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May 7, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:35
@GlennGreenwald | ​Journalism, Snowden, Brazil, Russia/Ukraine, and Censorship
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Our most critical debates, where did COVID come from?
Should we be involved in the war in Ukraine?
What happened with January 6th?
Was the FBI involved?
All of these debates that we ought to be having in a very vibrant way are instead being closed off in favor of establishment pieties.
And I don't regard anything as more dangerous than that.
Glenn Greenwald founded a law firm in 1996, where he focused on First Amendment cases.
But after the September 11th attacks and the actions by the Bush administration that followed, he began to write, accusing the federal government of violating Americans' civil liberties.
His work caught the attention of Edward Snowden, who provided Glenn and his team a plethora of classified documents from the National Security Agency.
The UK Guardian published Glenn's reporting on this leak, which revealed the NSA was secretly gathering information on American citizens.
The work resulted in a journalism Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2014.
Ten years after the reports, I asked Glenn what the reputation of our three-letter government agencies and Edward Snowden are like today.
After massive success with the Snowden leaks, Glenn co-founded the news organization The Intercept, with journalist Jeremy Shahil and filmmaker Loyal Portris, who made the Academy Award-winning documentary Citizen Four, which told the story of the journalists who worked with Snowden.
The Intercept's mission was to hold the most powerful governments and corporations accountable.
But in 2020, Portris was terminated, and Greenwald resigned after leadership attempted to censor his work.
The news organization they created had turned its back on their original vision.
Glenn has since gone full-time with his Substack newsletter, a growing trend for journalists, and a nightly news program called System Update, live exclusively on Rumble.
In this episode, we analyze the state of honest journalism.
Plus, we'll discuss Brazil's political climate, something Glenn has done in-depth reporting on, and we'll discuss a key area of debate between us over the years, U.S.
goes foreign policy Just a reminder, some of our conversation at the end will be exclusively for our Daily Wire Plus members.
If you're not a member yet, click the link at the top of this episode's description to get the full conversation with Glenn Greenwald and with every one of our awesome guests.
Glenn, thanks so much for joining the show.
Yeah, happy to be here, Ben.
Thanks for inviting me.
So obviously it is super weird that we are sitting together since you and I have sparred
a few times I think on social media.
Probably not just a few, probably over the course of the past decade we've called each
other out more than a few times.
But one of the things that I think has happened that's really fascinating about the current
trajectory of our politics is this movement on the right, myself included, to move away
from a lot of trust in institutions.
There is a piece recently at Tablet magazine by Ilana Goodman talking about the kind of divisions that have emerged in politics that are cross-cutting between people who look at the institutions and see them as fundamentally corrupt and people who wish to sort of preserve and correct the institutions.
And I find myself kind of more and more right on the line between the people who wish to blow up the institutions
and the people who believe that some of them are still correctable.
But one of the things that's been obvious over the course of the past couple of decades
is that many of the critiques that you were making two decades ago about the fundamental corruption
of many of our institutions has now become obvious to a lot of people.
So why don't we start there?
Why do you think it is that it's become so clear now?
I mean, it was obviously clear to you before.
Why do you think it's become clear now over the course of the past few years
that so many of our institutions, the media, the national security apparatus are fundamentally corrupt?
So really, it's an interesting question.
I've obviously spent a long time thinking about that.
One of the things I think happens is that at any given moment, those institutions can be wielded in favor of someone's particular political agenda.
So there have been times, for example, the corporate media over the past 20 years has been more favorable to one side than the other.
There have been times that the U.S.
security state has been more favorable to one side than the other, and I think In those moments, it's easy to think that those institutions are benign and benevolent and things you can and should trust and want to fortify.
At some point, though, they turn not against everybody.
As long as you're embracing establishment pieties, they're going to be your allies.
But the minute that you question establishment pieties, which most people end up doing—thankfully, it's part of adulthood— The more you're able to see that they're there to essentially prevent that kind of dissent, and I think people's eyes start opening.
A major change, for example, with the CIA and the FBI, where the very visible abuses they perpetrated by interfering in our domestic politics in the name of sabotaging not just the Trump campaign, but the Trump presidency, even when he was their commander-in-chief.
They were clearly acting against him in all sorts of ways, and I think that opened a lot of space toward skepticism of those agencies that previously didn't exist, and that's happened across the board.
So, Glenn, I talked about sort of my evolution in terms of viewing some of these institutions, and as you say, there was a fundamental belief on people on my side of the political aisle that the FBI, the CIA, that yeah, these institutions could be overbearing, yes, these institutions could have too much power, but when they were sort of directed at, say, America's enemies, terrorist groups broad, that that was something that was sometimes necessary, you were obviously much more skeptical of that, but this has now put you at cross-purposes with large segments of the Democratic Party, and that's kind of weird, because the Democratic Party For most of my young adult lifetime was the party that was sort of in line with the idea that these institutions were fundamentally corrupt and had serious problems.
And then they sort of flipped circa about 2015, 2016.
And suddenly it was just anathema to talk about the corruption inside the FBI.
James Comey was the greatest FBI director we'd ever had.
The CIA was working perfectly well.
There was no deep state.
And it really was kind of a shocking volte face.
They were, you know, singing songs and treating almost as a deity figure George W. Bush's FBI director in the post-911 era, Robert Mueller.
So that was somebody, obviously, who was a target of mine early in my journalism career because he was running the FBI in the era when I thought that civil liberty assaults were starting to become not just excessive but intolerable in the name of fighting terrorism.
And to watch not just the Democratic Party, which, you know, I think A lot of times I always tell people on the left they're unaware of a lot of the political divisions and internal dogmatic debates on the right or they see it as a monolith.
I think sometimes, I'm not saying that you do, but I think sometimes people on the right see the other side of the spectrum a little bit that way too.
The Democratic Party itself, sort of the establishment neoliberal wing, has always more or less been, for example, on the side of the Cold War.
It was John Kennedy and LBJ that prosecuted the war in Vietnam and, you know, not Richard Nixon or Barry Goldwater.
But there was at least a significant sector of the Democratic Party, you could call it the left-wing sector or the liberal sector, for which distrust in the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon was a staple of their political worldview.
And exactly as you said, everything changed in 2015-2016 when they began to perceive correctly, I would say, that those agencies had turned into their allies because those agencies viewed the Trump presidency and the movement behind him as a real threat to their hegemonic control of Washington.
And because of that, the right started seeing these agencies
much more skeptically and the left began, and I mean the left, not just the Democratic Party,
began embracing them.
And I've sort of always kept my same skepticism and sort of the alliances have shifted around me.
So, you know, when we look at institutions like the FBI or the CIA,
the argument that you've made obviously from the beginning is that the kind of power that these agencies
been given since the Patriot Act in four have been overweening.
When you look at the history of the FBI, there have been abuses throughout the history of the FBI, obviously.
The question arises as to whether it is possible to have institutions that carry out the functions of things like the FBI or the CIA without the abuses, and if so, How do you curb those abuses, or is it sort of an all-or-nothing game here?
Because when you're trying to formulate public policy around institutions like this, obviously it would be a good thing to keep an eye on foreign terror organizations via the CIA, or obviously it would be good to have domestic law enforcement organizations that are able to capture criminals, like the FBI supposedly is supposed to do.
But is it sort of an all-or-nothing game, or do you think that there are specific correctives that can be taken?
Yeah, no country can survive, at least no large significant country, without having a capacity to collect intelligence on other countries.
Every single major country does that.
The same is true of domestic law.
If you're going to have federal law, And we do have federal laws.
You need a federal police force that will investigate violations and that will arrest the perpetrators.
That seems obvious to me.
The problem, though, is, you know, we went, Ben, for most of our existence as a country without having this part of the government that was this clandestine security state.
It was all really formed by the 1947 National Security Act under Harry Truman.
When World War II ended and the Soviet Union emerged as the adversary of the United States and there became this kind of global Cold War that lasted decades, all of this is relatively new in our history.
And the problem from the beginning was it was never really embedded in any kind of constitutional authority.
It was designed almost to be this parallel government that operated outside of democratic accountability.
The idea that you should be collecting Intelligence on other countries, the idea that you need a federal law enforcement.
To me, these seem uncontroversial.
The problem is the nature of these institutions are created to be without accountability.
And if there's anything we believe as Americans, it's that you cannot have human institutions wielding power without significant safeguards and checks and limits on them.
And the problem is these institutions were designed To this day, they not only lack those, but each year that goes by, they have fewer and fewer safeguards on them, and therefore the abuses increase.
I think that's the problem.
We'll get to more with our conversation with Glenn Greenwald in just one second.
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All right, so let's talk about the kind of Trump revelation.
So again, if you go back in your career, it would have been very weird for you to be appearing on Tucker Carlson's show circa 2010, for example, or on this show circa 2012.
But now, obviously, there's kind of a broad scale agreement on the corruption of these institutions.
So you talk about how in 2015, 2016, there was sort of this revelation at the FBI that Trump was a threat to the system, or at least there was the perception that the Trump movement was a threat to the system.
And I think this raised a lot of weird issues in the minds of people who are traditionally conservative
like me in the sense that, well, I did not vote for Trump 2016.
I did vote for Trump in 2020.
I was sympathetic to people who voted for Trump in 2016, specifically over Hillary Clinton.
If I'd been forced to the mat to make a choice, I was in California, my vote didn't count.
I would have voted for Trump.
I didn't vote for either in 2016.
When I look at the kind of threat level assessment that was being done by the quote unquote deep state
FBI or the CIA or inside the halls of government.
It is so wildly out of consonance with the actual threat provided by the quote-unquote Trump movement or by Donald Trump himself.
Why do you think there was this assessed threat that Trump was so great that they needed to essentially corrupt themselves and do so publicly in front of the entire country?
Barack Obama gave this speech, I recently found it, and we played it as part of our show, where he was essentially complaining about the extremist rhetoric that he thought was emanating from House Republicans about him, Barack Obama, that they were calling him a socialist, that they were using these kind of extremist labels for him.
And his argument was, look, if you want to know what real socialism is, go to places where there's actual socialism.
Go to Cuba, go to Venezuela.
You'll immediately see the enormous difference between myself and the leaders of those countries.
I'm not actually a socialist.
I believe strongly in the free market and free market economics.
Maybe not to the extent, kind of a laissez-faire approach that people in the right have.
But the way he put it was that the two major parties, the establishment and wings of both parties, are playing within the 40-yard lines.
That the differences are kind of incremental and piecemeal and not fundamental.
And it seems like they disagree on a lot more than they agree on because the parts where they agree we tend to ignore.
The media doesn't pay attention to those parts where there's bipartisan consensus.
They only pay attention to the part where they're bickering and fighting.
And so it creates this illusion that they're fighting all the time, they have nothing in common, when in reality, if you look, for example, at the war in Ukraine, There's overwhelming bipartisan consensus.
100% of Democrats, 80 or 85% of Republicans voted for that gigantic war package.
There's not really much of a difference on a lot of these fundamental questions.
And I think what happened with Trump is, at least comportmentally, but even substantively, he began questioning things that no presidential candidate that's viable would ever have questioned previously, such as, for example, the ongoing viability of NATO.
We were talking before about the Cold War.
NATO is a byproduct of the Cold War.
It made sense.
Western Europe needed protection from an expansion of the Soviet Union, and the United States joined with Western Europe to warn the Soviet Union that any encroachment into Western Europe would be a war on everybody.
With the Soviet Union gone, with Russia a tiny shadow of itself, spending one-fifteenth of what the United States spends on its military spending, not even able to hold towns in Ukraine, much less being able to go conquer France and the United Kingdom, whether NATO is viable, we can debate that, but You can't debate that.
That was declared off limits and when Trump started doing those things or questioning the CIA attempt to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the entire premise of kind of the US posture of endless war, he became a real threat to the permanent power centers in Washington when he started kind of saying, Everything there is dirty.
It's a swamp.
I could, you know, get any politician on the phone I wanted by writing them a check and they'll do my bidding.
This started to really threaten, I think, the stability, not of one party or the other, but just of the entire status quo order in Washington.
And they, for that reason, viewed him as a very unique threat and united to try and sabotage first his campaign and then his presidency and now his attempt to return in ways I think are Very, very disturbing.
Even if you hate Donald Trump, even if you agree that he's a danger, this unique danger, which I don't, at least as dangerous, if not more so, is the fact that these institutions are now very willing to interfere in our domestic politics, way beyond what they were ever supposed to do.
And I regard that, and not any particular politician like Donald Trump, as the greatest threat to our democracy.
Glenn, one of the things that's so weird is just the people in these organizations are high on their own supply because for years and years, for decades, there was a sort of baseline assumption that everybody at these institutions was almost uber-competent.
The heroes in movies were always guys from the FBI or the CIA who were amazing at their jobs.
And even if they were the bad guys, they were conspiratorially amazing at their jobs.
They were pulling off these elaborate plots that would require extraordinary levels of competence.
And now it turns out that they Pretty much can't hit the broad side of a barn here.
They're really bad at pretty much everything.
And you're seeing the evidence of that day in and day out.
And yet they continue to maintain that they have to have this outsized power in order to shape world events.
Is it just that they're delusional or it's that they've been given so much cover by the media and by the press and by Hollywood and by the American people that they actually believe kind of the press that they've been given?
Yeah, I think one of the reasons why secrecy is so nefarious is not only because it fosters abuse, that's the obvious reason that it's something to be avoided, but also it prevents self-correction.
So if you're constantly operating in this very insular way, no one is entitled to see what you're doing before the fact or after, you have nobody who can even obtain enough knowledge about what decisions you made so that nobody can critique it, It becomes a system that has no corrective.
It has no ability to engage in self-critique, to have external criticisms being made.
And I think you're exactly right.
What they have is this kind of endless budget.
No matter how many mistakes they made, no matter how many times they go wrong, their budget constantly increases, and so does their power.
So the incentive scheme within it, it's kind of ironic, it's a little bit of a socialist incentive scheme in that these are government agencies that have no competition and no repercussions for when they err.
They don't lose any marketplace, they don't lose any authority, they don't lose any budget.
And so there's no reason for them to improve.
There's no reason to get better.
So quite apart from kind of the insidious motives that is bred by that kind of a climate, just the competence factor alone, like you just look at the way that the United States withdrew from Afghanistan.
I was in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
So was Donald Trump.
I think what wrong there is that they just told Joe Biden And the White House, something that was completely false, which was that the Afghan army was ready to stand on its own, at least to protect Kabul and some of these major cities.
And they withdrew, thinking that it would at least take months for the Taliban to come back into power, and instead they came back into power within a week or two.
So they're not only ill-intentioned, they're also incredibly inept, and that's a really bad combination.
So when we look at how to hold these institutions accountable, this is something obviously that you've been deeply involved in for your entire career in the most controversial ways.
So to go back to the revelations that Edward Snowden made about the NSA and what people consider, many people in the intelligence community, the largest single security breach in the history of the United States, you're obviously the journalist who broke a lot of that material.
So for those who don't really remember this, because time moves incredibly fast, why don't you sort of recap What happened with Edward Snowden that made him both an international celebrity and in the United States a bit of an international pariah?
So it's a really interesting story because we had the Super Bowl and they celebrated Pat Tillman who was kind of, you know, just a football player who after 9-11 got inspired to go and fight for his country out of anger about the attack that had been launched.
Edward Snowden was had a very similar trajectory.
His father was in the Coast Guard, he was kind of a lower middle class family.
He didn't really have a lot of educational opportunities.
And after 9-11, he wanted to go and fight for his country, including in Iraq.
He enlisted in the army, broke his legs in basic training, and instead ended up at the
CIA.
He was a true believer in what he was being told about what the security state does, that
it protects the greatest democracy in the world, the United States, and it does so with
good intentions.
And he wanted to be part of that.
And instead, once he started working within it, he started seeing the truth, which was, in particular, the thing that offended him most was, you know, we have these agencies that have enormous, virtually unlimited power, especially the CIA and the NSA, the two agencies with which he most worked.
And what he saw was that instead of directing those capacities outward as their mission
requires, as their entire function is intended to do, there's a prohibition, the kind of
red line that they never were supposed to cross from the beginning, which is turning
their powers inward on the American people.
That's exactly, after 9-11, what began happening.
Maybe with good intentions or not, nonetheless, by the point that he decided he was going
to kind of blow the whistle, he was looking at a system in which the NSA was spying on
millions and millions and millions of American citizens en masse and indiscriminately, exactly
what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit.
And the breaking point for him, for Edward Snowden, was he was holding this information in his hands, deciding whether or not He was willing to risk his life to tell the American people about what their government was really doing to their privacy rights and watch James Clapper, the senior national security official in the Obama administration, he was director of national intelligence, go before the Senate in March of 2013.
And when asked by Senator Ron Wyden, does the NSA collect data on millions and millions of Americans, Clapper looked right at him and lied and said, no we don't, at least not wittingly.
And Snowden was holding in his hand the proof that there were many programs that did exactly that.
that collected information on Al Qaeda or on foreign terrorist groups or on China or Iran or whomever, but on the American people.
They had secret court orders telling phone companies like Verizon to turn over all phone records of American citizens to them every three months so they could see everyone who you were calling, who was calling you for how long you were speaking, where you were when you were talking to them.
Incredibly revealing information.
And he thought that it was intolerable to allow Government officials to lie, right, to the American people and also to allow this extraordinarily awesome power to be directed inward where we basically have no privacy and he decided not to dump it all onto the internet like he could have done if he wanted to harm the United States or didn't want to sell it to foreign powers like he could have done and gotten very rich.
He instead came to journalists and told us only release the information That you believe the public needs to know to understand these issues and keep everything a secret that might endanger people or in which you're in doubt.
And to this day, we've only released a small portion of that archive in accordance with his direction because he really was acting patriotically.
You may disagree with the methods and all of that, but there's no question, for me at least, that his motive was pure, which was that he was offended that the internet Which is supposed to be this technological innovation designed to empower the citizenry, free us from centralized state and corporate control, was instead degraded into the opposite, the most powerful force for surveillance and coercion ever invented in human history.
And he felt like if that was what our government was going to do, that the citizens should at least be aware of it, and that they should decide whether they wanted their government doing that or not.
So to drill down on a few of the issues there, because it really was maybe the biggest controversy in the history of national security in the United States at the time, and maybe to this day.
There are a few, you know, kind of critiques of Edward Snowden's behavior that have cropped up.
One, of course, is the fact that he ended up fleeing the United States.
He now, I believe, lives in Russia.
He has Russian citizenship.
And so this has led to accusations that actually he was acting on behalf of a foreign power.
So I want to get your assessment.
of that. And then I also want to get your assessment of the overall importance of the
leaks because there's been this sort of interesting attempt to both upplay and downplay the extent
of the leaks. On the one hand, it was a tremendous threat to national security. It never should
have been revealed. It endangered American lives and means and methods of gathering information.
On the other hand, he was basically revealing what we all knew anyway, which is that you're
getting your data tracked by the internet or you're getting your data tracked by the
government. And I worked in a prosecutor's office. It wasn't particularly hard when I
was summarizing for prosecutor. It wasn't particularly hard to get the metadata on phone
records for a particular suspect, for example.
So why don't we hit those two sort of in order?
One, how can we, the American people, know that Snowden's motives were pure as opposed to he was working for a foreign power on behalf of a foreign power?
And two, how grave or not grave were the leaks themselves?
Yeah, so first of all, if you look at the options he had, as I just referenced, I won't repeat those, but, you know, if you were working for the Kremlin, presumably what the Kremlin would want you to do is take as much information as possible and give it to the Kremlin, not give it to the world and make the government aware that this information has been pilfered.
That's what spies for foreign governments typically have done.
They haven't gone to journalistic outlets and asked journalists to curate the material carefully.
They've gone and given the material to foreign governments.
The other thing is, when Snowden first decided he was going to do this, his main concern was, how do I get this material into journalists' hands and allow them to be able to report this story without having the government stop me?
And he knew in order to do that he needed to go to a place that the U.S.
government would have difficulty getting him, would have difficulty stopping us.
And he didn't go to Russia in the first instance, nor did he go to China.
He went to Hong Kong.
And the reason he went to Hong Kong was because Hong Kong, in his view, and I think a lot of people share it, is this place that kind of represents a struggle for freedom.
People in Hong Kong have been battling for decades to be free of tyrannical control by mainland China.
And every year there are massive protests demanding that they be given greater civic freedom.
China has recently cracked down on it.
But at the time, it was a place that kind of aligned with what he felt that he was doing.
And it was a place the United States would have difficulty getting to.
So he called us to Hong Kong, myself and Laura Poitras.
We traveled there.
And as I said, his instructions were adamant.
He was actually a very conservative whistleblower.
In the sense that I probably would have released more information than I did had it not been for his insistence that we be very cautious with what we release, that we first consult with the United States government and hear them out about any arguments that they have that we might not have been aware of as to why something might be harmful.
And there were a couple times the United States government persuaded us not to release things.
So had he been working for a foreign power, had he been intending to harm the United States, he would have acted completely differently, as spies in the past have.
And the other thing I would add, Ben, is this idea that he's in Russia.
The reason he's in Russia is because he tried to get to Latin America, to Bolivia or Ecuador, where they were going to give him asylum.
And to get there, he had to transit from Hong Kong, where he was meeting with us, through Russia, and then Havana, and on to Latin America.
Ben Rhodes, in his book, a senior national security official for the Obama administration, boasted of the fact that they knew Snowden was trying to get out of Russia and trying to get to Latin America.
And they called the Cubans, at which point they were negotiating the lifting of the embargo with Cuba, and they said, if you have any hope of getting this embargo lifted, you better not let Edward Snowden pass safely through Havana.
We want him trapped in Russia.
Havana, the Cubans withdrew their offer of safe passage and they trapped him in Russia.
He didn't choose to be in Russia.
He never wanted to be in Russia.
He has an American wife.
He now has two kids.
He wants to come back home.
They trapped him in Russia and then they turned around and said, oh look, he's in Russia.
That's proof that he's somehow working for a foreign power.
All I can tell you is, if that were true, there'd be a lot of things he could have done that he didn't do.
And, you know, there were times that, you know, the New York Times or the Washington Post made decisions about what
to do with some of these stories that we shared with them.
And he was really angry because he felt like some of the things they published should not have been published.
He only wanted things the American people should know to be published.
He didn't want to help foreign terrorist organizations and the rest.
The other thing, as far as the seriousness of the leaks are concerned, there's no doubt that what he took and gave to us is the biggest leak in American national security history.
The amount of documents, I've never put an exact number on it on purpose, but it's extremely high.
Many of them were very sensitive documents.
But as I said, I think the percentage of documents that we publish is something, it's definitely under 5%, probably closer to 2 or 3%.
And the reason, again, was because he was extremely insistent that we not publish things that could put anybody's life in danger.
Even the U.S.
government admits that they can't point to a single person whose life was in danger.
We never published the names of any agents or anything like that.
And as I said, there were a couple times when the American government convinced me that if we were to publish a story for reasons I didn't know, It could actually endanger people.
And on a couple of occasions, we held back information for that reason.
So, you know, he lives in the United States.
His family goes to the United States.
Much of my family goes to the United States.
Nobody wants to endanger American citizens.
That was never part of the story.
The part of the story was, let's have disclosure.
So that the Congress can decide whether or not these agencies need to be reined in and just to quickly add to their kind of how that story ended.
Once we did those revelations, there was this incredibly interesting bipartisan coalition
that arose in Congress led by Justin Amash, that young then Tea Party Republican, in partnership
with John Conyers, one of the most left-wing members of Congress, to rein in the NSA.
And it would have passed had it not been for the fact that Nancy Pelosi worked hand in
hand with the leaders of the Republican caucus in the Obama White House to save the NSA from
reform.
And that was when I really started, my eyes were opened up and I realized most of our
political differences, or at least many of them, are not definable by left versus right
or Democratic versus Republican, but instead pro-establishment versus anti-establishment.
And that was a really vivid example of it.
There's an article in Foreign Policy magazine from 2013 headlined, Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA.
And if that doesn't tell that story, I don't know what does.
We'll get to more with Glenn Greenwald in just a second.
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Okay, so let's talk about Big Tech and its sort of coordination with government along these lines.
Obviously, we saw this most obviously in the lead up to the 2020 election when Big Tech decided, essentially at the behest of the FBI, not to allow any publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, even though it had already hit the New York Post.
They were banning accounts, they were shutting down accounts and censoring accounts, they were promoting this sort of stuff, and you had the people over at Twitter And at Facebook, suggesting, well, you know, we were never told explicitly by the FBI that this was foreign agitprop.
But, you know, they were saying there was a lot of quote-unquote disinformation out there.
And therefore, we sort of took it upon ourselves to lower the boom on this particular story.
Obviously, this sort of stuff is happening all the time.
It happened a lot with regard to COVID.
There was just stuff that you could not say if you hoped to remain on outlets like Twitter or on YouTube.
Our end around for that on Twitter and YouTube has always been I'm about to say something I can't say on YouTube.
Head on over to dailywireplus.com, go subscribe, you'll hear the rest of the story over there.
But this has led to a massive censorship regime.
And this is something that feels like is fairly new in the last five to ten years from big tech.
For a long time, big tech was seen as sort of a new wave of openness.
That before, you had all these gatekeepers in the mainstream press that would determine whether people could see material or not see material.
And then, for a while, it was like, well, you can put whatever you want online because it's online.
And now it feels like the censorship regime has sort of re-centralized and a monopoly has now ensued.
Absolutely.
I mean, beyond the issue of U.S.
security state interference in our politics, and it's very linked to this, I regard what you just described as the greatest menace that we face.
The Internet, you know, as I said earlier, is probably the most important human innovation, certainly in decades, maybe, and you can go back even a little longer, depending on where it leads.
And if you go back and read the kind of triumphalist literature of the internet in the mid-1990s, it was all about how it was going to empower the individual, it was going to liberate everybody from the need for state and corporate control in order to reach vast numbers of people.
As you guys proved at The Daily Wire, you no longer need, you know, a major media outlet behind you that owns a television network or a printing press.
You can build trust in your own audience speaking to them directly.
and become as big if not bigger than those traditional outlets.
That's an incredibly important human achievement, or the ability to purchase,
you know, people with a cell phone show truths that media corporations don't want you to see,
or that governments don't want you to see.
And the reason why I thought the Snowden reporting was so important was because it turned
the Internet into this, you know, weapon of coercion and monitoring and control.
And now the censorship regime is trying to turn it into something worse still,
which is the most potent propaganda machine ever invented.
It's not just that certain material ends up being deemed impermissible.
It's that when you exclude all dissent, The bombardment of information that goes right into our phones and right into our brains becomes even more potent than ever.
It's not just that information is being censored, it's that what's allowed is being strengthened and fortified with no challenge.
And I think the critical part of this to note is For a while, the idea was, well, big tech executives must be liberal.
They're probably Democrats, and they're censoring on behalf of the Democratic Party.
Maybe there's some of that, but I think the much bigger part of the story is most of those early internet Founders and pioneers, I would say, were more libertarian.
They really believed in the vision of the Internet as this liberating force, as this kind of hands-off thing that government was never supposed to touch.
And over the years, what has happened is, as the potency of the Internet became more and more obvious, as always happens, When with power centers they began looking at this as a threat and thinking how they can neutralize or how they can co-opt it.
And most of these censorship decisions that seem like they're coming from Facebook or Twitter or Google are in fact coming from external forces.
The corporate media often coerces and pressures this by saying if you don't censor you have blood on your hands.
A lot of it comes from the Democratic Party using their majoritarian power in Washington
to explicitly say, if you don't start censoring more, we're gonna impose reprisals on you
legally and regulatorily.
And then also, there's the security state constantly telling these media outlets that
if you don't censor this material, blood is gonna be on your hands.
So you have this pressure coming externally, and then also internally, as a company gets
larger and larger, they're hiring people in California from, you know, our academic institutions
that are obviously left-wing.
The workforce itself doesn't believe in free speech.
They too demand censorship.
So you have it coming from both angles.
And that has created this regime now where the Yoel Ross of the world, this kind of left liberal caricature, is governing the internet and deciding what can and can't be said to the point that our most critical debates, where did COVID come from?
Should we be involved in the war in Ukraine?
You know, What happened with January 6?
Was the FBI involved?
All of these debates that we ought to be having in a very vibrant way are instead being closed off in favor of establishment pieties, and I don't regard anything as more dangerous than that.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that really is amazing is the people who insist that they have to have control, because if they don't have control, then the bad guys are going to be able to infiltrate, they're going to be able to win, bad narratives are going to get out there.
Nothing has undermined trust in the institutions more than this, is the great irony, of course.
Because, you know, people like me, again, as a traditionalist conservative who tends to be very much in favor of upholding traditional institutions, the best way to destroy an institution is to hollow it out from within to the point where you say, okay, well, this is now an authoritarian tool that allows me to shut down all dissent.
Because how am I even supposed to know what you're saying is true anymore?
It's such a massive problem.
I've been in rooms with people who run organizations like this.
And the amount of intellectual arrogance it takes to say, we can't even have the debate over these particular issues because the people must not know.
And if we just tell people that they can't even say this thing online, then we'll make the decisions for them.
And then they wonder why people hate the institution.
And I've said to them, To their faces.
Maybe it's because you guys declared that you should be in control and you're bad at this.
Maybe that would be... I don't know how many times you guys can fail over and over and over before you realize maybe people are objecting to your control largely because you're failing.
There was a sort of consensus for half a century in American politics that the elites could run the show because they were doing at least a half-decent job.
And then it turns out when they do a crappy job, nobody wants them to run the show anymore.
Yeah, you know, I think one of the things I've come to realize is at the heart of the censor resides hubris more than anything else.
I mean, if you look at the history, kind of the intellectual history of humanity, it's nothing but trial and error.
What people believe in one generation is absolute truth gets to be regarded as the next generation as a grievous error.
That's the way that we advance.
That's what makes life exciting.
The fact that we err, we're fallible, we're constantly in search of the truth, we're using our reasoning skills and our cognitive abilities to try and figure out what is true and what is false.
And when you have people... I know there are a lot of things I believe very, very, very passionately and forcefully.
I know that's true of you as well.
I honestly have never, ever gotten to the point where I felt like what I believe in is so clearly and indisputably and permanently true that I believe it ought to be illegal for anyone to express an opinion different than the one that I have.
I couldn't imagine ever finding the hubris necessary to believe that about myself, that I've freed myself, I now reside above the human history of trial and error.
But that's really what these people believe.
I think that is the reason censorship is so appealing is that once you convince yourself that you are on the side of objective good and the other side or whoever disagrees with you or sees the world differently than you is the epitome of all evil and you can only see the world in that kind of binary way, It almost becomes not just tolerable, but necessary to say those people shouldn't be able to speak because they're fonts of falsity and lies and deceit, whereas I am the owner of the truth.
And I don't know about you, but I feel extremely uncomfortable believing that about myself, even though, as I said, there are a lot of things I really strongly believe in and believe are true.
I just never have gotten to that point and can't imagine getting to that point that I have that mentality.
Glenn, that really takes us to the journalistic establishment, because the corruption of journalism that's happened in our lifetimes is really astonishing.
The move from, we're at least going to purport to pretend to be objective and try to report facts, to, you know what, we think objectivity is now something that is passé and actually kind of stupid.
That actually there's no reason to tell both sides of a story, or even to attempt to get somebody else to tell the other side of the story.
We are emissaries of the truth, we know what's true, and therefore we are just going to say what's true.
Again, we talk about the hollowing out of our institutions.
As a conservative, since I was a kid, basically, I've never trusted the quote-unquote legacy media because they were so obviously biased to the left.
But now, they're not even hiding that fact.
They don't even attempt to portray themselves as objective or hold themselves to any standard anymore, with some very few exceptions in the legacy media.
A lot of them are just saying, you know what?
Trump is evil, and that's a fact.
And because Trump is evil, I can therefore say whatever it takes to stop Trump is therefore justified.
Yeah, I think that is the key.
I think that has really been the biggest change is that once you adopt a view that your political opponents are no longer people who are misguided and wrong or even ill-intentioned, I think that's typically how we think about political opponents.
That's probably natural.
But that they're essentially on the level of Hitler.
So, you know, the single worst evil we can possibly think of.
If you really believe that the United States faces a choice between remaining a liberal democracy, on the one hand, or succumbing to a Hitlerian white nationalist dictatorship, if that's something that you actually believe, On some level, it becomes rational to say, I think the evil we're facing is so overarching that anything and everything we do—censoring, lying, sabotaging, cheating, deceiving—becomes, again, not just morally justifiable, but morally necessary.
I think, you know, that's why I think that Sam Harris, who For all my criticism of him is very candid in the things that he thinks he tries to reason from first principles and that interview that he gave that's kind of become notorious where he was defending the censorship of the Hunter Biden materials on the grounds that I don't want to you know paraphrase him everyone's heard it but essentially that look whatever happened there the prospect of a second Trump term was so much worse
That it had to have been justifiable, anything and everything done to prevent that second term from Trump.
I think that really is the way most of our institutions have reasoned, and people see that.
People see that they're no longer tethered, even nominally, even aspirationally, to any ethical constraints, any sense of truth.
The idea is that That Trump and the Trump movement, and the broader Republican Party now as a result, is of such a singular and unprecedented evil that it is our duty to do anything and everything, including lying and censoring, to stop it.
And history shows that that is the most dangerous mentality, when you convince yourself of that righteousness to that degree.
Glenn, this seems to be an international phenomenon also.
It's just this move that we've seen in politics to suggest that if your political opponent wins, it's the end of the country.
This is something we've seen.
I've never really believed this.
I mean, again, I opposed Hillary Clinton passionately in 2016.
If she had won, would it have been the end of the country?
I don't think it's the end of the country that Joe Biden won, and I think he's an awful, awful president.
I voted against him, and I'll vote against him again if he runs again in 2024.
But this sort of kind of Near apocalyptic thinking is not just present in the United States, and there is some of it on both sides.
It's also present abroad, and it actually is, I think, putting democratic institutions and democracy itself in danger, specifically because, again, if you believe that your political opponents winning an election means the end of the democracy in that particular country, That's going to justify an awful lot of bad behavior.
I wanted to get your opinion on that, particularly with regard to Brazil, because you've been doing a lot of reporting about the last Brazilian election and Lula and Bolsonaro.
There's a lot of talk on the one hand that if Lula was going to win, Brazil was over.
And on the other hand, if Bolsonaro was going to win, it was going to be a fascist authoritarian takeover.
You had some reporting during Lula's trial and his legal kind of travails about what was going on inside the legal regime in Brazil.
So what was your take on what's going on over there?
Yeah, I was just about to say, as you were asking that question, you know, a reference point for me is Brazil.
It's a country in which I've lived for 18 years.
My husband's Brazilian.
He's been a member of Congress in Brazil, so very politically active.
Our children are Brazilians.
I've done a lot of reporting in Brazil.
And the similarity in the dynamic between how Bolsonaro was talked about and how Trump was talked about is incredibly striking.
And I think one of the reasons for that is that the Internet has, in a way, kind of exported American political ideas into almost every country, including countries that used to pride themselves on being separate from the United States, like France and Germany and Europe and Brazil and South America, so that you see these trends, including the one that you just described of seeing politics through this kind of all-consuming apocalyptic lens being repeated over and over and over.
I think the reason for that is that we used to have a lot of different ways that we derived purpose in our lives, whether it was religion or community or family, and so much of that has been deprived of people, sometimes by choice, but I think our neoliberal societies have kind of secularized everything, have Taking away every form of human potential.
People aren't having families, or they're having families much, much later.
It's a lot lower of a priority in their life.
And so where do you find purpose?
And where do you find spirituality?
Something we all need.
As human beings, something greater than ourselves, people find it exclusively in politics.
And in order for you to get it there, you have to believe that you're talking not just about the kind of fighting within the 40-yard line, as Obama described it, but a kind of world historic Morality play of absolute good versus absolute evil.
And with that, you lose the capacity for nuance, the ability to understand the people with different political views than you might still actually be good people.
You might have actually things in common with them, not just politically, but as humans as well.
And I think the only people who benefit from that are institutions of power and authority because it's very easy to manipulate people when they're thinking about politics of that high-pitched, You know, it's ironic because you and I obviously feel very strongly about politics.
It's what we do for work, and there's a reason for that.
We obviously, you know, think it matters and think it's important, and I do, but I think this inability to See it in its kind of contained form, politics as being one of the things that defines humanity and our lives is very dangerous and it's replicating in part because social media is almost eliminating national barriers and cultural barriers and how we used to kind of have our own individual characteristics as nations and that too I think is pretty menacing.
We'll get to more with Glenn Greenwald in just one second.
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So we've been doing a lot of agreeing so far, and I think there's a lot of kind of fascinating crossover that's happened just because, again, the political table has been upended over the course of the last several years.
But there are some areas where I think there are some pretty significant disagreements.
One of those is probably in Ukraine.
So what's your perspective on what's going on in Ukraine?
What caused the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine?
And what's the best way out of it?
What should the United States' role there be?
What should be the end goal there?
I think the starting point for everything that's happened, and I'm happy to say that the Russian invasion was morally atrocious and illegal.
I don't think there's any question about that.
I don't think anyone decent can defend the full-scale invasion of a foreign country that is indirectly threatening that other country, which isn't the case, or even arguably in Ukraine.
But having said that, You know, we talk a lot about, for example, the kind of political scandal of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its board despite his lack of expertise.
The reason that happened is because the United States is playing an extremely important role in the internal governance of Ukraine.
The Joe Biden as vice president was essentially this kind of imperial consul figure up to the point of micromanaging which particular prosecutors should be fired and which one should be hired right on the most sensitive part of the Russian border.
It's not just at Russia's border.
So imagine if like in Mexico, China were it.
very intricately involved and had all kinds of military support going on right in Mexico
or in Canada and was heavily involved in changing the government in that country.
We would find that very threatening.
We almost started a nuclear war when the Soviet Union got too close in Cuba.
It was a sovereign country, but it was still close to the United States.
Ukraine is the part where Germany twice invaded Russia in the 20th century.
So when there's all kinds of Western interference and Western presence and Western activity, including talk of expanding NATO right up to the Russian border, of course that's going to be provocative.
That's something that Washington policymakers have long said, is why are we going to provoke Russia and risk war with Russia over Ukraine, a country in which we have no vital interest?
If you actually care about Ukrainians and Ukrainian democracy and the like, I think that the number one goal should be figuring out how to end this war because the people who are suffering the most by far are not the Russians but the Ukrainians and that will continue for as long as this war endures.
And so I don't think we're doing anything good for Ukraine or for Ukrainians.
I think the goal of the West and of the United States is to weaken a country they regard for some reason as an enemy or not just an adversary, which is Russia.
I feel that we're not defending Ukraine so much as we're sacrificing Ukraine at the altar of those geopolitical goals, spending an enormous amount of money to do it, depleting our own military stocks to do it.
And it's very dangerous.
Russia is a new core on power.
And I think we need to be a lot more, take a lot more seriously that risk of escalation as well.
So what's interesting is we may end up in sort of the same place in terms of policy by different routes.
So it's my view, as it is yours, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is unjustifiable just on a basic level.
I also agree that the West was playing this bizarre footsie game with Ukraine where it was like, okay, maybe you could join the EU, maybe you won't join the EU.
Maybe you'll join NATO, maybe you won't join NATO.
And it's like that's the dumbest possible policy to take.
Either say that You're they're neutral or say that they're joining and then at least everybody kind of knows where the cards are as opposed to this kind of in and out game, especially given the fact that Russia has actually invaded sovereign territory of other nations multiple times over the course of the last 20 years.
It's a very little response from the West.
So why wouldn't Vladimir Putin think that he could just walk into Kiev and that the West would kind of fold like a house of cards and that you can see how the miscalibration happened there on Putin's part.
With that said, the American interest once the war starts in Say, degrading the Russian military to the point where it no longer has the capacity to invade other nations, or dissuading nations like China from invading Taiwan by making an example of Russia, or making Europe, reorienting Europe toward an American perspective on foreign policy and away from a sort of quasi-pro-Russia, quasi-pro-China perspective.
If you think those are goals of the United States, I actually do think those are goals of the United States, and if you even want those goals, You still need an off-ramp now because you've already degraded the Russian military.
You've already achieved the goal of reorienting the European Union away from Russian oil and natural gas, not through any kind of willingness of their own, but because when you're at war with Russia, it's very difficult to import natural gas and oil from Russia.
And you've already reoriented them away from China, which I think mostly was the result of COVID and the supply chain problems.
So you've achieved most of your goals.
Now the question becomes how you actually get to an off-ramp And this is where I've said publicly that I think that what Joe Biden should be doing, if he actually had the stones to do it, is he would actually be going behind the scenes and saying to Putin, what does it take to end this thing?
And then he would be publicly saying, I am going to end this war so that Zelensky can take the hit domestically.
Because the truth is that despite what you're saying about Ukrainians being the ones paying the penalty, by pretty much all of our data, Ukrainians are the most pro-war people Who are in this conflict right now.
They feel their country has been invaded.
They want to fight this thing until the bitter end, whatever the bitter end is, without any definition.
And so the idea that there has to be an outside force saying to Zelensky, you must come to an agreement on this.
And giving Zelensky the out of being now able to go and say to his own people, OK, you know, I don't want a solution, but the solution has been forced upon me.
That saves Zelensky.
It provides an end to the war.
I just don't think that Biden has the stones to do anything like that.
Yeah, so just very quickly on that last point, which is, you know, it is important to note, I think, that Ukraine is using a conscription army, not a volunteer army, because so many people have been caught trying to flee Ukraine for good reason.
It's a very difficult thing for a small country like Ukraine, even with the military support of NATO, much of which is not yet online, much of which they're not trained to use, to fight what is still a pretty formidable enemy, at least compared to Ukraine, In the Russian army, there are an enormous number of Ukrainians dying, and I think over time, you know, Russia invades people's, you know, natural instinct to defend their land, kind of gets animated, but over a year of atrophy, you know, people start questioning, why am I willing to kind of go die for this cause?
Zelensky has had to increase penalties for people fleeing and the like.
So I'm not sure how much people, just ordinary Ukrainians, which is what they're using at this point, are eager to go and fight for that war.
My guess is, based on that behavior, that they would like to see a diplomatic end as well that gives their country the sovereignty and dignity they think it should have.
But this is the key point, Ben.
If the case for the war in Ukraine or the United States' role in the war in Ukraine were made as you just made it, We have our own geostrategic goals that are served by this war, and I think you're absolutely right that the two key goals were separating Russia from Europe, and in particular ending Nord Stream 2, which makes Germany and Europe buy natural gas not from Russia but from the United States, and that was Trump's argument.
Why do we pay for your defense, and then you go and buy your gas not from us but from Russia?
That was achieved almost essentially in the first month.
What has happened the rest of the time, it's hard to see the diminishing returns now on this war.
And I think you're absolutely right that what is required is for the United States, without which this war could not happen or could not go on, to tell Zelensky that we are not going to just simply give you a blank check into the infinite future.
It's time to sit down and negotiate.
And I think had the United States been willing to give that assurance that you suggested we could have given, which is, look, Everyone knows that Ukraine is not going to be in NATO.
That's never going to happen.
You know, Blinken, when asked why they wouldn't say that, you know, referred to this kind of principle of, you know, the open door policy that we have the right as NATO to allow anyone in who we want.
Is that really a principle worth having this horrific war over?
But either way, I think you're right that whatever one's views were at the beginning, Clearly, it's time for this war to end, and I think a negotiated solution is very possible given the options that each country, or kind of the incentive each country has to end it.
But it takes, I think you're right, someone like Biden to come in and say, I'm not going to have this war end by making it appear as though Zelensky sued for peace or surrendered.
It's we in the West who are going to say it's no longer in our interest for this war to continue.
And even though Zelensky wants to continue to fight it, we have to bring a war to the end because it's not doing any country any good at this point.
No country any good, including the United States, because those geostrategic goals that you laid out have long ago been achieved.
OK, so let's talk about kind of first principles here, because when you and I have gone at it online in the past, it's typically been about American foreign policy or about Middle Eastern policy.
But all of that, I think, goes back to sort of first principles and disagreements.
And I think it makes it clearer for the audience and for everybody else to figure out exactly where we disagree when we go to those.
So what do you think should be the first principles of American foreign policy?
What do you think America's role in the world should be when it comes to global politics?
So, what I was saying earlier was, it makes it so much easier to talk about foreign policy as first principles if people are being honest.
So, the idea, the sort of neoconservative idea that was sold during the Iraq war, which is that we're going and invading Iraq to free the Iraqi people, or we're going to go into Libya and free the Libyan people, or we're now fighting for democracy in Ukraine.
I think that is unsustainable as a kind of propagandistic framework because we're very happy and always have been to partner with very despotic regimes if we believe they serve U.S.
interests.
We're very close allies and partners with the Saudis, with the Emiratis, with the Egyptians, with countries all over the world that are anything but democratic and we always have been.
So I think if you start there that the United States does not fight wars and does not I think everybody agrees the role of the United States and its military should be to serve American interests.
to allow freedom to flourish and the like. You've already made a big leap in
being able to kind of have this discussion in an honest way.
I think everybody agrees the role of the United States and its
military should be to serve American interests. For me though, that means that we
should fight wars if and only if another country is directly threatening or
directly attacking the United States or American lives.
To fight wars, cold wars, proxy wars, or any other kind of wars, for these vague, long-term aspirations of dominance, I think serves a sliver of people in the United States, a tiny elite, and prejudices everybody else in the country as a whole.
So, I think that, you know, I guess, if I had to pick, and I went back and looked at some speeches that Ron Paul was giving in 2008 where he was going to South Carolina and Iowa and doing quite well challenging Republican orthodoxies in a way similar to Trump ended up doing in 2016, the idea is we should strive to get along with other countries, to trade with them, to have friendly relations with them, have a strong military so that people know that we do have the capacity to defend ourselves if need be, and that, in general, We should be striving to avoid military conflict and interfering in other countries in any way, because when we do so, we're only doing it for insidious reasons and not for benevolent reasons.
That's the pretext for doing it, not the real motive.
So, I actually agree with some of what you're saying, in the sense that I think that the United States goes way too far in suggesting, for example, that the war in Ukraine versus Russia, what it's really about is democracy.
And you see people, I've talked to foreign ministers from dictatorships, and they're like, what are you even talking about?
Like, you guys do work with us, you've allied with us.
Are we supposed to feel threatened now because you're suggesting that it's about autocracy versus liberalism?
And I sympathize with that.
a lot because again, when you look at the Cold War, as you suggest, there were many
times when the United States was in fact allying with worse people in order to prevent the
worst people from coming into place as the United States saw it.
Where we might disagree is that I do believe that there is an American exceptionalism,
but I believe that it lays in long-term interest, and that doesn't always necessarily mean that
the most immediate means at your disposal is siding with the people that you like the
most or with whom you agree the most.
Sometimes, for example, Angela Cotevilla over at Claremont Institute, he had suggested that
sometimes what that means is in the Afghan war, we should have gone in, we should have
toppled the regime, we should have put in place a brutal dictator who is going to be
more to our liking, and then if that person doesn't do what we want, then we topple him,
until basically something arises that we actually like, again, in the interest of protecting
Americans.
And the higher interest of protecting Americans isn't just a pure nationalistic interest in
the same way that it would be for other places, but the United States, as its forces expanded
around the world, has in fact brought with it a lot of capitalism, a lot of increase
in living standard, a lot of democracy in places that hadn't, here's to foreseen it.
That doesn't mean that that's the primary goal of every single engagement.
It does mean that that's the long-term goal that sometimes requires you to get your hands
really dirty in foreign policy.
And so what that means is that there may be some differentials in the way that we address
foreign policy.
So, for example, you talk about the idea that we should not get militarily involved in conflicts
unless there's a direct threat to American life.
And what I would suggest is that from a broader foreign policy perspective, there are certainly
things that we do in terms of foreign policy that are designed to forestall the possibility
of loss of American life or the loss of American living standard, which I think is also important.
And we do that for good reason.
Folks, our conversation continues with the possibility of Chinese invasion of Taiwan, what the United States should do if that happens, how the American people feel about foreign conflicts, and our disagreements on the U.S.' 's place on the world stage.
You can hear the full conversation with Glenn at Daily Wire Plus.
Click that link at the top of the description.
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