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Feb. 1, 2024 - On Brand

02:30:20

OB #40 - Glenn Greenwald

We tackle another formerly reasonable journalist who has glommed onto the alt-right grift, Glenn Greenwald, and he makes the most brazen show of not giving a damn we have yet seen on Stay Free. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - gogetchasomegold

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, Lauren B. And I don't know what we're up to today, but if history has any bearing, then it's probably not good.
	Probably not good.
	It's definitely not good, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	So, there were youths out on the street today in front of my house, which is normally a crisis.
	Well, you know, the youths, in the most Tina Fey sense.
	The youth of today, yes.
	Usually when I hear youths outdoors, I'm like, oh, youths.
	Today they were marching up and down and they were they were demonstrating for a ceasefire which I think is fucking awesome I do live close to a couple of schools and usually when I hear These fucking little monsters screaming outside.
	I'm like, God, but today it was very exciting and I ran out the window and I like I was going to holler, you know, like to the river to the sea or something else supportive.
	But then I caught my reflection in the window and realized that I looked like an old sea hag that had just Crawled out of a swamp wearing a fucking old Mickey Mouse t-shirt.
	And I was like, the shirt's too much.
	I can't.
	Like, hair's not accessible enough.
	The hair gives me away as to how tired I am.
	And it was the Mickey Mouse shirt that was like, that looks crazy.
	Don't yell at these children.
	You'll just frighten them.
	But in my heart, I felt a ton of support and enthusiasm for their plight.
	Yeah, you didn't want to be the lady that they all later tell stories about, and that's fair enough.
	I mean, a good story's fine, but- and you know, like, let your freak flag fly, of course, but like, I'm still wearing long- you know, like, being heavily tattooed, like, I'm still wearing long sleeves to a funeral.
	Like, you just do- you do what's considerate, and I had a moment where I'm like, no, I look fucking crazy.
	And even if they don't hear what I say, maybe they're like, we've had some issues in this neighborhood, you know, not in a long time, but like some, some, some, what, I'm sorry, where are you coming from kind of moments.
	And like, I don't want them to have to figure that out because my heart and my feelings don't match what I'm serving.
	So I just wasn't going to, I felt a little sad that I was like, well I probably could have said something but also I don't need them to feel like clarifying because as a person who's also been screamed at on the street consistently their entire life.
	Cause I guess I've got it coming.
	I don't know.
	Cause you exist.
	I exist.
	I'm like, I don't, even when someone's being nice and my friends have like playfully screamed and been nice.
	And then they're like, Oh no, I put you in danger brain.
	Cause you didn't know this was my truck.
	And I'm like, yeah, I was ready to fucking fight or ready to record you.
	And like, I was ready to take down your fucking license plate.
	Oh, it's scary.
	Never mind.
	You're fine.
	I'm sorry.
	And he's like, I'm so sorry.
	Oh my god.
	So I didn't want to, like, having been in that situation far too much.
	I didn't need to put that on them kids.
	I look crazy.
	No, no, no, no.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	That's fair.
	Yeah.
	Inflicting kind of indistinct yelling from a sea hag, you know.
	It might at the very least confuse them, so yeah.
	We don't need the confusion layer, you know?
	Nah, that's fair.
	Well done on the restraint.
	And hey, good for the kids!
	Good on them, that's great.
	It's so cool and exciting, and I think it's great.
	I think that, you know, and it seems kind of like either they did a walkout, or like the school is okay with it, and they're encouraging it, which is also fantastic, and I wouldn't be surprised, you know, either way, and so it's great.
	So what's your good thing?
	My good thing this week is, kind of attached to last week, I told you that I was reading a physical book again.
	Crazy.
	Who are you?
	Didn't have a choice.
	I'm not doing it by candlelight anymore, so that's something.
	We've progressed.
	But no, the first of the Witcher books, The Last Wish, I'm about halfway through the thing, and it's great!
	It's really good, really enjoying it.
	Tight.
	Yeah, it builds on a lot of stuff that's in the games and the show and all that kind of thing, and I'm getting to that point where I'm starting to be able to be like, they made terrible choices in this show, nah.
	Which is why I always tend to read the books after consuming the media, so it doesn't ruin it for me in the moment.
	Get it on the other side.
	Completely agree.
	I don't need to come in with the heart of judgment.
	I don't need to come in with that attitude.
	Yeah, because especially if like, yeah, a movie, I even used to feel that way about like, if I knew I liked a band, and I knew they were coming to town, because also I used to go see shows fucking Constantly.
	And I was like, normally people would be like, oh, I'm gonna do my homework and read up on it.
	And if I haven't already done that, but I know I like them, I'm like, I'm gonna wait until after I see them because, especially if it's like a smaller group, then...
	The gear and also like, this is a long time ago, so technology was certainly less accessible.
	So like, boy, their recordings might sound like dog shit, or they might just be kind of disappointing compared to their live.
	And if I have the live in my head... Old school demos, yeah, old school demos used to suck.
	Oh, I mean, or just, like, whoever they can afford to help them, like, to record.
	It's a hit or miss.
	Hit or miss.
	Especially if they're, like, really good live, then that energy just doesn't always translate on a recording.
	So I'm like, I don't want to color my view.
	We're going to go see, and then we're going to enjoy.
	And if I need them in my life after that, then I have the live in my head.
	So I try not to.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That makes sense.
	There are plenty of bands that I grew up with where, you know, the recordings were shit, you know, but I would always go and see them live because I'm like, oh, this is a great fucking time, great band, just lifeless on a record, which isn't their fault.
	It's not really their fault.
	It's just, you know, it's hard to translate.
	It's really hard to translate.
	It can be very, you need the right people in the right place doing the right stuff.
	It's a whole thing.
	It's a whole, it's a It's a very expensive thing, in that case.
	But yeah, there are some great smaller bands out there.
	And yeah, Witcher books.
	Well, at least the first one.
	Great!
	It's awesome.
	Cool.
	And I mean, you know, people make choices.
	Maybe, let's not judge.
	Knowing that what you would want to do is great.
	But everybody's got a different vision.
	And that's okay.
	You can still enjoy the books, too.
	Yes!
	Yeah, absolutely.
	There's a whole thing around the show and Henry Cavill exiting due to creative, because he's a super fan of the books and everything, and was very upset at the way certain things were done, and it was a whole thing.
	It was a whole thing.
	And now he's been replaced by Liam Hemsworth and the internet's not pleased about that situation.
	And to be honest, neither am I, I don't think.
	But I'll give him a chance.
	I'll give him a chance.
	But I'm not optimistic.
	Henry Cavill was born for that role.
	Plus, I no longer get to stare at Henry Cavill in a hot tub and that's always upsetting.
	I get it.
	Now, we've got a show to get to, but first we should thank some new Patrons.
	So, first up, Kosh Mardesk, you are now an Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
	Thank you very much, Kosh Mardesk.
	Thank you so much!
	I'm hoping I've not butchered that.
	Sean Allen, you are now an Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
	Thank you very much, Sean.
	Hi, Sean.
	Thank you.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Plus, our dear pod friend Natalie of Natalie's Hot Tea, the Elixir of Life has upped their pledge to us.
	So, Hot Tea Natalie, you are still an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Hey!
	Thank you, Natalie!
	Hi, hi, hope you're well.
	Love your hair.
	Hope you win.
	Good job.
	Nice.
	Thank you.
	Always winning.
	Always winning.
	If anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
	As a patron, you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show, Offbrand, where we discuss anything but Russell Brand.
	And this week, we had a fun two-hour conversation about Trump being taken off the ballots, as well as the differences between the electoral systems of the UK and the US.
	It was interesting stuff.
	Kind of really good and important to understand, I think.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I agree.
	That was a fun conversation.
	So yeah, head to patreon.com slash off-brand to, off-brand, on-brand, to check that out.
	And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere, you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video should come up there too.
	And if you're a listener that's outside of either of those countries, we welcome your input and opinion as to how it affects you and what you have to think about it.
	I'm so interested to hear from not just these two weird, miserable empire countries.
	Always.
	Absolutely, and we did specify in the chat itself, people from out there, like, how do your electoral systems differ?
	If you can comment on the Patreon, on the post, that'd be great, because yeah, it's interesting.
	It is interesting.
	Yeah, I'm putting the call out on Maine.
	Hey man, I think it's super interesting and different.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Australia, I know you've got some different elections coming up.
	How does that work?
	I haven't had time to properly look into it, so you know.
	Let us know, everybody!
	Yeah.
	So this last week, obviously, we dealt with Monday's show already.
	And then later on in the week, Russell had Dr. Drew on his show.
	And I thought in the back of my head, I was like, oh, fuck, I hate this guy.
	And he's not going to have a bigger guest, really, for the rest of the week, probably.
	So we're going to have to deal with this guy.
	And I was wrong about that.
	A bigger name did, in fact, stick his head out of the sand.
	But it turned out to be someone I hate even more than Dr. Drew.
	As ever, I will let Russell tell us who we're looking at this week.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	We will be talking about events at Davos.
	What can we glean?
	Let me know if it was a surprising Davos for you.
	Maybe Javier Millet surprised you somewhat.
	Let me know in the comments on Rumble.
	And if you are an Awakened Wonder, please let me know what you think in the chat over there.
	If you're watching us on YouTube, the first 15 minutes of our conversation with Glenn Greenwald, world educator, true journalist, truth teller, Pulitzer Prize winner, and of course now conspiracy theorist, will only be available on Rumble.
	Yeah, Glenn fucking Greenwald to deal with.
	I will say this isn't the first time he's been on Stay Free, but it is the first time he's required the treatment from our show, and I imagine you'll see why a bit later, but first, Lauren, how do you feel about Glenn Greenwald?
	Oh, you know what?
	Good try, I guess.
	Not my cup of tea.
	I love that it's so dismissive.
	Fantastic.
	Well, so did you hear what Nicki Minaj said, like Ben Shapiro has that new song?
	Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	What was it she said?
	I can't remember exactly.
	Not bad, wasn't it?
	She said not bad, which is such a sick fucking burn.
	That's a flex, yeah.
	Like, I don't hate you.
	I don't think about you, is what that was like.
	That's fine.
	It's fine.
	It's the worst, and it's such a move.
	I'm thrilled.
	I told Mike, I was like, wow, we found out that Ben Shapiro's black friend is a white rapper, so that's a thing.
	But then everybody wanted her to clap back, and she's like...
	No.
	Not bad.
	And not worth her energy?
	Well, it's the best because it doesn't inspire people to go and look at it because they like it, and it doesn't inspire people to go and hate watch it either.
	It's just the perfect response.
	Exactly.
	Perfect response.
	Such a fucking move.
	It's great.
	Now, that being said, I'm not... But also, whenever I have to be reminded that Glenn Greenwald is around, I'm like, eh, okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's kind of...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no, he does inspire that very feeling, doesn't he?
	It's malaise.
	Yeah.
	Yes, yeah, yeah.
	Malaise.
	Well, according to Russell, Greenwald is a world educator, true journalist, truth teller, Pulitzer Prize winner, and of course now conspiracy theorist, and I will say that at least two of those things are in fact mostly accurate.
	Yeah.
	Now, for any of our listeners who don't know who Glenn is, I will get to his bio in just a minute.
	But first, let's hear how Russell brings him into the show.
	Glenn is, of course, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
	He co-founded The Intercept, and I think then they threw him out.
	He got an award for breaking the Edward Snowden story.
	He hosts Systems Update live on Rumble weeknights at 7pm Eastern Time.
	and some of this conversation was available on Locals.
	In fact, it was available in its entirety unedited.
	So if you are a legacy media journalist and you're spending your time scrambling around,
	finding ways to try to oppose a movement that does have you in its sights,
	then you can join us on Locals as well.
	It'll be helpful for you to get more stories on us.
	But let me tell you, it's gonna be hard to stop this movement now, baby.
	So without further ado, Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today.
	It's an honor to have you, as always.
	Always!
	It's a pleasure to see you, Russell.
	Thank you for asking.
	Russell didn't ask anything.
	This is of course just a case of once again badly putting a show together but editing an introduction like this in and removing what I imagine was a standard how are you or whatever just serves to make Glenn Greenwald look a little bit silly before he's even gotten to his second sentence.
	It's real basic stuff.
	Russell mentioned last week that he took a screenplay writing class and apparently he didn't make it to the continuity part of the semester.
	It's keeping very, like, TSA saying have a nice flight and you saying you too.
	Like, oh!
	Yeah, right, exactly.
	Exactly.
	I somehow doubt Glenn Greenwald has rewatched this interview.
	I don't think he cares.
	But anyway, it's something to make notes of because it will come up again later.
	And also, it's just another thing to heap on the pile of evidence that Russell's team is these days a skeleton crew made of shit.
	Now, they're doing their best.
	They're doing their best.
	Now, before that, however, Russell was suggesting that members of the legacy media join his locals channel to get more stories on him!
	Right?
	We've done that on the free tier.
	That was crazy arrogant.
	That was crazy arrogant, like, I'm sure you're watching and you better, like, oh, if you want to get dirt on me, who do you think is watching you, dog?
	Like, really?
	The only people he can guarantee are watching this is us, is me.
	Yeah, I was going to say, us is even a little rich.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's me.
	I don't think he was talking to me.
	I think he is just that kind of out there.
	Well, we aren't legacy media.
	No, exactly.
	You think racial maddows out here hanging on your every word, sir?
	You can guarantee if we ever got covered somehow on his show, it would be, oh yeah, Legacy Media somehow, it would be like, oh, funded by Soros or whatever, they'll make some shit up.
	They'll make some shit up.
	I would think minimizing is the way I would go if I were gonna be a dick about it, but.
	Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	I mean, yeah, fine.
	Hey, if it's based in reality, I'll take it, right?
	Oh, it won't be.
	It won't be.
	No, exactly.
	That I can say for certain.
	No.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Anyway, we have taken a look at Russell's Locals channel on the free tier, which is when we established he's forming a cult.
	No major updates on that front, by the way, but he has decided it will have to be multiple communes
	now and that they will have to support the police and military just to get off the ground,
	in his words, which I'm not thrilled with that notion.
	But also, is it true?
	Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess, yeah.
	Because Bali is where he's thinking, right?
	Even though no one else agrees in his locals, but yeah, okay.
	I also don't know when monsoon season is, so maybe it's just a pause.
	Maybe.
	For winter time, I don't know.
	Maybe, I'm not sure.
	Maybe he'll set up several around the world and kind of hop from commune to commune so the police can never catch him.
	Oh, God.
	I really hope not.
	I know.
	Oh, it'd be funny.
	It'd be very funny.
	Just, you know, catch me if you can, but with Russell, you know, as Leo DiCaprio.
	I mean, I'm going into my true crying brains.
	I'm like, it's not funny at all.
	That's how people die.
	That's also how you cart your wife's, like, dead body all over the country for two years or a year or whatever.
	I don't think he could do it with the wife and three children.
	Because, yeah, I don't think that's an option.
	But just him doing it, it's a romp.
	I would enjoy it.
	Anyway, yeah, I have of course done some snooping and I like to keep tabs on what's going on back there on the Old Locals channel, but I still refuse to give this guy money.
	That said, if there are any former Awakened Wonders who listen to our show and still have access to a subscription, get in touch!
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com because I will absolutely head on in there and take a deeper dive.
	Anyway, Russell threw some accolades of Greenwald there into the mix before haphazardly dragging him onto the show, including co-founding The Intercept, winning awards, and hosting his own show on Rumble, all of which is absolutely true.
	But let's take it from the start, because honestly, I'd never been able to fully answer the question, what the fuck happened to Glenn Greenwald, but I think I've gotten most of the way there.
	So, Glenn Greenwald was born in March 1967 in Queens, New York.
	He was then raised in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.
	His parents separated when he was six.
	His parents and grandparents did try to introduce him to Judaism, but he grew up without practicing an organized religion, did not have a bar mitzvah, and has said his, quote, moral precepts aren't informed in any way by religious doctrine, unquote.
	This may come back up a little bit later.
	At 17, he ran for a seat on the Lauderdale Lake City Council.
	At 17, he was unsuccessful.
	Ambitious!
	Ambitious!
	His grandfather had a seat on the council and he was conspired.
	Yeah, there may have been a degree of attempted nepotism.
	But we'll see.
	It didn't get anywhere.
	It didn't work?
	Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	And then he came out as gay around age 20.
	And in 1991, at age 23, he ran for a city council seat again, coming in third with 18% of the vote.
	So a marked improvement from 7% to 18%.
	Had he kept trying, he probably would have eventually gotten there.
	Sure.
	Yeah, why not?
	After that, he decided to instead focus on college, which is probably sensible.
	He received a B.A.
	in Philosophy from George Washington University in 1990, and a J.D.
	Law Doctorate from New York University School of Law in 1994.
	Greenwald practiced law in the litigation department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz from 1994 to 1995, and in 1996 he co-founded his own litigation firm, Greenwald, Kristof & Holland, where he litigated cases concerning issues of US constitutional law and civil rights.
	He worked pro bono a lot of the time, and his cases included representing white supremacist Matthew Hale in Illinois, who Greenwald believed was wrongly imprisoned, and the Neo-Nazi National Alliance as well.
	He represented them.
	Yeah, he's had this to say on his own work in First Amendment cases.
	He told the Rolling Stone magazine in 2013, "To me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed
	to a principle that you apply it, not when it's easy, not when it supports your position,
	not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate."
	I mean, maybe don't describe yourself as heroic, but I do largely agree with your point.
	Everyone deserves a defense.
	Everyone deserves to be represented in court.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Later, according to Greenwald, quote, I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could and because after 10 years I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing, unquote.
	He was 38 at this time and went to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, expecting to stay there for two months.
	He then met David Miranda, a 19-year-old who grew up in the Jacarezinho favela.
	It is also worth noting that in David Miranda's own words, he didn't speak much English and Greenwald only knew a few words of Portuguese.
	They had a romantic entanglement, and about a week after they met, they decided to move in together.
	Yeah, Greenwald has lived in Brazil ever since.
	The two would later marry and adopt three kids.
	Now evidently, this relationship did turn into something quite different over time, but good lord, the power imbalance at the beginning of that is insane to me.
	19 year old, 38 year old, don't speak the same language, one incredibly poor, one incredibly wealthy.
	Doesn't feel great.
	But I mean, it worked out, I guess.
	I guess.
	Yeah, still feels a little bit icky.
	Yep.
	In October 2005, Greenwald began his blog, Unclaimed Territory, focusing on the investigation pertaining to the Plame Affair, the CIA leak Grand Jury investigation, the federal indictment of Scooter Libby, and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.
	Um, simpler times.
	It's amazing that guy could have that name and be in public.
	I know, I know.
	It's really... The thing is that, like, Scooter being his nickname, it's like, why didn't anyone just use his real name?
	Scooter Libby, are you in the Archie comics?
	And had he been an awesome, squeaky clean do-gooder that we could all get behind, I feel like it'd be charming.
	Like, Bernie Sanders.
	That's a cute name.
	Bernie's cute.
	Um, I don't think I know any male.
	I know a Bernice that goes by Bernie, but I don't even know.
	It's cute.
	Bernice, you know, Aloysius Sanders or whatever.
	But like, yeah, I don't know.
	I'm still like Scooter Libby was a person.
	Scooter Libby, yeah.
	was a person in our lives. Man, oh man. That's a human being. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. What?
	What? Oh dear. In 2007, Glenn became a contributing writer for Salon and was widely praised for his
	work. He was described by Rachel Maddow during his period writing for Salon as, quote, "the
	American left's most fearless political commentator,"
	unquote.
	High fucking praise from someone who Greenwald now hates.
	In July 2012, Greenwald joined the American wing of Britain's Guardian newspaper.
	Good old Guardian to contribute a weekly column and a daily blog.
	And then in late 2012 he was contacted by Edward Snowden who had read some of Greenwald's prior Salon articles.
	He then began the breaking of the story of the scale of domestic surveillance in the United States with Snowden blowing the whistle and Glenn Greenwald and others reporting on it.
	It was this which contributed to the Guardian and the Washington Post winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014.
	So he was a major contributor to that prize being awarded, but there is no Pulitzer Prize in Glenn Greenwald's name specifically.
	Either way, good work was done.
	Yeah, that's a big deal.
	That's a legitimately big deal.
	Huge deal.
	Excellent that it was recognized and for public service specifically deserved.
	Greenwald's work on the Snowden story was featured in the documentary Citizenfour, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
	And in the 2016 feature film Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone, Greenwald was portrayed by Zachary Quinto, which is an interesting casting choice.
	Sila from Heroes, you know.
	I like him, anyway.
	It was 2014 when The Intercept was launched and it was founded by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras with funding by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar.
	Uh, the organization is incorporated as a 501c3 tax-exempt charitable entity, with Omidyar stating that the site sprang forth from a rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	The Intercept was in contact during the 2016 presidential campaign with Guccifer 2.0, who relayed some of the material about Hillary Clinton gathered via a data breach to Greenwald.
	Wait, Guccifer?
	Is it Guccifer?
	Yeah, Guccifer 2.0.
	I've only ever heard it, that's why I was... I see it, it's Gucci in an F.E.R.
	I'm like, that's Guccifer!
	Anyway, anyway, Guccifer.
	The GRUSHK counterintelligence specialist reported in October 2016, quote, The Intercept was both aware that the emails were from Guccifer 2.0, that Guccifer 2.0 has been attributed to Russian intelligence services, and that there is a significant public evidence supporting this attribution.
	Meaning, Greenwald and the Intercept knew it was Russian interference and decided to run with it anyway.
	Lovely stuff.
	See, crazy names always stick out to me.
	Scooter Libby, Guccifer.
	It's not going anywhere.
	It's in the brain.
	That's in the damn.
	That is stuck in the damn forever.
	It's not going back out.
	Yeah.
	Yes, so there is of course overwhelming evidence that the DNC hacks and all of that was Russian election interference from the GRU intended to sow discord, take Hillary down and promote Trump.
	Mission accomplished.
	During and after this time, Greenwald had made himself known as saying the various claims about Russian interference and specifically anything around Donald Trump was overblown and didn't have any validity to it.
	He also, around this time, began to be a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
	So, what happened next?
	Well, I'm going to quote from a Politico piece from 2019 entitled, How the Intercept is Fueling the Democratic Civil War.
	In the past few years, and especially in the aftermath of the 2016 campaign, The Intercept has taken a sharp turn into party politics.
	With a hard-charging Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim, driving its political coverage, The Intercept has taken a more classic gotcha approach to campaign reporting and landed in a unique spot in the media ecosystem as the loudest voice attacking Democrats from the left.
	As the party grapples with fractures emerging in its coalition, the Intercept is a crowbar working those fractures apart.
	From further on in the article.
	For some in the media world, it's a shock that The Intercept made it to its fifth birthday at all.
	Since its founding as mostly a home for the Snowden Archive, it has published some massive, deeply reported scoops and developed a reputation as a hub for serious national security wonks.
	But it has been as noticeable for its internal dysfunction, finding itself the subject of flaming first-person takedowns by ex-staffers over the years.
	One of its early seminal investigations was a deep dive into its own newsroom and how journalist Matt Taibbi, who was hired to launch an ill-fated satirical digital magazine, left the company on extremely messy terms.
	In 2016, Intercept reporter Juan Thompson was fired from the site for fabricating quotes and sources, and he was later convicted for making bomb threats to Jewish community centres.
	The Intercept has also been embarrassed even on its supposed area of expertise.
	Its mishandling of leaked documents helped get a source, Whistleblower Reality Winner, thrown in prison.
	This past March, the company laid off members of its research staff, and in a move that prompted a fresh round of anguish from The Intercept's original true believers, decided to stop managing the enormous archive of leaked Snowden documents.
	Unquote.
	So we get the picture there of The Intercept that is perhaps not the best.
	Elsewhere in the article was a quote that tickled me from Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, Saying, quote, I often feel like when it comes to this space, Jacobin and the Intercept are the only reliable places that left politicians have, unquote.
	And maybe that says enough.
	Oh dear.
	It's the never and always statement.
	It's them all at once.
	It's a lot.
	Just throw in a maybe.
	Just throw in a most.
	Just throw in a, you know... I do have to say, Russell doesn't use The Intercept as a source particularly often, so that's something, compared to Jacobin anyway.
	As for Glennie G, by 2019 he had no control over the news reporting at The Intercept, but served as a columnist.
	Until in October 2020 when he resigned, kicking up a big stink as he went.
	He gave his reasons as political censorship and contractual breaches by the editors, who he said had prevented him from reporting on allegations concerning Joe Biden's conduct with regard to China and Ukraine.
	Betsy Reid, the editor-in-chief, disputed Greenwald's accusations and claims of censorship and accused him of presenting dubious claims from the Trump campaign as journalism.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I'm like, okay.
	I feel like that's, sorry, I'm like, there's a pause for me to react.
	I'm like, okay.
	Things are added up.
	It was here that Greenwald set up his substack, writing about his resignation and publishing the full unedited piece that The Intercept didn't want.
	Those were his first big things on his substack, right?
	Greenwald says in the article, quote, the same trends of repression, censorship, and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles, unquote.
	Naturally.
	I took a look at the groundbreaking reporting he was apparently doing at this time.
	Lauren, any guesses what the story was about?
	Just based on what's been said?
	I want it to be a dog fashion show, because that seems like... I'd go to the mat for that.
	That maybe The Intercept wouldn't take me so seriously if I wanted to cover a dog fashion show.
	I thought The Intercept would be fine with that.
	Who's to say?
	That's my guess.
	Okay.
	Nah, it was Hunter Biden's goddamn laptop.
	Shut up!
	That's what it fucking was.
	Yep, onto Biden's laptop.
	That, Ukraine and China, right?
	Within the piece he also references Matt Taibbi and Li Fang with admiration.
	Suffice to say it is in fact unsubstantiated bullshit interspersed with bad faith arguments and I can see exactly why The Intercept rejected it.
	It just wasn't great.
	Just really wasn't good.
	From there, Greenwald amassed over 300,000 subscribers to his sub-stack, and just last year got his own show on Rumble called System Update, where he spends his time being aggressively pro-Trump, and get this, flinging shit at the LGBTQ plus community.
	A recent piece included how... What?
	He's a gay man, yes I know.
	A recent piece included how because some gay guy was supporting Israel on TikTok, that is LGBT rights being used to justify Gaza's destruction, according to Glenn Greenwald, and Israel are on board and offer special gay tours of Tel Aviv to gay people, apparently.
	This is all according to Glenn Greenwald.
	I could not separately verify.
	So there is propaganda that is targeted at sowing discord with the gay community.
	But wait, what's his point?
	If gay tours are happening in Tel Aviv to kind of demonize another side, we'll say.
	I would want to bring that up in a certain context.
	What was his intention of bringing that up?
	I don't understand.
	To say that the LGBTQ rights are being used to justify Gaza's destruction, basically, because of all that, and Israel are intentionally making that happen, was his view.
	So Israel is using the cover of gay rights to justify their actions or the opposite?
	Well, here's the thing.
	They're not saying that, though apparently it's the Israeli government that are doing the gay tours of Tel Aviv, which, I mean, you know.
	But no.
	I can't make a citation.
	I can't pull up an article.
	No, no, no.
	So it was a guy on TikTok who was gay who was saying that, yeah, that Israel are great, basically, and that Palestine suck.
	And that is LGBT rights being used to justify Gaza's destruction.
	That's his whole thing.
	Yeah, and it's very much painting the LGBTQ plus community as...
	Yeah.
	Negative.
	That's confusing because like it could be like the thing is it's all about the spin because that could be like an actual point of like birthright tours being a manipulation tactic on the part of Israel.
	I went into it on his channel thinking, like, surely as a gay man you would be annoyed if LGBTQ plus rights are being used to justify all of these things.
	As a smokescreen.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Exactly.
	Like, yeah, I would be upset about that.
	That's not what he's saying.
	That's not what he's saying at all.
	Which is like, oh, oh, Glenn.
	Why?
	Why?
	Is he blaming gay people?
	Is that what he's saying?
	Is he looking around and blaming other gay people?
	He goes up to the line, I'm gonna say that.
	He goes up to the line, which is a remarkable... He kind of twists himself in knots to do it, but he gets there.
	Weird.
	By all means, everyone, check it out.
	It's on his Rumble page.
	Listen, this is observation bias.
	I don't know if you've experienced this.
	I certainly have, kind of more and more.
	Sound off.
	Listeners, fucking tell me, let me know.
	It feels like they're being like conservative, you know, like right-wing pundits or whatever, or anybody that's just like arguing with, like finding a leftist to argue with.
	Or, you know, even just a liberal, a regular old nice liberal, is that their arguments are getting so much more confusing.
	Like, I'm feeling more like, so do you agree or disagree?
	And then you gotta let them kind of wind up a little bit.
	To even know what they mean?
	It took me a long time to get to his point, I will say that.
	I was like, what the fuck are you saying on this subject?
	Yeah, it took me a good chunk of time to understand what the fuck he was on about.
	But yeah, the main thrust of- It seems like a phenomenon that's happening more and more that I'm in, maybe, again, maybe it's observation bias, but I'm interacting with these things where I'm like, what are you even, what are we saying here?
	Comments to articles like, okay, hold on.
	I can't tell if you're mad or happy.
	So what do we do from there?
	Yes, yeah.
	I mean, he's visibly upset in almost all of his videos.
	Well, so am I. What are we going to do?
	Well, I mean, at least we have some fun.
	He's just, he's very, I will say, his show is very dry.
	It's incredibly dry.
	We could never actually, we could never cover it.
	We could never take a deviation.
	Yes, yeah, exactly.
	Exactly, right.
	Oh boy, oh boy.
	But yeah, it's not great.
	And he generally spends a good chunk of time on his show painting the LGBTQ plus community in negative lights.
	Which, great.
	Cheers, Glenn.
	Regular guests on his show include Tucker Carlson, Michael Schellenberger, Lee Fang, Matt Taibbi, RFK Jr., and of course, Edward Snowden.
	He also has his own locals channel where he republishes his Substack work.
	Great.
	Another thing to note is that his husband, who had gone on to become a Brazilian politician, tragically passed away this last year after being in the hospital for a gastrointestinal infection.
	Oh, God!
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, he was in there for nine months, so, you know... Oh, no!
	That's awful!
	Horrible, horrible stuff.
	Yeah, it was from 2022 to 2023.
	Yeah, he was 37 when he died, leaving behind Glenn and their three kids.
	So, you know, that sucks.
	It does suck.
	That's not gonna help his attitude.
	No, no, exactly, no, no, which fair enough, but yeah, sadly it doesn't excuse any of the things that come out of his mouth either.
	But yeah, my estimation of Glenn Greenwald is that he's an intelligent guy who can do some impressive investigative journalism, but he's had something of an ideological shift helped along by a huge profit motive, which has led him to doing and saying incredibly intellectually dishonest things.
	I take special issue with him because, well, he knows better.
	He's not an idiot.
	Russell quite famously blurs the lines of idiocy and malice, sometimes being quite clever and other times completely moronic, but Glenn knows what he's doing.
	Well, the argument can also be made of what being smart versus being cunning.
	Like how, again, true crime brain, serial killers can be a complete mess in every other part of their life, but they manage to get away with crimes.
	It's like they just have that cunning for what they're doing.
	And they can be quite slippery and they can be quite intent on their goal, which is what it says to me.
	Like, Russell, I don't think is looking big picture whenever he like will insert his own, you know, his media.
	I think that he thinks he's helping himself by saying like, Mentioning the allegations against him and, and, oh, it's a media conspiracy when like, no, you should just never, you should just ignore it completely is what you should do if you actually like for a long term plan.
	But he thinks that I think because that that's got kind of like blinders on can't see forest for trees don't really have a beat on what's important in the long run.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it can seem smart and slippery.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	He can see it seems slippery and it seems smart in the moment, but like, ah, that's maybe not a good chess move.
	Yeah, probably not.
	Probably not.
	I would agree.
	I would love for him to shut up about it.
	But as we know, the right-wing media sphere is essentially a victimhood Olympics.
	And so he likes to break that out whenever he can.
	I mean, he's in the club!
	He wants to play with the other boys!
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	Other boys. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. All right.
	Yeah. All right. All of that said, let's have Glenn's first proper clip today, leading with a
	question from Russell.
	It seems like the landscape of American politics has been irrevocably altered.
	There is no chance that the Republican Party will ever be recaptured by what might have been regarded as conventional or traditional interests, and yet there is an appetite to homogenise the central space of the American political system.
	Do you think, bearing in mind we're broadcasting this after New Hampshire, it seems that Trump's ascendancy to the nomination is assured and that even within the Republican Party and beyond it, within the American representative democracy more broadly, there is still no antidote for this phenomena and that they are still flailing and conflicted in how to address this, both within media and political circles?
	I think the key truth that people have to realize if they want to pay attention to politics on a kind of deeper level than just what pundits say on cable news shows is the understanding of power works.
	And how power works for me as the first law is that establishment forces that wield power not only don't give it up easily, they will fight to the death to hold on to it.
	The nature of history.
	You can look at pretty much every historical event where people are fighting over who will build power.
	And if you try and take power away from status quo institutions, whatever you want to call them, they will do everything and anything, like cornered rats, to keep it.
	So you see, first of all, pouring $250 million into Nikki Haley's campaign to stop Trump from the presidency.
	Obviously, if that doesn't work, which it likely will not, Then you have all these prosecutions.
	I mean, they're serious about forcing Trump to run from prison as the leading presidential candidate from a jail cell or from a courtroom, which is, you know, such an extraordinary recipe for civil unrest that they don't care about because they're so desperate.
	And then even if he overcomes all that and wins, we're gonna have the kind of subversion of his elected presidency that we saw in 2016, where the US security state, the deep state, working hand-in-hand with the media, went to work to try and destroy and sabotage him in every single way, to even encourage people in his administration, generals and the like, to ignore and subvert his orders, In order to neutralize whatever he wants to do, they're already trying to do that, they're already planning that, there are articles openly in the mainstream press talking about the kinds of plans that they would intend to pursue if that happens.
	And so you're gonna have every step of the way, because they understand that they've lost the ability to control how people think, people have tuned them out, they obviously, even the most narcissistic and delusional get that by now, when you see Trump winning despite all the things they've done, There's a multi-pronged plan to prevent him, even if he wins, from exerting real power, and that is, to me, the great threat to democracy.
	Oh boy.
	Now, to be fair, the first vague history point you made?
	Now, to be fair, the first history, vague history point you made, true.
	Sure.
	Better than what we've been getting.
	People wrestle for power.
	Yeah, no, but certainly more accurate, even if it is much more vague.
	Yeah, you know what?
	The vague stuff was even worse that we were finding, like, what, a couple months ago.
	So listen.
	That's true.
	That is true.
	He's not Neil Oliver.
	Point for Greeney.
	And that's one.
	And that's where it stops.
	But hey.
	Yeah.
	Boy, how the mighty have fallen.
	To go from reporting on the surveillance state and breaking that story to the greatest threat to democracy is people trying to prevent Donald Trump from exerting real power.
	Who is they?
	Which they?
	Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?
	I mean, he said the deep state and the media, and I would say the Democrats.
	But he said Nikki Haley's campaign, which is Republicans.
	Yes, yes, but it's being funded by the left because we just don't want Donald Trump.
	No?
	What?
	Yeah, apparently.
	Rarely have I seen a booth quite so thoroughly licked.
	That's what I'm going to say.
	Yeah.
	I would also argue that, well, I mean, it could be argued, certainly, that a greater threat to democracy is a guy saying, I'll be a dictator if I win the presidency.
	But no, apparently it's that some people don't want to let Donald Trump do whatever the fuck he wants completely unhampered.
	It is crazy to me to act like it's some kind of ploy that he's he's facing lawsuits.
	He's facing criminal charges.
	He's facing the justice system for laws he broke, and that's not easy to do.
	No, especially not for someone in his position, right?
	That's like, yeah, that's kind of been real tough. And, uh, and we just don't care about the civil unrest that that's
	going to cause.
	We don't care because we're so desperate.
	We're so desperate.
	Well, then we should just never prosecute any crimes because somebody might get mad and, I don't know, throw a Molotov cocktail about it.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	They might run for office.
	Is that the solution?
	We shouldn't really.
	Everyone might run for office.
	Really, we should just get rid of the law, I think.
	Yeah.
	Oh, that was weird.
	OK.
	I know, I know.
	And the kicker for me in all that is that in the Trump presidency there were people stopping him, like essentially treating him as a child, and I'm just not convinced that those people exist anymore.
	Like, either you're a Trump loyalist or you're fucking out of there, and none of those simpering idiots are ever going to prevent him from doing what he wants at this point for fear of being ejected from what is now almost the entire right wing.
	Yeah, being slightly an adult gets gallows Built in protest on the lawn and call for your head on a pike.
	You know what?
	I wouldn't sign up for that either.
	I think that's a pretty reasonable human choice.
	Get on board or get fucking insurrectioned.
	Not thrilled by my choices.
	Oh dear.
	Okay.
	Yeah, so I mean that opening clip is a good summation of the universe that Glenn Greenwald is coming from these days.
	Holy fuck.
	Now one of the specific qualities of Glenn Greenwald, especially in media spaces, is that he's a condescending arsehole.
	He will talk down to basically anyone, and we get a little bit of a taste of that after a question from Russell.
	The last time we spoke, you said that in previous times of mass inequality, there were tokenistic moves, you said, from the likes of the Rockefellers who might cast dollar bills from a passing limousine as a plutocratic gesture to the proletariat.
	And then you said, but these days with the rise of the militarization of the police force, anti-protest laws, ongoing surveillance measures, it seems less necessary to even mitigate these rising tensions.
	And I've felt with speculation around a second pandemic, the disease X, with fear-mongering around potential cyber attacks, with the escalating wars around the world, with the unique ...configuration of global elections this year, that there is something precipitous happening, that it is possible and plausible that the prognoses of giddy, shamanic outlier figures in the dark web are closer to being accurate than the kind of
	Casual dampening down of expectations that you might read in ordinary mainstream media.
	Do you think that we are on the precipice of moves towards a more globalist authoritarian regime?
	Do you feel like the pieces are observable?
	Do you feel that that's happening?
	Do you think it can be averted or do you think that that's a sort of a hysterical perspective?
	There's no doubt that that's happening.
	I mean, you don't have to be a remote conspiracy theorist, you don't have to be particularly insightful not to impugn the high quality of your observation, but I don't even think it requires that much insight to see.
	Oh dear.
	Yes could mean either thing.
	Yes could mean either thing.
	Like, yes the conspiracy QAnon is real, or yes we see authoritarianism taking hold.
	Well, I mean, firstly, get to the fucking point, Russell.
	Jesus Christ, that took a while to get to.
	What is basically a question that amounts to, you know, do you think we're on the precipice of moves towards a more globalist authoritarian regime, which is, I mean, The most softball of softball questions in this particular media space of right-wing conspiracy shitheads.
	I mean, none of these ding-dongs are going to say no, are they?
	It's a yes or no question.
	It's impossible to say no!
	It's impossible to say no!
	A real question would be, why do you think, or what is there to do about the obvious How do we deal with it?
	Not, not, not is this happening?
	Not is this entire thing that I've been, that I talk about every day, is it happening?
	Because like, well, according to you and everyone else in your space, yes, it fucking is.
	There's an expectation he's going to agree and then Russell's going to go for him there.
	In which case, like, that's just, I don't like that.
	I don't know.
	If that's all that's supposed to be, it should be a shorter fucking question.
	Also, Glenn Greenwald appears to be drinking milk in this interview, and there's something I find really strange about that.
	We don't know what he's drinking.
	It could be... It's a white liquid in a glass.
	I mean, it could be a pina colada, to be fair.
	Which, I mean, that would be, in Brazil, much more reasonable.
	It could be horchata.
	And I live, I live.
	I wish.
	I guess, I guess.
	It looks like milk anyway.
	I really, okay.
	I just kind of, I just noticed.
	I was like, that, okay.
	Slightly distracting.
	Get a straw.
	Yes.
	Plus distracting.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Anyway, so let's hear the rest of Glenn's answer to the obvious question after, you know, not to impugn your question.
	Because, well, yeah, he's got plenty of space to wriggle around and say pretty much anything, so let's hear it.
	That when you have things, like one country after the next, Adopting brand new laws to provide really extreme powers, unaccountable, unreviewable, extreme powers to governments to censor the internet and punish people for failing to remove content that these governments deem dangerous or false.
	You see this law in the EU, in the UK, in Canada, in Brazil, in Ireland, in all parts of the democratic world now, and you've seen it already in places like the Persian Gulf long ago, that give these states enormous power over the instrument that was supposed to be the thing that guaranteed us the ability to communicate with one another and to organize.
	They're petrified of that.
	They decided after 2016, when they had these dual traumas of Brexit being approved and then Hillary losing to Trump, that they simply could no longer allow a free internet and free discourse over the internet because it's too out of their control.
	And ever since then, they've clamped down on free thought and free discourse, on the right to protest.
	I mean, I think the thing that happened in Canada with the trucker protest, I even think some of the things you're seeing now with these pro-Palestinian protests throughout Europe and in the United States where the reaction has been to crack down because whatever your view on that war is, those protests are against the policy of the EU and the United States that supports Israel.
	You're seeing with the right to protest, the right to free speech, the right to organize, the right to use the internet, increasingly repressive systems of control that are designed to curb some of these kind of wild excesses that elite see people engaging in, and they're trying to regain control of how people think, how they behave, and put limits on what they can say and do.
	Equating the trucker protest with the Palestine protest is bonkers to me.
	That's... Yeah, as it should be.
	As it fucking should be.
	There was even a good trucker protest before the insane one that we all had to watch happen in real time to terrorize a fucking town.
	There was one before that for actual...
	It was like a worker, it was from the point of view of the worker, not just about COVID restrictions and the vaccine or whatever.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So like, what?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Because again, he's referencing real shit and then mixing it with bullshit.
	Yeah, I couldn't find anything for the Persian Gulf misinformation, you know, whenever that was supposed to happen either.
	He's just insinuating that the Middle East is repressive, is what he's saying.
	Yeah, that's pretty much what I came to as well, rather than it being any kind of, well, censorship law, as he calls it.
	Which, yeah, I mean it's an interesting narrative when he's literally said that it's to remove information which governments deem as dangerous or false.
	Now obviously that's that's supposed to be a big sinister thing in his view with governments having apparently unaccountable unreviewable extreme powers given to them to crack down on misinformation.
	And he then says that this is happening in quote all parts of the democratic world now unquote.
	And the whole thing is a contradiction in terms because the government fundamentally gets its power from the people who vote them in, in democratic countries that is.
	Them and the laws they pass are held to account and reviewed by the people.
	The fun thing about legislation in this day and age is that it's incredibly easy to find.
	And I could find examples of every single piece of anti-misinformation legislation that he was just talking about in a single Google search, and I was able to read it and review it almost instantly.
	Unreviewable indeed.
	And, you know, if you want your legislators to change it, read the thing, figure out what you want changing, and get in touch with your representatives.
	And if they're not doing a thing, vote the fuckers out!
	That's literally the way the system works.
	Well, the way the system works is skewed because of money.
	Point that out.
	Make that complaint.
	We are disenfranchised because we have... It is skewed because of money, but not usually in instances like this.
	You know, in terms of a misinformation law, I don't think there's a great kind of lobby, you know, from someone being, you know, news organizations being like, this is a fucking problem.
	You know, it's...
	People with legitimate concerns being like, oh, no, no, we we need something to to stem the tide of bullshit from these people.
	We need some kind of legislation to try and deal with this, because at the moment we're letting these idiots run rampant, say whatever they want and destroy our societies very, you know, in various ways.
	Totally.
	And I agree with that.
	I'm just saying as far as amending legislation, because there's an issue as a citizen, I think it's reasonable to point out it ain't that easy.
	I don't know.
	I think ignoring that is not going to help our argument.
	No, no, no.
	I think, especially on an individual level, that there's a struggle there.
	I think, you know, collectivizing.
	You know, if there's enough of you, you'll be able to say and do something, depending on the issue, of course.
	Yeah, if they're just accusing a mysterious deep state, then they are obscuring the steps that you take in a democratic society that you just outlined.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Taking issue with a specific policy or piece of legislation is of course very different to being like, oi, the climate's fucked, we need to sort this out.
	There are different kinds of conversations to be had, some much harder than others.
	When trying to get them through a system that is, as you say, entrenched in money and moneyed interests.
	I think it would be much easier to deal with this law, with the misinformation laws, than it would be Extinction Rebellion trying to get their point across in the UK, for instance.
	Well, I mean, the only law they managed to fucking actually pass and care about over here is keeping protesters away from the Supreme Court, justices houses or some shit.
	That's like the only thing that seems pressing for my Congress, which is frustrating.
	And also, there's a lot around legislation.
	I don't disagree.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm coming off like I disagree.
	I don't disagree.
	I'm a yes.
	I'm yes-ing and and-ing.
	I think that the issue is they're distracting from the democratic process as it actually is supposed to function because the less people engage with it, In addition, the less that people engage with it and they are disenfranchised, they're willfully listening to information.
	They're like, please disenfranchise me and my vote.
	I want to listen to Russell.
	Please disenfranchise me and get me all riled up.
	And that's not going to help anything.
	And that's the complaint I would have.
	Because it's it's actually a very hard road to hoe, because understanding the enemy, quote unquote, the enemy, understanding your opposition, having so much time, resources, money to throw at something, it just gives you the it gives you like a better picture, like a better, like actual picture of understanding the system rather than just being like mysterious deep states going to do what they're going to do.
	And we're powerless against it.
	Mm hmm.
	That's not positive.
	That ain't helpful.
	That's that's you're taking someone's agency away that they don't that they have as a citizen, you know?
	Yep, pretty much.
	I do somewhat agree with Glenn on the right to protest being under attack in recent years.
	Trudeau using the Canadian Emergencies Act to shut down the trucker protest has been described very recently as unreasonable and not justified by a federal court in Canada, but of course The Canadian government are appealing the decision so it's not quite settled law yet.
	The protest was intensely fucking stupid and ultimately inflicted harm on the entire country because of the way they were protesting.
	So it is a grey area for me but I do generally support people's right to protest even if it is moronic.
	The bigger issue I have is actual legislation curbing people's right to protest like we've had over here.
	And like in the US, after the Extinction Rebellion protests brought central London to a standstill yet again, legislation was ultimately passed to ensure that any protest wouldn't be in any way a public inconvenience, which I dare say is the entire fucking point of protesting.
	Um, no mention of it from Greenwald here, though, even though it's a much better example of what he's trying to say, because there's less money to be made from my example compared to throwing your weight behind a bunch of anti-vaxxers.
	So, yeah.
	Well, in the trucker protests in Canada that they're talking about, like, they weren't just stupid, they were dangerous.
	Like, they were dangerous and violent and disruptive.
	Like, they allowed for a lot of uh like law gen genuine law breaking and danger for the people that lived there like that's yes so it became a point that they like that was for safety not just to like let alone the Canadian economy and infrastructure and all of that
	There are so many ripple effects of what they were doing that it was unreal, let alone the people themselves and the way they were conducting themselves.
	It was ridiculous.
	I do sympathize with what the fuck do you do in that situation.
	Yeah.
	How do you deal with that?
	It was a struggle.
	It was a challenging moment, and I just cannot stand people using that as an example whenever, like, you got a body count on the left.
	You know, like you have a body count, not like, oh, I'm cranky.
	You'll go to home like people get hurt.
	Kids get hurt.
	Kids get killed, like trying to stop destruction of our of our country.
	And yeah, that's man.
	That's difficult to listen to.
	Yeah, it was bleak.
	And yeah, comparing it to a Free Palestine protest is less than great.
	Gross.
	I'm gonna go, put me down for gross.
	Make that two.
	In the next clip, Russell compares his and Glenn's career paths.
	You and I have both had, in a peculiar way, comparable journeys from darlings of different aspects of the establishment.
	You, obviously, as a very highly regarded and decorated journalist to apostate and attacker of the establishment.
	I, from being a Hollywood insider to being very much an outsider and extremely publicly maligned, I always assumed, particularly perhaps around the time of Occupy, That radical movements such as you are describing, or at least you're describing the potential for with the communications miracle that is being addressed through these highly sensorial measures, that it would bear the hue of a kind of culturally progressive
	Leftist revolutionary movement.
	Plainly that's not the case with the cultural left aligning itself with authoritarianism.
	Where does that lead us?
	What type of aesthetic is it going to be?
	Particularly when I speak to some journalists who say that even figures like Javier Mele or indeed Donald Trump are ultimately aligned with economic interests that are not Anti-establishment in practice.
	What kind of inflection do you imagine that these movements might bear?
	Is this something that you think about?
	Glenn, I'm gonna have to stop you before I pose the next question because we are going to leave YouTube now.
	If you're watching us there, have a look.
	There's a link in the description right now.
	ALICE You just asked a question then, I need to stop you right there before I ask the next question!
	It would be such a simple thing to fix and make smoother, it really would.
	Anyway, that was a bit of a bramble of a question from Russell that is difficult to track what the fuck he's talking about.
	But he's saying in essence, oh, I always assumed anti-establishment movements would be culturally left-wing, but now the left are culturally authoritarian.
	Of course, referring to the left wanting to, I don't know, have everyone be respectful of people's civil rights.
	And then he says, well, Trump and his financial interests, those aren't anti-establishment.
	So how the fuck are these movements going to look?
	You know, what's the situation going to be?
	Which, you know what?
	Valid question.
	It's... ish.
	That's his question to Glenn anyway.
	Yeah.
	In terms of Trump's finances, I'm like, well, yeah, well done for acknowledging, yes, not
	anti-establishment, not even in the slightest.
	It's just you need to take that to the next logical step about the rest of the human being.
	To me, it very much answers itself, especially with the MAGA movement, in terms of how that's
	already represented, which is fundamentally all kinds of bigotry and conspiracy theory
	And that's what you're going to get, Russell.
	That's how it's going to be that, but more.
	You're going to get more of it.
	That's what's coming.
	And just free speech stops at what I want to say, not what I want to hear back from what I want to say.
	It's so childish.
	You're such a dumb baby.
	You want to say what you want, and then no one can tell you that they don't like it.
	Or it's dangerous.
	You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
	Yeah, it's a culture of people who aren't a fan of consequences.
	And, you know, that's in any shape or form.
	And Russell is very much on board with that concept, as we have seen.
	Well, to be fair, life has trained him.
	He doesn't have to actually suffer consequences.
	He has constantly failed upwards.
	Yeah.
	So then can you really blame him?
	We've trained this dog to respond this way.
	Can we be mad?
	I do understand.
	I'm still gonna blame him, though.
	Oh, sure!
	Sure, sure, sure.
	And the other fucking idiots, you know.
	Now, I do think it's fundamentally a stupid question, really, under any amount of analysis, but Glenn disagrees.
	Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question because in the 60s and the 70s, the primary threat posed to American power and American domestic stability largely came from the American left, from the anti-war movement, from the civil rights movement, from a lot of black radical groups like the Black Panthers.
	And Malcolm X and all those sorts of movements that were largely, not entirely, but largely left-wing.
	And as a result, all of the weapons assembled to combat them, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S.
	security state, all these laws, infiltration, became an enemy of the American left.
	That's why the American left, for decades, had always had a very jaundiced view of these security state agencies, of the U.S.
	federal government, And then what happened in the era of Trump and the emergence of right-wing populism, not just in the United States but around the world, is the security state switched.
	They no longer think that left-wing radicalism is harmful.
	It's very neutered.
	It's basically harmless.
	It's not a communist movement.
	It's basically just a very soft AOC, Bernie kind of like, let's just make things a little more like Denmark.
	It's not threatening to anybody.
	And the threats that they decided really exist are right-wing populism.
	And so the CIA, the FBI, the U.S.
	security state turned their guns on right-wing populism.
	They did this explicitly.
	I mean, you look at their doctrine and they say the greatest threat to United States national security is not Iran or Raqqa.
	Or Russia, or Al-Qaeda, or Hamas, or Hezbollah.
	It's right-wing extremism here at home.
	They've made right-wing extremism, namely the anti-establishment populist right of Donald Trump, the greatest threat.
	That's why they needed to call them an insurrectionary movement, to justify all the surveillance on them and the criminalization of them.
	Oh, okay.
	We're not on planet Earth.
	I see.
	We're in a rocket ship to fucking Mars.
	Now I get it.
	I get it.
	Some bad takes.
	Some bad takes coming through here.
	Yeah, the left aren't dangerous enough.
	It's interesting, honestly, to watch.
	No one's threatened by AOC, no one's threatened by Bernie.
	I mean, yeah.
	You know, I mean, just take a look at AOC's Twitter and then tell me if anyone's threatened by her.
	Also, like, there's a conflation here, a convenient conflation between leftist and, like, neoliberal.
	Like a neoliberal, like, which, honestly, like, liberal or Democrat, if you look at a reasonable, you know, continuum of left v. right, They're still, they're center-right.
	Our center, or our left, is center-right, if you just look at the way that politics works.
	In terms of the world, yes.
	Yeah, I mean, it's even in terms of just, not just the world now, but the world kind of generally.
	Historically, yeah, I'm saying, compared to the ethics and morals and belief structures of the left, I mean, this is the thing.
	I hear the same complaints from the left on the surface, from leftists, but then they have real shit to say.
	After they make the accusation, they're like, and here's my evidence.
	And these guys are like, yeah, it's usually this isn't going anywhere near far enough.
	Right, yeah.
	Completely fair.
	But yeah, the idea that the policies that AOC or Bernie would want to put forward aren't dangerous to anyone is like, well, I mean, maybe ask the billionaires.
	Ask Harlan Crow how he feels about it.
	Control everything.
	Ask Nancy Pelosi how she feels about AOC.
	She's made it no uncertain terms.
	That's her project, is to keep that gal under wraps.
	It's kind of nuts.
	Like, yeah, come on.
	Yeah, she does make a compelling argument for wanting to shit on her desk, I will say.
	Now, some remarkably bad takes coming through all around.
	The greatest threat to the United States' national security, in Glenn Greenwald's mind, should in fact be Iran, Iraq, Russia, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, or some foreign entity, and not right-wing extremists.
	Firstly, Iran, Iraq, Russia or Hamas have never to my knowledge made an attack on US soil.
	I don't think.
	Al-Qaeda quite obviously did 20 years ago, but these days they're a shadow of their former selves having been usurped by the Islamic State.
	Hezbollah technically have attacked on U.S.
	soil, but we're talking about an embassy in Beirut, which is pretty far away from the U.S.
	itself.
	But technically speaking, counts as U.S.
	soil.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Yeah, I know.
	Also, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Also a weird, yeah, that's a whole weird concept.
	Conversely, let me read you some information from the ADL's Center on Extremism, published November 2023.
	Quote, right-wing extremist terror incidents in the U.S.
	have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet.
	There were just seven right-wing terror incidents in the period between 2005 and 2007, but by 2017 to 2019 there were 27, which increased to 40 in 2020 to 2022.
	So they're on the rise, right?
	But by 2017 to 2019, there were 27, which increased to 40 in 2020 to 2022.
	So they're on the rise, right?
	The ADL Center on Extremism has documented 67 domestic terror incidents by right-wing extremists in the United
	States from 2017 to 2022.
	These include successful terrorist attacks, failed terrorist attacks and foiled terrorist plots.
	White supremacists were responsible for more attacks than any other type of right-wing extremist in the past six years.
	30 of 67, or 45%, right?
	But anti-government extremists, anti-abortion extremists, and other types of right-wing extremists have also plotted and carried out attacks.
	Right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths, 58 from such attacks than any of the previous six-year period since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.
	All but five of those deaths occurred in white supremacist attacks, primarily mass shootings directed against minority targets.
	Most incidents, that is 72%, involved only a single perpetrator, whether an arsonist targeting an abortion clinic or a white supremacist shooter targeting a synagogue.
	Single perpetrators were also far more likely to successfully carry out attacks.
	Plots with multiple perpetrators were usually stopped by law enforcement.
	Most incidents were not committed by organized extremist groups.
	Right-wing terrorists considered a wide array of targets.
	Government targets were most frequently chosen by perpetrators, so 27%, closely followed by targets based on an actual or perceived religion, which is 25%, which consist of Muslims and Jews.
	Abortion-related targets and targets based on race, primarily black people, were also common at 13 and 12% respectively.
	Oh, so the numbers say it.
	The numbers say it.
	There's statistics that are pretty plain.
	This is it.
	The government considers right-wing extremism as the biggest threat to US national security because it is.
	More innocent non-combatant American lives have been lost to right-wing extremists in the last 20 years than any of the things that he's mentioned.
	And the government has even been facing massive pressure not to focus on it, and it's finally gotten so bad they can't ignore it anymore.
	They have to deal with it.
	They have to deal with it.
	They don't want to.
	They don't want to.
	All of the white people in power do not want to deal with this, but they have to.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's going great everybody, everything's going well.
	That's pretty plain.
	We're straight forward.
	I'm curious what the statistics from the next two years are going to be, let's put it that way.
	I get the feeling the election results are going to play a big part in determining that factor.
	That's later, let's talk about that later, not now.
	Nope, nope, nope, nope.
	Yay!
	Okay, anyway, Glenn has a little bit more to say on this subject.
	And of course it switched so that now most of the liberal left sees the U.S.
	security state as their ally against Trump and right-wing populism.
	And especially that's true because the culture war has now become so important on the liberal left.
	You know, LGBT issues and trans issues and abortion and all that and women's rights and minority rights.
	And, you know, the CIA and the FBI are very happy to go along with that.
	You know, every week they're posting like, Hey, happy Indigenous Day and take a look at our bipolar trans, you know, operative in the field.
	We're so proud of our diversity.
	And it's really done a great job of persuading, you know, they sold the war in Ukraine that way, also the war in Israel, like, hey, this is good for LGBT rights.
	So the kind of establishment has done a very good job of branding itself as left liberal from a culture war perspective and aligning itself with the liberal left by making their primary enemy the same enemy that the left has, which is right-wing populism and Trump.
	And it has completely reversed the political dynamics in this country of who trusts those agencies and who doesn't, who cares about free speech and who doesn't.
	And the reason is, is because these Western power centers do now view right-wing populism, anti-establishment politics, even from the left but also from the right, to be their greatest threat.
	Oh boy.
	So in Glenn's view, us lefties have just been too taken.
	We've been tricked by the FBI and the CIA being inclusive and embracing diversity.
	Now we just love them.
	We love the securities agencies in the US.
	Again, the leftist perspective is that performative advocacy is fucking bullshit and it's not enough.
	Like you said earlier, it's not nearly the fuck enough.
	Protect DEI, protect affirmative action, what we used to fucking call it, and actually invest in civil rights, not just create systems within institutions to give you plausible deniability for fucking lawsuits.
	Because that's all DEI is.
	That's all any of that shit is anyway, is to protect you from a lawsuit.
	As a corporation, and very often in the government, It's not even to accomplish anything because it gets like any some any any legislation or any kind of like step forward with teeth gets gutted because of fucking like bad actors and attitudes just like this guy.
	That's fucked up.
	Oh, I don't like it.
	Oh, I don't like it at all.
	And yeah, Moderates and Centrists on Twitter, which let's remember, Twitter, because here's the thing, when he gets x.com, and if I can type x.com into my browser and go to x, I'll start calling it that.
	It's fucking Twitter.
	It's annoying.
	It's Twitter.com.
	People like this consider that to be the public square.
	It is such a small portion.
	Even though it is still very widely used, it is a tiny, tiny amount of the human beings that deserve to be heard on the world.
	Getting tinier every day.
	Yes, also that.
	So, gauging what, like, moderates suddenly, like, loving the FBI and loving the CIA if they do something they like, yeah, I have a problem with that, too.
	Fucking knock it off.
	You don't get to make exceptions and play both sides.
	I mean, I haven't seen that much of that.
	I don't know if you've seen that much of that, to be honest.
	It's the same shit!
	It's like going to a diner and interviewing the Biden-Trump voter.
	Yeah, I guess.
	Did you find eight?
	New York Times?
	Oh, you found eight of those people?
	Maybe that's not the story you need to focus on.
	Yeah, maybe we don't need all sides of a conversation.
	Or just reasonable proportion of what the sides are, and the veracity of your support of your point, you know?
	I don't need every opinion, just the main ones would be fine.
	Yeah, anyway, this whole thing is plainly stupid on its face, but do take note of the demonization of supporting the LGBTQ plus community in what he's saying.
	Like, ah, look at these silly lefties supporting trans people in the LGBTQ plus community, getting taken in like idiots.
	We're not that stupid, so we'll just continue to hate them all and throw money at Donald Trump.
	Fantastic.
	The obvious point here is that no, the left do not love the various securities agencies in the US.
	It is generally the left shouting to defund the bastards and make their spending transparent, as well as taking issue with the various actual problems within these institutions and their behaviour towards marginalised groups of society, in particular Among other things.
	But the problem we're really running up against here is that the arguments the left have against the FBI and CIA or what the fuck ever are based in reality, while the arguments that the right are making are based on elaborate and fantastical conspiracy theories, which then gives the appearance of the left being quite genial towards the Securities Agency.
	Well, in fact, no.
	It's just our criticism is based in reality and not some variation of the head of the CIA eating babies or whatever, you know?
	Oh, boy.
	Yeah, we look sick.
	And haven't just completed another book about the CIA.
	I have no love.
	I just finished Chaos, like, this morning and I'm just like, oh, it's bad.
	Just not how you're saying it.
	Exactly, exactly.
	As with everything on these fucking shows, just like, no, we do take issue.
	It's just we have real problems to deal with, not this mad bullshit that you're coming out with.
	Well, and like we were talking about before, I think it was maybe in the off-brand when we were talking about like, they're gonna call you a fucking socialist anyway, Joe Biden.
	Like, you don't need to reach across the fucking aisle.
	They're gonna call you a socialist no matter what.
	You might as well, like, fulfill your promises to the people who are gonna vote for you.
	Swing hard to the left.
	Yeah, yeah, fuck it.
	Who gives a shit?
	Yeah, it's all gonna be this.
	They're all gonna play make-em-ups anyway, so you might as well just do the thing that's the right thing to do.
	Yeah, I think we're past the point of trying to walk the line at this stage.
	Well, our politicians aren't, unfortunately.
	They still are pretending they're living in a different world where they can.
	Or some days they sound like they're taking a hard line, and the next day they're not.
	And that's not good enough.
	If you're over the age of 75, you probably are living in a different world.
	Also there.
	Also there.
	Good Lord, Glenn Greenwald.
	Anyway, now in the next clip, Russell is about to present the argument that the MAGA movement is in fact not religious enough.
	Yes, because if ultimately these movements are undergirded by, if not the same, but comparable economic interests, there's a trajectory that can be predicted.
	Ultimately, the resources will be directed towards the kind of...
	to operate with and move within the lines that are established always within that kind of framework.
	I suppose that's why it's interesting and such a hideous phantom from the past to consider those
	truly ideological movements that were to some degree not materialistic, i.e. the
	Does he mean Nazis?
	of the 20th century, obviously I will acknowledge the horrors that they led to, but when you
	start to establish ideals that are not about materialism, and it seems that much of the
	populist America First, or many of the ethno-national, even if they're not explicitly ethno-national,
	even if they're sort of patriotic or nostalgic, many of these movements seem to me to be trying
	to revitalise and establish a kind of a sense of purpose, a sense of tribe, a sense of unity,
	a sense of coherence, a sense of meaning that goes beyond we're just going to let the markets
	decide, or we're going to let globalists, or in the case of the region of the world
	I live in, sort of EU bureaucrats determine what our life and lifestyle is going to be.
	It seems to me that that's kind of what's Burgeoning, that's what's, you know, waiting to be born.
	Something that is explicitly anti-materialist, perhaps, or certainly anti-establishment seems like a step in the direction of movements that are not able to be housed within the current rubric.
	Yeah, I mean, if you look at, let me just give you a couple examples.
	If you look at Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign, That was, I think, very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically.
	Rhymes with cake.
	Right, so, difficult to pigeonhole ideologically, I'm agreed there.
	Yeah, right.
	We'll get to Vivec in just a second, because that's a whole other can of grifter words, but I want to address what the fuck Russell was just saying.
	Dude!
	That was something!
	What are we talking about?
	So he's saying the MAGA movement needs to embrace ideas that are not based in materialism.
	If I were to be generous, I would say he means not profit-motivated, but in reality we know from his many, many chats on Christianity that he believes secularism, rationalism, and the scientific version of the word materialism, which is to say the opposite of spiritualism, are the downfall of society.
	What's more, his ideas that are not about materialism from the 20th century appear to be, based on his inference, Nazism.
	The thing is, Russia and China, he's labeled Stalin and Mao as atheists before, which again, not accurate.
	We've covered that.
	But yeah, so I think he mostly means Nazis.
	And he's like, look, you know, they had some things right.
	I mean, the thing is to trust him to be consistent within his own feelings about, like, on a given day.
	I'm not going to give that to him.
	Well, he has apologized for Nazis before, though.
	He has done apologetics for the Nazis before.
	Also, I'm not disagreeing, it's just... What is he trying to say?
	I can't parse what he means to even definitively... I can guess, but to infer is a bridge too far for me.
	Yeah, my guess is that the MAGA movement is supposedly not religious enough, and possibly not fucking Nazi enough.
	And I've gotta say, hard disagree on both scores.
	Are we talking about, like, did he accidentally say 20th century and he's talking about, like, the French Revolution and the terror?
	Like, what are we talking about?
	I mean, if he meant that, I would, you know, I would, um, I don't know, there'd be more to talk about, but yeah.
	I know!
	See how far I have to stretch?
	Specifically, oh, nevermind the horrors, you know, and, and, and, um.
	That's what I'm saying, and the outcomes, like the bad outcomes.
	Okay, what?
	Also, to conceive.
	I don't think there's any other way to read it.
	To have any understanding of any revolution of any kind, and usually what has ended up happening in the 20th century is that the Bauer vacuum is filled by people that are not the same revolutionaries, and in fact, The nature abhors a vacuum, the vacuum happens, and then the outcome of the revolutionaries isn't exactly what ends up shaking out.
	To call any revolution glorious or beautiful, even if glorious revolution is in the history books, whatever, to conceive of any of them as pure and good and wholesome, that isn't what we should expect from revolution.
	No, no.
	That's not how this works.
	No, and Russell's problem specifically is that he wants more spirituality infused in there.
	He wants more of the religiosity.
	That's what he's after.
	He's saying, no, no, everyone's kind of, the things that people are striving for are too grounded.
	They're not aiming high enough.
	And I think he might mean that somewhat, literally.
	Oh, so he wants crusades.
	Well, this is what I'm saying.
	I can't help but feel that if Russell ever gets what he wants, we will end up with a literal inquisition and a religious crusade that would make Richard III blush.
	I mean, I'm just taking his own statements to their logical conclusion.
	I know, I know.
	It's insane.
	And I think it's because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
	I mean, there's definitely an aspect to that.
	I think he doesn't know the probable consequences of the things he's talking about, even if he likes the words that are coming out.
	Yeah, if he doesn't know what he's saying, how am I going to know what he's saying?
	Because that was... That was jumbled.
	I would love a full treatise from the man on this specific subject to be able to parse what exactly he's shooting for, but before that... Girl, don't hold your breath.
	No, I know.
	I know.
	God.
	Yeah, but before we can ever achieve that, we first got to hear about Glenn's assessment of Vivek's campaign.
	One of its principal themes, I would say its central theme, was that the main problem with the United States is not that we have too much debt or social spending or this or that, that we've lost any kind of purpose greater than ourselves.
	And so everybody wakes up every day and focuses on their little job in their cubicles.
	People don't have religion, they don't have spirituality, and that's why everybody's on antidepressants, everybody's depressed, everybody has, you know, all kinds of mental health struggles, because if you don't have a, you know, we're social animals, we're meant to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and if you lose that as a country, and I think this is a big part of right-wing populism, then you lose what it means to be human, you know, this kind of connective tissue that makes us feel like we are part of something.
	Mmm, okay.
	We're all depressed because we're not spiritual enough.
	We've lost what we need to be human to feel like we're a part of something.
	That's why Vivec's campaign resonated, apparently.
	Was that his campaign?
	That's news to me.
	I mean, I do agree with the portion about, well, you know, he wasn't coming out with policy or any of this stuff.
	No, no, he was entirely vibes-based, was Vivek, and continues to be constantly at Trump's back at the moment, which is just insane to look at.
	Yeah, I said the part about Glenn not being religious would come back because, well, as far as I know he still isn't, but he's gotten fucking great at sounding like he is.
	I'm going to read to you from a piece that Glenn wrote in 2022 in defense of a Brazilian politician called Cabo Daciolo.
	Daciolo is described as messianic, theocratic, a Christian fundamentalist, and a conspiracy theorist.
	Yeah, he has prophesied the cure of his fellow disabled lawmaker, which has yet to come to pass, by the way.
	He also prophesied being elected president of Brazil in 2018, which I don't think that happened.
	He's also viciously anti-LGBTQ rights and anti-women's rights.
	And he's a piece of shit.
	So this article was written after Glenn's husband fell ill.
	In Glenn's words, quote, Each time Cabo has called me to ask about David, he also conveys messages of support for me and our kids.
	It is usually an overtly religious message, but it is the opposite of alienating.
	It expresses the best and most noble sentiments of the Gospels, which I read for the first time at the age of 21, when I was shocked to find how radically different it was from what I had been taught to believe about the New Testament and Christianity, and how it often found expression in 1980s political debates from the likes of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
	There was nothing evangelizing or mechanical about the biblical verses he references to me.
	They resonate deeply with me.
	He chose them with our family's fear, suffering, and deprivations in mind.
	They provided great comfort, spiritual connection, and love.
	This was the person who I have long heard from the left and still hear is driven by hatred, especially for LGBTs and our families.
	I have a lot more to say about all of this and maybe someday I will return to it.
	For now, I will just say that left-wing politics cannot accommodate or form alliances with or even permit respectful and civil interaction with the Cabo Daciolas of the world.
	He's a picky girl.
	movement that cannot succeed and probably is a movement that should not."
	Unquote. Okay, so because he's nice to me, he can't possibly also be a hateful piece of shit.
	He's a picky girl. Okay. Gotcha.
	Yeah, the argument is stupid on its face, and we've dissected it plenty of times already on this show.
	And then, well, he seems to be warming up to Christianity just a little bit.
	Oh, and of course, using all of that to be like, oh, the left is never going to succeed and shouldn't succeed.
	But yeah, of course, you know, it's a time of emotional crisis for Glenn when this was written, but I can't help but sense a bit of retconning of a lot of his previously outspoken atheist viewpoints.
	Which people can change, and we can see them change and wonder why.
	Yeah, yeah, and yet he's not kind of he's not kind of come out and wholeheartedly, you know been born again anything,
	you know, it's Neither do I neither do I
	The bitter reality is that sure there are good moral points to some of the New Testament in particular
	I think but the bad stuff is also still there And shitheads like Cabo Daciolo get to pick and choose
	which parts they want to listen to based on who they want to hate
	For being different to them that same book with the loving passages in also has passages about burning me at the stake
	or stoning me to death And ultimately, people can and will use the Bible to justify their hatred.
	Cabo Dasciolo is just exactly one of those people.
	Oh, and he hates atheists and said they should round up all the atheists in a football stadium for a crusade from God, and that if nothing happened to the atheists, he would quit politics.
	Glenn, the man literally wants you dead for the entirety of who you are.
	What the fuck are you doing?
	I just don't understand the rationale of like, well, they like me.
	Who do you think they're going to put on the chopping block when they run through everybody else?
	Like, it is very much that.
	Or they're going to find an excuse to kick you out of the boat.
	They're just waiting for the time to do it.
	Come on.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	You know, it'll be the gay atheists that they don't like that are on the chopping block first, and the ones they do like are coming next, I'm afraid, Glenn.
	So, boy oh boy.
	Speaking of Glenn intensely misjudging who people are, apparently Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are socialists who are actually more socialist than most socialists.
	The other issue is, you know, if you look at what Steve Bannon was saying in 2016, I once got in trouble because I said, I think Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson are both more socialists than a lot of people who identify that way.
	And if you listen to what Steve Bannon was saying during the 2016 campaign, or if you listen to what Tucker Carlson in 2018, Did one of the most anti-capitalist segments on Fox News that I've ever seen in my life.
	It was kind of like, what are all these hedge fund managers who are billionaire overlords actually doing for our country?
	They suck out wealth.
	They de-industrialize our country.
	And then all this wealth is just banker wealth.
	It doesn't produce anything.
	It's like vulture capitalism.
	And I think Steve Bannon has a lot of that sense, too.
	You know, this kind of idea that, like, what you need actually is greater empowerment of American workers.
	Now, that has to be paired in their view with the idea that you can't have millions of people flowing over the border.
	into the country, especially illegally every year, otherwise we'll lose the ability to, you know, kind of have a healthy society where people can live fulfilling, economically prosperous lives.
	But a lot of that ideology is focused on the need to get away from corporatism, this kind of extreme view of capitalism, and return to a sort of sense of what is the welfare, prosperity, and happiness of the ordinary citizen.
	You're an immigrant, you fuck!
	Shut up!
	No.
	I'm sorry.
	I yelled.
	I was trying to keep my head away from the- You're an immigrant.
	But you're white.
	And you went to a brown person country so you think it's fucking fine.
	Greenwalled.
	You're an immigrant.
	Get.
	Fucked.
	That.
	Ooh.
	I didn't hear a lot of the other stuff because I was so mad.
	I apologize.
	That's okay.
	That's okay.
	The fury is justified.
	Yeah, so concerned about the ordinary citizen's happiness is Tucker and Bannon.
	Yeah, I can save Glenn some time with his assessments.
	Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are lying liars who lie to their audience for money.
	That is fucking it.
	They're two of the most extreme libertarian free market capitalists you can imagine and I don't give a shit what they've said to Glenn Greenwald or what they've said in front of a microphone because their actions and immense wealth tell enough of the story.
	Also, they have the leeway to be inconsistent, because no one holds their feet to the fire.
	So you can find, just like the Bible, you can find something in there to justify and hold on to your idea that you want to hear.
	Which, I, you know, maybe I have heard this previously, and it just didn't connect, but the notion that Steve Bannon is, like, he said Steve Bannon is about empowering the American worker, and I was like, that sounds Fucking wrong.
	And then he was like, because immigrants, and I was like, oh, no, no, no, no.
	Oh, oh, hey, you know what?
	Excuse me, sir.
	No, no, no.
	Thank you for showing me one of the plays that I should be expecting.
	I should be expecting that argument.
	I should be expecting the anti-Brown people, anti-immigrant, anti-immigration argument to be couched in- For the workers, right?
	The worker, yeah.
	Worker empowerment.
	Yeah, well, you know, ticker jams!
	Everything he just said was like, yeah, you can entertain that if words don't mean things anymore.
	I was going to point out one time that he was just usurping the meaning of words, but it just kept happening.
	So I just had to gesture to the man with my hand in front of me.
	I don't know what else to say about that.
	And also I was a little upset.
	So what are you going to do?
	Oh my god.
	Entirely fair.
	Geez!
	Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are very socialist socialists.
	How does he even get through the sentence without giggling to himself?
	I honestly don't know.
	Practice.
	Practice.
	Yes, yeah, probably.
	Probably.
	He's there doing it in the mirror all morning.
	He's been doing it for a long time.
	That's why.
	Yes, yes, he has.
	Yes, he fucking has.
	He's a seasoned bullshit artist.
	Anyway, Russell wants to talk about Tucker a little bit more, but viewers and Lauren, please watch what Glenn is doing closely in this clip.
	Similarly, Tucker notably opposed that other great myth of our time, progressivism, and I don't mean cultural, but the idea, of course, that we are broadly progressing along technological and medicinal lines, reaching Icarus-like, and we all know how he ended up, into New Apolline territories, when he said that he wouldn't hesitate to ban AI truckers and automated work in order to facilitate great negotiating
	conditions for American workers and drivers. And it seems to me that those kind of
	principles when espoused by someone who identifies with conservatism likely come from
	many of the principles of fraternity that would be found in Christianity and it's often said of
	British socialism that it has more owes more to Methodism than to Marx but having a set
	of social principles I don't mean socialist principles about the idea that people or and
	only be regarded in terms of their utility and when their utility expires so do they
	these are these values these ideas which you know I can see why they might be coupled with
	anti-immigrant pro-boundary type politics it seems to me have a kind of value to them and
	there's certainly values that appear to be popular and ultimately I figure that even if
	these views are at odds with many of the sort of contemporary ideas around battle you
	know no boundaries and immigration is beneficial I suppose these things kind of if that people
	have the right to hear those And have the right to entertain them and even vote for them.
	Oh boy.
	Okay, so if Glenn Greenwald is gonna open mouth chew food into a mic, I gotta leave.
	This is not my choice.
	My brain was made this way.
	I'm so sorry.
	Bye!
	This is one of those rare moments where I'm super glad that Stay Free have a policy of muting the other side when Russell is talking.
	No shit!
	He was chomping away.
	He was munching on something through most like open mouth chewing.
	I almost respect how little he gives a shit.
	You gotta say, like, it is a little bit of, like, it all, the thing is, it's like, all of these interviews are so, like, there is an underlying tension of either we're both, like, we have to keep up the game, and if you don't keep up the game, there's gonna be a problem.
	So there is this kind of underlying tension of, like, we're all on the same, like, we're going down the same path, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You can't bring it up.
	Yeah, but like, but also like, man, oh, that is so fucking rude.
	Like, it's so- He was, I mean, to try and paint a picture for listeners, like, he was grandpa chewing on that thing.
	He was really- It was cow.
	It was cow.
	Giving cow.
	She was giving cow.
	And like- Yeah.
	To watch this kind of like, man, Glenn Greenwald does not give a single solitary shit.
	Does not give a fuck.
	About this.
	Man, oh man.
	I would be, I'd stop the shit and be like, nope.
	I know you're not listening to me.
	I can see your fucking face.
	Sir, excuse me.
	Don't chew on my show.
	This is not a Wendy's, sir.
	Right.
	Like, I'm sorry.
	Do you have better things to do?
	You should have noshed a little bit before we got here.
	If you're hungry, we can stop right now and you can go and do your thing, sir.
	I don't want to make this, like, it sounds superficial.
	It does.
	Like, to just say that, and, because for me, it is, like, I know what my kryptonite looks like.
	I know what, like, all my grades in college were a fucking grade letter lower, at least because of the existence of chewing gum.
	I don't get to make these choices, and nobody helped me manage it.
	I've just been out here in the wild fucking suffering.
	And, like, it's, misophonia is not fun.
	I don't like it at all!
	But like, there is a little honey badger to it that I do have to say.
	Yeah, it's a baller move in a way.
	It's a very fuck you and your fucking listeners.
	Yeah, I don't give a shit.
	Yeah, I'm not bringing it up just for the aesthetics of it.
	There's a deeper quality to the disregard Yeah, just no subtlety, no trying to know anything. It's
	incredibly distracting to watch him chomp his way around what I think it was a lozenge or something,
	to the point where I had to watch this clip about five times before I properly took in what
	Russell was saying.
	Obviously I have no idea what Russell said.
	No, no.
	Russell wasn't helping me!
	But I have no idea.
	You're gonna have to help me out.
	ALICE Also, you were giggling at my horror-struck face the entire time, I had no chance.
	I couldn't help it.
	Watching you being stunned and then watching Glenn just chew harder, I was like, nah.
	What, I'm just like, it's still happening!
	It's still happening, it's getting worse!
	He's opening his mouth wider, why, why?
	Is it gonna be a whole sandwich?
	Like, oh.
	So, what Russell was saying was that, oh god, I had to get back into this now.
	What Russell was saying was that Tucker rejects technological progressivism and is against AI and robotics and blah blah blah.
	I did.
	I got that far and I'm like, oh, okay.
	Yeah.
	And I mean, I think plenty of people are skeptical and concerned about AI, so fucking whatever.
	What Russell is saying is that people have the right to hear and vote for ideas that involve them being more than just a utility, like in the current system where people are either productive or cast aside.
	And again, Russell, the thing you're railing against is called capitalism, for the thousandth time.
	Capitalism is the problem, but you can't say that because it would alienate your audience and their god king.
	He also says that he understands why the concept of people being treated as more than units of production being tied to anti-immigration rhetoric makes sense.
	Yeah, and curiously, he doesn't seem to push back on the idea or describe it as problematic in any way at all.
	Again, it would alienate his audience if he tried, regardless of what he believes.
	So yeah, that's pretty much what he was saying in the moment.
	Well, yeah.
	And the AI thing, I think that I am also very worried.
	Man, that makes me mad because I remember a while back I described like, oh yeah, we went to Roswell.
	We actually got to watch real commercials on TV.
	And yeah, Pat... Not Pat Robertson.
	He's dead.
	He's dead, yeah.
	Baker Buckets, Jim Baker, had this whole impending doom destruction of AI and likening it to a nuclear holocaust.
	Now, There are also commercials that I see on TV for my streaming services that say, that are like, AI can do this magical logistics thing, and I can't help but watch those commercials and think, what if one thing goes wrong?
	Like, what if one thing in that computer program Either as an input issue for humans, or just in the guts of the thing itself.
	Well, if that goes wrong, destruction could be, like, the destruction could be epic.
	The problem could be epic.
	Now, that's not how, like, that's, I'm engaging in good faith that I understand, just like the, the, Humans have not proven themselves to be responsible across the board with nuclear power.
	That's the complaint that we have against nuclear power.
	It's not that it's inherently good or bad, necessarily.
	It's that humans can't be trusted to keep it safe and good.
	It is too big of a problem.
	We can't be trusted with it.
	So AI will get to a point where they're like, I'm just going to hit a button and everything will be fine.
	And like, no, something really bad could happen.
	And we can't ignore the ramifications of a problem.
	Humans aren't great at this level of risk management.
	That's the thing that we need to keep an eye on.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Great power, great responsibility, right?
	It's the Spider-Man lore of the universe.
	And yeah, we as a species, as a collective, are not great with that.
	Some places are in the world, some places really fucking are not.
	And capitalism, that would be the factor that is really, but also not necessarily all the time!
	Yeah, I mean, you know, my brother, you know, Senior Scientific Advisor to the Welsh Government, he specifically works with nuclear.
	That's his field.
	You know, and he deals a lot with the regulation side of it and the problems therein.
	And, you know, it's not perfect in this country.
	Drastically fucking underfunded is typically the problem.
	Which is the danger.
	That's what causes the danger!
	Exactly, exactly.
	And we are considered a fairly responsible country in terms of dealing with nuclear power.
	So, you know, let alone countries that give less of a shit about, you know, big clouds
	of radiation making their way across the world, that kind of thing.
	So, you know, yeah, no, I agree with you.
	And AI is very much the same thing.
	It's like, okay, this is a massive amount of power, but, you know, it needs to be under strict and tight kind of conditions.
	And it doesn't feel like that's what we're doing right now as a society.
	Not at all.
	Yeah, anyway, we should be able to vote for all of the things that Russell just said, so to be more than just a unit of productivity, and I guess alongside that the anti-immigration rhetoric as well.
	Fantastic.
	Glenn's response was nothing especially interesting to that, so we're going to move on just a little bit to where Glenn is no longer eating, and hear Russell pose a different question.
	Because much of what you do is about bringing together complex information and telling stories using that data.
	It's interesting to me when one discovers in conversation that still the modes and methods of the powerful involve quite arcane ideas like just flooding a population with terror.
	That the issue of Julian Assange's imprisonment seems just less significant relatively if you feel like you're in an existential crisis.
	It also helps me to see now the value, importance and power of independent media almost in real time.
	If you take something like the Nord Stream Pipeline, it was almost like it seemed ridiculous When it was reported that it was Russian sabotage, when it was clear what the dynamics and effect and point of that pipeline was.
	People could quickly say, no, it's more likely that this is a sort of a Navy SEAL, ARP, maybe Poland were involved, potentially them.
	Everything has collapsed.
	The amount of time has collapsed.
	That's why it's interesting to discover, for example...
	the journalists did some reporting on Moderna's surveillance and the amount of money Moderna
	are spending on tracking and de-amplifying dissenting voices like Alex Berenson and Jay
	Bhattacharya but you know obviously they I was targeted by them. It's interesting to see how
	independent media voices will be smeared, maligned and attacked in order to preserve these interests.
	And I afforded myself a wry smile and a slightly terrified chuckle when you said, if you want to attack establishment power, do be ready for them to attack you a lot more seriously because of what's happened to me recently.
	It's a sort of a recognizable playbook, is it?
	And now that independent media is so influential and effective, it's something that we're likely to see more of, I suppose.
	You gotta warn me.
	You gotta warn me.
	This isn't fun.
	I can't.
	That's the last one.
	Last one?
	Are you sure?
	I'm 99% sure.
	He now has a mouth full of... You cut the clips!
	You're either 100% or 0% sure!
	I'm not yet... Okay, 100%.
	100% sure.
	I'm not yet.
	No, no, I'm, I'm okay.
	A hundred percent.
	Yeah.
	If it happens in your surprise, I'm not going to hold it against you.
	But if you're pretty sure that you're convinced that it's over.
	I can't remember exactly when he swallows.
	But either way, he now has a mouthful of lozenge and it's buried in his cheek.
	So he has to answer the next question with a mouthful of lozenge.
	Still not great.
	It's not fantastic.
	Just the flowery, like, Just the faff around these questions that are so simple and like, why are we talking about the Nord Stream Pipeline with your persecution complex in the media?
	Yeah, I don't know why he's bringing both of those things into the mix, but that was another brief reference to our first episode where we did cover that there Nord Stream Pipeline.
	Available evidence since we first covered it points at the sabotage most likely being a Ukrainian operation, not a Navy SEAL one like Russell just said, but conspiracy theorists will keep conspiracying.
	That was wild.
	Yeah, and Ukraine do still deny any and all involvement, so there is that.
	Pipelines are a great example of humans not doing enough, like not being willing to do enough to protect the environment, to protect each other from the effects of these massive environmental undertakings.
	It's a lot of work and a lot of money.
	Yeah, and they usually don't keep it out of the groundwater, so come on.
	Track record is not good for us to trust you.
	Nope.
	And Russell is once again expressing his victim complex, yet again saying, I've been attacked.
	Which is a funny way of saying, I attacked several women, and it turns out people don't like that very much, but hey, he's been attacked.
	Validated by, of course, by Glenn Greenwald with a mouth stuffed full of lozenge.
	Oh, what happened to this show?
	Right, as it is, the part of that question that Glenn seizes on is Julian Assange, so here is his answer.
	I think people forget, because of everything that happened in the Julian Assange case, that the very first thing they did to him after that 2010 leak of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the diplomatic cables Beyond trying to convene a grand jury to criminally prosecute him, and they ultimately found they couldn't find anything, but what they really tried to do was use allegations of sex crimes against him.
	Suddenly, these two women in Sweden appeared together.
	They didn't really claim he had raped them, but it became a rape charge because they said that they were having consensual sex with him.
	They asked him to use a condom and he didn't, which under Swedish law is rape.
	It ended up, you know, they were clearly not interested in investigating it.
	They could have gone and interviewed him at the...
	Embassy, they chose not to.
	They pretended they had to get him onto Swedish soil, but he wouldn't go there.
	The Ecuadorians protected him because they knew if he went there, they would give him over to the Americans.
	The whole thing was a farce, but that was what led to the entire process, first of creating a big cloud around Julian Assange, and then, you know, forcing him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy and not be able to leave for nine years, and then ultimately bullying the Ecuadorians out of asylum and going to arrest Julian Assange.
	We've covered Julian Assange being a piece of shit before but I will give a brief overview.
	There were several rape charges, unlawful coercion and many cases of sexual molestation levelled at Julian Assange.
	Sweden wanted to extradite him from the Ecuadorian embassy to be able to arrest and try him for the charges.
	Ecuador wouldn't comply and Assange managed to wait it out for years until the evidence for said charges had weakened enough for them to be dropped.
	Real piece of shit.
	As for why he's in prison, he was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for helping Chelsea Manning hack a government computer and has been avoiding extradition to the U.S.
	The very final appeal hearing on that point will be on the 20th and 21st of February 2024 this year, at which point the expectation is he will most likely be extradited to the U.S.
	immediately to face the justice system.
	Extradition laws.
	Just know what they are before you make accusations, right?
	Yeah.
	Extradition treaties are a thing.
	Yeah.
	That's part of the legal system.
	Yeah, he fucked around, he found out.
	Yeah, I don't, I mean, give me evidence that Collusion was occurring between America and Sweden, and I'll listen.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But there was no evidence.
	That sounded like another Megamups to me.
	It might be on his LiveJournal, I don't know.
	Oh yeah, in terms of the conspiracy there to, you know, to hide, you know, to get rid of Julian Assange because it was too difficult a problem.
	Yeah, fuck off.
	Yeah, sure.
	But, I mean, the right don't exactly have a history of believing women, so we'll say that.
	Right?
	Right.
	Kind of the most important first step.
	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
	He is making these bold claims on the right show, I will say that.
	That's true!
	In the second half of his answer.
	He knows his crowd!
	Yes.
	Glenn gives the allegations against Russell one hell of a lot of cover, and engages in more than a little bit of gross flattery.
	The thing that always amazes me, Russell, I always go back to this, is when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers.
	What the Nixon administration did was they ordered a break-in of his psychoanalyst's office to try and find out what are his psychosexual secrets, to release them, so that you kind of hear about Daniel Ellsberg's sexual fantasies or deviations or whatever, and everyone's like, ew, I don't want to have anything to do with Daniel Ellsberg or his Pentagon Papers.
	It always struck me as such a non-sequitur when I was young and naive.
	Like, why would you break into a psychoanalyst's office as a response to the Pentagon Papers?
	But that's the playbook.
	And if you can create kind of a personal sexual scandal around the dissident, which is almost always done, you can get a lot of people to just instinctively turn away and say, oh, this person is someone who's kind of scummy, who I shouldn't trust, who I just kind of want to avoid.
	And that is something that you see over and over and over happening to people who end up in those positions.
	I suppose it's difficult for me to entirely indulge that because it feels self-aggrandizing to put myself into that kind of category where really what we're doing... I'll say it for you!
	I mean, I've said it for you, so you don't have to.
	Oh dear.
	Yeah, okay, so sexual preferences are of course the same as being a serial sexual assaulter and rapist.
	Thank you for the false equivalency there, Glenn.
	And Russell is actually exactly the same as Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange.
	Well, maybe he's a little bit like Julian Assange.
	The Daniel Ellsberg thing, like, sorry you're simple, that you didn't figure out that they were trying to find dirt on a guy by Breaking into their doctor's office.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, you're simple.
	Don't apply that to everybody else.
	Sorry you took your time getting there.
	That sounds like a YP, sir.
	Don't extrapolate that.
	It's also never presented in an innocent way.
	It was a completely random and not associated burglary.
	Don't extrapolate that.
	Like, no one-- it's also never presented in an innocent way.
	Like, oh, they just-- well, it was a completely random and not associated burglary.
	Like, no, no, no.
	No one's saying that.
	And you thinking that because you were--
	you're claiming you thought that because you were young and naive.
	That's your problem.
	That's not--
	Yes, indeed.
	You can't extrapolate that past you.
	That's weird.
	That's weird.
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	It is weird, it is weird.
	As are the comparisons to these here whistleblowers.
	Greenwald, as mentioned previously, doesn't really give a shit about most people or things.
	Except, Russell's audience is about six times the size of Greenwald's, at least.
	Yeah, so he's laying the flattery on thick and heavy.
	It is gross, and this man knows better.
	He's not stupid, he knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows, he knows that there's no way the allegations against Russell were manufactured.
	He just doesn't care, as long as there's a way for him to profit.
	Like, Greenwald knows this, he was a journalist once, he now does this.
	But, you know, wow.
	Wow.
	You know what, though?
	If I could just snack or leave when, like, so there is another, there's, Greenwald's been, I think, in our, like, our orbit, you know, like, recently, and whenever, like, his time is up, he was, he was contracted for three hours to show up at this little talk, and as soon as three hours hit, he was like, bye!
	Yeah, he didn't even buy, he just noped out.
	Yeah, you gotta respect somebody who knows their boundaries and will enforce them, to be fair.
	But also, everything feels, like I was saying earlier, everything feels like a little bit of a tension and a power play.
	And even if he's saying things that are nice, I can still hear, you know, there's been several moments in this in this interview where like, oh, Glenn Greenwald thinks what you just said is stupid.
	And you're not aware that he, you know, like thinks that you're kind of dumb.
	And I'm not saying that he's correct.
	And maybe you should be less of a judge generally, but like also correct.
	But like, I mean, the eating thing is like that seems like LBJ, like whipping your dick out to take a piss in public.
	Yes.
	And everyone around you just has to deal with it.
	Like, that ain't just because you gotta pee.
	It ain't just because you're hungry.
	Fucking suck it up.
	That's rude.
	Don't be rude.
	Yes.
	So it's that tension that like makes this all kind of like extra uncomfortable.
	But then this, him like, Glenn Greenwald then like playing into Russell not wanting to self-aggrandize, but then, oh, I will!
	Okay, well.
	You can see that there's an insincerity if you won't like put food in your mouth while they're talking, like while you're in an interview.
	This interview isn't five fucking hours long, dog, come on.
	No.
	No, it was what?
	Three quarters of an hour, roughly?
	This whole thing.
	That's tough.
	That's tough.
	What are you going to do?
	That's weird.
	Now Glenn has some things to say about those of us who dare call him and Russell conspiracy theorists.
	But it seems like by putting videos online where you're critical of the deep state or corporate interests or COVID policy or the origins of the war in Ukraine or the increasing power of organizations like NATO, WF, WHO, it's like I know how it will be reported on outside of these spaces.
	They'll go, conspiracy theorist Russell Brand claims, then that's disrespectful.
	You know, but it's there is a precedent, it seems, for that.
	Russell, think about this.
	The people who call you a conspiracy theorist, and of course I've been called that, you know, everybody who's a critic of the establishment gets called that, these are the people who went around for four years claiming that Vladimir Putin had secretly seized control of the United States by having a PP pornographic tape of President Trump urinating on prostitutes in the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
	They were constantly claiming that Russians were hiding under every bed, were controlling our country, even while Trump did exactly the things that would be most harmful to the vital interest of Moscow, like Blood Ukraine with lethal arms and trying to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
	He was trying to bully the Germans out of buying natural gas from the US and not from Russia.
	I mean, what a weird blackmail victim to go around doing the worst possible things to Putin.
	But it doesn't matter.
	These are the real conspiracy theorists.
	And, you know, all the stuff with COVID, the minute you try to question whether or not this was done through a lab leak and not through a natural occurrence.
	Oh, that's a malicious conspiracy theory they publish in Lancet.
	These are the ways that they control dissent.
	They're free to disseminate the most ins— Remember, the Hunter Biden laptop came out right before the 2020 election, and what did they say?
	It's Russian disinformation.
	The Russians are behind it.
	It was a total lie.
	It was a total deranged conspiracy theory that came from NBC and CNN and major media outlets.
	It didn't come from independent media.
	So this idea of conspiracy theory is always what they try and do to discredit anybody who deviates from their orthodoxies.
	Thanks.
	He can't turn his phone off either.
	Cool.
	So yeah, I don't know.
	Yeah.
	Listeners or viewers, I don't know, but like I heard it at least in my ears that his phone started vibrating on the table where his laptop is, which I, listen, the, the, the wiggly laptop struggle with your, with your camera.
	I get it.
	It's tough, but that means I got to work extra hard to not touch my table.
	So I look like some semblance of a professional, and letting the folks vibrate on the table.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We don't make millions out of this show.
	Glenn Greenwald does make millions doing what he does, so I feel like we can maybe expect a higher standard.
	Yeah, that was a lot.
	So, Russian interference in US politics and elections is a conspiracy theory, apparently.
	Except for the, you know, evidence.
	You know, and the multiple arrests of Russian agents for doing exactly the things that we've said that they're doing.
	Which, one might say, might take it from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact, to use Russell's terminology.
	Well, and he's making that, like, extreme example that no one is saying, just to bolster his argument.
	Yeah, no, no one is making the argument that all Putin is- That Putin was secretly running America?
	Secretly running the country, shut up.
	No, just nobody was!
	No, no, no.
	It's a straw man is what it is.
	As for the pee tape, I couldn't care less if Trump likes to get peed on.
	More power to you.
	And it wouldn't overly surprise me if the tape exists, but if it does, my bet is that it's far from the worst thing that the Russians could have on Donald Trump.
	Yeah, right?
	I was like, don't care.
	Super don't care.
	Put the laptop and you put the pee tape in a box and throw it in the fucking ocean.
	I don't care about those two things.
	I care about using the presidency and using all your money to leverage fucking shady, Oh, what do I think?
	Realty, you know, like shady property deals.
	And yeah, to like leverage real estate and leverage money laundering and leverage like favoritism for your fucking kids to be able to keep your money in the family so you can hide it better.
	Yeah, I'm worried about all of that.
	That's what I'm concerned with.
	Can we talk about that?
	The pee tape from everybody.
	Fucking shut up!
	I don't care about the color of his skin.
	Honestly, I think that Donald Trump's hair is hilarious.
	I don't care.
	I'm not going to complain about it.
	As is his suits.
	They're funny.
	He looks like a deflated blow-up dinosaur.
	Great.
	Comedy gold.
	I don't care about- Tiny hands as well.
	It's all hilarious.
	It's all there.
	What I actually care about- The dancing?
	Funny.
	Is the stuff.
	Yeah, the actual, the laws.
	The laws!
	Yeah, like the actual illegal dealings that are going to impact us as Americans and going to hurt us as a society.
	Beyond that, you know, I realize this is kind of a quaint notion at this point, but for anyone who wants to lead a country, I care about just moral stuff as well because that should be cared about.
	That should be cared about for a president.
	That's absolutely fucking true.
	If you start listing those things as well, by God, it's a long fucking list.
	And as for Hunter Biden's laptop, I know you don't care about it, but Glenn Greenwald resigned over that story.
	He cares about it.
	He's gonna bring it up any chance he gets, because he resigned over that story.
	You can't be right, be loud, I guess.
	Well, he's doing something.
	Next, Russell brings up Gonzalo Lira, or Coach Redpill, who we spoke about last week.
	Gonzalo Lira?
	He died in jail in Ukraine.
	At his most recent White House press dinner, Biden talked a lot, and passionately, within the limitations that he always appears to experience, about the importance of the free press, and how it's a foundational principle, and our site in Jefferson and stuff.
	He predicted his own death and why is it important?
	Why is it not reported on in the legacy media where you know when they would talk about other journalists that were behind bars and it'd be something they would celebrate and magnify?
	The way human rights concerns work is very simple.
	Human rights concerns are weaponized against the countries we dislike and want to destabilize.
	So you hear constantly about the mistreatment of LGBTs in Iran, or the mistreatment of women in Iran.
	But you almost never hear about the mistreatment of LGBTs in Egypt, or in Saudi Arabia, or women in those countries, or at the UAE, or Bahrain, or Jordan, because these are all American allies.
	We have no interest in destabilizing those countries, so we don't care about the human rights abuses of them.
	But Iran...
	Which is a more open and democratic place than any of those other countries I just named, certainly than Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
	It's a constant drumbeat of, you know, how are they treating their women?
	How are they treating their elders?
	Why?
	Why do we hear so much about Iran and nothing about these other more savage countries?
	Because Iran is a country adversarial to the United States, and these other countries are our close allies.
	We prop them up, we arm them, we finance them, so the U.S.
	media ignores their abuses.
	More savage countries.
	That's the phrase he just used.
	Lovely.
	So from the off, this is some dumb whataboutism.
	It's incredibly obvious and a bad argument.
	So Iran's treatment of women and LGBTQ plus people cannot be excused by other countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia also treating their women and LGBTQ plus people poorly.
	Or in the case of Saudi Arabia, torturing and murdering gay people.
	It is incredibly obvious whataboutism, and here's a fun fact for you.
	Glenn Greenwald was on the debate team in college, and he has a law degree.
	He knows exactly what he's doing here in this clip.
	Like, he knows exactly what he's saying.
	What's of course even dumber is that a very brief cursory Google search brings back tons of articles from the BBC, New York Times, Al Jazeera, et cetera, et cetera, on these very issues if you ever bothered to fucking look.
	That's what I was waiting for.
	I was like, how easy is this to find?
	It's just, it's all right in front of you.
	Like, Glenn Greenwald, you might not be in the right media sphere to see those articles naturally.
	I did!
	Sorry about your algorithm, dog.
	Sorry about your algorithm.
	Given that you apparently hate the LGBTQ community so much, I am not surprised.
	But I promise you, those articles do exist.
	Yeah.
	Like, they are fucking there.
	Just because you've not seen them, doesn't mean they don't exist.
	This isn't fucking, you know, ostrich theory.
	Like, Jesus wept.
	Oh, wow.
	Right, we've got one final clip, and Glenn gets to chat about Gonzalo Lira, finally.
	So when you have somebody like Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen, literally not just being arrested
	and imprisoned for his criticisms of this war that he has every right as an American citizen
	to criticize since his government is financing it, but to kill him in prison
	through mistreatment and negligence, it's the kind of thing that ordinarily
	the United States government would be screaming bloody murder over.
	It's their obligation to protect their citizen.
	But Ukraine is our puppet government and we have no interest in criticizing Ukraine.
	And so the idea that Gonzalo Lira was a critic of the war means in a lot of people's minds, like Julian Assange,
	that he's a Russian agent and therefore he got what he deserved.
	That's extraordinary.
	Glenn, thank you for coming on and providing, as usual, the standard of education and passion that we associate with you.
	Cheers for coming on, Glenn.
	I appreciate your time, mate.
	Always great to see you, Russell.
	Hope you're well.
	Thanks so much.
	Okay.
	Now, now.
	Goodbye, Glenn.
	We covered this last week.
	Gonzalo Lira was a piece of shit, misogynistic YouTuber known as Coach Red Pill, throwing pro-Russian propaganda around during wartime in Ukraine.
	He was jailed, released on bail, he tried to flee the country, breaking the terms of his bail, and was consequently imprisoned for doing so, because he was a literal flight risk.
	He then unfortunately got pneumonia and died in hospital.
	There is also a rumor that he was supplying troop and weaponry information to Russia, but there is no credible source for that point.
	Yeah, it's unfortunate, but the guy fucked around, very much found out, before dying of natural causes at 55.
	Very unfortunate.
	Well, but even if it's pneumonia, like, okay, is, yeah, you gotta, yeah, prisons being a bad place in wartime, you gotta give me more than that.
	Yeah, also in general.
	Exactly, exactly.
	It's like, well, yes, populated place, probably not in the best of conditions.
	Yeah, stuff's gonna go round.
	It famously does.
	Maybe.
	Try and avoid ending up being there, you know?
	Rather than putting videos up about how the Russian invasion is the best invasion in history and all of that shit.
	Yeah, I just I feel like, oh, you just do something wrong and you end up in jail, then you just complain about the like you find a weird pet complaint about politics, then magically you're a political prisoner.
	That's not how that works.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	And, you know, he very much could have avoided the situation twice.
	And there we go.
	He went back.
	Yeah, it's unfortunate, you know.
	Prison should be in better conditions all the time, I'm sure.
	Agreed, agreed.
	Do you know what?
	A war shouldn't be happening there, full stop.
	Also that.
	We can start with that.
	That would be cool.
	That would be cool.
	And know for a fact that we have different solutions to that problem compared to these two chuckleheads.
	Ah, boy.
	So, yeah.
	Fuck Glenn Greenwald, I guess, is where I land on this whole conversation.
	I mean, I see it.
	I get it.
	I get like, I know what I'm looking at now.
	I don't think I had to confront his like, attitude or disregard or like, you know, flippantness, necessarily.
	But whenever you brought up at the beginning, Rachel Maddow praising him
	for being this aggressive advocate, one of the best advocates that the left has.
	So Naomi Klein and Doppelganger, which I finished a little while back,
	the book is basically about how she has a very similar name, Naomi Klein,
	to Naomi Wolf, and it became this joke on her Twitter where people were like, "Wrong Naomi,"
	because they would be...
	So in a sense, she kind of got to track...
	Naomi Wolf's career as this like famous feminist, she wrote The Beauty Myth, and this is like this feminist kind of treatise.
	And people were kind of like, wow, she's really, you know, like falling off.
	I trusted this person and Naomi climbed to the point where she's like, had like a stock response of like, wrong Naomi.
	That's not me.
	So that she got this kind of front row seat to this descent into now Naomi Wolf, who Naomi Klein looked up to as a professional, right?
	And met her.
	There's a story at the end of the book that's kind of fucked up and harrowing, but very telling, that Naomi Wolf is now on the war room with Steve Bannon.
	She's in it.
	And the same kind of like accolades were were given to her.
	And it's like Clinton and like all this kind of stuff like and advising the Gore campaign.
	And I think that we need to be especially strict about how we judge our most aggressive allies.
	Because if they don't have a foundation, and like what she had a foundation is is white feminism.
	Not feminism.
	She was disregarding and discounting a lot of feminist tenets for the sake of her feelings and ignoring a lot of the discussion about feminism in general.
	And so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised whenever these people that just like to fucking fight and like to fucking argue show up and like, oh, being aggressive Isn't necessarily and I know it's me saying this isn't necessarily the you know the the heroic move I think maybe if they just find the thing that people want to listen to them argue about so then whenever these cultural shifts happen.
	Seeing them shift along with it, chameleon style, I don't think we should be fucking surprised, or listen to people that were sounding the alarm back whenever they were on top of their game, because I bet there's a lot of people that are like, I hear dog whistles up in this and I don't know about it.
	ALICE Yeah, probably.
	I think, yeah, if we're hearing someone say something we agree with, we are far less likely to examine them critically.
	And that's exactly what Jimmy Dore fuckin' went through.
	A hundred percent.
	Everyone was like, he's saying lefty things, isn't he?
	And then things progress, so, oh no, wait.
	And now you can look back and you can track it, and you can see, like, oh, okay, now Now I understand where this has come from.
	It was really there all along, it's just you don't recognize it when it sounds like something you agree with.
	And if you bitch about it loud enough, like me, everybody just calls you fucking crazy.
	And a buzzkill, you know what I mean?
	Us kills unite, that's why we're here. Well, it's just, it's something that like,
	I think that, um, that is the double-edged sword of like, Any Path Up The Mountain. Like,
	oh my god, I wish Russell was not saying this. Oh my god, I wish Russell even mentioned capitalism,
	because I feel like Glenn Greenwald is the best I have heard at towing the line,
	because every single time he started talking, his first sentence or two, I agreed with.
	I absolutely agreed, but then where he end up, I was like, "What? Oh, we're on a rocket to Mars.
	Oh, this is way out of left field." And that's the problem with, "Oh, any way up the mountain,
	as long as we get there."
	Not necessarily, and that's tough.
	That's hard.
	Yeah, and with people like Glenn Greenwald specifically, who do make this transition from being legitimate and good at what they were doing, especially in a field like journalism, And investigative journalism, you know, it lends such a kind of such a kind of an amount of credibility to him as a person and to what he is saying.
	And and obviously, you know, that's being that's being weaponized, you know, with the things that he's saying now.
	And that's that's bitterly unfortunate.
	And consent can be rescinded at any time.
	That includes, like, down from the Julian Assange story, that he was like, well, I don't know, which is gross!
	Or just, I don't trust you anymore.
	You can trust someone and then find stuff out and say, I don't trust you anymore.
	And that's not persecution.
	They're not being punished.
	Yes, no, absolutely.
	The left have definitely gone through that with Glenn Greenwald, I think, for the most part.
	But now the right are able to say, oh look, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, he's on our side.
	Which, you know, fantastic.
	I do kind of wish there was a way to have a hard reset on people, like with Russell, to just be able to press a button and be like, okay, What is it that you do?
	What are you doing?
	And instead of Google showing up as actor and comedian, it'll show up, you know, alt-right shithead slash sexual assaulter.
	I will say that Googling about him is a lot harder now.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I will say that Google is doing a decent job of putting the Channel 4 documentary in the Times.
	It's a much harder experience for Russell anyway, that's for sure.
	That's what I'm saying, is at least Russell's... If you give him a Google, mmm... And, like, any verb.
	Yes, true.
	We know the man does like to Google himself.
	So hey, that's a fun thing to think about.
	Well, all right.
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	Yes, and go have a further look at Lauren's store.
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	Alright everybody, well, yeah, we'll see you next week.
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	Alright, we'll see you next week everybody.

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