Glenn Greenwald - The Complete Interview!
The Jimmy Dore Show (November 23, 2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_xmYwr6qt8

Jimmy Dore: ". . . he recently resigned over censorship from the online news publication The Intercept, an organization he helped found. Please welcome Glenn Greenwald and his dogs. Hi, Glenn. How are you?"

Glenn Greenwald: "Hey, Jimmy. Great to be with you. Your pineapples look fantastic."

Jimmy Dore: "Now, Glenn, ever since the hysteria over Russia-gate, there's been a culture developing that calls for Internet censorship. We even see figures on the corporate left calling for censorship, pleading for the unaccountabile authority of faceless Silicon Valley empolyees to protect us from our own thoughts and the thoughts of others. Can you tell me, how did we get here?"

[1:01] Glenn Greenwald: "What's so interesting, Jimmy, is that Facebook and Google and Twitter never wanted the power and the responsibility to regulate our discourse or censor, not because they're good, benevolent people who believe in freedom, but because it wasn't in their interest to take on this responsibility. The model they wanted to implement was the one that AT&T has, which is, we're just a content neutral platform. We have no responsibility for the information or the ideas that go over our wire. Nobody, for example, expects that if Alex Jones calls Milo Yanopoulos and they have a conference call and AT&T is going to intervene and cut off their service, because AT&T is a content-neutral platform. That's what Facebook and Google and Twitter wanted to be. Because that way they would make more money and they wouldn't have this responsibility."

[1:53] "The reason they started having to censor is because journalists -- journalists -- began demanding that they do so. They have employees at the New York Times and CNN and NBC whose only job is to troll the Internet lookging for people who violate the rules. They're like little middle-school tattletail hall monitors and they say why if Facebook giving voice to this person. Why is twitter not yet banning this person? And they've created this public demand that has foisted upon these companies not just the duty to censor. And just last week that had a bunch of tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google in before a Senate committee and Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massa chusetts who the Left -- the actual, like, Left -- like the little Sunrise Movement kids and all those like got behind to defeat Joe Kennedy III said to Mark Zuckerberg: Our problem with you is not that you're censoring too much. It is that you're enough censoring enough."

[2:57] "Here's a post we think you should take off the Internet. And here's another one we think you should ban. This is what they're going to do in power. They're going to pressure these social media companies even more. And if people on the left think that this is only going to be aimed at the right, you're fucking stupid. The whole idea of censorship is to eliminate any dissenting voices that challenge institutions of power. And they hate the Left every bit as much as they hate the right.."

[3:24] "They convince people to support this on the Left by saying, Oh, look. We're only going to do it against Alex Jones. And it's already starting against the Left and it's only going to get worse."

Jimmy Dore: "It's amazing that the people on the Left, still to this day, I just had a confrontation on Twitter with a lefty journalist who still stands by calling for censorship, with no adversarial process, just letting Mark Zuckerberg censor someone without anything. And even to this day, as they're being censored, they'll still stand by their call to censor someone else. Like the problem is: Do they really not understand, Glenn, that you don't get to choose, pick and choose who gets censored once you start censoring? It's out of your hands and that it's going to come back on you, especially if you're on the Left and you challenge the status quo. That's who they're going to use censorship against. How is it that people on the Left don't understand this?

[4:21] Glenn Greenwald: "You know, that's always the amazing thing to me about censorship advocates is this idea tht they're going to have this imaginary world where institutions of authority are going to censor benevolently in order to defend the marginalized. It's such a radical misunderstanding of how power operates. Say to a leftist: What do you think of the U.S. government? And they'll say, Oh, the US government is authoritarian and fascist. And if you ask: What do you think of the federal judiciary? And they'll say, Oh, it's filled with right-wing, law-and-order judges, because that's who Reagan and Bush and Trump appointed, which is true. And then it's like, What do you think of tech executives, billionaires in Silicaon Valley? And they'll say they're hideous, they're horrible, they're right wing oligarchs, which is true. And then you say, like, Are you in favor of giving those institutions, the ones you just condemned and denounced as fascist authoritarian oligarchs, the power to control the Internet and regulate? -- 'Oh, yes. Absolutely. We need to protect the marginalized.' Why would you think that that is how they are going to do it?"

[5:21] "Censorship is always aimed, always aimed, at the marginalized. Not the powerful. That's the nature of it. It's a minoritarian right, free speech, because it's always people with minority views who are aimed at by censorship. We reported to me, Jimmy, at the end of 2017, I did actually, not we, that Facebook, when they get requests from the Israeli government to censor or remove pages of Palestinian journalists, Palestinian activists, or just ordinary citizens in Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza on the grounds that they're inciting violence or advocating terrorism in something like 98 and a half percent of the cases, Facebook complies with the Israeli government's request. Why? Because the Israeli government is powerful and the Palestinians aren't. They never take down Israeli pages when Palestinians ask because Palestinians have no power. These censorship powers are going to be exercised on behalf of the powerful, which right now means the neo-liberal order of the Democratic party, the CIA, the NSA, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC, CNN axis. That's who's in power. That's the ruling coalition. And anybody who is against them, you, or me, on the Left, the right, it makes no difference, will be subject to these kinds of constraints, these kinds of speech constraints."

[6:40] Jimmy Dore: "And, so, what do you say to someone, Glenn, because this is what they say to me, they go; Well, of course, Twitter and Facebook shouldn't have to wait for a court order to get rid of Alex Jones because the people he was harrassing, right, the people at Sandy Hook. And I've had a journalist say to me that Of course, you shouldn't have to wait for a court before you step in and do something. So what do you say to that?"

[7:09] Glenn Greenwald: "Well, I'm sure you guys remember the debates over torture that took place in the second half of the Bush/Cheney years and into the Obama years, the 2008 election. It was one in which I participated very vigorously. One of the reasons I started writing about politics was in opposition to the world-wide torture regime that the Bush administration had implemented in the name of fighting and stopping terrorism. And so, in order to defend torture, what they would do is they would concoct a hypothetical, like the best example of their case, say, imagine that we have a terrorist in our custody who has set off a nuclear bomb that if it detonates is going to kill two and a half million people in the middle of New York or Los Angeles or wherever, and the only way you can find out where that bomb is and defuse it is if you torture that person. Do you torture that person or not? That's a hard case, right? You don't just say no, let the two million people die. Torture's always wrong. But the reason why it's such a scumbag way of debating is because you are purposely creating the most extreme hypothetical case and then demanding that a generalized rule be extracted from it. That's never how torture is used. That's like a once every 10th every 10,000 year scenario, at best, that you don't use to base rules on."

[8:34] "It's the same thing, what they'll do, when the government wants to censor, they'll pick out Fred Phelps who goes to, you know, the funerals of veterans killed in wars or gay people and marches like God Hates All -- like the most hateful odious person, or Alex Jones who says Sandy Hooks is a hoax or whatever. And they lure you in, just like those people who were torture advocates tried to do, saying, Yeah, I'm so angry at the particular person to whom you're going to apply this power, that I endorse this precedent. I hope you're going to just use it Alex Jones and not start expanding it outward. But I'm so emotionally charged by the person you've gotten me to hate that I'm willing to stand behind and cheer for authority: the CIA, the DOJ, Twitter, Google, Facebook. And, of course, the next day, they start expanding it outwards, from Alex Jones to a more mainstream person until it's basically anybody who, you know: people get suspended all the time now. They get demonetized on YouTube. They get suspended for a week and they don't even know why. There's no appeal. It's just an invisible Silicon Valley overlord on whom we now rely to determine if we have the right to be heard. Who would support that?

[9:52] Jimmy Dore: "I just got into an argument on Twitter who's a 'journalist' who would support that. That's who. Most of the people in journalism who consider themselves on the Left would support that. Unfortunately. Most of the people on YouTube who I know are Lefties support that. That's who supports that, Glenn, that's what I'm talking about. It's not like we have a group of people who see through this bullshit. It's just like a handful of people who see through it and everyone else is for this kind of censorship which is why our country is going into a dark age right now. We have McCarthyism. I saw McCarthyism and censorship come from the Left. That's to me the most mind-blowing thing. The Left is supposed to be pushing back against that stuff, not pushing it. Yes, it is amazing, Jimmy. All right . . ."

[10:42] Glenn Greenwald: "This is such an important point. Let me just add to this point about the Left. In 2016, the Left scared the shit out of neoliberals when Bernie almost beat the invincible Clinton machine. He almost won. Had the DNC not cheated, in documents revealed by Wikileaks -- which is why Julian Assange is now in prison -- he would have beaten Hillary Clinton. An old Brooklyn jew who wasn't even a Democrat who calls himself a socialist would have taken down the Clinton machine. Because in the 2008 financial crisis and afterwards, huge numbers of people are identifying as socialists because their towns are boarded up. They have nothing but opioids and shitty jobs at Amazon and Walmart, at best. They get out of college or even a master's degree with $150,000 in debt and can only get a job for $13 an hour. They have no future. So, of course they're starting to identify -- in the most capitalist and richest country in the world -- as socialists. So the neoliberals are thinking: 'Holy shit. We better do something to co-opt the Left to get rid of this left-wing movement.' And what do they do? They invented a fascist monster. Fascism is taking over the United States. So you get behind us, [even if you] may hate us, the neoliberals, but if you want to fight fascism, you need to cheer the FBI and Bill Kristol and Silicon Valley because we're the only things that could protect you from fascism. And I hear these tough-guy liberals say all the time, saying what's the point of defeating neoliberalism, if we lose to fascism."

[12:17] Glenn Greenwald: “So they convince people that Trump is actually Hitler. And once you think Trump is Hitler and that the Proud Boys aren’t just a tiny band of like fat, white-guy losers in their 50s who just cosplay, but it’s like some kind of serious insurrectionary fascist movement, like if you get convinced of that, of course you’re going to march behind Neera Tanden and the New York Times and Rachel Maddow and fucking Joe Biden because they convinced you that your only alternative to aligning with them is to succumb to fascism. And it’s completely cucked the left. They’re total authoritarians now, because they believe they’re fighting Nazi-ism.”

[13:08] Jimmy Dore: “Proud Boy rallies. It’s a joke. There are way more cops and spectators than there are people participating in their stupid rally. And then it’s just really, anyway, yes.” . . . You know the most amazing thing is they kept saying, you know, Trump is a dictator, Trump is a dictator. Trump is a dictator. And every time he had a chance to consolidate his power, he didn't. Someone else pointed this out that when the pandemic happened, that would be a time when a dictator would actually consolidate his power. Trump did the exact opposite. Trump said 'I'm not handling this and I'm giving it all over to every state governor. So, if you're a governor of a state, you handle it."

[13:49] Glenn Greenwald: “Trump is a fat, slothful clown. Exactly. He had the perfect pretext with the pandemic. Victor Oberon in Hungary is a fascist. What did he do? He instituted martial law in the name of fighting the pandemic. That’s what fascists do. With Trump, the democrats were complaining he wasn’t doing enough. They wanted him to invoke laws that let him seize the means of production in order to produce masks and ventilators. And he didn’t do anything. He never has. He tweets shitty things. That’s the full extent of it.”

[14:25] Jimmy Dore: "And, Glenn, what do you say... We predicted on this show -- when I say 'we' I mean 'I' predicted -- that the day Trump was elected that he would deport more hispanics than Barack Obama. And my theory was that he puts an ugly face on the horrible stuff our government has been doing all along and now people are going to be aware of our horrible immigration policy, even though I had been reporting it at this show. The general public had no idea what a monster Barack Obama's administration was when it came to immigrants in the United States and that he was the deporter-in-chief and he deported more hispanics that all the presidents combined since 1890. They had no idea of any of this stuff. So I was able to make that prediction pretty confidently and Jacob Silveras reporting from MSNBC just confirmed my prediction that Trump isn't going to come anywhere near close to the deportations that Barack Obama and Joe Biden made in their first term. So, what do you say about that? What are... This lesser-of-two evil voting. I've made the case. Thomas Frank has made the case that Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils. And I make the case that Barack Obama was not the lesser of two evils because the country would not have let Barack Obama take over from George Bush, make his tax cuts permanent, take us from two wars to seven, and then make the banks bigger as he kicked 5.1 [million people out of their homes]. They would have never let John McCain do that. but they let Barack Obama do it because he was a black guy with a Muslim name. "So I don't even know what my question is, but do you want to say anything to this?"

[15:58] Glenn Greenwald: "Yeah. I know what your question is even if you don't. No, let me tell you this story. This is a real interesting story. And it's exactly relevant to what you asked without knowing that you asked. The first time I ever wrote about Wikileaks was 2008. And I wrote about them because they had published a document that was a document from the Pentagon that was top-secret or classified. And Wikileaks got a hold of it and published it. And what the document said was -- it was during 2008 in the summer -- when Barack Obama was running against Mcain. And what the Pentagon was worried about was that there was that there was growing anti-war sentiment in Western Europe. Two or three different goverments, I think one in the Netherlands, one in Portugal, had lost in the election because they were participating in the war in Afghanistan which the Western European populations were turning against. And the Pentagon was petrified that they were going to lose all their allies and be left to rule Afghanistan alone. It was going to be expensive and very difficult." . . .

[17:09] “And what they said was, our only hope – you know what their only hope, Jimmy was, for reversing the growing trend of anti-war sentiment in Western Europe, their best hope? The election of Barack Obama. That’s what the Pentagon said. Because that will put a much more cosmopolitan, elegant and pleasant face on this war that up until now had been represented by this, like, Texan evangelical, Christian evangelical that was kind of anathema to cosmopolitan secular europeans. Whereas Barack Obama, this like Harvard-educated African American, human rights lawyer, he would become the new face of the war on terror, and they would then come to see it as benevolent. And that’s exactly what happened. He got in. He continued all those policies. He continued the war in Afghanistan. It became popular again in Western Europe to this very day. The reason they hate Trump is not because he’s a horrible person. He is a horrible person. But that doesn’t determine what you can do as president, the damage you can do. The reason they hate Trump is because Trump lacks both the willingness and the ability to put that pretty face on American imperialism and corporatism and to deceive both the domestic population and the international population about what the United States really is.”

[18:30] “I remember one of the things they hated the most, was when he went on Bill O’Reilly and Bill O’Reilly asked him about Putin killing people and why he’s not more upset by that. And remember? And Trump said: “Oh, you think we’re so innocent? We have our own killers. Which is like basic, standard truth on the left. Like, if you don’t know that about the United States, you don’t know anything. And they were horrified because the president is not supposed to say that truth about the United States. The president is there to lie. Through his face, through his behavior, through his comportment. Nothing really changes. Wall Street and the CIA keep running everything. The president is there to kind of manipulate and massage public opinion, and Trump has no ability to do that. That’s why they hate him.”

[19:13] Jimmy Dore: “You’re exactly a 100% right. Because it certainly isn't about his policies. Nancy Pelosi gleefully passed his entire legislative agenda, including giving him money for his border wall. She didn't have to do that but she did it. You're right. He puts an ugly face on imperialism and they just can't have that.And so that's why they've got to get rid of him. That's why there's a Lincoln Project. That's why that whole thin. And those guys are just as big a grifter. They're worse than Trump. That's why I say somebody like Barack Obama had the ability to be more insidious than Donald Trump because he made you think he was doing the opposite of what he was doing. when Trump does something, you know he’s doing it.”

[20:03] "Dylan Ratigan said on this show that the United States is sliding into being like Brazil. I took that to mean that we're going to be a rich -- we're going to have a handful of rich people and a bunch of poor people and nobody in the middle. Is that how you take that because you're there. What do you say to that?"

[20:28] Glenn Greenwald: "Sure. I don't know the context, what he said for sure but what you, what he probably said is really interesting and true. You know, I've lived in this country for 15 years and there's incredible poverty everywhere. And there always has been, right? That's one of the things that has shaped Brazil's political culture is extreme levels of wealth and income inequality. If you are wealthy or affluent, you get the best of everything. You get the best private schools, the best medical care, the best security, the best transportation. There are great doctors and hospitals in Brazil, great everything. But if you're poor, which is the vast majority of the country, you get the worst fucking shit. Your kids don't have clean drinking water. They barely learn how to speak Portugese. People who go into the emergency room with heart attacks or strokes wait six or seven hours to be treated and often die because the resources are so poor they die in hallways. And I remember in the 2016 and the 2018 presidential election when Bolsonaro won there was a candidate who was a socialist candidate and he said, 'People assume Brazil is a poor country because there is so much poverty here. We're not a poor country. We're a rich country.' And it's true. Brazil is very rich in natural resources and oil. It's the sixth largest economy in the world. It has a bigger economy than Great Britain and many other countries."

[22:05] Glenn Greenwald: “The reason there is so much poverty [in Brazil] is because the distribution of wealth is so lopsided that this huge portion of the population ends up in complete deprivation. The middle class in the United States is disappearing. All those towns that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, their whole town is boarded up. They have no jobs. They live on opioids to numb the pain. And what did they hear in 2016? You voted for Trump because Russia deceived you. And now you voted for Trump because you’re all fucking racist. Even though, Jimmy, the reason Biden won, isn’t because black people and hispanics and women rose up in anger over how he treated the marginalized. He lost those voting sectors. Trump got more than any Republican in many years. He won, Biden did, because of white, affluent suburbanites who work in the professional managerial class and who migrated to the Democratic party for the first time after voting Republican forever because they know that Democrats are now the party of corporatism. That is the Democratic party.

[23:17] "The centers of of power and money on the coast: Silicon Valley and Wall Street combined with the media and national security state and affluent white suburbanites. And, yes. Black people who have voted for generations who live in Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee, overwhelmingly will still vote for Democrats. If they go to the polls. But increasingly they don’t because they don’t think it’s worth it. So that’s how Biden won. Through affluent white suburbanites."

[23:40] Jimmy Dore: "So, I've been saying on this show since people are celebrating Cory Bush and Jamal Bauman being elected as progressives into Congress and I poured some water on their party saying they're just going to do whatever Nancy Pelosi tells them to do, exactly like The Squad. Even Bernie Sanders voted for the Cares Act, the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. Without any repercusions. None of them had to pay a price for it. Just like the Iraq War. Because if you all are for something then it's nobody's fault, right? So what do you do? I'm making lots of people angry at me because I'm really poo-poo-ing the idea of taking over the Democratic Party. It's a joke. It's an obvious joke. They'll be able to take over the Democratic party with progressives about five years after we're all dead from Climate Change. So, I've been trying to start a third party -- I've been trying to help. But, anyway, what do you make -- so I say, having people like The Squad inside the Democratic Party in Congress actually hurts progressive causes more than it helps because it gives to people the idea that there is an opposition party in the United States when you and I know there isn't an opposition party. Nancy Pelosi is the progressives' opposition just as much as Mitch McConnell is, if not more, because it's more insidious because everybody blue check lefties Hollywood think that Nancy Pelosi actually is on the Left. Just like Barack Obama. They actually think he is opposing the corporations and the military industrial complex when [he and] they actually are not. They're using her femaleness, just like they used Barack Obama's identity to do insidious shit. What do you say to that. I say it's actually more insidious to have them inside the Democratic party because it gives the false impression to people that there is an opposition party. What do you say?"

[25:39] Glenn Greenwald: "When I first started writing about politics I was part of the Liberal Blogosphere and I believed the whole bullshit about how Democrats are basically good people. They just needed some spine, like stiffening. Like they're stiffening their spines, like that Daily Kos shit. And the more I watched the Democratic Party the more I realized what bullshit that was, right? But then I still thought, well, the way to change that is to support insurgents. And for awhile I actually believed that. And listen to this story.

"In 2018, in June, like Ryan Grimm who is the Washington Bureau chief of the Intercept and a good friend of mine and a great reporter messaged me and he's, like, Hey, there's this woman running in Queens against this shitty incumbent who hasn't been to the district in 20 years, one of those guys. He's really powerful but nobody knows him except in those back rooms of the capitol where everything gets done. And he said, I think you'd really like her. And I was like, Ryan I'm not interested in like supporting Democratic candidates. 'No, No. Just look at her and talk to her' [he said]. And it was AOC. And I looked at her Twitter feed and it was like, that week she had said, You know, the Israelis had killed a bunch of Gazans. And she went onto Twitter and said, The oppression of Palestinians is a human rights issue. You can't pretend you care about human rights in the United States and racism in the United States if you support Israel. And I'm sick of people in my own party. And I was like, Wow. She's running for Congress in fucking New York City saying, I'm sick of Democrats supporting Israel. So I was like, 'All right, I'm interested in her.' And I went and interviewed her. And you can see it on YouTube. It was like 250,000 people watched, however many. And I really was impressed with her."

[27:35] "I asked her about identity politics and she said, this is a Trojan Horse. They get like black and Latino candidates who pretend to be liberal but they're, you know, just there to give the appearance of diversity but it's not real diversity. I asked her if she won if she would support Pelosi and Hoyer for leadership and she said 'Absolutely not. They've been there too long. We need new leadership. I won't vote for them.' She fucking wins. What does she do? She gets to Congress and the first thing she does is she votes for Pelosi and Hoyer, of course. And then she fires her staff that's too critical of the Democratic party. And she basically turns into a good soldier for the party. She calls Pelosi Mamma Bear. And most of what she does is identity politics."

[28:27] "Now. Let me just say two things. One, is that I get why people do identity politics in her position. Because to take on true power centers, like to take on Wall Street or to take on the CIA, to take on the Israel Lobby, it's really hard. It's not easy. You're gonna get fucking attacked if you do that. From every direction. With money. With Everything. And it's complicated and it's difficult work to make any progress. But identity politics. That's so easy. You denounce racism. You talk about genocide. I want this statue down. So you have to feel like you're at least doing shit. It's kind of like a psychological easy path. So Jamal Bowman and Corey Bush and they probably have more left-leaning politics than the standard Democratic caucus on things that matter. But they're going to get there and they know that if they try and do any of that they're going to get crushed. The only space they're going to get is culture-war stuff because the Democratic party loves that stuff because you feel like you're changing things when you're actually changing nothing."

[29:25] "Now, let me say one other thing. I have a little more sympathy for this dilemma becaue my husband he's in Congress. He's now a politician. In 2016 he was elected to the Rio City Council. In 2018 he went to Congress as a member of an actual Socialist party. And I know the compromises you get face with like he'll have a bill that he thinks will improve the lives of the people that he grew up with in the slums. And they'll come to him and say, We'll let your bill on the floor for a vote if you vote for our shitty, corrupt lobbyist crap that we'll give money to. And then yo can say, No, I'm going to stand on principle. I'm not going to help these people because I'm not willing to get my hands dirty with your sleazy bill. Or you say, OK, I'll play ball with you. And then, the more you make those compromises, suddenly you're part of that game. So, I agree with you completely. It's different in Brazil because there's 26 different political parties. There's not just two. So if you're in one of those parties with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer you just fucking leave and go to a different party like he did.

[30:34] Glenn Greenwald: "With a two party system, if you stay in the Democratic party your only choice is going to be to succumb to it. You're going to be a fucking good soldier, the way Bernie is, the way AOC is. You know you're going to get behind Biden and Kamala and they're going to let you for a couple of months, like, talk a good game every now and then. But they know that at the end of the day you're going to snap into line. And if you don't, you're not going to get anything. So, Yeah, I don't see how that kind of reform is possible within the party. I really don't. I wish I didn't. For a long time I did but. And AOC was kind of my last hope."

[31:08] Jimmy Dore: ""Me, too. So when I saw her vote for the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the human race, and Bernie also voted for it and then basically lied to his supporters about it and about what he did. He pretended that he got the unemployment insurance in that bill. He did not. That was Michael Bennett. That was strait-up gaslighting from the left to protect them for doing something corrupt. So when they voted for the CARES Act it's my position that that was corrupt. That was what happened in 2008 when Barack Obama was president. They figured out how to do it. It took months for them to get that, extract wealth upward. [This time] They figured out how to do it in two weeks. And they got it done, man. And not one opposition, not one vote against it. Bernie Sanders could have voted against it. And then people would ask Why did you vote against it? And then people would know why there's 10,000 people in a food line in Texas today. Because of the CARES Act. But now, since Bernie Sanders voted for it and every member of the squad, nobody's going to be held accountable for it. Nobody is going to be held accountable for voting for the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the human race. Because they all did it."

[32:27] "Bernie Sanders went from being a passive, spineless, willing tool of the establishment to actually doing evil. When you vote for that thing, which he didn't have to vote for, it would have passed anyway, he's now actually giving the impression to people in the country that this had to be done. It's a good thing. And what the CARES Act really was a piece of cheese inside of a trap. And we took the cheese. And now our head is inside that trap. And that's why there's 10,000 people in food lines in Texas and every other part of the goddamn country, and people are living under every bridge in California, a state that is super-majority Democrat -- Democrat governor -- no one will ever be held accountable for the CARES Act, Glenn. And it's because most of the people in journalism don't even fucking know what it was, what was in it, or what the ramifications are. When they see 10,000 in a food line, they don't make the connection to the CARES Act, Nancy Pelosi, and every member of the federal government voting for this. So, I'll stop talking. You talk."

[34:16] Glenn Greenwald: "Well, I mean, first of all I don't know what broke in the matrix on that day, but you'll remember when Nancy Pelosi was on CNN and Wolf Blitzer was actually asking her in a pretty persistent manner. Like I said, something broke in the matrix or that cassette that's in Wolf Blitzer's back was malfunctioning. He was asking her real questions about why it was she was holding up this aid for people when they were starving. I remember she was like, she go really sarcastic and she's like, 'Thank you so much for your concern for our kids. We know them. We know.' And then he said 'Well, no, I actually am concerned because I see them on the street asking for money for food and she said, 'We feed them. Do you feed them? We feed them.' It was such a mask-dropping moment because it's such Marie Antoinette behavior, right? It's like that kind of 'We sit inside the walls of power in our castle, and we ride by the poor people in our golden carriages, and we throw them crumbs occasionally. And that's all they need and they should be happy with that.' That's what the CARES act was."

[35:17] "I think the problem, though, with seeing all of that, I don't know, I don't know in each individual case, which of these two motives was driving them. But I know it was one of the two, and maybe in some cases both. Either they felt like they really were gonna get something for their good behavior. They were going to get a little biscuit. Like Bernie was going to get some kind of cabinet position or some leftist was going to be influential. Like I think they convinced [themselves]. You see these Warren people. they're like 'Oh my god! You're not going to make her Secretary of the Treasury?' Of course he's not going to fucking make Elizabeth Warren -- Did you actually think that? You actually thought that was going to happen? Did you, like, start watching the Democrats last Thursday? So I think that, like, some of these people really believed. I think she stayed in Super Tuesday and fucked Bernie because she thought she was gonna get a position. And, of course, they're not. You see who they're giving their positions to: every lobbyist, every sleazebag corporate -- exactly the people you would expect. Republicans, warmongers."

[36:25] "I think it's that. And I also think it's like what happened to me at the intercept, too. It's like, inside liberal culture, it's so insular. They only talk to one another. And this idea that Trump was this, like, unprecedented historic evil, that you cannot do anything to endanger or impede the Democrats in every way. Like, all your obligation as a human being to do for the next year, is to just be obedient and stand behind Joe Biden and the Democrats no matter what they tell you to do and not utter a peep. Because if you do, you'll risk re-electing Trump. The cultural pressure of that was so immense, that even if they didn’t think they were going to get biscuits or cookies for their obedience, they were just too scared to step out of line.”

[37:17] Jimmy Dore: "AOC gave a speech on the floor calling out the Repubicans for passing the CARES Act, transferring 5 trillion dollars of wealth upward when it was Nancy Pelosi who was in charge of the Congress, which is why we voted them in in 2028 so we could have some control and of course she never , she wasn't allowed to call out Nancy Pelosi. But she did say What we're getting in this bill is crumbs and it's the Republicans fault. She's just gaslighting. Now you're just a partisan liar. You're the exact opposite of what we elected. We elected you to stand up against Nancy Pelosi. We elected you to stand up against the corruption in the Democratic Party. And all she's doing --

[37:55] Glenn Greenwald: "We already had Joe Crawley. There was already a Democrat in that seat who was loyal to Nancy Pelosi. No one needed her [AOC] to go like The Republicans suck. And you're right. There is this Leftist case, I'm not saying I'm convinced by it. That it would be better if Joe Crawley was in that position, because at least with him you know what you're getting. With her, it's like people [say] Oh, if I'm a Leftist, and I'm like a cool, socialist Leftist, the Democratic Party is the place for me because she's telling me that's the place where you come to do cool left-wing, subversive socialism. Which, of course is a complete deceit. It's total false advertising.

[38:41] Jimmy Dore: "Well, I've caught a lot of heat for making that point on this show. We catch a lot of heat from everybody. I've been called sexist for doing that. I've been called racist for doing that: that I'm picking on women of color because I'm making that observation. So kudos to you for having the balls to do that, too."

[39:09] "Let me just ask you about what happened to you at the intercept. I'm sure everyone pretty much knows what happened because you waited so goddamn long to come on my show to tell everybody. You went on every other fucking show in the world before you came -- but that's OK. I'm still your friend. And, when you were writing at the Intercept despite your contract giving yo editorial autonomy, your writing was suppressed. And it still blows my mind that the news outlet you helped found was censoring your work. Tell us about your decision to leave the Intercept. And tell us about the editor of the intercept whom we've taken down here for her Russia-gating. Can you tell us about how she somehow had the power to stop your work drom being published.

[39:53] Glenn Greenwald: "I'm still kind of confused about that myself. So, remember, the Intercept was created at the height of the Snowden reporting. At the time, I was at The Guardian. And I had the best possible position I could have. I would have been at the Guardian forever. It's a great perch if you're a journalist. You make a lot of money. You're at one of the most influential papers in the world. And I had the biggest story in my hands in generations, or in years. The biggest story in journalism and politics. So I didn't leave the Guardian because I had to. And I didn't leave the Guardian because I wanted to go create a new Mother Jones, right? Like Mother Jones already existed. And I already hated it. So obviously I wasn't looking to creat some, like, nice liberal Left magazine where editors just make you only say nice things that fit into the liberal Left ideology. The point of the Intercept was not just a new kind of journalism in terms of the ethos. It was supposed to be structured differently."

[41:00] "I've known Matt Taibbi forever. And I remember Matt Taibbi would always tell me the story, which is, Matt Taibbi's father was a fairly well-known and accomplished journalist in, I think, Boston, and in the area where they grew up. And he would tell me he'd be around journalists all the time, you know, like, as a kid. So he would go out to dinner, to a bar with his dad and his dad't friends. They were all journalists and they would all sit around talking about the news and it was so much fun. They were vulgar and funny, and it was so spirited. And then the next day you would wake up and you would read their copy, and it was like so fucking boring. It was like drained of all its vibrancy and voice and personality. Why? Because editors were there, flattening and hammering it into, like, this staid, formulaic obligatory, acceptable-to-advertiser tone."

"And so when I started my journalism career, I started the way you started it. I didn't start a YouTube channel. I started a blogspot, and I would just go into my blogspot every day and I would write what I felt about Bush and Cheney and I would fucking hit 'publish' and I built an audience that way. And then, when I moved to Salon and the Guardian, I said, I'm only going to come and work with you if you let me continue to work under those conditions which is that no editor touches what I do except in very rare circumstances when I ask. And obviously I didn't leave -- and the said OK. And I didn't leave the Guardian to crate a new news outlet built on my reputation and my work to impose on myself greater editorial restrictions and less freedom than I had before, obviously. I built the Intercept, the idea was it was going to be a journalist-run publication where editors were there just that you picked and chose to. like, that you trusted to make suggestions about how your work could be improved. But they weren't going to be the bosses. They weren't going to be the people that, like, dicated how you had to speak and write. I wanted to create a news outlet that gave that same freedom to other journalists that I always had for myself and my career. And slowly, over time, because we chose not to run it because I didn't want to be in budget meetings and HR meetings and corporate bullshit and lawyers, I wanted to do my journalism. We knew we had to get a manager. The idea was that the manager would basically report to us. We would pick the editor-in-chief. And the idea was that she was basically there to fulfill our vision.

"And over time we had John Cook -- he used to be with Gawker -- it didn't work. He upped to go about nine months and then we got Betsy Reed from The Nation. And over time her vision diverged from at least mine -- I don't want to talk for Jeremy or Laura who left very shortly after Betsy got there. Jeremy's still there. But it gradually became a standard liberal Left publication. Especially after Trump won because they were very sensitive because we did the reporting on the DNC and Podesta emails because that was our job. We exposed corruption on the part of the DNC. So for four years they heard from, you know, the peope of the New York Times and NBC and their friends in Brooklyn. 'Oh, you guys helped Trump win. You shouldn't have been reporting on these emails.' So they resolved, like, now we're not going to do this again. We're going to become good Democratic party soldiers."

[44:08] "And so, as I saw the Intercept morphing into something I not only didn't like or recognize, but that they actually made me sick. I figured, at least they're still not fucking with my journalism. They're still giving me the stuff that I want when I did my Brazil reporting last year. They paid all the criminal lawyers I needed when the Bolsonaro government tried to prosecute me. They paid my 24-hour security that I needed because of death threats. They stood behind the reporting. So, it's like all right as long as you're not fucking with my reporting, I'll let you use my name and fundraise off me and stay -- even thought you're not what I like -- just stay the fuck away from me and I'll stay away from you. We'll be over in different quarters so that was the only rationale I was clinging to for staying. So when, in the week before the election I decided I wanted to write about the Hunter Biden emails in large part because I knew they were afraid to do so. And the only article they published about it was one by Jim Risen which quoted the fucking CIA. The Intercept. The thing that I created to be opposed to the national security state quoting the CIA claiming that Russia was behind this story, and therefore you should ignore it.

"I was so offended that that was what we had published about it that, you know what, I'm going to write my own story about it, saying what it is that -- and you know this is the kind of story, Jimmy, I wrote without editors for fifteen years. And suddenly they descended on me like fucking vultures looking for a meal, like I was filled with meat, and they're just like, 'Oh. We see you're writing about this. We need to put this through our editorial process. And you saw the email, the last email was, like, We're not publishing this unless you take out all the parts about Biden. Feel free to bash the media but not Joe Biden. And I said 'Fuck you, and I quit, because I'm never, ever going to allow somebody to tell me what -- imagine if you started The Jimmy Dore Show and it turned into a success and then someone, somehow, came in and it was like: 'Jimmy, you can't say this on the Jimmy Dore Show.' And you'd be like, 'What the fuck! I didn't start the Jimmy Dore Show for someone to tell me what I --' That's how I felt. So I was like, 'Fuck You. I'm not staying at a place that's going to tell me what I can and can't say.' And I quit and I left."

[46:20] Jimmy Dore: "So, this is obviously a big grift. That you would leave such a high-paying job where they were taking care of all your bills to go work for considerably less money and start all over again. I mean, it's obvious you're just a nefarious grifter who isn't sincere in his beliefs."

Glenn Greenwald: "You know, it's so funny because the way the Intercept is funded, as you know, it's funded by a billionaire. And I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories around on the left about his influence. But the reality is, he gave us the money he promised. He swore he would never be involved in our editorial process. And he kept his word. And I'm not there anymore and I have no reason to say that if it's not true. He is not the problem. He never fucked around with the intercept. He really didn't. And he was like a huge Russia-gater, Pierre Omidyar. And while he was paying me I was writing one screed after the next against Russia-gate. He was funding those 'Never Trump' goons. Those neocons. He was funding all that. And I was like bashing them. So it was like the US funding both sides of a civil war. He never once -- no one ever said to me on his behalf, like, 'Hey, can you stop at least bashing the organizations he funded?' He wasn't the problem.

"But because it was funded by this billionaire and we're a 501c3, which means that the Intercept has no advertisers, no subscriptions, and therefore no pressure of any kind to like produce journalism. With huge salaries. Everybody there gets above-market salaries. It's the easiest place in the world to work. Like, you make a huge salary. No one ever pressures you to work. You just take a couple of months off. No one gives a shit. No one has to produce. And because I was the one who co-founded it, I was making more money there than anybody. And not only was I making more money there, but as you say, they were paying for my very expensive -- you know, the Bolsinaro government is still trying to put me in prison -- I have the most expensive criminal law firm in Brazil representing me because I'd like to stay out of prison. They were paying for that. They were paying for the 24-hour armed security that I have, the armored vehicles that I need in order to go around Brazil in the Bolsinaro era in light of the -- I have two kids. I have 26 dogs. And I have a husband who, as I told you was in public service so he's not making a lot of money. He's a Congressman. It was a huge gamble for me to leave the Intercept. If money were motivating me, I would have just parked my ass there for the next ten years and never written again and no one would even have given a shit. As it turns out, when I left, I still do have a very large audience, and on substack you can make a very good living. I'm still not making what I was making when you add on all the expenses and everything else at the Intercept, but I probably will wind up making that.

"But I didn't know that. I took a huge gamble because I couldn't be at a place, no matter, there's this: I'm not for sale. You could have tripled my salary at the Intercept and said: 'We're not going to let you publish this article' and I would have said 'Shove this money up your ass' because if you don't have integrity with your readers, if your readers don't believe that you're telling them what you really believe without letting anyone stop you from saying things, you're fucking worthless I might as well go to work for CNN if that's what I'm going to be."

[49:52] Jimmy Dore:" Yes. That is exactly right. So I'm just confused how, it seemed like the entire, like, James Risen, the editor Betsy, everybody turned into these conspiracy, the worst form of journalist. The worst form of journalist. The worst. Like the kind of stuff you would see Sean Hannity doing when Obama was President. Like that's the kind of stuff they ended up doing at the Intercept. On the regular. Like constantly. Like still to this day. Right now. This moment. How did that happen if you were hand-picking the people running that place?"

[50:33] Glenn Greenwald: "Well, I wasn't. I wasn't hand-picking shit. I wasn't hand-picking anybody. We picked Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief and then she decided, 'OK. I'm now in charge.' What happened was, after 2016, they were really traumatized by the criticisms they were getting, that they had helped Trump win by virtue of our reporting on Hillary. We did do a lot of reporting on Hillary. I got original documents from Guccifer and I reported them with Lee Fang, because you know what? That's our fucking job. My job was not to be an aid for the Hillary Clinton campaign. If I wanted to do that, I would have gone and done that. I chose instead to be a journalist which means we did what our job was. And they were really traumatized after the election about being accused of having helped Trump win.

[51:18] "When I started so vocally calling bullshit on the McCarthy-ite Russia-gate scandal that the Kremlin had infiltrated the United States and everybody was a Russian agent, the kind of stuff that McCarthy said, they freaked out because they felt like, wow, like the face of our organization is making us look even more pro-Trump now because he's so off-key from our left-wing cultural circles. And so you know what they did? They went and hired two New York times reporters: Robert Mackey and, especially, Jim Risen, because they knew that they would be able to counteract what I was doing. So they had, if you look at what Rob Mackey has done for the last four years, it's nothing more than just whatever anti-Trump theme arises on Twitter for the day, like Trump lied, Trump posted some tweet that's not normal. That's his thing, like every day. Whatever the anti-Trump theme of the day is, he published that shit so he looked anti-Trump."

And, then, Jim Risen who's a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter who I always have had a good amount of respect for -- he broke the NSA story at the New York Times and won the Pulitzer for it -- they felt like he was one of the few people who had the voice to counteract mine. And they brought him on to do Russia-gate bullshit. And it just went full-on, like every day that he wrote he will -- actually he wrote like five times a year. But when he wrote is was like Trump is a traitor. Trump is beholden to Russia. What does Putin have on Trump? All that bullshit. There are still really good journalists, Jimmy, at the Intercept. I'm not just saying that. There really are. There are people who want to do real investigative reporting. Ryan Grimm does do a lot of investigative reporting against the Democratic party. So does Lee Fang. There's good people there. The problem is that the senior editorial leadership at the Intercept, in New York, all live in Brooklyn. They all come out of liberal-establishment magazines, like Betsy came from The Nation. Rodger Hodge, here deputy came from Harper's. They're just creatures of liberal media cliche. And so, they wanted to make sure that they weren't associated with what I was doing. And they just put all this pressure on people to get on board with Russia-gate."

[53:43] "And the reason they fucked-up the Reality Winner thing that they let me take the fall for, they never publicly accounted for what happened. The reason they sent those documents to the government recklessly and didn't protect the documents -- she would have gotten caught anyway. She's not imprisoned because of that. But, obviously, that was a fucked-up thing to do. The reason they did that was because Betsy was so eager to prove to the media outlets that we were supoosed to attack and subvert, not like worried about winning their approval. She was like so worried about proving to like the New York Times and NBC and like Vox that we were willing to get on board the Russia-gate bullshit that she pressured those reporters. She said 'I need this document authenticated. I need to get this published. And that's why, as they will say, if the Intercept ever does its duty of providing transparency about what happened, that's why they were forced and rushed into sending those documents to the government without the proper precautions Simply because the senior editorial leadership of the Intercept was desperate to prove that despite my Russia-gate skepticism, they were still good liberals on board with that narrative."

[54:57] Jimmy Dore: "So, I had this conversation with Aaron Maté who also won the Izzy award for his debunking of the Russia-gate narrative. He was actually published in the Nation because of Katrina Vanden Heuvel -- ironically, at The Nation -- where Betsy Reed comes from. Because I don't come from journalism. I come from stand-up comedy. And, consequently, being in journalism I'm not trying to win anyone's friendship or approval. I'm not trying to get any pats on the back. I'm not trying to join their club. Which is why I think I'm able to do so much of a better job than 99.99 of journalists on anything I decide to talk about, whether it be Venezuela, whether it be Syria, whether it be Russia-gate, or whether it be your story. And I always tell Aaron Maté, it's like if I was at an organization that was Russia-gating -- I was at an organization that was Russia-gating -- and I would go into their studio every time I did a show and I would tell people that people who are telling you Russia-gate stuff are full of shit. And I would do that in their studio. And, of course, that made them really pleased with me. But I stuck it out because I thought that once the Mueller Report comes out they'll see. And, of course, that's not what happened. And I say to Aaron: How can you go to work at an organization that is doing McCarthy smearing on the regular and still sleep at night? And he says: Well, you know, journalists have families and they -- I go: "Why don't you go sell fucking cars. That's got more dignity in it than writing for a piece of shit organization that is doiing McCarthyism on the regular, and misleading its readers. What do you tell journalists to do, Glenn? Because what I tell them to do is go take your fucking dignity back and go get an honest job. That's what I tell them. Anyway, what do you tell them?"

[56:54] Glenn Greenwald: "Yeah. You know what? That's a really interesting question. So let's talk about Aaron, right? Aaron Maté who's a young journalist. Unlike me, I can afford to take some risks, right? I have a big following. I have, you know, a reputation from the stories I've broken. Aaron doesn't have that. He's a young kid without a big platform working in an industry where jobs are disappearing. And he knew that if he positioned himself against Russia-gate, he would be cutting off huge amounts of job opportunities. And you know, he was right. We published an article he wrote in 2017 because I demanded that we publish it. I actually edited it. And I don't edit usually, and I was like: If you guys don't let him do it, I'll edit it myself and put my name on it and then I'll just publish it myself. And it was a great article. It was about how Rachel Maddow had devoted 60% of her air time to Russia at the expense of everything else. Do you know that I could not get Aaron published ever again at the Intercept. He would pitch Russia-gate skepticism stories and they would just not even answer. And they hated him."

"I'll tell you another story. Right before the Julian Assange trial began which is the greatest threat to press freedom taking place in this country. They attempted prosecution and extradition -- by the Trump administration -- of Julian Assange. I told the Intercept, we have to cover this, these hearings. Like report on them because so few news outlets are and the deadline for getting credentials had passed. So I asked Julian's lawyers to give me the list of the journalists who had gotten credentials. And there were, like, three peopleon the list. Like Richard Murmets, the youtuber who I really liked but I knew they weren't going to publish him. And the only other one was Kevin Gostola who was writing on his blog. Really detailed, smart reports. And I said, Let's just hire Kevin and he could -- and they were, like, We're not going to hire Kevin Gostola because he's not part of the in-group clique in the media that they care about. The New York Times doesn't think Kevin Gostola is good. That's not a coup for us. We're not going to associate ourselves with some left-wing dirt bag."

This is how they think, Jimmy. And I think, like, you know, I saw in the last two weeks, there has always been a lot of hostility toward me in the media among corporate journalists. It has definitely skyrocketed since I left the Intercept. And I think in part because they figure, like, I don't even have one foot anymore in the club so they can let their hatred for me loose. I think the fact that I went to Substack and immediately shot to the top. There's a lot of professional resentment because they don't have audiences. The only way they'll be heard is by working at NBC. And a lot of them are just telling me, like, you know what? We don't fucking like you. They're just telling me that, like, on Twitter. Like, We think you're a fucking asshole. And I am so happy with that. Like, genuinely. I care about my husband. And my kids. And my family and my friends. I care whether they like me. I care if my readers respect me. I don't give the slightest fuck if people in journalism at these organizations hate me or not. I went into journalism to attack them and subvert them. Not to make them like me. If they liked me, I'd be concerned.

And so that is a big part of what has happened at the Intercept is they want to be part of this group that I thought we were creating a media outlet to oppose. And they do care very much about being liked by those people. They knew that that statement they wrote about was specifically designed to tell journalists, Oh, you have to be edited. Why shouldn't he get to. That's always their audience. What does the New York Times think of us. What is NBC? What is Vox? What do these liberals on Twitter think about us? When you start thinking that way as a journalist -- I want to make sure these people like me -- you lose all your value."

[1:01:02] Jimmy Dore: "I agree with you. And I think that's why I have to pat myself on the back at the show because if I don't no one will. but I think that's why we're able to do an actual better job is because I'm not looking for a job in journalism. I'm not looking to get invited to the press dinner. I'm not looking to be friends with these people. I'm not looking to go to the Hamptons with Chris Hayes and his mistress. I'm not looking to do these things. By the way, the last time I had you on the show -- I went back and re-watched that interview -- at that time you were saying that you were friends with Chris Hayes and that it was awkward for you to criticize him. Are you still friends with Chris Hayes?"

Glenn Greenwald: "No. And that's not awkward for me to criticize him. I mean, it's funny. I was friends with both Rachel and Chris. I abandoned my friendship with Rachel prior to Chris. They're both like perfectly nice people, at least like when I was friends with them. It's not that they're evil people. What happens is they go work for evil insitutions and then they get co-opted into the pernicious prism of that place. And ironically, Jimmy, Chris Hayes wrote a book in 2011 called Twilight of the Elites which I read and reviewed and interviewed him about. And a whole chapter is called cognitive capture. The point of which is: no matter how smart. No matter how well intentioned. No matter how resistent you are. If you go and immerse yourself in these institutions of power, they will eventually co-opt you. You will start seeing the world through their distorted perspective. They'll offer you money. They'll offer you fame. They'll offer you celebrity. They'll offer you adoration. And the only people you'll end up talking to are the people similarly immersed in that world. And you'll lose your capacity to see outside of it. And I think the fact that you come from the world of comedians, I think that the fact that I live in Brazil and started off as a lawyer and never went to work for the New York Times and never wanted to.

"Look at Joe fucking Rogan. Probably the single most influential person in all of politics at the moment in journalism who they fucking hate, he was the fucking host of The Fear Factor and started off with extreme fighing or whatever the fuck that's called. And yet people trust him infinitely more and trust you infinitely more. If one of those little dweebs from, like, NBC or CNN that tries to get people kicked off facebook and twitter were to go and like do their own youtube channel, they would have 3,000 people at most watching. They have no audience of their own. that's why the hate you. It's why they hate me. It's why they hate Joe Rogan. Because by being emancipated from the constraints under which they live, the things to which they're captive, not only are we freer as people, but we can actually reach a bigger audience than they can and have more career success."

[1:04:03] "And what has happened to Chris is, you know, I don't think he has a mistress.I think he's faithful to his wife, I guess, but he definitely has, at least, a second home. And when you have multiple mortages on massive homes, like a huge fucking thing in Brooklyn Heights or wherever the fuck in Brooklyn that he lives, and some big, big house in the Hamptons, it's like golden handcuffs, they used to be called when I went to work on Wall Street as a lawyer right after law school. It's like no matter how much money you make, it's never enough because every time you make more you buy more and you're more dependent on those things. And then you can't escape. You're a slave. It's golden handcuffs. And he knows. I won't say that he told me, but a MSNBC host once told me that they don't just get show-by-show ratings. They get segment-by-segment ratings. And that if you put somebody on to criticize the Democrtic party you can watch the ratings plummet. You see people turning their channel. And so if you have, you know, two different homes and three kids and a wife who likes your four-million-dollars-a-year salary from Comcast, you're not going to do anything to jeopardize it. And then, eventually, because you need to sleep well at night, you're going to convince yourself that the reason you're not putting Russia-gate skeptics on your show, and the reason you're not putting Democratic party critics on your show is because Russia-gate is true and the Demcoratic party is you're salvation. That's what you have to tell yourself in order not to slit your own wrist for what you're doing. And that's what they do."

[1:05:31] Jimmy Dore: "There's no way that Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes believes anything they say about Russia-gate is true. They are 100% willing tools of the establishment. They are willing to be a cog in an evil wheel, which makes them evil. You know, there's sins of omission, there's sins of commission. They do both. What makes it more insidious is that Rachel is gay and Chris is a nerd. So, normally, people on the Left think, well, a homosexual wouldn't be immoral. They're good people. And a nerd wouldn't be a fucking lyin tool of a war machine, would they? 'Yes,' the answer to both of those are 'Yes'. And so that's what makes them even more insidious. They're like the Barack Obama's, right? What made Barack Obama so indisidious --"

[1:06:25] Glenn Greenwald: "Or Kamala Harris or Susan Rice or Michelle flournoy, or Pete Buttigieg." That's the tactic of neoliberalism. You fucking drape the Raytheon building in the Rainbow Flag and you have the CIA celebrate Woman's Day, and, you know, like have Boeing donate money to Black Lives Matter. This is what they do. They exploit WOKE ideology and Culture War issues to make the Left and liberals think that they're their allies and march behind them. And they put black faces and gay faces and female faces onto corporatist and miliaristic policies to soften them like we started off beginning by talking about the Pentagon wanting to make Obama the face of the war on terror knowing that it would drag people into supporting it and making them think it was actually benevolent rather than evil and malignant."

[1:07:26] Jimmy Dore: I didn't write this joke. Someone said it on Twitter: Perfect Democrats in 1860 would have been bragging about their first transgendered slave owner."

Glenn Greenwald: "I don't know if you remember Freddy DeBoer, several years before he dropped away for awhile had my favorite tweet ever. He said 'liberalism in the 21st century is demanding more gender diversity on the Boeing panel entitled How To Make a Deadlier Drone.'"

Jimmy Dore: "Look, I want to show you this really quick before I let you go. This is from the Post, it says Joe Biden's transition official wrote an op-ed advocating free speech restrictions. This is from November 13th."

And here's Barack Obama. He's going along with the same narrative. He says:

Jimmy Dore: "So Barack Obama would ban War of the Worlds, but I wonder if he would ban lies like this: [shows video of Obama stunt in Flynt Michigan] - "Can I get some water? ... I really did need a glass of water. This is not a stunt."

"So, is that considered a deep fake? Is that considered garbage? Is that considered a false narrative? Here he is doing it again, in Flint, Michigan, May 4, 2016. [shows video of Obama drinking a glass of water - https://youtu.be/UWS30kJPKtc] "You know, generally I have not been doing stunts here, but you know . . ."

Jimmy Dore: "But here's a stunt. This is obvious bullshit. And I'm pretending the water is fine in Flint Michigan. So that's misinformation, but that's OK. So the biggest purveyors of misinformation -- and here's one more. Just remember:

"So they would have that stifled. Obama wants to stifle that but he doesn't want to stifle his bullshit water drinking. Can you go ahead and speak to what is happening right now?"

Glenn Greenwald: "Interestingly, just to add a quick fact to that article that you discussed at the beginning, that Rich Stengel used to be the editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, so in addition to being an ex-Obama official and a future Biden official, he used to be a very influential journalist, as well, that person who's calling for hate speech restricitons. Let me tell you a couple of things."

"When I first started writing about politics, one of the reasons I started writing was because the civil liberties assaults being perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. And the argument was terrorism, islamic extremism, is such a grave threat that we have to limit all these previous civic rights that we once enjoyed. And there's an article from 2006 -- and you can Google this, and you should because it's a sign of what's coming -- where Newt Gingrich gave a speech, and he said, 'I think we need to amend the First Amendment so that we reduce the amount of, the range of, free speech that is protected in the name of terrorism because islamic extremeism is so dangerous. It's not just an idea. It incites hatred,' using exactly that same formulation. That we need to get around the Supreme Court cases that say we can't ban it by amending the Constitution to ban it if we want to win the war on terror.'

"Another tactic that they used to use is the FBI would go searching for Muslim terror plots that didn't really exist. They would manufacture them because they wanted to keep fear levels high and convince people that the threat was much greater than it was. So they would get an informant, some guy who they caught on credit card fraud charges or whatever, who was Muslim, and they would say, 'Hey. If you want to stay out of prison, you need to go work for us as an informant and they would send them into mosques or to college campuses. And they would target, like, not very smart, emotionally disabled 21 year old Muslim kids. And they would deceive them and manipulate them into saying like 'OK. Yeah. I'll join your plot to go blow this thing up.' They would offer poor Muslim kids money. 'Hey, if you join the plot, I can get you ten thousand dollars. Yeah, my mother needs that. I'll join the plot.' And then the FBI would come in at the last second and say, 'We just arrested this ring of Muslims who were plotting to blow up this bridge in Buffalo when in reality it was the FBI's fucking plot. They were manufacturing those things."

[1:13:11] "This is what they're going to do, Jimmy. Exactly what they are going to say. The adversaries of the Democratic party are not just Republicans or Conservatives. These are fascists. They are domestic terrorists. and they're going to go find some, like, group of 21-year-old meth heads in like Montana. And the FBI is going to send in an informant, like some white kid, and they're going to be like Hey, why don't we go murder Gretchen Whitman or Rahm Emanuel or whoever the fuck. And then they're gonna be like, Look, we just disrupted this plot. And MSNBC is gonna be like "Breaking," CNN, "Breaking" This white terrorist ring is plotting to do this violence. And they're going to drive up fear levels so not only do you watch MSNBC and buy the New York times, you support the Biden administration when they say we need to censor this stuff on the Internet because this is dangerous. This is terrorism. Just like Newt Gingrich wanted to do in the War on Terror. This is the stuff they're planning. This is going to be an extremely authoritarian administration. They have the FBI and the CIA and the NSA behind them, who all supported them. All those Bush-Cheney goons and ghouls from neocons to like the Dick Cheney, Karl Rove disciples are all on their side. They have Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And they are going to try and choke the legal processes of this country and free discourse over the Internet in the name of scaring the shit out of people and then saying that it's necessary to stop the threat. Just like Bill Clinton tried to do after Oklahoma City when he tried to get a back door to the Internet to stop the White Militias, just like Bush and Cheney did by scaring everybody about Muslims, this is what they're going to do. They're going to say, This is the new threat we face and we need these powers to stop it."

[1:14:57] Jimmy Dore: "But what's weird is that it's not just coming from government officials like Barack Obama and Joe Biden's administration and I didn't recognize it was that ex-Time Magazine guy. I have a video of him saying propaganda is good and necessary. Anyway, I wish I had known who that was. But the weird thing is it's coming from journalists. So here's a guy, Mehdi Hassan and he had on another joker from Vox -- they're owned by NBC -- very pro-censoring people like me and you. That's what Vox is in business for, to squelch their competition, which is people like me. And by squelching them, I mean using nefarioius legal means to do so. Using censorship. That's what Vox is all about. That's what that Carlos Maza was about. So watch this. It's kind of stunning. Now Remember, they have to keep us from bad information.They all know they can all tell what's bullshit. But they're there to make sure that we don't get suckered. Let's listen:"

[1:16:07] Mehdi Hassan: "It's not just Fox News and OANN and Newsmax and all these right-wing outlets, this is social media as a whole. It's cable news. Social media is supposed to be liberal, Silicon Valley, and yet, for example, in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, you have all these social media employees talking about how these platforms are manipulating their audiences. And tech pioneer Jaron Lanier has this amazing warning at the end of the film. He says, 'If we go down the status quo for, let's say, another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance.' He's talking about the role of social media disinformation there. That's not just cable news. We're way past cable news."

[1:16:48] Jimmy Dore: "Before we get to this [other] joker, what they're doing there and what that movie did where it took the very real thing of social media apps being able to have all algorithms that tap into the part of your brain that causes addictions. So they know how to manipulate your brain to get you addicted to their app. Then that movie makes the leap of also, because of that, we need to suppress conspiracies and bad information because people are susceptible to it. Hey, I don't know if you know, but there's a thing called the Iraq War that happened in my lifetime complete bullshit printed in the New York Times and Washington Post. Should we then de-platform the Washington Post and New York Times because we went to a war over what they printed? But let's just listen to what they say and then I'll have you comment on it."

[1:17:38] David Roberts, staff writer for Vox: "Sure and I think what we're trying on social media is, what if you spread information with no gatekeepers? And I think what you find out is in an atmosphere with no gatekeepes at all, misinformation wins. Because it's more compelling. It's more fast. It appeals to your negative emotions more. It's just more clickable. If all you want, if your only algorithm is clicks and virality and that kind of thing, it's going to be misinformation that wins in that environment. What we're just finding out is that you can't operate a coherent information ecosystem without some kind of trusted gatekeepers. There's just no way around it."

Jimmy Dore: "And what? Guess who these guardrail gatekeepers are? [shows screenshot of headline article:

"This is the kind of stuff these guardrail gatekeepers do. They push us into wars with fake evidence. It's what they do".

Jimmy Dore [shows screenshot of graph]: "Number of documented civilian deaths in Iraq War from 2003 to October 2020. That's from misinformation in the goddamn New York Times and Washington Post."

[1:18:53] Jimmy Dore: "So, let me just throw it to you, Glenn. What do you have to say to this [points to Medhi Hassan and David Roberts] who are journalists calling for other people to censor other journalists. Go ahead."

[1:19:23] Glenn Greenwald: "I mean, the smugness and oozing arrogance of that clip makes me almost want to do physical violence. To that particular individual who said that we can't possibly manage our discourse without them acting as our gatekeepers, as our overseers determining what we can and cannot hear. I mean, speaking of the Iraq War, that network that owns that platform that you just showed was one of the prime propagators of the lies of the Iraq War. Talk about disinformation. They needed fucking gatekeepers. It was Meet The Press where Tim Russert would have Dick Cheney on every other Sunday to talk about Saddam's nuclear program. And MSNBC actually did have one person on their network who was against the Iraq War. And do you know what his name was? Phil Donahue. They fucking fired him for exactly that reason. So they're the ones who are going to use that network to say Oh. We can't allow people to conduct their own conversations without us acting as their gatekeepers, as their overlords, because otherwise -- on the very network that sold America, not just the Iraq war. They turned the people who did the 2008 financial crisis into heroes. Andrea Mitchell was on that network. She's married to fucking Alan Greenspan."

[1:20:09] "And what about the last four years? 2016 to 2020 of convincing Americans we've been taken over by the fucking Kremlin. And that, like, puting Adam Schiff on every night saying he's heard, he's seen definitive proof of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government only for the Mueller investigation to close and not only say that they couldn't find any evidence to establish that, but they did not arrest one person, not one American for criminally conspiring with the Russians over the election, the whole point of the conspiracy theory in the first place. Thost are our fucking gatekeepers? The people that we need to control -- we don't need any gatekeepers. That's the whole point of the Internet to begin with. That was why it existed. The promise of it was, it was supposed to be free. And Edward Snowden gave up his liberty in defense of that idea. Using it as mass surveillance, monitoring us, is to degrade and convert the Internet from this tool of liberation into one of coercion. Same thing if now we're going to have this little fucking worm, Dave Roberts, at Vox telling us that the only kind of information that can be disseminated is one he, as a gatekeeper, approves of."

[1:21:57] "OK, Jimmy. You're working me up too much. I've got to go."