will not allow that to hold, and you will start
to see people emerge and say, vote for me because
(25:15):
I will not betray you in this way. And when
that happens, I think that, like Lynn said, some really
powerful people are going to be pretty nervous about it.
One of my other favorite things to talk about is
the Russia hoax. I really feel like I peaked during
the Russia hoax. And I remember those days where Paul
Ryan and Trey Goudi were telling us to trust Robert Muller.
We should just hope Donald Trump hadn't committed any crimes.
(25:39):
And if people just started to ask kind of basic
questions about the Russia hoax, like well, where where did
this dossier come from? And how are the how are
the mechanisms of intelligence collection being validated. If you ask
those questions, it was like you're Vladimir Putin's lawyer, You're
a trader to the country. And now, I mean, I
(26:00):
think history is going to reflect on this and say,
you had this batch of people in the Obama administration
that were very dedicated to the Russia hoax, you know,
before and after they ever found the first fact that
could have been tied to it, and then you know
you you had a reckoning thereafter, where during the Trump
administration some people who hadn't spoken up previously feel like
(26:21):
they've got enough of a yellow brick road to have
their views platformed with their criticism of that effort. I
think that's kind of how it washes. But what's just
crazy is the way those of us who ask questions
were were vilified, like you were among those voices. How
do you bring the new revelations into perspective?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
For I think the new revelations are helpful to make
people who still have residual doubts about whether Russia Gate
was a gigantic fraud and hoax perpetrated by the CIA
and the FIODO of manipulator elections. It's now a little
bit easier to convince more people that there's no doubt
that that's exactly what happened, That the CIA and the
FBI manufactured a complete lie and then fed it to
(27:06):
the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News,
and they gave themselves polishers for it and celebrated themselves,
and it led to a special counsel. But you know, Matt,
the thing is, like you could tell from the beginning,
the whole thing was a fraud.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
It never made any sense. Why would the Kremlin have
to conspire with Donald Trump and his campaign officials to
hack into the DNC and Podesta's email in order to
give them to WikiLeaks and have stuff that's incriminating about
Hillary Clinton be published? Would they? Why couldn't they just
do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
There was also never any proof that Putin ordered it,
that he did it in order to help get Donald Trump,
who I could nobody thought Donald Trump was gonna was
gonna had a chance against Hillary Clinton. And so there
was all this huge evidentiary evidentiary holes in it from
the start. On top of which the way the story
was being presented at the American public is exactly how
so many lies got disseminated to the public. So many
(27:56):
other times, the CIA and the FBI whisper to their
favorite servants of the Washington Post of the New York Times,
demanding anonymity, which they then get the things they want
the American people to hear. The Washington Post, the New
York Times, NBC News, they all go around repeating it,
and especially because they were so unified in their hatred
of Trump, they were absolutely determined to have this be
the thing that destroys him. And no evidence is needed
(28:20):
by any of these so called journalists when journalistic skepticism
of the CIA in the FBI is as foundational to
being a journalist as you can possibly get, they had
none of it. And it wasn't just this time, so
many other times as well. But you know, the other thing, Matt,
is that like the whole conspiracy, the whole conspiracy theory
from the start was basically composed of two claims. One
that Trump officials conspired, colluded and collaborated with the Kremlin
(28:45):
to break into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta.
And then the other one was even more important, I think,
to this conspiracy theory, was that Vatim red Potin had
blackmail power over Donald Trump sexually, financially, personally, as Nancy
Pelosi would always say, and as a result, if Donald
Trump got elected, it would basically be Putin who was
running our country? Okay, that was the core conspiracy theory.
(29:07):
Trump gets into office and the two policies that he
implements toward Russia are Number one, to flood Ukraine with
lethal offensive arms, which Obama didn't want to do, but
Trump was pressured to do it to prove he wasn't
a Russian agent. He flooded Ukraine with offensive arms, like
the most threatening thing you could do to Russia. And
then number two, he set out to destroy Nordstream two,
which was the basis of future Russian economic prosperity. It
(29:30):
enabled them to sell cheap natural gas to Germany and
then to Europe. And Trump told Europe, if you keep
buying gas through nord Stream too from Russia, we're not
going to pay for your defense. You have to buy
it from us. Why should we pay? So basically, Trump
attack the national security of Russia and the financial prosperity
of Russia, and not one journalist ever stop to think, Ah,
how do I reconcile with the claim that he's captive
(29:52):
to Russia, that he's controlled by Russia. And finally, I
will just say that on this core conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Of you know that Trump or his son, or his family,
or his.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Key campaign officials conspire with the Russians, they set out
they on leashed Robert Mueller, who they said was the
greatest and most honorable prosecutor ever do exist. He had
a so called dream team of prosecutors, unlimited resources, unlimited
subpoena power. They unleash them for eighteen months. It drowned
our politics in this conspiracy theory. He comes back, closes
investigation without indicting even one American for collaborating with Russia,
(30:25):
and then writes a report saying I looked, but I
did not find EDNY ambience establishing this link between the
Russians and Trump in order to interfere in the twenty
six US and to this day, if you go and
ask the New York Times, the Washington Post them, and
I'll people say, no, this wasn't debunk This is absolutely true.
And they're running cover now to try and claim that
Toulsi's documents that she released that she declassified, even though
(30:46):
they obviously fortify the fact that it's a hoax. No, no,
you're misreading them, they're fake whatever. They're so invested in
this fraud that they perpetrated. So yeah, I think the
disclosures help. But Russia Gate really is and was religion
to the corporate media into liberal America, and I don't
ever see that being really changed.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Well. And the media played their role in information laundering
because they're not going to be critical of what they're
fed if they're just so hungry to be fed anything.
Right there, there's an ecosystem where they're all there frothing
for information from these Intel officials, who, by the way,
a bunch of whom they want to go work for
these media companies afterwards, so that incentives they did. They did, Yes,
(31:28):
they did.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I know.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
It is the exact same dynamic we just described on
the think tanks and members of Congress with the Intel
officials and then the frothing media entities that are engaged
in this in this information spin up and what like
regular folks that are upset about this one. And I
was like, wow, you know, when someone getting thrown in jail,
which is very challenging prosecutorial decision, you got to make
based on the likelihood of a conviction and what for
(31:52):
you to get kind of the actualization where more people
do in fact acknowledge what this was, even if at
the time they were bamboozled. You have to have a narrator,
and that narrator can't be Director Gabbard as good a
job as she's done, like you have to have the
person on the inside explaining how this occurred. And based
(32:15):
on the documents that CIA Director Ratcliffe and Dni Gabbard
have released, those people do exist because they keep referencing
these career folks. But if we have to hear that narrator,
like forget the bloodlust of whether you want to see
people behind bars? Is that better done in a courtroom
or in a congressional hearing? If we think about how
(32:38):
both have been used to create a historical reckoning, where
does Glenn Greenwald want to see the best narration we
have of the worst features of this hoax?
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Any perfect world, which is not the world we live in.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
If you are inside the national security state of the
intelligence community and you purposely abuse the basically unlimited powers
that they have to interfere in an American election to
manipulate the electorate to try and get your colleague Hillary
Clinton elected to the presidency and destroy the Trump campaign
in the Trump presidency. I do think those ought to
be crimes that are held people are held accounted for
(33:15):
it legally. The problem is we've created so many barriers.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
And impunities and immunities for people who work in the
intelligence community. Who I mean.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
I thought, you know, Bush officials should have been prosecuted
for authorizing warrantless spying on American citizen and violation for
the law, but everyone agreed, no, no, we can't do
anything like that, or for torture. There's so many different
layers of protections that these people have, and there's statute
limitations issues. So I agree that it's both unlikely and
the problem is if you didn't have an extremely strong
case legally or factually, you risk vindicating these people if
(33:49):
you can't overcome the gigantic kerdle of reasonable doubt in
order to get a conviction, and that would end up
having the opposite effect. So I agree with you totally.
The way to do this is to get people the
Republicans control of Congress, get people who are both the wrongdoers,
but then also people inside these agencies who will tell
the story of what they understand, what they know, and
(34:10):
that will bring a lot more public attention to.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
It as well. And to that I agree with you totally.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Someone credible needs to be sitting in those chairs with
the cameras on explaining to the American people why they
were deceived and why this deception was accomplished through incredible
abuse of these powers.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
That is the cathartic moment we need. And I sometimes
debate the role that the Russia hoaks played in the
conflict that we currently find ourselves in Ukraine in this
proxy war, and I think NATO expansion without a real
vision for NATO in the modern times, is a contributing
(34:52):
factor to what we're observing. And I also think that
just when the Afghanistan war wound down, there was a
place that the money launch and weapons launderers needed another
ecosystem to go in and habit. And I do kind
of think the winding down of Afghanistan and the winding
up of our involvement in Ukraine or linked. But others
have made the argument to me, and I don't know
(35:13):
that I agree with this, but that what the Russia
hoax did to kind of position Vladimir Putin as this
villain trying to manipulate our elections somehow led us to
this moment where we're more involved than we otherwise would be.
Where do you fall on that one?
Speaker 3 (35:32):
I absolutely believe that.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
I from the very beginning, my concern with Russia Gate
as a journalist was that it was a evidence free,
baseless scandal.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
So obviously a journalist, I'm looking at this and saying
this is false. That was my concern.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
My bigger concern, just as I kind of an American,
a citizen of the world, whatever, is that there were
a lot of people inside the of administration, people like
Victoria Newlin and definitely Hillary Clinton, who believed that Russia
needed to be confronted far more aggressively than Obama was
willing to confront them.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
He didn't confront them in Syria.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
He didn't confront them, you know, with the twenty fourteen
annexation of Ukrainian He got criticized by the Hillary Clintons
and Victoria Nuance of the world for not having done that.
And they were determined to significantly raise the antagonism and
hatred level among American people toward Russia by telling them
you know what, the reason you got Donald Trump is
(36:23):
because of Vladimir Putin. He wants to end our democracy.
He's a thug, he's a tyrant. And basically, you know,
when Mike Flynn got prosecuted for doing nothing other than
picking up the phone and calling his counterpart in Russia
to basically say, hey, we'd like to reset the relationship.
You know, don't worry about these sanctions we're going to have,
We're going to try and have a better relationship. People
became petrified of even talking to the Russians. Communication got
(36:45):
cut off, and the United States and Russia are still
the two largest nuclear powers on the planet. We have,
you know, thousands of intracontin kept continental ballistic missiles that
our nuclear tempt aimed at each other's cities on hair
trigger warnings to go to war again Russia, which is
basically what we're doing in Ukraine, is incredibly dangerous. But
I absolutely believe that one of the main reasons the
(37:06):
public got on board to do it was because this
endless propaganda about Vladimir Putin and Russia Gate and him
taking over our democracy, and a lot of Republicans believe
that as well as you know, you worked with them.
They were hardcore on funding the war in Ukraine. It
wasn't just Democrats, and I think that was very much
in the air, this idea that he got demonized, Russia
(37:27):
got demonized. We had fifteen twenty years a president saying
Putin is a shrewd rational person, he acted in his
self interest. You can do a deal with him and
trust him. And then overnight it became no, actually, he's
the gravest danger to the United States. And a lot
of older Americans still think of Russias and then from
the Cold War, and that propaganda really worked, and I
do believe that's a major factor while we got into
this now four year war with no end in sight.
Speaker 1 (37:50):
In Russia and Ukraine, it really has shifted though. I
remember when they initially did the sanctions package for Belarus
and Russia, there were only three men who voted against
that on the Republican side, you know, Thomas Massey, Marjorie
Taylor Green and myself. And we went from that moment
the kind of low water mark of opposition to US
(38:12):
involvement in this conflict to like, by the time I
left Glenn, half the Republican conference in every vote on
this conflict was voting against continued US investment and involvement.
And I don't even know that these boomers in Congress
came to that position out of anything other than political necessity,
(38:33):
because you had a lot of Republican primary voters out
there who couldn't point to Ukraine on a map, didn't care.
But they saw the inflationary effect of this. They saw,
like you said, a country around them that was getting
worse in terms of their own quality of life. And
there was fatigue after Afghanistan and Iraq in Syria, and
(38:53):
so I think that the worm has really turned on that.
And what you don't hear more also is like that
this is what we have to do in the front
lines of democracy. That was what always got me when,
like you know, Biden or whomever, Jake Sullivan would puff up,
oh for democracy. They canceled their presidential elections. They're trans
(39:15):
they're lifting people off the streets and forcing them to fight.
They're making elements of faith and media and political opposition illegal.
And I'm thinking of if this is the front lines
of democracy. And now I see that US policy is
to have the fifty percent tariff on India as a
(39:36):
secondary sanction to because they bought stuff from Russia. So now,
in defense of democracies that don't hold elections that cancel
the rights of media and opposition groups, we are literally
creating an economic sanction against the biggest democracy in the world.
Is that lost on everyone, Glenn.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
That's incredibly a huge geo stretching apart India's. I mean,
it is shocking, but you know, I think one thing
that is important is you are right that a lot
of Republicans turned against it. There were maybe six dozen
people on the first funding bill in the House Republican
caucus who voted against it, you being one of them, obviously,
(40:19):
and I think eleven Republican Senators, and then that opposition grew.
One of the things that I think is worth noting,
and I think one major reason that had happened was
at the time Tucker Carlson was in the eight o'clock
spot on Fox News. He was by far the most
popular and watched cable news host in the country, and
pretty much every night he was on TV ranting and
raving about the stupidity and how nonsensical it is that
(40:39):
we're sending billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, when
obviously it's a war about who governs various provinces in
eastern Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
It has no bearing on the United States.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
And I remember when Tucker got fired from Fox, and
I think part of it was that a lot of Republicans,
your colleagues ran to like Axios and Politico anonymously and Settle.
We're so happy that Hunger got fired because he now
it's so much easier for us to fund the war
in Ukraine like we want to.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
He was the one of many people, but he in
particular making it. It's so difficult.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
But you know, then again here we are where it's
now seven months into the Trump presidency. I do absolutely
believe that Trump wanted to and continues to want to
end the war. And I do think that he's frustrated
that Russia won't take his his directions to stop because
Russia invested. You know, they've lost hundreds of thousands of
young Russian men, They've spent massive amounts of money, they've
(41:32):
paid prices and sanctions and stuff, and they believe they
have an existential national security interest in creating a buffer
between themselves and NATO and themselves in the West, and
they're not going to just stop because Trump tells them to.
It's too important to Russia. But the current position is,
and you never know if it's just Trump negotiating or not.
It's like, we're going to continue to fund Ukraine because
(41:52):
we have to help them in this war. But I
do think that's going to be a lot less than
it was before. And a big part of that is
and this is what we began by talking about the
America Verst ideology was very much about this, like stop
funding the wars of foreign countries, and I do think
Trump and a lot of people in the White House
in Congress very much want to stop it when it
comes to Ukraine. They just don't apply the same mentality
(42:13):
to Israel. But I think it was so important to
get that message out there about Ukraine, like we need
to stop sending all our money.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
To these foreign wars.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
It's breaking their country, because that has helped with every
instance where we're doing that. I think Trump was politically
pressured not to bomb Iran for more than one night
because he knew that his own base would revolt. These
are all good things, these are all important and positive things,
and so it just needs to keep being pushed like
we shouldn't send any more to money to Ukraine.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
It's a feudal war. They're going to lose.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
The reality is Russia is much bigger and more powerful,
and that's just the reality, and we're just throwing But
also just one quick point, which is that the time
that elapsed between our leaving Afghanistan and the war in
Ukraine beginning was about eight months.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
So the whole military scout boy Scott to take a
little break, got to breathe a little bit, and right
away there was these huge contracts falling in again for
all their missiles and weapons and tanks and everything to
send the Ukraine. It's obviously not a coincidence.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
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They're doing this because they believe people should have real
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they're working to keep prices low. Go to Allfamilypharmacy dot
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Matt promo code Matt ten. There is one other area
of the world I want to discuss with you, Glenn,
and it's one you cover closely. I've been covering it.
It's what's happening in Brazil. And for those who don't know,
(44:16):
Glenn was really one of the original reporters who showcased
the corruption of the Lula administration and probably one of
the reasons why Lula had to face some consequences as
a result of his conduct. But now you have Bolsonaro
as this re emergent. I guess he never really went away,
but certainly the popular support for Bolsonaro is palpable and noticeable.
(44:43):
They want to arrest him. They now the United States
has issued sanctions against Justice Moris, the individual who's kind
of acting like the dictator of Brazil. But at the
same time, Lula seems to be more popular than ever
because the retaliatory economic consequences that were applied to the
(45:04):
whole country seem to have constituted some sort of base
for Lula. So you have covered this extensively, what's going
on in Brazil.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah, just to.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
Quickly clarify that I did reporting in twenty nineteen and
twenty twenty about corruption inside the prosecutorial office that put
Ula in jail, and then the Supreme Court used my
reporting to let out of jail. But then I did
your reporting. Last year, we got this huge leak of
documents from Arice's office, the Supreme Court judge that has
been censoring, imprisoning political opponents, putting them in exile, that
(45:37):
showed massive abuses of power, Like we had documents. It
came right from his chambers by a very brave whistleblower,
and we were able to show things like he would
wake up one day and say I want that magazine closed.
Go find some evidence that would justify closing it. They
would come back and they would say we looked everywhere
that it doesn't seem like they did anything, and it
was like a right link pro Bowlsnaro magazine or a website.
(45:57):
And he would then send a message back saying creative.
This is a person. I can't overstate what a tyrant
he is. It's really like kind of a mental illness
at this point, like he's so invested in his own
righteousness and also in the determination to prove that his
power is without limits that he's he's actually quite maniacal.
(46:19):
And there's a lot of people, including Lula. Yes, you're right,
they got some benefits because Lula raised the sovereignty flag.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Like no one tells us what to do.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Brazilians decide what Brazilians do, and of course that's going
to create some positive feelings towards Lullid. It's like when
any country gets attacked from an outside country, they unify
behind their leader. The problem is is that these tariffs
and these sanctions are going to harm Brazil's economy very severely,
and fourteen and fifteen months from now, when Lula runs
(46:48):
for reelection. Bolsnaro is barred from running, but we'll see
who runs against. When people are suffering economically, when they've
lost huge numbers of jobs because of tariffs and sanctions,
and when you know, the economy starts crashing, no one's
going to remember, oh yeah, I remember that Trump put
sanctions or tariffs. They're going to blame the government. And
Lula really wants to find a way out of this
(47:13):
conflict with the United States and negotiated deal because he
knows it's going to make He's going to put him
in trouble. The problem is that Reich is a freak
and a maniac, and he doesn't want a deal. He
wants to blow up any deal. And so even you
know every time they do something the tariffs are sanctions,
he goes further. He is now at the point where
he's ordering an American social media company, Rumble to censor
American citizens inside the United States for ordering them to
(47:36):
turn over data about American citizens of the United States
and threatening Rumble with massive fines if they don't comply,
which of course they're not going to. He's deliberately provoking
the United States, the United States government to show that
he doesn't care, and you know, I was at first
a little bit doubtful, even though I do think right
is a maniac, Like what why should the United States
(47:58):
be interfering in Brazilian politics? It's punishing a judge because
he's internally repressive. But I do think it becomes justified
when that censorship, when those punishments start getting directed at
of American companies, American citizens, even legal residents of the
United States, which he's been doing for months now. And
you know, it's kind of like Ukrainian and Russia in
(48:18):
one sense. You can decide who you think is the
just party, but at the end of the day, Russia
is so much more powerful than Ukraine that they're going
to win. The United States is infinitely more powerful than
Brazil with the dollar as the reserve currency, and Brazil
can keep trying to pretend that they're willing to fight
the United States, well, will get a little popularity. He's
raising the banner of sovereignty. But at the end of
(48:39):
the day, this is a major crisis, a major problem
in Brazil. We don't talk about in the United States
because it really doesn't affect the United States, but in Brazil,
it's by far and away the most talked about issue
is the conflict of the United States.
Speaker 3 (48:50):
So they're going to have to find ways out of that.
This persecution, the bulscenario is going to have to end.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
The censorship regie is going to have to end, because
if not, I know for sure that the United States government,
the executive branch, tends to continue to intends to continue
to crush Brazil.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
The more defiant they become.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
How long until we can accurately call Brazil a dictatorship.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
I am very careful about, you know, words like that,
But at the same time, I'll just tell you you know,
there are huge numbers of all Star supporters, journalists, elected
members of Congress, senators, bloggers, activists who are either in
prison because of my rights, Who's ordered them in prison?
(49:35):
They're all banned from the Internet and censored. Huge numbers
of them are in exile. And when they go into exile,
when they leave Brazil, he tries to put them on
the Interpol list, he tries to extradate them. The United States,
even under Joe Biden, refuse his extradition requests because the
United States said, no, these are political crimes, these are
(49:55):
crimes of speech, we don't extradit for that, there's some
in Spain. The Spanish government all so told Mo Rees
we're not extraditing, and then in retaliation, he actually released
a drug dealer that Spain wants extradited. Kind of his punishment,
he asked Interpol to put bols and art supporters on
the list. Interpaul said, this is not appropriate. These are
enough the kind of crimes that we're here to do
(50:16):
to govern, and everybody I know in Brazil is afraid
of him, is afraid.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Of speaking out against him.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
I mean, I do it because I feel like I
have a lot of extra protection being American, having a
big profile internationally, and some of the people do it too.
But when you get to that point where people are
genuinely petrified of criticizing government official, and for good reason
that you wanked up in jail, you want up having
your life destroyed. He freezes people's bank accounts, their assets,
and there's so many people in exile. You do get
(50:45):
to the point where I think you can say Brazil
is under a judicial tyranny or judicial dictatorship, even though
I'm very hesitant to use words like that, but it's
we're getting to the point if we're not already there
where it's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
Glenn Greenwald. He is the host of System Update on Rumble,
someone I follow closely. When he speaks about matters of
the world and access to information, I always get a
lot smarter every time we have a chance to chat
and greatly appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
It's always great to see Matt. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Take care
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