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Oct. 20, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:28:39
20211020_havana-syndrome-and-vaccinating-young-kids-with-gl
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Broader Frame Missing From Coverage 00:15:05
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Oh, we've got a packed show for you today and a good one.
On some topics we've never discussed on this program before, a deep dive into the supposed deep state today with voices across the spectrum.
Why is the CIA suddenly having its informants around the world go missing or even worse, becoming suspected double agents against the United States?
And what is Havana syndrome, the mysterious disease said to be plaguing our diplomats and national security forces in Cuba and many other countries for years?
Our friend Glenn Greenwald of Substack is here.
He's doubtful about this Havana syndrome thing, but we're also going to be joined by a former CIA official, top, top guy, who is speaking out about having it.
And he doesn't agree with Glenn because he says he's experienced it personally.
First, though, we want to start with breaking news about COVID and the Biden administration's plan for vaccinating five to 11 year olds.
And apparently, as they tell you to stick this needle in your five year old's arm.
The CDC will not be bending at all on masks for children, vaccinated children in school.
Watch.
From FDA and recommendations from CDC, we will be working to scale up pediatric vaccination.
That said, it will take some time.
And as I just noted, as we head into these winter months, we know we cannot be complacent.
We also know that from previous data, schools that have had masks in place were three and a half times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school.
Closure.
So, right now, we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools.
And we will look forward to scaling up pediatric vaccination during this period of time.
It's never ending.
It's just never, it's never going to end.
David Zweig is a journalist for New York Magazine and other outlets, and he's with me.
David, even vaccinating the five to 11 year olds, they're already doing it to the 12 plus, even that.
Won't lead to any bending when it comes to masks.
And you heard her say right there, her purported reason is that the evidence shows schools that have had masks in place were three and a half times less likely to have school outbreaks requiring school closure.
You're the only one who's actually taken a look at the studies behind this claim we keep hearing over and over again that masks in schools prevent the spread of COVID.
And so to Rochelle Walensky, you say what?
Well, the study she's referring to has a long list of confounders, which are problems with it.
And a number, I haven't written about it yet, but a number of experts who I confer with every day, including infectious disease people who really understand how to read these studies.
And I also reached out to a number of biostatisticians regarding this study.
And it's just, It's just not worth it.
It's sort of, it's not worth the weight that they're putting on it, to put it mildly.
I won't bore your listeners and viewers getting into the weeds on the study, but I can say three and a half times is so wildly outside.
The realm of what you're seeing benefits from other studies regarding masks, that according to one of the infectious disease people I spoke with, they said that instantly set off alarm bells when they saw that.
So we can sort of set that aside.
I mean, we can cherry pick 20 other places where there were masks in one district and not in the other, and there was no difference noticeable in the benefit.
So the study she's referring to is not trustworthy.
But she still throws out the number.
She noticeably does not cite the CDC's own study that you were on reporting about earlier and reported in New York Magazine, it was of 90,000 kids in Georgia, which did not show masks help stop the spread of COVID.
And so now, even with the vaccination, I mean, even with the vaccination of that would be all school aged children.
If you've got five plus vaccinated and more and more schools mandating the vax, like we've seen in LA and elsewhere, my own school.
For 12 plus, or at least 16 plus.
I mean, you tell me whether anything is going to make any of these officials, in your view, based on what you've seen, listen to reason.
I mean, what's interesting is I think that the frame about this debate has actually kind of gone off the rails.
And, you know, we could debate different nuances and the minutiae of one study or another, but I think we're missing the larger point.
There was some marginal benefit to be found from masking in schools.
The larger question is to what end?
Why?
And what I've continually written about and what I spoke about when I testified before Congress is why aren't we looking at the real world observational evidence from Europe where it's not a hundred, it's not that millions, millions of children are not wearing masks in schools.
The ECDC, which is the European version of the CDC, recommends against.
All primary school kids from wearing masks.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly said, we don't think anyone under age six should be wearing a mask.
So, those facts alone, it doesn't mean that they're right and we're wrong, but at minimum, I would like the CDC to explain why their guidance differs so dramatically from that of its counterpart in Europe.
So, this is kind of the broader frame that I think is missing from a lot of the coverage about this, where we're kind of arguing about one study or another.
There is not A uniform belief about the value of children wearing masks in schools when you look at Europe versus the United States.
Has anybody been forced to answer that?
I have yet to see any of these officials pressed on the difference between what they're doing in Europe.
I mean, I did it with Scott Gottlieb when he was on my show 10 days ago, but he didn't have a good answer.
But Fauci, Rochelle, I'd love to see what.
Have you seen that?
Anybody pressing them on are the Europeans insane?
Do they not care about children?
Right.
So anytime I ever bring this up, the rebuttals tend to either be silence or it's something on the order of, well, Europe is different than here.
Denmark is not America or this country or that country or the UK.
I mean, these are children in schools.
And I've done the research, Megan.
I've looked at the vaccination rates, the current case rates, and the overall mortality per capita.
And they are all over the map, so to speak.
Some are above the US.
And some are below.
So it's not this notion that Europe has beaten the virus and they've sort of earned the privilege of children not wearing masks in schools.
They haven't.
The cases, the vaccination rates, and the overall mortality, they're above and below.
They're all over the place.
The one unifying factor is that they're not having little kids wearing masks.
They do have different cutoff ages depending on which country, but they're all in agreement that at least little kids shouldn't be wearing masks.
Here in New York, where I live, the new governor put in a policy where kids all the way down to age two are wearing masks.
I had a call yesterday with a bunch of frantic moms who have children in.
Preschool, who are saying, who are basically apoplectic, saying, we don't know what to do.
You know, please talk to us.
We're really worried about our little kids, two year olds, three year olds wearing masks in school.
So these are things that, even if we set aside and say, hey, maybe the CDC is right, I think as American people, we are owed an explanation, a very clear and cogent explanation why their guidance differs so dramatically from that of their European counterpart, the CDC in Europe.
And frankly, not just on masks in children, but on natural immunity too, because over in Europe, they're accounting for that in a way we're not here.
I think one of the most astonishing developments has been this sort of refusal to acknowledge the value of natural immunity.
And once again, sort of echoing a bit of the argument about masks, whether or not there may be some marginal benefit of masks kind of is a distraction from the broader point.
And similarly, Whether there are differing studies, and there are, there's mixed evidence about the duration of natural immunity versus vaccine induced immunity.
But what we know, I mean, this is kind of, you know, infectious disease virology 101.
We know that when someone gets infected, there's a long history in most of disease science where we know that they're going to, that's going to confer some degree of immunity.
And there's a fair amount of evidence that the immunity conferred from natural infection is stronger.
Than it is from vaccines.
There, of course, are also some studies that show something different.
But what I'm saying is, we keep getting into the weeds of, well, maybe one's a little bit better or not a little bit better.
We don't know the duration of the vaccine induced immunity either.
I'm very pro vaccine for adults.
That is something that I think makes sense for nearly all adults to do.
I'm fully vaccinated.
But we need to have a nuanced discussion.
Why is it embarrassing that other countries are able to say, We think vaccines are great.
Vaccinate all the adults, but let's slow down and take a look at this for kids.
Let's offer only one dose to children, which some countries are doing.
Let's say only kids with underlying conditions should do it, which is what some other countries are suggesting.
Why is it that in the US we have this only binary messaging and binary policies from our CDC when there's so much more nuance in other countries?
I would like an answer for that.
Yeah.
Gottlieb was suggesting, again, for our audience, former FDA commissioner.
Was suggesting, well, parents should have some say when it comes to exactly how the child gets vaccinated.
What, you know, should it be 10 micrograms or 30 micrograms?
I guess, you know, the adults, I think that's a unit microgram.
Yes.
We get 30.
Now, five to 11, what they're testing on the five to 11 year olds is 10.
And maybe, you know, like my 12 year old's thin.
I mean, he's in the 70s in terms of his weight.
That he should not be getting what my 200 pound husband got.
That's, you know, that's just Doug's a little under 200.
He wouldn't want to be misrepresenting that.
Anyway, my point is, You're not allowed to account for any of this.
And what Scott Gottlieb said was oh, sure, you know, parents, they should.
They should have the right to sort of say when and how much and whether it's one dose or two.
And what I was saying to him was, but they can't.
They cannot.
If you have a child in Los Angeles school district, you're required to get two jabs.
And right now, of 30 milligrams, not 10.
Oh, okay, we have that.
Actually, here, take a listen.
You said you could potentially wait for the lower dose vaccine to be available.
No, they can't.
They've got to do it.
You said if your child has already had COVID, one dose may be sufficient.
That's not true.
So there are different approaches that you can take in consultation with your pediatrician to try to address whatever concerns you may have.
That's just, I love, I, look, I appreciate you talking.
It is too, because the, Parents in LA do not have that choice.
They've got to stick a vaccine in their 70 pound 12 year old.
That's the same as they put in their 200 pound husband.
Right.
You're talking about one city and one part of the country.
By the time that this one is actually incorporated into the vaccine schedule, it's going to be a long way off.
California moved quickly here.
I wouldn't expect many other parts of the country to mandate vaccinations.
It's happening right now.
I'm telling you right now, it's happening in private schools and across the country.
It's happening in my own private school right now.
And by the way, you mentioned the flu.
They don't mandate the flu vaccine, and that did kill more kids last year than COVID.
Oh, a lot of school districts do mandate the flu vaccine, actually.
It's not a nationwide thing, and it's not a school district-wide thing.
And the flu vaccine's been around for a lot longer.
So, what's your point?
You knew my point very well, right?
There is no flexibility.
Right.
It's not just Los Angeles.
I read, I believe, Cambridge, Massachusetts also is mandating the vaccine.
So, you know, the dominant.
So is my school.
My school.
I mean, it's private school, but my school is mandating it right now.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So it's incorrect to say it's only Los Angeles.
I would say there's, there's, An overlap here with your questions about natural immunity versus vaccine, which is if this is an important question for anyone who's getting vaccinated, but particularly for children, because the vaccine then functions as the second exposure if you've already had COVID.
And we know from the studies from the CDC itself that it's the second dose, aka the second exposure, where we're seeing a much higher incidence of myocarditis.
So this is.
This doesn't mean that kids shouldn't get vaccinated.
Let me be clear with what I'm saying here.
However, it does mean we should look at this very closely and get answers.
And particularly if a child already was naturally infected with COVID, that is a very, very different cost benefit calculation for vaccination, whether it's vaccine at all, whether it's one dose or two doses, or the amount in the dose.
Again, I keep emphasizing this.
There seems to be a total lack of nuance in the guidance.
And connected to that point, There also are no, what the term du jour is, there are no off ramps.
Every infectious disease person and epidemiologist I've talked with over the past month, people are pulling their hair out saying, What are the off ramps?
When can we actually unwind this thing?
And from talking to someone who's an implementation scientist who I was chatting with yesterday, and she said, Look, the hardest thing to do is once you put something in place, is to reel it back.
CDC Investigates Test to Stay 00:15:29
It's really challenging.
And we're seeing this play out in real time right now, where we have our Governmental health agencies refusing to give very specific metrics and guidelines for when these things can be dialed back and how they're basing it on those metrics and guidelines.
It's like when you're waiting for the train, for the subway in New York, they finally added those signs that show the train's coming in five minutes or whatever.
People need to know what's going to happen.
This notion of like, eh, it's going to keep going on and on, we'll figure it out, is not really scientific.
And it's not fair to American people to not have a clue about what's happening.
Just tell us what the plan is.
It's infuriating.
I was following your Twitter feed, and there was a woman who calls herself an evidence based Boston University assistant professor.
And people go to this woman for COVID information on Twitter.
And she was pointing out, and this is her claim there's an expert consensus that we should use masks.
Delta's caused record deaths of children, she writes, and young people under 50.
More mask policies help, she wrote.
Cities, oh, she cites, sorry, reading my own handwriting, she cites a chart on how epidemiologists are predicting how much longer we're going to wear masks.
And 55% surveyed said we're going to be in masks for one year or more.
What, more than a year?
I mean, I'd love to get your response.
My own response is no, no, I won't.
I won't.
And I won't do it to my kids.
And I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.
And yet we have school districts saying, well, then get out.
Right.
So, because she's just sweepingly citing some sort of science or epidemiologist, you've got actual studies that get ignored.
The report that she was referring to in this tweet that you're talking about was like an informal survey done by the New York Times of a bunch of epidemiologists, just them sort of prognosticating about.
How long it would last.
That's not science.
That's not how this works.
The one thing I just can't emphasize enough is be very wary when you hear people like Ashish Jha say, there is a consensus.
I don't know of any expert who is not for masking children in schools for the benefit.
Be very wary when you hear that.
All you have to do is readily accessible information.
Just hop on your computer and look at all the countries throughout Europe.
Look at the advice.
The recommendations from the World Health Organization and look at it from the ECDC, the European Centers for Disease Control.
They have very different guidance than we have here in the United States.
It is demonstrably false to say that there is a consensus about the cost benefit of children wearing masks in schools when a continent is just saying something different.
Yet, our top public health experts keep claiming this over and over.
There is this solipsism of the American health community that is baffling to me and a number of the experts who I talk with.
But most of them are afraid to speak out.
I just got off the phone with one a half hour ago and I said, Oh, I'm going on Megan Kelly.
She said, Don't mention my name.
And she's one of my top sources.
She is highly, highly credentialed at one of our top universities in the country, who is an absolute one of the top people in this field.
And she said, Don't mention her name.
This is really, really important stuff that people are not aware of how much of dissent there is within the medical community, but how afraid so many people are to speak out.
On masks in particular or more?
On everything, but masks are such a ridiculous third rail here that they are afraid to speak out.
There are some who have courageously spoken out about it.
Alyssa Perkins is one of them who I interviewed for one of my articles.
She's in Boston.
But there are most of them, people just don't want to touch it.
And it's either explicit, whether you're in a university hospital, you have the director of your department who says to you, hey, You better not talk about this.
Or I think what's more often is that it's implicit.
The notion that you are going to go against the CDC, our nation's leading disease health agency, that's a big deal if you're a doctor.
And beyond going against the CDC, you have to think about who becomes a doctor.
Most of these people, you had to get great grades in high school, then you got great grades in college, then you went to medical school.
It's a certain type of person that, not 100%, but to a large degree, weeds out.
I think a more independent thinking type of person.
Not that doctors aren't super smart people and aren't amazing in a million ways, but it's a very type of mindset.
Once the group is moving towards something, it's really challenging to push back against that.
I think it's not.
They don't really value this idea of being the minnow swimming against the stream of everyone else.
And again, I'm on the phone with people every day at highly prestigious universities and hospitals who really feel strongly about this, but are afraid to speak out because they've already seen what happened.
There have been, Cody Meisner, who's on the Vaccine Advisory Committee, wrote an article questioning the masking guidance for children, and he was excoriated for it by people at his own hospital and elsewhere.
And this is a highly credentialed.
And pediatric infectious disease specialists.
There is just zero tolerance, it seems, for any dissent or any discussion.
And again, but we can keep pretending that something in Europe isn't happening.
It's like this weird sort of non debate happening in our bubble, our solipsistic bubble in America.
It's just baffling.
This is, I mean, it's not exactly on point, but it is reminding me of what happened to somebody like Lisa Lippmann, the.
I don't want to get her credentials wrong, but she's a psychiatric.
I want to get her.
Anyway, she's a psychologist, I guess, at Brown University, who wrote the study on this sort of trans craze sweeping young girls, teen girls, and talked about how it's a social contagion.
This has crossed over for them into a social contagion.
And man, she's gone through it.
They made her rewrite the article.
She didn't get anything wrong.
She just added in some more context.
And now I just found out recently that she's been booted, she's gone.
I mean, slowly but surely, if you go against the grain, they'll find a way.
May not be today, may not be tomorrow, but they'll get rid of you.
Yeah, this is not how medicine should work.
We all know that.
And I want to be clear I am not saying that Europe is correct.
I'm not saying that these other countries are correct, whether it's with their vaccine schedules for children, whether it's with masking.
We don't even have to make that claim.
But what we do, I think, have to make a claim about, at me as a journalist and you as well, and American citizens, what we do have to demand.
Is an allowance for debate, particularly among highly credentialed people who are at prestigious universities who have the expertise in this.
They shouldn't be shouted down.
There shouldn't be calls for their head to be fired because they dare question the guidance.
Think about what happened.
The CDC recommended six feet distancing in schools.
It was only because certain states didn't go along with the CDC's guidance that there was a study done in Massachusetts where they found that, lo and behold, three feet of distance.
Was no worse than six feet of distance.
Ultimately, the CDC changed its guidance after that study came out.
Had every single state gone lockstep with the CDC's guidance for six feet, who knows if it ever would have been changed.
It was only because there was independent thinking of the health experts in certain states and of the state policymakers where they allowed, in Massachusetts in this case, to do three feet of distancing.
And it's the same thing with tests to stay.
By the way, this is the program where instead of quarantining kids, if there's a positive individual in the school and in the classroom who kids are exposed to, you simply test them.
And if they're negative, send them back to class.
And there's a huge study in the UK that found test to stay was no worse than quarantining kids.
There was no benefit of quarantining them.
So just now, recently, I think I saw something that the CDC is starting to look into test to stay.
But even suggesting that was considered crazy a while ago.
In fact, I corresponded with some of the health directors in New York State and in my county, and I was basically just dismissed for even suggesting this.
So, but again, this is being done in many places, it's being done in Massachusetts, it's being done in Europe.
And we have studies that show that it is as effective as quarantining.
So, why wouldn't you do this instead of quarantining a kid?
There's an interesting chart you can click on from Massachusetts, and it showed thousands and thousands of school days that were saved by doing this program instead of quarantining kids.
So, the three feet distancing, the test to stay, these are just two examples of where the CDC is not leading, they're following.
And it's only when states are going against the CDC.
And then showing the effectiveness of what they're doing, that then the CDC follows them.
That just seems kind of, that shouldn't be the trajectory, that shouldn't be the order of what's happening.
And let's be honest, and not just states, it has to be a blue state for them to pay attention to it.
There's no accident that that happened in Massachusetts and they started listening.
If DeSantis had done that in Florida, do you really think that they'd reevaluate?
Exactly.
Yes, that's a very good point.
So I would just urge everyone, and particularly people in the medical community or at least regular people who are watching.
People in public health and the medical community to tolerate isn't the right word, but to encourage dissent, encourage debate, have a discussion.
If you are confident in your decision, stop just saying this is a consensus.
Everyone thinks this.
That's not true.
We know that in Europe and in a number of countries, they're not doing things the same way we're doing them here.
It doesn't mean they're correct, but it does mean there's not a consensus.
And it means we should encourage discussion, encourage debate.
And across the board, a couple little examples about that's across the board.
That's significant.
That prevented kids from being in school, that six foot guidance.
Oh, yeah, not every school can take all the children and keep them six feet apart.
Exactly.
All right, I got to go, but I want to ask you quickly before we wrap it up.
We always presume in these discussions that, eh, it's a mask.
Eh, it's fine.
You know, doctors wear masks all day long.
Your kid can wear it, he's fine.
You've actually taken a look at it.
It's not necessarily fine.
In fact, just today, just sort of a sweet moment, my husband was dropping.
My boys at school, I was taking my daughter, but my 12 year old, apparently the song Billy Idol, Eyes Without a Face, came on and he said, This could be the theme of COVID.
Right?
I'm like, Oh my God.
He's so right.
Eyes Without a Face.
That's what they're all experiencing.
But there are downsides to children having a mask on their face all day.
I mean, come on.
This is just empirical reality.
There's a reason why we're not wearing masks doing this interview right now.
Why the press secretary for Biden, when she steps up to the podium, she's not wearing a mask.
We human beings need to see each other's faces.
Whether or not people think masks are necessary in school is a separate discussion from this farce of pretending that they are benign.
There's a great thing that just came out on NPR, I think it was today, where they interviewed kids.
And lo and behold, kids said, I don't like wearing a mask, it's hard for me to breathe.
I mean, this is the notion that this is just this benign intervention and not a big deal is farcical.
And I think people will be very embarrassed.
Years from now, pretending that that's the case.
If this was for a week, not a big deal.
A month, we could do it.
We are 18 months into this thing and we have no schedule about when it's going to end.
And when you are an American and you're, you know, metaphorically looking across the Atlantic and you see little kids who aren't wearing masks in school, and when you're in a place like where I live in New York, in my area, and other places where we have an extremely high vaccination rate, Higher than it is in some of the countries in Europe where they're not making kids wear masks.
As a thinking person, you can't help but look somewhere else and say, hmm, I'm comparing A versus B. You can't tell me it's a consensus.
And you can't pretend that something is benign.
If it was benign, we would just do it all the time and it wouldn't matter.
This is the most basic part about sort of how human beings socialize with each other.
I wear a mask for like an hour and I on the train going to the city and I found it super annoying.
The notion of a kid wearing it for seven hours every day, not being allowed to pull their mask down to even take a sip of water in class that is a fact that happens.
That is, this is not hyperbole.
Like, we've got to reel this in a little bit and demand some specific metrics about what it's based on and when it's going to end.
Yeah.
Our kids are lectured too about how you can have a sip of water.
You have to go over to the corner to take the sip.
You have to pull your mask down and put it right back up, right back up.
The second you get the water in your.
It's absurd.
Meanwhile, we've got people running around, you know, and soon these kids will be vaccinated and under the exact same requirements, right?
You've been tweeting about our governor in New York running around, you know, celebrating the bills.
Without her mask on inside, meanwhile, she's got a much better chance of dying from COVID than an unvaccinated child does.
Even she's vaccinated, but there's no accounting for any of that reality.
And the other thing is parents might vaccinate their kids if they knew it could, it could get the masks off of their faces, right?
We might do it if we, but now you've got Rochelle Walensky on the record saying, well, you won't.
It will provide no relief.
What, so what does the vaccine do?
It prevents most hospitalizations and deaths.
Well, children are next to no risk.
From either of those things.
So, what's the incentive to get them vaccinated?
Take off the masks.
That's just been removed.
These people, from a PR standpoint, are complete jokes.
But from a medical perspective, they're misinforming us.
I know, listen, I talk to moms all the time in New York and Connecticut and beyond.
David, we are really grateful for you.
Not everybody has the time to go read all the studies or the smarts to do the comparisons and figure out what's happening state to state, country to country.
We rely on guys like you who will take the time.
So, Even though New York Magazine is not my favorite magazine, you are one of my favorite journalists.
And I'm really grateful to them and to you for doing the work.
Thank you.
Thanks, Megan.
Thanks for that.
I write for The Atlantic too.
So, you're absolutely right about everything you're saying.
And I would encourage people to, the information is freely available to see what's happening in other places.
Yes, I'll do the legwork for getting into the details for everyone, though.
Thank you.
And we'll have you back.
Consensus on Exposure Event Confirmed 00:15:35
All right, coming up, what is Havana syndrome?
We'll be joined by a former CIA agent, top, top guy, by the way, who says he's experienced severe symptoms from this mysterious disease for years.
And then Glenn Greenwald will come on later to challenge the assertions that it exists at all.
This can be interesting.
We'll learn something.
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Fiken et super enkel drainskast program.
Switching gears now to Havana syndrome.
What is this?
Have you heard about this?
And what effect is it happening on our diplomats and national security agents around the world?
It's been in the news quite a bit lately, including a postponed trip by our vice president, who believed there might have been an incident of it overseas, and so she delayed her trip.
So joining us now to discuss it is former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos, who has experienced.
These symptoms, symptoms consistent with this syndrome.
And he's with me now.
Mark, hi, how are you?
Megan, good to be here.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so you were pretty high up in the CIA, as far as I read.
You were not messing around.
Could you just give us a little bit on your credentials so people know you're not a wannabe, you're not a glommer?
Well, no, no, certainly not that.
I'd served for 26 years at the CIA, retired from the Senior Intelligence Service.
My last job, I was head of clandestine operations over Europe and Eurasia.
So it was the equivalent, I would say, if you want to look at the military as a four star general.
So I was relatively senior.
I'll be modest here on that, an organization where I spent 26 years of my life.
It's kind of exciting.
I know you're here to talk about this health thing, but I have to say, just looking back in your career, was it.
Was it exciting?
Was it invigorating?
Was it full of danger or was it boring and a lot of paper pushing?
Everything you just described.
I mean, you know, the secrets of, you know, being an intelligence officer and an operations officer is that, you know, there are periods of intense boredom and then periods of total terror and excitement.
I mean, I spent most of my career in the Middle East.
I spent almost three years overseas in our war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I'll tell you that, you know, I'm very proud of my service.
I mean, I think that, you know, as we, even as we look at the debate over Afghanistan, I will say that.
You know, in those 20 years, you know, the actions of CIA officers, my colleagues, you know, just like me, heroes, really, you know, saved the lives of many Americans.
And so, you know, whether it was the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or, you know, I was a base chief in Eastern Afghanistan, I spent lots of my time in the Middle East as well.
I'm pretty proud of what we did.
But again, you know, there's times of boredom, there's times of excitement.
People always ask me, what's a great trade of a CIA officer?
I say, you got to be able to type, you got to write cables.
And so maybe that's the boring part of it.
But I was, oh man.
Yeah, I was expecting vodka martini.
I don't know.
Jacob not stirred.
Car chases.
We'll get into that later.
Okay.
So, where were you?
You were 50 years old when this first started happening to you, and you did ultimately leave the CIA because of these symptoms and this medical problem.
So, where were you stationed, and what were you doing when you first had this happen to you?
So, at the time, this was in December of 2017.
I was the deputy operational chief at that point for Europe and Eurasia.
And so, I made a trip to Moscow.
It was a 10 day trip, something we call, you know, just frankly, to visit our ambassador, John Huntsman, who was a seasoned diplomat or former governor.
Of Utah.
I'd been ambassador in Beijing.
Now I was ambassador in Moscow.
And I was also there for meetings with my Russian counterparts in the security services.
And so it was kind of a fateful trip, certainly something I didn't expect to happen.
Again, I'd been shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan many times.
But I woke up in the middle of the night at a hotel room, a five star hotel room, only blocks from the U.S. Embassy, with a stunning case of vertigo, a splitting headache, tinnitus, which is ringing in my ears.
And it started this almost a four year medical journey that continues today.
I've had a headache for that entire time, even with.
Being treated at some of the country's best hospitals.
So, something pretty significant happened to me in Moscow that December.
So, you were, I mean, I don't know if you were actually patient zero on this so called Havana syndrome, but you were, as far as I understand, if not the first, one of the very first to say, This is happening to me, which will become relevant, I think, later.
Because, in other words, it wasn't a suggested thing.
It wasn't in your head that there is a Havana syndrome and that you might be a victim of it when this first started happening.
Is that correct?
Well, yeah, so the first case is certainly well, there's been a long, first of all, the US Embassy in Moscow has been kind of bathed by the Russians in kind of microwave collection efforts for a long time.
So the Russians have done this to us.
The Soviets did, even in the dark days of the Cold War.
But this is a little different.
Now, what happened in Havana in 2016 before my trip was that there were numerous US officials, including intelligence officers, who were hit by something that was certainly suspect.
But when I went to Moscow, I wasn't thinking of anything of this.
In fact, my trip was a routine trip.
And so when this happened to me, I didn't say, oh my God, this is what had, I had a preconceived notion that this was possible.
This was a, frankly, a boring, what we call a liaison trip.
I was there to meet Russian officials and meet our ambassador.
It wasn't operational.
So there was really no kind of suspicion in the back of my mind before I went that anything untoward would happen.
I got it.
Okay.
So I got it.
Yours, it was in Moscow, but Havana had happened before you, Cuba.
Now, when you say that they're bathed in sort of like what you're saying is that the Russian spy on your phone.
I mean, I went to Russia a couple of times to interview Putin, and I know we didn't even bring phones.
We had to leave our iPhones back stateside, and we just brought Burner phones because we knew very well that they would see everything on our phones.
And, you know, I was like preparing my questions for Putin sitting in a bathtub in the hotel room so that they couldn't spy me through a camera in the ceiling.
They couldn't see my questions weren't on a phone.
I did find guys going through my room when I came home a couple of times.
I mean, it was just, you knew it was going to happen.
You prepare for it.
So is that what you're talking about?
Yeah.
So that's what happened during the Cold War and then even, you know, after when, you know, so you know, it turned into Russia's certainly.
So What's called signals intelligence collection.
So the Russians were always trying to find out, you know, whether it was in the embassy itself or at our residences or hotels with, you know, journalists visiting.
They want to find out, you know, who you're talking to, what are you saying?
So there's collection systems.
And I think they, you know, all the time.
So that's the question.
Is it because I read you say something like maybe they dialed it up too much?
You know, maybe it was like you stand in front of the microwave for like two hours with it on high.
Like, so maybe things just got a little dialed up and that's what's causing my neurological symptoms.
Well, sure.
And, you know, so look, I have to be, you know, I am biased on this because I have been injured and I know my colleagues have been as well.
But in terms of what this is, whether it's an actual weapon or, as you said, making a collection system turned up, I'm, you know, I'm certainly, you know, not one to kind of make, you know, statements one way or the other, but something certainly happened to us.
And so I think that's the thing, you know, as I've gone to Walter Reed's National Intrepid Center of Excellence, that's one of the nation's leading traumatic brain injury centers where I was diagnosed with TBI, or you talk to neurologists from the National Institute of Health or for Johns Hopkins.
I mean, There is pretty much consensus that something, there was an exposure event that people are suffering from.
You know, what that, the actual motivation of this, I think, is still up for investigation.
And look, I think the intelligence community will come to a conclusion.
There's a lot of people working on this because we have to.
There's too many people who are being injured.
When it first happened to you in Moscow, did it, because I've heard people like in Cuba say they heard like very loud crickets.
That's what it sounded like, this high pitched sort of mass sound.
Did you hear that?
No, not at all.
And in fact, You know, as I go to Walter Reed and I go, you know, and I talk to a lot of the victims, I think that's something that happened in Cuba.
But for, you know, the recent cohort, if you call it, from, you know, 2017, 2019, even till today, you know, no one has really said that there was any kind of sound.
For me, there was not.
It was just waking up to a start, something happened, and then this extreme vertigo and headaches.
And so for me, no, there was no sound, there was no audio.
And so, look, I'm just going to, you know, as I've told people, I'll explain very clearly what happened.
And that's what it was.
There was no sound.
What did you think was happening to you when it first, you know?
And if I had that, I would think I had some sort of a bug, I guess.
So, absolutely.
So, look, I, you know, I spent my year, you know, years of my life in foreign countries and particularly in the third world.
Now, you know, Moscow is a developed city.
But my first, you know, as the room was spinning and I had this vertigo, my first thought was food poisoning.
Absolutely.
Because something was really wrong.
It was scary.
I was definitely scared because that's not a usual sensation, especially with the headache and the ringing in my ears.
But then I realized, you know, as the symptoms did not subside, And even when I got back to the States, you know, several days later and then months into this, when I, you know, I lost my long distance vision, I had incredible brain fog, the headaches were continuing.
I knew something really serious had happened.
It wasn't just.
You know, a bout of food poisoning, which would have gone away in 24 hours, but it certainly did not.
Why would there be, if this was orchestrated, you know, by someone, if it were the Russians or somebody else, why would the victims be popping up all over the globe, right?
There's so many countries in which people have claimed to have been targeted and have this now.
So, look, I can only tell you, you know, there's a lot of media reports on this and certainly a lot of media interest in this, you know, but I think it's most useful for me to tell you, you know, my kind of recollections based on victims who I've spoken with.
A large majority of them have worked on Russia in some fashion.
Certainly, that was the case with me.
That's the case even when we look at the victims around the globe.
There is, in many of these, a connection to having worked the Russian subject, target, over the years.
So I think that's suspect for sure.
But at the end of the day, at some point, we'll find out what adversary is doing this.
But you're right, the motivation is certainly curious because this is.
You know, it's something where it's taking our diplomats and intelligence officers kind of off the playing field.
You know, people are certainly being injured, but it's not killing them, but it's injuring them.
And so, you know, and certainly it's something that's caused a pretty dark shadow over our overseas officials who really, you know, are working for the United States government, for the American people in defending our country.
So we have to get to the bottom of it.
The government's saying there's some 200 victims of this alleged syndrome.
And now they are putting together, I think they just passed a bill that will provide medical coverage for people like you who are suffering from it.
But still, there are many people like I know you're not Glenn's fan, but Glenn Greenwald is going to come on.
He's a doubter, but he's not alone.
Some people say this is like psychosomatic.
It's, you know, people may genuinely think they have this, but it could be old age.
It could be.
Okay, so that's where we're going to pick it up right after this break and squeeze in a commercial, and then we'll talk more about.
Why do you think people need to know it's real?
It's not psychosomatic, and your response to the doubters.
So stand by for that.
Now, some of the theories are that it could have been caused by a covert sonic weapon that operated outside of the normal range of human hearing.
Then, a leading theory after that became it's some sort of energy device to collect data, like we were talking about from your smartphone or your laptop.
But the concern is that it's something that the Russians or somebody else have found that we don't know about yet and we don't have that's being used against our guys to sort of hobble them and get them out of the agency, like what happened with you, and that we're still operating in the dark.
So I know you don't know, but what do you think if you had to put money on what it is?
So, I mean, look, all I know is that I've gone to Walter Reed, I've gone to the National Institute of Health.
My colleagues who have gone to Johns Hopkins and University of Miami and University of Pennsylvania, these are the leading neurologists on the planet in terms of traumatic brain injury.
And every one of them, and again, this is based on the victims, the doctors are saying that it's an exposure event has caused some type of traumatic brain injury.
So, what do they see?
When they look at your brain, what do they see?
So, it depends.
So, some of the MRIs show nothing, some they do this kind of advanced brain mapping, show something, which is significant.
And then, of course, you have the symptoms.
Which, you know, some people have lost hearing, some people have lost eyesight, there's vestibular issues.
Most of it is consistent with, you know, what traumatic brain injury, mild traumatic brain injury consists of.
And so ultimately, again, for me, something happened.
So I'm kind of past the idea that everyone is kind of psychosomatic, but what is it?
Look, you know, and again, this is someone I served 26 years at CIA, so I think that, um, at the very least, uh, it's a signals intelligence collection system that's turned up, and then the worst, it's that they turn this into an offensive weapon.
And but, but look, I remain, you know, open to whatever the investigation kind of leads us to, and so we will find out.
The intelligence community is looking very hard at this, they are.
But I'm past the point of whether you know we're all kind of making it up for psychosomatic.
I mean, when Donald Trump, during the Trump administration, they called it an attack.
I mean, they came right out, the Trump administration said that our guys have been attacked.
And now, since then, they've changed that and their language has become softer, like an incident.
I think that's unfortunate.
And I think they're trying to be careful, but I don't agree with that.
I mean, Chris Miller, who is the acting Secretary of Defense in the last two months of the Trump administration, has been very clear on this.
He firmly believes this occurred.
And so ultimately, we're going to get to the bottom of it.
But for me, I've turned into an advocate for the health care of our officers.
And so, in some ways.
But let me ask you the question about.
I don't know if you would call it psychosomatic.
The doctors I listen to, and I listen to a very good podcast on this called Unexplainable by Vox, and they said there's something called a functional disorder that could explain this.
They said the way a functional disorder might work is let's say you experienced vertigo, like from a virus, it might cause so much anxiety and other trauma, the experience of that, that a chronic brain problem would then emerge and that your brain could get locked in sort of a bad pattern.
Of brain fog, fatigue, headaches, and so on.
And that you then sort of need to retrain your brain to take the right path.
Do you buy that?
So it's not exactly psychosomatic, like, you know, a trauma is making your brain make this stuff up.
It's like something did happen, but then you're sort of locked in a bad pattern.
Well, you know, I don't know.
You know, and, but you know what?
If that's the kind of health care that I need, you know, I'm up for doing anything because I still have a darn headache, you know, after four years.
And so, my gosh, so ultimately, I mean, I've had a headache for Four years.
And it's, you know, and as I see the victims and I think about what I've gone through, I mean, you know, there's two parts of it.
Heart Attack Symptoms vs Psychosomatic 00:04:17
There's the physical injuries where I still have this splitting headache every day, but it's also a moral injury in that I have to really fight for health care.
So I guess my point, Megan, on this is, you know, at the very least, everybody needs to be treated, you know, regardless of what we think this is.
And by the way, you know, having a debate on this is fine on what caused it, but at the very least, we have to get our U.S. officials who come back and report this, we have to get them health care.
And that's true because let's go with psychosomatic.
It's very, Stressful.
It's full of anxiety provoking events, I'm sure, being a senior CAA officer.
Well, that happened on the job.
We should be taking care of that.
We shouldn't be letting you twist in the wind with all these symptoms.
And so, I don't believe it was psychosomatic.
I mean, again, that's my opinion on this, but healthcare is absolutely critical.
And so, going to a place like a traumatic brain injury center, whether it's at Walter Reed or Hopkins or any of the leading centers around the planet, now they're telling us it was an exposure event.
I'm going with what the doctors say.
But at the end of the day, I just need health care.
I need to be able to find ways to feel better.
That's kind of what I'm comfortable in an advocacy.
Listen, Mark, thank you.
Thank you for your service to our country, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
And I hope you feel better, genuinely.
So much.
Thanks, Megan, for having me on.
All the best.
Coming up, Glenn Greenwald with a very different take on Havana syndrome and much, much more to go over with him.
He joins me right after this quick break.
Joining me now, Glenn Greenwald.
He's a journalist and Substack editor who has serious doubts about Havana syndrome.
He has cited that the reporting of Havana syndrome is oddly similar to Russiagate and the Steele dossier, works of fiction pushed to pin Russia.
As enemy number one.
So, is this mass hysteria?
Hey, Glenn.
So, you know, our previous guest has got actual symptoms documented by MRIs and doctors at Hopkins and Walter Reed and elsewhere.
And he's not too, you know, insistent that we call it one thing or another or determine its cause, but he says that Moscow moment was a before and after moment in his life and he hasn't gotten rid of his headaches since.
Right.
So, I do think we have to be careful that when we're questioning.
Parts of the government and media narrative, or even demonstrating what is unquestionably true, which is that some of the claims that were disseminated publicly have proven to be false, that we're not suggesting that the actual diplomats and other personnel who are claiming to experience symptoms are faking it, or even that they're the victims of some kind of mass hysteria.
It's very possible two things.
Number one, that they actually have neurological injuries, which many of them clearly do.
I mean, they show up on MRIs and And other examinations that neurologists and other medical specialists administer, but that the storyline about how those injuries occurred can nonetheless be false.
I think that the distinction that you alluded to at the end of that discussion, I heard the last part, is a really important one, which is sometimes an actual physical injury that people experience can have as its origin something psychological.
One of the most, I think, vivid examples is people can have panic attacks.
They think they're having a heart attack.
They feel the symptoms of a heart attack.
They go to the emergency room and it turns out they just had a misguided panic response.
It doesn't mean they're faking their symptoms.
In fact, they have really acute symptoms that can be really dangerous.
They have very high blood pressure.
They can fall into a heart attack or a stroke because of that pressure.
So the symptoms are real, but the question or the origin of it is psychogenic.
If you call it psychosomatic, which has a negative connotation, what bothers me here journalistically, I'm obviously not a medical expert, I haven't examined these patients, is that number one, the claim was asserted from the very beginning on NBC and other places that intelligence officials know or both strongly believe that the culprit was Russia at the time when everything was getting blamed on Russia, even though there's no evidence for it.
Real Symptoms, Psychogenic Origins 00:04:36
And what always was so fantastical to me about this is that the idea that Russia could develop.
This extraordinarily sophisticated weapon that resides outside of the scope of Western scientific knowledge that not only are they able to weaponize without us having any idea how it functions, but it's incredibly portable.
They can just take this new weapon around to Havana, to Austria, to South America, to Asia, to all different places where these symptoms have been reported.
Seems very extraordinary to me.
And then the one thing that we know was debunked was personnel in Havana.
Recorded what they were hearing that caused them in the first place to believe there was a sonic weapon.
And when scientists analyzed those recordings, they determined that although it seems exotic, it's actually identical to the mating sound of crickets who are native to the Caribbean.
So the media got so far ahead of itself.
Let me get that on because we got to hear the mating sounds of crickets.
This is sound bite number three the sounds of Havana syndrome or crickets.
Take a listen.
Well, there you go.
Now I just endangered millions of people.
But that is the actual recording of what was heard in Havana.
And yeah, so that's the dispute.
Is that actually crickets?
Because there was at least one report that said, surprise, that actually is crickets.
Well, they had scientists who specialize in these species, and they, in a very advanced way, analyzed with sonic instruments, very delicate sonic instruments, and determined that that is the sound that the female cricket emits during mating season to attract males in order to mate.
I mean, it's not like it's similar.
Identical, just as an aside, they have it so much easier than female humans.
It's like the makeup and the hair and the spanks and the dress and the you know, a cocktail or two.
Good lord, all they have to do, ladies, is a little screeching, a little screeching, and they come to come running.
Although the truth is, most men would come running if you know, you did if you basically did one key thing as a human, too.
Yeah, a little screeching would probably work for human men as well, but no, I mean, so that's what you know, I found so dubious about this from the start, and and now you do have.
The State Department and the FBI that are increasingly adamant about the fact that they simply don't believe.
They're not saying they haven't found evidence.
They're saying we disbelieve that these symptoms are the byproduct of some sort of sophisticated weapon.
Now, you can say, well, maybe it's the FBI.
The FBI came out and said initially, they said it's mass hysteria.
They initially said this is the result of mass psychogenic illness, which is essentially mass hysteria.
Like laugh contagion.
So if I start laughing hysterically, then you can't help but laugh a little and so on and so forth.
But I think they've softened on it a bit since then.
They have, although, you know, even Gina Haspel, who was President Trump's CIA director and a longtime high level official in the CIA from going back to the war on terror and who is not at all known for being dovish.
She was a very kind of aggressive hawk during the war on terror and advocate of the harsh interrogation programs that.
Most people like me call torture, was very skeptical of the view that the Russian unit inside the CIA had real evidence to pin it on Russia.
She actually accused them of trying to gin up hostility toward Russia as part of this overall campaign that had been going on by concocting a narrative for which there was no evidentiary basis.
So I don't pretend that we know the answer, but what I know for sure is that the level of certainty presented in a lot of clips we could listen to where Russia was to blame, as they said.
Were completely baseless.
And when you add on to that, Megan, not just the kind of like low likelihood that they would be able to do this, but also the fact that we have surveillance tentacles in every aspect and every agency within these governments that they would be able to develop a weapon like this and move it around the world and use it against us without any clue on the part of the US government that they were doing it seems very, very unconvincing to me.
Functional Disorder and Brain Power 00:02:25
I mentioned earlier this podcast called Unexplainable by Vox, which took a hard look at this and it was good.
And one of the things they pointed out was, They had a neurologist.
His name is John Stone.
He's at Edinburgh.
And he was saying, he's a neurology professor.
And he was saying, I've got tons of patients who are non CAA who have this.
You know, like this is a thing.
This is, again, this functional disorder.
And he said, when I listen to these descriptions, I think, oh, yeah, if you walked into my office as Glenn or Megan or anybody, I'd say, I know what you have.
It's called a functional disorder.
And it happens to non CAA just as often.
So, you know, he, He casts some water on it, even though he hasn't examined any of the patients.
Here is John Stone speaking on that podcast.
I think it is possible a lot of anxiety may be caused about the possibility of having a brain injury from a sonic attack, and that that concern is heightening people's vigilance for events that might be consistent with a sonic attack and then symptoms that might be consistent with a sonic attack.
Right?
So now it's like people have been primed to think it could happen to them.
And whether they know that or not, it's in there.
And so when something happens, you may not even be conscious of the fact that your brain is like, ah, this is it.
Yeah.
I mean, first of all, exactly.
The human brain is a very powerful instrument.
It can actually create real symptoms in the body.
I mean, the brain and the body, or the mind and the body, however you conceive of it, are extremely interlinked.
And oftentimes, what happens mentally in our lives affects us physically, not in imaginary ways, but in very real ways, exactly like he just explained.
The other point I think is so worth keeping in mind always is we always like to think that.
Our science and our medicine is very advanced.
And obviously, relative to what it was 200 years ago, it is, but relative to what it will be 200 years from now, it's extremely primitive.
There's all kinds of phenomena that take place medically and in the world that we can't explain within the limits of our scientific knowledge.
And as you have the world changing so radically with new technologies, new movement, new things happening in the climate, in the weather, in all kinds of cultural and social dynamics, I think it, Makes sense that there are going to be neurological symptoms that we can't yet fully explain in terms of the origin of.
Deep State Narrative Discredited 00:09:27
And to simply leap to this like bizarre science fiction story that the Russians had, you know, invented this like dastardly 23rd century weapon is something that appeals to like the science fiction side of us.
And more disturbingly for me, fit very well into the geostrategic narrative that was very popular among the CIA and their media allies during the Trump era.
But We should demand a lot of evidence for that.
So let me ask you about that.
I mean, you know, having studied up on the Russians a fair amount before going over there, I can say they're really, really good at hacking and they're really, really good at making nuclear weapons.
But I didn't see anything about them really, really good at making things like this, which is more in the science field and sort of 22nd century stuff.
Who knows?
But the media and the reason that you are sort of skeptical, because it really did, this started coming out during the Trump administration.
First, there was 2016.
That wasn't Trump.
2017 and during his administration, we heard more and more about it.
And this is just a sampling of this particular reporter, Kendallanian, on MSNBC talking about the syndrome.
Listen to how it's been described by the media.
Intelligence agencies investigating attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba and China now strongly suspect that Russia is to blame.
Why do they suspect Russia now, and what's the evidence that they have?
Well, it's still partially a mystery, Chris, but they have more and more evidence, they say.
Three U.S. officials tell us.
Pointing to Russia, including communications intercepts that suggest that the Russian intelligence agency was involved.
Now, really, there were only three suspects from the beginning here Russia, China, and the Cubans.
One of the technologies used to injure these American spies and diplomats was some kind of microwave weapon that is so sophisticated the Americans don't even fully understand it, and they've been testing some kinds of aspects of this technology.
Your thoughts on him and that?
Well, it's, you know, first of all, when people ask me, you know, what is the ideology of the American media, obviously, at least now, I may have had a different answer 20 years ago.
They're very.
Supportive of the Democratic Party, largely because of their extreme animosity toward Trump.
But the overarching loyalty they actually have is to the security state.
That's where most of their leaks come from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI.
That's where Russiagate came from.
And that relationship, which had always been close, became closer even more.
The poster boy for that corrupt relationship is Candelanian.
In 2015, when I was at The Intercept, we FOIA'd to the CIA any communications that they had with journalists, and they couldn't withhold it because it was with people outside the government.
And they produced a bunch of emails with journalists.
And what Candelanian would do, he was at the LA Times at that time when he was covering the CIA, is he would actually submit to them the drafts of the articles he was going to write about the CIA before he would publish it.
Basically, they get their approval.
His whole career is based on being a puppet for what the CIA tells him to say.
So you see in that clip, he's saying stuff that we now know isn't true.
I mean, obviously, Megan, if the US government, as he claimed, had intelligence intercepts where the Russians were admitting that they had developed a secret weapon, why would Gina Haspel and the entire top level of the US government, both under Trump and now under Biden, be acknowledging that they have no idea where this came from?
Obviously, those intercepts didn't exist.
The CIA told them they did.
And unskeptically, he went and disseminated it all over the country.
Why would the CIA want Kendallanian to believe that the Russians, that they had interceptions from the Russians saying that they did it?
Because so many, the CIA obviously had a very antagonistic relationship with Donald Trump.
The clip that I always point to is before Trump was even inaugurated, he had gone on Twitter and mocked the CIA for getting WMDs wrong.
And Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow and warned Trump.
It was something that you don't usually say out loud, but Chuck Schumer said it that everyone in Washington knows that it's stupid to take on the CIA because if you take on the CIA, they have six different ways from Sunday to get back at you.
And for me, that was a major part of the Trump presidency this antagonism between these unelected but very powerful bureaucrats and the security state on the one hand and Trump on the other.
And a major storyline they used to undermine and sabotage his presidency was that he was in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
And so many of the fake stories.
The Russians had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers, and Trump did nothing about it.
The Russians were attacking us in all sorts of ways, and Trump was either overlooking it or sanctioning it.
This was a similar story that Trump was doing nothing as the Russians were injuring the brains of American service members and personnel using this microwave oven.
It was the kind of storyline that they used to attack him all the time.
And that was the goal of it, aside from the fact that the CIA likes to have and needs to have.
Foreign enemies that the American population is afraid of, because that's where the CIA budget and justification for greater powers always comes from look, there are these really villainous foreign countries like Russia that you've been trained for decades to hate that we need to protect you from.
And that's why we need a hundred billion dollar a year budget and all these surveillance authorities.
But that was the secondary goal.
The primary one was that was their primary tool for delegitimizing Trump.
They're still out there doing it.
I mean, I'm sure you saw Christopher Steele sitting down with George Stephanopoulos.
Last week, and standing by his dossier, basically still trying to make us believe that it's based in truth.
And even the so called P tape, he was standing by it, saying, I believe it does exist, and ABC's putting this on, and we're still being led down the garden path of the dossier is real.
Now, ABC did offer a skeptical report.
It wasn't entirely enamored with Christopher Steele, but I looked at it saying, What's he doing on my television?
He's already been discredited.
This report's already been discredited.
Why are we asking him about it?
I mean, Christopher Steele is responsible for one of the most destructive and sustained media frauds and conspiracy theories in decades.
And it's fine if they're going to ask him adversarial questions.
And I know that the interview wasn't entirely friendly, but he doesn't even deserve that platform.
I mean, remember, these media corporations are claiming that the greatest threat that the United States faces is disinformation.
And that it's such a grave threat that we need to censor the internet.
We need to control what people aren't allowed to say and who isn't allowed to use the internet because disinformation is such a grave problem.
And the people who ought to be deciding what is true and false.
Are these media corporations?
They're our fact checkers.
They're our guardians of truth against falsity.
And yet, Christopher Steele is the person who shaped the false narrative that they used for four years.
It wasn't just things like the tape, it was the whole wild conspiracy.
Remember when Trump went to Helsinki, based on his body language, they decided this was proof that he was some kind of subservient vessel of Vladimir Putin.
And they called it the Treason Summit.
They were off their rockers for four years with this Russia stuff.
And Christopher Steele, the person that they're still treating as like a reasonably respectable source, was the first one to really inject it into our political bloodstream using Mother Jones and Mike Isakoff and Slate.
And there's one false story after the next that came out of that.
Yeah.
It's like having Michael Avenatti as your interviewee and not asking him about the absurd claims he put forward.
From the women he represented against Kavanaugh, like just treating him like he's a respected authority.
And these are just claims that deserve to be investigated.
You know, some are true, some might not.
No, this is a fraud.
This is a fraudster who's been proven to be a fraudster.
So you only want one reason to put him on, and that is to rip him, to kill him, and show everybody what you already know.
I remember, and I don't remember all the details, but I remember when you interviewed Alex Jones at the height of Alex Jones' influence, when You basically did nothing in that interview except confront him on the falsities and the crazy conspiracy theories he had been disseminating.
And the media, more or less as a consensus, had decided that you had done something wrong simply by giving him a platform.
Even though the interview was incredibly adversarial and hostile and challenging, based on the view that once somebody proves that they disseminate falsehoods, they no longer should be heard from, even though Alex Jones had immense influence and he doesn't go away because you ignore him.
Christopher Steele is not even comparable to Alex Jones in terms of the number of people.
Christopher Steele would disappear if you didn't interview him.
And yet, here they are platforming him and, yes, asking him some hard questions, but still treating him as though he's a credible source and like a lifelong intelligence agent who knows things that we ought to be listening to.
Yeah.
And he's still trying to tell us that there's the so called P tape of Trump.
Like, he wasn't out there in any way doing a mea culpa or, okay, I got it wrong.
It was like, no, I'm telling you, it's still out.
Fox News Political Shift Explained 00:07:01
I mean, they love it.
They ate it right up.
The mainstream went with it.
It was replayed all over and over again in many outlets.
Okay, Glenn is staying with us.
And up next, we're going to talk about why progressive liberals, so many of them, are suddenly speaking so favorably about the CIA and the FBI.
Remember when it was Fox News defending those organizations?
What is happening?
So, the subject of the deep state.
It's been really interesting to see the switch.
We talked about this last time or the time before about how Fox News used to be the one that was a very pro FBI, pro CIA.
Pro Secret Service, all law enforcement types.
And now it seems like everything's done on 180.
Fox News is more skeptical after the Trump years, and the mainstream media is in love with these organizations.
Your thought on that and on, you know, I'm sure you read Matt Taibbi's Substack where he talks about how there is a deep state.
And these young guns who are wet behind the ears and probably 22 years old, who think that the CIA is full of truth tellers who are there to protect us and we can trust them when they get a scoop or not, don't have any sort of a memory for history and don't know how they're being used.
Your thoughts on all of it?
You know, it's so remarkable because I generally avoid and always have trying to apply political labels to myself, left, right, servant, liberal, whatever, because I think that so often they obfuscate and keep you in a prison.
But the one.
Political label with which I've always identified was civil libertarian, in part because my formative years politically and philosophically came out of this identification I had with the civil liberties movement, with the free speech movement, with the ACLU, that was very much a movement of the left.
You know, a lot of the free speech cases were written by the left wing Supreme Court justices.
The free speech movement began at Berkeley.
The ACLU lawyers were Jewish leftist lawyers primarily.
That was the politics with which I identified.
And one of the worst civil liberties abuses from that perspective of the 20th century were the McCarthy hearings.
Which, regardless of one's views on how big of a threat communism was in the United States, people can obviously disagree on that and do.
The idea of Congress and the CIA investigating private citizens because of their political ideology and destroying their reputations and their careers and putting them on blacklists with no due process was, in a lot of ways, like the root of all evil from a civil liberties perspective, right?
Just imposing punishments on people with no.
Fair process for evaluating whether they're actually guilty of anything and determining whether they have thought crimes, which was the McCarthy abuses for me.
And then, if you look at the Cold War, the thing that the CIA would do is go around the world and overthrow democratically elected governments that were a little bit more left than they were comfortable with and impose using savagery and barbarism and very kind of violent tactics far right autocracies that would suppress the population.
The CIA and then the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, which kept dossiers on politicians for decades, tried to get Martin Luther King to kill himself.
Skepticism of those agencies at best was steeped in left wing politics and formed left liberal politics for decades.
And what has happened is there are a lot of people who really began paying attention to politics for the first time only out of fear of Trump.
For them, political history begins in 2015 when Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower.
And because, as we were talking about earlier, the CIA and parts of the FBI and the security services were trying to sabotage Trump for a lot of reasons, a lot of these liberals started looking at people like John Brennan and James Clapper and Michael Hayden and all these CIA and FBI officials, Jim Comey, as their allies, as the heroes who were going to save us from Trump.
And it instilled in left wing politics this kind of reverence for the very security state agencies that have always been the greatest threat for interfering in our democratic.
Processes domestically and not just internationally.
And now you look at polls, Megan, and you ask people, do you trust and approve of the CIA and the FBI?
And 80% of Democrats say, yes, I approve and trust in those agencies.
And 20%, or 12%, or 30%, at most, of Republicans say that they do.
It's been an incredible shift because liberals who have embraced this view that the Trump movement is kind of like this Nazi like movement.
Have come to believe that the people they're fighting aren't just their political adversaries, but criminals, terrorists, Nazis.
And when you believe that, there's like no limits on what you recognize should be imposed on the methods you can use to defeat them.
And that's definitely the prevailing liberal mentality.
Taibbi was saying in his Substack that he thinks the greatest thing that ever happened to the actual deep state is Donald Trump saying there is a deep state because they could just say, boogeyman, boogeyman, like, oh, he's crazy.
Of course, he's a lunatic.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's bizarre that, first of all, the idea of a deep state, even though he didn't use the phrase, really originated with Dwight Eisenhower, like the most conservative figure of the 20th century.
I don't mean like politically conservative, but just compartmentally, right?
Like a five star general.
The person who won World War II for the United States was a two term Republican president in the 50s.
He, when he left office, had 15 minutes to speak to the American people on network television and chose to warn them about what he called the military industrial complex this permanent power faction, this fusion of the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon and the intelligence community that, in his words, were becoming more powerful than democratically elected leaders.
That's what the deep state is.
And that was.
Before the Vietnam War, before 9 11, when obviously the powers of those agencies and the secrecy behind which they operate grew even more.
And the concept of the deep state was something that was created, that term, by left wing foreign policy scholars in academic institutions around the world.
But if you ask the standard liberal what the deep state is, they'll say, oh, that was a crazy conspiracy theory that Sean Hannity invented in 2017 in order to protect Donald Trump.
They've like completely.
Convince huge sectors of American liberalism that to believe that there's a deep state, which is so foundational to understanding how American power functions, is something only a crazy right wing conspiracy theorist on Fox News or Newsmax would possibly believe, as opposed to central to left wing scholarship and the view of Dwight Eisenhower for decades.
It's interesting because I can look back at myself on Fox News and say I was very pro law enforcement at the federal level and beyond, including CIA, FBI.
January 6th Trauma and Media Silence 00:12:35
But I forgive myself because it was post 9 11.
You know, I went through that and you and I talked about that once before.
It was just, I was, you know, a young woman who wanted the country to be safe and I didn't want any more 9 11s on our soil.
And so in those crises, you are deferential to the big state, deep state, whatever you want to call it, but these extraordinary measures that were undertaken.
And as you get farther in time from them, then they start to look a little different.
If they don't wane as the threat wanes a bit, you've got to ask questions.
And that's been your genius all along, is that you've been sort of jumping up and down.
But I wonder what you think about the CIA today and its strength and just how effective it is because there have been reports that we're having agents turned against us, that our sources that we've been using are being killed in extraordinary numbers.
There was, I'm trying to remember what it came out.
It was in the New York Times, a Julian Barnes, captured, killed, or compromised, is the name of the piece.
And they're saying that the CIA, a top American counterintelligence official, that they had warned every CIA station and base around the world about troubling numbers of informants.
Recruited from other countries to spy for us, being captured or killed.
I was thinking, is that a leak?
But they were basically saying that we kind of took our eye off the ball, and now our adversaries in Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan have been hunting down our sources and turning them.
You know, I think one of the reasons that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was so traumatizing for a lot of people, it even caused the sectors of the media who literally haven't criticized a Democrat in five years.
To really unleash a lot of genuinely felt anger toward Biden, the Biden administration, wasn't necessarily because the evacuation was poorly planned, although obviously it was.
I don't think.
A poorly planned evacuation would generate that level of visceral anger.
I think it really was a symbol of the reality that the United States, after being the world's sole superpower for at least three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, is clearly starting to become weaker relative to these other large powers.
And I actually thought about this for the first time the other day about January 6th.
If you look at what happened on January 6th, President Trump convinced a large Segment of the population, falsely in my view, but he convinced a large segment of the population that the election had been stolen, that democracy was basically subverted, that he really won and the Democrats stole the election.
And yet, despite that, on January 6th, you had maybe 700 or 800 people, extremely poorly organized, none of them brandishing a weapon, according to the FBI, not even centrally organized, show up at the Capitol to protest.
They killed nobody.
Four of them got killed.
They didn't actually kill anybody.
And then on the other side, you know, you're talking about the US Capitol, right?
Like we talked about 9 11.
That was one of the targets of the 9 11 terrorists.
That was where the plane that landed in, that crossed in Pennsylvania was supposed to go.
You would think that would be an incredibly fortified building.
And yet they just marched in as though there was no security there.
And it took hours to subdue them, even though most of them weren't even violent.
So both sides of that equation, for me, kind of.
Revealed this sort of physical weakness.
You know, we have a population that is obese.
We have a military that increasingly is about much more about social values than it is the traditional military values.
And so I think what we're seeing is a country that has become a lot weaker in the areas where it had always been strongest.
And the CIA, and we saw this with General Milley, you know, has lost focus on what its mission had always been.
It still does a lot of pernicious things.
But when you're training them to make videos about, you know, I'm the first Latina woman of my generation and using this kind of like woke language and instilling those kinds of values into these institutions, they're going to lose their military agility and readiness when you have intelligence and military agencies in China, Russia, Iran, and lots of other countries focused on their traditional mission.
I think you're seeing that in a lot of ways.
I'm like, we should focus less on our intersectionality.
And more on our sources and methods, which apparently are not being well protected overseas.
Can we talk about January 6th for a minute?
Because I, you know, I've spoken about this privately, but I was on my pal, Dan Abrams' show.
He's got a show on News Nation now in the evenings.
And he was asking me, among other things, about my comment that the media has grossly overplayed what happened on January 6th.
Not to excuse what happened on January 6th.
I didn't like what happened on January 6th.
There's plenty to condemn about what we saw that day.
But It wasn't an insurrection, and the media said it was over and over.
It was never an insurrection, legally or otherwise, and the FBI's confirmed that now.
The comparisons to 9 11 saying that it was worse than 9 11.
And Dan said, Who said that?
I was like, Well, how long do you have?
I could go down the list.
You know, George Will, Matthew Dowd, Joy Reid, I could go on.
The White House correspondent for Huffington Post, on and on it goes.
But it's beyond that, it's the actual reporting of what happened that day.
And the painting of these people as these insurrectionist terrorists, none of whom have been charged with anything like that, right?
So, where's the outrage, right, from the Democrats and the media?
Where's the no one's been charged with the things you're telling us they did?
It's trespass charges, it's petty Annie BS that they held people in solitary confinement on for a long time, unjustifiably.
And the one narrative that I know you've done great reporting on is what happened to Officer Brian Sicknick.
And the media held on to the story that he was murdered by the Trump mob that day on Capitol Hill, even when they knew it wasn't true.
They put it in the impeachment documents.
Even when they knew it wasn't true.
And your reporting on it has been so insightful because you sort of track it minute by minute by like his mom that night saying, Don't say this.
Yeah, I heard from him tonight.
You know, like he just the misreporting and the unwillingness to bend.
It's all part of the same thing, Glenn, right?
Like narratives, the commitment to them, the desire to bring down Trump or anybody associated with him.
And still to this day, just to say it was bad.
I don't like what happened on Capitol Hill at all.
It was disgusting.
But how dare you compare it to 9 11 is somehow controversial.
I mean, nobody likes what happened at the Capitol.
No one, you know, if you're an American citizen, you don't want to see mobs smashing windows.
And, you know, some of them had like some violent intent.
Most of them, I do think, were just there exercising their lawful right to protest and got carried away in this kind of like mob mentality, as we were talking about earlier.
It can, you know, we're social animals that kind of can.
Contagion can happen.
It happened on a lot of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rallies over the summer as well, when people went with the intention to peacefully protest and it turned violent, and a lot of them became violent.
I never saw that as an insurrection either, even though a lot of those protesters were violent as well.
The problem, you know, when I went throughout 2020, the question always was how is this media, the US media, that was failing before Trump and then found a savior in Trump?
He saved.
Most of those media outlets, what were they going to do in the likely scenario that he lost in 2020, as polls were showing?
And I gave dozens of interviews where I said what they're going to try and do is say that, well, Trump might be gone, but the movement he left behind poses an existential threat to American democracy because they have to keep people hooked with fear and terror and high levels of emotion in order to keep watching their programs.
And that is what January 6th served to do.
It made people.
You know, it kept fear levels high.
It is justifying all kinds of new powers in these agencies.
They gave $2 billion to the Capitol Police five months after they were chanting, defund the police in the street.
The thing that's amazing is, you know, this whole movement that erupted after 2020 was about excessive prosecution.
I'm somebody who thinks that we put more citizens in our prisons than any other country in the world.
I do think we overcharge crimes and put people into prison for longer than they should.
Especially for nonviolent crimes.
And yet, here you have judges, Obama appointed judges, who are giving sentences longer than the prosecutors of the Justice Department are requesting.
And they're being applauded.
And it all is because they believe that the Trump movement, as I was saying earlier, are terrorists.
They're not people with whom Democrats and liberals have ideological disagreements.
And you always need the maximalist, Narrative in order to keep those fear levels high and to justify all the powers that they want to use.
The idea that 800, you know, Trump boomers from Facebook came close to overthrowing.
The most powerful and militarized government in the history of humanity is more preposterous than the idea that the Russians had invented some new supersonic weapon that they were deploying over the world without anyone knowing about it.
And yet, as you say, it's not just that people are asserting it, it's that you're not even allowed to question it, or else you get accused of being, you know, an apologist for the insurrection or even a secret sympathizer of it.
It's not totally dissimilar from the story that's been in the news this past week about the guy in Virginia, Scott Smith, who showed up at the Board meeting, the school board meeting to say, What the hell?
Because his daughter had been raped in a high school bathroom, ninth grader, and got upset when the superintendent of school stood up there and said, There have been no sexual assaults by any transgender assailants in our bathrooms.
And you could argue whether the assailant was transgender.
It was what we're told is a bisexual young man who was wearing a skirt.
That's splitting hairs.
The parents are there to find out whether anybody's been hurt in the restroom.
They don't need to know the actual gender dysphoria status of the person committing the offense.
So the guy lies.
The dad, who's the dad of the victim, gets upset.
And the local DA goes after him, guns blazing.
She never apparently prosecutes cases.
She went after.
She's one of these soft on crime, sort of far left people who wants to change all the crime laws to be softer.
With him, she has showed up personally to try to get as much of a punishment against this dad as humanly possible.
He was totally demonized by the media.
Why?
Because she's not actually wanting softer crime laws.
She wants to target political enemies and she wants to go soft on anybody she thinks might show up at the ballot box for her or people who would be persuaded by her perceived softness towards those groups.
It's political persecution.
And the faction of American liberalism has become incredibly punitive with their political adversaries.
Look at what they're doing with people who are vaccine hesitant, talking about them like they're murderers, basically, and celebrating.
The fact that they're losing their jobs in the middle of a pandemic.
Remember, a year ago, people were, you know, opening their windows at 8 a.m. to applaud all the brave frontline healthcare workers as they deserved when we were all staying in our homes because we were told to.
And now, a year later, hundreds or thousands of them are being fired from their jobs because they had COVID and believe natural immunity is sufficient or have doubts about the vaccine.
And liberals want them all fired.
Why?
Because they're questioning liberal pieties.
No BS Agenda or Fear 00:02:03
The January 6th committee in Congress.
Is designed to compensate for the fact that the Biden Justice Department isn't charging anybody with sedition or insurrection or attempting to kill or kidnap elected officials, all the things that we heard the media claiming they were.
And so that committee is there to say, we're going to fill in the gaps by finding that this was an insurrection because we know that you need this vengeance against your political enemies.
Saying that the FBI is going to start to treat parents who come to school board meetings and protesting the fact that their kids have to wear masks.
Or other COVID restrictions is now they're now going to be treated as terrorists for terrorizing school board officials.
When you asked me earlier about why they love the FBI and why they love the CIA, it's because those are their tools to persecute their political enemies, to turn them into criminals, to punish them, to make their lives as difficult as possible in retaliation for their dissent.
That's really what American liberalism has become.
It's a real problem because it doesn't matter who you put in the White House, as we've seen.
I mean, this problem was right.
In our faces during a Republican presidency.
It's still there now under a Democratic president.
And it's not going anywhere.
And so, knowledge is the key, right?
You got to stay informed.
Follow people like Glenn, read his Substack.
Taibbi's great too.
Can follow this program.
But it's up to you because this isn't one of those things like, oh, if we could just get Biden out or Trump out or whatever.
This is the reality, Democrat or Republican president in there.
Glenn Greenwald, always a pleasure.
Always good to be with you, Megan.
Thanks for having me.
I want to tell you tomorrow we have an exclusive interview with Allison Williams, the ESPN reporter who left her job because of the vaccine mandates.
Go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly to watch the show, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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