Biden's Escalation Of The War In Ukraine With Scott Horton; Lee Fang On The Junk Food Industry Sabotaging RFK Jr.'s Plans & The Gaetz Situation
Author Scott Horton discusses the latest escalations in the Ukraine War; Journalist Lee Fang explains how the junk food industry is thwarting RFK Jr.'s "MAHA" plans and weighs in on Matt Gaetz announcing he will not return to Congress.
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Read Scott Horton's book: https://scotthorton.org/product/provoked/
Read Lee Fang's Reporting On RFK Jr. and the Junk Food Lobby: https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-junk-food-lobbys-plans
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, I don't really know why so few people seem concerned about this, but US-backed wars are really intensifying with Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Trump has chosen multiple nominees for key foreign policy positions that have some things in common, but by no means all, making it a bit confounding to predict what that administration will do.
Our first guest tonight is one of the most informed and insightful voices on foreign policy, wars, and neoconservatism.
He is Scott Horton, who is the host of Antiwar Radio, the editorial director of the site Antiwar.com, and has been involved with numerous libertarian projects as well.
He has a great new book out entitled, very timely, "Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine," in which he explores many of the key dynamics of America's foreign policy apparatus, particularly as it regards to the increasingly dangerous Russian war with Ukraine.
If you want to see, by the way, one of the best one-sided destructions masquerading as a debate, you should absolutely watch Scott's explosive confrontation with neocon chief Bill Kristol that was done a couple of years ago and is one of the best deconstructions of neoconservatism I've ever seen.
Scott will be here tonight to discuss his new book and to help analyze this danger zone in particular in Ukraine and the role the United States played in inciting it, a war that is intensifying as we speak.
Then, when it comes to attacks on Trump's nominees, most of the negative attention has been focused on Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, Pete Hegsath as the Pentagon chief, and Matt Gaetz, who yesterday withdrew his nomination to be the attorney general.
But it is genuinely difficult to overstate how many major power centers, corporate power centers in particular, are most afraid of the appointment of Bobby Kennedy to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which is an agency that he will oversee and thus oversee such critical agencies that determine massive which is an agency that he will oversee and thus oversee such critical agencies that determine the CDC, and the National Institute of Health.
My former Intercept colleague and friend of the show, the great investigative journalist Lee Fong, has a new article out on his Substack detailing the numerous ways that large junk food companies, that huge industry that poisons Americans and destroys our health, are gearing up to sabotage the health and food initiatives that are gearing up to sabotage the health and food initiatives that Kennedy is planning to Obviously, Big Pharma and the health insurance industry are gearing up to do the same.
Lee will be here to talk about his findings about how this industry intends to sabotage RFK Jr., and we will also spend some time analyzing the situation with Matt Gaetz as well.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
When I first started writing about politics and doing journalism in 2005, one of the main focal points that almost everybody talked about was the influence, the toxic influence one of the main focal points that almost everybody talked about was It was the first part of the George Bush and Dick Cheney administration and neocons like Douglas Fythe and
People who worked for Dick Cheney were extremely influential in the war in Iraq, the entire war on terror as we came to know it, and we thought, a lot of us did, that once George Bush and Dick Cheney were out of office, the discredited neocons would go away, and yet they never did.
Many of them, like Victoria Nuland, wormed their way into the Obama administration, where she got to work with Hillary Clinton, provoking a confrontation with Russia.
And that went through the Trump administration, although Trump ran on a platform, the first president in a while, to try and restore relations with Russia, to avoid confrontation with Russia.
But then when Joe Biden was elected, people like Victoria Nuland were back in office.
The neocons migrated to the Democratic Party.
And now we have this increasingly dangerous war that is escalating as we speak, to show for it one that began in 2022, but that the United States played a great role in helping to provoke.
And as it turns out, the name of our next guest's book, new book, is Provoked.
He is Scott Horton, who is, I think, one of the best, if not the single best critic of neoconservatism over the year, but also American foreign policy and its endless war machine.
Russia, starting a new Cold War with Russia, and especially the catastrophe in Ukraine, which is the name of his book.
There you see it on the screen.
We've talked to Scott before.
He's a good friend of the show, and we are always happy to have him on.
Scott, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Happy to be here, Glenn.
Thank you very much.
Of course, I've been a big fan of yours since Unqualified Offerings back in 2005. Unclaimed Territory, very close, though.
Yeah, that would have been a good...
It's been a long time.
Believe me, I have trouble remembering the name of that as well.
I promise it was Unqualified Offerings.
Yeah, Unqualified Offerings would have been good as well, though.
That would have worked.
All right, let's...
Well, I was reading you back then.
I remember your great list of things Phil Crystal got wrong way back then.
Exactly.
No, the people who were readers of mine pre-Snowden are always the kind of OG readers that I value the most, so thank you for that as well.
Yeah, we've known each other's work for a long time, and I'm happy to have you on.
Let's begin by talking about this book, because...
Honestly, I've been focused a lot, as I know you have, on how American media propagandizes the citizenry, specifically with regard to war and foreign policy.
There's a whole apparatus of propagandistic terms and frameworks that our media uses that come from the intelligence agencies to sell new wars to the public, and it's very effective.
And once the Russian invasion in 2022, the full-scale Russian invasion, happened in Ukraine, it was almost mandatory.
Whenever corporate media outlets described the war, they would say, Russia's unprovoked invasion.
That was almost the required title, the adjective that had to precede invasion.
Unprovoked, unprovoked, unprovoked.
And yet, obviously, the name of your book is Provoked, in large part because you make the opposite argument.
So what was the impetus for writing this book, and why is Provoked the title?
Well, you know, I had originally given a speech back in 2020 called The New Cold War with Russia is All America's Fault.
Now it's two years at the very end of February of 20. And it was two years before this part of the worst part of the war broke out there.
And essentially what I was trying to do, it's the same sort of thing I try to do with my book Enough Already about the war on terrorism, is to try to connect the dots and the puzzle pieces all the way back.
You know, like if I say to you that America backs Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s, you go, yeah, yeah, I knew that.
But what I want to do is I want to be able to connect that all the way through with all the different puzzle pieces leading up to the current situation.
And so it's the same kind of thing here where I think this is the advantage that I bring is Maybe I just hold a childish grudge against George Bush and Bill Clinton and the other George Bush and Barack Obama and at least everybody who worked for Trump, if not him, at least on some things.
And of course, Joe Biden and John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
And they truly did this.
And for those of us who are this old and have been watching all along, we've seen it all happen in slow motion.
At Antiwar.com, of course, we covered the Orange Revolution back in 2004 when America overthrew the government of Ukraine the first time.
In fact, they helped rig the election of 94, but the second time.
Anyway, and so, but that's the deal is America has been meddling.
And as I know that you're very familiar with the fact that America was involved in the Maidan revolution in overthrowing the government in the beginning of 2014, which is what led immediately or virtually immediately to the war in the east of the country.
That remained what they call sort of low-level fighting for about seven of the eight years there between the wars.
And we had peace deals, the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 peace deals, but under American encouragement and protection, Kiev refused to ever implement them.
And so the war remained on sort of, you know, a slow boil, low boil, but still about 4,000 people killed over the seven years after the first year of the worst fighting of the war.
And so it was this massive, unresolved problem of ethnic Russians being killed right on Russia's border there, which, even if you want to be a cynic about it, provided a very great excuse for Russia to go ahead and finally intervene.
Although, as I pointed out, the thing had been going on for eight years before they finally rolled in the way they did in 22. So I want to talk about all those individual events.
Sorry.
Well, let me just add real quick one.
Sure, go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's okay.
It's my fault.
I'm a long-winded one.
So you have this civil war raging in the east, but then overall you also have this global contest between the United States and Russia over who's going to control all of Russia's so-called near abroad there.
And the American doctrine has been to take every bit of this away from them while expanding our military alliance right up into their front porch, as Papi Cannon put it, right up into their area and truly surrounding them and threatening their country.
And so, it's not to justify what they've done, just like my book about Al-Qaeda attack in America.
It's not to justify what they've done, it's to explain why they did what they did, and how when the Americans, Washington D.C., when our government announces that they're innocent and they had nothing to do with it, and all they're doing is defending what's good, true and beautiful, then based on those lies, they write themselves license to do works.
As we saw with the terror war, instead of stopping provoking al-Qaeda terrorism, they quadrupled down or worse.
And it's the same kind of thing here.
Instead of admitting that, gee, we might have pushed our luck a little bit there, maybe we should back off a little bit, they can never admit it.
And so they can only double down and double down on their theory of the evil of the other side.
And I'm glad you made that distinction between justification and causation because so often people have difficulty Distinguishing those two, for example, as you mentioned, if you do say the reason Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on 9-11 wasn't because they hated us for our freedom, but because they hated our intervention and constant interference in that region, people say, oh, so then it was justified?
No, you're not commenting on justification.
You're just explaining the causation.
Kind of like if I say, oh, that person got lung cancer because they smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for 50 years, doesn't mean I'm saying that they deserve it, that Lung cancer is good for people who smoke.
I'm just observing the causal relationship because that's necessary to understand the situation.
So I think it's important to keep in mind that when you say it's provoked, it doesn't mean it's justified.
That's a whole separate question.
Let me ask you, though, this is something I genuinely don't understand.
I'm not asking this rhetorically.
I think a lot of people in the United States first started understanding that That there was a lot of animosity toward Russia, and a lot of people got convinced to join in with that animosity right around the time of Russiagate, when we were told that the Russians were interfering in our sacred democracy, that they were the reason Hillary Clinton lost and Donald Trump won.
The reality is there has been a huge amount of animosity toward Russia in Washington long before that.
I think sometimes people will identify the starting point as being in Syria when the CIA was trying to remove Bashar al-Assad and the Russians supported Assad and kind of thwarted the intentions of the CIA there that were fighting along al-Qaeda and ISIS. But even going back way further,
You know the idea of NATO expansion eastward, something that violates the promise that we made with Gorbachev, started in the Clinton administration, went through the Bush administration, including when Victoria Nuland was the U.S. ambassador to NATO. And then Hillary Clinton's State Department in 2010 openly financed anti-Putin protests, talking about interfering in a country.
And then when Hillary Clinton left office and wrote her book.
The one thing which she was critical of was that Obama had essentially refused, not entirely, but as much as Washington wanted him, to confront Russia by arming Ukraine, something Trump did, but Obama wouldn't, by unleashing the CIA more to remove Assad.
It was kind of this Hillary Clinton's view was Russia is the great evil.
Long before Russiagate, long before Syria in 2012, And then you look at neocons as well who have long had an obsession with Russia, people like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland's husband, neocon husband.
What explains that?
Why is the United States so intent on seeing Russia as an enemy despite overtures from Russia?
Yeah, it's a really great question.
I mean, I think first of all, and you'll find this in the book, which I meant to joke at the beginning, Glenn, that I'm so glad that I can prove that I hit the button to publish this book on the 16th.
Otherwise, I'd be afraid that you would think that I just transcribed your interview on The Tucker Show the other day and put my name on it and published the thing.
Because essentially, that's what the book is.
It's what Glenn Greenwald said on The Tucker Show the other day, only with 8,000 citations.
That's basically it.
And yes, you're right.
You can find a lot of markers.
I saw Dave say on the show he thought Syria was a big part of it.
I think that's right.
John Mearsheimer says it's Crimea.
Once they took Crimea, Russia did, the Americans had to come up with an excuse for why that happened.
And it couldn't have been because, oops, we just really screwed up and launched this coup and it blew up in our face.
So instead, they said, oh, Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union.
He's a psycho.
He's Stalin, et cetera, et cetera, Hitler and the rest.
So I think that's part of it.
But you're right to identify this going back to even earlier.
And I think the first time that the Americans, I think, truly tried to throw down the gauntlet against Putin would have been Dick Cheney's speech in Vilnius in 2005, where what had happened was the Russians started playing hardball on Gas transfers across Ukraine.
And Ukraine is heavily dependent on those revenues, but they also steal the gas.
There's been a lot of controversy since independence between, you know, of Ukraine from the Soviet Union fighting over payment and theft of gas and this and that.
And what the Russians did, Putin decided no one was getting any subsidy on gas anymore except Belarus.
Everybody else was gonna pay the market price.
And Dick Cheney gave a big speech saying that this was extortion and using gas as a weapon and all of these things.
That's the first time they really threw down the gauntlet against him.
What had really turned them against him before that, I can't really say.
I mean, he was the first person to call George W. Bush on September 11th.
And he told them, listen, I'm with you.
I hate these terrorists as much as you.
I'll do anything to help you.
You want to invade Afghanistan, you can use my bases in Central Asia that I got left over from the old days, and we'll help you with logistics and intelligence and everything you need for the war.
Remember, in Afghanistan, we were the ones switching sides in the war, not the Russians.
And so he said, we'd be happy to help you with that.
And then it was just two months later, three months later, that George W. Bush tore up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which Immediately, we know now, but anybody could have guessed then, immediately led to the Russians embarking on a new program to develop essentially just more and better missiles to overwhelm our defenses.
And so it was a terrible move and really a major step back.
In the Cold War.
I mean, when Bill Clinton was expanding NATO, they hated it, but they were essentially trying to just take it on the chin with a smile and turn the other cheek and hope for a better day.
You know, Yeltsin had ended up extremely mad at Putin.
I mean, pardon me, at Bill Clinton over the war in Serbia and so forth.
But then he was gone within a year and Putin came in and he tried to do a new reset.
With Colin Powell and George W. Bush.
And they just would only ever let it go so far.
And I have quote after quote after quote in the book of the various apparatchiks saying essentially We just don't care about Russia.
What are they going to do about it?
They're not big enough to worry about.
They're too big to be partners with because then they'd have to try to have a say.
So we have to leave them on the outside of all of our structures.
But when it comes to their complaints, come on, they're a third-rate power.
Remember John McCain said, it's a gas station with H-bombs.
They're nothing.
This kind of degradation of their position.
So in looking at them from that way, it was essentially...
Not as much just outright anti-Russian animus.
It's just a refusal to care about their position or how they might react at all.
And then on the question, because you brought up it's important, the Snow Revolution of 2011, as you quite correctly say, Hillary Clinton's State Department, especially through Ambassador Michael McFaul, were encouraging and including with money And the NGOs, the same old NED-type scam that they used for the color-coded revolutions, to support dissident groups in Russia.
Now, I mean, just think about this like on a sheet of paper.
This makes no sense to do this.
You know, you think you could overthrow the government of Ukraine?
I don't know.
From the State Department's point of view?
Okay, take a risk.
But you cannot overthrow the Kremlin.
You couldn't possibly boost up who?
Nemtsov or any of these guys.
There were no dissidents or dissident factions in Russia prepared to take the mantle from Vladimir Putin, who had anything like the popularity or the support or the ability to take over that state.
So why come at him like that?
Why finance a bunch of protesters?
When all you're essentially saying is America hates you and you should fear us, that might as well have been the chant of the slogan of the protesters out in the street.
It was absolutely ineffectual, except for anything other than turning Russia against us.
And bottom line, their sin is...
That Putin is a Russian rather than an American patriot.
That he refuses to give in to the United States.
And the neoconservative doctrine which the rest of the entire American foreign policy establishment has adopted is that America must rule the whole world.
No one can be independent from us or that's a threat.
I mean, think about the way they talk about Cuba and North Korea.
They call them a threat.
What does that mean?
It means they've been able to maintain their independence from us.
It's the same reason Iran is a threat.
It's the same reason that Russia is a threat.
That America no longer completely owns it.
Not that they completely owned it in the 90s.
They thought they were making great strides in taking over that country or coming to have major influence over its politics.
And then when Putin came, he was just too young and too strong, froze them out, froze out the oligarchs, made himself the boss.
For real, in that country, in a way that they just cannot abide.
And so they're counting the days.
I mean, it's amazing to hear them.
They would talk about this guy, Navalny, Alexei Navalny, who is a right-wing nationalist, who is not a liberal and not a pro-democrat type at all, and who got, what, 20% or something?
He talked about Muslims as being vermin and needing to be extinguished, and then he became the darling of Western liberalism.
And then they talked about him like, oh man, we could install him in power and it would be great.
But this is just crazy.
And anyone with a lick of sense could tell you, if America really got close to overthrowing the government of the Kremlin and doing some kind of color coded coup d'etat there, it would lead to war.
Obviously, war is an alternative that people use when they feel that their very existence or their hold on power is being threatened.
I mean, the United States, it's like recognizing Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, even though he had no very little support among the actual population.
Like, oh, we're going to put Alexei Navalny as the president of Russia.
It's such incredible ignorance.
Let me ask you, let's focus on the 2014 election.
Coup of Yanukovych was the democratically elected president of Ukraine.
Nobody denies that.
He had a constitutional mandate to stay in office until 2015, but he became more pro-Moscow, leaning toward Moscow, a little bit away from the EU, more than the United States is willing to tolerate.
And I just have to say, a few days ago, I wanted to find an article that I had read once about the coup, and I entered into Google, someone should do this and you'll see, you'll replicate the results, Ukraine 2014 coup.
And the very first item that came up was the Wikipedia page, as usual.
And they don't even, the title of the Wikipedia page of that event is not even the Maidan Revolution or something like that, more neutral.
It's, what was it?
It's The Revolution of Dignity.
That's the name of it, the official name of this coup, this US-backed coup, The Revolution of Dignity.
Talk about what the role of the United States was in essentially removing the elected leader of Ukraine that Russia was comfortable with and replacing it with a government that was very antagonistic to Russia.
Okay, well first of all, this is the second time in 10 years.
W. Bush had done the same thing in the Orange Revolution in 2004. And so...
As I describe this, think about the view from Moscow as you see this happening again.
So this guy, Yanukovych, I think you correctly described as sort of kind of something like more pro-Russian than somebody else or something.
Now, of course, TV will tell you, well, he was just Putin's puppet.
But I would strongly urge you, Glenn, and your audience, if you guys have not seen this, everybody go watch Patrick Bette-David's interview of Paul Manafort.
Now, Paul Manafort, you remember, was accused of being Donald Trump's handler, his secret spy agent of Vladimir Putin controlling Donald Trump.
Well, this is just obviously as ridiculous as all of the Russiagate hoax, but it's even more ridiculous in this case, because as you can see in that interview of Patrick Bette David, Yannick, I mean, pardon me, Manafort, if anything, and I'm not saying this is right, but I'm saying for context, if anything, he was CIA. And, you know, judging by his cufflinks and stuff, he would probably fit in with those guys.
He clearly was working for, clearly, 100%, there's no discrepancy here.
He was serving America's interests.
He had been hired by Yanukovych to help him integrate with the West.
And here's something that I had learned in that interview that I didn't know before, which was these Eastern Ukrainian oligarchs, Which again, every Mueller she wrote on Twitter will tell you are all Russian puppets or whatever.
In fact, they were sick and tired of being treated like the redheaded stepchild by the Russian oligarchs.
and they wanted to try their hand at playing a business with the EU.
Part of it was after the Orange Revolution, the new government had nationalized their companies and given them to their friends.
And this is how corrupt Ukraine is.
It's one of the most corrupt societies in the world.
It's like Afghanistan under the United States or something.
And so they thought if they could join the EU, rules would prevent that kind of chicanery from going on.
So they were sick of the Russians and they were sick of arbitrary decisions by Kiev.
And that was why the Eastern oligarchs who supported the party of regions, the party of Yanukovych, why they wanted to join the European Union.
Yanukovych had told, and by the way, at issue was an association agreement, not full membership, but an association agreement with the EU. And Yanukovych had told his entire cabinet, I don't want to hear another word about we're leaning toward Russia instead.
Forget it.
It's done.
They said, okay, this is in November of 13. Now at this time, Putin starts playing hardball and says, listen, If you do this, I'm cutting off your trade relationship with Russia.
Now, he did publicly contradict that, but I'm pretty sure the other reporting that he meant it when he said it in other circumstances is probably the more serious case there.
But he also offered a $15 billion loan.
I forget if it was three or five right up front.
The Americans, pardon me, the Europeans, led by the Germans and the European Union, they were demanding a severe austerity regime.
Not here's a giant loan, but here's a loan that's barely enough to pay the interest payments on your previous loans.
It's not even going to keep you whole.
And in exchange, you're going to have to give up all your resources.
You're going to have to drastically cut pensions and welfare and subsidies for fuel and all these kinds of things that are going to drastically affect the standard of living of the people.
And it's a relatively poor country where these kinds of subsidies, you know, really sustain the quality of life for people.
And so they just put his back up against the wall.
And in fact, Glenn, when the situation fell apart and Yanukovych balked and did not sign the agreement, Henry Kissinger blamed Angela Merkel.
He wrote in The Guardian or in an interview with The Guardian, Kissinger said, this is typical Merkel, playing hardball, playing too hard to get, and she blew it.
So that was essentially the contest there.
It's not that Yanukovych was Putin's puppet.
That he had, you know, somehow enslaved Ukraine under Russian control.
It's that the West was bad at negotiating.
And so the signing on to the association agreement was postponed.
It wasn't even necessarily officially canceled.
But then the same groups who had done the Orange Revolution immediately came out and started to protest in the Maidan, which is the big town square there in Kiev.
And just like in 2014, they were backed by tens, I think probably hundreds of millions of dollars by the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and a thousand different Soros organizations, the International Republican Institute and a thousand different Soros organizations, the International Renaissance Institute and a bunch of others.
And what they do is they pour in tons of money First of all, to support so-called independent media, meaning AstroTurf, Western, or in this case pro-Western Ukrainian, pro-EU and anti-Russian media.
And then they also supply the polystyrene foam boards.
That are pretty good at insulating from the cold so that people can sleep on the ground.
They bring in blankets.
They bring in large screen TVs and the stage equipment and the public address systems and everything they need to hold rock concerts, to play movies, to have a constant stream of entertainment up on the big stage and food.
You know, constantly people cooking and all of these things.
And they keep this full carnival atmosphere going through all of December and January and February into 2014. So this is the part that...
This is one of the major facets of the American and Western intervention there, is that this is not grassroots stuff.
This is astroturf.
And there are obviously many Ukrainians who agree and wanted to join with the EU, or at least definitely did not want a new and deeper relationship with Russia again.
It doesn't really matter when the Americans are parachuting in with all of their agents.
And, you know, we also know for a fact, too, from deep and good reporting after the fact, that the CIA and MI6 were in fact involved and were working with the SVB, I believe it is, I'm sorry, The Ukrainian intelligence service.
So one major faction of essentially the Ukrainian CIA was working against their own president in concert with the CIA and MI6. Now, another major and extremely important facet of the revolution of 2013-14, this coup d'etat, essentially.
Is the role of the radical right in Ukraine.
Now, this is a big, long, complicated history, and I go into every bit of it.
And just let me interrupt you there, because I think just to kind of translate it into the American context, a lot of people hear the far right or the extreme right or whatever, and it kind of people are desensitized to it because of the way in which that's used in the United States.
We're talking here about uber-nationalist groups that have a legacy and a connection to and an admiration for Actual German Nazis, their leaders and their symbols are people who collaborated with the Nazis, with the SS, in order to kill huge numbers of people in Ukraine and Poland.
They are groups that the United States itself has sanctioned as neo-Nazi groups, passed laws that said no weapons could go to them.
I want to just set that context.
So that when you're saying far right or extreme right, this is the kind of thing we're talking about, not the way that term gets tossed around in the United States for like Donald Trump or, you know, Mitch McConnell or whoever, or Paul Ryan or whoever it gets applied to, but this is like the real deal Nazis, not the ones that you call because people have a MAGA hat on.
What was the nature of the US partnership?
And you lay it out really well in your book, but a lot of people are unaware of this, of the partnership of the United States with those elements in Ukraine in order to remove Yanukovych.
Well, first of all, on the point about how this is not when, you know, American liberals and progressives call anyone on the right a fascist.
That is not what's going on here.
And in fact, these, as you say, being actual fascists, they show what a damned lie that is when American liberals use that against conservative and populist Republicans.
Americans and right-wingers call left-wingers commies unfairly sometimes, too.
But in Ukraine, they're really communists and Nazis.
And a major legacy of that, of course, going back to the Soviet Union and the horrible Holodomor, which was the genocide or pseudo-somewhat genocide.
Approximately three to five million people starved to death.
In the early 1930s under Joseph Stalin in Ukraine.
And then when the, and it's a complicated history, but when the Nazis invaded, I think we all kind of grew up hearing about this in sort of general terms.
This really was the case in some places in Eastern Europe.
When the Nazis came, they were greeted as liberators.
By many people who thought, oh good, someone is here to kill the communists for us and free us from the communists.
And then in many cases, they were disappointed to find that the Nazis were not better and certainly not interested in their interests.
So Ukraine has a heavy history of this.
And these factions are directly, when we talk about 2014 and through today, These factions are directly descended from the Nazi factions that fought with the German Nazis during World War II. So we don't even just mean neo-Nazi skinheads like the Aryan Nation or something like that, but we're talking literally the grandsons and the great-grandsons of the men who fought for Hitler in World War II. What Nazi insignia and tattoos and flags, you know, they don't hide it.
It's very out in the open.
And it's so amazing to me that American liberals, broadly speaking, Western liberals, broadly speaking, will scream Nazi at somebody for no reason other than the fact that they have a MAGA hat on or they vote for Donald Trump or oppose affirmative action or whatever.
And then they meet the real deal Nazis, like the actual Nazis, the overt Nazis.
And they want to arm them and fund them with no end in sight.
Right.
And then they want to spin and spin all day for them, too.
Well, you see, Glenn, they were Nazis a few years ago, but they're reformed.
They came to Jesus and decided to not be Nazis anymore, which is just not true.
And if you ask them, they'll tell you that's not true.
They're proud to say what Nazis they still are, all of them.
We want a clean nation, all this stuff, man.
They're war criminals and regular criminals.
I mean, they murder Roma, they murder each other, they are guns for hire, and they're scum.
I mean, what would you...
They're equivalent to the SA, right?
They are bad guys and they act like it.
And then at the start of the war...
Okay, well, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead.
So look, toward the end of February of 2014, The European Union was taking the lead on trying to force Yanukovych to accept a deal.
And he did accept it.
Putin encouraged him to accept it.
And that deal said that he would stand for an early election in December of 2014. And that he would pull his forces back from the town square, the Maidan there in Kiev, if the protesters pulled all their forces back too.
Well, they didn't, but he did.
And this was a huge mistake.
But when he began to pull his forces back, apparently the rest of the cops saw the officers get on a bus, and they said, well, forget this, and they all left too.
And so all of the government office buildings in downtown were just left wide open.
So after the neo-Nazis had taken the stage and said, we refuse to accept this deal.
In fact, it was the same guy who admitted that he had led the snipers on the morning of the 18th.
He, Paris Yook, the guy's name was, he got up there and said, we don't accept this deal.
And I swear to God, if the president is not gone by 10 a.m., we're going to go there tomorrow and kill him.
And the New York Times reporter even said, hey, this was a credible threat.
These guys are armed with rifles and they're serious as hell.
And we'll see.
So then the next morning, the president fled.
So this was not a classical coup d'etat.
It was more of, I guess, what you would call a right-wing street putsch, where the guy was forced to flee.
Now...
You're familiar with Stratfor, which is the so-called private intelligence firm run by George Friedman from here in Austin, Texas.
And his emails were famously hacked and posted on WikiLeaks years ago.
And George Friedman, I guess, fancies himself a bit of a realist analyst along the Henry Kissinger kind of lines.
And he gave an interview to Commersant, which was Boris Berezovsky's old outlet.
And they asked him about the Maidan coup.
And he said, this was essentially the most blatant coup in world history.
And they said, well, what do you mean?
You mean like the last day or the whole thing?
And he said, well, the whole thing, America just poured in millions of dollars to support what he called all these human rights groups, meaning all the NGOs who were behind all the dissent.
And he said, and the Russians, they just couldn't adapt and catch up in time to see what was happening before it was too late.
And so, you know, that was his expert opinion.
And in fact, Henry Kissinger gave an interview to Der Spiegel where he was not quite as explicit, but almost.
He said, yes, I am blaming the West for creating this situation, you know, meaning forcing the change of government there.
And then, as you have noted repeatedly, Mr. Greenwald, I have seen you.
You like to cite, and as well you should, Barack Obama's interview with Commissar Goldberg in The Atlantic, where he explains that essentially Putin moved in Crimea in a desperate reaction against the transition of power that we had brokered, he said.
And so what had happened was, as soon as they had completed the coup and the new government had taken power, all of the former presidents signed an open letter demanding that the new government Revise or cancel what was called the Kharkiv Pact, which was the agreement that allowed the Russians to keep their naval base at Sevastopol, the city and naval base on Crimea.
Now, if you go back to the foundations of the Communist Empire in 1917, it was really 1921, that Vladimir Putin, the other one, Vladimir Lenin, drew the line and included the Donbass region, Zaprosia and Kherson, Inside Ukraine.
And that was an attempt to basically have extra Russian control inside Ukraine, which I guess made sense for the time being, but was setting a time bomb for later.
Now, it wasn't until 1954 That Nikolai Khrushchev, after Stalin died, Khrushchev had been, he was Ukrainian, and he had just finished putting down the CIA-backed Nazi insurrection in the West in, what, 58. And so now he was trying to consolidate power, and he needed the Ukrainian Communist Party support to come to power to succeed Stalin.
So...
On the 300th anniversary of Ukrainian and Russian alliance, I guess it is, or whatever, joint statehood, he announced the gift of the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine.
Now, at that time, it didn't really matter because everybody was just answerable to the Kremlin anyway.
And the Crimean Peninsula was something like 65 or more percent ethnic Russian.
And so they were treated with a great degree of autonomy by Ukraine anyway.
Now, the status quo had held.
Ukraine declared independence, including Crimea, in 1991, after the failed commie coup in August of 1991 and firmly ratified it that December when the Soviet Union fell apart.
And the status quo had held.
Until Barack Obama and Joe Biden overthrew the government.
And then the previous presidents threatened, now's the time to kick the Russians out of their only warm water, all year round, warm water port there in the Black Sea and direct access to the Mediterranean.
And so this is the hugest issue.
John McCain liked to misparaphrase Zbigniew Brzezinski, saying that with Crimea, Russia is a global power.
Without it, they're a regional power.
It's everything.
It's their Navy's access to the Black Sea.
There's no way in the world.
In fact, Putin joked at the time, me and Ray McGovern used to laugh about this.
Putin joked at the time, oh, the NATO sailors are great guys.
But we just thought, you know, when it's the holidays, we would rather that they come and visit us at Sevastopol rather than we go down there and visit them.
So he was just saying, no, I'm not letting you have my naval base in no uncertain terms.
And so then what he did was in what's called a coup de main, one great big, not even battle, but they just essentially, the sailors and Marines went outside and stood on street corners and took over the Crimean Peninsula.
Only four people were killed in the entire thing.
But this caused a total freakout in Kiev.
All this was supposed to work.
It was supposed to be easy.
If you listen to Nuland and Pyatt on their intercepted phone call, we gotta glue it.
We gotta stick it.
We gotta midwife it.
We gotta make it sail before Putin can react.
We're gonna get this done, as Gideon Rose said to Stephen Colbert on the old Colbert Report on the Comedy Channel.
That we have to do this while Putin is distracted with the Sochi Olympics.
And Colbert says, oh, look at the shiny medal while we just basically take an entire country away from you.
And Gideon Rose, this is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine from the Council on Foreign Relations, says, yeah, that's right, Steve.
And basically, that's what we're doing.
But the thing is, it's not working, right?
Putin does have time to react, Olympics or not.
And so now he's taking Crimea.
And now, when the people in the east of the country say, well, geez, if you guys can overthrow our democratically elected president twice, and you can just occupy government buildings and refuse to accept his governance, well, then we can do the same thing to you.
And they started seizing buildings in the east.
And people say this was all Russian sock puppetry, but these are the same people who say that everything in the West going on is completely organic when it happens in Kiev or Lviv, right?
And there certainly was Russian influence here of some kind, but basically it was locals seizing government buildings in a mirror image of the Maidan movement.
And then what did Kiev do?
At the urging of Barack Obama and CIA director and Jabhat al-Nusra commander John O'Brennan They launched a war, the anti-terrorist operation, and called in airstrikes and tanks and heavy weapons and started blowing people to hell.
They launched a civil war against the people of their own country at American insistence.
And the brand new, at that time, I believe Poroshenko had finally just been sworn in after the temporary government.
And he said, the anti-terrorist operation will not last months.
It will last days.
It will last hours.
Well, no.
Right?
Like Operation Decisive Storm in Yemen that lasted for a decade.
Right?
No.
They launched a horrible bloody war and it didn't work.
And the Russians finally did intervene to a certain degree in August of 14 and in February of 15 and really beat the Ukrainian forces very badly.
Oh, and this is where the Nazis come back in.
So much of the Ukrainian military was unwilling to participate in this.
Many of them defected to the other side.
And so when the Ukrainian military wasn't up for the fight, what'd they do?
They called in the Nazis and they sent in what was called the Azov Battalion, which is made up of the right sector and C-14 and these other Nazi groups.
And they went and committed the initial acts of violence against the protesters in the East, including just cold-blooded murders and war crimes, etc.
Let me just interject here because it's the perfect segue to what I think is so important to talk about and what I really want to ask you about, which is...
You know, what you're essentially describing is a civil war that has been ongoing since 2014 between, let's call them Russia-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, but U.S.-backed forces, including neo-Nazi forces that want Kyiv to be very anti-Russian.
And all of this is taking place, I think it's important to emphasize, right on the other side of the Russian border.
This is not a conflict in the Middle East, which has some distance from us.
The border of Russia, one of the most sensitive borders in Russia, and I wanted to ask you, you mentioned this Obama interview that he gave with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic on the way out.
It was sort of the Obama doctrine, here's what Obama sees as his foreign policy legacy, and you mentioned one part of it that I've mentioned many times as you said, but there's another part of it as well where Jeffrey Goldberg is kind of like, You know, like kind of aggressively criticizing him for not having done enough to stand up to the Russians, especially in Ukraine.
Not, you didn't send troops, you didn't do this, you didn't do that, you didn't stand up to them more.
In Syria, why not?
And on the issue of Ukraine, Obama said something, which if you say it now, you'll be immediately written off as a Russian agent forever.
He said...
I don't think there's anyone in Washington who's willing to stand up and say we should risk war with Russia, the world's largest nuclear power, over who rules eastern Ukraine.
Because eastern Ukraine is and always will be a vital interest to Russia, but it has never been, is not now, and never will be a vital interest to the United States.
Why would we care who's governing provinces in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea when the population there, as you said, identifies as Russian?
So, I think one of the kinds of main propagandistic narratives that have been sold to convince Americans that Russia's all evil, Ukraine's all good, the United States is all good, is that Russia has no right to tell Ukraine what to do.
Russia has no right to interfere in Ukraine.
It's a separate country.
It's a sovereign country.
If the Ukrainians want to join NATO, that's their right.
The Russians have no right to object.
Now, we have a pretty good example of the Cuban Missile Crisis when Cuba said, oh, to the Russians, we'd like you to...
Put missiles inside of our country because the United States invaded us and tried to overthrow our government.
We'd like to protect against that in the future by having your military assets including nuclear weapons here in the United States and say, oh, well, Cuba's a sovereign country.
They can do whatever they want in their own.
We almost went to nuclear, came to nuclear war over that.
That's how much of a right we thought we had to interfere in Cuba and tell the Cubans what they could and couldn't do.
Why, when Obama says Ukraine is, has always been, is and will always be a vital interest to Russia, why is all of this instability and violence and interference by NATO on this side of the Russian border of such importance to them?
Well, why is it of such importance to the Americans to keep it going?
Why is it of such importance to Russia that they would go to war with it?
They might even use nuclear weapons if Crimea was slipping away.
Why is it of such vital interest to them, as Obama put it?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the main reason is that there are millions of ethnic Russians in the Donbass, especially, and in Zaprosha and Kherson.
And, you know, in the book, I quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who years ago, you know, you probably heard me make the analogy to Canada here.
He brought up a great analogy to Mexico.
He said, what if when the American empire finally does fall, we don't just lose our satellites?
Yeah.
But what if Washington D.C. starts losing states west of the Mississippi River, right?
And the Southwest goes back to Mexico.
Let's make it Texas, because I'm from Texas.
Say Texas, Washington loses it, and we go back to Mexico.
Okay, everything seems okay for now, but then they start outlawing our Protestant churches.
And then they start persecuting Anglos, outlawing the English language, and all of these things to prejudice and to persecute the Anglo minority of the state of Texas now.
What would Washington D.C. do?
Well, first they would start making threats and later they would bomb Mexico, right?
That's essentially the position here.
It's, you know, not a perfect analogy, but it's something like that.
I mean, you have essentially, and this goes for virtually all states, so I don't mean this to be particularly mean to the Ukrainians, but it's a very made-up country.
It really is right that You know, Galicia and Volhynia in the far west, they belonged to Poland and before that to Austria-Hungary.
And the Ruthenian population, that's the ethnicity there, or at least what they used to be called, they're just quite different than the people in the Donbass, who really, as I said, Lenin, Drew the line there to essentially strand these Russians inside Ukraine so as to keep Ukraine divided and conquered and hopefully under the rule of people who favored Moscow.
And so when the war broke out and America made it just a civil war where America's on the side of the Galicians and their culture, And Western Ukrainian culture and their state against the people of the East and the guy who, again, they voted for twice and who was illegally overthrown twice in 04 and 14, and they began to resist.
Then Kiev started killing them.
And at some point then, the Russians have an interest in not letting that happen.
If only just, you know, if you think that Vladimir Putin is just nothing but a complete psychopath, well, fine.
As the psychopathic president of Russia, he has a personal political interest in not looking like the guy who stood there and did nothing while all these ethnic Russians are being killed on the other side of the line.
And then also, importantly, is the missiles.
As you say, Now, W. Bush announced, and Barack Obama continued it, Trump continued it, and they only really just, I saw this the other day, I couldn't believe it, they only just announced the final operational status of the Aegis onshore systems in Romania.
Bush announced this in, what, 2007, I guess, or maybe earlier, 06, 07, that we're going to put anti-missile missiles, Sparrow anti-ballistic missile interceptors in Romania and Poland and radars in the Czech Republic.
And this is to protect Poland from Iran, he said.
And everybody thought that that was crazy.
That doesn't make any sense.
Iran doesn't have missiles and is not developing missiles that can fly that far, nor do they have nuclear weapons, nor are they producing nuclear weapons.
So what's this all about?
Putin said, geez, I think maybe you're trying to build up a defensive system that would be able to shoot down a Russian retaliatory strike, thus allowing you to cancel mutually assured destruction and give yourself the capability of launching a nuclear thus allowing you to cancel mutually assured destruction and give yourself the
I would urge your audience to look at this article from Foreign Affairs from 2006, where these guys got all braggadocious and said, now's the time to achieve a first strike capability against Russia.
Well, they read foreign affairs over there, and they panicked about that and took that very seriously.
Now, so you see, it's called a defensive system.
But if I wear armor to a fistfight, then that means that essentially I'm putting myself in a position to be more aggressive than I otherwise would be.
So it's not purely a defensive system.
It's part of the whole.
And the idea, the danger would be that we could shoot down A retaliatory salvo from them, thus giving ourselves carte blanche to go ahead and launch a Pearl Harbor-type sneaky first strike, a sneak attack.
Now, George W. Bush responded to this, Glenn, by saying, come on, Putin, you're being crazy, because we don't have enough interceptors to shoot down a salvo from Russia.
You guys got thousands of nukes pointed at Europe.
There's no way we could shoot them all down.
So this couldn't possibly be for that.
And Putin said, huh, well, you know what, that makes sense.
Maybe it's because the Mark 41 missile launchers that you put those sparrows in can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles that can be tipped with hydrogen bombs.
Now I think we're on to something.
There really is no other sensical reason.
You can't convince me it's for the Ayatollah.
It's just ridiculous.
And Putin is right.
And George W. Bush is right.
It's not enough interceptors to shoot down an incoming salvo.
But it could be enough launch tubes to launch a first strike H-bomb attack on Moscow in an attempt to cripple them in a first strike.
And to prevent a retaliatory strike, which destroys mutually assured destruction.
And it's enough to make the Russians panic that that's what we're gearing up for.
And that's what Putin said about Ukraine over and over.
He said, look, you're doing everything you can to integrate Ukraine.
The Americans call it interoperability between our military and theirs.
And they said over and over again, we are bringing Ukraine into NATO. And he said, well, if you do that, then I have every reason to believe that you're going to put these missile launchers right in Kharkiv.
And he said in his declaration of war speech, that would be, I think he said, 15 minutes for a ballistic missile, less than five minutes for a hypersonic missile to travel from Kharkiv to Moscow.
He said, this is like a knife to our throat, and we will not tolerate it.
So you can say that as a psycho, but these are rational and serious security concerns, and the Americans refused to treat it that way.
Yeah, and of course, I mean, I think it's interesting, too, that, like, this idea that Putin is some sort of psychopath when American presidents for two decades were saying exactly the opposite, that he is a very rational, calculating actor who operates in predictable self-interest, that you can do deals with him.
And it was only in 2022 when the whole narrative switched and suddenly he became this, you know, unhinged Hitler figure because that's what we needed to convince Americans of to support the war.
Yeah.
Let me ask you just the last question, and then we're going to have to let you go just because we have someone else going on in a few minutes.
But I did want to...
I wanted to say I think your book really does lay the best foundation for understanding the current conflict.
There's no...
Conflicts don't just emerge out of nowhere.
There's a long history, a very arduous and complicated history, and part of the role of U.S. propagandists is to prevent that history from being understood except from our perspective.
And of course...
There's another perspective as well.
I think your book does the best job of presenting both.
Thank you.
But I want to, and I just wanted to make a couple observations quickly before I ask you the last question, which is, you know, you mentioned Serbia before.
And so ironically, when Putin objected to what the US was doing in Serbia, namely bombing Serbia in order to break away the province of Kosovo that had always been part of Serbia, in part because Kosovo didn't want to be a part of Serbia, but it was integrated into Serbia and before that Yugoslavia on the map.
Putin said you're making this extremely dangerous precedent because there's all the other patched together countries including ones with very different ethnic and cultural allegiances and if you create this precedent you can break up European states now because one little part of it or province has allegiance to some other country besides the one of which they're a part They're going to destabilize all of Europe.
And of course, that's what the war in Georgia was about with those two breakaway provinces who identified as Russia.
Obviously, the eastern Ukrainians did as well.
It's ironic that he warned of exactly that precedent.
The other thing I wanted to say quickly is, I don't know if you've seen this, but we've had the German politician Sarah Wagenknecht on our show, who is a longtime left-wing politician.
But she's had big differences with the left.
She hates the German green.
She's an immigration restrictionist.
She doesn't like a lot of the culture war agenda of the left because she thinks it alienates the working class.
But she's also a vehement opponent of German involvement or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine.
One thing she said on my show that I never really had thought of before, probably you need to be a German to understand this, German or Russian, is she said this was after Germany had followed the United States and sending tanks To Ukraine, German tanks to Ukraine for the Ukrainians to fight.
She said, imagine the trauma, the psychological trauma, the generational trauma of Russia once again seeing German tanks rolling You know, from the west eastward to Ukraine, which in both world wars was how the Russians were invaded and lost tens of millions of people.
And I think that, too, is such an important part of it.
This is a very sensitive part of the Russian border.
And all of the things that you've been describing that you write about in your book have been happening right on the other side of it.
All right.
So let me just ask you this last question.
Something about very recent development, which...
Weren't included in your book for obvious reasons, but your book sheds a lot of light on, which is this kind of frantic escalation that the Biden administration is doing in the lame duck on their way out, including the most serious of which is authorizing the use of attackums to strike deep inside Russia precisely because, as Putin has observed correctly, The Ukrainians can't operate those.
Every time they're launched, it means a NATO military force or an intelligence force or the United States has actively participated now in bombing Russia.
Then landmines, now you see a Russian kind of threat of retaliation with this ballistic missile.
How dangerous do you regard this escalatory spiral that we're now in and what do you think is the motive of the Biden administration in doing this on their way out?
Well, it is certainly dangerous.
And it's just amazing that, at least according to the New York Times, this was done on a split decision.
They say that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, was against it.
But the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said go ahead.
Now, my book actually ends with Biden refusing this pressure just last month.
It's almost up to date.
That came from the UK. Keir Starmer flew to Washington to pressure him, and he said no.
Right.
And for this exact reason, as you said, these aren't just longer-range missiles, but they require American and or other NATO participation intelligence or special operations forces to help them to do it.
Now, a couple things here real quick, Glenn.
The first one is...
I would encourage people not to panic.
I shouldn't go making predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra said.
But in this case, I know some people on Twitter have been truly scared that we're headed toward a nuclear war imminently here.
And I would encourage people to chill out a little bit on that, because what I believe is happening here is that...
The Biden administration has decided that Putin is definitely not going to do anything too crazy here in response because they just lost the election.
And because he knows that it's just a matter of eight weeks or so before nine weeks before the new president comes in and will want to negotiate, who won the election on that basis, and that he'd be crazy to break out nuclear weapons or to do anything too drastic in order to reverse this in the and that he'd be crazy to break out nuclear weapons or So in other words, they're being cute, right?
They thought they had an advantage that they can get an extra few sucker punches in here at the end and that Putin won't do anything about it.
And in fact, they even told Reuters that they're only hoping to help Ukraine get into a little bit stronger position to negotiate by, you know, February or whatever, which is ridiculous.
It's buying them a tenth of a percent of nothing.
It doesn't mean anything as far as that goes.
But I want to go to what you're saying there, too, about the psychological effect of having the German tanks rolling across Ukraine.
Well, same thing for the Americans who were their deadly enemies in the Cold War all those years as well and what that looks like.
And just remember, Glenn, And I know you were great on this at the time, and thank you for it, man.
But when the vile Charlie Savage came out with this absolute ridiculous hoax that American mothers and fathers of dead sons in Afghanistan should falsely blame Russia for paying the Taliban to kill their sons.
Charlie Savage didn't care about the feelings of these mothers or fathers of these dead men.
He's just making his money telling lies for the CIA because that's Charlie Savage's honor and dignity less job that he does for The New York Times.
But remember how the liberal American establishment, all of Congress, both parties and Rachel Maddow and everybody on TV absolutely freaked out over the rumor.
He absolutely and it's totally debunked, by the way, I absolutely destroy this lie in my book.
I show you 10 ways why it's not true.
But based on this false rumor, they were calling this absolutely an act of war by Russia against the United States of America, flipping their lid.
On the basis, again, the rumor was that the Taliban had gotten a few lucky potshots off at our guys, right?
Maybe a roadside bomb here or there, a lucky sniper shot here or there.
And yet, here we are after pouring $175 billion into Ukraine, boasting and bragging in that same New York Times newspaper of record every day that we are killing Russians.
We're sending them home in body bags.
We're sending them home in coffins.
We're sinking their ships.
We're killing their generals.
Yes, we do have Special Operations Forces on the ground.
Yes, we do have CIA Special Activities Division on the ground.
Yes, our guys are coordinating the entire war in Germany through their tabletop exercises and using Peter Thiel artificial intelligence to decide where the artillery shells should go and all of this crazy stuff.
It is the Afghan bounties hoax times a hundred million and it's true.
I mean, imagine if we knew for a fact and they bragged about it in Moscow that they put out a hit on General McChrystal and killed him in Afghanistan in 2010. What would America have done?
It is just the level of, just the abject inability of the American foreign policy establishment to put the shoe on the other foot, even to save their own lives, is really incredible.
Yeah, it's the single worst propagandistic trick that they have successfully engineered, which is to have Americans never, ever, ever ask whether the behavior that we're condemning is behavior that we ourselves engage in, or to look at anything from the perspective of any other government besides the United or to look at anything from the perspective of any other government besides the United States to try and understand whether the reason they're doing things might be different than the All right, Scott, it's always fantastic to talk to you.
It's incredibly illuminating.
Your book really is, I think, the definitive history of the U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
The title of it, which I hope people will check out, is Unprovoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia.
Provoked.
Provoked.
No, look at how victimized they am by propaganda that even I say unprovoked.
The title is Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
People can also follow your work on Twitter, but also on Antiwar.com and a lot of other places.
And people really should because it's always very informative.
And it was great to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you so much again for having me.
Yeah, absolutely.
Have a great evening.
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That's cbdistillery.com, promo code GLEN. Lee Fong was my longtime colleague at The Intercept, where he did some of the best investigative reporting, broke some of the best and most important stories, just using traditional shoe leather reporting, following money, tracing what these kind of invisible but very powerful factions in Washington are doing in a way that few other people can or do.
He's still doing exactly the same thing, but he's doing it at his outstanding sub-stack, which I think you do yourself a great favor to read.
And he's a friend of the show.
He's my friend as well.
And it is great to see you, Lee.
Thank you for coming on.
Hey, great to see you, Glenn.
Yeah, you too.
Do you actually see me, or do you just mean that metaphorically?
Yeah, it's working this time, or at least it's working on my end.
Am I frozen?
No, no, it's working great.
You actually see my face, though?
That's the treasure.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay, good.
All right.
So you have been writing about Trump's appointees, not necessarily positively or negatively, but more about the reasons why so many of these power factions in Washington, corporate, and political have been opposing them, and more importantly, how.
And one of the new articles that you have in your sub-stack is entitled, Inside the Junk Food Lobby's Plans to Derail RFK's Agenda.
It's interesting because there's not a lot of attention being paid to RFK yet, negative attention.
It's been on Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth and Tulsi, but it's definitely coming, that's for sure.
It's just too big of an industry, billions and billions of dollars at stake, not to have it at some point become a focus.
So before we get to what they're doing to RFK or what is it about his agenda that they dislike, what is this junk food industry?
Well, it's a pretty broad industry.
You know, I got access to some lobbyist memos and also to a Zoom meeting that occurred last week where a lot of these lobbyists were kind of huddling and strategizing over ways to oppose RFK or to whittle down his agenda, but they really represented a broad So the American Beverage Association, that's the trade group for Coca-Cola and some of the other sugary soda companies.
PepsiCo, which doesn't just make Pepsi, it's also the makers of Doritos and several of the fruity cereals and snack products.
The Corn Refiners Association.
Now, this is a little bit less well known, but this is a trade group for Archer Daniel Midlands and many of the other big corn processor companies.
And so, you know, these are the companies that are not just selling corn as a kind of direct product, but many of the kind of refined byproducts.
So the ethanol, you know, the fuel, the cooking oil, the high fructose corn syrup that's ubiquitous in American food products, but really, you know, across the world, you don't see it as commonly, as well as just many other fast food companies, McDonald's and others.
This lobbying firm, Invariant, represents all of them.
So, you know, they have a shared interest in the Make America Healthy Again agenda, and they're very concerned about raising nutrition standards, about cracking down on food additives, on taking a closer look at some of the conflicts of interest for folks who have advised the FDA and made suggestions in the past.
One of the things that's so interesting about the RFK junior appointment, there's a lot of different interesting aspects to it, but one of the interesting aspects is that there's no doubt that if you compare the United States to other countries, the United States has a big problem with child obesity.
If you live outside the United States and you visit, one of the first things you notice is that Obese people are everywhere.
You see people who can't even walk, not like 90-year-old or 80-year-old people, which is understandable, but like people in middle age who are just too fat to walk in the airports, they need carts, and increasingly so many overweight, seriously overweight or obese children.
And one of the things that RFK has pointed out that I honestly didn't know before, and when he pointed out people claimed it wasn't true, but there's a lot of evidence now that it is, is that if you look at the ingredients in a whole wide range of products, food products, There's so many kind of poisonous ingredients, things that are additives or artificial or unhealthy that don't exist in exactly the same products in Canada or in Europe or in South America.
So why is that an important practice for this industry to preserve and protect?
Well, the food industry wants to get you addicted to their products.
They want you to enjoy the products.
They want you to keep eating them, to keep buying them, to give you kind of like a chemical response in your brain that's almost very similar to a drug.
And they know that some of these food additives enhance the flavors.
You know, they increase the sugar uptake and kind of make some of the The color's more vibrant and the flavor's more vibrant.
As you mentioned, many of these food additives that are ubiquitous in cereal and snacks and other products are banned in other countries or looked down upon in the same food manufacturers.
That sell Fruit Loops or Doritos here, and they don't sell the same formulation even in Canada and in Europe.
One very viral video that Kennedy produced during the campaign was on yellow dye 5, also known as tartrazine.
This is found in all kinds of different snack and food products.
And this is another kind of flavor and color enhancer, but it's been linked to behavioral problems in children, several other chronic health issues.
And it's been something that has been banned in some countries in Europe, and the European Union broadly requires food companies to place a warning label that this is dangerous for children.
Yet we market this Products with the same ingredient to children in this country.
If you're watching children's programs on YouTube or on television, if you have marketing aimed towards children, it's products that predominantly have this ingredient.
So we really just have an entirely different food culture, regulatory approach than many other countries in the world.
And what's interesting about RFK is that this is an issue that is not new necessarily.
There are people in the public interest that typically have been on the left who have talked about this for a very long time.
But RFK has really kind of broadened his populist approach and broadened the kind of ideological and partisan kind of composition of people who care about this, bringing this into the Republican Party.
And he's tapped into major podcasts, Theo Vaughn, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, many big TikTok influencers who are increasingly concerned about this kind of toxic or harmful ingredient list that's so common in American foods and turned it into a very kind of valuable and salient part of the Trump agenda.
Yeah.
And he also has some kind of charismatic and themselves telegenic and increasingly well-known medical experts and nutrition experts who are his top advisors who also go on these So it's become this very, as you say, popular agenda, almost stripped of ideology.
But I want to ask you about that because it's so interesting to me how...
Flexible, let's say, to be generous, like the two sides of the ideological spectrum often are.
On the one hand, the idea that our government is captured, regulatorily captured by major industries and corporations like big food, big pharma, health insurance, companies.
And that we need to combat the control of corporate influences and the revolving door where regulators go work for these corporations, make a lot of money, get back into government when their party wins and then start regulating those same industries.
That this has been a major cause of the left for a long time, and here's RFK Jr. appointed by Donald Trump to run the entire apparatus of the health industry, of the government's health regulatory system, who really is the first HHS secretary to make this a primary focus of eliminating the ability of corporations to capture the regulatory process that's supposed to be regulating them, not the other way around.
So you have a lot of people on the left who finally have gotten what they've said they wanted, only it's coming in the form of Donald Trump and RFK Jr., But then you have a lot of people on the right as well who viciously mocked Michelle Obama when all she tried to do was just kind of use her platform as First Lady to encourage school children to do exercise and eat more healthy.
She's not even coercive, just kind of encouraging them.
And they all said, oh, this isn't the role of government.
Michelle Obama has no right to tell kids what to do or what to eat.
That's not her role.
Nobody needs a nanny state.
And now you have RFK with a huge right-wing support structure behind him.
Not just encouraging people to eat more healthy but talking about using the power of government regulations to combat the worst practices of this industry and interestingly very few people on the right seem to mind.
What is going on here?
Well, look, I mean, this is one of the most interesting kind of areas of realignment of Trump really taking the kind of polarization that you see in this country and totally swapping things out and providing a new opportunity.
I think this is one of the biggest areas of potential reversals from the first Trump administration, where we see some of the biggest differences.
In the first administration, he was not particularly public interest minded on these issues.
He appointed a lot of people from the pesticide and chemical and agribusiness lobby to staff his agencies, kind of took a very traditional Republican approach.
This time he's broadening the tent.
He's kind of tapping into this new populist anger around health and wellness and why our largest multinationals that control our food supply have not actually cared about our health and well-being.
It's kind of an incredible moment.
But if you look at my story, I looked at these memos and kind of strategy sessions and the strategies that they are talking about to block Any type of reforms that RFK is talking about, well, these look very similar to what happened 14 years ago when Michelle Obama proposed something very similar.
You know, back then, this is something I covered at the time, when they were trying to update the school nutrition standards, the Lobbyists for the food industry worked with their allies in Congress to place budget riders that forced the federal agencies to classify frozen pizza as a vegetable, basically saying, you know, the tomato sauce justifies this kind of forced change.
So therefore, even if you have updated nutrition levels, the actual foods that children eat are exactly the same.
You know, it's a dirty political trick.
But again, you know, behind the scenes, lobbyists for the same industries were talking about using those same strategies to thwart RFK that, you know, in this upcoming Congress, in case they can't block his confirmation, in case they can't get Trump or others to If he starts advancing, they're going to work with congressional allies.
What's interesting here is the kind of cultural dynamic as well.
Back then, you know, we saw kind of the more libertarian arguments that, you know, this is a nanny state government.
This is big government seizing your food.
This time around, because they're speaking to a different audience, even though the goals are the same, it's preserving the status quo, keeping this junk in our food supply, keeping it federally subsidized and ubiquitous in our grocery stores.
The arguments are different, though, this time because of the partisan difference.
Now, instead, they're attacking RFK personally.
They're saying he's a kook.
He's crazy.
He can't be trusted.
Even if he's advancing long-term progressive goals, goals that even Michelle Obama or, you know, I listened to the Ron Johnson roundtable back in September where he had a lot of these kind of food influencers and people from the RFK orbit, people like Callie and Casey Means, Several bloggers and TikTok influencers who have been talking about this subject, I mean, it sounded almost like a Ralph Nader event, if you strip away the kind of like the partisan labels.
Instead of, you know, using the big government attack, they're going to say, no, the left and the Democrats who are being co-opted by the food and beverage industry are going to make a different set of arguments, but the goals are essentially the same.
Yeah, obviously also they're going to use this anti-vax label just over and over and over that's designed to stimulate this visceral reaction, especially to prevent Democrats from supporting him, even though they might otherwise do so.
Obviously the whole COVID religion and the orthodoxy became sacred to the Democratic Party and RFK was one of the most vocal heretics to that religion.
But I want to ask you this, just to delve a little bit more deeply into it, because Yes, you had the Michelle Obama and a couple of people in the Obama administration talking in a very kind of muted way about these issues.
But the Health and Human Services Secretary was Kathleen Sebelius, the former governor from Kansas, a very, very establishmentarian, pro-corporate kind of figure.
She's out there on a rancid crusade against R.K. Jr. I don't know what she does now.
I presume it's some sort of industrial or corporate job that she has.
But so, you didn't really have people in the Obama administration or in the Trump administration in the first term.
As you said, he appointed, you know, sort of standard Washington insiders, corporatists, big donors, to a lot of these health and agriculture positions who just were part of the revolving door.
But now you have someone who is crucial to his campaign, who has crusaded on these issues forever, Who is a pretty sophisticated person.
As you say, it's not just him.
He has kind of an army of people out there to influence public opinion who are experts in this, including the means siblings that you mentioned.
I never am somebody who wants to bet against the corporate lobbies in Washington because they basically are like neocons.
They almost never lose in Washington.
At the same time, you have this kind of collision, finally, of another genuinely potent force, which is the mandate of Donald Trump's victory and the determination to ram through his agenda that he ran on and that a lot of people voted for combined with RFK Jr.'s kind of fervent belief, his passion, For these kinds of issues.
I mean, he's worked as an environmental lawyer combating corporate waste dumping in our water streams.
I mean, this has been something that he's cared about for basically his whole adult life.
How do you see these two huge planets colliding?
Well, it's hard to predict, but I do believe that this is going to be, if RFK gets in, this is going to be a major priority of the administration.
And I say that just by witnessing this last campaign, where we saw a gigantic realignment in our election system, that all these kind of traditional democratic groups, working class voters, a lot of first-time voters, people who are generally apolitical, when they came out to vote, they tended to vote Trump.
That's what the exit polls show.
And a lot of these folks appear to be motivated by these types of issues.
They're concerned about illegal immigration, they're concerned about inflation, and they're concerned about our food system and wellness.
You really see it just as a writer.
I've touched on these issues in the last year, I get a tremendous response because people are angry, and they're angry from across the board in a non-ideological way.
My subsec, I have Left-wing, right-wing, moderate readers, you know, I'm kind of all over the map.
But whenever, and on some issues, it's very divided.
People get upset about certain hot topic issues.
But on health and wellness, about kind of corporate capture of our food and nutrition system, there's broad public support.
So yes, the kind of industrial food lobby is very powerful.
King Corn is kind of famous for dominating the kind of energy and food policy world for decades.
You know, you've had kind of the role of the Iowa caucuses, the corn lobby kind of funneling dark money to both sides, you know, using super PACs, having an army of lobbyists.
Actually, if you look at some of the townhouses that are right next to the Supreme Court that are right on the Senate side, Of Washington, D.C., and right by Congress, several of those are owned by the corn lobby and the agribusiness industry.
So you have senators making votes on ag policy and then walking across the street and picking up checks from King Corn and some of the corporate food conglomerates.
So, you know, they have a lot of influence, but they don't have a lot of public support.
People are...
People are very upset about these issues.
And for Trump, I think a lot of his kind of policy agenda that we're going to see next year is probably going to be fairly traditional Republican.
With the Trump tax cuts expiring, it's going to be...
A lot of tax cuts for corporations.
It's going to be probably less Affordable Care Act subsidies as those also expire next year and need to be renewed.
You know, it's not going to be particularly exciting, I think, for this new working class coalition.
He has to give them something.
And I think that something might be what RFK wants to deliver on food and wellness.
Yeah, as you said, I think one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, and positive outcomes of Trump, just Trump himself, Trump emerging on the scene, reshaping politics, is that both in foreign policy, the question of civil liberties in the intelligence community,
and the power of corporations and the food industry and big ag and big pharma, it really has erased so many of these old standard, longstanding, left, right, conservative, liberal dichotomies.
And it's, I mean, replaced it.
It's, as you said, it brought together multiple factions.
It's more like an anti-establishment or anti-DC dogma faction or pro-establishment, pro-institutionalist sector that has, you know, verged, which is why Liz Cheney felt so comfortable with Kamala Harris and not with Donald Trump.
And I think you're going to see that play out with RFK and a lot of other things as well.
All right.
Let me just switch gears for a second and ask you just a little bit about Matt Gaetz, even though he is no longer the nominee to run the Justice Department because he has withdrawn.
You wrote an article...
Not about Matt Gaetz so much as, although it was about Matt Gaetz as well, but also more so about what you call the D.C. lobby and how intent they were on preventing Matt Gaetz from becoming Attorney General and how they were kind of coming for him to destroy him, to prevent his nomination.
I think the title of that article from September was, or last month, yeah, it was the D.C. lobby comes for Matt Gaetz.
Oh, you know what?
Actually, I'm sorry.
It's from late 2023 after he sabotaged Kevin McCarthy and forced Kevin McCarthy out.
So it was the D.C. lobby is coming for Matt Gaetz.
So this was not part of the nomination, but it was just sort of this lingering widespread hatred for him in this attempt to destroy him.
What did you mean by the D.C. lobby coming for Matt Gaetz and why were they doing that?
Well, look, it's very well known that he's hated by some of his colleagues.
And the kind of tabloid, beltway press like to play up the kind of little petty insults that happen on Capitol Hill, the little subtweets that happen on social media.
That part's not particularly interesting to me.
What's interesting to me is that...
Matt Gaetz was the first House Republican and one of the only House Republicans to jump on the kind of Bernie Sanders coded movement of getting rid of PAC donations, saying no to lobbyist donations, no to leadership PAC donations, no to any of the kind of corporate money that sloshes around D.C. that funds both parties.
He's rebuked his party on many key votes, you know, fighting leadership on arms to Yemen on, you know, he led the opposition earlier this year among Republicans on voting against the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, you know, encoding the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which essentially outlaws, you know, Discourages certain criticism of Israel.
He's fought with House progressives on non-compete agreements, on antitrust, on breaking up the big tech monopolies, on vote after vote, on corporate copyright law, and on many kind of very esoteric issues that have to do with worker power and corporate power and anti-competitive policy.
He's broken with the swamp, with the We're good to go.
Tweeting out and promoting anti-Matt Gaetz stories, promoting sexual allegations against Matt Gaetz.
If you actually looked at their bios, who are these people?
Several of them were working for the tech lobby, people who work at groups funded by Google.
Matt Gaetz has really led the effort to encourage the continued prosecution of Google, under antitrust law, he's praised what the Biden administration has done, you know, kind of picking up the torch from what the Trump administration had started four years ago.
And that has made him a very hated man in Washington.
He walks around with a mark on his back, with a target on his back.
Yeah, he said, I love Lena Kahn, but also, you know, he also has that same profile when it comes to foreign policy.
He was adamant about the need to leave Afghanistan to cancel authorizations to use military force.
I saw him at war with Liz Cheney on several occasions in the House over exactly these kinds of issues, but also with pro-war Democrats.
He has a lot of heterodox views that are very counter to the Swamp's dogma and ideology.
And so certainly at least part of the hatred toward him is motivated by exactly that, which is part of the reason why I thought that choice could have been so good in terms of its outcome.
But I don't want to...
I want to just talk about the sex scandal thing for a second.
And it's still, a lot of the details are still emerging.
We don't have the report yet that the Health Ethics Committee prepared.
That's supposedly very damaging.
But one thing I do know for sure is that Sex scandals are often the way that Washington does try to destroy the people they want to destroy for totally separate reasons.
I talked on Tucker Carlson's show about how the response to Daniel Alsberg linking the Pentagon Papers was to break into his psychoanalyst's office precisely in order to discover his psychosexual secrets and leak them and use them to destroy his reputation.
It happened with Julian Assange.
At the moment, he became genuinely threatening.
Out of nowhere, two women came forward and said, we had consensual sex, but I didn't consent to him not using a condom.
And that became rape under Swedish law, which drove him into the embassy.
Obviously, it was used against Bill Clinton.
And now it's being used against Pete Hegstatz.
And of course, this is the thing that has been used to destroy Matt Gaetz.
There's a lot of murkiness, a lot of murkiness on this issue, on the whole sex scandal issue, and as I said, I don't want to ask you to delve deeply or comment on it in detail because there's still a lot known, but is it your sense that...
Had Matt Gaetz been different than what he is, had he been a swamp creature, had he been somebody who just sort of went along, that there would have been a lot less interest in this sex scandal than there was when it was needed to prevent him from taking over the Justice Department?
Well, of course.
And actually, just speaking of Pete Hegseth, I mean, much more damaging, much more serious allegations against Pete Hegseth.
But I would say, I don't know, I haven't run the numbers, but maybe 100 to 1 in terms of media coverage on Matt Gaetz.
And I think part of that comes down to power and who Matt Gaetz has pissed off over the years, the established interest groups that he threatens with his kind of policy platform.
I think that kind of reflects that reality.
And, you know, I would go even further back than the list that you mentioned.
Ralph Nader earlier, you know, when he came out with his book, Unsafe at Any Speed, looking at kind of the known design problems in the automobile industry that were killing people, General Motors had kind of worked with trying to frame him with a sex worker or something of that nature.
And so, you know, this is a tried and true playbook from the corporate and kind of political elite to Use this kind of sexual allegation, sexual innuendo, to destroy their political enemies.
And you're right, we don't know all the facts here, but the facts that are available here in the Matt Gaetz issue do not justify the rhetoric that you see in the political and media sphere.
I mean, if you log in to Twitter or X or Blue Sky or any of these platforms and you see any mention of Matt Gaetz, people claim that he is a rapist, a pedophile, that he paid for child sex.
You know, that he's a sex criminal.
None of, you know, from the facts we know, none of that is justified whatsoever.
There's this kind of trial by media, you're guilty until proven innocent dynamic that I find very unbecoming and kind of disgusting, actually.
And you can't kind of engage in any Policy-oriented debate, political dynamic, when this is what's overshadowing the entire discourse.
Any kind of article I post about Matt Gaetz, I wrote another piece about him last week, just looking at some of his heterodox votes and his kind of more worker, small business aligned, pro-consumer views.
Policy agenda, which is, you know, very unusual for a House Republican member.
And you look at thousands of responses to this article, and it's, this person is a child rapist.
He's a pedophile.
I mean, it's just incredibly toxic and dishonest.
And, yeah, there's so many more examples.
Like, obviously, that was done with Brett Kavanaugh.
And out of the blue appeared, like, decades-old allegations.
I don't know if you remember this, but in Massachusetts— Yeah, just to remind people that Rich O'Neill, even though most people don't know his name, is an extremely powerful member of Congress.
He was the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which controls essentially the budget.
And when this young gay mayor of a town in Massachusetts decided to run against him in the primary to primary Rich O'Neill, Out of nowhere came this scandal that when he was 28, 29, 30 years old, he was talking to 21, 22-year-old gay men on Grindr, that he actually had gone out with them.
And the same rhetoric was deployed against him, that he was a pedophile, that he was some sort of sex pest, even though all of them were above the age of consent.
And then it turned out that that scandal was...
And all these left-wing groups ran away and canceled their endorsement of him.
And it turned out that that scandal was manufactured by a bunch of slimy Democratic Party operatives who wanted a job with Richie Neal and who went to Amherst College and who helped invent that knowing that that's the way to destroy people's reputation.
And I have to say Two things which is, I just want to get your reaction, you know, one is that in the Matt Gaetz case, it's actually even worse than a lot of the other cases because here the Justice Department aggressively and actively investigated Matt Gaetz to determine whether or not there was any evidence that he committed crimes.
And it wasn't the Trump GOJ that did it, it was the Biden GOJ. And obviously they were eager to get Matt Gaetz, they leaked constantly to try and destroy his reputation, but at the end of the day they closed the case on the grounds that there was no evidence available to prove that he was guilty of any crime, and yet this doesn't matter at all.
It's not even just that the government never proved his case, it's that the government actively investigated and themselves said there's no evidence that he committed a crime.
And then the other aspect that I think the reason why these weapons are so effective It's because when somebody is accused of that, like Julian Assange gets accused of rape or Alex Morris gets accused of, I don't know, somehow like pedophilia or being a sex pest because he was like dating 22-year-old gay men, obviously in the case of Matt Gaetz, And I've defended Matt Gaetz just on due process ground.
I've defended Alex Morris based on the ground.
You know what happens to you when you stick your head up and defend any of these people, which is you then get kind of smeared by the same tactic like, oh, he must be defending Matt Gaetz because he's a pedophile and Alex Morris or Julian Assange because he's a sex pass.
And it's a huge incentive for people to just kind of Run away and not have anybody defending them so that just the accusations themselves are enough to destroy the person without any due process or evidence required.
No, that's right.
You know, I haven't written anything publicly about the Matt Gaetz sexual allegations.
And yet when I post a tweet or my story about, you know, narrowly about Matt Gaetz's policy positions, his political positions, his beliefs around privacy or political power or business, I get swarmed with people claiming that I'm in support of sex crimes or I support pedophilia.
You know, it's You know, it's a chilling dynamic.
I think, you know, I don't mind it.
You know, I've gone through the ringer a few times.
But I think for most reporters, they see this dynamic.
They don't think it's worth it.
So they don't say anything.
You know, they keep quiet and they or they actively engage in this smear campaign.
And, you know, for the Richard Neal case, you know, this this, you know, just for your listeners, some one additional context.
Democrats have talked.
For 30 years now about closing the loopholes that hedge fund managers and private equity bosses exploit.
So they, you know, pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
You know, it's something that Obama talked about a lot and many other Democratic politicians.
One of the big reasons that never actually changes, even under Democratic control, is that people like Richard Neal, who was the top Democrat on the tax writing committee, is very cozy.
With big business and with those major donors.
So, you know, this effort to primary him from a more progressive candidate from Alex Morris completely concocted fake allegation of a sex crime, of, you know, grooming people or whatever.
I mean, it was a honeypot thing where operatives were lying to him and manipulating These kind of, like, attempts at dates.
And just to look at the reaction that so many left-wing and Democratic groups, after this, I think, very obviously fake allegation came out, you know, they ran for the hills.
They abandoned this effort to challenge Richie Neal.
So, you know, this is the part of the process of how the establishment stays in power.
You wonder, why does the tax code never change?
Or perhaps why the ingredients in cereal never change when it comes to RFK or something else?
It's the same kind of smear cycle.
And again, just to pick up one other thread that you mentioned, it's not just that the DOJ aggressively investigated this and had many FBI agents, you know, had the FBI agents even paying for the therapy of some of the women who were involved.
You know, you see so much other evidence.
I encourage anyone who's curious about this Gates dynamic, yes, we don't know all the facts publicly yet.
But Chris Dorworth, a Florida lobbyist, was allegedly shaken down by a criminal in Florida, someone who introduced Gates allegedly to some of these women as this criminal judge.
Joel Greenberg, I believe is his name.
He was a local tax collector in Florida.
He was using taxpayer money on crypto scams and pyramid schemes.
He was using taxpayer money to pay prostitutes.
He was abusing his office.
He controlled the government office that creates IDs, and he was creating fake IDs for himself and for other people.
Including ones to make underage girls who were 17 look like they were above the age of consent.
That's exactly right.
And so this guy, Joel Greenberg, after he's caught for his criminal enterprise, he attempts to basically shake down powerful Florida politicians and obtain a pardon from Donald Trump.
And part of that effort...
That's exactly right.
I included Chris Dorworth and Matt Gaetz and others who he believed to be close to Donald Trump.
And there's a lot of text messages and evidence that there was a very elaborate scheme from Greenberg's family, which was very wealthy, and from Greenberg himself, to basically coerce and smear folks who would not join the scheme.
You know, he created fake Social media profiles to claim that other people were pedophiles.
He attempted to honeypot folks to essentially extort people to obtain this pardon from Donald Trump, and he didn't get it.
So, you know, read the lawsuit from Chris Dorworth.
Look at all the evidence.
Again, not all the facts are known yet, but from the few facts that we do know, nothing has really justified the smear campaign that we've seen in the last two weeks.
Yeah, and there's actually a great Twitter thread that I read in its entirety, and it's extremely well documented.
It's based on almost entirely well-reported and publicly disclosed facts that give a great kind of perspective about these murkier and more complex aspects of the Matt Gaetz case.
I actually recommended it on my Twitter feed today so people can find it that way.
Maybe we'll post a link to it as well.
I highly recommend it.
And, you know, I just want to say one last thing, Lee, which is, A lot of time people talk about the importance of independent media and independent media has a lot of flaws in it.
There's a lot of people who have bad motives or they get audience captured.
It's far from a panacea.
But one of the things that I think makes it so important, and I remember I really realized this when Russiagate was happening.
And I was very, very vocal from the very beginning about the reasons for skepticism, about the lack of evidence, about some of the crazier components of what was being alleged that were so obviously false.
I really did hear a lot of times from journalists inside corporate media outlets Who would say, oh, thank you for doing this.
I'm so glad you're raising these questions.
And the implicit idea was that they couldn't.
Because you stick your head up one time inside corporate media to raise even a slightly off script question and you become public enemy number one on Twitter by liberals attacking you, let alone doing that by raising questions about a sex scandal and getting labeled a pedophile or a pedophile sympathizer or a defender or whatever.
Your career is over.
You're the first one on the layoff list.
You might get fired.
You're the last one to get hired.
Whereas people in independent media who have a kind of fixed audience, who trust them, people are far freer to take these positions and take these arrows and not be intimidated by these kinds of tactics because There's not the same stakes involved and I think that freedom that independent media gives is probably its most important asset just to kind of push back and dissent from what otherwise would be taboos that have been created.
It's absolutely essential.
On this topic, on kind of the height of the riots of 2020, you could only really find criticism of the really dogmatic ideology that was prevailing across the country in independent media.
On many of these kind of national security issues on Ukraine and on the Israel war, independent media has become crucial.
You know, I'm perhaps biased in that I'm now independent media, but I'm also very concerned about the issues around audience capture and these kind of More bubble effects if you're only talking to one subscriber base.
But yeah, you know, just to kind of put a cap on this dynamic and bring it back to RFK, you know, one of the lobbyists' discussions that I obtained access to, they talked about how, you know, they've been monitoring that, hey, Donald Trump, it was very different, this media, this campaign cycle.
He went on 35 different independent campaigns.
You know, he was campaigning to this new energy around independent media, substacks, that sort of thing.
And I think here's one of the dangers.
They said their clients, people in the corporate food industry, instead of just advertising On corporate media, legacy media, they need to shift their advertising dollars, create partnerships with people like Joe Rogan and others so they can start buying influence within the sphere.
So, you know, nowhere is safe.
You have to remain vigilant.
And, you know, I'm a supporter of really just of high quality legacy media, if you can find it, and also continually reading independent media.
You really have to read both if you want to understand the world.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, it's not that independent media is entirely immune from a lot of the things that have corrupted corporate media.
They're maybe immune from some, but much more vulnerable in other ways, namely that they rely on their audience, which creates a huge incentive to please your audience, to never alienate them.
I know we went through that when it was time to condemn the Israeli war in Gaza.
There was a significant portion of our audience that was not just opposed but offended by that position.
And we knew that was going to happen.
But you have to do that.
Otherwise, you're just captive in exactly the same way.
And you kind of squander the unique value that independent media has to speak freely and speak your mind and not be imprisoned by a lot of these dynamics that have rendered these media outlets just so homogenized and so constrained in the kinds of things they're allowed to question.
that's right And I think there's a larger backlash happening because of the failures of Legacy media, in terms of the kind of uniform ideology, the kind of loyalty to conventional wisdom, the refusal to kind of question the establishment order, whether that's on COVID or the war in Ukraine or on so many other issues, we're seeing just an abandonment.
You know, people, as you've pointed out, leaving MSNBC, the viewership is completely dropped into the toilet.
People unsubscribing from the Washington Post, although there's some kind of Ideological issues there around the endorsement issue from a few months ago, but I think it represents a broader trend.
The bankruptcy of vice, you know, people are searching for answers.
And as the mainstream media collapses, I think it's even more important that the independent media, people who do have a platform, maintain high ethical standards and do what you've done, Glenn, which is remain independent.
And even if it costs you financially, you know, the same thing happened to me as I have raised issues around free speech and around the Various issues around the Israel war, I lost a significant number of subscribers, but you can't have that shape your editorial judgment and your pursuit of the truth.
Yeah, the minute you start compromising your ability to say what you actually think or to express, show facts that you think are necessary because you're afraid of financial harm, you become exact replicas of what the corporate media has become.
And I think ultimately as well over the longer term you cultivate a better audience that way.
audience that knows that sometimes you're going to say things that they're not in agreement with or that they maybe even dislike, but they're willing to give you a fair and respectful hearing because they trust that you're always going to be honest and kind of careful and evidence-based and the sorts of things that you say and you respect your audience enough to but they're willing to give you a fair and respectful hearing because they trust that you're always going to be honest and kind of careful and evidence-based I think that builds a better, even a bigger audience over the long term.
All right, Lee, as always, it's great to see you.
I think people can really get a sense from our discussion of, I do think your reporting is unique in that you just cover a lot of these kind of industry groups, a lot of these lobbying dynamics that so often get ignored.
They're complex to understand.
They take a lot of research.
And, you know, it's the thing that I think has shaped your career for a long time.
People should subscribe to Lee's Substack where they can get all this excellent reporting.
Lee, it's always great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Great to see you, Glenn.
Thank you so much.
All right, have a nice evening.
All right.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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