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May 30, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:09:04
Glenn Greenwald: The Truth About Epstein, Jake Tapper's Humiliation, & Insane New Push to Nuke Gaza
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glenn greenwald
01:24:45
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tucker carlson
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tucker carlson
Must be a little weird to get scooped by CNN on Joe Biden's dementia.
Like, you had no idea.
glenn greenwald
None of us knew.
You know, but now Jake Tapper has uncovered the truth.
Like, it turns out Joe Biden was in cognitive decline.
Did you know that?
tucker carlson
How did he find out?
glenn greenwald
Just hardcore shoe-leather investigative reporting.
unidentified
Just working his sources.
glenn greenwald
Working his sources, like, calling all the people in Washington, digging up, like, FOIA documents.
I just find the Epstein file so fascinating because the two biggest issues are, are there people to whom he's trafficked minors that nobody has been charged with being the recipient of that sex trafficking?
But the much more interesting question for me is, was he working with or for any foreign intelligence agencies?
Israel is the number one recipient of NSA technology and NSA intelligence.
But at the same time, the documents that describe who are our greatest intelligence threats, who are our greatest intelligence adversaries, who spies on us the Number one on the list is Israel as well.
tucker carlson
Music All right, Glenn, I think last time you were here, I ambushed you just by rolling the cameras.
Not doing that.
We are on camera right now.
unidentified
Right.
glenn greenwald
It was funny because every show you ever go on, it always begins in some sort of way to indicate that you're actually starting.
Like, Glenn Greenwald, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Tucker, for having me.
But the last time I was on, we were just sitting here chatting and it turned out 10 minutes in, I was like, oh, we're rolling?
Yeah, we've been rolling since we started.
tucker carlson
Yeah, but you are one of those people, and this is the highest compliment I can give, who's exactly the same off camera, exactly the same as you are on camera.
glenn greenwald
Right.
There's no difference at all.
I thought our conversation was just the conversation that we always have, and it turned out it was just the show, which made no difference.
Your staff, Curtis, let me see this first time in it.
I was like, yeah, that's what I think.
That's how I speak, and that's all fine.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
If you like Glenn Greenwald, you'll like him at dinner.
Trust me.
That's what I can say about you.
So you are, I think, the dean of alternative media.
You've been doing this longer than anybody that I know personally.
So it must be a little weird to get scooped by CNN on Joe Biden's dementia.
Like, you had no idea.
glenn greenwald
None of us knew.
You know, I mean, there was that debate, and we were all shocked, but we were told he had a cold.
So I was like, okay, he's on some cold medication.
Like, who hasn't been there before?
He makes you a little draggy, a little groggy, a little just, like, dragged.
But no, now Jake Tapper has uncovered the truth.
Like, it turns out Joe Biden was in cognitive decline.
Did you know that?
tucker carlson
How did he find out?
glenn greenwald
Just hardcore shoe leather investigative reporting.
tucker carlson
Just working his sources.
glenn greenwald
Working his sources, like calling all the people in Washington, digging up FOIA documents.
No, it really, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of can't believe what you're witnessing because Jake Tapper is pretending to have uncovered a scandal that he himself led the way in the media or one of the leaders in the media in covering up.
To the point where if somebody would go on his show and say, Joe Biden is obviously in cognitive decline, he can't get a sentence out, he would say, how dare you bully kids who stutter?
Are you at all ashamed of what you're doing?
That's what he told Laura Trump when she was like, yeah, I feel bad for Joe Biden.
I wish he could get a sentence out.
And he's like, do you ever think about what you're doing to kids who stutter and the kind of world you're creating for them?
And she's like, what?
Like everyone else, I never even knew Joe Biden had a stutter.
I've been watching him for decades.
I never saw him stutter before.
The whole stuttering thing was just itself.
tucker carlson
Did he actually say that?
glenn greenwald
Yes.
He told Laura Trump that she was at an event and she was a very like...
He was just saying, yeah, you watch Joe Biden.
Because we've talked about this before when, you know, I was on your show.
It wasn't even when he was president.
It was in the run-up to the 2020 campaign and we were talking about this.
And we always talked about, everybody I know did, no one takes joy in it.
Like, we've all had that experience of watching an older person in our family, you know, go through cognitive decline.
It's actually quite sad.
So the way she was saying it was like, yeah, you know, honestly, as a human being, I watch Joe Biden.
And he's in the middle of a sentence that he can't finish.
I'm like, come on, Joe, get that out.
And then when she went on Jake Tapper's show, he played that tape, and he said, do you understand the world of bullying that you're creating for kids who stutter?
unidentified
And she was like, what?
tucker carlson
I'm just protecting stuttering kids.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, and she's like, I didn't even know he had a stutter.
And he said, and we all know he has a stutter, and I know that you are mocking his stutter.
And so this was not just a person who didn't speak about Joe Biden's cognitive decline, who's now uncovering this shocking truth that 85% of the public has known for years according to polls.
He would go on—I heard him this week saying one of the very few people—because he was asked, why didn't people in the Democratic Party speak up and say this since they all knew it?
And he said, well, Dean Phillips tried, and he got mauled.
Maligned and his character was attacked by the Democratic Party.
I was like, by the Democratic Party?
Go watch what happened when Dean Phillips went on Jake Tapper's show and said that one of the reasons he was running for president, he was concerned about Joe Biden's age and his infirmities and how he couldn't win and couldn't govern.
And Jake Tapper said to him, do you know that your Democratic colleagues despise you and they've been telling me the worst possible thing?
That's what he did to everybody who went on his show.
In order to say, hey, I think Joe Biden's in cognitive decline, he was – I mean, obviously he wanted Biden to win desperately and would not tolerate anyone going on the show and saying that Biden was in cognitive decline.
And now he's making millions of dollars off a book.
But the only good thing is – Like, imagine being a journalist and being exposed as such a fraud that you have to hire a PR crisis team of the kind that, like, public figures hire when they're involved in some, like, big, you know, sex scandal or, like, bribery scandal.
That's who's managing Jake Tapper's...
But everything he says now is scripted.
You know, like, every interview he does now, at first, it was like, what are you talking about?
This is outrageous.
And now every time he's in an interview, he says, I look back on my coverage with humility.
You know that phrase they feed you to make it seem like you're accepting accountability even though you're really not?
tucker carlson
False humility is called, yes.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, yeah.
tucker carlson
What's interesting, though, is that it wasn't just...
Biden seems fine to me.
What's interesting is that he used the most vulgar moral blackmail.
You're attacking children who stutter.
You're attacking disabled kids when you criticize the President of the United States.
That is so low.
It's hard to believe that happened.
I haven't seen the clip.
glenn greenwald
He claims he called Laura Trump to apologize.
Maybe he should do that on his show since that's where he told his audience she was attacking kids who stutter.
Like, that's a pretty...
Like, if my kids ever did that, I would punish them for three months.
You know, so, like, accusing her of having done that, like, probably doesn't warrant a private apology, or maybe it does too, but also, you know, you go on air and you're like, hey, I did something really despicable.
You know what's so amazing, too, is they're trying to rewrite history.
Obviously, one of the ways they're trying to rewrite history...
We in the media were the victims of the fraud.
And we're so angry at this inner team of Joe Biden's White House advisors who kept this from us, who hid this, even though the entire public knew forever.
But I've written about this so many times, it drives me crazy how easily history is rewritten.
The first time I ever heard...
was viewed as loyal, has been around forever.
And they all knew there was no way he could sustain the rigors of an election because he was in cognitive decline.
And so it was like these Democratic operatives, like Andrea Mitchell talked about it, Cory Booker and Julian Castro in that 2019 debate, all made fun of Biden for not being able to remember what he had said three seconds ago.
This, it was the Democrats who were raising it, trying to alert everybody I'm not talking about 2023.
It was down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary.
That's when all of a sudden the...
And that's when I wrote an article saying, what do you mean you were the ones who first raised it?
I heard it from you, you know, those DC insiders.
So it's not—and the only reason why, you know, what saved Joe Biden from that was that— COVID happened and he got to run the campaign from his basement where he only talked to Nicole Wallace who spoke to him like some ailing grandpa.
You know that voice that you use for your ailing grandpa like, Mr. President, Mr. Biden, hello.
And then you do that fake laugh.
They get even close to a joke because those were the kind of interviews he was doing and he was in that basement in Delaware.
That's the only reason why he could sustain that campaign.
tucker carlson
But it was so widely known.
I mean, his sister, Valerie, Told a good friend of mine that she didn't want him to run in 2020 because he had dementia.
My former makeup artist, a makeup artist, was there in the room when he was injected with amphetamines before an event more than once during that campaign.
And like I said all that on TV and everyone I knew in D.C. who knew Biden, I knew Biden, said, yeah, no, he's got dementia.
Like everybody knew.
Everybody knew.
It wasn't just like some right-wing Twitter thing where people were being cruel.
It was like the people who knew Biden knew that.
So like, how could you not know that?
glenn greenwald
Well, I think the reason this media fraud of all the other media frauds that have been perpetrated is probably the most damaging.
In 2016, they pushed this whole deranged, demented conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had sex tapes on Donald Trump where he was being urinated on by a prostitute.
And of course, if you know Donald Trump, that's pretty much the last thing that all the people on the planet is one thing he did.
Like, they always accuse people on independent media or, you know, whoever of being conspiracy theorists.
Like, think about that conspiracy.
like Donald Trump was being blackmailed by the Russian government into sacrificing the interests of the United States to serve the interests of the Kremlin.
That really was the predominant media narrative from 2016 to 2018.
So that's what they did to try and stop Trump the first time.
In 2020, you know, weeks before the election, the New York Post had very serious reporting about the Biden family.
And we were told by the media over and over the lie that this is Russian disinformation, that this laptop should be, the contents of it should be ignored because it's inauthentic.
That, of course, was when I left The Intercept because they wouldn't let me write about it, claiming that there were doubts about its authenticity when I knew there weren't.
But that was, and then Twitter and Facebook censored it.
But on those kind of questions, like RussiaGate, the authenticity of these emails, like for most Americans, they don't have the...
competence to judge that because they do other things but when it comes to seeing older people in cognitive decline most of them have had that experience with like a grandparent or a parent or a sibling or a neighbor or whatever and don't need to be told by quote-unquote experts that is happening because they can see it with their own eyes and
And for the media to have sat there for a year and a half and told everybody, as Joe Scarborough said, this version of Joe Biden is the best Biden we've ever seen.
I mean, imagine being such a state propagandist that you do that and then keep your job.
I think that's why this scandal is so devastating to them and why, like, when Jake Tapper stands up to write a book saying, I've uncovered the truth with investigative reporting, you know, everybody is reacting with justifiable nausea.
tucker carlson
You've got to admit it takes some balls to do that, though.
I mean, I famously advocated for the Iraq War, realized in 2003 that it was a bad idea, and said I was wrong.
What I didn't do was write a book saying, like, it was wrong and I always thought it was wrong.
glenn greenwald
Or, like, hey, I'm here to write a book saying why the Iraq War was based on falsehoods.
It's like, we already know, Tucker, thank you, right?
Like, you didn't go and write that book because you were the one helping to perpetuate that.
tucker carlson
I totally agree.
So I guess without repentance, It's all fake, unless you admit your role in the lie.
glenn greenwald
Right.
And if that happened, if you said, look, I was really swept up in the media bubble I was in, and I want to tell the story of why I did this, or how I convinced myself of this lie.
Then there would be some nobility to it.
There would be some value in work.
This is what I mean.
There were several people, but myself was included, who I was bashing the table every day.
We were compiling tapes of Jake Tapper doing all the things that I had just referenced.
And I remember at the time, Jake Tapper always serving the Democratic Party in these ways.
And his initial response was to send out...
There was one in the Daily Beast, one in the Huffington Post.
tucker carlson
Wait, actually attacking you?
glenn greenwald
Oh, yeah, they were pitching stories like, yeah, and there's, you know, they were in like shitty liberal sites that no one, like Huffington Post and the Daily Beast.
There was a couple others.
But they had pitched them to the New York Post, to the Wall Street Journal, I think, as well.
New York Post got in contact with me.
They didn't run it because it was so easy to prove.
tucker carlson
What was the allegation?
glenn greenwald
That all of these incidents that I just described, and there were others as well, of things he did on his show were like...
That's the other thing.
They didn't just deny it.
They attacked anyone who said it.
People in 2024 here were saying, oh, look, Biden clearly doesn't know where he is, including at that event with Obama, that big George Clooney fundraiser.
The Washington Post wrote an article saying...
Like, they weren't exactly fake, but the narrative was fake.
And anyone who said Joe Biden clearly is in cognitive decline, if you look at him at these events, they were called right-wing disinformation agents.
And as it turns out, George Clooney ended up saying, the reason why I wanted Biden not to run was because the Joe Biden I saw at that event was completely unrecognizable.
He was like a, he has dementia.
At the time, when people were saying, like, clearly he doesn't know where he is being let off the stage by Barack Obama, none of this was new.
This is what we had been seeing for so long.
The media affirmatively used that disinformation term that has become their weapon of deception and propaganda and smearing people who tell the truth to label all of that disinformation.
And so they were the ones who perpetrated the fraud.
And now they're pretending like they're the ones uncovering it.
I think the reason they don't get it is because of that insulated bubble that they exist in.
They all do believe that they're truthful, they're good, they're benevolent, they're nonpartisan, and that unfortunately there was no way for them to have told the story because Mike Donilon was lying about it or Jill Biden was keeping the truth from them.
And so what can they do?
tucker carlson
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I think that kind of self-deception is a byproduct of the tribalism that really defines DC, and it's like, we can't help the other side.
We're going to start with, the other side is evil, and anything that helps them, we can't do.
Therefore, we're going to have to make some accommodations that may include lying, but it's not really lying.
It's in the service of a greater good.
glenn greenwald
Oh, yeah, which is what every person who has ever done anything evil has said to justify it.
I'm not an evil person.
I'm not a sociopath.
I'm doing something that seems evil, but it's for a greater cause.
The end is justify the means.
I mean, that's the most basic, basically amoral statement you can have.
And since the emergence of Trump, that is all that journalism has become.
Not just journalism, but so many...
Academia, so many different institutions have renounced their core function, whatever that might be, science, in order to...
tucker carlson
That's right.
glenn greenwald
And, you know, Sam Harris, just whether through stupidity or just, like, inadvisable candor, you know, was the first one who came out with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff after he realized it was a lie and said, like, yeah.
I guess this laptop was true, but at the end of the day, I really don't care.
If they have to lie about it, fine.
The evil of electing Donald Trump is so much greater, and he was the first one to really candidly acknowledge what they are all thinking, which is, we'll lie, we'll spread disinformation, we'll hide things, because the destruction and fear that we have of Donald Trump in power is so great.
That anything we do to try and impede it is not just justifiable, but almost morally imperative.
That is how most of these institutions ended up reasoning, and that's why they lost their credibility.
tucker carlson
We're all Dietrich Bonhoeffer at this point.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, it's very self-glorifying, too.
We're on the front line of fighting fascism.
tucker carlson
I mean, this is such a tired question, but I've never really gotten an answer that satisfies me.
I mean, I look at Trump and I'm like, you know, this is not a radical person in most ways.
Why, and a lot of the things that he says are things that the Democratic Party was like officially for 10 years ago.
You know, less wars, pay attention to the forgotten man.
glenn greenwald
Free trade is kind of bad.
tucker carlson
Right, exactly, right.
I mean, these are not, he is not a radical right-winger as I would have conceived of a radical right-winger in 1998 or 2018.
So why, but...
What is that?
I still don't fully understand it.
glenn greenwald
I think it's two things.
One, less important, though still not trivial, which is comportmentally, he's just such a radical departure from the way anybody who has ever gotten close to the presidency has conducted themselves, and I remember so well the time I realized.
fair.
Yeah, it's true.
I remember the time that I realized just how far gone the media was when it came to this, and the political establishment generally, which was during the 2016 campaign, when they kept asking about collusion with Russia and collusion with Russia and all that.
And he said, I don't know anything about that.
I have nothing to do with the Russians.
And he was like, I didn't have anything to do with that, but hey, Russia, if you're listening, maybe you could find Hillary Clinton's 87,000 deleted emails, which was obviously a joke.
Just a joke.
I have nothing to do with Russia, but if they're such great hackers, maybe they can find...
The media took that and they, for over a year, earnestly pretended...
Like, if you have some, like, back-channel secret relationship with Russia, the way you're going to, like, submit your requests is by standing in front of 130 cameras and be like, hey, Putin, this is my latest hacking request.
Go find those emails.
Instead of, like, having, you know, Don Jr. meet in a parking lot with some, like, Russian agent or whatever.
I mean, but the fact that they were willing to, they really thought that that was a smoking gun and could not understand how Trump jokes, how he uses irony, how he like purposely trolls was, you know, the time that I realized just how far gone they were.
But I think the bigger reason why they were, I think we've talked about this before, is Trump.
You have, you know, on the margins, things that make it appear like the parties are so different.
They fight about abortion.
They do disagree on abortion or culture war issues, all of that.
But on the question of how power is distributed, on how the U.S. maintains global hegemony, Like, those permanent power factions in Washington, the corporatism, militarism, don't care at all who wins because their policies prevail no matter what.
You can vote for whoever you want.
You can vote against it.
You can vote for it.
It doesn't matter.
It continues.
Trump, by necessity, Because the Republicans had already chosen Jeb Bush as their candidate.
We all expected it was going to be another Bush-Clinton race.
It was going to be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.
That was the assumption that everyone had.
Hillary would have lost had the DNC not cheated for her, but they did cheat for her, so she was the nominee.
But the only way Trump could break through, how do you break through against all the Republican money behind Jeb Bush?
you have to run against the Bush family.
You have to run against conservative Republican dogma on both economics and...
He ran against permanent war.
He ran against serving corporatism at the expense of the working people, against free trade, at the expense of having an industrial base.
And he became a kind of threat.
And Steve Bannon was the architect at the time, and Steve Bannon's vision very much was that.
Like, the Republican establishment is at least as bad as the Democratic establishment, and he was a threat to disrupt this bipartisan continuity on which power factions in Washington depend, and I think that's what made him so anathema to so many different factions.
tucker carlson
He was a challenge to the post-war order, basically.
glenn greenwald
Like, questioning the viability of NATO?
tucker carlson
I know.
glenn greenwald
It's like walking into a church and saying, like, we sure Jesus is divine?
You know, like, that alone.
tucker carlson
That actually changed my life when he said that.
I grew up around NATO, grew up supporting NATO unthinkingly, never thought about NATO.
glenn greenwald
NATO's the good guys.
tucker carlson
100% NATO keeps the Soviets from rolling into Belgium, you know, and like, that's good.
Why is that bad?
Of course we love NATO.
glenn greenwald
But then he was like, hey, but like the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.
tucker carlson
No one had ever, in a lifetime in D.C., no one had ever mentioned NATO in a way that challenged me to think about what it was or its role until that.
And he just said it offhandedly.
And I was like, NATO?
Really?
He's against NATO?
How could you be against NATO?
And that began a chain of thinking that totally changed my view of everything.
So I think you're right.
It's dangerous to have people saying stuff like that.
glenn greenwald
I mean, what you want is continuity with the status quo.
And like who was a more reliable maven of the status quo than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden?
And so that's why they were so desperate, including all, you know, all the neocons and conservatives that you knew.
So many of them openly supported Clinton and Biden.
And many of them, like to this day, like half the Republican Senate caucus at least hate Oh, yeah.
tucker carlson
You really think Mike Rounds voted for Trump?
I don't think so.
I don't know, but I'm just saying like these guys.
glenn greenwald
Right, those types.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
So can I just go back?
I want to ask you more about that and like the place of neoconservatives.
And I guess we're not even to use that term.
So think of a new term as I ask.
All right, I will.
But before we get to that, like you mentioned Russiagate a couple of times and the hacking and the subsequent leaking of those emails from the DNC.
Who did that?
unidentified
It's possible, of course, that the Russians did it.
glenn greenwald
Like, sometimes you get the official story and it's possible.
You know, I know Julian Assange a long time.
I know him very well.
tucker carlson
What a good man.
glenn greenwald
Oh, I think he's like one of the heroes of our lifetimes.
And not just a hero, but like incredibly consequential.
And just a decent person too.
tucker carlson
I agree.
glenn greenwald
Not without his personality flaws, but oftentimes that kind of courage.
Whenever people used to complain about Julian's difficult personality, let's use the generous term difficult personality, I would always say, who do you think is going to go and spill the secrets of the world's most powerful government?
You think it's going to be some mild-mannered, gentle, congenial person?
No, it takes a certain personality type.
tucker carlson
Yes, yes.
glenn greenwald
And, but in any event...
He had raised the possibility that Seth Rich was murdered because he was the leaker.
It was WikiLeaks who received them.
tucker carlson
Yeah, but who shared them with the world.
glenn greenwald
Who then published them all, exactly.
tucker carlson
So it's not a small thing when the guy who runs WikiLeaks suggests something.
glenn greenwald
Correct.
That said, if you are the recipient of leaks, as I've been many times, you don't actually know who the kind of...
That could be a go-between.
But at the same time, Julian is extremely smart.
You know, I talked to him this day.
He's, I think, not fully recovered.
He'll never be, I mean, after what he went through, but his brain is, you know, just like a font of insight.
You can go back and look at stuff he said, and it proved to be so prescient.
tucker carlson
I know.
glenn greenwald
And so when he says that, I do think Julian sees himself for good reason as an enemy of the intelligence agencies in the West.
tucker carlson
We did like seven and a half years in confinement because of it?
glenn greenwald
Yeah, like eight years in the Ecuadorian embassy and then four and a half years in the prison that the BBC calls the British Guantanamo.
tucker carlson
Mike Pompeo, the head of CIA, plotted his assassination.
glenn greenwald
Plotted his assassination, badgered the Ecuadorians into lifting the asylum they had given him and promised him and allowed the London police to go in and, you know, coerced, threatened.
He bribed the Ecuadorians to lift that grant of asylum so that they could then go in.
Mike Pompeo in his first month as CIA director gave a speech saying, we're going to destroy WikiLeaks.
It's time that they stop hiding behind the First Amendment.
So he was very serious about that.
tucker carlson
Mike Pompeo should be charged with...
That's a crime.
You can't do that in the United States.
glenn greenwald
I mean, there's so many things Mike Pompeo should be charged with, but we know for certain that he was wanting...
I mean, he was the CIA director thinking, oh, now I get to murder people who I want.
tucker carlson
Yeah, who embarrass me, who've never been trying to do it.
glenn greenwald
not who committed crimes he'd never been charged with a crime in the united states when that until like until 2018 right when when when they engineered this you know obscenely faceless indictment that He would never have been convicted.
They wanted to break him psychologically and physically, and they came very close to doing that.
But in any event, so when Julian Assange says something like that, part of me knows that he views himself as an enemy of the intelligence agencies and wants to use the same methods they use, which is sometimes he spreads disinformation for confusion.
But I also believe that he believes there's something to it, and so we never had a real investigation into anything relating to Russiagate at all, because in the first term, Trump was, you know, that whole administration was commandeered.
It was run by people who were opposed to Trump's agenda, for the most part.
Part of this new administration is constructed to avoid that from happening, and I think they are now going back and looking at a lot of these things.
tucker carlson
So we're not positive that cryptocurrency is the future of finance, but we do know that what we have now is broken and dangerous.
Debt has never been higher in this country.
Many of our so-called leaders are getting rich, serving you.
It's a scam.
So where does it go?
Well, thankfully, there are options.
Donald Trump has said repeatedly he wants the United States to be the crypto capital of the world.
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What do you think the chances are that those emails came from a DNC employee?
glenn greenwald
Honestly, I don't know.
I just, I don't like to, I'm open to it.
I'm definitely open to it, but I'm not going to affirm it.
tucker carlson
I think it's very strange.
I got from an MPD, Metropolitan Police Department officer, who was a friend of mine, the fact, which I checked, which is that the FBI immediately took over the...
murder investigation.
Now, why would the FBI...
glenn greenwald
Of a routine, supposedly routine, Why would the FBI take that over?
tucker carlson
Like, is there a good reason for that?
That's bizarre.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I know.
That's why I say I'm open to it.
Even though, you know, that's been something that is immediately branded like such an obvious conspiracy theory that the second you suggest that you're receptive to it.
But that's exactly when conspiracy theories are often ones that deserve attention.
tucker carlson
I don't know.
An American citizen got murdered in my city.
And so I feel like I have an absolute right to ask, why did the FBI take that over?
And what did they learn?
And like, what is that?
That's a totally fair question.
They don't, you know, it's so funny.
They set themselves up as the arbiters of everything.
It's the moral arbiters, for sure.
And you're, like, not allowed to ask that question.
It's like, I spent my life in D.C. I know the street he was shot on.
He's an American just like me.
I have absolutely a fundamental right to ask like, Why wasn't there a real investigation into this?
And, like, this seems anomalous.
Like, what's the answer?
glenn greenwald
Shut up!
And then the tactic is by, like, the Ben Shapiros of the world and the people who are the people who have anointed themselves to be the guardians of official versions or, you know, no challenging any sorts of, like, why did the USS Liberty happen?
Those kind of things.
Like, what happened with JFK?
tucker carlson
My favorite was, why was JFK?
I don't care.
It was a long time ago.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, it was so long ago.
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
And they mock that now as just asking questions.
It's like, I don't know, I feel like my job as not just a journalist but a human being and a citizen is I kind of want to be asking questions.
I don't want to just be ingesting what I'm told because what we've been told has been proven to be deliberate lies so often.
tucker carlson
Also, I like people who ask questions.
I'm uncomfortable with people who make declarative statements.
Exclusively.
Because you actually don't know the answer to most things.
Like, I said, where do you think those emails came from?
Podesta's emails, DNC emails.
And you're like, I don't really know.
But here are the questions that I have.
That's the honest answer.
glenn greenwald
Well, also, you know how many times, not just in politics where the liberalized happened, but in every field of discipline, like physics and chemistry and biology, everything, linguistics, where a certain...
And that's why I believe in the absolute necessity of preserving the right to question everything.
tucker carlson
That's the scientific method.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, and it's just basic humility.
It's like to think that human beings have discovered unchallenged truths that can never be disproven and that from here, henceforth, you're not allowed to question.
No, I'm not accepting that from anybody.
tucker carlson
Oh, I want to print that and put it on my fridge.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Okay, so...
Yeah, sure.
glenn greenwald
I mean, just because...
everywhere in the media, on their shows, on every other show, banging on the table, demanding the immediate release of all the Epstein files.
We're now five months into the Trump administration.
We haven't gotten a single document that wasn't previously published of the Epstein files.
They made a humiliating showing of pretending to release it.
When they called those conservative influence, and they all waved around the binder.
Epstein files were like, oh my god, what was in them?
And then it turns out, like, nothing.
You know, just every document that was in this binder was already previously released as part of the litigation or journalism that was done.
And Pam Bondi's new excuse, because, I mean, I'm glad that there are a lot of people in the Trump movement and the MAGA movement who are not contrary to how they're depicted in some sort of cult.
Like, they...
They want to understand.
We were promised these things.
Why isn't this happening?
And so Pam Bondi's excuse now is we have thousands and thousands of sex videos of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with minors, implying that it's obviously going to take a lot of time to go through these videos, and therefore we have to be patient before we get them.
It's like, I don't care about sex videos.
Of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with children, because we already know that Jeffrey Epstein had sex with children.
That's kind of the reason we know who he is.
He's been twice charged with that, once convicted, and then was ready to be charged again.
For me, the two biggest issues are, are there people to whom he trafficked minors?
because he was charged with sex trafficking, but nobody has been charged with being the recipient of that sex trafficking.
But the much more interesting question for me is...
There is no way they don't already have that answer.
Maybe the answer is no.
Maybe he wasn't working with any.
It would shock me, but maybe that's their answer.
Maybe their answer is he was.
Why don't we have those answers?
Like, have FBI agents, for whatever reason, go through those sex tapes for the next three years?
That's fine.
What stops them from releasing that answer now?
tucker carlson
For people who may not be as familiar with the details, what leads you to raise that question?
Is there evidence that suggests he might have been working with a foreign intelligence?
glenn greenwald
Well, first of all, the source of his wealth has always been mysterious.
I mean, he wasn't just very rich.
He was living the life of a multi-multi-billionaire.
He had, you know, $50 million properties in Manhattan and West Palm Beach and bought that island, New Mexico, flying around on a 747.
This is not just like somebody who's very wealthy.
This is somebody with essentially unlimited resources, right?
like Bill Gates type world.
And one of the ways, one of the, He was a highly competent accountant.
Yeah, like a tax accountant.
That's a tax accountant.
They tell you what strategies to use to save money.
So maybe Les Wexner valued him so much that he gave him, I don't know, $3 billion.
In general, billionaires don't like to give money away that they don't have to.
Maybe Les Wexner is super generous, like, oh, so gratefully to Jeffrey Epstein, here's like $2 billion.
But Les Wexner has all sorts of ties to his main non-money-making.
Endeavor in life is supporting Israel and donating to pro-Israel groups and working closely with the Israeli government.
Jazayne Maxwell, who's now in prison as having been essentially his right-hand man, her father, Robert Maxwell, who died in a very mysterious way, he slipped off his yacht, was a known Mossad agent.
He worked with the Mossad.
He had very close ties to Israel.
He was given a state funeral.
Yes, in Israel.
And, you know, when I did this note in reporting, people, there's a lot of documents that we released that, and just because there were so many, not all of them got the attention they deserved.
One of the set of files we released described the intelligence relationship that we have with Israel, the NSA has with Israel.
Israel is the number one recipient.
We share more with Israel, even more than we do with the Five Eyes partners who developed this technology.
we give more to Israel, more intelligence, raw intelligence about Americans as well, and more intelligence know-how.
But at the same time, the documents that describe who are our greatest intelligence threats, who are our greatest intelligence adversaries, who spies on us the most, who is capable of spying out the most, number one on the list is Israel as well.
Obviously, the Israelis use, you know, some, I mean, the, most dangerous spying programs like Pegasus and others come from Israel, are developed by Israel, are controlled by the Israelis, by which I simply mean to say that Israel uses every weapon at its disposal, including gathering, incriminating information about its enemies.
Some people have suggested that Oh no, it's not Israel.
It's probably the Qatari intelligence agencies with whom he worked.
Maybe it was Peru.
Maybe it was Indonesia.
tucker carlson
People have said that Epstein was working with the Qataris?
glenn greenwald
Yeah.
tucker carlson
I want to keep a list of people who make that claim.
Do you know anyone who said that?
It's pretty funny.
glenn greenwald
You know how like Israeli, like supporters of, like Loyalists of Israel in the United States I find it hilarious.
And I'm always like, you know what?
Let me know when Congress starts passing on a weekly basis pro-COTA resolutions or when, like, students are being...
Let me know when we start sending billions of dollars a year to Qatar.
Let me know when all that starts to happen, and I'll be receptive to the fact that maybe Qatar...
I'm just saying the nature of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing, the amount of wealth that it required, the number of the most powerful elites on the planet who were with him, who were involved with him, who were at his island, Despite knowing that he had been convicted in 2010 of having sex with minors,
hiring prostitutes who were underage, who continued to consort with him in the most proximate ways, something was going on there.
It would be incredibly valuable.
He had cameras in every part of his house.
He had tapes of everything.
Obviously, that would be of immense value to any foreign intelligence agent.
tucker carlson
Of course, and American.
I mean, he was close friends with Bill Burns, the former head of the CIA.
glenn greenwald
Maybe domestic intelligence agencies as well, but it really is starting to inflame my suspicions a great deal every day that goes by.
When we're not getting that information, particularly because the people who have it are the people who spent years demanding its release and promising to facilitate it if they got into power.
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Two facts, data points as they're now called, that suggest to me that something's up.
One is the fact that Epstein was represented in his first...
And the second is the statement by Alex Acosta, which I think maybe is at the top of your memory, about why Epstein got off so easily.
glenn greenwald
How is this not talked about every day?
Okay, so in Florida, in the United States generally, having sex with minors.
Hiring, you know, using minors as prostitutes is considered, like, a pretty terrible crime.
Yeah, you know, most people agree on that.
Yeah, you don't really have to debate that.
That's considered, like, something that deserves huge amounts of jail time and typically results in huge amounts of jail time.
Jeffrey Epstein barely went to jail for that.
As part of a plea bargain, they had...
It wasn't a question of could they prove his guilt.
They gave him a plea deal, a plea deal, where he spent like six seconds in jail, and then like most of the time at home doing community service.
And Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time, which was in charge of the case, that's where Epstein was, ultimately ended up in the Justice Department and other roles inside the government.
And so he was constantly asked, why would you give Jeffrey Epstein such a, like, generous plea deal that nobody would ever get for those crimes?
And he ended up saying, I was told that he's intelligence and therefore leave him alone.
That's what Alex Acosta, the prosecutor, says that he was told about what he should do with the Jeffrey, like, leave him alone because he's intelligence.
tucker carlson
Well, there were, we're just kind of, the conversation just, like, ended.
Like, we know.
Now, if the prosecutor says, the federal prosecutor in Florida says that, then I think we can assume that that's true.
glenn greenwald
Right.
So why don't we know what that means?
That's what, you know, like, what would be the reason that people inside the Trump administration, who have long expressed vehemently, vocally, at the top of their agenda, demands that the Epstein files be released?
Why are they not telling us that information?
tucker carlson
I think the net effect of this is to drive everyone insane and to make everyone angry and suspicious and paranoid and conspiracy-minded.
I do think that.
It's like you expect that we're going to hear the truth, and then it's like, oh, by the way, no.
Everyone assumes the worst.
I mean, why wouldn't you assume the worst?
I don't think that improves American society.
glenn greenwald
The thing is, whenever I talk about independent media, including from people who are...
tucker carlson
Yeah, of course it is.
glenn greenwald
There's been a lot of conspiracy theories embraced by the credible legacy media as well.
I mean, it wasn't like Reddit that convinced Americans Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program.
tucker carlson
Or that Joe Biden was the best version ever.
glenn greenwald
Right.
Or that, like, the North Vietnamese were the aggressors in the Gulf of Punkin.
Right?
That came from like CBS and Walter Cronkite and the New York Times.
But in any event, of course there's going to be The Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, all of the lies around Trump.
9-11 itself.
And then if you go back further, like the Vietnam War, but then also COVID.
And like, one after the next, at best, massive fundamental systemic failure on the part of all the institutions we were taught to trust, and probably at worst, and probably more accurately, Overwhelming deceit and lies and falsehoods and propaganda continuously disseminated by them in order to facilitate what they wanted.
What is going to happen to a society where people lose faith and trust in institutions, not because, you know, charlatans are on the sidelines encouraging them to make that happen, but because rationally those institutions no longer merit trust or faith?
tucker carlson
If you lie too much, I don't believe you.
glenn greenwald
It's kind of basic.
tucker carlson
So the only antidote to that is transparency is revealing the truth.
And I really worry right now, especially, that this is hardening people's cynicism and rage and really, at some point, nihilism.
Like, nothing is true.
That is the conclusion a lot of people are going to read.
Nothing is true.
I don't believe anything.
It's all fake.
glenn greenwald
Also, you know, Cash Patel and Dan Magino are people who...
I mean, these were the people among the most respected.
I mean, Dan Bongino's show on Rumble, a platform that still maybe like 30, 40, maybe even 50% of the people in the United States have never even heard of, was getting bigger audiences than almost every daytime cable show.
Kash Patel, the surge of support for him when he was nominated to lead the FBI was massive because people thought, no, that's who we need to get in and root this out and clean it out.
And I believe there is something to that.
I think they are authentic and genuine in that way.
But at the same time, something is constraining them.
And so I asked myself, what kinds of truths would people be determined to hide who are more powerful than they are?
And when it comes to the Epstein files, I continuously zero in on that question of...
tucker carlson
I know Bongino well.
I think of him as a friend.
I think he is a man of integrity.
And I think his integrity remains pure because of his rage.
Like, Dan's mad at lying.
And so I don't know what's going on at all.
And to be clear, he said, I know that Epstein killed himself because I've seen the evidence.
So I'm pretty confident in the case of Dan Bongino.
glenn greenwald
I don't even mind that.
But then the question still becomes like they said, they know how they're.
And they were among the people raising doubts about whether Epstein killed himself.
I'm not that...
Like, you live a life of great wealth and then suddenly you know you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison.
It seems odd to me that you can go to a federal prison and kill yourself.
Like, there's not safeguards against that.
But whatever.
things that are run by the government failed.
I'm not suggesting...
But even there, they're saying like, look, I promise you we read the files.
He killed himself.
So then my question is, well, why can't we read those files?
tucker carlson
Well, that is my question too.
And I would just say in the case of Bongino, I know Kash Patel, but I'm not like a friend of Kash Patel's.
I'm a friend of Bongino's and I do think that will come out.
But I think big picture DOJ is making a huge mistake, huge mistake in promising to reveal things and then not revealing them.
And that gives the whole country a kind of moral blue balls at that point.
And it's bad.
It's really bad.
It's going to cause a lot of hate.
And second, I think that we underestimate the physical threat that people in Washington face.
It's always like blackmail or ideological affinity.
People are afraid of getting hurt.
I do think that's a component.
I mean, I know that's a component here.
glenn greenwald
And the JFK case is an example of the President of the United States having his head blown off.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
Exactly.
And you think that that's not ever present or constantly present in the minds of people in Washington?
They killed the President and got away with it for over 60 years.
So, like, clearly there are forces that are above justice.
glenn greenwald
Oh, no, don't worry.
Lee Harvey Oswald was killed and Jack Ruby went to prison.
Jack Ruby!
tucker carlson
The whole story is Jack Ruby, by the way.
The whole story is Jack Ruby.
glenn greenwald
I mean, he just walked up to the person they had claimed and just shot him in the stomach.
tucker carlson
And there's no evidence he even liked the Kennedys.
There's zero evidence.
He never campaigned for them, never gave them money.
There's not one person who's ever come forward to say, you know, Jack Ruby was passionately attached to JFK.
Not one person.
Right.
So, like, what was the motive there?
He was clearly sent there to silence.
Lee Harvey Oswald.
So by whom is the obvious question?
There are very serious indications by whom, but whatever, I don't know.
But I don't know why everyone spends all this time on Lee Harvey Oswald when the key to the story is so clearly Jack Ruby.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I mean, this is, I think we are so indoctrinated to believe that this sort of thing happens in other countries.
Like how much, think about how much we've heard, for example, about Putin and Albani.
tucker carlson
Right.
glenn greenwald
And we're all supposed to like obsess on the idea that in Russia, you know, if you get too much influence or you become too much of a threat to somebody, you get killed or imprisoned.
tucker carlson
The funny thing is, Putin didn't even kill Navalny.
unidentified
I think everybody...
glenn greenwald
Yeah, exactly.
After months of I got blamed for his murder.
tucker carlson
I was in Russia when he died.
glenn greenwald
I can't believe you killed Navalny.
I remember that timing.
You had your big Putin interview.
Two days earlier, Putin killed Navalny.
And you were there with Putin.
No, but that's a big part of how that propaganda works.
I grew up thinking that.
These kind of bad things happen.
They just don't happen in our country.
tucker carlson
It must be cool to live, you live outside the country, famously, where, you know, you're a foreigner living in a country where you've been a long time, you speak the language, you're engaged in the politics, so you're like part of it, but you're also from the United States, so you're not coming at it with that baggage.
You can see you're just like, you don't lie to yourself about what it is.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I do think, I think one of the great, one of the things for which I'm most grateful is that I was never embarrassed.
tucker carlson
It didn't help me being a part of that at all.
glenn greenwald
I'll tell you, there's a...
I've been, you know, Jake Topper's co-author in that book.
tucker carlson
Former political reporter.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, so now works at Axios.
tucker carlson
Yep.
glenn greenwald
And I've been very aggressive about praising him, like, going back two years when he was one of the only ones working for these news outlets who was on the story of Biden's cognitive decline getting mauled and attacked by the entire Democratic Party.
I was often praising him and defending him.
You know, I mean, I wouldn't say we're great friends, but, you know, he, like, sent me a copy of the book with very nice words.
And so when I go to attack Jake Tapper, which is essentially attacking that book, of course, there's a part of my brain that, like, you know, Thinks about, wait, what is that going to do to my relationship with Alex Thompson?
And then you have to be like, I don't care.
But if that is your life...
I mean, Alex Thompson is not an important, close friend of mine.
But if you live in Washington, and your whole social scene is integrated into...
You know, so funny, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson were on...
So can you imagine?
tucker carlson
Jeffrey Goldberg is a PBS show?
glenn greenwald
Yeah, it's like The Week in Washington.
tucker carlson
Jeffrey Goldberg hosts a TV show?
glenn greenwald
Yeah, PBS.
Like The Week in Washington.
tucker carlson
He's the most unappealing person.
glenn greenwald
I know, I know.
You can't find anyone less telegenic.
But anyway, he is the...
He sits there like...
Anyway...
And so at the end, he said to Jake Tapper, like, what is the lesson that we have to take from all this?
And Jake Tapper got very serious.
He, like, furred his brow.
But he only, like, looked down at the table because he just—it was a very weird thing.
Like, he's just kind of—you know, he's on television every day.
You know you'd look up.
You'd talk to people.
He was, like, looking down.
He had his head bowed.
Like, the face of somebody who has a PR crisis firm.
And he said, what I have realized is that you cannot trust what people in power tell you.
People in power lie.
And when they tell you things, you have to take it with skepticism.
You cannot take it on face value.
So Jake Tapper at 56 years old, after 30 years of...
Like why it's important to have journalism because people in power lie to keep their power.
And this is something that now that Trump's in office, they've suddenly discovered is an important thing to do to be adversarial to people in power.
And I think...
Like, they are friends with Mike Donilon and, like, Anita Dunn.
Their kids go to their same schools.
They live in the same neighborhoods.
They intermarry.
You know, like, half these couples are, like, one in the media, one in politics, and then they're wobbling door.
They constantly switch, and they're at lobbyist firms together.
Washington is like, you know, Versailles.
And so it's impossible to be adversarial.
tucker carlson
Man, we had dinner without naming names, but with a journalist last night, you and I did here, who I never met before.
Nice guy, actually.
But from D.C., grew up two blocks from me.
Mother went to the same school that I did.
He went to the same school as everyone I know.
I mean, it's like, if you're from there, you are connected to every other person who's from there.
Of course.
Like, to a much greater extent than people understand, just physically.
glenn greenwald
Yes, it's like the British court, like, totally incestuous.
tucker carlson
It's unbelievable.
glenn greenwald
Well, you know, this is what I think, I think a lot of times, you know, because I've been a very harsh critic of media corporations and the like people, you know, ask me like, when did this change or whatever?
And I like, there's always been a lot of closeness between the media and its supposed heyday in the 50s with like, with Murrow and Cronkite and all that.
But I think, you know, there was a long time when journalism was considered this, like— Working class, outsider profession.
And the people who went into it didn't want to be wearing Armani suits and going to dinner at the White House with B-list celebrities.
They were just working class guys who just wanted to throw rocks at power.
That was their personality.
That's why they went into journalism.
And of course, going back even further, like the First Amendment says, you know, all Americans enjoy freedom of the press.
There was no such thing as like this secret priesthood of called journalists, like professional.
The press was literally the printing press that everybody could use and everybody did use.
You didn't have to be a journalist to use it.
It was just a means of expressing and disrupting and informing and organizing, and that's what they protected.
And as huge corporations started buying...
it's never being disruptive to anybody who has authority.
It's conformity.
It's just sort of being a good soldier for people.
People in power, which is the exact opposite attributes that make a good journalist.
And the incentive schemes that journalists are now encouraged to follow to rise within media are the kind of people who worship power, who are obedient to it.
And that, to me, has become the most fundamentally wrotted part.
And that's why, you know, what inspired media and journalism, like, the blogosphere of, like, the early 2000s, which are, like, just all these angry people on the right and left, like, hating the media, no credentials, but, like, seeing things that they weren't seeing, you know, hating the Bush administration, but either from the right or from the left, hating the mainstream media, same thing and like you start realizing like wow like this mainstream media and politics it's like a tiny little like obama once described it as you know like
Like, we're basically on the same team.
We just, the 40-yard line.
And you realize there's this whole other space and way of looking at things, and it was really the internet that gave rise to it, which is why the internet is, and controlling it and censoring it is the thing that is on the top of their agenda because it's the biggest threat to them.
tucker carlson
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Why do you see things...
Well, I should just say, I think your mom worked at McDonald's, actually.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I mean, I think...
tucker carlson
Which wouldn't be shocking if you were in any other business, but I don't think I know a single other person.
I don't think I know a single other person in our generation in media who can say that.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I think like...
I think Trump has it to an extent too, even though Trump grew up very wealthy, but it was like outer borough wealth, which is not looked upon kindly by old money in Manhattan.
And then he comes into Manhattan and starts building gigantic buildings and being all flashy about it.
And so he understood that he was looked down upon by those people.
Same with Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon always knew that the intelligentsia on the East Coast hated him, thought he was disgusting.
And I think if you grow up feeling excluded from certain kind of power centers, there's always going to be a kind of resentment that you have toward it.
And I suppose in some way that could lead to a desperation to be integrated into it.
But I think more often than not, and certainly in my case, it made me want to deconstruct it and show the facade that they use to glorify themselves, but the dirt and filth that really lay underneath.
And I think that kind of distance really helps with clarity of vision.
tucker carlson
I totally agree.
And traveling.
You were saying last night that you think that traveling is one of the most expanding things you can do.
glenn greenwald
I had this, I did that interview with Alexander Dugan.
I know you've interviewed him too.
And I know we're all supposed to hate him and he's a fascist, whatever.
But one of the reasons I really loved him is, you know, he's a philosopher.
When I say I loved him, I mean I love talking to him.
He's a philosopher.
Sometimes I studied philosophy in college.
It was my obsession.
I wanted to teach philosophy.
I ended up being more practical and going to law school.
But thinking about things in terms of their first principles and always needing a rationale or a logical train that gets you from the start of your question to the end of whatever answer you think you've embraced is very important to me.
And just thinking about not being reflexive.
So one of the things he said to me was, he said, you know, I'm always accused of being like a racist or a white supremacist because I'm so devoted to preserving Russian culture and Russian civilization.
And he said, actually, the biggest racists by far are Western liberals because they believe that their way of being is so superior that every single other culture should give way to...
The whole world should be homogenized in their vision because they're inherently superior.
They find a tribe, some ancient tribe, and they want to immediately mold it into Washington neoliberals.
What he was saying was, like, what makes the world valuable and interesting and ultimately, like, the way you advance and think about things is that you have all these different traditions, all these different civilizations, like Russian civilization and Chinese civilization and Muslim civilization and, you know, Western civilization.
And preserving those is what ensures that we have this diversity of thought.
tucker carlson
It's like a seed bank.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, everything contributes something.
And so, you are constantly told, and maybe this is universal.
When you grow up in a society that your way of life is, you know, we're always told like the United States is the greatest country ever to exist in the whole history of the world.
Like what a great coincidence for me that I was born in like the objectively greatest country to ever be on the planet, not just now, but all of human history.
And there are some parts of the United States that I know I love and I think are very uniquely valuable for sure.
But the more you get to know...
other types of ways of thinking and you have this experience like if some neighbor has a politics different than yours and you think they're crazy and then you go and talk to them and you understand them better yes and then that makes you be more open to ways of looking at things that that to me is what you know like intellectual vibrancy is is going to places that you don't understand hearing ideas that you were taught to believe are crazy or evil or wrong and then you know when you talk to the human beings who
I just think that's a beautiful sentiment, and thank you for saying it.
tucker carlson
So what you're really arguing for is diversity.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, like diversity, like not the kind that, you know, we've been told is diversity where everyone thinks the same thing, but like they have surface level diversity.
tucker carlson
The Indian guy, the black guy, and the white lady all went to Princeton, and they're diverse.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I remember this initiative where we wanted to diversify our newsroom at The Intercept, and so we hired like...
And then, like, you know, and that was, like, diversity.
Like, everything but, like, working class diversity or experiential diversity.
You know, the most, like, superficial kind, the most easily accommodated kind.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I do know very much.
So what did you think?
So you interviewed Dugan in Russia, in Moscow.
What did you think of it?
When was the last time you were there?
glenn greenwald
I had been several times because I visited Snowden.
In Citizen Four, the last scene of Citizen Four, the film that was made about the Snowden, our work with Snowden that won the Oscar that Laura Poitras directed was her and myself going to Russia to interview Snowden about a next sort of story.
tucker carlson
Imagine, pardon to interrupt, imagine a Snowden film winning an Oscar now.
glenn greenwald
I mean, at the time, it was, we were.
And at the time, I remember after they announced Citizen Four as the winner of the Oscars, it was Neil Patrick Harris who was the host of the Oscars.
We had gone on stage and gotten the award.
And he then said, Edward Snowden wanted to be here, but he was unable to for some sort of treason.
You know, like doing a wordplay on reason, but like with the word treason.
And it's like, you fucking idiots.
Like, you're Hollywood.
You went through like the McCarthy era.
You went through all these things that you claim.
tucker carlson
Oh, he was told to say that.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, of course.
It was part of the script.
But it was a very, you know, War is a brilliant filmmaker.
And I think it won because of the quality of the film, like in the drama inherent in the story, not because the politics of it were that we were exposing.
Spying programs developed under President Obama, largely, almost entirely.
But as you're so right, this was before Russiagate.
This was before, you know, where anything connected to Russia was considered.
tucker carlson
There's no chance.
You wouldn't even get it here.
I don't think it would even, yeah, they wouldn't even consider it at this point.
So you'd been to Moscow before, but you were just there this winter, this spring?
glenn greenwald
Just, yeah, a few months ago, two, three months ago.
tucker carlson
What did you think?
glenn greenwald
Well, I mean, you know, we talked about this before, but like, I remember the first time I ever went to Russia.
I was so shocked by the immense disparity between what I had been taught to think what Russia was like and what I was seeing in front of my own eyes.
And, you know, you can go anywhere.
And like, you know, people come to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro, and they only go to the richest neighborhoods.
So I'm very cognizant of that, right?
you can't go to a country and spend like two days there and be shown the best parts and think like oh wow nonetheless it's
I mean, this is a civilization that has been around for, you know, thousands of years and that has produced the highest in, like, literature and music and dance and architecture.
I mean, and has been through, like, wars of, like, the most difficult kind, and you just feel the heaviness of all of that, like, the greatness of it.
And obviously, I understand that there's political repression there.
I understand that there's a huge, all kinds of social problems.
I'm not denying any of that.
That's true everywhere, right?
Pretty much.
You understand why Russians have this immense pride in their country and in their civilization.
tucker carlson
So it didn't feel like a gas station with nuclear weapons, as McCain said?
glenn greenwald
Exactly.
tucker carlson
Has there ever been an uglier thing than any politician, just a dumber, and McCain was dumb.
I knew him very well.
He was low IQ.
glenn greenwald
Totally.
tucker carlson
Wasp.
I hate to say that, but it's true.
With good qualities.
He had good qualities.
But he was an idiot.
But to say something like that out loud is like, there's just, I don't know.
Like, if you're an idiot, keep it to yourself.
A gas station with nuclear weapons.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I mean, that's what I mean.
Like, you, you know, you're taught in college even.
Like, the greatest literature is like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who are the greatest novelists ever.
tucker carlson
Which is true.
glenn greenwald
I mean, undoubtedly.
Also, just the history, like the role they played in World War II and like the Bolshevik Revolution and the, you know, the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries and then, you know, Moscow itself and St. Petersburg even more so are so, you know, beautiful and striking.
tucker carlson
Overwhelming.
glenn greenwald
Like in a way that like the best Western European cities are, you know, like the history of it, the grandness of it.
And so, yeah, I mean that you have to go see things for yourself and you start realizing how much your content.
I never intended to be a journalist.
I didn't go to school for journalism.
That was not part of my life plan in any way.
It was just after 9-11, you know, as I saw these radical changes.
To our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, but also just the climate became so oppressive in terms of what you could question, what you could say.
That's when I started feeling a need to want to say things that I felt like weren't being said.
And when I started doing that, more or less full time, it gave me the luxury of going and looking at things so that I wasn't being told by the New York Times what a document said.
I was able to go spend the three hours to read the document.
And when you go and do that, you have the luxury of that time, which most people don't have.
They're taking care of their kids, they're working, etc.
You can't fight propaganda if you don't have the resources to do it, especially time.
I started realizing how many things I had believed.
And I had a high opinion of my intellect.
I thought I was a high-end political consumer.
I lived in New York.
I went to good schools.
In many ways, that makes it worse, not better.
tucker carlson
I've learned that, yes.
glenn greenwald
You know, just going back and I basically decided I had to dismantle almost everything because so much of it was just ingested through no critical faculty.
tucker carlson
But why would you want to dismantle your assumptions?
I mean, that's such a painful process.
glenn greenwald
It sucks.
tucker carlson
But why would you want that?
Why wouldn't you just say, you know, I believe what I believe and that's it?
Like, I decided in college I'm not changing.
glenn greenwald
This is like right after 9-11 and the war on terror, like the Iraq war, which everybody was kind of like.
Wait, what just happened?
We just went and did this massive land war, this invasion on the other side of the country, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, because we were told they were somehow responsible based on nuclear weapons and chemical weapons they actually didn't have.
Like, everybody at that point, more or less, was starting to question.
And, you know, you feel angry and betrayed when inside your brain you're led to believe things that are just false.
unidentified
Yes.
glenn greenwald
And you want to...
You want to cleanse yourself of that.
tucker carlson
I think that's a virtuous response.
glenn greenwald
Well, I think you've done that.
That has been contradictory.
tucker carlson
I have.
It took a little longer, but yeah.
glenn greenwald
Because you were so much more immersed.
tucker carlson
It was a little more painful.
Yeah, it was right in the middle of it.
But a lot of people didn't.
I just want to call to the attention of listeners how rare what you did was.
And that process of self-examination, which is the root of wisdom.
Is unusual.
People just don't want to deal with it.
glenn greenwald
Like Jake Tapper saying, I look upon some of my coverage with humility.
Like that fake kind of like...
tucker carlson
I mean, that's like meta-fake.
glenn greenwald
Scripted fake humility.
tucker carlson
Because the one thing you hope is real is humility.
But it's not.
So I got to ask you about something.
So because of AI...
So someone sent this to me the other day.
This is a person who I confirmed is a real person.
I didn't believe it at first.
Congressman Randy Fine of Florida.
And he said this the other day on Fox News last week.
Quote.
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis.
We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese.
We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender.
That needs to be the same here in Gaza.
There is something deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.
So, we're going to nuke Gaza because of its culture.
We're going to kill everybody because we don't like the culture, which, by the way, lots of Christians in Gaza.
Muslims in Gaza.
glenn greenwald
Just innocent people in Gaza of all kinds.
tucker carlson
Of course, but to say there's some Gazan culture that's cohesive, it's like, what?
But we're going to kill them all because we don't like their culture.
And so I didn't believe that was real.
I didn't really think he was a member of Congress.
I texted a friend.
glenn greenwald
He's newly elected.
I think it was Mike Waltz or Matt Gage's seat, one or the other.
tucker carlson
It was Waltz.
glenn greenwald
Waltz, yeah.
tucker carlson
So I texted a friend of mine in Congress.
Is this really a member of Congress?
Yes.
I don't even know what to say to that, but first of all, it's evil.
But how can you say something like that and not get expelled from Congress?
How can that person be a member of the Republican Party?
I don't understand.
glenn greenwald
Let me say two things about that.
And yes, Randy Fine is very real.
I've been watching him for a while now, ever since Trump endorsed him as this America First candidate.
He had served in the Florida Senate, in the Florida legislature.
maybe the Florida house, but one of those two bodies.
He was, so he was a member of the Florida, uh, He hates DeSantis.
He has a feud with DeSantis.
And his entire political existence is centered around a foreign country, which is Israel, not the United States.
He barely ever talks about the United States.
tucker carlson
So that's America first?
glenn greenwald
Right.
America first.
So let me just say two things.
One is this broader point, and then I want to get to the more important one.
I started noticing this in 2006, 2007, and I know you hear this all the time.
World War II was one of the worst things that has ever happened to humanity.
And the reason it happened was because you had these massive military powers with these new technologies that had never previously been used in war, engaged in mass destruction, and a madman who was leading and had started the war for all kinds of reasons.
And you had the world's most powerful factions throughout the world destroying each other in the most inhumane way to the point where we not only used nuclear weapons, but after the war was over, we decided we never wanted to have a war like that again.
We imposed by convention.
We agreed to all sorts of limits through the Geneva Convention and all these other The people who got blamed for it, it was a form of victor's justice at Nuremberg, were put to death.
But at the same time, the Nuremberg trial, the judges and prosecutors said the only way— It was meant to enunciate universal principles that all countries agreed to unearth because it was so inhumane.
Like, it just stripped everybody of their humanity.
And yet, so every time we have a new war, we're...
The only historical framework that they'll use as if they only studied one thing in high school and college, like the only thing they know is World War II.
And either you're on the side of Churchill— World War II, by the way.
No, but they know, all they know is that- Churchill is good because he went and fought, and Chamberlain is bad because he tried to use diplomacy.
I wrote an article about this six months after I started writing about politics in 2006, how everything superimposed on it was the framework of World War II, and you are either Churchill or Chamberlain, and you choose one or the other, and neocons to this very day, by which I mean people who always want the United States to go to war in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The minute you say you're not interested in war, you're Chamberlain.
And the minute that you want to go to war, you're heroic Churchill.
And so the idea that because we use nuclear weapons against Japan, Imperial Japan, filled with enormous amounts of skill and money and know-how and a massive military force allied with Nazi Germany, one of the most industrialized military forces ever, that because we ended the war with nuclear weapons...
Then we're supposed to now use it on a completely defenseless population of two million people, half of whom are children who have no army of any kind, can't even break out of Gaza, let alone threaten any other country in the world, is absolutely demented.
But that is one of the war propaganda themes that are always used is everything is World War II, and that's the only word that we can reference.
They want to replicate it eternally.
tucker carlson
But I don't know that I can support a party with someone like Randy Fine.
I don't understand.
That's so disgusting.
glenn greenwald
It's demented.
That is psychotic to say that.
tucker carlson
Does anyone say that about Randy Fine?
glenn greenwald
Well, I think Randy Fine is such an important...
So Donald Trump, obviously there were a lot of Republicans who wanted to run for that Mike Waltz seat and for the Matt Gaetz seat, and whoever Trump endorses is essentially guaranteed to be the winner, and he endorsed Randy Fine.
And said, Randy Fine is all America first.
And I remember the day that that happened, thinking, Randy Fine actually is not even concerned about America, let alone placing it first.
His entire political existence is driven by loyalty to a foreign country.
Everything for him is Israel.
Everything.
And even to an extent that is very severe for a Congress that in general prioritizes Israel to a shocking amount, I can't think of a foreign country that is as important as Israel is to the United States that has any other kind of foreign country placing its interest on partisanship.
Who Donald Trump endorsed as a member of America First and whose loyalty is to a foreign country who wants to have the American worker fund that foreign country, wants the American worker to pay for their military, give $4 billion automatically every year in a deal negotiated by Obama and Netanyahu when Obama was on his way out.
And every time Israel wants to have a new war, we send them whatever they want, billions more.
We feed them all these weapons paid for by the American taxpayer.
Isolate ourselves from the rest of the world.
We block every UN resolution that the entire world supports in order to tie ourselves to Israel.
We lose our own standing, our own soft power, our own imagery in the world.
We lose massive amounts of money.
All sorts of people have said that the reason we have—there's so much anti-American hatred in the Middle East.
The reason why— People want to attack our country.
The reason why we can't get things done in the Middle East, a region where we have a lot of interest, is because of the hatred for the United States, driven primarily by our standing behind and doing everything for Israel.
tucker carlson
Well, someone said that in his manifesto.
He spelled it out.
glenn greenwald
Can we just talk one second about the fact that bin Laden wrote a note to the American people explaining why al-Qaeda was driven to attack the United States?
And there were some religious references, obviously, because al-Qaeda is a nominally religious organization.
But overwhelmingly, he listed very specific grievances with American foreign policy, all having to do with the fact that we constantly interfere in that region.
We place military bases on sacred Saudi soil.
We imposed a sanctioned regime on Iraq for years that killed 500,000 Iraqi children that Madeleine Albright said was worth it.
We overthrow their leaders and impose the ones that we want that then serve the interests of the United States and Israel.
And we fund and arm Israel to repress and kill Palestinians.
And he said, it's not that you're some country that's just sitting there peacefully and that never bothers us.
And we decided, hey, look over there.
They let their women wear bikinis, so we better go and attack them, right?
Like we were attacked for our freedom.
So he writes this letter.
I remember the letter at the time.
He was interviewed by Al Jazeera and previously by The New Yorker.
So we got to hear from Osama bin Laden, although right after 9-11, the U.S. government told media outlets do not broadcast any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden.
And their reasoning was we're concerned that he may have embedded within his speech some sort of secret code that will activate sleeper cells inside the United States.
Like he was going to blank Morse code or like have secret phrases and then people inside the United States would hear it.
So they told ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, do not air any broadcasts.
It was because of our interference in the Middle East in general and our support for Israel in particular.
They were selling this lie that it was because we're free and they hate our freedom.
There are a lot of countries that are free.
Like Brazil, women walk around in bikinis.
They have elections.
Al-Qaeda has never attacked Brazil or Japan or South Korea or Norway.
Bin Laden was explaining why there's so many Muslims in that region who hate the United States, but the United States government didn't want anyone to hear it.
Twenty years later, while October 7th happened and were supporting this ethnic cleansing, and I would call it now a genocide as well, in Gaza, that's what most genocidal experts, including Israelis and Jewish ones, call it.
It's hard to say anything else, but whatever.
In the middle of all that, A bunch of young people who were told the history of 9-11 that the U.S. government wanted everyone to believe discovered the Bin Laden letter because it was on the Guardian's website.
Because the Guardian's a British newspaper.
It was no American news outlet, despite its historical importance.
And they started passing it around on TikTok and saying, oh, wow, I never knew any of this.
I never understood that one of the reasons why these people attacked us was because we are so monomaniacally Devoted to Israel and why we're constantly interfering in that region.
Bombing them, sanctions, overthrowing their government, overthrowing their leaders.
Of course people are going to get angry at us and want to attack back.
And the minute that letter started to become well-read by the American people who were, you know, primarily younger, the U.S. government went ballistic and demanded that TikTok ban it.
The Guardian, a news outlet, immediately took the letter off their website so nobody could read it any longer.
All those links that people were posting on TikTok to go read that letter would no longer work.
And then TikTok, immediately under pressure from the U.S. government, which was obviously already threatened to close TikTok and ban it from the United States anyway, started banning all the hashtags.
Bin Laden letter, you could not anymore read or find.
I mean, this is like the stuff we're taught that the Soviets did, right?
Like hiding letters, hiding documents, erasing history.
And I continue to be shocked by that event, that everybody thought that that was fine.
To take a letter that is of great historical importance from the person that is alleged to have been responsible for the single worst attack on American soil, maybe on par with Pearl Harbor, but in terms of a single-day casualty count.
Explaining from his perspective why he did it.
Like, you want to hear from your enemy, right?
Like, you want to understand, like, what they're claiming.
tucker carlson
I want all relevant information, and I'll decide what it means.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You don't want people deciding for you what you can and can't read.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
glenn greenwald
They were petrified that young Americans were going to hear the reasons proffered, and they made that letter disappear.
tucker carlson
Why would The Guardian, which is supposedly like this left-wing British publication, like, why would they go along with that?
glenn greenwald
The Guardian is very, you know, Supportive of the Western establishment.
The UK is aggressively supportive of Israel, always has been.
Funds it with arms, does a lot of reconnaissance fights over Gaza to feed the Israelis' intelligence.
And when that kind of pressure comes to bear, TikTok, a gigantic multi-billion dollar corporation, The Guardian, one of the oldest newspapers in the West, they fold in a second.
They're no match for that kind of pressure.
A pressure that said, we want that letter censored so Americans don't know about it, have never read it, don't hear from it, so they only hear from us.
So, okay.
I'm still amazed.
I didn't mean to go into that.
tucker carlson
So why do you love Osama bin Laden so much?
glenn greenwald
I mean, of course.
I remember being shocked by it and saying, how can it possibly be the case that we're watching this?
There was no pretext to it.
It was explicit.
Like, we can't have people reading this.
This is terrorist propaganda.
And then, exactly, if you stand up and say, no, I actually think people should be able to read that.
And then they'll say like, oh, you're pro-Al Qaeda, you want terrorist propaganda to spread?
And I'm like, no, I just think adults should have all information that they want to have available to them.
And I don't think the government should be prohibiting certain information from being exposed.
tucker carlson
And I'm an American.
I have an absolute right to know all available information about that.
I don't understand.
What's the justification for keeping that information from me, an American citizen who faithfully pays his taxes and obeys the laws that was born here?
glenn greenwald
What?
You can't do that.
You know, after the 2022 invasion by the Russians into Ukraine, one of the first things the EU parliament did is made it a crime to platform Russian state media.
I want to understand what Russia's argument is for doing this.
You couldn't get it.
If you looked hard enough, you could.
If you went to Rumble, you could.
That's why they're banned in France because they refused to remove RT and Sputnik.
Think about what that says.
Like we want to make sure that we...
tucker carlson
That's why I went to Russia, because it drove me—I had no interest, really, in going to Russia, but it—I'm so grateful that I did, but it drove me so crazy that I wasn't allowed, and that Americans were not allowed, relevant information about what their government was doing.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, like, I want to hear from them what their perspective is.
Maybe I'll walk away and think, like— Oh, they're murderous imperialists who just want to consume their neighbor.
100%.
Or maybe there's some other way of looking at things that I'm not permitted in the West.
tucker carlson
I just want to know what the truth is.
And that's the whole point of living here, is I get to know what the truth is.
I get to decide for myself what's true.
And if you take that away, then why?
glenn greenwald
Well, speaking of that, let me just finish this thing about Randy Fine, if I could.
Okay, so I...
And some non-MAGA people, too, like RFK Jr.
And I was obviously very opposed to it from the start.
You were, too.
I went on the show many times to talk about that.
And I had a bunch of them on, like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and RFK Jr., a lot of them.
I always had this same plan.
I would ask them, like, why are you opposed to having the US fund the war in Ukraine?
"Don't you want the US to stand up for Ukraine against Russia?" And they would all say, This is on the other side of the world.
It doesn't affect my constituents.
Our communities are falling apart.
We have fentanyl addictions sweeping our communities.
Nobody has jobs.
Nobody has healthcare.
Our country is falling apart.
We don't have the money to keep sending to foreign countries, and it's outrageous that we keep doing it.
And they would be very passionate and very adamant.
I would encourage them to keep developing that idea, and they would, and they would say all those things with which I completely agreed.
And then my next question was always, do you apply the same rationale to the United States funding the Israeli military and Israeli society and Israeli wars?
And they would all stutter to try and distinguish why it was that...
Why are we sending billions of dollars?
To Israel, when Israelis have a higher standard of living than millions of American workers, than millions of American citizens, why is the American worker forced to subsidize Israel?
You said we can't be doing that, we can't afford it when you came to Ukraine.
Why isn't the same applicable to Israel?
And he then finally said, you know what, I'm going to think about that.
Maybe it is time for Israel to stand on its own.
I was like, oh, you think?
So this is the utterly unbiased We build our military to defend our borders, to defend the American people.
We use our resources to improve their lives materially, to build better roads and better schools and better communities, to offer them addiction.
That is the America First philosophy, as Trump has articulated it, and many people have articulated it for years, and the foreign policy of America First as well.
Excellent.
And then on the other hand, those same people, many, are adamant that we have to fund money We have to fund its wars.
We have to subsidize society.
We have to sacrifice our own interests to protect theirs.
We have to put the lives of our service members in risk, have American citizens die in order to protect Israel and the wars that it starts with its neighbors.
And there is no reconciling this.
There is no way to take an America first ideology and make it consistent.
With this constant prioritization of Israeli interests, let alone what is now happening, which is the aggressive erosion of our free speech rights and core civil liberties guaranteed to us by the Constitution, not to protect our own government from criticism, protect this foreign country from criticism.
And I do think there are people now starting finally...
tucker carlson
Well, it's going to blow up the Trump movement, I think.
I don't think it needs to.
I think there's a, you know, you could pivot, but I agree just conceptually that those are irreconcilable goals.
glenn greenwald
They're so blatantly irreconcilable.
And of course, the proof in the pudding is going to be what happens with Iran.
You know, I woke up today, I'm here, and I saw the New York Times and the lead story on the front page of the New York Times is...
And it's like, how can that even be possible?
What do you mean Israel might attack Iran despite Trump's desire to reach a deal?
Their weapons came from the United States.
We pay for the operation of those weapons.
They can't attack Iran without some kind of military and logistical support from the United States.
And who is Israel?
That depends on the United States, that is a vassal state of the United States, supposedly, to say we don't care what the President of the United States wants in his foreign policy.
We're going to subvert it and undermine it and blow it up and destroy it if we want to.
tucker carlson
That's not the behavior of an ally.
And I think that, you know, someone who's really tried to avoid this topic and bears no animus toward Israel, actually like a lot of Israelis, talked to me the other day.
But I think the idea that Our interest in being served is clearly not true.
glenn greenwald
It's the opposite.
tucker carlson
Well, you know, the Israeli government has had a relationship, a close relationship with the Chinese communist government for over 40 years.
And there have been a lot of transfers of military technology from Israel to China, including transfers of American military technology to China.
It's a fact.
People lie about it.
Well, it is true, actually.
Don't think that's widely known.
I mean, the Chinese help operate the port of Haifa, one of the most beautiful ports in the world.
Wonderful place.
But yeah, they're on the port of Haifa.
So how is it that the main recipient of American support, both financial and moral and legal, and, you know, all the things that we have done for our closest ally, how is it that that country is materially supporting our main global adversary?
A country really described by the Trump administration as an enemy.
Okay, that's their posture toward, you know, China's an enemy.
And our military technology is going to Israel and then widening up in China?
That's a fact?
Like, how?
I don't think, again, I don't think most people know that.
And I don't know even if people in the administration know that.
I mean, some do.
How can that?
What's the answer to that, Mark Levin?
glenn greenwald
Well, also, you know, there's this fascinating history, but because it's 30 years ago, a lot of people didn't live through it.
People did forgot about it.
It's been whitewashed.
But the last two presidents that tried to exert independence with respect to Israel and that told Israel, you cannot do this if you want to continue to receive our largesse, were Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan called the Israeli bombing of Lebanon a holocaust.
tucker carlson
I know.
glenn greenwald
And picked up the phone and ordered them to stop, and they did, and then withdrew the military barriers.
tucker carlson
1982.
glenn greenwald
Exactly.
George A.W. Bush.
tucker carlson
And then our Marine barracks were bombed a year later.
glenn greenwald
But then he didn't go to war as they were demanding he did with Iran, whoever.
He said, why are we even there?
tucker carlson
But how did our American military, I mean, whatever, without getting into this, but like, did anyone know that the bombing was coming?
Is it possible that information, intel, about that bombing was withheld from the United States?
glenn greenwald
I mean, the Israelis do have a lot of their neighbors under extremely heavy surveillance, as you imagine they would.
But the other interesting thing was, in the George H. W. Bush administration, which was run by these kind of realists, of the kind, you know, they didn't call itself in America first, but the idea was, you know, we do foreign policy not for benevolence to other countries.
We don't rebuild other countries.
We prioritize American interests, people like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, who were the key foreign policy figures in the Bush 41 administration.
He was in the CIA, had a very similar foreign policy.
And their argument was what American presidents have always said, which is that one of the worst threats to American national interests in the Middle East is the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
And the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank was a direct threat to American interests.
And James Baker said, as part of the State Department policy, if you continue to expand West Bank settlements, which prevent an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution that harm our interests, we're going to cease giving you the loan guarantees that you desperately need.
Why are we going to give you loan guarantees if you're directly harming what we keep telling You are our interest.
And what happened was there was this massive smear campaign.
You can go read it in any newspaper.
tucker carlson
I remember it.
glenn greenwald
It was led by Bill Clinton, who was preparing to run against George H.W. Bush.
Calling the Bush administration anti-Semites, suggesting that they were inflaming anti-Semitism by disagreeing with Israel in public.
And since then, there has been no president.
James Baker, I mean, this is like one of the most respected, you know, foreign policy operatives in the world.
And I hated James Baker for a lot of what he believed at the time.
Would have to probably go back and revise some of that and think about why.
tucker carlson
If only we had that now.
glenn greenwald
But there was like zero, zero, zero, zero evidence that he harbored any animosity.
tucker carlson
Well, there's also evidence that there are plans to commit violence against George H.W. Bush, the president, actually.
That's been incredibly alleged.
So, whatever.
No, of course, what you're saying is absolutely right, and no one wants to deal with being slandered, and it is slander.
It's not true.
It's unfair.
pretty over the top.
Well, the irony of it, Tucker, is that Transferring American military technology to China, if they're operating, at least in part, the port of Haifa, we're supporting you.
You have to explain that right away or else we're going to stop all aid because why would we want to be supporting...
What the hell is going on?
glenn greenwald
So what is the answer to why the Trump administration, given their views of China, doesn't?
tucker carlson
I think that the first step, well, I'll just say my position is probably different from yours, but like, I'm not against Israel.
I like Israel.
I like going there.
I like the Israelis, nice people.
I'm not, you know, don't seek any kind of argument.
I'm not anti-Israel.
But I think what America lacks, desperately lacks, and it's gotten to a point where it's dangerous for the country, is like an honest conversation about any of this stuff.
And that's because certain ruthless acts.
But like someone needs to be brave enough to just say, let's have a rational conversation about our national interest.
I don't think it's harder than that.
glenn greenwald
But you know what the irony of it, the core irony of it is the conservative critique or grievance about the American left over the past 20 years has been the minute you try and have an honest conversation about any kind of policy, you instantly get...
tucker carlson
Because of identity politics.
glenn greenwald
Because of identity politics.
I don't know.
tucker carlson
And you may be suggesting that something like that's going on here.
glenn greenwald
Oh, it might be a little bit similar that the minute you suggest a question or even a peep of criticism about Israel, you instantly are branded an anti-Semitic.
It seems pretty similar to me to the tactics long used by the American left that the conservatives have been vocally complaining about for a long time.
tucker carlson
Glenn, I would love to shout you down and say that's unfair, but it's not.
That is fair.
It's true.
What you're saying is true.
And I agree.
And it's shameful.
But, you know, the choice is not between like being a Nazi or being Randy Fine.
There is like a reasonable, sensible, rational course forward where our country, like every other country, makes its foreign policy decisions on the basis of what's best for its own citizens.
Exactly.
Or saying, I don't know, you know, how is it good that American military technology winds up in China or Pakistani fighters that they receive from China through Israel?
Like, if that's true, and I think there's a lot of evidence that it is true.
Like, how is that a good arrangement?
And why is our greatest ally doing that to us?
I don't understand.
I'm, like, really confused.
Like, why don't you answer the question?
And it's not enough to call me names.
You should have to have an honest conversation about this.
And I do think when that begins, like, healing begins.
Things get better when people can be honest, I think.
glenn greenwald
I mean, but there's so many mechanisms.
Like, we just, I just, I'm still, I know I've talked about it so many times, but my mind always gets so blown when we talk about it again.
Talking about honesty and discourse.
They ban the Bin Laden letter.
There's so many mechanisms designed to prevent any honest conversation from being held about all sorts of policies that people in power want to keep immune from questioning or challenge.
Like, hey, why are we still in NATO?
That's, to me, the thing that turned people in the establishment against Trump more than anything.
We already talked about that, but that's not supposed to be a questionable topic.
Like, why are we still NATO?
And like, oh, it's a defensive alliance, except like, we bombed Serbia and Yugoslavia with it, even though they weren't actually posing a threat to Western Europe and had nothing to do with the Soviet Union.
Or like, it went to war in Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi.
Because he wanted to start using Libyan oil more for the benefit of the Libyan people.
tucker carlson
Okay, Glenn, if I could say it's a defensive alliance.
glenn greenwald
Those are preemptive words.
tucker carlson
It's a defensive alliance!
glenn greenwald
It's a defensive alliance!
tucker carlson
Not to be defensive!
glenn greenwald
So there are all those mechanisms, including calling people racist for a long time who wanted to raise issues about whatever.
tucker carlson
Well, sure.
I mean, I remember this in 1991 when I got into this business doing a story on Head Start.
I've never been against Head Start as an idea.
The original idea was like we're going to literally raise children's IQs through better nutrition and early childhood education.
That is not a crazy idea.
It didn't strike me as crazy at the time.
And you start asking questions.
Well, does it work?
I don't know if I'm supposed to help these kids.
Is it helping them?
Shut up, racist!
I was so confused.
And I realized no one even remembers what Head Start is.
But it was a very promising program in the minds of many that didn't work.
But the point of calling you names was to continue doing things the way they'd always been done because some people are benefiting from that.
It had nothing to do with race.
I don't think this argument has anything necessarily to do with ethnicity or religion.
It's just like, what's best for America?
glenn greenwald
The protest movements on college campuses were, I don't want to say led by, because that's maybe an exaggeration, but in many cases it's definitely true.
Driven in large part by Jewish students vehemently opposed to the destruction of Gaza by Israel.
So the idea that somehow it's anti-Semitic to question either the Israeli destruction of Gaza or the U.S. financing of it, when you have huge numbers of Jews on the streets every day marching in protest against it by itself should reveal...
And yet, it's so effective.
Because it's instantaneous, right?
No one wants to be called a racist.
No one wants to be called an anti-Semite.
And it is an effective tactic.
At least, like, it makes it so that you think, like, maybe it's just easier for me to keep my mouth shut about this and talk about something else.
tucker carlson
I've always felt that way.
It's way easier.
I don't want to get involved in it.
It's not worth it.
I've got all kinds of concerns about my country, which really is kind of falling apart in key and measurable ways.
People are dying younger.
I feel like that's something we should think a lot about and try and fix and everything.
It's like, I don't want to get involved.
And I do grieve when I see our public conversation hijacked by what I consider foreign concerns.
Like, both sides.
Like, you know, you shut down midtown Manhattan because of some conflict thousands of miles away.
Well, that is it.
But it's not just Israel.
I mean, you see it all the time.
You see people getting murdered in, like, the upper Midwest because of, like, there's a sick Hindu, you know, whatever.
All that stuff.
I do feel like this country needs a lot of care and attention, and it's been neglected, and that's how I feel.
Or maybe that's how I justify staying out of it.
I don't want to be involved in that.
glenn greenwald
but you have kind of been a little bit more involved than you used to be.
tucker carlson
And I think, but also because what's gonna destroy It's in a sense not just about Trump.
Of course, I love Trump.
I've said that many times.
I have displayed it.
I campaigned for Trump, and I'm glad that I did.
But I feel like if there's one thing that could destroy this essential reform movement, it's like kind of our last chance to make government responsive to the people who own the government, which is the citizenry.
This will destroy it.
glenn greenwald
Because it's a massive contradiction sitting at the heart of it.
That's what I'm saying.
It's not all the stuff we talked about, but also free speech, free expression, not being punished for your views was also a vital part of this movement.
I know that's why I found so much common ground with the American right and with the MAGA movement over the last 10 years because of my vehement opposition to attempts to censor the internet or introduce laws to characterize certain views as hate speech and therefore punishable.
And that's exactly what has been done.
tucker carlson
I couldn't even believe it.
I always liked DeSantis.
I spent a lot of time in Florida.
I was there for part of the pandemic.
And I liked DeSantis.
He's smart.
He's not a warm guy or anything.
I'm not looking for new friends.
I respect DeSantis.
And he's very on it, on the details.
Then he signs a hate speech law.
Travels to a foreign country to sign a hate speech law in Florida.
And I was so confused.
I didn't even think this was real.
And I said...
It's not a hate speech law!
Looks like a hate speech law.
It looks like Sharia law, kind of a version of Sharia law.
In Florida?
unidentified
Shut up!
tucker carlson
And no one said anything about it.
And then, like, all the DeSantis people start attacking me for noting that I've never talked to DeSantis again.
On the basis of that, what is that?
How can you do that in the United States?
glenn greenwald
I mean, there's this attempt now to impose on colleges, require colleges to adopt, but also enact into American law this radical expansion of what anti-Semitism means.
There's laws that say, here's what racism is, here's what xenophobia is, here's what Islamophobia is, misogyny, whatever, to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include statements not only about Jewish people who should be subjected to critique.
Like, you should be able to say, huh, that Ben Shapiro seems to care quite a lot about Israel, maybe even to the point that he cares about it more than the United States.
Like, you should be able to express that critique.
So this expanded definition prohibits not only statements like that, accusing any Jewish person of having greater loyalty.
I can say, oh, that person's Irish.
He seems to really care a lot about Ireland more than the United States.
Or that person is Indian.
He really seems to care a lot about India, maybe even more so.
You're allowed to say all that.
tucker carlson
Or, in my case, Swedish.
I've been accused of dual loyalty many times.
glenn greenwald
Oh, your obsession with Sweden is so annoying and very disturbing.
But the other thing is, you cannot say, this is just one example, you cannot say Israel is a racist endeavor.
You can say Iran is a racist endeavor.
You can say Hamas is a racist endeavor.
You can say the United States is a racist endeavor.
You can say anything you...
You write an op-ed, one-tenth of those criticisms, but about Israel, and ICE is coming to get you and to deport you.
Why is that?
So this is the kind of thing that cannot be sustained by a movement that has certain values that it professes that are being radically assaulted by this one single policy and loyalty toward this other country.
tucker carlson
I could not agree more.
I mean, it's in the matter.
And I do think, and I know people who, I have a million friends who believe that, and I'm not mad at them about it.
But you could believe that and say, America's founding documents, its Bill of Rights, is sacrosanct.
And under no circumstances should American citizens be stripped of their rights, any circumstances, period.
It doesn't matter whether it's in the service of a foreign nation or in the service of anything.
That's the whole point of America.
Like, you could have that position, couldn't you?
glenn greenwald
I mean, the whole MAGA movement is about preserving American identity and American values.
So what does that mean?
It certainly has to include...
tucker carlson
I don't know what else it would include.
I don't know what else there is.
glenn greenwald
Right.
So you cannot simultaneously say that you want to be a movement that is devoted to preserving American identity and American values while at the same time permitting attacks on the core rights and the core founding ideals on which the entire country was founded.
tucker carlson
Right.
Right.
No, I couldn't agree more.
For all my...
I don't want to deal with it.
It upsets people.
It's not my greatest interest in life.
It's not even on the top ten.
And I shouldn't have to care this much about a foreign country.
That's kind of my internal monologue on this question.
I feel like it's being pushed to the point where this whole species of news stories, ideas, developments is a threat to our Bill of Rights.
And that has to be The point where you're like, no, stop.
Right?
glenn greenwald
I mean, you know, I was said before that you go to other countries and you see all these values of other countries that you're told have none.
But I also said, like, there are certain things about the United States that I consider uniquely valuable.
And one of them is, you know, the stuff that I went and studied in law school, which I became incredibly enamored of and still am, which are, like, the Federalist Papers and the debates over, like, how to form this new government to prevent it from replicating the tyrannies of other governments, including the empire that they had just risked all of their lives to wage war from and gain independence from.
And created these documents that to this very day continue to be our guiding principles.
And the idea that we're going permit the erosion of those for any reason is offensive to me, but to do so in defense of a foreign country on the other side of the world because they have so much influence in our politics...
That is just so offensive to me.
I don't care what impact it has on my career.
I don't care what people say about me.
That is something I will never stop talking about.
tucker carlson
I agree, and I think it's not sustainable because, as you said, the contradiction is just too obvious.
And the last thing I'll say is, not that it's a top concern of mine or whatever, but I don't think it's great for Israel, actually, at all.
Like long-term, this is not the way to play it.
glenn greenwald
Well, an Israeli politician, actually a general, just said...
tucker carlson
Yeah, that's not, I don't know how that helps.
And you can't transfer American military technology to China.
I just want to say that for the fifth time because I don't think most people know that that's happening, but it is.
I want to ask you one last question.
We had this long and deep conversation off camera about what makes people happy, and there does seem to be, quite apart from politics or global affairs, An epidemic of unhappiness, at least in the world that I live in.
glenn greenwald
In the West.
tucker carlson
In the West.
Not, thank God, in my family.
But everywhere else, people are really unhappy.
It's measurable, suicide rates, all that stuff.
Where do you think, what is that?
glenn greenwald
Well, first of all, there's a documentary that is on Netflix that I watched many years ago called Happiness.
And it measures the rate of happiness in various places around the world.
And it turns out that in some of the poorest countries in the world, the levels of happiness are at its highest in some of the richest countries of the world.
The rate of happiness is at its lowest.
And in many of those poorest countries, they live in villages where they have their children around them all the time.
tucker carlson
Yes.
glenn greenwald
They have extreme connectivity and connection to other human beings who live in their community.
They live in a communitarian way.
They are constantly receiving one of the things, I might even say the greatest thing, that constitutes human happiness, which is connection to other human beings.
We are political and social animals.
We can't survive isolated.
You look at any people who have been put in sustained isolation and they will say that There's nothing worse than that.
John McCain talked about that all the time, that he was physically savage, but that that was nowhere near as horrifying and terrorizing as the sustained isolation that he was kept in, where you have no human beings around to connect to or talk to or interact with.
We need that so fundamentally.
And you look at how the West is now constructed, where people leave their house early in the morning, both parts of a couple, the children don't.
We run off too, so everybody's running off in different directions.
When our parents get sick, we put them at homes.
When they get old, we put them at homes.
We don't stay together as families anymore.
And then when we work, we all go scatter far away and we spend all day in cubicles.
And then the worst part is the internet encourages us to stay at home.
People got trained during COVID especially.
How to live completely isolated from the rest of the world and from everybody else.
They were forced into it.
And if you deprive human beings of connection, then you can have all the money in the world, all the fame in the world, whatever you think is the thing that will make you happy and you will never find happiness.
And I think we both know Yohan Nahari, who's a friend of ours, who wrote this incredibly, I think, revolutionary book about how to understand addiction.
tucker carlson
And depression and sadness in general, emptiness.
Right.
glenn greenwald
He then wrote another book about just like the depression epidemic, especially among younger people in the West.
That first book about addiction, the thesis of it was that people think the opposite of addiction is sobriety, when in reality, the opposite of addiction is connection.
And by that, what he means is that All of these things are spiritual diseases.
Depression and addiction and anxiety and all these disorders that people suffer from that are new.
You talk to anyone in Gen Z. I have colleagues in Gen Z. My kids are getting to that age.
They're 16 and 17. I see their age group.
There's so much mental disorder.
It's because society is not giving human beings what they want, which is connection.
And that's why you can go talk to medical doctors.
About addiction.
And they will all tell you the same thing, which is like, there is no cure for addiction, chemically, medically.
The only cure for addiction is going to places like NA or AA or whatever, because there you find this instant and immediate connection with any kind of human being based on shared experiences.
And that's the only thing that cures that disease because it's a disease of the spirit, like of the soul.
It's not a biological disease where chemical medications will cure it.
And I think that the ability to be open to human connection, to have it readily available, is probably the foundation of human happiness, and the deprivation of it is what will eliminate human happiness.
and all of modern society is about keeping people stratified and isolated and away from each other.
And, you know, I think there's like surveys that say, you know, people who are in their 20s will say on average they have like People live away from their family.
Everything is about depriving people of connection.
unidentified
Not saying that was the intent or the plan, but that's the outcome.
glenn greenwald
And there's no way to have human happiness without connection.
tucker carlson
I know that in my life, the place where I've seen it most clearly is in AA.
I haven't, I'm sober many years, haven't been in AA a ton, but the first time I ever went, cultures, races.
It was the diversity we're always promised, but we're so cynical about it.
I am so cynical about it.
It's all bullshit.
You go to an AA meeting and because it begins with Oh, I'm Tucker.
I'm an alcoholic.
It's like, ugh, say that out loud.
It hurts.
Even if it's true, which in my case it is.
glenn greenwald
And like the first admission is like, I am powerless.
tucker carlson
That's exactly right.
glenn greenwald
Like to confess your impotence.
tucker carlson
But you have to confess it.
And once that strips away all the pretense, and then you like, you experience people on a level that church promises, but I personally have never experienced in church.
I want to.
But where it's just, like, you are dealing with people on the most human level.
Like, all that matters is the other person's soul or something.
I don't know.
glenn greenwald
You know, it's into like the new Pope and like this is the part of Catholicism that I really admire so much, like the ethos of the Gospels.
You know, Jesus always wanted to minister to the like the lepers and the prostitutes and the outcasts, even though there were no people.
see that they're all equal before God, all of this.
One of the things diversity does, like diversity in this modern, corporatized HR sense, is it pretends to do that, but it actually is constantly reminding you of these differences and forcing you to think about them like, oh, I have three black co-workers that I'm supposed to get along with, and I have two gay ones over here, and it is constantly stratifying people across these lines, categorizing them and counting them based on their differences.
And so any kind of similarity or connection is forced.
It's very self-conscious.
tucker carlson
Nothing causes more division than that.
glenn greenwald
Right.
You strip everybody down to, like, no ego and have everybody converge based on their greatest weakness and suffering and difficulty.
And you don't even have to give the slightest thought to, oh, this person is different and yet I'm able to have communion with them that's so genuine.
It just happens automatically.
Like, all those things fade away.
Like, people can walk into an NA meeting.
And just feel like they're living in a different world and thinking about other people and feeling other people in a way, and then they walk out and the whole world then reappears that constantly teaches us to, you know, keep everybody at arm's length.
But you walk into those kind of meetings, the idea of it is, like, you strip down to the deepest core, like, foundation of your humanity, and then on that level, everyone is the same.
And the connection that emerges from that is why it works, why people go their whole lives to it.
You know, even if they haven't had a drink or a drug for 25 years, they still need it.
tucker carlson
Well, that's why I went.
I have no interest in drinking.
I went because a loved one, you know, someone I love needed to go.
So I brought that person in.
I was like, I want to go every day.
I've never seen anything like that in my life.
glenn greenwald
Because it makes you see the potential for what the world could be.
tucker carlson
That's what everyone wants is the connection.
unidentified
Right.
tucker carlson
Because other people are all that matters.
Just to receive other people are all that matters.
And you, gosh, that's so easy to lose that thread.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, that's like our humanity.
That's like the soul.
That's like the spirit.
It's everything.
And that is what Western society is assaulting and depriving people of.
And so it's no wonder we have epidemics of addiction and suicide and anxiety disorders and depression.
tucker carlson
And distraction.
glenn greenwald
It's so easy to see why.
tucker carlson
You should write.
You should write on this.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, I mean, I've thought a lot about it.
I think a lot about it.
I try and incorporate it.
And at some point, maybe I will.
tucker carlson
I hope you will.
You describe it much better than I do.
I'm still trying to sort it out in my head.
It was less than a year ago I saw this.
I was like, I've not stopped thinking about it.
glenn greenwald
Yeah, we talked about it last night.
And so then I thought about it last night, this morning.
So it's fresh in my mind as well, like in terms of what it means and how to think about it.
But yeah, it's something that is, I think, it's kind of like sitting there right in plain sight.
It's a solution to a lot of things.
But for a lot of reasons, you need a lot of vulnerability and humility to strip yourself down that way, to admit your powerlessness.
We're constantly taught to affirm our invulnerability, like I'm strong, I'm powerful, I can deal with anything.
But human beings are, by themselves, not all that powerful.
There's a lot of things we can do, there's a lot of things we can't.
The whole point of these kind of addiction groups or whatever, there's a lot of these different kind of groups.
I think all communities are like them.
It's like together, like human beings connecting to each other creates a much bigger power than every human being sitting kind of isolated and alone.
tucker carlson
Yes.
I mean, I believe in a religion that extols humility, in which humility is like the cover charge.
Like you don't get anywhere without humility.
That teaches that God submitted to being tortured to death.
glenn greenwald
And you get on your knees in a church.
In Islam, you bow on the ground.
tucker carlson
That's exactly right.
glenn greenwald
All an expression of that same...
tucker carlson
I knew nothing about Islam.
I'm not Muslim, by the way.
I don't work for Qatar.
glenn greenwald
Contrary to what a lot of people think.
Despite the paychecks from Qatar.
tucker carlson
I'm not a secret shit.
But I remember...
Submission.
And like, let it hang in the air, like, that was self-evidently disgusting, and I was like, I kind of think submission to God is like the whole point of life, but I didn't say anything, I was like, I don't think I'm against that.
Anyone who submits to God?
I'm just for that.
glenn greenwald
I think a lot of religions seek the same things, just find different ways to think about how to find them.
But the whole point of AA and NA, the foundation of it is that you submit to a higher power.
It can be understanding that there's a lot of people who are now atheists or secular.
It doesn't necessarily have to be some religious conception of a God.
And so many people go into these groups, and they're adamantly contemptuous of this idea, like, this is so irrational.
I'm not going to pretend that there's some magic.
And, you know, I used to think that way, too.
And then I got to the point where I was like, no, you know what actually is irrational?
Thinking that there's no higher power than you.
Like, I am the highest power.
Like, that's the absurd thing.
But it's all about, you know, losing that sense that you're invulnerable and understanding that, You know, you can find something higher than yourself.
And it could just be the connection of the human group, whatever you want it to be, like whatever you recognize as being able to, something being able to do things that you can't do is already an acknowledgement that there's a higher power than you.
tucker carlson
But if you think you're God, you're not allowed.
glenn greenwald
I mean, if you think you're God, you're going to have a lot of difficulties in life.
tucker carlson
You're going to be Toria Nuland, so it's not good.
Glenn Greenwell, thank you.
Really, always my favorite.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
with everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally
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