Today we're joined by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and Rumble host, Glenn Greenwald to discuss the latest round of indictments against Donald Trump - are they legit? A distraction against the Biden family crimes or a strategic move by the Democrats? Plus, why are the Democrats advocating for funding the war in Ukraine when most Americans oppose it? And, given Dianne Feinstein's apparent cognitive decline, should there be a test to evaluate the mental fitness of elected officials, especially those holding significant power?Join us at ‘Community 2024' https://www.russellbrand.com/community/Come see me LIVE: https://www.russellbrand.com/live-dates/ For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Hello there you awakening wonders, welcome to the limitless glory that you participate in through the miracle of your own consciousness through which you can control your anatomy and indeed your life.
If liberty should ever return to a planet that is increasingly interested in centralizing authority, surveilling us, controlling and censoring us.
Not here though, well...
For the first 15 minutes, we are on YouTube, so there will be a degree of censorship.
But after that, we're going to be on Rumble.
And of course, today, we're talking about Trump's third arraignment.
And we're talking about what this means for free speech, what this means for democracy.
In our item, here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
We'll talk a little bit about Tucker's interview with Hunter Biden's former business partner and whether or not there are significant revelations in there that ultimately amount to the criminality of the Biden family.
Once we get to being exclusively on Rumble, our home where we revel in free speech, where we bathe in the ambrosia of free speech, where we sup upon the sweet teat of free speech, we'll be talking to Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, pioneer, investigator, friend and co-conspirator over on Rumble.
First, let's talk about your free speech, my free speech, everyone's free speech.
And if you want to enjoy a little bit of free speech right now, press that red button on your screen.
You can join our locals community, where free speech is our watchword.
They're speaking in there so freely, even now.
People are talking about the federal government.
Close-up pictures of dear Dianne Feinstein.
That's from USA Now.
People want to hear an interview, huh?
They want to hear an interview.
That's Deb Hart.
You want to hear an interview with Glenn Greenwald?
Yeah, but you're going to hear one.
Ash Eller is there chatting to us.
Some people saying that they want to hear free speech.
Free speech.
Yeah, you'll be getting free speech.
That we can guarantee you.
Should we have a little... Well, let's have a look at this headline.
Biden's Department of Justice has just asked the court to limit what Trump can say, which is absurd, isn't it?
Because it's a free speech case and they want to not let him speak freely.
Is that a bit crazy?
My on-screen assistant, associate, co-writer...
Partner, friend, Gareth Roy?
Yeah, it seems a little ironic, you could say.
Is that literal irony?
Ah, who knows?
Who knows anymore?
I mean, the fact that, you know, this is all about whether Donald Trump made knowingly false claims, whether he had the right to make those claims, if he honestly believed that the election results were wrong, and that that's what this whole thing is hanging on to.
It's extraordinary because it's a high court case where a former president is potentially being indicted that hinges upon epistemology and ontology.
What does he know?
What is happening in the private hermeneutics of Donald Trump's mind?
You knew that that election was fair and yet you're saying it's not.
That's led people to say that they must have some evidence as yet not revealed.
Do you think they've got evidence they've not revealed yet?
Let us know in the chat.
My favourite bit is when your man there, Smith, what's he called?
Jack Smith.
Jack Smith said that he was sowing doubt.
Where is that bit?
Smith's indictment cites Trump's speech on January 6th as a feature of his effort to sow doubt about the election and allegedly organise a conspiracy to overturn it.
Sew doubt.
Sewing doubt.
That's such an odd, almost folkish piece of language.
Don't you dare.
Don't you ever sew doubt in me.
Because that sort of suggests you can control the consciousness of other people, that you're responsible for what other people think. It's becoming a bit diffuse, a bit tangential
and a bit abstract. One person who is never tangential, abstract or in any way anything
less than robust in his discourse is Donald Trump. Let's have a look at him addressing these
charges now. Those indictments aren't worth the paper they're written on. Former President Donald Trump
keeps fighting back after being charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.
This weekend, he ramped up his attacks, railing against the man who was leading the grand jury investigation, Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Deranged Jack Smith.
He's a deranged human being.
And on social media, Trump deranged.
That's good, isn't it?
That's what he is.
He's a berserk.
He's crazy.
He's a lunatic.
Posted, if you go after me, I'm coming after you.
Which prompted prosecutors to ask the judge to limit Trump's outbursts.
That means prohibit his free speech.
The problem is, I suppose, is that with the ongoing conversation, which we'll be covering later in the show, around the Biden family's business dealings and the degree to which Joe Biden knew about and was involved with Hunter Biden's business interests, in particular with Burisma in Ukraine, If corruption becomes part of the system, not a bug but a feature, how can a charge of corruption in any way harm Trump?
You'll be aware that since these allegations have amped up, since these prosecutions have increased in intensity, so has Donald Trump's popularity.
It's extraordinary to find ourselves in a time where our trust in the establishment is so low.
Our loathing of conventional politics So charged, so heady and high, that if an anti-establishment figure is significantly attacked, we like them more, not less.
This leads us to an important question and I'd love you guys to answer it.
Do you think that the Democrat establishment are strategically attacking Trump, knowing this will increase his popularity because they would prefer to For Biden to face Trump in 2024 than any other candidate, or do you think they're making a mistake?
Let us know now.
We had a poll a little bit earlier.
Let's have a look at the results of that poll and remind me of the question, would you guys?
Do you think the Democrats' pursuit of Trump Stay free with Russell Brand.
because they want to face him a distraction from Biden family corruption.
You have resoundedly answered that, but at least 91% of you think that this is a distraction.
What about those of you on locals right now?
Do you agree that it's a distraction?
Certainly, Tulsi Gabbard says that the Trump indictment is a political hit job.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Should we should we talk to Glenn straight away?
Is Glenn available now?
Is Glenn with us?
Yes, he is.
Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, icon, leader, role model to us all, dog owner and man of great beauty.
Hello, Glenn.
Thanks for joining us.
I think you're muted, either your end or our end.
Come on, Glenn.
I wanted to say that was a very insufficiently effusive introduction.
I'd like you to try that again.
I'll go again.
Why don't you re-mute?
I was like, Glenn Greenwald, a man who cannot operate a laptop, even in front of a beautiful mountain scene.
Live from a shack.
Much better.
Thank you.
Much better.
I appreciate that.
What do you think's on the line with the Trump arraignment?
Glenn, like, do you feel that, you know, given that this is a trial that's about free speech and free speech is being curtailed, where do we find ourselves now if the Dem establishment continues down this path?
I was just actually reading a very good and interesting article, uncharacteristically so, in the New York Times by the former Bush Justice Department, Harvard Law professor, Jack Goldsmith, who seems to think Trump at least acted very poorly, if not criminally, but nonetheless is warning About the widespread perception that already exists that most of our institutions of authority are corrupted and politicized and can't be trusted, which is always dangerous in a democracy.
The only institution that polls well these days is the military, meaning the soldiers and the armed forces, not the people who run the Pentagon, and that's never good for a democracy when the only thing people trust is the military.
And, you know, his argument is that no matter how you slice it, this actually is a case where the current government looks at polls, sees that there's only one person who's likely to be able to challenge Joe Biden and defeat him for re-election, and that's the person whom his Justice Department happens to be prosecuting in multiple cases, two so far and counting, and not just Cases that have been brought, but ones that rely upon highly dubious interpretations of law.
It's not like these are murder cases or rape cases or bribery cases, things people traditionally think about when they hear of criminal accusations.
They're very, you know, kind of distant and vague accusations that do depend a lot on free speech rights.
And it's just only going to worsen perceptions that the Justice Department and justice system generally can't be trusted.
Often a sense that America is a somewhat solipsistic nation.
Do you imagine that if this were happening elsewhere, it would be regarded as the kind of corrupt antics of a banana republic, a takedown of a powerful political opponent?
How much have our institutions altered that we can incrementally move into this position without identifying that that's what's happened?
As you say, not egregious criminality, but somewhat diffuse and tangential.
Amoral, immoral conduct.
Do you think that this is something, if we were seeing it in Latin America or Central America, forgive the dismissiveness of that appraisal, we would regard it as crackpot, banana republic conduct?
Yeah, I mean it's interesting the reporting that I did in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that ultimately led to my indictment but that nonetheless freed Lula da Silva from prison was based on exactly that argument that he was in prison, Lula was, at a time when he was leading all public opinion polls for his re-election in 2018.
He had a 15-20 point lead on everybody including Jair Bolsonaro.
And what was obviously a politically inclined prosecution and a politically inclined judge, namely inclined always to be against BT, ordered him arrested, convicted him quickly, and rendered him ineligible to run, which let Jair Bolsonaro run and win in 2018 without having to face law.
Maybe he would have won, we'll never know.
And now they've turned around.
The establishment in Brazil hasn't done exactly the same thing to Bolsonaro, knowing that he's probably the only person who can defeat Lula, a court without even trying him or convicting
him of a crime has now declared Bolsonaro ineligible to run for the next eight years. So of
course, this is the sort of thing that happens in countries that don't trust democracy. It's
ironic, Russell, because when I first started writing about politics in 2005, the first
book I wrote was an argument that the Bush and Cheney administrations and the top officials in it
had committed obvious crimes, were crimes, through things like torture and rendition and
warrantless spying on Americans.
And when Obama got into office after promising to let his attorney general prosecute the people
who did that if it warrants, immediately he announced there will be no prosecutions.
He said, we have to look forward, not backward.
And the entire D.C.
class agreed with Obama, saying only banana republics prosecute their political opposition.
And that was for real crimes like torture and kidnapping and You know, killing people and spying without warrants, not these kind of attenuated theories of criminality on which the Biden Justice Department is now relying to prosecute Trump, their primary political opposition.
And yet Obama arrived in office on waves of optimism, ushered in under a banner of change and hope.
It's pretty plain that the scepticism and cynicism that many people feel for their institutions is well earned and is experiential.
We did a poll earlier and most of our audience, like 90% of our audience, Believe that the Trump prosecutions are a distraction from corruption and criminality within the Biden family.
And how effective can prosecuting an opponent be for corruption when most people think that the institutions themselves have lost all moral authority?
And in the case of the current current American government, that the Biden family in particular are criminal?
How much do you think, as Trump's lawyer, one of Trump's lawyers suggested, this case Is retaliation to and response to matters that pertain particularly to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's relationship around his business and Burisma in particular, Glenn?
Well, I think that's the other key part of the context, and that's one of the things that Professor Goldsmith in that article I mentioned in the New York Times this morning highlighted, was that at exactly the same time the Biden administration is prosecuting Donald Trump.
They are also protecting and shielding Hunter Biden, who is guilty of far more blatant and obvious criminality, just blatant political corruption, tax evasion, a refusal to pay taxes, hiding assets, misaccounting for things.
In a way that most people go to jail for many years and Hunter Biden gets this incredibly generous deal that was so shocking to the judge that it immediately crumbled upon the slightest bit of judicial scrutiny because she couldn't believe that the Justice Department was really offering him this full-scale immunity given how many other crimes are pending and given how he was allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for what she has seen many times in her short judicial career are treated as serious felonies.
So when you set that aside, that kind of You know, sweetheart deal given to Hunter Biden, aside to this politicized prosecution, it becomes even worse.
And Russell, I think this is the key question that is central to everything that was embedded in the question that you asked, which is, I know, like me, you're often accused of having changed your political views or having moved from the left to the right, et cetera, et cetera, even though you haven't changed any of your political opinions at all as somebody who's listened to you for quite a while.
I know that to be true.
The reason that's happened is because what is the relevant metric now is not so much left versus right.
But it's anti-authoritarian versus pro-authoritarian or anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.
Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not?
Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population?
I believe it's absolutely justified to hold in contempt these political agencies, the U.S.
security state, the corporate media, big tech, for all kinds of reasons.
And I think standard classic liberals, you know, by which I mean just Democrats, ordinary Democrats, even the part of the left that claimed they were launching a revolution under Bernie Sanders and AOC and the like, have come to view these agencies as their allies and
therefore legitimate. And that more than anything is the relevant fundamental distinction that I
think defines our political spectrum, much more so than old definitions of left versus right. -
Yes, and the deserved contempt that you described appears to be accompanied with an unwillingness
to enter into a good faith conversation and advocacy for censorship.
it.
One of the defining issues of our current news cycle is this ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the manner in which it is funded primarily of course by US taxpayer dollars and yet it's not something that can be When did advocacy for war become a liberal standpoint?
When did an unwillingness to discuss the expenditure on American tax dollars become an ordinary policy?
Was it the same as this in the Bush-Cheney administration that you publicly criticised and referred to earlier?
Is it them that have shifted their position rather than people like you and I?
You know, I think the media, the corporate media, was notoriously pro-War on Terror, pro-Iraq War, pro-Bush.
The New York Times had to apologize institutionally for the lies they spread to sell the invasion of Iraq to a liberal population.
A lot of the lies came not just from Fox News and the Republican Party at the time, but also, and more importantly even, from leading institutions in American liberalism like The Atlantic and The New Yorker and The New York Times, which were battering liberals every day to believe that the invasion
of Iraq was necessary, that the excesses of the war on terror from the Patriot Act of
torture and the like were all necessary.
There was really a closed system that didn't really tolerate a lot of dissent. That's actually
the primary reason why I started writing about politics in 2005, was the reaction
to this inability for dissent to be aired. I have to say, compared to the war in Iraq and
and that whole era after 9/11, where at least we had the excuse,
really had suffered a cataclysmic attack on its soil, there is so much less dissent and so much more homogeneity.
Now, on most questions, but certainly the war in Ukraine, in the EU, where you used to be, and now I think good for you are not, but still near it, the EU at the start of the war made it illegal For any social media platform to host Russian state media like RT and Sputnik.
That's the reason why this platform, Rumble, is not available in France because Rumble refused to remove RT at the orders of the French government.
The attempt is to just close the information system completely so that the Western population is completely propagandized.
All around the world, Russell, especially in these so-called BRICS countries and developing countries, Almost everybody is against the war in Ukraine, views it as something that NATO and the U.S.
provoked, assigns 50-50 blame to Moscow and the West, if not more to the West even, for having provoked it, refuses to join in with the sanctions regime.
And yet in the West, we're constantly told the entire world, the entire international community is united behind the United States in this noble effort.
And I think now, as that polling you referenced demonstrates, that shows that a majority of Americans 55 to 45 no longer want the U.S.
to continue to fund the war in Ukraine.
They've had enough.
They're starting to realize yet again that they were propagandized at about a war, that they were convinced at the start they should support and are now coming to oppose.
And I should say, if we look at the ideological breakdown of that poll, overwhelmingly, by far, the group that most supports the U.S.
financing of the war in Ukraine are self-described liberal Democrats, 75% of them.
Support this CIA-NATO war in Europe.
If it weren't for that, the margin would be even much bigger.
It makes me wonder if people have any intuitive or essential morality at all.
Or are they rather just fielded, shepherded from opinion to opinion in accordance with the preferences of the centralist authority?
When we have the bizarre spectacle of yet another cadaverous statesperson being cajoled into compliance, this time in the form of Dianne Feinstein, do you feel that there's almost an archetypal truth emerging in the political space?
That our institutions and those denizens of it are beginning to visibly decay before our eyes?
That this will not be resolved in the typical cycles of bipartisan electoral oscillation, but will require an institutional reckoning, significant change.
In fact, the kind of things that rhetorically great political orators have always referred to, hope, change, an America where communities and individuals are empowered, whether that's Trump saying that or Obama saying it, God knows they all say it.
Do you think that figures like Robert F. Kennedy could ever flourish within the Democratic Party?
And do you think that what's required is a kind of new political mechanic emerging from these new independent media spaces that we participate in?
Do you start to feel, and I know that this is a big part of your journey and you've been an activist and an advocate and much, much more over the last 10, 15, 20 years, but you're starting to feel that independent media will become politicised as a necessity?
Yeah, I mean, it's basically the only thing about which I'm optimistic.
You know, on my show last night, my Rumble show, we interviewed The director of this documentary that was released last year, I don't know if you saw it, but if you haven't, I really recommend it, called The Orders of War, which used FOIA requests to unearth all of these documents showing how producers and directors in Hollywood of the biggest mass-marketed films work in complete partnership with the Pentagon and the CIA to the point they give them script approval,
They can only get films made if the Pentagon and the CIA approve of these films for the most part, in part because Hollywood's a huge business and doesn't want to alienate the US government, but also because a lot of these films need access to things only the Pentagon can provide.
And the film really is about how potent propaganda is, how it kind of infiltrates every component of our, not just political eyes, but our cultural eyes, where it's even more insidious when our guard's not up.
If you go to the film to see Godzilla, you don't know that the CIA and the Pentagon has helped shape the script.
And yet they have.
And so when I look at things like the history where every time the US has a new war to present, every time the ruling class of Washington has a new war to present, the population gets on board with the war at first and then turns against it, which is what happened in Ukraine.
I think it's because propaganda is very effective.
They know how to play on people's emotions, including positive emotions.
If you show somebody the victims of a war, the civilian victims of a war, the way they did constantly when it came to Ukraine, but never do for U.S.
wars.
Like, when do you ever see a victim of an American war in Iraq or Pakistan or, you know, Yemen or Afghanistan or Syria or Libya talking about, you know, the lives lost and the ambitions crushed?
Never.
You only see it when you hear from Ukrainians talking about Russian missiles that fell, and so people connect to this.
They're stimulated emotionally, and sometimes it's a good emotion, but they're being so manipulated by a propaganda science that has been developed over decades.
And then you combine that with this newfound fixation on using the internet to censor
more than we've ever been censored.
This relentless campaign to take off the internet, anything that raises questions
or dissents from the establishment narrative, and you can see why it's an incredibly potent weapon.
And I absolutely think that the only thing that matters, in my view, in terms of looking at myself,
not as a journalist, but as a citizen, is fortifying the parts of the internet
that still are devoted to permitting dissent and protecting free speech and free discourse
that still are devoted to permitting dissent and protecting free speech and free discourse
and free inquiry, because without that, we have nothing.
and free inquiry, because without that, we have nothing.
We're all humans, and so stop the little propaganda.
We're all humans and stop the world of propaganda.
Even those who think of ourselves as resisting it, is fortifying the parts of the internet
Even those who think of ourselves as resisting it, you need alternative voices and it's being,
you know, rapidly removed from the internet and places like Rumble and a few others are like it,
it's kind of independent media that, you know, has emerged.
That's why I say it's the only source of optimism for me and it's why I spend so much time
protecting its prerogatives and freedoms that are constantly under assault.
So, and yet, as you've observed, Rumble is already not available in France
and perhaps elsewhere in the EU because of Rumble's refusal to de-platform Russia today.
Seems to me that forces and legislature is being marshaled to prohibit and certainly inhibit the rise of independent media spaces and that we're kind of sleepwalking into the normalization of censorship and even your cited figures on support for the Ukraine, ongoing financial
support for Ukraine in their conflict with Russia, suggest that many
people will just blindly and blithely support ventures such as this. So
whilst you say you're optimistic, I sometimes feel like pretty scared that in the
end they're gonna just say you're not allowed to have rumble
anymore.
They'll just shut it down.
And I feel like something is happening in Brazil with a significant podcast being censored.
And do you feel that there is a kind of consensus among the powerful, even though they may have conflict elsewhere, to manage emergent voices such as the ones that we're discussing in independent media spaces?
You know, what's happening in Brazil is very scary, and it's also very illuminating.
I mean, I've lived here for almost 20 years, so obviously I focus on it in part for that reason, but also because Brazil is a huge country.
It's the sixth largest country in the world, second largest in our hemisphere.
It has a lot of, you know, environmental resources like the Amazon and major oil resources.
It's a country of great geostrategic importance, and it has been part of the democratic world for, you know, since 1985 when it redemocratized.
It's been basically a democracy.
But what has happened over the last four years, first in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, just like everything in the U.S.
is done in the name of fighting Trump, like it used to be justified in the name of fighting the Soviet communism, and after that, Muslim extremism.
There's always some enemy that justifies authoritarianism to keep the population fearful.
But in the name of fighting Bolsonaro, they've essentially adopted a completely authoritarian mindset and implemented a system Uh, censorship so extreme that it's genuinely impossible for me to exaggerate or overstate it.
It's so extreme, in fact, that the New York Times, before the 2022 election between Lula and Bolsonaro, when they were obviously rooting for Lula to win, raised flags on two occasions about how extreme it was becoming.
They consolidated all the power to censor in the hands of a single member of the Supreme Court, who is very pro-PT and anti-Bolsonaro.
He has no opposition.
There's no trial.
There's no process.
He just issues decrees and orders saying this person shall hereby be removed from the internet.
This person shall be denied access to be able to speak.
He imposes massive fines if this isn't immediately obeyed.
There's that person that you referenced.
He was once called the Joe Rogan of Brazil because he's in his mid-20s.
He built this enormous audience, was the most influential podcaster in Brazil.
Millions and millions of views every show, every day on YouTube.
He got banned off YouTube, booted off YouTube.
He went to Rumble, where Rumble signed him, and now the judge has ordered Rumble to de-platform his show and has, because Monarch found a way, his name is Monarch, found a way to kind of circumvent it, he opened a criminal investigation, this judge did, fined him $300,000, which is the equivalent of $75,000, all without an accusation or a formal trial or anything else like that.
He's banned from speaking.
He can't speak in his own defense.
He can't speak about politics, even though he's been convicted of no crime.
And all the people who defend this stuff, like the influencers and the academics and the government officials, constantly are flying to Paris and Berlin and London and Amsterdam, where they have these conferences that they're studying Brazil as a test case for how far the EU and then the US can go.
The difference with the US is that there is a First Amendment that Brazil doesn't really have.
It's kind of been whittled away.
But that's what's coming.
That's what they want to do.
In general, if establishments by definition see something that threatens their hegemonic hold on power and on people's brains, they will feel a need to attack it. It's what they did to the
internet broadly. The internet was supposed to be this revolutionary tool of liberation and innovation.
They looked at that and they said, "We can't allow that." They centralized everything in the
hands of four corporations that are easily manipulated and controlled by the US
government and the corporate media.
Now they are trying to implement formal laws that control the flow of—
of information on the internet, if that really takes hold, what hope is there?
That is the thing that I do worry about.
As you said, I do think there's reason to be concerned as well.
Oh, that's pretty cool.
Plus, you explained something really important to us there that I'd not properly understood before.
That by corporatizing and commercializing a formerly truly free space, you create a meaningful and manageable ally, even whilst creating the tension between what is regarded as old media And these new emergent Titanic spaces.
But that is a much easier tension to manage than the potentially disastrous and cataclysmic scenario where there are all manner of free, diffuse oppositional voices existing online with sufficient power and ability to accumulate and grow to attack and even bring down a government.
I suppose after they saw it in corporate spaces like, you know, with Napster and political spaces, perhaps, you know, with Brexit, Trump, Even Podemos and Sarita, possibly these kind of online spaces contributed to those successes.
They had to, as you've just said, generate a large corporatist entity that could become enmeshed with and that they could have true complicity with in order to have the kind of corporate power that in the last century would have been rightly regarded as literally fascism.
Absolutely.
They cannot tolerate anything that they don't control.
And I think one of the things that's interesting to remember, especially for people who are old enough, unfortunately, that includes you and me, to remember what the internet was like in that kind of advent in the early stages when it was all euphoric.
is that it was completely decentralized and anonymous.
You could do anything on the internet and you wouldn't be tracked, you wouldn't be connected to your name.
There was a great freedom that came from it.
And the idea of the internet was supposed to be that it would be a way to empower individuals to speak with one another, to exchange information and ideas, to organize without having everything mediated by centralized corporate and state authority.
That was the vision of the internet.
A lot of the people who run these big tech companies were the pioneers of that kind of era, and they do still have this thing in them that resists this control.
But when you have a public company worth hundreds of billions of dollars, when your personal wealth is a billionaire, and your acceptance in good liberal society is dependent upon social acceptance, which all human beings are kind of constructed to crave, it's in our DNA because we're tribal animals, There's so many different weapons to control, even people who seem very wealthy and powerful, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg or the head of Google or, you know, in the previous regime, Jack Dorsey.
Where if you threaten them with enough legal and regulatory reprisals, or you print enough New York Times articles accusing them of having blood on their hands for their refusal to censor, eventually they will start to capitulate because they are, no matter how wealthy they are, susceptible to being controlled and co-opted by other institutions that are more powerful than they are.
And as you said, as long as you keep it in the hands of a tiny number of corporations, it becomes very manageable.
Monopolies, duopolies, and this kind of centralized authority, even if it's under the auspices of private enterprise, can be controlled in the way that you described.
That's pretty fascinating.
What struck me is that there are sort of historical precedents in social spaces.
Two examples that come to mind is in Orwell's accounts of Barcelona in homage to Catalonia in the first flushes of revolution, there's this genuine sense that there's syndicated, localised or consensus-derived authority that eventually coalesces into more overtly communist organisations and eventually into Franco's right-wing dictatorship.
And then in the immediate aftermath of the French There are these accounts of this rather blissful Paris, where people are giddy on sort of utopian revolutionary sensation, which ultimately becomes militarized, centralized, colonialist.
In a sense, that template seems to be one that has an almost archetypal power.
And the way that you describe the seduction of even these oligarchical, or certainly potent The figures in the tech world, Zuckerberg et al, is in a sense just a large scale version of what we're all experiencing when we're propagandized.
When we're like, oh yeah, I suppose you do have to have a war against Russia.
Oh, I guess I probably should censor people on social media.
In the end, we are all susceptible to quite primal forces and quite deep psychological stimuli.
George Orwell has this preface that was supposed to be, I think, the preface to his book about the Catalan movement.
Maybe it was Animal Farm.
I don't recall exactly which book it was supposed to be part of because it never got published.
It was right after the war, the World War II.
And it was just simply deemed too offensive to publish, where he talked about Soviet communism under Stalin and all of the obviously repressive weapons they used to control the population and crush dissent.
But he then said, we in the West are really in no position to boast about how we're so free because oftentimes The way more effective means of controlling human minds is not the overt means of putting prisoners into camps or into prison, or dissenters rather, into prison or camps, or sending people in black uniforms with guns to kill people who criticize the government.
The much more effective way is through these subtle and insidious means of controlling the means of communication, which is through mass media, And not putting people in prison, but putting the prison in their mind so that they're just never exposed to dissent, they believe they're free.
The socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, he who does not move does not notice their change.
Where, you know, you can think you're free, but it's only because you're so conformist and so compliant that nobody considers you threatening.
Nobody considers you enough of a danger to try and do anything against you.
And so you say, look, I'm saying everything I want and nobody bothers me.
But that's because everything you're saying serves establishment interests and establishment orthodoxies.
I think that's very much the world in which we live.
And bizarrely and paradoxically, the Internet is making it worse.
The Internet is, you know, when I was doing the Stonehenge reporting, the Internet In my view, became the single greatest weapon of coercion and monitoring ever created in human history.
It is also now becoming the single greatest weapon of propaganda and thought control, even though it was supposed to be the opposite, because they've been so successful in commandeering control of it, centralizing how it runs in the hands of a tiny number of people, and then controlling them.
That's the reason why so many people, these people hate Elon Musk with such a passion, because even though he's been far from perfect in it, He's at least saying that he won't comply with these dictates and threatening their control over the flow of information.
And that's why they feel like he has to be destroyed.
And I think that shows you how much this control is of the most vital importance to them.
Indeed, in the documentary Citizen Four that covers your investigation and the revelations that Edward Snowden made, the way that I observed him was as if he were patient zero in a real-life Bentham Panepticon.
He is the first prisoner that recognizes that he is indeed being observed thought by thought, action by action, data point by data point, that this insidious form of control can now be enacted through the omniscience of a kind of cyber panepticon where we are all observable from every conceivable angle through recourse and observation and correlation of our actions.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, just quickly, it's funny when Snowden first contacted me at the end of 2012, he was very worried about disclosing to me any information about him or saying much of anything.
And he kept saying, essentially, I can't because we're constantly being watched and it's too dangerous.
And of course, even though I was a critic of the NSA at the time, a harsh critic of the U.S.
security state, I was thinking to myself, this guy seems kind of crazy, like very paranoid.
And of course, as it turns out, he was right because he had in his hands the documents proving it.
He had seen it all firsthand.
And even though I thought I was kind of immune from the propaganda, I immediately started thinking, oh, this guy's kind of paranoid and crazy.
Of course, that's not true to that extent.
And only once I saw the documents was I able to really see the full extent of it.
It just shows you How, again, even those who think we're kind of resistant to propaganda are really susceptible to it because it's not just a superficial field of discipline.
It's something developed over many decades involving the study of psychology and sociology and all kinds of other fields of discipline.
It really works, propaganda does.
Yeah, even your most cliched crackpot, your aluminum foil hat-wearing nutjob, now looks eerily prescient, and so, they can read your thoughts, they know everything that I've typed, your search history, they've got access to that, they can turn on the microphone whenever they want to, yo!
Okay, well let's get you back to your ward now!
We were like talking earlier about how like stuff that almost you get disoriented by extreme conspiratorial discourse like there are nanobots in these medications and you know the earth is flat and then when they say oh there's this chrome orb that's going to read your retina and we're giving that data directly to the government and we're piloting that now in Kenya you think well that's not as bad.
Carry on!
You know, you've been primed to accept things that would have just 10 years ago seemed extraordinarily dystopic.
Yeah, it's exactly how it's done.
I mean, the thing that amazes me Russell is if you go back and look at the weeks after the 9-11 attack, when obviously most Americans were traumatized, everybody was like, look, whatever you have to do to prevent this from happening again, go fucking do it.
You know, I'm for it.
Let's go.
The Patriot Act, when it was introduced, even in that climate, was still a bridge too far.
They knew it was an incredibly radical act.
The New York Times and Washington, bipartisan Washington ruling class, had to keep coming and saying, look, we know this is radical.
It's only temporary.
The law itself says it will expire in three years.
Congress has to renew it, so it's going to go away.
Here we are 22 years later, the Patriot Act just gets automatically renewed
with no reforms.
Every time it pops up, it's a quick, not even a debate, it passes 92 to six,
and it just has faded into the political woodwork.
It's now just part of our reality.
No one thinks about the Patriot Act anymore as being this grave threat because it's been normalized.
And every time we let one of those things go, we allow a little more censorship on the internet, we allow a little more dissent to happen, we allow the EU to make it a crime for social media companies to platform Russian media if they want to and close our information circle just a little more.
Every time somebody starts having a political awakening because of their age and they start paying attention, what they're connecting to, the reality and the normality of it, is totally different than it was even 10 years ago.
And the things they're conditioned to automatically accept and not even realize they're accepting becomes more and more extreme.
And you're so deluged with stimuli that there's a kind of much commented on cultural amnesia that you almost can't be bothered to recollect that three years ago these measures were introduced, this was why lockdown was conducted, this is the reason that we had this set of regulations.
It all seems like it passes so quickly.
We're in a sort of state of hyper-stimulation and we're so overwrought and fraught and there's so much information that to be steadfast and principled becomes so superhuman that I think one would have to be devout.
That the only way that you can have principles now is if you believe in If not God, something that's so like God that it may as well fall under that term, i.e.
some values and principles that are not swayed by what you are materially offered and what you are given as information, what you are offered as truth, that ever-changing carousel.
Thank you, Glenn, for being someone that operates on that plane, for having endured what you've endured in the I'm sorry.
It's not.
I apologize.
What can I do?
I didn't create Rio de Janeiro.
I just enjoy its beauties.
But Russell, it's always great to talk to you.
investigative journalism should look like, what good communication sounds like, and what a...
That better be a false backdrop for your standing in front of. That better be green screen, Glenn.
That better not be real.
I'm sorry, it's not. I apologize.
What can I do? I didn't create Rio de Janeiro. I just enjoy its beauties.
But Russell, it's always great to talk to you. Thank you for having me.
There is Glenn Greenwald. Just come down from that mountain with a tablet with 10 edicts
that he will be sharing with us in just a moment.
You can, of course, catch Glenn on System Update live on Rumble, 7pm Eastern Time.
That's about an hour from now, wherever you are in the world, always worth watching Glenn.
Still to come this week, we're going to be talking to Vivek Ramaswamy.
We've got so many fascinating questions for this renegade Republican presidential candidate.
My friend Nick Ortner will be on the show.
You're going to love Nick.
He's going to help you disrupt your inner systems of anxiety and despair with fantastic methods that I personally use.
Click the red button.
Join us on Locals to get early access to the great interviews we do.
For example, we had Jordan Peterson on just yesterday.
You could have been watching that live as old Leather Harlequin himself.
He was wearing like a weird leather patchwork suit.
And I kid you not, a wooden tie.
Wooden tie.
Why not?
Wooden tie like to speak to Jordan Peterson.
That's a pun, but a pun I won't get to make again.
