Glenn Greenwald - On if Trump Get Stop the Deepstate & 2024 Elections
Today here’s my conversation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded the Intercept and earned his award for breaking the story on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. Glenn hosts “System Update” live on Rumble, weeknights at 7 pm Eastern.In this conversation, we discussed whether Trump can truly dismantle the deep state if he is elected. We also touched on topics such as free speech, Gonzalo Lira, the 2024 elections, and much more! --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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♪ Music Playing ♪ Glen, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's an honour to have you, as always.
Always a pleasure to see you, Russell.
Thank you for asking.
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 homogenize 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 going to have the kind of subversion of his elected presidency that we saw in 2016, where the U.S.
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.
A contingency of course.
It was interesting to see the guy, is he called Diamond, who's from JP Morgan, sort of at Davos, casually advocating or at least assuaging fears around a potential Trump presidency.
Certainly he was using some populist language.
It seems to me, unlikely Glenn, that something as plausible as a Trump Presidency could be allowed to go ahead without some contingency in place.
Do you think when you hear high-profile figures from the financial world cautiously backing Trump or at least being open to a Trump presidency that's an indication that they can accommodate his ascent even without the kind of obstacles that you've indicated could be put in place i.e.
to some degree could a Trump presidency ever be co-opted by the same globalist interests that you say are now cowering like rats at the emergence of such a popular figure.
I think it's very difficult to imagine Jamie Dimon, of all people, the head of JP Morgan, the person who was so enamored of President Obama that he treated him like the second coming of Christ and Obama.
He preys on Jamie Dimon.
Dimon was called Obama's banker.
Suddenly embracing populist sentiments and trying to say, hey, you know what?
They kind of have a point.
I think what he was doing there instead was offering strategic advice, which is one of the ways that establishments can co-opt anti-establishment sentiment is by ceasing to be overtly hostile to them, not insulting them, not telling them they have nothing valid to believe, telling them that they're all racist, telling them that they're going to be in prison, and instead kind of throwing them some crumbs to keep them a little bit satiated, to keep them placated, That's really been the history of the United States and the capitalist society we have, the way we've been able to tolerate massive inequality, is occasionally you have things like the New Deal, things to ameliorate the edges of harsh capitalism just enough to keep people
They're not quite willing to go out onto the streets and risk their lives to protest.
I saw Jamie Dimon's little speech in Davos more as a way of saying, look, what we're doing isn't working.
We're fueling all these anti-establishment and populist movements, not just in the U.S., but throughout Western Europe.
I think we need to change our tact and start talking to them and about them with a little bit more respect so they start believing we understand their sentiments and aren't completely hostile to and at war with them.
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 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.
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
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?
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Glenn, so, 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,
Malcolm X and all those sorts of movements that were largely, not entirely, but largely left-wing.
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, 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 states 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, Iraq, or Russia, or the 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.
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.
It's really done a great job of persuading.
They sold the war in Ukraine that way, also the war in Israel, like, hey, this is good for LGBT rights.
The 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.
I'm astonished at how effective that modality has been in rebranding deep state interests and formerly assumed bad actors such as the CIA, as well as globalist corporate interests.
We saw this, of course, during the pandemic, where the formerly loathed pharmaceutical industry were welcomed with open arms as saviors.
And it's astonishing to me that in such a relatively short period of time, such an effective rebrand can be enacted.
It leaves me though with questions about the depth of anti-establishment feeling that was ever present in the left and perhaps it was a brief cultural hiatus that just took place in that sort of post-beat cultural revolution moment of the 60s and immediately Receded and you know that perhaps sort of the left has always been authoritarianism certainly has been centrist and centrism and authoritarianism might easily be aligned with one another and the other question that leaves me with Glenn is what type of other than libertarianism practiced at the level of the individual
Aligned with some principles gleaned from Christianity and patriotism, what kind of movement is likely to emerge out of this new feared MAGA Trump populist movement?
If we've already had four years of it, where is a true anti-establishment movement, if you agree that what's happening on the right isn't one, is likely to emerge?
Well, I think one of the problems with the anti-right populist movement is that there's a lot of doctrinal ambiguity and even a lot of doctrinal conflict.
So, you know, you might have seen people like Steve Bannon saying things like, oh, we need economic populism in this country.
We need to go to war against the bankers and the globalists and protect Social Security and Medicare and raise taxes on the rich.
And that was Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric in 2016, but then he gets into office in 2017 and one of the first things he does is he cuts corporate taxes for the wealthiest, increasing the debt, feeding all the corporate donors in the swamp that he said he would drain, actually one of the best presidents they could possibly have had, making Mitch McConnell and his donors and lobbyists very happy.
And I don't think there's been a kind of coherent anti-right populist, anti-establishment politics that has fully emerged.
If you look, for example, at the way economic populism works on the right, if you look at people like Donald Trump, who say we're never going to let them touch Social Security and Medicaid, and you look at Marine Le Pen, who actually ran to the left, of pretty much every party in France, including the socialists, when it came to things like raising retirement benefits and opposing increased retirement age.
These things, you know, the idea of right-wing populism is, let's close the borders, get rid of the people who don't belong here, but then make life better for our own citizens.
If you don't get somebody like Malay in Argentina or even Bolsonaro in Brazil who kind of gets grouped into anti-establishment right-wing populism just because they kind of rail against the same elites that everybody hates, That has nothing to do with those people.
I mean, Bolsonaro hired, you know, kind of like an austerity-mad University of Chicago economist, Paulo Schette, to be his Minister of the Economy.
Mollet is a really hardcore libertarian, you know, like, let's deconstruct the government, get rid of social programs that help the poor, just let the free market run wild.
So I don't think there's a clarity of thought yet, but I think the important nugget that does tie it together, that is important and that can be worked with, They've identified correctly who the enemies are, who the people are who are wielding power, and the ways in which that power is being wielded correctly.
There is obviously a tendency to conflate a divergent range of interests in the way that you've just described because of the way that media functions now and of course politicians in places like Hungary and Brazil and Argentina are going to be at odds with one another and dealing with a sort of a different range of challenges and problems even though the enemy is likely to be the same because globalism is real and if even within the sort of right when all of these sort of figures these populist figures Our group together on analysis, it seems that there is a degree of variety.
Is it necessary that the opposition to globalism is in itself global?
And is this even something that there can be a contingency for, Glenn?
Or is it that we simply have to continually identify corruption and hypocrisy in the manner in which you do?
And allow whatever movements emerge as a result of that, because I see independent media clearly relating to independent political movements, just if you take the example of RFK.
It's unthinkable that that would have happened 20 years ago, that he would have, you know, without the support of legacy media, been able to rise to the prominence that, you know, who knows where it will lead, but at least he is popular.
And a few years ago, he's someone I wouldn't have on a podcast because he's, you know, he was just a pariah.
So, yeah, I wonder then, are we at risk of, because of the nature of globalism, simplifying what type of form opposition to globalism might take because it is a ubiquitous phenomena but that may not require a ubiquitous response?
I do think it's important to have a positive, coherent agenda that people by and large who are part of the same movement more or less agree on.
Obviously, you're going to have differences and some debates on the margin.
Because anti-establishment hatred gets you only so far.
You know, you can kind of get rid of certain establishments, certain groups of authority, but then if you don't have a clear idea for what replaces them, you're gonna have a lot of people within that movement that did that, that think those people didn't go far enough.
Then you're going to have people in that movement who think it went way too far, and you're going to have people who think, no, it just needs to be on a completely different path.
You look now at the America First ideology, which speaks a lot about things like non-interventionism, about focusing on America before we start financing foreign wars, and yet suddenly you have a lot of people who identify that way as wanting to fund the war in Israel, wanting to deploy American troops to the Middle East to get involved in all these Middle East wars that I thought we were supposed to be done with to protect Israel.
You have a lot of people wanting to confront China and kind of turn everything into a Cold War, which of course is going to only fuel the intelligence agencies and the arms industries that a lot of people say that they're against.
So I'm seeing a lot of ideological incoherence That at some point is going to have to be resolved in some way, otherwise you're just going to have this mishmash of ideas that I think is going to end up replicating, or won't have the focus necessary to overthrow establishment doctrines, even if you put different people in place.
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 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 great movements 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 You know, 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 you know in the case of the region of the world I live in sort of EU
bureaucrats determine what our life and lifestyles are 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.
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 all kinds of mental health struggles.
We're social animals who are 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.
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 I 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 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.
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 Appaline territories when he said that he wouldn't hesitate to ban AI truckers and automated work in order to facilitate greater 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 owes more to Methodism than to Marx.
That having a set of social principles, I don't mean socialist principles, but the idea
that people oughtn't only be regarded in terms of their utility, and when their utility expires,
so do they.
These values, these ideas, which I can see why they might be coupled with anti-immigrant
pro-boundary type politics, it seems to me have a certain value to them, and they're
certainly values that appear to be popular.
And ultimately, I figure that even if these views are at odds with many of the contemporary
ideas around no boundaries and immigration is beneficial.
I suppose these things, people have the right to hear those views, don't they?
And have the right to entertain them and even vote for them.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, it's so interesting.
In the 2022 French election, when Macron was re-elected, It was right around that time, maybe it was a little bit after, when the French were rioting the way they always do, but this time it was over Macron's attempt to increase the retirement age by two years from, I think, 62 to 64, which obviously for the United States, where it's been 65 for a long time, seems like a big luxury.
But in Western Europe, they've always valued more this idea that you retire earlier, you have more workers' rights.
And he gave this speech, Mélenchon did, who's considered a far-left figure in France, We talked about how so much of human worth in today's society is determined by a human being's utility.
How much utility do you have to a corporation?
How much utility do you have with your labor?
How much utility do you have to the economy?
So that the minute you lose that, you kind of lose your wealth, your value as a person, as you were just saying.
And he was saying that this ability to work your whole life, 40 years of hard labor, and then get to, you know, 62 and maybe have like 10 years based on life expectancy, where you kind of get to reflect and ponder and like read and do what you want, this kind of human freedom that you don't have when you're working hard jobs five days a week, 40 hours a day, is of such great human value, especially at the end of your life, to try and rob that in order to empower the IMF and the World Bank and European elites in Germany, is like criminal.
And I think this is something that you could hear and resonate just as much on whatever is called the far-right or the populist-right, this kind of attempt to get away from this dehumanizing, mechanizing form of capitalism that's globalist, that's spirit-crushing, that's human-crushing, and find ways to once again re-emphasize what human connection and what human fulfillment are.
I had a set of wonderful conversations with my friend Adam Curtis.
A few things that have always stayed with me.
Once when we were doing something live, he was saying, you don't know what you want, he said to the audience.
What is it that you want?
You just want the banks to be a little bit nicer.
Is that the extent of it?
Adam Curtis, I think, sort of identified quite early on, as he often does in his filmmaking, what actually is happening.
At the beginning of our conversation, Glenn, when we talked about it's plain that we are at a precipitous point, not because of evangelist, shamanic figures.
The prognosis of zealous figures like Alex Jones or whoever saying, look, because of observable legislation.
Does it seem to you, too, possible that a counter-movement could emerge?
I sometimes sense that there was like the Assange, Snowden, and indeed Greenwald moment.
Something got frozen in time there.
It was the end of something.
Media changed in that moment.
People's ethics changed in that moment.
The left and the liberal classes had to rewrite their agenda in that moment.
It was an odd time in history for it all to have occurred.
All that information is out there and is still true and yet more true.
Everything that Sandra Veale, everything that Snowden spoke about, it's all still out there and the culture is sort of kind of reformed around it and they're still there those guys like Telltale Hearts Or pictures of Dorian Gray, exiled away in Shadowlands, and the problems are unaddressed, and the culture's sort of tried to morph itself around, this is why this is okay, and yet he, like, Assange's name in particular can't even really be spoken.
Do you think that the media and the establishment more broadly had to reconfigure itself because of what is indicated by the punishment of those two men and because of the nature of what they revealed?
That it's them that have to be impugned and condemned rather than what was indicated by their revelations?
For sure.
I mean, I think it is still underestimated the extent to which Julian Assange is a true visionary of our time.
I think easily the most consequential journalist of this generation.
For whatever people want to say about me, I mean, I feel like Julian's impact is so systemic and so broad that it's really not even a close competition.
And the reason for that is that he was the first person to really realize that in the digital age, these institutions of power, I mean the main ones, like the big ones, had a huge vulnerability, which is that by storing all of their secrets, the secrets that show their lies and their crimes, in digital form it becomes much easier to take it You know, to like find a way to suck it up.
One of the things that's so interesting to hear Daniel Ellsberg when he talks about the Pentagon Papers leak was one of his biggest challenges was just like, how do you Xerox 40,000 top secret pages without being detected?
You know, you like go to the grocery store, you go to the drugstore, they have these big Xerox machines, you have to put a diamond for every page.
And he actually did that sometimes.
Whereas when Chelsea Manning wanted to download the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, she did it in about 20 minutes just by pretending she was listening to a Lady Gaga album by downloading it onto her thumb drive and then sending it to WikiLeaks.
Same with Snowden.
He planned it, but it didn't take that much time to take all that information.
Julian was the first one to realize to create WikiLeaks as a kind of anonymous way to do that.
And then, of course, the Snowden leak, which was by far the biggest national security leak, came from the most secretive agency inside the world's most powerful government.
And both of those created a lot of support and popularity.
And like I was saying before, when you're the establishment, when you have establishment power, you will do anything to figure out how to protect your power.
And right away, you know, the smear campaign against all of us that were involved in those things began.
But more than that, like, trying to put Snowden in prison for life, putting Assange in prison for life.
But then also, you know, right away, what happened was when these things happened, It was already 10 years since Al-Qaeda had attacked the United States.
Nobody thought about Al-Qaeda anymore.
Nobody cared about Al-Qaeda.
It wasn't really a useful force to scare people any longer.
And then within a year of the Snowden reporting starting, then it became, oh, ISIS is worse than Al-Qaeda.
And then a year later, it became, Russia is an existential threat to democracy, and then Trump, of course.
And these institutions of power successfully re-scared everybody into believing that unless they put their faith and blind trust into these agencies, They would not be safe.
They would be threatened.
They need these agencies.
And you see the polling data that now shows that these agencies are viewed far more favorably, especially by left liberals, than they were a decade ago.
So this is part of this cycle where you push them, you attack them, but they attack back.
And if you're not Aware of that fact that if you attack establishment power successfully, they're going to attack you in at least ways that are at least as harsh.
You shouldn't do it.
But that is the cycle of history.
It is the cycle of history.
I mean, indeed, isn't that the initial contract between the governing and the governed right down to sort of feudal system?
You give us your taxes, we will keep you safe.
And if people start thinking, but I don't need to be kept safe, we could keep ourselves safe.
Like once that dynamic starts challenging, the whole thing falls apart.
So how do you think that the culture has sort of reformed, metastasized, like when you see a wire in a tree and the tree kind of grows around it?
How is it that, you know, the Guardian and the various European and American newspapers that were advocates of Julian's have sort of Regrouped and said oh, yeah, it's okay that he's in Belmarsh without trial and it'll be alright if he's extradited to America Well, how is it even maintaining the pretense of being like moral arbiters and reliable conveyors of information?
How can they do that?
What is the trick they have pulled?
I think one of the things that establishments need, and especially security states need more than anything, is a villain, is a scary villain that they can convince people they should need to be scared of and want protection from.
So, of course, during the Cold War, that was communists.
The communists were coming to take your God away, were coming to take your church away, and it sustained, you know, this five-year, five-decade massive growth of the security state, of wars all over the country, and then once the Berlin Wall fell, We were supposed to have, oh, this peace dividend, but right away we started getting new enemies with, like, Milosevic and, you know, having to go to war in Yugoslavia.
And then right away 9-11 happened and suddenly we had a 20-year war on terror.
And then along the way as well, we got these new enemies like Russia and Trump and the threat of right-wing fascism.
And now suddenly all these people who are scared of those things are convinced that these are the good guys, you know, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, these major corporations, these major media outlets who are protecting people from these threats.
And that's really all there is to it.
Trump did change everything by, you know, if you look at what people say about Julian Assange now, the main reason why people are happy he's in jail is because they think he's a Russian agent.
Which is, you know, it's such an insane accusation that it doesn't pass the most minimal scrutiny of anyone who knows anything.
But it seems like if you're afraid of Russia, if Russia is what you're told is contaminating every part of your society, ruining all things decent, anyone remotely connected to them is an enemy, is someone who is a danger and needs to be crushed.
And that's how you turn a population authoritarian.
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 op.
Maybe Poland were involved, potentially.
Everything has collapsed.
The amount of time has collapsed.
That's why it's interesting to discover, for example, Lee Fang, the journalist, 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 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 recognisable 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.
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.
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 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 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 a 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 when 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.
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, 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 because these are the real conspiracy theorists.
And, you know, all the stuff with COVID, the minute you tried 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.
Gonzalo Lira has 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.
Gonzalo Lira 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 sort of 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 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 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.
So when you have somebody like Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen, clearly 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.
