Glenn Greenwald: Dangerous New Escalation in Russia, & Our Blackmailed Politicians

I think we're watching the most evil thing I've ever seen in my lifetime, which is the lame duck administration leaving the next administration with the World War with a nuclear conflict by allowing Ukraine, a proxy state of the United States to strike within Russia. And I'll just have one editorial comment and then I'm going to let you go. But I think that people in Washington misunderstand Vladimir Putin and they think he's a monarch with absolute power, which is not true.

And Russian politics is complex and it's lively. And Putin is very concerned with his approval rating within Russia. He cannot appear weak. That's a huge threat to him. He feels that I can confirm. And if he can't hide attacks on him by the United States through Ukraine, either a Moscow or a big civilian casualties, I think he will have no choice in his view, but to launch like a serious response against Ukraine or some or NATO countries or possibly the United States.

So this seems like the most reckless thing that's ever happened in my life. I hardly have for words for it. Let me just say, am I overstating it? Do you think? No, no, not even remotely. Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at Tucker Carlson.com.

Here's the episode. So let me just say specifically what has been authorized. This is something that some NATO countries, including the United Kingdom, have been pressuring the Biden administration to do for quite a long time, for at least a year. But going all the way back to the beginning of 2022, this was an option that they had, which is that we have these guided missiles called ATT&COMS, which are very powerful for attacking inside Russia.

You can guide them specifically and very precisely to where you want them to go. Obviously, you have to get intelligence about where you want to strike. And the reason we never permitted the Ukrainians to use them is because the Ukrainians can't use those missiles on their own. In other words, if they want to launch these missiles, it's not just the US giving them the missiles and telling them no problem going use them.

It requires the direct involvement of the United States and or a major NATO country like France or the UK or Germany because the Ukrainians don't have the guiding capability in order to know how to launch these missiles. So this is not just us giving them missiles and saying go attack deep inside.

Imagine if some major country, China, Iran, Russia, whoever gave missiles to Canada if we were at war with them or Mexico or Cuba and said we're giving you these specifically for you them to use them inside the United States. We would consider that a grievous act of war, not just on the part of the country shooting them but on the part of the part of the country giving them. Well, Biden had here so much worse. He didn't just give Ukrainians missiles and say feel free to use them inside Russia.

We are going to participate in the bombing of Russia, NATO and or the United States because there's no way the Ukrainians can launch these missiles on their own, which means we are now, our military or intelligence community are participating in missile attacks inside the country of Russia.

This is something that even the Biden administration for all their hawkishness on Russia and Ukraine feeding that war, fueling it, preventing diplomatic resolutions because they wanted this war, even they were unwilling to do it because they understood the dangers of the escalatory

risks, progibyden or whoever's acting in his name, to do this just two weeks after the country resoundingly rejected governance by the Democratic Party and the administration and on his way out as an 81 year old man knowing that he has about six weeks off to the office to say, I know that these are massive risks but I'm going to take them. I'm 81. I don't really care.

And then to make it so much more difficult for the following administration to do what they promised to do during the campaign, which the American people voted for and wanted, which is to resolve this war. Instead, we're risking escalation with the world's largest superpower, nuclear power over what? Over what? I mean, it placed in context to this is without precedent. And I think it's Blinken. I want to ask about that in a second. In 1956, Soviets invaded Hungary and murdered a ton of people.

61, they put nuclear weapons in Cuba. 68, they invaded Czechoslovakia, murdered a bunch of people once again. These are all incredibly provocative acts, far more provocative than invading eastern Ukraine. And this was the middle of the Cold War and no American president, Democrats, and Republicans in charge during those periods. They didn't respond by attacking Russia. I mean, there's nothing like this has ever happened. No one's ever been this crazy.

Well, this is my big breach with the laugh, my big permanent split with whatever they thought I was in terms of. It's from them to they hate you. Oh, yeah, I know. And that all happened in 2016 when out of nowhere, Russia got appeared. And I remember, like it was yesterday, the very first ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign with this like menacing baritone voice, you know, what does Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have in common? What are they? What is Russia having, Donald Trump?

And journalistically, I just couldn't believe it because it was so retellent of McCarthyism, which is a civil libertarian is I found. I was taught was like one of the worst civil liberties of the 27th by right. I agree. Yeah. I mean, you go around just accusing people of being Russian agents with no evidence, destroying their reputation, their lives kind of like what they're trying to do to Tulsi Gabbard. Now what they tried to do, Donald Trump for the last eight years.

So just on that ground, I was kind of offended by a journalistically. I was so skeptical of it because when you have intelligence agencies leaking anonymously, unverified claims to the Washington Post in the New York Times and they put it on the front page and gather pollets, it's for them that's usually a sign that a huge disinformation campaign of deceit is underway. That was the exact method used. For example, to sell the war on Iraq to the American people was that kind of process.

That's why these intelligence agencies need to be ridded out. So what'll army most was that the climate was deliberately created in Washington, especially once Hillary lost and they blamed Russia for it, that any communications with Russia, anyone who visits Russia, anyone who talks to a Russian official is automatically deemed sinister or treasonous. And as you said, during the Cold War, which dominated our American life for 50 years, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire.

They were infinitely more powerful, more threatening, more everything than they then Russia is now. We always communicated with Soviet leaders. There were phones all over Washington that rang to the counterparts. They commented they communicated constantly. After Russia gave, there's basically no communication any longer between the Russian leaders and the American leaders on either side. And I should just say, I mean, that not because Russia wanted that.

That was something that in Washington got created because they blamed Russia and claimed that Russia was our existential enemy because of the claim that they interfered in the 2016 election. Before that, there was all the Obama administration and the Putin government cooperated in all sorts of ways around the world. Of course. But it's the leadership of the Republican Party too. I had a conversation with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

And he was about to appropriate tens of billions more for Ukraine. And I said, well, why don't you check with Putin? You're the Speaker of the House, you're number three in line for the presidency. Well, what? I said, well, I'll see if I can facilitate that. I'll call the press office. Kind of set you up. Why don't you talk to Putin? No, absolutely not. Will not. Why? Imagine if he had, though, and that leaked. But I'm not excusing him.

But why wouldn't he just say, I mean, I'm not attacking Mike Johnson. I guess I am attacking Mike Johnson. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just reporting what actually happened. I said, you know, like, what? You know, you have a moral duty to get as much information about this war before you fund its continuation and the killing of all these people. Like, shouldn't you know more?

No. I think it is important to say that this war has been 100% bipartisan, although the Biden administration as the leader of the executive branch is primarily responsible. The primary, there's been about, I would say, five or six dozen anti-interventionists were Republicans, typically more Trump supporters, both of them, the House and Senate, who have spoken out from the beginning against funding this war.

But the vast majority of Republicans, to the extent they have a criticism or had a criticism of the Biden administration at all with respect to Ukraine, it was that they didn't do enough. They didn't spend enough money on Ukraine. They didn't give Ukraine enough weapons. They didn't get more involved more heavily, more and earlier than they should.

But, you know, the thing that you said about encouraging Mike Johnson to speak to Putin, which of course, as the third in line to the presidency, as you said, when they're proposing it to escalate a major war, of course, you should want to understand the Russian perspective.

This is what Tulsi Gabar did in 2017 when she was a member of Congress and the Obama administration had unleashed this billion dollar year CA dirty war to change the government of Syria, to dislodge Bostorail Assad from the government. And we fought along ISIS and Al Qaeda, who also wanted Assad gone. We were told those were our existential enemies for 15 years. We fought alongside them to do it.

And so many of the weapons we sent ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and ISIS and other Islamic radical groups in Syria. And Tulsi Gabar does a member of the military, but also a member of Congress with constitutional responsibility to authorize or disauthorize a war, wanted to go to Syria and see what was happening for herself. And then she spoke with Syrian officials and got an opportunity to speak with the Syrian president.

And based solely on that, she's now accused of being a Russian agent, being some sort of treasonous sympathizer of Bostorail Assad. This is the jingoist climate that has been created way worse than what prevailed in the Cold War. When all we, we, Nixon went to China, Reagan negotiated all kinds of arms deal with the Soviets. This is now totally prohibited. It's like we live in a marble cartoon for children where there's good guys and bad guys where the good guys you don't speak to the bad guys.

And the good guys are kind of the nicest, they're the good guys. Yeah, we can fight with them because they're really good. At her point, I don't want to speak for Tulsi Gabbard or new director of national intelligence, nominee. But my view was, I don't have any feelings about Assad or Syria, but it's a fact that that government protected religious minorities, including an ancient Christian community there in the alloites of which he's one in that country for a long time. He and his dad.

So why are they my enemy exactly? I don't understand. Like, why should I be opposed to Assad in Syria? Why should I be opposed to Vladimir Putin? I was not supposed to be opposed to the Soviets who were anti-Christian, but now you have a pro-Christian president supposed to be against him. Tell me, why wasn't somebody explained to me why? As a 55-year-old American taxpayer, I should be against him. So first of all, I think the principle is that, and this is what Donald Trump ran on.

I explicitly in 2016 was that we shouldn't be involved in wars designed to change the governments of other countries, rebuild their government, transform their societies, in part because it's not our place to do it, and in part because we're terrible at doing it because they have very complex, rich, long histories that American intelligence officials and political leaders have no understanding of whatsoever. They don't speak in language. I mean, they don't know anything. They know nothing.

And we've proven that over and over in all these failed attempts. But also when it comes to, I mean, the policy garbage entire world view, and I have spoken to her about this. I've interviewed her about this, so I feel comfortable saying this is that she's not, in any way anti-war pacifist. She believes that we should be very militarily aggressive against, say, terrorist groups that actually want to attack the United States or have done so, or American assets or American interests on the world.

Her argument is that we should not be involved in regime change wars of the kind we did in Iraq, that she fought in, of the kind we did in Syria, of the kind we did in Libya, of the kind that we did in Ukraine in 2014 when we actually engineered a coup on the most sense of the part of the country. Of the kind they were trying to pull off in Russia right now. The point of this is to knock out Putin.

Yeah, to weaken that regime and to the thing is though that what you said about Putin is so important, which is Putin's critics, he doesn't have very many liberal critics, meaning people who has laughed. Exactly. His real critics are hardcore nationalist. Exactly. And the criticism of who see him as a liberal, who see him as weak or insufficiently militaristic when it comes to confronting the West, but it's actually particularly on Ukraine. They wanted a destruction of Ukraine.

A lot of them are enraged. The Russian government has taken the position, warned the United States government privately and publicly that any use of these missiles involving as they do direct US or NATO involvement in their launching against Russia will be seen as the entrance of the United States and NATO as belligerence in this war, as a war against Russia, as World War III.

And he will have to treat it as such, even though he's been very constrained, even though he clearly doesn't want a broader war. There are a lot of people inside Moscow who do wield a lot of power, who do, and who will demand that he treated us as why wouldn't they? We are attacking Russia. We're shooting missiles inside Russia.

So I think, as you've said, I don't think we can say it enough, so much of this has been conducted in bad faith, but also someone to that bad faith has been informed by ignorance or uninformed by ignorance, nonformed at all. And I think that people really think that Putin is an absolute dictator who can do it every once, and that is not the case. To not the case, super complex place, a lot of smart people in Russia, complicated political situation. So I agree completely.

We're pushing him toward that. The view, I think, I know from Putin is that Blinken is driving this, and that Blinken has a lot of hostility, there's reckless, but has a lot of hostility toward Russia that has nothing to do with the United States at all. Do you think that's true? Do you think Blinken is driving this? Yeah. I think Blinken, Jake Sullivan, that's kind of the brain trust as it is.

Obviously, Joe Biden has no involvement in this whatsoever, which I think has been an issue which we've shockingly ignored. Everyone saw what Joe Biden was, long before that debate. Everyone knew it, the only people who didn't say so were the media and Democratic allies. After the debate, it became untenable for them to deny it any longer that this is an old man who has lost his cognitive capabilities.

Yet, he's still the sitting president of the United States, and you had the vice president understandably doing nothing for the last four months, other than working on her own empowerment through the campaign. She obviously wasn't involved ever in any decision making, let alone when she became the nominee.

So the question has been all these consequential decisions we made, deploying massive military assets to the Middle East, making decorations about when we would go to war in the Middle East and for whom, escalating the war in Ukraine, now authorizing the use of these long range missiles. He's obviously not coming from Joe Biden. He barely understands where he is. It's not a character flaw in his part, but it's just a disability, a clear disability.

He's obviously not making any of these decisions. I do think that if you look at the national security crowd that emerged from the Obama presidency, especially the people who were associated with the State Department run by Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, even before Russia gate in 2016, they had an obsession with Russia.

In fact, when Hillary Clinton left the administration as Secretary of State and wrote her book, hard choices, the only areas in which she was critical of Obama was her view that he wasn't willing to confront Russia sufficiently. Obama had this view, sort of this realist view from Brent Scowcroft, those were the kind of people who liked Jim Baker, that why would we send lethal arms to Ukraine and provoke Russia? Ukraine is not a vital interest to us, but it is to them.

He wanted to work with Russia and did to facilitate the Iran deal to bomb terrorist targets in Syria. And there was a faction in the Obama administration led by Hillary Clinton. Blinken was there. All these sort of national security people woven into the, you know, that's Victoria, Victor Nolan was hired by Hillary Clinton. That's how she made her reigns at the Obama administration. They viewed Russia as this grave menace.

The reason Putin hated Hillary Clinton was because when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the United States openly spent millions of dollars funding opposition groups and organizing protests in Moscow. I mean, we talk about Putin interfering in our sacred politics and our internal affairs. Hillary Clinton was openly funding protests and anti-poutine agitated agitators inside Russia in the 2010 election in 2012, 2011 or rather. And they were obsessed with Russia well before that.

And I do think that Russia is disliked by a lot of people in Washington because of the perception that they are detrimental to our interests in the Middle East and especially to Israel's interests in the Middle East, including their support for a Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The fact that they have a good relationship with Iran. It doesn't really always have a lot to do with the United States, but with the interests of other countries as well. So you think that's the prime mover here?

Because it is true that Assad is only there because of Russia. I think that's a fair statement. Yeah, that's their ally in the Middle East. Right. It's been their ally in the Middle East for decades. And just like we support our allies around the world, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, you know, very savage brutal dictatorships, but at least to do our bidding, the Russians have theirs as well.

They have a long-term relationship with Venezuela with Cuba going back to the Cold War and still do as well as with Syria. And yeah, the Russians operate in Syria. They protect Assad and Syria. And as a result, they end up being antagonistic to Israel, which ends up being defined as US interests as well. Like there's no such thing. But strictly speaking, this is kind of nothing to do with us whatsoever. I mean, I don't, I honestly have it for the past.

Unless you see Israel as a part of the United States, you know, I'm not hostile toward Israel, but I think it's a separate country. It seems to me to be a separate country as well. Oh, it's often not treated as that. I'm just saying, but don't pay taxes there. It wasn't born there.

So from my perspective, just from an American perspective without wishing ill in any other country at all, and I really don't, I have been struggling for really since the 2016 election, but particularly since the war began in February of 2022 to identify what exactly would be the US interest in this. And I just can't. And I really think tried hard, but I just don't see what's in it for us at all.

Tucker, there, there is nobody and certain of this in the United States, just an average ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules are there? There's provinces in the Donbass in Eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone Eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev.

The question of what that territory should be, should it be some of the autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West?

The whole framework, as you all know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened the Berlin wall, fell, fell and they allowed the Eastern and the Western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of it.

You, the only concession they extracted in exchange for that was, okay, with reunification, NATO is now moving eastward closer to our border. In a country that has devastated our country twice and two world wars and invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens, the only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that.

Immediately in the 90s, the current administration started talking about it and implementing NATO expansion eastward toward Russia, exactly what was promised to Gorbachev, the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why, why, why did we need to expand our inevitable eastward toward Russia?

And now it's not just eastward in general, it's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia in both of those, those world wars. We also participated in the change of government.

We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional terms expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him, Victoria Nguyen, constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-US.

Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to the US and put in a hardline pro-Russian anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine.

What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act. Well, they keep telling you AI is going to make the world a better place that may be true, but you have to ask better for home, better for your health insurance company, which could use it to calculate exactly how much to raise your premiums based on your WebMD search history.

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That's one of the reasons that experts like CNET and the Verge rate express VPN the number one VPN on the market today. Use our special link to get three extra months of ExpressVPN's privacy protection for free go to expressvpn.com slash Tucker. That's expressvpn.com slash Tucker. Three extra months for free. So I find it so terrifying. I'm not, no, I don't think I'm sort of overstating that. I mean, we are on the brink of a global war. Can you just say one thing about that? What do you think?

Aren't you kind of amazed by how impervious and dismissive media and political elites are the prospect of nuclear war? Well, it's not imaginable. And yes, and I mean, it's sort of... Like they think it can't happen if it's not happening in the first generation. Yeah, and I will say the one thing that Trump has said repeatedly over the past, certainly since he left the presidency four years, that he's received no credit for it.

The sugar enormous credit for it is that nuclear war is the worst thing. He was, of course, been briefed on it as the person who controlled the launch codes. He knows what it means. And anyone who spends five minutes looking into what a nuclear exchange would actually do is terrified of it. But only Trump seems worried about it. I don't understand. Yeah, I've said this. I've talked about this so many times. And I think goes back to when Trump was president in the early stages of presidency.

Every time Trump talks about the prospect of nuclear war, he knows that he's limited in what everything he can divulge, but he's so clearly trying to signal. And he often says that these weapons are of a different universe than even the ones we dropped in the town. That's correct. And he's obviously, as you said, understands and been briefed on.

But you see these morons at the Atlanta Council or AEI or HUD Center, or this cluster of the dumbest people in the world, all implicated in the Iraq disaster, say, well, you know, maybe tactical nukes are fine. That we, that in Africa, we work together. That's like such next level crazy. Like that's crazier than any schizophrenic sitting next to you on a public subway. Well, yeah, I mean, it's crazy. We constantly call like RFK Jr. they call him crazy.

They call, you know, Tuck a supposed to get out of the macchete crazy whoever these people who have been in power, who have been generating American orthodoxy, especially in foreign policy, are the most insane people on the planet. It's because actually the United States has been the most powerful country in the world. No one could constrain it. No one could stand up to it. And as is true with everything, that level of unconstrained power corrupts people. That is correct.

And these people have any control of this power for decades. That is correct. Past on one to the other through this dog one that gets increasingly out of touch and detached from reality and and and meglum and I equal apps. Exactly. I mean, at least during the Cold War, I'm not saying it was a good thing, but the Soviet United States were of equal power. They were competing with one another. They were both very constrained in what they were. They both were patrified of a nuclear.

Well, we almost came to nuclear apocalypse at least twice, especially in the Q missile crisis through misperception and miscommunication when a Russian commander of a submarine thought incorrectly that they were using nuclear weapons against the submarine and against Cuba and almost launched the nuclear weapons at the sub came about five minutes away from doing so until someone intervened on that sub and said, I don't think that this is actually an attack.

It's very possible we've come to the brink of it before it probably is the single greatest threat to the survival of the species, not probably definitely is the use of nuclear weapons. Every time Trump talks about it, you can see the fear that he has. He's trying to convey to others every time. And I'm I mean, Tucker, I'm amazed. This is like impeachment level stuff for Joe Biden on his way out of the door to involve the US directly in a war for the first time.

We've been very involved in other ways. They should impeach him. Why doesn't there's a constitutional limitation on the president's ability to involve the US in a war without congressional authorization, which is exactly what has happened through the use of these missiles. What does I said, we need to help direct.

And the question is, yeah, why the answer though is that the vast majority of the Republican caucus in the House and in the Senate supports what Joe Biden is doing, thinks he should have done this a year ago. And there's probably not a lot of anger in the House and send it over this except the question that it's called lame duck for a reason. A lame duck is supposed to be a duck that really doesn't do much, can't do much, does move much. It's by design pretty limited.

It's like this transition period. Yeah, he's floating in the water because he's been shot. Yeah, exactly. His legs are broken. And so he's lame. This is not a lame duck decision. It's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't, there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't and so they did. It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin.

This person we've been told is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer, can't be trusted. The only reason we're not, I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. We're just a fact right now. How weird is that? Well, I mean, first of all, this is, this is what amazed me is that sometimes propaganda and propaganda is, you have to respect it.

It's a very potent field of human knowledge that has been refined over many decades using every field of discipline, social sciences and psychology and psychiatry. I mean, propaganda is not just some intuitive thing that people do. It's an argument that you make. Yeah. And it's very powerful.

And we love to talk about how propaganda, as the Russians are and the Chinese are, and how there's no descent allowed, you know, Georgia, or well, in the preface to animal farm wrote, actually, in 1994 wrote an essay where he was essentially saying that overt totalitarianism of the kind that was taking place in the Soviet Union is repressive, but it's not nearly as effective as subtle repression, the kind where you give the illusion that people are free.

But in reality, the flow of information is heavily controlled because at least when, you know, the guy's dressed in black with weapons come and take you and put you in a glue log for criticizing the government, everybody understands the level of oppression it often generates a backlash. But when you combine repression with the illusion of freedom, that's what's incredibly effective. And that's what we know. And you tell people with an abundant consumer economy, like, you know, hear your edibles.

Here's your Netflix come down. Yeah. And you can basically get them to do anything. Yeah. And at the same time, there has been a concerted effort to control what was supposed to be the one innovation that was going to break the centralized control of information, which is the internet. That's why there's so much attention and energy.

It's why it's the number one priority of Western power centers to control the internet because it's the one threat to their ability to maintain this propaganda and just to control. You know, I still can't believe this that it's not talked about as much. But right after Russian invaded Ukraine and Western governments decided they wanted full on support for Ukraine. And this very simple, my generative that they fed their public after they started the war.

When the Biden administration started, that's my view of it. They knew that Russia would invade if they publicly pushed Zelensky to join NATO. So they did that common hair stood in and Russia made my view as they started this war. And threat talking openly about expanding NATO to Ukraine. You can find memos from the highest levels of the US government. Exactly. If you do that, it's not just Putin. It's every political faction in Russia. That's exactly it.

And Russia will see it as a war in will invade the Lannox Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Of course, the American government knew that you can show documents where it says that. But the EU, the minute that war started in earnest with the Russian army invading, one of the very first steps they took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media. Like Russia, RT and Sputnik, they made it a crime.

And YouTube immediately pulled it off because they didn't want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective. I mean, you can hate Russia. You can think Russia is evil. You can think whatever you want about Russia. But why wouldn't you want to hear from the other side? You know, the New York Times used to publish all the time, like the speeches of Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov and Krusev. And you could read what the Russians would say. They would come to the United States.

They would speak openly. Now it's practically criminalized. Putin's speech in February of 2022 to his country nationally televised there right before the invasion was absolutely just a remarkable speech, which I, by the way, never got around to even looking at before I got to Moscow. And I was like, I can interview Putin. I think you should watch that speech. I'd read about it, never watched it. And I think, I mean, you can agree or disagree. You can hate Putin. I mean, it's totally fine.

I don't care how people feel about Putin. But to most Americans had no idea his thinking in invading Ukraine. Like no idea. Why wouldn't people want to know? It was just the cartoon where he's an evil, Hitlerian figure who wants to reconquast, all of Europe the way Hitler did. Putin has been in office for 25 years. He has gone through six different American presidents, every single one of them until you were not allowed to say it anymore. Always said you meet with Putin. He's incredibly shrewd.

He's incredibly smart. You can trust Putin. If you do a deal with Putin, you can count on the fact that he will adhere to it. Other heads of state still feel that way and see that. Well, American president set it all the time, starting with Bill Clinton, that he's rational that he acts in his self-interest, that he's calculating in terms of, and careful.

And then suddenly, this is what amazed me propagandistically is that overnight everybody was forced to say that Putin invaded Ukraine simply because suddenly he became the psychotic, evil, Hitler-type figure who just wanted out of the blue. They all believed it though. A lot of them, I mean, the people who screamed at me at airports for being pro-Putin, of course, I'm not sure. I've never been pro-Putin.

I don't have strong feelings, either way, but they really had been convinced, not just by MSNBC and CNN, but by the entire oligarch-controlled internet that like anyone who talked about Putin and raised questions about the war was like for Putin. It like that worked. Propaganda worked. Propaganda worked. Propaganda worked. Propaganda worked. Especially nationalist propaganda because human beings evolved over a thousand of years to be tribal. Like we want to feel part of our group.

We take pride in our group. It's why, if you're born in America, you say, I'm an American. This is my country. This is what I'm loyal to. It comes from these tribalistic instincts, right? It makes sense because we evolved for thousands of years where you, if you got expelled from your tribe, you would die. You needed a tribe in order to survive. So we're tribalistic animals.

So if you appeal to people's tribalism and say, we're the good guys, we're the innocent victims, our enemy are the bad guys, they're evil, they're, you know, that appeals to people's most visceral instincts. And the problem, of course, is the counter-vailing punishment, which is the minute you question it.

You know, I had, from the beginning, I had on my show, you know, people like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walton, Jeffrey Sachs, and they were all saying, from the beginning, there's no possibility that Ukraine can win this war as NATO has defined it, which means the expulsion of every Russian troop from every anti-V Ukrainian soil, just simply on size grounds alone. Just saying, just basic understanding of history, every one of them, I'm sure I think it happened to you too.

It happened to me, we're put on these official lists issued by the Ukrainian government of being pro-Russian propagandist, everywhere you went, you get accused of being a Russian propagandist or some sort of agent of the Kremlin, simply by questioning our own government's propagandistic views or simply trying to understand things from the Russian perspective.

Like this is, you know, after 9-11, the big question on the minds of all Americans after they were traumatized by this extraordinary assault on our soil designed, obviously, it imposes much suffering and killing as possible was, obviously, they asked, like, why, why do they want to do that to us?

Why would people hate us so much that they would devise a scheme as complex and deadly as hijacking planes, passenger planes with box cutters and find them into major American buildings filled with people? Why would they hate us that much? And the government had to give an answer to that question because people obviously wanted to know the answer. And that was when David from and Cheney and all those people said they hate us for our freedoms.

They just can't stand the fact that women are allowed to wear bikinis on the beach and that we have a Congress. And it's like, no one ever thought, well, there's like dozens of countries around the world will run and get to win Burb bikinis and have Congress is like in Japan and Korea and all throughout Latin America and like Scandinavia, why aren't they attacking those places?

And then Bin Laden wrote a letter in 2002 to the American people saying, here's why there's so much animosity toward the United States. And there was, of course, some appeal to religion in it. I made the mistake of reading part of that letter on the air at CNN at the time, not to make a kind of point, but just because super interesting, you know, and 9-11 changed everyone's life very much, including mine, lost a friend that day.

Like just like every American who was an adult and 9-11, it was like you felt like it was an event that you participated in or it affected you. I feel like at every right to read that letter like, hey, this is going to, he's now saying why he did it. I'm just going to pull off the air for doing that. Oh, I know. I just have to have to have a free guy. Not only doesn't that surprise me. A lot of people have forgotten that this happens, but it's actually quite extraordinary.

After 9-11, obviously, some of Bin Laden was one of the most important people in the world. He just perpetrated the worst attack on American soil. Yes, it's Pearl Harbor. A lot of people wanted to interview him or play clips of interviews, the United States government told, called all the network news agencies into the White House and said to them, you should not and cannot show interview Osam Bin Laden or show any interviews with him.

And they invented this excuse as to why, which is that he might put some sort of code in his interviews that signal to sleepers. Sleepers? Sleepers? Wiggle his ear like Carol Burnett did or like, you know, raises eyebrows three times or blanking a more code in a certain way and then networks all obeyed.

And the most amazing thing was this letter, which you can go read where he says exactly why all the different ways the United States has brought violence to that region has interfered in that region. And the policy is the bottom line. Yeah. Well, we've been bombing that region and interfering in them, opposing dictatorships on those people for decades, specifically to suppress the things they believe in.

We don't want popular opinion being prevailing in democratically in the Middle East because we don't perceive it in our interest. So we've been imposing dictators on them, secular dictators. We've been bombing them. We've been sanctioning them. We've been invading them. Of course, we support Israel, which in that region, people view as this grave assault on the rights of Palestinians. But we put bases in Saudi Arabia, which is the most sacred soil to that religion.

We imposed a blockade and sanction regime on Iraq, which Madeline Albright admitted killed 500,000 children. But nonetheless said it was worth it. So we've been so active in that region. And that's the reason they wanted to attack back. That's the reason they'll kind of had so much support. But they banned Osama bin Laden from being heard just like the EU banned Russian state media from being heard because of course you don't want Americans being exposed to this.

And then the amazing thing is that letter, which really didn't get much tension at the time, the only place that existed on the internet was on the Guardian's website. And somehow, you know, 22-year-olds on TikTok found that letter and they started talking about it. And they were like, oh my God, I was never told this before. He didn't attack us because he hates us for our freedom. He says specifically here why they're attacking us.

And in other words, they were reading a historical document and discussing it, things that you would want a free citizenry to do. But the fear that they were allowed to not only read but talk about that document with one another was so intense that in 48 hours, they forced TikTok to ban every discussion of that letter to remove the hashtags, define it to take down any poster accounts that were talking about it.

And then the Guardian, a news outlet, removed that letter, which had been there for 20 years, which was of obvious historical and journalistic importance. They removed it from their website because they were too frightened that people were going to be able to read it. Why? Because it prevents the propaganda and the narrative from being unchallenged. And that's the same with Russia and Ukraine. That shows you how we think we're so free.

We have, we can, we hear so much dissent because you have a Republican and Democrat beggar on a cable show about trivial things. You're like, oh, look, we have free debates, open debates. They don't get to have that in Russia and China. But the minute there's information that actually threatens the government that they fear people understanding, they clamp down on it and suppress it. That's what they did there. You wonder where we put up with that.

You wonder why we put up with the government that continues to keep secret files about 9-11. It's been 23 years. What could possibly be the justification for not telling me information that I own and have a right to see, which is what the hell was that? And they constantly lecturing. Even the JFK files. Especially the JFK file. But much more immediate. It was 23 years ago. But I mean, we're both adults. We remember it very well. Yeah. I mean, it was like, I was traumatized by that.

It was a horrible event. Exactly. And then a lot happened. Our country changed radically because of it. To this day, the Patriot Act exists. It's not never been the same country. And in some ways, it was much more successful in its aims than I even want to admit to myself because it's so sad to see what it did in this country. But here's the point. They're constantly they, meaning the media and the intelligences which work together.

They're constantly tacking other people for being conspiracy theorists and crazy and discreeting the memory of the 9-11 victims, etc. by coming up with explanations that are not authorized. Okay. Then why don't you just tell us what actually happened? Why not just declassify it? What's the answer? It's going to jeopardize sources and methods. That's not true. And we all know that.

And you know that this, the importance of protecting those secrets, keeping those documents that might show the truth. Not not allowed in the JFK. That's the most important thing.

In fact, the whole point of the second impeachment trial, which never made any sense, why would you bring an impeachment trial against the president on his way out the office, was because they were petrified that Trump was going to do certain things in that transition, like pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, which he came very close to doing.

But especially fulfill his promise to declassify things like the JFK files and other national security files that have been kept hidden with no justification from the American public, even though it happened decades ago, 9-11 JFK. And they told him if you do that, all the Senate Republicans are going to vote to impeach you, you're going to be convicted and ineligible to run ever again.

That was the sword of democlies they held over his head precisely to prevent him from bringing transparency to the government and allowing the American people to see what they ought to have a right to know. But if your greatest fear is transparency, then you're a criminal. I mean, that's basically proof. I can't think of a better indicator of behavior than the crazed desire to keep that behavior secret, right?

Can I just say something about that, which is if you think about what a democracy is supposed to be like what an ideal free society is, whatever you call that, it's supposed to be that everything that public officials do in the name of the public power is supposed to be known to the public with very few exceptions, right? Like if there's a war and they're planning troop movements, they can keep that secret. Yeah, Normandy a week before they can keep it quiet.

They don't have to tell everyone that they're going to do that. But outside of those very rare exceptions, we're supposed to know everything about what they do. Of course. Because they're doing it in our name. They're our employees. Yeah, and they're supposed to be accountable to us, but they can't be if we don't know what they're doing. Conversely, they're not supposed to know anything about what private citizens do.

They're supposed to track us or eavesdrop on us or keep dossiers on us or know where we are or where we're going. Yes, again, very rare circumstances were criminal. They're probable cause to spy on us because they've convinced the court is the constitution requires that there's probable cause to believe. But except those rare circumstances, that's why they're called public officials and were called private citizens. We're supposed to have privacy. They're not.

They're supposed to have transparency. Our society is completely reversed. If you are private citizen, the government knows everything about you. They keep all kind of that on you. That was the Snowden reporting. Obviously that's what Edward Snowden revealed was the extent to which we were being surveilled by our own government.

Conversely, we know almost nothing about what the government, you know, when I got the Edward Snowden archive, which was hundreds of thousands, if not more, of top secret documents from the NSA, obviously what was surprising is what was in them and what they revealed. But even more surprising to me was that the documents, so many of these documents, most of these documents that were marked top secret, had no interesting information in them at all.

We just reflexively put, like, how to get a parking credential, how to ask your supervisor for a vacation. These were top secret because everything the government does reflexively is kept secret from the public. That's the default. You have no rights. Exactly. So everything is reversed. The government knows everything about what we do and we know nothing about what they do. I'm Tucker Carlson for Alp. Now, as you know, the FDA requires us to warn you while it's redo the warning. Quote, warning.

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So a long time Intel official told me, not that long ago, I guess I should have known this, that the big pornography sites are controlled by the Intel H&C. They save access to the data on those sites. And the reason that they do, and I think the dating sites too, and the reason that they do, of course, is blackmail. And once you realize that, once you realize that the most embarrassing features of your personal life are known by people who want to control you, then you're controlled.

And you look at the behavior of some of these people who I know personally and particularly in the Congress. Why are you doing that? You don't agree with that. And you're out there doing it anyway. We always imagine that it's just donor. Really getting paid to do that. I think it's more than donors. I've seen politicians turn down donors before. I've watched it. You know, I don't believe that I'm not doing that. I know a lot of people have very safe seats. Not everybody is desperate for donors.

Exactly. Okay, just give you an example. I'm not just the carrot. There's a stick in there. I'm not saying this happened here. I'm not saying that at all. I have no basis for saying it. But I had Mike Johnson on my show about two months before unexpectedly, he became the speaker when he just became like the nine-year-old homerized Johnson on your show. Yeah, and I read Mike Johnson. And the reason I read Mike Johnson was because he would not go on your show now. Oh, no. But this is why.

This is so interesting. And this is why. So yeah, just by chance I read every Mike Johnson, the reason was was because Christopher Ray went before a committee on what he sat in the house and Mike Johnson grilled him about FBI spying about the involvement of the intelligence communities in our politics, about the attempt to censor the internet coming from the intelligences. And he did it with this great kind of intellect, but also this very effective demeanor.

And I could just tell that he's passionately, he's developed passionately about these issues. And then I started following more and more of what he was doing. And he was almost single-mindedly focused on spying abuses, curbing spying power, curbing sounds and shit. And so we asked him. I said, can you call him a show? He was like, yeah, my big fan of plans. I think the work that he's doing great. I love Johnson from Louisiana. Yeah. And he came on my show. I came on my show.

No, go watch the interview. I'm hard to shock you or shocking me. I had him on my show. And after this interview, I was like, I love him. One of the reasons, one of the things we spent the most amount of time on was Pfizer Reform and the need for Pfizer Reform. Come on. Come on. I'm swear, I'm telling you, Pfizer Reform was coming up in about three months. Where they had to extend the Pfizer Law that allows the FBI to see a spying American citizens, the NSA, without really any reforms.

And he was determined. It was like his big issue. That's why he was on my show. That's why he liked what my work was. He was like, we cannot allow this Pfizer Law to be renewed. It is a great threat to American democracy. At the very least, we need massive fundamental reforms. I'm holding the loan away. And I was like, oh my God. And he's very smart. He's like a smart lawyer. He's very informed about these issues. I walked away super impressed. That is what we spent most of our time on.

But also just that we put these clips on the internet. The whole show was on the internet. No, I know. But we just post these on social media because you're free. I did. But I'll do it again because Mike Johnson becomes speaker about two months later. I don't mean four years later or two years later, about two months after that, three months at the most. Right when the Pfizer Law is coming up. And I was like, oh, it's so great. He was made speaker.

There's no way this Pfizer Law is getting passed. Not only did Mike Johnson say, I'm going to allow the Pfizer renewal to come to the floor with no reforms, not allowing any reforms. He himself said it is urgent that we renew Pfizer without any reforms. This is a crucial critical tool for our intelligence agencies. And I put that clip everywhere when that happened, showing we're just too much early. Did you butt them together? Yeah, of course. I was attacking the shed at Mike Johnson.

And then somebody, I find me asked him, like, but you've been saying all along for years for the last two years that you vehemently oppose this and suddenly know your for it. What changed your mind? And he was like, yeah, well, when you're a speaker, you get access to a lot of things.

And I was taken to this secret room in the CIA and they showed me these very important things and these sensitive documents about how important these powers are and how devastating would be if we put any reforms on them. And so I realized that it was wrong what I had believed. And now I believe this law has to be passed with no reforms. You don't have smart people like that. He was already in Congress, he had access to classified information, getting briefings, secret briefings.

You don't have people that invested in position who with one meeting, I can see someone really dumb being affected by that. Like, oh, these guys with big metals on their chest, take you to like a secret super secret room inside the CIA, like with all these locks and codes and things on the wall and you're all impressionally, oh my god, I can't challenge this. He's a very smart guy. I don't believe each change is mine. So the question is, why did he? I don't know. I really don't.

But I know that the person that was on my show two months earlier no longer exists. Wow. I can honestly say that's one of the most shocking things I've heard in a long time because I didn't, I should also echo whatever one else who's ever met him will say, which is nice guy, you know, not a mean man or anything like that. No, great guy. He adopted kids. He liked totally.

Yeah. Everything he says about the East and Sea, but just for everybody I totally, I was even saying today that he was, you know, with the whole thing about the question of whether this new trans lawmaker was good to use about the rooms. He was asked about it. He was just like emphasizing the respect and decency and civility, even if, you know, things. Yes. And I believe he believes that.

I believe he is in connection with the like best parts of Christianity and takes them seriously and conducts himself that way and always has nothing against Mike Johnson personally, quite the contrary, but to watch that happen was, I mean, as, as skeptical as I am, I don't even know how to respond because I didn't, I have interviewed Mike Johnson over the years, but he was like some guy from Woolie's and whatever. I wasn't paying close attention.

And it was only after he became speaker on the FISA question and on the question of funding Ukraine. That was the other thing. Go on. I talked about that too. He was like, you know, he did say he wasn't at all like, you know, say like Matt Gaetz type or, you know, Tom Massey, like, we can't fund that war that war. He wasn't saying that.

He was, he was like, we can't lie Russia win, but he was still pretty skeptical, but it was really on these questions of FISA and the C.I. and the FBI and spying powers and internet censorship powers where he was passionate and vehement. That's why I had them on. You're making the error. You made them my arms go up because I agree. Look, I'm not alleging anything because I don't know anything.

I didn't even know that he was that invested on precisely the opposite side, but he's made all these things possible. And, you know, I had a conversation with him off camera. I probably shouldn't be too detailed about it, but he said something that I thought was like non-sensical, but like insane, crazy. And it was internally and coherent. And he's not stupid, as you said. And I got upset. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense at all. And he just kind of said, no, it does make sense.

It does make sense. It was like there was no answer. It was just like, wow, this is. I saw, I saw there's the Obama too. You have to like, especially for people who are kind of new to power, right? Not Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell, people have been in these positions for decades. Mike Johnson went from a very back bench to the Congress to the third in line who controls the House of Representatives.

You can only imagine the instance, just unlimited amount of pressure that comes from multiple directions to force him to align himself with whatever the agenda is of the people who rule Washington. Same thing happened with Obama.

I believe Obama, when he talked for two years, when running for president about how he's a constitutional law professor, how he believes so much in the core rights of the constitution like KBS Corpus, the right to cast your imprisonment, to have evidence presented against you, but placed like on Tundra Moe. And elsewhere, how we wanted to uproot the worst abuses that Bush and you are in terror. Then he gets into office and not only doesn't uproot them, but he starts extending them.

Because, again, these generals come, including the ones he likes who went to Princeton, like David Patreyes, the ones who dazzle Obama and give him secret briefings about all the blood that's going to be on his hands if he does any of the changes he's present to you as promising. And then suddenly on a dime, he switches. And there's a lot of other pressure you can imagine as well, like the stick, as you said.

And anyone who thinks that this is, that our intelligence agencies are above these kinds of things, then I even take it required to believe that is. Well, they're not above them. And they've done it. I'll go, they've done it. This is their currency. It's just amazing having spent all this time in Washington with all these people. I have just who I know. And by the way, in some cases, like Mike Johnson, I like it.

You can't really reach another conclusion other than there's something very heavy duty going on behind the scenes, like really profound going on. And I just don't know why no one has ever emerged from the system to say what it is. Is there not one career? There are very few courageous people. You're one of them. But there just aren't many in this world. Well, I mean, why doesn't someone just call one of these people out?

One of the things that made Trump so threatening and that continues to make him so threatening is that in a lot of ways, he was pulling the curtain. He is open. It's the fourth wall is coming down. Yeah. I mean, I remember he just said openly, yeah, like as a billionaire as a business man, I just gave a candidate, you know, $50,000 and then they would automatically accept my call and do whatever I told them to do. Who says that in the top level politics? Like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur.

I want you to know here's how the system works. You give a lot of money to some place that these lawmakers tell you to donate money to. And then they do whatever you want. They do your bidding when in that 2016 debate, when he started rallying against the evil and the stupidity of the Iraq war because his principal opponent at the time was Jeff Bush, who was backed by the establishment and the audience started booing.

You know, as though the America was rising up in defense of the Bush family, he was like, oh, these seats here, these are all the big Republican donors. That's the only people who are booing me because they're supporting Jeff Bush. And that's, if you ever into a debate, as I know you have, that's exactly how it is. The big, both parties, they put their big donors, the parties and the right behind where they get where their audience here's only their reaction.

So Trump constantly was sort of doing that. Here's how things really work. And then once he started getting targeted by these agencies, by the CIA, the FBI, starting with Rechek 8, but the steel dossier, which Jim Komi did, looking up to the media, and then all those investigations, that's why he started saying these intelligence agencies are corrupted to their core. They're filled with people who have their own political size agenda.

They were supposed to have an elected leader, democratically elected leader, who supervises these branches and these agencies and the executive branch and their duty is to carry out his policies. But they don't, they subverted his policies. They sabotaged them because they didn't agree with them. They were like their own branch of government, completely powerful. And he's the first one, I guess, in St. Eisenhower, who tried to warn of this on his way out after spending eight years.

And obviously the intelligence community and military industrial companies were way smaller. When Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn of how much of a threat it was, the Democrats he and his farewell dress, it was before Vietnam, before the real build up of the Cold War, obviously, before 9-11. They're sprawling now. They're almost impossible to even analyze or quantify. And Trump is the only one who's trying to say these institutions are radically corrupted at their root. They're rotted.

And that's why he's trying to choose people. You know, he picks some like comfortable institutionalists and status quo perpetrators like Mark Rubio, Lee Stafonik, John Ratclay. People like that just to give Washington a sense of, okay, there's some people here we're good with. But then the people that he picked who are share his view that these institutions require a radical overhaul. They're just undemocratic, unaccountable corrupt. Those are the ones they're trying to destroy.

Well, there's, there's, there's Halsey, there's Matt Gates, there's RFK Jr. And a little bit to some extent Pete Hegseth. I mean, he's not really ideologically unaligned. But the problem is is that he doesn't come from the Pentagon bureaucracy. That's what they care about most. That's a trillion dollar agency. You know how many wheels that grease is in Raytheon and Boeing and general dynamics? That's what they care about most is making sure that money goes where it's supposed to go.

That's why they're concerned about him. But the people who aren't the ones that, Kamal could appear easily are the ones who they're most out to destroy because that's what these power, permanent power factions are is they are their own government and they wield the most power. They have, sure, considered Mike Johnson, no threat at all though. Let's take them and do what we have to do. But you wonder like just, I don't know.

I mean, look, these guys are under pressure that, you know, we probably, we can't imagine. You know, if somebody knew the thing you were most embarrassed about that would destroy your life and make your kids not like you or whatever. I'm not speaking of Johnson specifically, but I know a couple of people who I know are compromised in the US government and I sort of feel sad for them because how do you like to be in that position?

But it does, all it would take is one brave man to give a press conference. You know, there was actually a guy, um, Koki Roberts's father, Hill Boggs, who stood up in Congress. He was this majority leader in about 1970.

He was on the Warren Commission and he didn't buy the, did not buy the conclusions at all and he told other people that he was from Louisiana and he stood up and made some noises about, on the, on the floor of the house, about how the CIA was, you know, doing things they were not supposed to do in domestic politics and had unchecked power, et cetera. And he was immediately denounced as mentally ill, probably an alcoholic. And then he disappeared in a plane crash with baggage in 1972 and Alaska.

The flame was never seen again. So I'm like, I'm not saying that he was, he was murdered for that though. You know, I would not at all be surprised if he was. But why is he the last guy to say anything like that? Like because he died in a plane crash. I was declared mentally.

No, but I mean, this is the thing is, you know, uh, I remember doing this, no one reporting when there was all this controversy about government spying on people and the big reaction that I got that had been cultivated for a long time, not just by the government, but Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg famously said privacy is an archaic value or whatever. Don't worry about privacy anymore. People are saying, I don't have anything to hide. Like, I'm not a terrorist. I'm not a pedophile.

I don't care what, but I'm a government spying on me. And I would always say everybody has things to hide. There are things that you don't tell anybody. There are things you only tell your psychiatrist, only your spouse, only your best friend, things that you don't want to need. But the people to know that you're petrified. If everybody knew about you, we are private. We need, we're social animals. We need connection to society and other people. We're also great privacy without privacy.

We go insane. And there's no freedom without privacy. None. Because that's where dissent and creativity and exploration and a rejection of societal mores, that's where it resides in the private realm. Without that, if you're just being surveilled and watched all the time, that breeds conformity. And so everybody needs privacy. Everybody values it. Everybody has something to hide.

And the ability to surveil people to know everything about, I think what actually happens is we're so inculcated from birth to have this very idealistic image of our country and our government. And in some ways, it's valid. I think I revere the Constitution. I went to school to study it and I went to practice it. I believe in its values. I think it's a genius document. I do too. Comes from the enlightenment.

Just a very intellectually based, philosophically based idea of how it was constructed, very carefully. And there are things very good about the United States. But if you think that the most powerful country on the planet, the richest and most powerful country arguably ever to exist, doesn't have at its core in terms of the people who run it, people who are willing to do anything to preserve their power, to augment their power.

Again, it just takes a kind of naïve a day that's almost impossible to find. People risk death every single day in this country to rob liquor stores for $300. So you can't tell me that control of a trillion dollar federal agency or the multi trillion dollar government with vast majority of your power to decide who gets bombed, where war started. That's what I'm saying. The most powerful institution in human history doesn't have sinister things going on. People do to control that.

No, the stakes are very high. And I think the closer you are to it, the more often you forget that. You're like, oh, it's just a secretary of whatever who cares. Well, there's, you know, people care. Understandably, people will do anything for power and money. Wow, that's so distressing. Did you in your reporting, and I always forget that, you know, you were behind the stone thing. And thank you for that. What a wonderful guy he is.

But did you ever get any hint of what the pressure is that's applied to politicians to comply in obey? Yeah. Well, first of all, I do think, like we were just talking about people who, why don't people stand up? Like Edward Snowden is a perfect example of somebody who believed in mythology of the government, who believed in, you know, he went to enlist in order to fight Iraq. He broke both his legs. He couldn't join the military.

So he went to work for the CIA and the NSA because he really believed in the, and then what he saw was so horrifying, was so corrupting, was so deceitful that he risked his life and his liberty, which to the state he's deprived of, to inform everybody about what was going on by stealing under their nose documents that he could give to reporters so that reporters could tell the world what was happening. It is kind of an example of that level of courage of somebody saying, here's what's going on.

What Snowden gave us was a tiny picture of what the NSA does. So obviously if there had been in their like specific black now, sort of documents about how they were spying on particular politicians, that's something we would have reported on very aggressively and very early on.

So I can't say I saw that, but what I did see is all sorts of incidents of people at the NSA abusing their authority to spy on people who they had no right to be spying on, including sometimes, you know, just things as trivial as like ex-girlfriends or family members. But also when in other countries they wanted to impede our arms, somebody they spied on those people all the time and use that information in part to gain power over them.

So of course, how can you expect human beings to resist that level of power when it's all operating in the dark? Strong families are built on strong foundations and it all begins with what you bring into your home. It's hard though because Big Pharma and the processed food industry have spent decades putting you and your loved ones at risk pushing toxic harmful products that make you sick that have made our country sick. It's not a guess, that's happened.

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Stock your home with the quality essentials and shopper gifts your whole family will love. And it's easy, public square dot com slash Tucker and you can get started public square dot com slash Tucker. So, I mean, you can't have anything like representative government with that system in place.

The whole idea of having a national security apparatus, an intelligence community that operates in complete secrecy and that just does what it does permanently without end and constantly expands its authorities and powers because there's no political gain to its budgets which are classified as budgets, which nobody had, you know, that was one of the things we actually were able to see was the black book of the intelligence budget.

And we were put it on the things that, you know, we thought were were newsworthy about that. There's zero transparency to any of this. There's no oversight.

You technically have like oversight and Congress in the Senate, the Senate intelligence committees, you select committees that were created after the church commission found all these, you know, with the church commission found just by itself, you know, CIA developments of medications to try and like, you know, make people lose control of their brains or inject people with diseases like really sinister dark stuff that the CIA was doing that nobody knew about.

Not even the president, they just did it on their own. It was a discovery of a secret government inside the government. The idea was we need at least some oversight, this oversight, they tell nothing to these committees. The people who get put on those committees are people who are the ones who most support these intelligence communities. It was run in the Senate for years by Diane Feinstein. Her husband was a military contractor. She was embedded in these agencies.

She defended everything that they did. So one time she questioned them, which was when she wanted to investigate the use of torture in the CIA, John Brennan CIA spied on Diane Feinstein and on her entire staff. He got caught doing it. He lied and said he didn't. He finally admitted that it was done. He apologized and there were no repercussions. That's the bygones we got. Go Google. John Brennan spying on Diane Feinstein. I'll never forget it.

And when that story first broke, it was years ago, it was at least 10 years. It was on the Obama. He was the CIA director under Obama. And I remember thinking I don't think the CIA would ever dare spy on the select committee on the Senate oversight committee of the CIA, of the Intel community. I mean, I can't imagine they would have the balls to do something like that. That's insane. But I had no idea. And they didn't want somebody who was one of their most, their blind disloyalist.

The one time she stepped a little bit out of line because she wanted to investigate exactly what happened in the torture program. That point, like, why don't you, why have people put up with that? I mean, I guess Frank Church did die of incredibly fast acting cancer. So maybe that's why I mean, people must be afraid because you'd think out of 435, 535 with the Senate, there'd be somebody who was like, this is not democracy. This is totally immoral.

Like, I'm going to just stand up and take them on. Like, let's say that, you know, people had things on you that would, as you put it, destroy your reputation, make your kids think very importantly of you, would embarrass you for the rest of your life, would destroy you, whatever you value in life. It takes a very rare person to say, uh, effort. I'm going to risk that happening. And you know, I think we have the self preservation tactic.

That's why those kind of things like blackmail, extortion are so effective is because they can force people to think. I think you're right. Look at how much these sexual misconduct allegations are used when Julian Assange really got dangerous. Suddenly, I'd have nowhere up here to women claiming that he, uh, quote unquote, raped them because the allegation was they had consensual sex with him, but he didn't use a condom when they had not given their consent to no condom.

And that became rape under Swedish law. That's what forced him to the Ecuadorian embassy and led to everything that happened subsequently. Now with Matt Gates, um, the minute Matt Gates, Pete XF2, like out of nowhere appears this alleged rape that nobody had heard about that nobody knew about. It's always, the thing that always amazes me. This is actually the best example in case anybody thinks our government doesn't do that.

When Daniel Ellesberg leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times in the Washington Post, and I remember when I first heard about this, I was kind of confounded about why this happened. Obviously, they were saying the normal things you say about people like that. There we go. He's a Soviet asset. He hates America. He put troops in harm's way because he showed the public that the government was lying for years about the Vietnam war. Like inside they were saying we can never win.

Now externally they were saying we're on the verge of winning. But what they also did, and it's the only reason Daniel Ellesberg ended up free, right? Is they broke into his psychoanalysts office because they wanted to steal all the documents about his most intimate, uh, admissions to his psychoanalyst about his psychosexual life and fantasies because that was the weapon of choice that they wanted to use to destroy him. That's a fact.

The next administration broke into the psychoanalysts office of Daniel Ellesberg. When they couldn't find the documents, they planned a break in at the guys house. And that was they finally put a stop to that. But they did break into a psychoanalysts office. And only because of that government misconduct, did the judge dismiss the charges against Daniel Ellesberg who otherwise was headed to prison for the rest of his life. Why would that be a response to a whistleblower?

revealing to the press that then revealed to the public that the government was systematically lying about the Vietnam War. It's because if you can have that information over somebody and then use it against them, you destroy. I remember when it happened with Julian Assange, no one wanted anything to do with Julian Assange anymore. No one wanted to mention his name. It's just like, ooh, this person's guilty of accused of rape. I just don't want anything to do with that.

So if you could have shown that Daniel Ellesberg had this fantasy or had done this or had done that in the intimacy and privacy of his own life, it just everybody would have wanted to avoid it. It's totally true. Did you ever find yourself on the wrong end of any of that since you were very high profile?

I mean, I think the important thing is that if you want to confront the government, if you want to spill secrets, if you want to bring unwanted transparency, which happens to be the job of a journalist. You know, people forget that, but that is the job of a journalist. If you go into the journalist, not what you're supposed to try to do, you have to, as best you can guard against that.

You have to protect yourself, make sure that your own houses in order as much as possible, because that will be a huge vulnerability. But as I said before, everyone has things to hide. There's no one who doesn't. 100%. And it's also true that if you get really attacked in a scary way, you don't want to talk about it. I mean, I feel that.

I've been, that has happened, you know, not sex stuff, but I've definitely felt a lot of pressure and you don't, you don't want to, you know, it's not just sex stuff. Yeah, there's, there's not just sex stuff. All sorts of things in our past that we do that were embarrassed. But you worry the Intel agencies would try and hurt you. Yeah. I mean, don't question. This is the, here's the thing.

Like, I, you know, I think a lot of people remember, but my husband, who's not deceased, but at the time, he went to Germany because there was a part of the archive that was corrupted, and we knew there was a lot of work that was there. And it was with Laura Poiters and she, using her genius, had figured out how to access it. No one else could. But she didn't trust anybody, including the Guardian, to give it to you, to bring to me the only person she trusted was David.

I couldn't travel outside Brazil because there was a concern that I would be arrested by the US. So I had to stay in Brazil. So only David could go and get those documents. And the way we talked about it was in a very secure, secret way. We're using the highest levels of encryption at the time that Snowden insisted on.

And when David went to Germany, he came back home through Heathrow, but at Heathrow, the British arrested him and detained him and threatened to prosecute him under an anti-chirisome law. And the only reason they let him out was because the Brazilian government, it became a huge story in Brazil, the Brazilian government was like, give us back our citizens immediately. And so they let him go.

And then David sued the British government over human rights abuses because they were detaining him for journalism. And the British government said in their papers, when they defended their actions, we knew exactly what he was doing in Germany. We knew exactly what he was carrying. And that's the reason why we detained him because we wanted to prevent the secret documents from getting out into the public because it harms British national security.

Well, obviously we got the archive anyway, and we reported on those documents, but they admitted they knew and were listening to our conversation about why he was going there. They knew when he was going there, everything was being tracked. And so when you never figure out how I knew they were using, I mean, part of the reporting that we did was that the NSA had cracked even the most sophisticated levels of encryption. So things that people thought were safe.

There's nothing 100% foolproof. And at the time, we were among the most watched people in the world because we had in our hands the most sensitive secrets from the world's most powerful government that we were going around the world publishing to inform people of journalism. And so of course we knew where we were being spied on by probably a lot of people. It's just that the British were forced to admit it.

And when you get that confirmation as opposed to like a belief or suspicion, the level of invasiveness you feel is hard to express because they're not just listening to the parts of your conversations where you're talking about the stolen documents. Oh, I know. Oh, I know firsthand. Yeah. No, I know. Yeah, I mean, you had private conversations leaked as well when you were trying to do it.

Yeah, I was going to be good, but followed and had massive problems with Ukrainian intelligence service, etc, etc. It's not about me. I don't hold any institutional power. It's just interesting if you see what happens in your own life just by talking about I haven't done anything ever. Just sit around and studio talk to people.

But you know, you see the pressure they apply to you, like what would it be like to be, you know, the chairman of the Intel committee or the Speaker of the House or the president of the United States? Exactly. And I can't even imagine. And it just shows you what a remarkable person Trump is. He is just so he's weirdly resistant to that stuff. And that is that's why they hate him. I mean, remember all the stuff that came out of the 2016 when they thought he might win.

Like the access Hollywood tape that came out of nowhere. And I'm, you know, the strom Daniels stuff, you know, they threw everything out there. And Trump is is a very rare person who's just kind of shameless. Like he doesn't feel a sense of shame and he doesn't back down no matter what he goes. He gets more aggressive against people who tried to force him to.

It's just his instinct to do is I watched him for many decades when I was a lawyer in New York when he was a, you know, big real estate vocal, constantly being sued in lawsuits. Everybody knew how he was. And that's what it's so threatening about him. It's not his ideology or his beliefs. Of course. I think he's a Russia. It's the fact that he's a racist or that he's a racist. Right. No one cares about that.

No one believes that it's the fact that he's immune to the type of control that for decades they've been able to impose on people who wield any power. That alone the power of the presidency. Well, just type to the current state of US Russia relations or the war that we're about to. Like how do you, how do you think this ends? I mean, if you're setting in Moscow, obviously if there's a barrage of weapons, you know, aimed at Moscow, St. Petersburg, your major cities, that's one thing.

If there's a limited number of missiles aimed in Kursk, where, you know, Ukrainian forces are, that's another. And obviously they know what we talked about, which is that in about seven weeks, there's going to be a new American president with whom they've dealt extensively. And despite claims that he's some sort of, you know, lackey of Putin, he basically did the two things that were most threatening to Russian interests. He sent lethal arms. Do you crane after Obama refused to? Trump did.

I didn't agree with it, but that's what he did. And what he did even more so though is more threatening, damaging to Russia is he spent years trying to batter the Europeans out of the Nord Stream two pipe line. He was like, why would you be buying gas from Russia? You're getting dependent on Russia and where the ones who pay for your protection, you should be buying it from us.

That's the Nord selling natural gas to Europe was the anchor, the key to Russian vital interests and Trump threaten those vital interests continuously. So the idea, like anyone who's even a little bit rationally thinking would understand that this claim that he's being blackmailed by Putin while at the same time he simultaneously doing the two most threatening things to Russian vital national interests, you would immediately recognize what a fictitious claim that was.

So he's being blackmailed by the US intelligence agencies. And in fact, more so our government is the fascist state that they claim Russia is. Exactly. So, and that's not the fact that Russia is addressing. But, but so I think they know that, you know, they obviously know Trump's coming in and and they feel like he wants to go into different direction with the war.

And so even though there is going to be pressure on Putin, as there would be on the United States and any other country to respond in kind to NATO and the United States now bombing Russia, basically, I think as long as it's limited, as long as it stays limited to curse, as long as it's not, you know, in large numbers, knowing that Trump is coming into office, I think they understand that that's an opportunity to try and end this war without its escalation.

I hope, again, as you said, we're depending on Putin's restraint and rationality. So, as Christmas really about buying stuff, you'll be forgiven if you assumed it is because that's the message you receive. But most people send steep down there maybe a little bit more to Christmas. Maybe this is the time of year to focus on growing your relationship with God. Remember, there is a God and reach out to that God. Well, to do that, you can check out HALO, the HALO app and its Advent Pre-25 Challenge.

HALO is the world's number one prayer meditation app and for good reason, it's amazing, it's fantastic, we use it, we're proud to use it. This Advent we highly recommend you join HALO's Prayer Challenge for God so loved the world. Boy, that'll put meaning in your Christmas for sure. You've got spiritual stories, reflections, music, testimonies, it's really well done. You're not going to get it anywhere else in as easy a form. Just go to HALO, download it, and bam, it's right there.

So this is an opportunity to be transformed by God, this Christmas. Don't wait, get there, three free months right now when you sign up at HALO.com slash Tucker. My wife comes home and tells me all about it every day. Spend this Christmas working on something that matters your relationship with God. Maybe the only thing that matters. We hope you will. So among the many people Donald Trump has spoken to since winning a week and a half ago is John Mika.

And Joe Scarber and Mika Brzynski, they have a very low rated show on MSNBC, which I do think has outsized influence. The numbers are really small. People in Washington watch it. That's exactly it. That's exactly right. And so I think the show does have influence. I disagree with every single word ever uttered on that show, but I don't think it's totally insignificant. It's not joy, read. So they went to Marlago to meet with Trump. Like what do you make?

And then now they're saying, well, we went because we were afraid that we're going to be persecuted if we didn't kiss the ring or something. No, it's what they're excused even more pathetic, which is we're journalists. You have to go and talk to the people and power. But I think those two in particular are singularly pathetic. And I realize saying singularly pathetic and the context of employees of the corporate media seems like a designation that no one deserves alone.

But I think in their case, they really merit that distinction because I think like most of the people who work in corporate media like the Rachel Maddows and like the Laurence O'Donnells and the Donald Lamens and those kind of people, I think they believe all the insane on his stuff. I think they really believe that. Yeah, I think that's a Russian agent that Putin is blackmailing him that Trump wants to like put them in camps. Like I think it's insane.

But like credit for at least actually saying what they really believe is as preposterous and laughable as it is. Joe Scarborough has no beliefs other than his own advancement and self-importance. Okay, let's remember in the 1990s, he was elected. None is a Republican government, but is a radical conservative wire. With the whole new ginkering like firebrands, we're going to go in and like radically reformed the, you know, change the country and Washington.

No more of that anywhere in Joe Scarborough like this radical transformation of institutional power. And then as Megan Kelly said, no show did more to boost Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 in the in the Republican primary than Joe and Mika, they were down at Mar-a-Lago all the time. They loved Trump. They were best friends with Trump. They laughed with him. They let him call another show all the time part because it was very beneficial to that show. It was the only thing that rated.

He Trump saved all their jobs. But they also love just being proximate to power like that. That's the thing that they crave most. And then once what really happened was Scarborough thought that he was going to be chosen as Trump's vice president. He really wanted to. And when Trump rejected him in favor of Mike Pence and then also MSNBC turned into this fanatical anti-Trump network where the only people who watched were Trump haters.

At both out of personal or front, but also out of survival, they had to turn into a full on Trump hating show. You couldn't have the morning show of three hours be someone positive toward or neutral about Trump when the whole rest of the network everyone who watched.

I mean, I just ask you to press for a second, I'm just suggesting this Scarborough who I used to know really well, he thought he was going to be V. Yeah, yeah, that's what they remember how close they I know I remember that I didn't know. Oh, yeah, yeah, he that's. You should come to the United States more often. I learn a lot. I think my distance is what enables me to learn things. So yeah, that was a big part of it. But also it was survival at MSNBC.

And so they turned into these, you know, Joe Scarborough, Mr. Radical conservative, let's change all of Washington work became Mr. Institutionalist, you know, the people out on a show are like Richard Haas and like Norm Ornstein, like all these these like council on foreign relations and things people who were obsessed with hating Trump as well and it became ground zero for Trump as Hitler. They were saying as recently as two months ago or a month ago, like Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler.

He is a Nazi figure. Nika Brzezinski went on the view and cried and said Trump wants to murder women. Or going to die because of Donald Trump. He's a fascist. He's a racist. They said it every day over and over. And then Trump wins. And their whole influence was because they were Joe Biden's favorite show. Joe Biden would wake up at like 6 a.m. like many Geriatrics do because he went to bed at like seven o'clock p.m.

And he would watch morning Joe and then he would hear, you know, Joe Biden is the greatest president of the art. Joe Scarborough said that he personally can assure the country having spent so much time around Joe Biden that he sharper than ever he runs intellectual circles around all the Republicans were claiming that he's cognitively impaired. There's like a month before the debate. He was saying that. So of course they Joe Biden watched that show every day.

That's what gave Joe Scarborough his sense of importance was like, oh, I'm close to the White House. He was at the White House all the time. Now Biden's gone. Biden's not an ass anymore. Trump is back in power. And one of the things that has happened amazingly since the since Thomas loss is that the MSNBC audience, which is already tiny, has basically completely disappeared.

Like the number of people watching those shows when they're live in prime time with that big gigantic corporate power behind them promoting it. It's less than a lot of like YouTube shows. Oh, wait. Yeah. Including like, I don't mean like the cumulative audience of how many people watch YouTube or YouTube video at the end of the day. I just mean live watching. The Dan Bungino show has, I think, unrumble has like five or six or seven times more viewers than MSNBC's prime time.

This is unrumble, you know, which a lot of people don't even know about. Don't even watch. That audience is gone. In part because they feel disillusioned that the people they trusted who told them Trump was going to prison. The whole Trump family was going to prison. Trump could never win. He was going to be in jail before the election. All the women were going to rise up and vote for Kamala out of anger toward Trump. None of that happened.

And they're like, I've been watching this show every day for nothing. It was I was it. None of it happened. None of it was true. And that audience is gone. Half out of disillusionment. Nanger, but half out of just like kind of checking out through impotence and helplessness. And I think that their desperate, the only way they think they can get people to come back on is to have Trump come back on their show. And their Trump is going to make them crawl around on the floor multiple times.

Or like a dog. Yeah. They were like, Joe and Mika were like, Trump was incredibly cheerful and happy. Of course he was. He loves seeing you humiliate yourself because you know, he knows you need them now. I don't think that, you know, weekly interview with Trump, which is not going to happen anyway, but even if it did was going to save MSNBC. No, because who would watch it? There's no conservatives are going to trust that show or MSNBC. And no liberals want to see MSNBC host.

You know how angry liberals are about just even the fact that Joe and Mika went to. To Marlago. So who's the audience for that? They're caught. Like Liz Cheney, what, you know, I have to say of all the reasons I'm so grateful that come low lost, seeing Democrats turn on Liz Cheney and seeing her stranded between the parties and no man's lands. The best. Honestly, I can't, there's a piece by John Nichols in the nation today. I don't read the nation much anymore.

But you know, occasionally the nation is like kind of true to itself, not always, but some not, I don't agree with it. But John Nichols wrote this piece about Kamala Harris say where he, he goes through like all the places that she went with, Liz Cheney went with Kamala Harris and like they only did it not work. She turned off for Republicans. Like the idea was, you know, we've got Liz Cheney campaigning with us. A lot of Republicans do it like Donald Trump will vote for us.

Like just the opposite happened. You know, it was so predictable and so obvious and predictable. It was predictable. Also like what made Kamala's campaign like for the six seconds that it seemed like it had some like air to it. Yes. Was this like vibrancy of young people, you know, like celebrating the emergence. Right. But yeah, totally. And so you then take Liz Cheney and like send Bill Clinton to Michigan to like lecture everybody in the Muslim community.

I'm gonna hate you because you've been buying Israel about how the Israelis are totally right. And it's all the fault of the Arabs. And then you take Liz Dick Cheney's daughter with you through the rust belt where like all those policies devastated their lives, all those wars. And you think Liz, think about, I mean, this is a thing. Think about how out of touch and cloistered and in a bubble, you have to be to think that you're going to win an election.

Being on people who are in the working class who feel alienated from society who feel like DC doesn't work for you by taking the daughter of like the face of the American establishment Dick Cheney around with you as if she's your running mate.

And people are craving change and you have sitting there with Liz Cheney like the who don't people only know because she was the vice president's daughter heard the dad was Dick Cheney and not just Dick Cheney, but somebody who supports a whole range of policies that Americans vehemently reject now.

And I think that's more than anything what people like people in the media have finally had to come to grips with is, first of all, it's good that Liz Cheney actually isn't the secretary of defense secretary of state. That also was good. Even though there are a couple of people in Trump's campaign who have very similar views like work Caribbean Liz Cheney, but and at least demonic, but we'll be that aside. It's good that Liz Cheney specifically is not any of those positions.

But I think the best thing is that you have all these people inside these cloistered bubbles in Washington who really thought that they were the conscience of the nation, the voice of the nation.

And not only were they applauding the decision to take Liz Cheney, but they have been spending eight years claiming that Donald Trump is a white supremacist who wants to put minorities in camps and not only did Donald Trump win the election, but there was millions of non-white voters who for the first time left the Democratic Party and went to vote for Trump. So imagine you've wasted eight years of your life screaming and screeching like a petulant bird who has been like shot.

Donald Trump's a racist. He's the fascist. He hates, he only likes white people. And then you watch millions of Latino people and black people and Asian people and Muslims refused to vote for Kamal Harris. You obviously like, I have no influence at all. I'm completely out of touch. Well, but it's so good to know that about yourself. I mean, that's happened to me, by the way, they're all kind of vehemently opposed to abortion, which I think is like horrifying.

But lots of people don't agree with me. And so I see these, you know, Roe v. Wade comes down and you see these bout initiatives and say, you know, we're going to allow abortion until birth. And I'm like, wow, I'm so glad it's up for a vote. And then turns out the voters just don't agree with me at all. And even in red states, it's true. It's true. Like that was hard for me to accept because I am, I never talked about it, but I was just so, I'm so sincere on this object.

I'm not for abortion, period. And so, but you have to be real like, okay, sometimes people agree with you. Sometimes they don't. But there's something about the democratic base, which really is just basically just like unhappy college educated white ladies. That's really who it is. Honestly, I mean, and they say that they're like, we're relying on affluent women in the suburbs. Exactly. But the unhappy ones, I mean, I'm related to some happy ones.

They're not voting for Kamala Harris, but the ones who are sort of disappointed in their husbands and in their lives or whatever, I get it. I'm not being mean, but it's just true. They should know that they're in the subset of a subset and that not everyone agrees to them. I think that's the beginning of wisdom. I mean, it has been for me, like not everyone agrees to it. But the thing is, you were just saying you read the nation sometimes. Yeah. I go out of my way to read everything everybody.

You know, I try and have people in my life who have very different views. Yeah. And, you know, I have a lot of people in my life in Brazil, for example, who worship Blua. I have a lot of people in my life who hate Lil worship Bolsonaro. People who are in between. I want that. I want it here. Of course. You want to be challenged all the time, not be ossified. I'm telling you, I know a lot of these people. I used to be on MSMC all the time. I've been friends with a lot of the people here.

What do they know though? Oh, they despise me with the burning passion. But in part because nobody hates things more than no one, the person always most hated as the one perceived as the heretic. Of course. You know, but I was never really on their side in the way that they thought actually anyway, but anyway, it doesn't matter. I know a lot of these people and what has happened on MSMBC is that, or places like a New York Times, a bed page similar.

People who support Trump don't exist in that world. There's not one op-ed page writer at the New York Times of the dozens who is a Trump supporter, even though how the country is, more than how the country is. Like Ross, 2000 is like the person closest to, like sort of understanding the Trump movement, but he certainly doesn't like Donald Trump at all. And other than that, it doesn't exist in the world.

There's nobody ever on MSMBC on their shows who brings that perspective of why they support Donald Trump. So if you're only talking to people who are like minded and a lot of them have now left Twitter trying to go to some other platform where only they're only there. They don't want it. They really don't want to hear any dissent. And you're living a certain kind of life. You know, they're well paid.

They like are coistered in these like affluent places in the United States, like in the East Coast, like Brooklyn and Manhattan and Washington and Northern Virginia. How do you not realize that the life you're leading is so fundamentally different from the people on whose behalf you claim to be speaking? And I do think a lot of them, even though they're going to resist it and battle it, have to swallow this election as a complete repudiation of not just themselves, but their entire purpose life.

They're entire function. I mean, again, I just want to say how non-judgmental I feel about this. That has happened to me. I've been fired, I have found my views repudiated by the public at large. Those are very important moments to me personally. They made me a better person. So I am hoping that they internalize the pain and learn from it. Do you think they will?

Yeah, I mean, what always appears to me is like, you know, I really did grow up like in a working class environment, but my whole life, that was the only one. Yeah, no, I mean, there are other people who grew up like, you know, I wasn't like poor, but I was not even near middle class. I worked at McDonald's, my mom worked at McDonald's, she like, my parents got to fourth when I was seven, my father was an accountant, he had three marriages.

That's actually you are a low, like I don't know anybody. I mean, I don't know anybody in journalism. I know people who's mom worked at McDonald's. I don't know anyone in journalism who's mom worked at McDonald's. Well, I guess my point is that like, of course, that shaped me for a long time, but I realize now that that's not my life any longer. Like it hasn't been for, you know, 10 years, 15 years, like my life has been very separate from that.

I have a great amount of humility about my ability to speak for people who have a different kind of life because you're, of course, the way you live shapes your perspective, shapes your understanding, shapes your priorities. And it amazes me that these people don't have that humility at all. And so I think they're resisting it. Like they're, you know, that was what Obama did.

Remember when he was like, yeah, I know there's a lot of black men who don't want to vote for a comel who are going to vote for Trump. That's because you all hate women and you're misogynist. And then they're basically saying the reason a lot of Latino. What an arrogant douchebag to say something like that. And there's a perfect example. Like he spends all his time in like Richard Branson's yacht. Yeah, I know.

And, you know, just with the highest level of jet set and then he thinks he's going to go and speak to like black or working class men. You disagree with me. You're a bigot. That's like, that's such a crazy place to start any conversation. It's so alienating. I think I think this kind of kind of ascension that, but the other thing is like the main argument is that they're all stupid, like they're victims of disinformation, they're misled.

They have all these alternative media they're listening to that don't have the controls that happen with us. They're getting fall. You know, basically they're stupid. They're like, they're easily misled. They're gullible. So either they're racist or misogynist or stupid. That's their explanation. That's the thing they're clinging to. You know, like, oh, they don't realize how good they had an under Biden. Now great, the economy is how much comma Harrison Joe Biden did for them.

They just don't guess they were told that it was untrue. They can't figure it out on their own. Like the condescension wreaked out of, like just it oozes out of every poor of their being. And then they wonder why people despise them in their culture and their subcultures who wants that. It is nauseating.

But despite what I'm saying is that they're not, they don't have the attitude you had, which is like, oh, it's actually good to be humbled to like realize that things that you thought about the world need to be re-evaluated. There's no self-criticism, no reflection. In fact, every Democrat thinks like, oh, yeah, I know why we lost. It's been what I was saying all along. None of them are saying that. But you know, they're like, Democrats did this and Kamala did that.

You know, they all are trying to pretend that if people had just listened to them, the Democrats would have won, even though all on, they were like, oh, Kamala is running the most brilliant campaign ever. But what I'm saying is that the result is so overwhelming, so kind of pointed in devastating to their world of view. As I said, I think the thing that has really shaken them the most, even though they're fighting it, they're not embracing it, they're fighting it.

But they can't is that so many non-white voters are, and Trump made huge gains in almost every non-white sector of society. I mean, Trump was saying that New Jersey and New York are swing states and people were laughing at him. And he only lost New Jersey by five points. And did the best any Republican has done in New York City in many, many years because of how many black, Latino, and worse Asians and Muslims voted for Trump, non-white voters.

And so when that happens, like you don't even get to blame white people, but you have to accept that the people who you think you own, who have mindless loyalty to you, disobeyed you and didn't listen to you, that's what makes them feel really shaken inside. It's a slave revolt.

And if you read the accounts of people who live through slave revolts, not just in the American South, but like Grant and Haiti or, you know, anywhere, there's always, wherever you have slavery, you've got slave revolts at some point, they're always so shocked. Like they can't believe that like the nanny came after them with a knife. Like I, we thought you loved us. It's so brutal to the world view to believe.

No, it's the, I mean, those people, central to their worldview is at their benevolent leaders of these people. It's like that scene in the animal house. Oh, this, he loves us. He does. Drunk, Fred Boy. Yeah. No, people always imagine that the people they control, their employees, their serfs love them. And they need to understand, I think this is just true in life, is that the people subordinate to resent you. They may like you, but they also resent you. There's just the subordinates alone.

That's what I'm saying. Right. And it's one of the reasons you see hostility among women toward Mendistan general. Not a defining characteristic, but there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of that. If you're in the subordinate sexual position, you're like a little man about it. I'm just, I'm sorry, I think that, sorry to, like channel Dr. Freud, but there's some truth in that. And I, I mean, it's what we were talking about before about you.

I've said this so many times, like just, if you belong to one of these so-called marginalized groups, that liberals think they own, and have an entitlement to control, you will never see more naked and unadorned bigotry, contemptuous bigotry that you will see toward individuals within that group who disobey. Obviously, I remember when I really started sweating from the left, I never had real homophobia in my entire life before.

I only started seeing it like once I had that pretty, what once you questioned, before you remember the LBG community, exactly, exactly in a pedophile, whatever, you know, all the things. And then, oh, yeah. And then, you know, like the way they have always talked about, I'm sorry to laugh. I'm sorry to laugh. No, it's, it's amazing. It's the way they talk about Clarence Thomas. Oh, I know.

Any black person who's been a conservative, same with like women who are, you know, Gory Astinem said about the people, the young women who were refusing to vote for Hillary and voting for Bernie, when asked why they were doing that. She's like, because young girls go where the boys are. You know, like the most demeaning and insulting thing you can say about women, that they don't think on their own, they just like mindlessly do whatever the boys are. Right.

And so now you're seeing this like, oh yeah, like Latinos like are very misogynistic. It's a primitive. So our black men, they hate women, you know, they're easily misled. They're low information voters. You know, the amount of contempt that liberal elites have for these non white voters who didn't do as they're told is almost scary. Well, it's scary because it's a psychological condition. That's of course why they hate whites that they've been because they're losing the white vote.

And a second, they started to lose the white vote. Then whites became the problem in the country. It's like, where's all the anti-white hate coming from? Well, it's coming from the Democratic Party institutionally because they're being rejected by white voters. They were ready to, they thought they were going to get white women. They're going to get to embrace like white women were going to rise up and join them against Trump at a majority of white women voted for Trump. Incredible.

So they're going to get, I mean, I will say to his, his, his Panics in the United States, you're about to be the subject of a hate campaign. Oh, and like the thing, and Muslims too, who didn't want to vote for Kamala because the person, you know, because they were feeding Israel. I can't tell you how many times I've seen. I can't wait till you people are deported. I can't wait till you blown up in Gaza.

There's this sentiment like you're going to get what you deserve and I'm going to laugh about it and I'm going to cheer it. Same with the, with Latinos, I can't wait till you're deported. You're going to get what you deserve when your abuela is deported. Like really sick stuff. Joy, read. I'm not talking about obscure people on the internet. She's gone on the air almost every night and talked that way. Attack, attack the, his Panics. Yeah. And, and Muslims and Arabs.

Well, so the best part about this is the language barrier and very so few liberals like even bother to listen to what people actually think or say. They're not interested, you know, it's like they treat everyone like a three year old.

But when they find out the social views of your average Central American, which I find hilarious and kind of great, but whatever leaving my views aside, the average social views of a Central American just on the social issues are so far out of what's considered acceptable. But they have no idea, which is so ironic because democratic strategists used to openly boast about what if you say you'll get called as a white supremacist.

The replacement theory that, oh, we're going to import all these people into the United States, make them citizens and they're going to be supporters of the democratic party. And we're going to reign forever like a thousand years because these are all our voters when they get here.

And they find out that actually, but, but I have to say like there's a great article in New York magazine, which is words that pass my lips very, very rarely where this writer, who actually wrote a very critical profile of being like five years ago. So who is it? His name is Simon. I just, I just talked to him today about this article because it's a great article. I was, I'm bears, I don't know his name, but that can't remember his last name. It's hyphenated. So it's this little complicated.

But anyway, I really recommend this article. He just went, what he did was he purposely went to black Latino Asian neighborhoods where there was a lot of Trump votes. And he just walked around on the street and talked to as many people as he could who voted for Trump about why.

And what I think people don't understand is that the Latino and black NGO presidents who get put on TV were supposedly there at this point, or have lessen common with the people on who have their speaking, then like the white host of these shows way less. And so you go there and lessen me. I mean, I have like attitudes that are pretty popular in those. Right. Exactly.

And a lot of them were just like far from being like, you know, deceived by disinformation, they're like, there's a Democratic party that supported that after. They're like, we're having trouble paying for our health care, food for our kids and they're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and to Israel to all these other countries. They're just talking about the struggles that they have in their lives and the way in which the government doesn't care. There's some social issue stuff too.

But once you get to that and say to become a citizen, you integrate pretty quickly. The thing you don't sit around thinking about trans people or whatever, gay marriage or these are ancillary issues, even if they don't agree with the Democratic Party on, they might contribute to the alienation.

The fact that, you know, that's why that Kamala ad was effective, not because people are sitting around thinking about whether trans people should get government funded sex harassment, such as in prison, but because it was like a proxy for explaining that these people have nothing in common with your lives. They don't care about you. They don't care about your values. But they felt economically satisfied. I don't think that would resonate because that's not what people care about.

But most of them are just worried about the same thing everybody else is worried about. And they finally got to the point where they realized they were even more worried. Exactly. They're the people who get most affected, especially by immigration. Totally.

I mean, the people who lose their jobs with immigration often are non-white people, black working class, Latino working class, and they feel resentful about everything that's being done for, you know, there was a lot of, oh, they're giving free housing and free meals to illegal immigrants while I can't feed my family. I really recommend the article. It's not done with caricature. It's not like handpicking a few comments. It's a very long article.

And it just lets these people speak for themselves in a very revealing way. What's just so funny is you live in Brazil, which is another continent. It has been there a while. How many years? 20 years. 20 years. But if I called you the week before the election, I should have done, but I got busy. But if I'd said, like, what do you think black and Latino people, men, married people in New York City or on the country? What do you think they think politically? I bet you would have been pretty cool.

I know you would have figured this out. Yeah, I was talking about this. Well, you don't even live here. I know, but I lived here, like, for the first 38 years of my life. It's the only country of which I've ever been a citizen. I'm here all the time. But I do think that, and this is- But how do you know that and they don't? That's the point. I think that distance gives you a perspective.

The fact that my friends are not media and political people on New York and Washington, that I'm not cooked into their worldview, that I'm not subsumed with that, that I'm not dependent upon it in any way, gives me, I think, a broader perspective. If you live in Northern Virginia and you spend all your time in Washington and green rooms or New York, you're going to be so distorted in the things that you think about the world. Oh, it's about it.

You have to go out of your way to, okay, I don't want to be told what people think by other people who are reporting through their spokespeople. I want to hear from them directly. I want to look at the polling data. I want to understand what they're thinking. You can just see it. You can hear it. You can feel it.

You can observe it analytically in data, but they just, I remember people on CNN saying, you know, I think it was Van Jones or Noah's Bacari sellers who was like, I don't care what the polls say. I can guarantee you there won't be more than 5% of black men voting for Donald Trump. I don't care what the polls say. There won't be anywhere near 15% of, you know, he Bacari sellers of that. Oh, yeah. Just like, I don't care what the polls say.

I'm not like a huge, you know, I'm not a huge expert on black America and I don't have a million black friends, but I have some actually, like actual friends. I don't know a liberal black guy. I know some who vote for Democrats or whatever, but I don't know. I literally don't know except like the guys you see in green rooms going to Princeton or like fake preachers or something, but like actual black men, I don't know any. The only ones are in the media. The ones I can imagine.

I don't know any person I've ever even met one. Right. And so like what is this? But this has been, if you think about the Democratic Party, the thing you fear most is that these groups that have been voting for you for generations and have been past, had loyalties passed down from their parents, their grandparents who don't even think about not voting for you at election.

Once that breaks, I'm not saying those people who voted for Trump will never vote Democrat again, but now they know there's an option. They're free people. They get to decide for themselves who they want and nothing is more alarming or, or, or patrifying to Democratic Party elites than seeing that. I think it's really good. It's good for the country. No, the Democratic Party and its, you know, current iteration is just, is almost purely destructive.

And shouldn't be, you need a two party system where both parties are represent, it's integrated. Like, yeah, I remember like the smartest Republicans, like JD Vance, Josh Hotley, like the ones who really understand that you can't have the same Republican parties. You didn't 1980 have always been describing the future of the Republican Party as a multiracial working class coalition. And to watch people identifying primarily based on their citizenship and their class, that's what you want.

Those that constantly being divided by race, you want is so, amen. Promising to see. Well, it's essential or else you have Rwanda. I mean, because, you know, your class can change, but your race doesn't change. And so if you engender a conflict on the basis of immutable characteristics, it's not solvable. And so you don't want to ever do that. You make people hate each other based on how much they make. Okay, where they live even, but they're skin color.

Well, as you say, that gives them the idea of change. Like, hey, we can change the government. Well, that's exactly right. Exactly. Where is immutable characteristic by definition? No, no. That's like, that's like Albanian blood feud the last 800 years. Like you can't do that. But that has been the predominant liberal mindset is to encourage people to see themselves as part of insulated factions who hate other factions based on those characteristics.

And there's almost nothing more offensive to me about what American liberalism writ large has done than trying to impose that framework on people to divide people based on things that in fact don't divide them. Well, yeah, especially since the experience of just like living in this country, you know, is so different from what they describe. I've always been on the right. I've never had anybody, anybody who's black or Hispanic or non-white ever attack me. One time in public as a racist.

I've only had affluent white women attack me that way. I don't see people hating each other on the basis of race. I don't, I'm sure there's racism. I know that there is because people are flawed, but it's not a defining fact in this country that I have ever known. I don't know what the hell they're talking about. I mean, they're trying to scare the shit out of people to get their votes. That's it. Well, obviously millions of non-white people agree with this.

Yeah, because we just went and voted for the white candidate over the black one. I know. And the white candidate who they were told was Adolf Hitler and wanted to put all non-white people in camps. They were looking around though. That's not my experience. So I got to just one last question. Like we began the conversation with the war that we're now in. I were in a war with Russia.

And that really is something that the Biden administration is doing to punish the incoming Trump administration, I think, and to prevent it from acting with the autonomy any administration should have. But they're also going to leave all behind all kinds of, I mean, they're not going to spend the next seven weeks doing nothing. And one of the things they're going to try to do is increase censorship, I think, over the next seven weeks, or am I just being paranoid? I think you're right.

They're obviously not going to do nothing. They're going to try and fortify everything as much as possible from the kind of change of the American people just voted for. The party of democracy is going to do that. Centorship in my view began like systemic censorship on the internet began as a reaction to 2016 without question, both to Brexit, but with especially to Trump. That's right.

And the emergence of these highly well funded disinformation experts, the concoction of this fake expertise called disinformation experts, how do people get to be that? Where do you go to school to be a disinformation expert? I got floating arbiter of truth, but they needed to radically intensify censorship because they blamed free speech and the free flow of information on, they blamed that for Brexit first, but especially for Trump's victory. And they wanted to crack down on that.

There's always now an ongoing effort to try and crack down on that. I think though what they're going to try and do is look at the areas that they believe Trump is trying most radically to change beginning with foreign policy. That's foreign policy the thing that they value most. That's the, you know, centerpiece of how America runs in their view.

And they're going to spend as much of their time subverting him and sabotaging him in advance, even though he just won the election by a pretty solid margin. And there are some things that'll be reversible. But if you escalate the war in Ukraine and Trump now is coming into a war that the Russians perceive accurately to be not just a proxy war with the West behind Ukraine, but where Nito is actually bombing Russia, it becomes infinitely more difficult to keep under control and to resolve.

The problem is that the risks of this are so great that it actually sickened me more than almost anything I've ever seen that they're willing to do this on the way out. Just prevent this worth mending and trifling with the risk of a nuclear exchange. With the lives of every person on earth. Yeah. I just got it closed by saying there's been entrepreneurs in my whole life. You know, spent a lot of time around journalists bragging about the risks they take.

I've never known a journalist who's been threatened with prison more times than you have. Probably once every six months, I just check to make sure that you're not in prison. I do. I have my friends do that too. I'm always assuming you're going to wind up in prison for challenging the powerful and revealing what they're actually doing. So I just want to say congratulations on remaining free. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's not always been such an easy task.

There have been times when I've gotten pretty close, including recently, but I feel like if you're not hated by and perceived as a threat by people in power, you're not doing your job. That's for sure. That's what I really believe. Well then, by that measure, you're the most successful journalist of our generation, which I already thought it anyway, but congratulations. I think you're done. Glenn Greenwell. Always great to see you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show.

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