Transcript: Glenn Greenwald Interview on Totalitarian Surveillance State: Tucker Carlson Show

It’s a very effective science that’s been developed over decades, really centuries, using multiple fields of discipline — anthropology, psychology, psychiatry. It’s a very precise science. It’s not surprising that it works. But sometimes there are things that are so brazen about it that even my respect for the efficacy of propaganda makes me shocked that it does work.

One of the things I find most shocking is this idea that the United States goes to war against the tyrannical and dictatorial governments of the world because we want to free the oppressed people and bring them freedom and democracy. If you know anything about American history, our history is exactly the opposite. We spent so many decades overthrowing democratically elected leaders and imposing on those countries some of the most brutal military dictatorships ever known in human history — including, of course, in Iran, and countless other places. Right now, our closest allies, that Trump loves most, are the most brutal regimes: Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, the Egyptians, all over the world. That has always been our goal.

There was an article last week in The New York Times about how these Iranian exiles — who have lived for decades in London and Toronto and Chicago and L.A. — somehow got held up as the voice of the Iranian people, saying, “Please, please come and bomb our country, we want you to free us.” Now they’re saying, “Oh my God, we’re so disillusioned. It turns out Trump really wasn’t interested in freeing the Iranian people, nor was Netanyahu. They were fighting the war solely for their own interests, and they’re willing to kill as many of us as possible in order to advance that goal.” And it’s like — that just occurred to you?

If you were to believe that neocons and their war propaganda about wanting to free the oppressed people of the world were actually real, you would then find it oddly contradictory that they’re imposing this tyrannical surveillance state at home. But if you understand — which I think most reasonably perceptive people do — that spreading freedom and democracy have nothing to do with why we fight wars, that in fact we’re more interested in undercutting freedom and democracy, that we prefer dictatorships at our service who control their countries and suppress their populations for us, then it makes all the sense in the world that those same people would want to maintain as much of a grip on the domestic population as they do on the rest of the world.

This is, I think, the other point, Tucker. When we were doing the Snowden reporting, people really understood: wow, it turns out our government was converting what we were told was this very liberatory, emancipatory technology — the internet — into its exact opposite, the most coercive and potent means of human control ever in human history. I remember when we did one story about the ubiquity of the ability to spy on people, people who were actually in the Stasi in East Germany came out and expressed a kind of envy. They were like, “Oh wow, we never dreamed of having powers this significant.”

One of the big responses was, well, look — the NSA tried to encourage people to think this, and all the other corporations did as well — you don’t need privacy. Privacy is for losers and criminals. It’s for pedophiles and terrorists. If you don’t have anything to hide, then why do you need privacy? And of course, every single person has something to hide. We all do things in secret and in private that we wouldn’t do in public. Every single one of us has that division in our lives. It’s very healthy — it’s fundamental to how human beings operate. And a surveillance state — nothing gives greater tyrannical power to a centralized power than the ability to surveil and monitor and know what people are doing at all times. To see Bari Weiss and the Free Press justifying it and cheering it, making it seem all benign, is exactly what you would expect of people who have that as their goal.

“If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide”

TUCKER CARLSON: And not just benign, not just harmless and non-threatening, but they’ve actually taken it a step beyond that — they’re scolding anyone who wants privacy. And by the way, these are all pro-choice people who believe Griswold v. Connecticut, the ’67 decision that gave us the right to privacy, is really important, but you don’t actually get the privacy. So just to restate the headline: it says they’re not interested in you unless you’re a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good. So basically, if you’re worried about Flock cameras, you’re up to no good — you’re a thief, you’re a kidnapper. They’re yelling at us for caring.

GLENN GREENWALD: What they’re trying to do is essentially say that if you’re somebody who craves privacy in your life — who wants areas of your life free of government or corporate monitoring and scrutiny — then essentially you’re admitting that you do things that are wrong. In fact, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google for many years, said exactly that at one point, when people were raising questions about the invasiveness of Google and how it’s creating this dragnet of ubiquitous surveillance. He said, “Well, why don’t you think about it this way: if you’re doing something that you don’t want other people to know about, maybe you should stop doing it. Maybe that’s something you ought not to be doing.” As though the mere fact that human beings crave privacy in any realm, at any point in our lives, for any purpose, suggests that we’re somehow bad people because we want to hide things — and the only reason to hide things is if you’re a pedophile or otherwise engaged in dangerous conduct that you shouldn’t be engaged in.

I think that’s the most pernicious and sinister part of this — trying to convince people that anybody who cares about privacy cares about it only because they’re doing things that you should want the government to know about, because they’re probably really bad and dangerous people. And I think sometimes we forget how un-American that is. When I went to law school, and you study the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and its layout, it really struck me how the founders purposely imposed restrictions on police power, on state power — knowing it would make it easier for violent criminals, rapists, and pedophiles to often escape. The police would be able to catch so many more criminals if they could just barge into your home at any time or search whatever they wanted. Privacy is so foundational — the state can’t just come into your home and use your house to quarter their soldiers. This is all the value of privacy that pervades every part of the Bill of Rights, and what it means to be American. The idea that only bad people care about privacy could not be any more anti-American in its ethos.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you wouldn’t talk to your own population that way if you liked them. The normal reaction to complaint — if someone you love says, “I don’t like what you’re doing,” part of you thinks, okay, I love this person, I’m going to listen. I don’t whip around and scream at the person for complaining. And yet again and again and again, you see this impulse from our leaders, particularly the ones pushing the war in Iran, the neocons, that suggests deep contempt for the American population.

You saw it in the last ten days in the debate over food inflation. Rather than just making the argument that the numbers aren’t real, that your lived experience is imaginary, that it doesn’t actually cost more to eat than it did five years ago, that you’re making it up in your mind, you’re crazy — they’ve been scolding people, yelling at them: how dare you complain about a twenty-dollar burrito? You’re not doing it right. What is that?

GLENN GREENWALD: This is one of the things I think we’ve gotten away from so severely — and maybe it was too gradual, like the frog in the boiling water metaphor. The whole idea of why Congress was supposed to approve wars was because war, by necessity, affects every single person in very fundamental ways. There was an assumption — even though it proved not to be true — that in times of war, you’re going to have to pay more taxes, because someone has to pay for the war. They didn’t know we were just going to create this fiat system of money and borrow trillions from China. But that was their assumption. It would also affect the country in every other way — your sons would be endangered, because they were the ones who’d have to go fight. So it needed buy-in from the American people, and the way to do that was to ensure that the only way the president could start a war is if the American people, through their Congress, approved it.

We just completely got rid of that. It’s like we rewrote the Constitution. Even though there hasn’t been a declaration of war, typically political leaders have wanted the buy-in of the American people before starting a war. That was the whole eighteen-month campaign of what turned out to be lies — but still, it was an eighteen-month PR campaign by George Bush and Dick Cheney and the rest to convince Americans why we needed to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. They thought it was important that Americans got on board, and they did — two-thirds or more of Americans favored the war in Iraq when it began.

That doesn’t exist anymore. There was no campaign of any kind, no pretense of caring what the American population thought, when trying to sell this war in Iran that basically came out of nowhere. Polls showed Americans overwhelmingly opposed to it, and they’ve only gotten more opposed. And the reaction is: who cares? Who cares what the American people think, if they think it’s not worth it to pay more at the pump and more at the supermarket when they’re already facing economic difficulties? Too bad for them — they need to shut up and accept it, because our goals are more important. It’s such an overtly contemptuous message being sent by our elite. And then these are the same people who wonder why Americans are so disgusted by elite institutions that they’re willing to vote for anybody — left, right, socialist, far right, whatever you call them — who they see as radically opposing the establishment, because they have so many good reasons to hate them.

A Volatile Political System

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re describing a political system that’s becoming legitimately volatile. People who had no chance at all, who were truly fringe, and ideas that were truly fringe — including some that I personally articulate a lot — are now much more mainstream. That suggests the system is changing really fast, in a way that’s good in some ways but also kind of scary in other ways. And that’s exactly why you don’t embark on a massive project like a war without the buy-in of the public, because it could hurt you. But these people didn’t even flinch — and on a bipartisan level. Trump did it, but there were Democratic leaders for it too. So why aren’t they afraid? And still are — why aren’t they afraid?

GLENN GREENWALD: Okay, so this is where I think this gets back to your first question, and this is what I ultimately — I almost wrote a book on this once. I was about to write a book on it when I met someone named Edward Snowden, which kind of derailed me for a few years.

I remember growing up, I didn’t know any rich people, and one of the very first rich people I ever talked to was right when I started my blog. He was a major, high-level mathematician at one of the most lucrative hedge funds, making enormous sums of money. I remember, after the 2008 financial crisis, I was doing a lot of reading about oligarchs in the past and how frightened they were of the public — the greatest fear the very wealthy had in America was of a populist uprising. That was how FDR was able to sell them on the New Deal: “You may not like the New Deal, but if we don’t make these people’s lives better in some way, you can say goodbye to the whole capitalist system.” They used to have yachts with safes full of their jewels because they thought any moment they were going to have a kind of Bolshevik revolution. That’s why John Rockefeller and Henry Ford used to ride down the street handing out money — that’s where philanthropy came from, to convince Americans they were good people, because they were scared.

I remember, after the financial crisis, saying it really seemed like the elite class had completely lost its fear. The greed that drove the financial crisis, and then the insistence that all the money be used to bail out the richest people who caused it and let everybody else drown — the entire middle class, with foreclosures and mortgages — signals a kind of utter indifference. That fear is gone. And I think the reason it’s gone is because they believe the police state they’ve constructed is enough to keep them safe no matter how angry the peasants are.

I think that’s a lot of where this surveillance state comes from. If you have this massive wealth inequality, there are two ways to maintain it. One is to placate the public, the majority, just enough that they don’t feel it’s worth it to risk their lives and wage a revolution, because they’re at least minimally fed, at just above subsistence level. The alternative is to paramilitarize the society — build huge walls behind which all the rich live, give extreme authorities of violence and surveillance to the police forces you fund and construct, which are there really to protect that system and protect you. So much of this mass surveillance is the recognition that that is the path that’s been chosen.

I guess the French elite thought they were safe behind the walls of Versailles, and to some extent you can probably make yourself pretty safe. But at some point, if you keep creating this complete loss of faith and trust in institutions of authority, and a very well-grounded belief that the suffering people have in their lives is due to those in power — not left-right, not Democrat versus Republican, not pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-trans, but based on what’s being done with the distribution of power and wealth — I don’t think even the greatest amount of paramilitarization and surveillance will be enough to stop it. But that is definitely the goal, and it’s tied into their ability to go around waging wars and not care whether people are supportive of it or angry about it, because they believe — Peter Thiel believes he can build his own private island, have Palantir surveil everybody, and he’ll always know whatever threats are emerging. I think that’s the mentality they’ve opted for.

Pharmaceuticals, Distraction, and Control

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve always thought that pharma played a role in this. It’s not simply surveilling and threatening people into obedience, but it’s also changing the nature of people through benzodiazepines and SSRIs, and just the whole cornucopia of suppressive drugs that are handed out — you can get them online without ever seeing a doctor. That seems like an instrument of social policy to me, of social control.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I think marijuana is part of that as well. I’m definitely somebody who believes in the legalization of marijuana, just because it gives the state way too much power to criminalize it. But the fact that so many people are ingesting so many substances that are being fed to them, recommended to them, promoted to them, that are basically designed to create almost a zombie state — sometimes anxiety is good, anger is good. These are the things that drive us wanting better lives. If you sandpaper all the edges off of humanity and turn people into doped-up, narcoticized people who are willing to accept anything and everything and just be content with it — that’s very dystopian.

It sounds very dystopian, but to a large extent, if you know people in your life who are taking a large amount of antidepressants or Xanax or any of these medications, marijuana too, to put themselves constantly in a state of tranquility and acceptance and submission, you can see the effects of it in their daily lives — but also on this kind of macro level, which is very beneficial to people in power. You want a population that’s content and happy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Turns out opium is the opium of the masses, right?

Can you expand on your point that anxiety can be good? I do think Americans are trained to see pain in general, but specifically anxiety, as the last thing you ever want to deal with — you should do whatever it takes to avoid ever feeling anxious. Why do you disagree? Why do you think it can be helpful?

GLENN GREENWALD: All of these human emotions and instincts we have are fundamental to our survival. They’re the reason natural selection has produced human beings capable of feeling these things and reacting in these ways to these events — because these are the sentiments that maximize your chance of survival, and not just survival but thriving, prospering, and finding happiness.

It’s like fear. Nobody likes feeling fear, but I’m really glad I have the ability to feel fear if something actually dangerous is nearby, because then I’ll protect myself from it, or try to flee, or do things to save myself. If I just took pills that constantly eliminated my sense of fear, I might feel better day to day, but it would also drastically impede the capabilities I have that are fundamental to being a human being who can survive and thrive in the world. The same is true of anxiety. Anxiety tells us there’s something wrong, that things are going on that aren’t as they should be. This is what drives intellectual achievement — it’s what drives social and political change and revolutions. If you’re willing to take medication every day to drown that out, suffocate it, or kill it, you’re taking away one of the most important, valuable drivers you have as a human being, and you’ll just stagnate.

You may be happier in the sense that people who perceive nothing are happy — if you limit what you know to a very small number of things, there’s a level of happiness to it, an “ignorance is bliss” kind of formula. But it’s very shallow, very superficial. And ultimately, it’s designed to make you accept things that you really ought not to accept, ought not to feel good about, ought not to be happy about.

TUCKER CARLSON: It also reframes reality in a way that’s very dishonest. Therapy culture tells you it’s on you — you’ve got this trauma you’re carrying around with you, and there’s truth in all of that, by the way, I’m not dismissing it. But big picture, a lot of Americans are really unhappy because the system is working against them. The system they did not create, into which they were born, which has changed a lot over the past thirty years — it is bad for you. The way we’re living is bad for you, and that’s the result of decisions others made. But when you get prescribed SSRIs or benzos, what is the therapist really saying? “Your real problems are internal.” I’ve got internal problems, sure, but a twenty-dollar burrito and a lifetime of debt — other people decided to create that system, and it’s hurting me. So do you see what I’m saying? You shift the blame from the guilty to yourself.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. You do want all the tools, as an individual, that you can acquire to combat external forces, and to keep yourself in check — because sometimes those human instincts can become excessive or off-kilter. Fear is good, but paranoia isn’t. Anxiety is good, but crippling anxiety is a disorder. So it’s not as though those things can’t go wrong, and you want to always turn them up to ten and maximize them. Sometimes those things can help individuals struggling with some sort of disorder get themselves in order.

But in general — this has become such a common anecdote now — when Trump won in 2016, which was very shocking to most people, but especially to liberals, therapists in every city and every part of the country reported so many patients seeking out therapy as a way of dealing with Trump’s victory that they couldn’t accommodate a portion of them. During COVID, people basically went insane, and they should have, because the conditions in which we were forced to live were so completely divergent from what human beings need — just the minimum things you need, of interactivity and going outside, just normal human life. Those kinds of reactions are positive — they’re the kinds of things that make you angry and say, “No, we’re not going to accept this.”

But you’re right, in our culture we’ve been told that if we’re dissatisfied with something, if we’re angry about something, if we feel anxious about something, you take a pill for it, or you fix it. And sometimes it shouldn’t be fixed. Sometimes you feel those things because you should feel those things. Again, from the 1940s and ’50s, there are books by Orwell and Huxley — dystopian books about what was, to them, the future, but to us is our present — based on the idea that we were essentially going to be kept in this constant state of chemical or entertainment distraction, tranquility, in a way that would allow those in power to exploit us as much as they want, because we’ve turned off the reactions that are so vital to resisting it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why is distraction bad? You mentioned it — it’s so interesting — as a tool of control, but also a source of suffering. What role does distraction play?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it’s interesting — I don’t think distraction, in an absolute sense, is bad. I think distraction can sometimes be a positive. You watch some sporting event with your family, or a good film, or read a good book — part of its value is that it takes you away from your reality and puts you into a different one. So if managed and limited, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

But distraction is very addictive. We have companies that build products designed to do nothing but addict you to the distraction they provide. One of the most amazing articles I remember was a New York Times piece that interviewed a bunch of parents who work for Silicon Valley companies, and they were always saying, “I would never allow my kids to use the products I’m creating for kids, because I know what they’re designed to do” — which is to completely distort and trap their brain into this never-ending need for constant stimulation that has nothing to do with the real world. They’re designed to be addictive, like cigarettes were, like other substances were. And if you can keep people continuously distracted — meaning not focused on reality — then the people who are focused on reality have a gigantic advantage: they can do whatever they want, and very few people will pay attention. You feed them enough propaganda, enough justification, and they’re more eager to get back to that distraction, which really becomes an addiction.

Why No Anti-War Protests Over Iran?

TUCKER CARLSON: You certainly see it in the country since February 28th — the day the war with Iran started, and kind of the precipitous decline of the United States began. There’s obviously no way out without a readjustment downward in our standard of living. We know that’s going to happen. And yet people don’t seem as agitated about it as you might have expected at the beginning. And most interesting of all, there have been almost no protests — anti-war protests. Having seen a lot of anti-war protests in my life, I’m baffled. This is the most significant war we’ve fought, I’d argue, since the Second World War, in that it’ll change the balance of power globally. And there are no protests. What is going on?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think if you look at what has sparked anti-war protests in the past, it basically requires some visceral interaction with the war that makes people horrified and sickened by what’s happening. The Vietnam War protests were almost certainly induced primarily by the fact that huge numbers of coffins and body bags were coming back to the United States on a very regular basis. People’s neighbors and communities, people they went to school with or worked with, all had kids who went over to the jungles of Vietnam and came back dead. It was also one of the first really televised wars — not televised in the sense the first Iraq War or the wars now are, but there was still enough reporting done on some of the massacres by the US military, and the amount of death taking place, that people felt it in their neighborhoods, in their communities. There was no way to avoid it.

Even wars that have sparked anti-war protests more recently, that didn’t involve American troops coming home — like the US-funded and armed Israeli destruction of Gaza — were ones where every single day people were seeing the most horrific carnage. Babies having their limbs blown apart, entire families incinerated in tents even though they were completely defenseless. Basically the most horrific things you could think of. Anyone with a basic moral conscience, knowing their government was paying for it, that their money was being used for it, that their government’s forces were being diplomatically and militarily harnessed to participate in it and protect it, felt this visceral disgust that also caused them to protest.

We don’t really have either of those with Iran. The number of American deaths has been relatively limited, by virtue of the fact that Trump hasn’t ordered ground troops into Iran. At the same time, we’ve gotten very little visual idea of how many civilians have been killed in Iran. The very first day, we know we killed 165 schoolgirls — the very people we claimed we were going to war to liberate — by dropping a gigantic missile on their school, and then a second missile when people showed up to help them, the notorious “double strike” tactic the Israelis used constantly in Gaza. So it’s not like this war has been free of atrocities. But it’s been kept hidden enough — we don’t know the names of Iranian victims, we don’t get a full glimpse of it. And given the small number of people fighting the war, and the fact that not many of them are coming back dead, I think it’s been enough to numb people, to make them think this isn’t really something affecting them directly, even though they’re paying more. There’s a pretty high trigger for when people are going to go out into the street and actually protest.

I should also add, Tucker — this is something to consider — the protest movement that occurred on American campuses over the war in Gaza didn’t just peter out. Those were crushed, through a combination of police violence and especially the criminalization of those protests. Many of those protesters got expelled, a lot got deported. The government made very clear that they regarded protests against government policy — even though it’s one of our most foundational rights, protected by the Constitution — as something to be crushed through police force and state punishment. When you create a climate where people know that if they protest the government’s war policies, there’s a good chance they’ll suffer personally, you raise the bar, by design, even higher for when people are willing to go out into the street.

Hidden Wars and Information Control

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the reasons those protests took place is because there was evidence, as you said, of what was happening in Gaza. But there’s no coverage of the war in Iran, or for that matter, coverage of the war against Russia from Russia’s perspective. When the first Gulf War broke out in the winter of ’90 and ’91, CNN famously was there in Baghdad as the United States began its barrage of Baghdad — you could watch it live on television. That’s been true for every war; it was even true, to some extent, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with this war — how many American network correspondents are in Tehran right now? How many are in Moscow covering that side? It does seem intentional — like the propaganda is founded on a lack of information.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think this is so crucial — the easiest way to prevent public outrage about public policy or public behavior that deserves outrage is simply to hide it. I did a lot of reporting on the atrocities inside factory farms — the way factory food is produced through the torture and slaughter of billions of animals, and not just their slaughter but their actual torture, and also the grotesque public health conditions these animals are kept in that contaminate the food supply, the risk of epidemics from antibiotics, and so on. One of the ways this industry ensured nobody got outraged by it was to cover it up. They used their control of state legislatures in farming states to pass so-called “ag-gag” laws, making it a criminal offense for anybody to get a job inside a factory farm and film what was taking place — which was basically the only way we ever got a glimpse of what was happening there. Eventually courts overturned it as the obvious First Amendment violation it was. But their goal was: we’re going to use barbarism and savagery, but as long as we prevent the public from knowing about it, they can’t care, because they’ll never see it.

That’s very much been the case with war. I remember — in 2014, there was a lone gunman attack on the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. The gunman, even though he was Muslim, was mostly just psychologically ill, with a long history of psychiatric illness. He killed one young guard who stood outside the Parliament, and nobody else. That guy became an icon in Canada. I was there the whole week — they had marches in his name, interviewed all his family members. There was a real sense that our society had suffered the loss of this valuable, precious human life, which it had.

When have you ever heard the name of one of our victims, from all the countries we bomb and have been bombing for twenty-five years, all throughout the War on Terror — all these bombs, these drones, dropped on wedding parties? They’re all just dehumanized, swept under the rug. Did you hear the names of any of the families of the 165 schoolgirls we killed on the first day of the war in Iran? No. That’s a very deliberate strategy, to make sure Americans don’t focus on the amount of carnage and suffering and bloodshed our military is causing against innocent people — because that’s the only way you can get populations to accept these constant wars, if you don’t let them realize what it actually entails. I think the reason Gaza was an exception is because so many people in Gaza had cameras in their hands, uploading, with allies who could upload the actual carnage and inhumanity taking place every day, and people couldn’t avoid it. But they made a lot of efforts to try to prevent that from being seen as well.

That’s what the ban of TikTok was ultimately about — it was not a fear of China, because that had been around forever, and the idea that we had to ban TikTok because the Chinese have too much power went nowhere. The only time the TikTok ban picked up enough steam and got votes in both parties, with the support of the Biden White House, was when the ADL came out and said the reason young people were being turned against Israel during the war in Gaza was because there were too many of these videos circulating on TikTok. That’s when the government intervened and said we can’t allow TikTok to become this uncontrolled realm of free speech, because it contaminates our youth with the things we don’t want them to know. That’s why they took it out of the hands of ByteDance and put it in the hands of people like Marc Andreessen and Larry Ellison.

TUCKER CARLSON: How bitterly ironic that it was a Chinese-owned company that was bringing too much free speech into the United States.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah — no one thinks China is a beacon of free speech, especially when it comes to their own people, that’s for sure. But in a way, they were the only outlet the US government couldn’t fully control. During COVID, the US government had no problem cracking down on any debates about the origins of COVID, the efficacy of masks or social distancing or school lockdowns and their advisability. They were easily able to censor it, because they had basic control over all the American Big Tech platforms — those platforms need the US government for their defense contracts, their contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon, they’re never going to be adversarial to the US government. ByteDance didn’t have that vested interest in the United States government, and didn’t need to obey US government censorship orders. So, ironically, it was one of the only vestiges of a large platform the American government couldn’t censor — and that’s why it had to be taken out of their hands, not because Americans wanted to be free of Chinese repression.

The Censorship of Russia’s Perspective

TUCKER CARLSON: My concern about the censorship that covers all the main facts of these two wars in progress, in Russia and Iran, is that obviously it hardens us to the effects of what our policies actually do, but it also makes it hard to make wise decisions, because you have no idea about the other side’s perspective. For example, I keep running into people — including at dinner last night — who sincerely believe Ukraine is winning the war against Russia, and who have no idea the United States is actually fighting that war. NATO — our proxy, NATO — but the CIA is allowing all the targeting to take place, and we’re running Ukraine. But no one seems to know that. It seems like a feedback loop — “we’re winning,” or “Ukraine is winning amazingly, and Russia’s going to surrender at any moment and give back the Donbas.” If you really believe that — and it’s not true, of course — but if you believe it, you’re likely to do really dumb things that could wind up who knows where. Do you see that happening?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sometimes I see things happen that actually shock and amaze me, and I don’t fully understand why they don’t produce more shock and indignation in other people. So I just try, everywhere I go, to bring it up and remind people — hoping that one day people will understand not just how alarming it is on its own, but how reflective it is of how severely our discourse is controlled.

One example: when young people on TikTok discovered the bin Laden letter and started passing it around, they bullied The Guardian into taking that document off its site, so the links no longer worked, and got TikTok to ban any discussion of the bin Laden letter — because a bunch of young people were like, “Wait a minute, I never knew before that this is why there was so much hatred toward the United States in the Middle East” — because we sanctioned Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of children, put our military on their most sacred soil in Saudi Arabia, and funded Israel in the middle of the region to wage all this aggression. They always thought it was because, as we were told, “these Muslims” hated women walking around in bikinis and hated the fact that we vote. They were shocked to discover this history they’d never been told. Immediately the attempt was to take it off The Guardian‘s website, so there’s nowhere they can read that letter, and get TikTok to shut down the hashtag.

The other example: right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February of 2022, the EU Parliament quickly enacted a law making it a criminal offense to platform any Russian state media. So if you’re an adult citizen of the Netherlands or Spain or wherever, and you want to hear the Russian side of the story, or what Russia is saying about why they decided to do this or what’s actually happening, you can’t — because it’s now a crime to platform Russian state media. European citizens were not allowed to hear it. When I was at Rumble, the French government came and said, “You have RT and Sputnik on your site, and you need to take those down, because EU law doesn’t permit the dissemination of those media outlets in our countries.” When Rumble said no, they banned all of Rumble at the IP level — Rumble was not available in France. That’s how rigorously it was enforced.

Even at the height of the Cold War, you could go to The New York Times, and Khrushchev would come to the United States and give a speech, and they’d print the full text. He’d be interviewed. We always heard from Soviet leaders. Richard Nixon would go to the Soviet Union, go on national television, and talk about the virtues of capitalism and freedom. This is a level of censorship so extreme it shocks me that people tolerate it. But the reason is — if you actually hear the perspective of the Russians, and I know you’ve done this, and I’ve gone to Russia and interviewed Russian officials, because I do want to hear what they’re saying, I do want to hear the other side’s perspective in a war — it’s become almost treasonous. This climate has been created where you’re not supposed to listen to them, and any journalist who publishes or talks about it is somehow a traitor to the country, or accused of being on the payroll of propagandists, simply for reporting their perspective, not just what our government officials want you to know. Nothing makes propagandizing a population easier than banishing them from hearing any alternative views.

The Animosity Toward Russia

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think the purpose of this is? What’s the goal in the war against Russia? What’s the endgame? I’ll just say, in one sentence, from my perspective — it’s the biggest country in the world, it’s a civilization as well as a nation-state, and it has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. So you’re probably not going to defeat Russia, right? Let’s start there. But do they not know that? What is the plan here?

GLENN GREENWALD: I have to confess, I’ve never had a clear answer to this. I’ve never settled on a clear explanation for why the US national security state has so much deep animosity toward Russia and wants to destroy it. This goes back way before Russiagate — it’s one of the reasons I hated Russiagate so much, not just because it was a scandal with no evidence, but because I thought it was dangerous in the extreme to feed Americans, again, this idea that the gravest, existential threat to our democracy happens to be the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, that we’ve all been trained for generations to hate and fear. I just knew that was not just dangerous but very purposeful.

Even going back to 2010, 2011, Hillary Clinton at the State Department was absolutely obsessed with undermining and subverting Russia. She was openly funding, in the name of democracy, anti-Putin opposition groups. A lot of the protests that appeared on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, under Hillary Clinton’s orders — all kinds of covert operations. When Hillary Clinton wrote her book Hard Choices after leaving the Obama administration, the one real topic on which she clearly criticized Obama was what she saw as his refusal to “confront Russia,” both in Syria and in Ukraine.

Jeffrey Goldberg did an interview with Obama on his way out, about the so-called Obama Doctrine, and Goldberg, as much as he reveres Obama, was indignant, asking why he let Russia annex Crimea, and why he didn’t do more to stop Russia in Ukraine or Syria. Obama said — and if you go back and read this, you’ll get a different view of him — “Everybody in this town loves to beat their chest and talk about how we’re going to go to war, we’re not going to allow this, we’re going to stand up to this.” He said, “We don’t have any vital interest in Ukraine. We never have and we never will. Russia will always look at Ukraine, right on its border, one of the most vulnerable parts of its border, as a vital interest, for obvious reasons — the same way Mexico and Canada are always going to be a vital interest to us. They’re always going to have escalatory dominance there. If anyone in this town wants to stand up and say we should go to war with Russia, risk war with Russia, over who governs various provinces in the Donbas, then let them actually say it.” To me, that’s kind of insane — and it’s odd, because that was 2016, and just a couple of months later, the entire Democratic Party became utterly fixated on the grave threat posed by Russia.

I’ll tell you a quick story that always sticks with me. When I went to Russia, I think for the second or third time, after working with Snowden — there was a time when Snowden was trapped inside the international airport, and the US government wanted nothing more in the world than to get their hands on him. He was in Russian custody but inside the airport, because Russia hadn’t let him in, and he couldn’t leave. The US was offering the Russians everything they wanted — “you have all these Russian fugitives, we’ll hand them over” — and the Russians refused. I thought for sure Snowden was going to be handed over to the US, given what a high priority it was. When I went to Russia, I asked why the deal — which was so obvious — wasn’t made. What I was told, in part, was that Russia has always seen its identity as offering free haven to those oppressed and persecuted in the West, that seeking refuge in Russia is fundamental to Russia. So if Putin turned Snowden over to the US, it would be seen as anti-Russian — and I know a lot of people in the US think he’s this totalitarian leader who doesn’t have to care about Russian public opinion, which is an absurd fairy tale. They said the real reason is that so often the US and Russia end up not being able to do deals that are obviously in both sides’ rational self-interest, because there’s this generationally cultivated hatred within the military and intelligence establishments of both countries, that still believe the other is an existential enemy long after the Cold War is over — almost like inertia driving each country to want to harm the other.

So I don’t know why, Tucker. It seems to me the US and Russia could do a lot of business — they did do a lot of business under Obama. They helped negotiate the Iran deal. They were fundamental in fighting Al-Qaeda and ISIS alongside the US in Syria, with Assad. For some reason, people in the national security state — I’ll tell you one more part of it — a lot of the most hawkish neocons in the United States are people who are refugees, Jewish refugees, from the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and other parts of the former USSR. Russia, when it was the USSR, was considered pretty hostile toward Israel. So a lot of people who feel alignment with Israel, who are loyal to Israel, have long looked at Russia, the Russians, the Soviets, as one of their worst enemies, because they were adversarial to Israel, often aligned with the Arabs in the Middle East. I think a lot of it is that residual cultural allegiance that these people continue to harbor even once they become American and start working in the US national security state.

Immigrant Roots and Foreign Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of these people — well, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, for example, Victoria Nuland, formerly at Dick Cheney’s office and then the State Department — these are American-born people. They’re not from—

GLENN GREENWALD: They’re American—

TUCKER CARLSON: —Soviet Moldova or wherever.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, but their families are from there. Marco Rubio is an American-born American, but his parents come from Cuba. If you grow up in an immigrant home — I didn’t, but I know plenty of people who did, two of my grandparents were immigrants — you hear, and develop, a kind of affinity for the worldview that looks at that country of origin as a very special country to which you owe some allegiance. You don’t have to come from that country, although some of them do. I think one of the reasons Marco Rubio is so eager to rule Cuba — which he absolutely is, and is on the verge of doing — is because that was the lifelong dream of his parents and extended family and community: that the power of the United States government would be used to fix what they always regarded as their country, the one to which they always planned to go back once it was fixed. That’s now what Marco Rubio is going to do. The fact that he sees the world through this Cuban immigrant experience obviously plays a major role in that. I think that’s true for a lot of different groups, including people who were Soviet Jews, or whose families became refugees from Soviet Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why the fixation on—

GLENN GREENWALD: I don’t know, you tell me what you think.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know the answer, but I do know — because I’ve listened very carefully, as someone who’s been agnostic on Russia my entire life, I never had strong feelings about it — I’ve listened carefully to people describe it in Washington at the policymaking level, and you always get this sense that they feel, and sometimes they even just say it, that they have a right to control what happens in Russia. I’ve always been confused by that. Where does that right come from? It’s almost like an ownership — like it was ours, and this guy called Putin showed up and took it over, and he’s illegitimate. From my American perspective, I’m like — whatever you think of Putin, it’s not my country. He was elected. He’s very popular, no one can dispute that. All polls show Putin is more popular than Trump, or any American leader has been since Teddy Roosevelt. So where do you get this feeling that you have a right to control what happens in this country? I’ve always noticed a lot of these people seem to feel they have that right.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I still think Russiagate, of all the moral panics we’ve had — you know, AOC yesterday called wokeism “crazy,” even they’re being forced now to acknowledge it was some insane moral panic, trying to laugh it off like it was just some fun, zany, trivial thing that went a little awry, as opposed to a deeply repressive, McCarthyite, bloodthirsty campaign to destroy people’s lives for the slightest deviation or thought crime. But in any event, that was one. COVID was one. We’ve had a lot of these. I still think Russiagate was probably among the most deranged, and especially the one that got the most buy-in — when people started saying, with a straight face, “This is the Russians trying to interfere in our sacred democracy,” as though this were some kind of unprecedented crime that only the Russians do.

There’s a Time magazine cover story from 1992 or 1993, with Uncle Sam on the cover, two prominent Clinton-adjacent political advisers, and a big picture of Boris Yeltsin — I forget the exact headline, but something like “How Americans Helped Boris Yeltsin Win.” It was basically an armada of Americans — political consultants, strategists — going over and creating the brand of Boris Yeltsin, so that we could control the privatization process and every other aspect of Russian public life, which was one of the absolute worst moments for Russians in all their history, and they’ve had a lot of terrible moments. That post-Gorbachev, post-Cold War privatization, Yeltsin era, was absolutely sickening and atrocious in terms of the suffering it brought. And Americans were boasting of the central role they played in causing all that to happen, so they could have basically an American puppet — Boris Yeltsin — at the helm of Russia.

I think you’re right that when Putin came in — and this is so often what drives American foreign policy — it has nothing to do with whether a country or a leader is democratic or repressive. We love more than anything pro-American dictators, the more savage the better. The thing we can’t abide, the thing that causes us to want to overthrow countries and governments and do coups, is when we can’t control a particular leader. We had the war in Libya once Gaddafi wanted to use revenues from oil reserves to fund his own people instead of sending all that foreign capital out while his country lived in poverty and misery. That’s typically what happens. Putin very much represented this kind of nationalistic figure who wasn’t hostile at all to the West, but also wanted to preserve his own country’s traditions, and especially its sovereignty.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think that’s really worth saying. Putin, on the spectrum of Russian politics, is firmly on the moderate side — and pro-European in his early career, was in East Germany as a KGB officer, famously speaks German, tried to join NATO. So this idea that he’s a Russian nationalist who hates the West on principle, or for ideological reasons, is totally insane. I do think we’re going to see someone like that lead Russia next — there’s no doubt in my mind. But where did this fixation on lying to us about who Putin is, and what that system is, come from? It seems crazy to me.

GLENN GREENWALD: This is what the US government and its allied media institutions do when they want to demonize a foreign leader to justify a war. The Democratic Party — and not just, say, the Chuck Schumer wing, but AOC, Ilhan Omar, the whole Squad, as far left as you can go, to the far center-right — were unanimous from the start in wanting to take hundreds of billions of dollars they claim they really want to use to improve the material lives of American citizens at home, and send it to the coffers of Raytheon and Boeing and Palantir, to fuel the NATO war that does not save Ukraine — it sacrifices Ukraine for the geostrategic goal of weakening Russia. Not a single Democrat dissented. Recently there was some exchange where Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee accused some neocon senator, in an argument online, “You’re the one who pays for the bombs dropping on these people,” and he reminded them, “No, you also voted to send the money to buy those bombs for Ukraine.” I think some of them are starting to have second thoughts, now that they see how this war is escalating — it’s still very dangerous.

That’s when you can create a kind of demonized, single-headed figure — always based on the lie that he’s an absolute autocrat, that you personalize the entire country into that leader. It’s a very standard neocon pro-war propaganda technique. Back in 2008, 2010, we were constantly told Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was “the new Hitler.” There have been so many new Hitlers, since and before. He served two constitutional terms and walked out of office peacefully. No one heard of him again until recently, when apparently the Israelis were trying to reinstall him as the new leader of Iran — the new Hitler.

If you go back and look at what every American leader who dealt with Vladimir Putin has said, going back to Bill Clinton and George Bush and Obama, they always said he’s a very rational, trustworthy, calculating leader, that you can do agreements with him — and both Bush and Obama worked closely with Putin in all sorts of ways. Then, suddenly, when it was time to fuel a war and redemonize Russia, Putin became this madman unlike anything we’ve seen since Hitler. Overnight the narrative changes, and so many people succumb to it. That’s one of the main prongs of war propaganda — demonizing these other political leaders.

AOC, the Democratic Party, and the DSA

TUCKER CARLSON: So if AOC is describing wokeness as excessive, trying to laugh it off — or I saw she said yesterday that calling for the abolition of police was “just something you say during a pandemic,” kind of joking around, just a Halloween costume she wore for a day and discarded — if she’s talking like that, she’s running for president, obviously. How would you evaluate her politics? For someone like me who’s not a lifelong Democrat, who is she, and how different is she from, say, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer, or Steny Hoyer — the Democratic leadership?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the person who understood who AOC was much earlier than almost anybody else is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even before what became her own eye-opening, awakening transformation, Greene used to object to this notion that AOC was some kind of radical, some kind of threat to establishment status-quo dogma. She’d always say AOC isn’t a radical — AOC is a fraud, a partisan hack, there to put a happier face on things for younger people, to commandeer and steer them into the Democratic Party, to make them feel like they’re joining a party that isn’t really Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden’s party, or Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s party — a nicer, more socialistic, softer, younger, hipper version. In that way, she becomes the Democratic Party’s principal tool.

There’s nothing in AOC’s life that remotely suggests any anti-establishment or radical impulse. She got lucky — she ran against one of those guys who, even though extremely powerful within D.C., spends all his time in the backrooms, with lobbyists writing the laws — Joe Crowley, who was going to be the successor to Nancy Pelosi. He’s the kind of guy who never goes on any shows, no one in his district knows his name, has never seen him — he nominally represents it. Because she took out a member of the Democratic establishment, and was nominally part of the DSA, her branding suited her — that she was this very radical figure. She’s anything but that. To me, she’s already morphed into Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi, at one time, was considered far too left, from San Francisco — and then all she did was become extremely hawkish. She made a very provocative visit to Taiwan, almost like a state visit, very provocative to the Chinese, beyond what the Biden administration was willing to do. She was an absolute hawk on Israel and Iran and pretty much everything else. Few people served corporate power and corporate interests more than Nancy Pelosi. AOC is well on her way to being that. I could give you a thousand examples, but suffice to say, that’s who she really is.

TUCKER CARLSON: The DSA is ascendant, obviously, and DSA candidates are starting to win in primaries — famously, New York’s 14th district. Are there DSA-led protests against the war with Russia? Because it seems to me, if you were actually against the establishment, there’s no bigger establishment project than the war against Russia. It’s been ongoing, as you said, for thirty years, and it enriches Raytheon and Boeing and the rest of the defense contractors. If you were a radical political party, you’d start by opposing that. Are they?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, some are. I’ll tell you this interesting thing — when I first started really connecting to and immersing myself in critiques of foreign policy and US oligarchy, the models I used were kind of what you might now call the old left — the ACLU, Civil Liberties Union, even Noam Chomsky, who thought the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex were the greatest evil. When’s the last time you heard anybody associated with the left, on any platform like Bernie Sanders or AOC, talk about the evils of the CIA or the NSA?

TUCKER CARLSON: No — they endorse Abigail Spanberger, as the CIA literally takes over the Commonwealth of Virginia.

GLENN GREENWALD: Exactly — and of the Democratic Party. The reason is, in so many ways, because Russiagate was basically a hoax that emanated from the CIA and the FBI, and those people became allies of the Democratic Party against Trump — they aligned with those people. A quick anecdote: when Matt Taibbi testified about the Twitter Files, which showed this constant, endless coercive pressure from the Biden administration on Big Tech, including Twitter, to censor COVID dissidents, they had a Democratic congressman from Texas, Colin Allred, say something like, “You should take off your tinfoil hat and realize maybe the good folks at the CIA and the FBI are censoring not for any nefarious purpose, but because they want to keep you safe.” The Democratic Party is now the one telling you to be grateful for CIA censorship, because all they want to do is help the good people stay safe. That’s what the Democratic Party has become. That’s why there was basically no opposition when they were told Russia was what put Trump in office, that Russia was the absolute aggressor, that these were war crimes similar to the worst wars imaginable. They all got convinced, overnight, to want to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the arms industry.

One of the candidates who won in New York — who was actually one of the least likely to win — ran against an eight-year incumbent who was the head of the House Progressive Hispanic Caucus, and won. She has a history of saying we’re not going to support this NATO war — why are we spending all this money to fund the NATO war against Russia that’s sacrificing Ukrainians? I was so happy to finally find someone on the left reconnected to that older tradition.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

GLENN GREENWALD: But she’s kind of quickly downplayed it, because Ukraine remains a religion on the left. So there is some of that more positive radicalism among some of these DSA candidates. The problem, though, Tucker — you see this with Trump and the MAGA movement, and with a lot of these supposedly radical candidates who became adjacent to the Democratic Party — is that you can think you’re taking over these parties in order to commandeer them and their power, to change their dogma to yours. But it’s infinitely more likely, for so many reasons, that it will commandeer you, suck you in, and severely limit — even if you have radical or anti-establishment impulses — your ability to advocate for and impose them.

Is a Political Realignment Coming?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the most bracing fact — and I’m glad you said it, but also sort of sorry you did, because it’s so depressing. Do you see anywhere — and I almost hate to use the word “radical,” because I think this is also just reasonable and pro-human, like, “don’t fight wars if you don’t have to,” “don’t lie to your own population” — these shouldn’t be radical, they should be foundational beliefs. But anyway, they’re radical in the context of our politics. Do you see any actual reform movement rising out of the betrayal of MAGA and the corruption of everyone else?

GLENN GREENWALD: The problem is that our system of government has been constantly fortified, each decade, to make it harder to exist outside the duopoly. The reason is obvious — all politicians are either Republicans or Democrats, and one of their most common interests is making sure you only ever have the Democratic and Republican parties, and that it’s virtually impossible for anyone to compete with them in a meaningful way. Every law that gets passed, every time election laws are rewritten, it’s in the direction of making it increasingly difficult for any independent party or movement to have meaningful success.

There are countries — in Europe, in South America, including Brazil — that have multi-party systems. Brazil has something like twenty-six parties represented in Congress. But even in the democratic world, things are starting to get polarized too, between the populists and the establishment, because people are living on this politics of fear — you don’t have to like who you support, as long as they’re less scary than the alternative. That’s a cultural norm that’s been developed and imposed, which further strengthens this difficulty.

At the same time — and this is what everything we’ve been talking about throughout this discussion comes back to — Americans are so disillusioned that figures who would have been unlikely in the past became possible, for me, more than anything, with Trump, but actually Obama too, because people wanted unlikely figures — figures who didn’t look like they came from an establishment they’ve come to hate, with good reason, more and more every year. That’s creating an instability which, as you said, can be scary, because instability can lead to things even worse than what you’re rebelling against. But instability also entails a lot of opportunity. I can’t tell you exactly how or when, but I think we’re getting to the point where people who never before would have considered it are going to be much more open to identifying with movements, campaigns, or parties not connected to or identifying as Republican or Democrat.

We’ve seen this work before, like Ross Perot — of course he was a billionaire, which is maybe what you need — but he had a very successful third-party candidacy, based on opposing the support by both Clinton and Bush 41 for free trade, which, as he very presciently warned, would deindustrialize the country, suck out all the jobs. You’ve seen that before, but I think we’ve never been more ripe for it, because both parties are hated, and the system itself is hated. I think people are craving a credible alternative — it’s just hard to create one, given all the barriers that have been deliberately erected.

TUCKER CARLSON: But something is coming — you feel that?

GLENN GREENWALD: For sure. No doubt. How can it not? This is the biggest myth, the biggest lie, of our political system — that the two political parties can’t agree on anything, that they’re always at each other’s throats, always so polarized. The reality is the two parties agree on at least ninety percent of major policy issues. The only time the media covers it is in the very few cases when they disagree, which creates the appearance they’re always disagreeing. Obama himself, when they used to use this vitriolic language against him — John Boehner and the House Republicans — would always say in private, “We all know it’s theater, we’re all playing within the forty-yard lines.” That’s the reality of the two political parties in the United States. This myth that there are vast, fundamental differences between them is crucial to giving you the sense that you have this wild freedom, that everything is free-spirited, that nothing is controlled or limited — when in reality, there’s a lockdown on most policy debates, because both parties are fully on board, because they serve the same donor classes, the same interests. I think more and more people are realizing that. The fact that we elected Donald Trump twice, for me, pretty much proves that anything is possible.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have this amazing ability to crystallize and explain things I’ve suspected or believed, but better than I ever could. Just really the smartest. Glenn Greenwald, thank you very much for that.

GLENN GREENWALD: Always great talking to you, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thanks.

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