Welcome to the 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@tuckercarlson.com. here's the episode. You arrive at the same conclusions I do 100% of the time, at least on Twitter.

Yeah, it's an instinct. It's like. And like I said, I think you begin with like a certain kind of like, inclination, like view of who's running the country and how you feel about them and why you hate them. And then, like, everything else just kind of follows from there.

Yeah. And it may even be deeper than that. It's like, what's important to you? Loyalty, honesty. Children, dogs.

Totally, totally. Yeah. It's like what you get in life, too. Yeah. Like we're roughly the same age or obviously like a lot older, but in general, like, we're the same.

Are you older?

I think I'm like a year older. What year were you? I'm 1967.

Okay, so you're two years older than me.

Okay. Congratulations on your pro bust. You.

Yeah, it's interesting, I think about lies the way I do about alcohol. I just don't want it in me at all.

Yeah, well, cuz you end up deluding yourself, which is the 100 times you can consciously, like, deceive other people for whatever goal and you can tell yourself it's justified and maybe sometimes it even is. But the worst thing is to delude yourself. Like, to deceive yourself. There's nothing.

I know it. I mean, I've repeated so many lies.

Yeah.

My life. Yeah. Knowingly.

Yeah.

That. I just don't want to do that again, the way. Thank you for setting up that Snowden meeting.

Oh, I knew you guys were gonna love each other. I was actually hoping he would change his mind and do an interview. I think it was a good step to doing.

How is. Yeah. And even. Even if I never interview him on camera, I was just grateful to meet him. But. So you. You're the reason that we know any of this information. You were the guy who broke the story. It did feel to me like Snowden was. It was more important for the us government to capture and kill Ed Snowden, an american citizen, than like any foreign terrorist.

It was the biggest leak of top secret documents from the us security state by far. He walked and he like planned it. So meticulous. I mean, you're talking at the NSA, which supposed to be, like, our leading intelligence agency, he was in it, stealing all their stuff over months, figuring out how not to get caught, he walked out with it. He went to Hong Kong with it, having. They have no idea any of that happened. And he was just waiting for us to come and then pass it all to us and, like, put it in all secret places. Like, the only thing he cared about was getting that out before he ended up, you know, imprisoned or killed or whatever. He was so desperate for us to get there.

Why don't we do it?

I mean, I really think it's for the reasons he said. Like, he really felt betrayed. You know, he went to enlist in the Iraq war. He enlisted in the army. He wanted to go fight in Iraq. And obviously do that because you believe the mythology. And the more he saw, the more he realized it was, you know, a fraud. And it makes you, like, feel betrayed, like, ethically betrayed. Like, people who want to go fight in wars obviously have, like, a code of ethics already, right? They're saying I can learn to risk my. Risk my life for something that is greater than myself. And then when you realize that, like, what you're told is greater than yourself is, in fact, a total lie, that you're fighting for completely different reasons, you feel betrayed. And then the question is, like, what is really bigger than myself? And he, like I said, he thought he was going to be killed or spend the rest of his life in prison. Like, if I had to bet we weren't even discussing the possibility that he would end up free. It was inconceivable. Like, that was the darkness that hung over this whole thing the whole time we were doing it.

Obviously, I was very excited about the story we were plotting. We were strategizing like it was underwater. But the whole time, I felt this, like, sadness that this person had come to, like, admire and respect so much. I was never going to say again. He was going to end up in prison for the rest of his life. Like, that was for sure. That wasn't, like, a possibility. It was, like, almost inevitable.

And he knew that.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, like, obviously, you don't, if you're at all ethical, like, not just a journalist person, you don't use somebody as a source without making sure they understand the risk they're taking. Unlikely consequences. But he, you know, I remember the first conversation I had when I started talking about it. He was, like, all while versed in the espionage act, and, like, every single law that would be used against him, he fully understood he was sacrificing his whole life. He had to hide it from his girlfriend, who he wanted to marry. That was because he was told they were totally in love. But he couldn't have her know anything because she would have been complicit, and he was concerned she'd be vulnerable. You know, they would go after her, start charging with her crimes to get at him. So we had to keep it all from her. He just disappeared. He was like, I need to go on a trip related to business.

So, I mean, you're describing, like, one of the most ethical people I've ever met, one of the most principled people ever. It's. It's kind of revealing that he's considered, like, the criminal number one.

Criminal. Yeah, because he actually exposed real crimes. And the per. That's what always happened, is the people who expose the crimes. I mean, like, Daniel Ellsberg had documents showing that the US government was telling american citizens they knew they were going to win the war at exactly the same time internally, they said they knew they could never win the war in Vietnam. And like many other guys, too, he was like, you know, Danielsburg worked at the highest levels of the government forever. I mean, he got a PhD in nuclear policy, and then, you know, was at the Rand Corporation with some of the most secret access ever. And then he just couldn't believe what he was seeing, like, inside these documents, comparing them to the public statements. And he was like, how am I going to live with myself for the rest of my life if I don't, you know, make this known? And he was exactly the same thing. But, of course, at the time, he was completely vilified as a traitor, a russian agent, the whole thing.

A hater of America.

Yeah, I mean, everybody, like, who wasn't on the left hated Danielsberg. And the only reason he didn't spend the rest of his life in prison is because of the misconduct of breaking. They broke into a psychoanalyst's office to try and discover his psychosexual secrets, to discredit him for that was like that whole CIA group that did the Watergate break. And they also broke into his psychoanalyst office and tried to steal all those files. And then when they couldn't, they wanted to break into the psychoanalyst's home. And then that was, like, the one thing they didn't get permission for. But when that was discovered, the judge threw the case out solely because of government misconduct. Had they not, he would have absolutely been convicted.

But he had the. He had the support, effectively, of the american media. I mean. Daniel.

Well, he bit because he he commandeered them. That's like, the first thing I did with Snowden was I went to we went to every major media outlet that we wanted to work with in order to get them on our side, because if we didn't, we would have just been to, like, outsiders who wouldn't. They would have called us, like, non journalists. That's what they tried to do. That, Mike, is a cop piece reported on them trying to assassinate Snowden, but also create theories to arrest myself and Laura, calling us information brokers and like, aider and like, the whole time. James Clapper would always, whenever he referred to us, he would never call us journalists. He would always call us Snowden's, like, aiders and abettors or Snowden's co conspirators, because they were trying to create a theory that they could arrest us. That's why I didn't go back. That's why nether war and I traveled for a year. They were being super threatening. You know, I had the best lawyers, their guardian, the kinds who could get Eric Holder on the phone. It worked with him, you know, those type of lawyers. And they were like, if he comes back to New York, if it comes back to the US, can you guarantee that he won't be arrested upon arrival?

And they're like, right now we can't.

So that's why you live out of the country?

Well, no. I mean, I had lived in Brazil already, but I was always going back to the US. But for a year, I couldn't travel outside Brazil. The brazilian government said, we will always protect you because I did a lot of reporting on how the NSA was spying on Brazil. So in Brazil, like, the reporting was considered heroic. And they were like, we'll never turn you over, but we can't guarantee your protection if you leave Brazil. So I stayed in Brazil for.

It's just so funny. The Guardian was one of the places that ran this data, this information, and WikiLeaks.

They partnered with WikiLeaks as well.

But do you think the Guardian would run something like that now?

Nope, zero chance.

Why?

I mean, they've, you know, they got taken over by completely different. Like, the editor at the time was like one of those old school british editors. Yes. And now it's run by this woman who's, like, best friends with the editor in chief of the, who was the editor in chief of the Intercept, who degraded it into a partisan outlet. And they're both just like, standard left liberal white women and they're all into the whole, like, everything. All that matters is Trump. They have no animosity toward the security state agencies any longer because they perceive them, correctly as their political allies. And there's no chance that they would.

Have.

You know, run a story like that.

So they're just totally correct.

Do you ever hear any left liberals ever anymore talking about the evils of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the us security state? Never, never, ever. Maybe homeland security for being too aggressive with immigrants. But other than that, that discourse is gone. If you talk about the CIA and the FBI now, people, that gets coded as, like, Trump, Trumpism and, like, warning about deep state, the deep state. And, like, they mocked the idea that there's a deep state that's, like, been fundamental to left wing politics for as long as I can remember. And now it reads as, like, you know, trumpian, right wing, paranormal.

It's, you know, any country run by its intel and law enforcement agencies is an authoritarian country. It's not a democratic country.

They were built to be outside of the democratic system. There's no, they're built to be a secret agency within the government that is immune to democratic accountability. And the amazing thing is, when they had those hearings, like, after the Twitter files and all of that, every single Democrat stood up and said, like, when Matt Taylor and testify, they were lecturing him, saying, like, have you ever considered the fact that the people at the CIA and the FBI and our security state agencies are doing this to protect us, not to harm us? Can you imagine? Like, and like, even though the, like, AOC, same thing, like, even the left wing sectors of the democratic party, there's no space to criticize.

Are there any, are there any left liberals holding off?

Have we started, by the way, or no?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we're on. We're on.

Yeah, I think we're on. Yeah.

Okay. I didn't know, but I'm fine.

You know what an irish exit is, right?

Well, this is what we chat anyway. This is how we chat. So I was like, okay, we're just waiting until.

But yeah, so the irish exit, and I'm not irish, for the record, but is when you sort of leave without saying anything. This is the irish entrance. You sort of start with that.

Exactly, exactly. Just sit down and start with. No, no formal start. Yeah, but I mean that to me, you know, because it's always so bizarre to me that, you know, for a long time, I was considered, you know, like a left wing kind of leading journalist and finger. And then at some point, like, with the emergence of Trump. I had this huge breach with the left, and the, my allies started becoming people on the right. I think that's now changed a little bit more since October 7 and the like, but I haven't changed a single one of my views. I think the primary, the two primary views that I hold that used to be identified with the left, that are now identified with the right, is free speech, which began as a left wing movement. I mean, the free speech movement began at Berkeley. Some of the most important First Amendment free speech precedents were written by the most left wing journalists. And like, it was left wing jewish lawyers at the ACLU who are fighting for the most absoluteist versions of free speech and now free speech codes as a fascist value. And then the second is this critical scrutiny and focus that I've always had on the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and that two now codes as right wing.

And the reason for that is so disturbing, it's because those agencies became among the leading enemies of the Trump campaign. And then the Trump presidency, that's where Russiagate came from, was from the vowels of the CIA, the FBI, they were anonymously leaking every day, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all kinds of information that turned out to be false, but that was designed to sabotage Trump's campaign in the presidency. And Democrats looked at that and said, why would we have any problem with these agencies? They're on our side and they are on that side. And this inversion of politics, and then you add things like neocons almost entirely migrating to the Democratic Party. Whereas when I started talking about politics in 2005, neocons were being talked about as bloodthirsty Hitler aryan types, you know, Nazis and the like. That's how liberals talked about them. And now, like, the most influential pundits and liberal politics are like Bill Kristol and David from and Nicole Wallace and all those. Bush. Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney was hero of the year by Mother Jones in 2022. Mother Jones was, you know, like a hardcore leftist radical who, like, broke the law.

I mean, the idea that 100 years from now, a newspaper named after her would be naming Liz Cheney as hero of the year. Like, when people say, like, why have you changed? What have you changed? Like, you're the one naming Liz Cheney hero of the year. I hate the Cheney's as much as I hated them 20 years ago. And this inversion of politics is so radical and so visible and. And so transparent and so abrupt that it's changed almost everything.

It does seem like maybe a lot of the kind of ACLU positions which, for the record, I always liked. I always liked Nat Hentoff, for example. Wonderful man. But it seems like maybe a lot of it wasn't sincere. And it was. As soon as the ACLU kind of took power over american society, then it was like, now we have something to protect. Now we're not on the side of the underdog.

Now we're the overdog. I think there was authenticity to the ACLU in the sense that I remember this from childhood. It was one of the most influential events for me, even though it was only ten at the time when it happened. I just became very interested in it and started reading a lot more about it as a teenager in 1978, which was when the american nazi party, which was a band of like, 30 losers and misfits, but they were walking around in nazi costumes and stuff. They applied for a parade permit in Skokie, Illinois.

North Shore, Chicago, overwhelmingly jewish suburb.

Not just overwhelmingly jewish suburb, but particularly known for having a huge population of Holocaust survivors. People were in actual camps. So imagine the trauma for people like that to see people in actual nazi uniforms marching through their town. People with swastikas on their armbands.

Pretty heavy.

Yeah, yeah. And they had their permit rejected on the grounds that it was a threat to public safety or whatever. But obviously it was politically and ideologically driven because the people of Skokie hated the ideology of the nazi party, for obvious reasons. And the ACLU, despite being composed almost entirely of leftist jewish lawyers and having donors that were overwhelmingly leftist Jews who were donating to the ACLU, in part because they were also defending the civil liberties of communists. In the fifties and sixties, communists were barred from becoming lawyers and being admitted to the bar because their ideology was considered to prove poor character and fitness and the like. And a lot of those precedents came out of the idea that you can suppress communist speech. And the ACLU fought to preserve those free speech rights. And then they did the same for the american nazi party. That position that they took and ultimately prevailed on was something that destroyed the lives of almost every single one of those lawyers. And the organization. I mean, almost every jewish supporter of the ACLU, including ones who worked there, quit and discussed, turned off their donations and discussed and basically destroyed the organization, came very close to bankrupting it forever.

And that's what made it so interesting to me, was that they were so devoted to this principle that obviously was in defense of a view they obviously found not just disagreeable, but horrific, to the point where they were willing to sacrifice their careers and reputations in pursuit of that principle. And I just remember being so enamored of that posture. So they have proven that they. And even now, you have, like, a few of the remnants. You have a few of these remnants of, like, old ACLU lawyers, for example, they represent right now the NRA, because the Cuomo, the Andrew Cuomo administration sought to destroy the NRA explicitly by threatening banks, by threatening advertisers, by threatening anyone who's doing business with the NRA, that they will have their state contracts cut off. And the ACLU, like the old lawyers of the ACLU, like the real free speech ones, looked at that and said, obviously, you can't have the state government setting out to destroy a political advocacy group because of their hatred for their ideology, and represented the NRA and sued the state of New York and actually won on the grounds that Andrew Cuomo had violated the free speech laws.

But primarily, like so many institutions in the wake of Donald Trump, they became completely corrupted, in part because they were, for the first time, you know, they would post like, we're going to take Trump to court on this, and we're going to take Trump to court on that. They were, you know, turned into heroes. Like, the ACLU had been pretty marginal. Their whole, you know, existence. They were flooded with tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars, and they became this very well funded, powerful organization. And they knew that they were captured as a left liberal advocacy group solely to destroy Trump. And now, essentially, the entire organization is unrecognizable. And you have that key event where they defended the right of nazis or white nationalists to march through Charlottesville. They represented them. And then you had that woman who was killed by one of the parade protesters, the white nationalist protester who ran over Heather Heyer. And that caused this huge uproar in the ACLU. People who worked on lgbt issues or immigrant issues saying, why are we representing white nationalists and their free speech rights? And it's like, do you know anything about the organization?

That you actually applied for a job and then joined? But they didn't. And that was when the ACLU, for the first time, retreated by issuing this memo saying, in the future, we're going to weigh the value of free speech versus other political harm. And so many other instances then where they've taken positions that would have been completely anathema to the ACLU. And to me, this is so illustrative of what happened to left liberal political culture. The parts of it I used to really like is that it was renounced all in the name of defeating Trump, which in turn, had all kinds of financial values and benefits and benefits and power and the like.

So if you're paying any attention at all to what's going on in the world, you've probably asked yourself, what would I do? Not just for myself, but for the people who love me and I'm responsible for my family. What would I do if things really went south, either for a short period or a longer period? If there was an emergency, how would I respond? Well, of course you need food and water. You need security, some way to protect yourself and your loved ones. You probably have taken care of all of that. But one problem you may not have addressed is, what do you do about medicine? If there's a medical problem when there's not readily available medical care, what do you do for your family? And that's a tough question to answer, actually. But now there is an answer, and it comes from Jace Medical. It is a personalized emergency supply of medicines you might need, antibiotics, other life saving medicines to treat a long list of problems you could have, bacterial illnesses, respiratory infections, skin infections, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Things that could come up and happen when you can't just drive over to the doctor.

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Simply go to mypatriotsupply.com and secure one for each family member. That's $50 off every four week emergency food kit. Order by 03:00 p.m. and your kits shipped that same day. It's better to have emergency food than to need it and not have it. Shop mypatriotsupply.com my patriotsupply.com. so many questions. Just take a quick detour. What's so scary is, you know, I never liked any of the people in the ACLU. Like, I don't think I want to have dinner with them. But I, like you, absolutely admired, almost revered, their commitment to principle. You know, I, I'll die for your right to say something that I hate.

Right?

Okay, so I love that. And I still do love it. That was on the left. That was the best thing about the left. That and their anti war instincts, in my opinion, it's all gone. So it kind of migrated right. And conservatives start talking a lot about free speech, to my joy.

And then, you know, and also criticism of the us security state are found only on the right now in the white of Trump. All that inversion happened.

But then, you know, six months ago, all of a sudden you have people on the right being like, no. Well, you know, that speech is violence. If you're making people threatened by saying things they don't like, it's like stealing almost word for word the language of the, what are they used to call them? Snowflakes.

Yeah. The social justice war.

So maybe we need hate speech laws now. And then all the republicans vote for a hate speech law.

So it is. First of all, let me just say that, like, this has been there for a long time, lurking this huge contradiction in right wing politics. And I actually have done shows. Well, prior to October 7, there were an articles. Well, prior to October 7, even with my new alignment with a lot of conservatives who now appreciated my free speech advocacy and my criticism of the us security state, you know, lots of people who said, like you, oh, I used to really, you know, put my trust in the NSA and the NSCIA. And then there was this Snowden reporting and all these other things, seeing their abuses politically against Trump, that made me realize, you know, you were right. So I had a lot of new right wing, if not allies, like people who were followers of my work and readers and the like. But I was always aware of the fact and even saying, you have a huge Israel exception embedded within your worldview. Because it wasn't just since October 7. It's been for a long time that while a lot of right wing speech has been targeted with censorship on campus, and I've been very vocal and objecting to that, among the most common and frequent targets of censorship, both on campus and generally, United States have long been Israel critics, professors who have lost tenure because of it, who have gotten fired because of it.

There was Norman Finkelstein, who had his scholarship approved for tenure at DePaul University. And Alan Dershowitz went on a jihad against him to destroy his career and won and basically made him unemployable. There was a professor at the University of Illinois in 2014, Steven Salacia, who was given a contract for tenure. They found tweets of his criticizing very harshly Israel for its 2014 bombing of Gaza, and he got fired. University of Illinois had to pay him a million dollars, but they were pressured by donors. And there were students, jewish student groups, saying, we don't feel safe on campus with someone who's so harshly critical of Israel. So this has been going on for a long time. This is not a new development, but since October 7, and I have a lot of friends in my life who are jewish but were either skeptical of Israel or kind of apathetic to it, who got really radicalized after October 7. So Israel has kind of been on the back burner for a long time. So those contradictions weren't very apparent. Now, you listen to the pro Israel right, and they sound, and not ironically or like, you know, as parody or some strategic maneuver, they sound exactly like the left liberals who they've been heaping scorn on for the last decade.

You cannot enter a discussion with an Israel defender without them immediately accusing you of being a racist if they disagree with you. Oh, you're an anti semite. And this is one of the primary right wing grievances against liberals for the last decade. Oh, the minute you disagree with the liberal, they call you a racist, they call you a bigot, they call you a transphobe, they call you a misogynist. Try and have an argument, even like a substantive civil argument disagreement. Criticize Israel just a little bit and count down the number of seconds before you get accused of being motivated by bigotry and hatred. It'll be seconds. And these are the people who say, oh, I hate the tactic of accusing everyone you disagree with them being a racist. That's their only tactic. Their go to tactic. The minute you question, like, why is the US financing Israel's military in its wars when it not only hurts our own country, but when millions of Israelis are having better standard of living than millions of Americans, you're a jew hater. You hate. You know, you have some kind of problem with Jews. So it's the same tactic there.

Do they say that to you constantly being jewish? Is not in any way does not give you any kind of immunity from that accusation. Like, zero.

Are you an anti semite?

What?

It's so crazy.

Yeah. I mean, well, it's the same thing. You know, it's like black, you know, this is the amazing thing is I did a debate with Alan Dershowitz in Manhattan on Tuesday. It's about to come out, which nominally was about whether the US should go bomb yet another enemy of Israel in the Middle east, this one, Iran, but in reality turned into this broader debate about neoconservative dogma. And he actually wants regime change. And they did a vote before and after. And like 70% of the audience was with me, which was bizarre because it was the Upper west side, but the 30% who were not were extremely vocal both during the debate. But then as I was leaving, I was accosted by I would say, like two dozen of them. And they were hurling insults and screaming and trying to be menacing. And their main argument was, how can you be a jew and say these things about Israel? And I was trying to say, like, I don't think my being a jew compels me to have a certain set of ideas about foreign policy or this foreign country. And the amazing thing about that is there has been this sense all the time.

Like, if, you know, if a liberal sees a black conservative or a gay conservative, they'll immediately say, oh, you're an Uncle Tom. You have some psychological problem that you're self hating. How can you be a black conservative? How can you be a gay conservative? As though being part of these demographic groups somehow compels you to embrace a certain political ideology. Like, there's a relationship between your skin color and the political ideology that you have to embrace. That was always something argument on the right. Like, why, just because someone's black, are they automatically enslaved to the Democratic Party? And yet so many people on the right now say, oh, if you're a jew, you have to have unquestioning support for Israel. But, like, what if I don't? What if I think the government of Israel is actually wrong? But it's that tactic, like, you hate jews, or if you are jewish, you're self hating. And then the hate speech, you know, I've been hearing from liberals for the last decade, oh, yeah, we want free speech, but some things are over the line in our hate speech and they endanger minority groups because words are violence and words can incite violence.

And this has been the thing that the right has been scoffing out. Like, oh, these little left wing snowflakes on campuses want the administrators to intervene and protect them from ideas that make them uncomfortable. There's nothing that we've heard other than that from the last seven months from pro Israel conservatives, other than, oh, these poor little jewish students at Harvard and Yale and Princeton who grew up extremely wealthy and go to the most elite colleges, are now somehow endangered, even though there's no record of violence at these protests. Like, almost none, because hearing chants that are pro palestinian or anti israeli make them feel vulnerable. Like the conservatives in Congress, like Elise Stefanik and Virginia, all Mike Johnson, they had, like, a horde of jewish students from Harvard coming and saying, I don't feel safe at my school. The very things that conservatives have been mocking so viciously, when that came from black students or trans students or immigrants or Muslims or whatever, the hypocrisy, the stench of it is suffocating and nauseating.

From my perspective as an american, I think you can have any opinion you want on Israel. I'm not actually that interested. I personally like Israel. Whatever the red line for me is, this is my country. My birthright is free speech. God gave me that right. You cannot take it away. And if you're telling me what I'm allowed to say in my country, you're my enemy. It's just kind of that simple. You can't tell me what to say or think, period. Because I'm an american.

Exactly. And. But if there were a consistent standard, like, let's say there were consistent, period.

Like, let's just walk back from there.

Right. But if there were some consistent standard, like, western Europeans have hate speech laws, whatever that kind of. They don't really apply them consistently. But at least there's, like, a dogma. Like, hate speech is not part of free speech in the United States. We don't have a hate speech exception to the first. There is no such thing. So if you suddenly now start, you know, and it's not just in the discourse, they're passing laws. Oh, I mean, where, like, Greg Abbott issued an executive order that said there will be no more anti semitism, meaning anti semitism speech, antisemitic speech, or ideas allowed in the state of Texas. And you have, I don't know if you saw the video this week, but there was a video emerging where a school administrator went to a group of palestinian protesters and said, I just want you to know, if you chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free or globalized, the intifada, you will be turned over to law enforcement. We will call the police on you and you will be arrested and held legally accountable. That is now a crime. In Texas. They passed a law.

Is that actually true?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, the whole point of Greg Abbott's executive order was to say no anti semitic speech is permissible in Texas any longer. You're allowed to have anti black racist speech. You're allowed to have anti muslim speech. You're allowed to have white, anti gay speech. You can have anti white speech. You just can't be anti semitic to the point where these students are now being told that if they do these political chants, no violence, no obstruction of buildings, nothing illegal, the chants themselves, the ideas themselves will be decreed illegal. Now, as you say, like, you don't have to hate Israel or whatever, but we talk all the time like you have at every pro Israel rally in the United States. You will hear people saying, wipe out all the Arabs. Turn Gaza into a parking lot. Gaza belongs to Israel. We constantly talk about bombing this country, bombing that country. We're always advocating violence against this group, against this country. You know, this country is illegitimate. There's only one country that has the protection of these laws, which is the country of Israel.

You can't have these laws in the first place.

No.

And it's so obvious if they were chanting expel Tucker Carlson from the country. Well, I am Tucker CARlson, so obviously I'm opposed to that. I would have exactly the same position that I have on this or any other speech related matter, which is I'm an American. Every American has the right to say exactly what he thinks at all times, period. Period. Like, I thought that was the whole point of the country.

And like, and let me just say, too, that, like, just because I hear this argument so much, and I think a lot of people who are conservatives, who understand that they're now veering into this territory try and justify it by saying, look, we're only doing this because the left has been doing it. We're not going to allow the left to do it for sure, and we're not going to do it right constantly. That's the justification. And the thing is, this is the big delusion, as I was saying, about these protesters being fired as pro Israel critics have long been one of the most common targets of censorship. I'll just give you an example. There were 23 different red states, including Texas and Greg Abbott, but also New York and Andrew Cuomo, who well, before, you know, in the, in the, like in the Obama administration and then in the Trump administration passed laws that said this. It said, if you are a contractor. And you work with the state from now on, you have to sign a pledge that you do not believe in and will not participate in a boycott of the state of Israel.

And I interviewed this woman, profiled her once. She was this speech pathologist in Austin, Texas. She was. Her specialty was. She worked with children who had.

What does that mean? Boycott? So you can't refuse to buy israeli products?

Yeah. Like, there's a movement, like, like, you know, in the 1980s, there was a movement to divest from South Africa to boycott South Africa, not to go to South Africa, not to buy its goods in order to bring down the apartheid regime. So there's a similar movement called the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Like, let's not invest in Israel. Let's not go to Israel. Let's not support its products in order to end the occupation and give the Palestinians a state in the United States. In 24 different states, there was a, there's a law that says you cannot get a contract with the state unless you now sign this pledge saying you don't support this boycott and will not participate.

You have to sign a loyalty pledge to a foreign country.

Only one. This is the amazing thing. You're allowed to boycott any other country in the world, including your own. You can boycott Peru, you can boycott South Korea. You can say, I'm not going to buy Norwegian.

Boycott South Dakota.

Well, that's the other thing.

Wisconsin.

Andrew Cuomo, who has a. Who did this by executive order, said that anyone who boycotts Israel has no right to have a contract. He wrote a Washingtonpost op ed. The headline was, if you boycott Israel, we'll boycott you. Not six months before that and six months after. By executive order, he required state employees to boycott the state of North Carolina and then the state of Indiana in protest of their bathroom bills that they enacted for, you know, if you. You have to use the bathroom of your biological choice. So not only are you allowed to boycott your own country and harm economically the citizens of other states, Andrew Cuomo actually ordered boycotts of american states while at the same time banning anybody from boycotting the state of Israel. It's a single country that has all kinds of special privileges and rights. And let me just tell you another thing.

Did anyone say anything about this?

Well, I was writing about all the time, but few people cared. Finally, those cases got brought to the courts. And thankfully, courts have overwhelmingly, almost unanimously said this is a grave violation of the First Amendment. Are being struck, struck down. But the. I'll tell you something so amazing, this just kind of encapsulates it for me. So, Ben Shapiro, a good friend of yours and a longtime political ally, obviously, one of the main kind of unifying views of conservatives is that we shouldn't have job set aside for certain groups. We shouldn't have, we shouldn't judge people based on the color of their skin or their ethnic group when hiring or.

Their religion, or it should be a meritocracy or can you do the job best?

Exactly. So Palantir, which is a intelligence corporation that was started by Peter Thiel and that has all kinds of contracts with the CIA, the Defense department, but it's run by jewish vocal supporters of Israel, announced in October or November after hearing all this stuff about jewish students being discriminated against because of their views or whatever. And it was never really jewish students. It was pro Israel students, students who support the war, because a lot of these protests have overwhelming numbers of jews inside these protests. Yeah. So it's not a hostility toward jews. It's a hostility toward anyone who supports this war that they're protesting against. Palantir announced that they were creating 180 new jobs that were available exclusively for jewish students on campus who felt like they were being made uncomfortable. It was 180 jobs. No christians could apply, no muslims could apply, no atheists could apply, no black people, only for Jews. Ben Shapiro saw that, and he went onto Twitter, and above that, palantir announcement, said something like, wow, this is fantastic. And then after his own followers spent the day saying, what do you mean? This is exactly the thing you're supposed to oppose.

At the end of the day, he was kind of forced to say, yeah, you know what? Maybe it would be best if it were open to everybody. But then, like, what's the point of the announcement? He would never have commented. Obviously, he was happy about that. Barry Weiss, same thing. Ms. Like, anti woke this is identity politics, as pure as it gets, creating 180 jobs solely for jewish students. And it's, I think, very hard to make the case that jewish Americans are, like, an endangered or marginalized minority in the United States. Very, very hard to make that case. When she saw that announcement, she put this, like, very excitement. Wow. On top of it. And so you see this, like, utter and complete abandonment of what these people have been claiming were their principles, not even in defense of their own country or people in their own country, but this foreign government in Tel Aviv. And, you know, when you watch something like that and you see a political movement expose itself as a complete fraud, now, I should say there are a lot of exceptions to, like hardcore conservatives, like Chris Rufo has often condemned some of these bills.

You have too. Candace Owens has too. Tom Massey in Congress has been, like, incredibly steadfast to the point where APAC tried to take him out and failed. He just won his primary with like 76. But overwhelmingly, the pro Israel sector of the american right has proven itself to be such utter and complete frauds about virtually every value they've spent the last decade pretending to champion and believe in. And it's been sickening to watch.

The reason it's scary is, again, has nothing to do with Israel at all, about which I have less emotion than most Americans, apparently. I just don't care that much either way. But what's scary is if there's an alignment between left and right, which is to say, everyone with institutional power on the question of speech, in other words, if you say something I don't like, I can put you in jail, then it's a totalitarian country by definition.

By definition, there is no totalitarian country in history that has offered free speech. And conversely, there's no totalitarian country in history that has refrained from using censorship, which is one of the reasons why it's so bizarre that if you now waive the free speech banner, you're accused code just like fascist. It's like, show me the fascist country that actually offers free speech, that doesn't use censorship. It's like a hallmark of fascism to do what you're doing. But, you know, I, well, I know.

And I've been attacked recently for just asking questions on, by the right. I've been on the right my whole life, like since childhood, and just asking. Oh, you're just asking questions like, well, yeah, you're, that's kind of, like, important.

But here's the other thing towards my job, this is the other amazing part of it is like, you know very well that under Trump, and I think this is one of the things that Donald Trump has, has done that has been very positive, is he drag the Republican Party away from the kind of Bush Cheney neocon orthodoxy and even going back to the kind of cold war of endless wars and stuff by saying we shouldn't be focusing on all these other countries and we should be focused on our own citizens, especially because they're not doing very well. By every metric, every city is filled with addicts and communities that are being devastated and falling. Infrastructure. You compare the infrastructure of the United States. Every time I come here, I, like, come to an airport and see roads, and you go to Asia or places in the gulf and even in western Europe. The difference is so obvious. It looks like it's a crumbling country on every level, and we're spending all this money to benefit other countries. So the Republican Party has basically rebranded as America first based on the idea that our primary priority should be the people of our country.

I can't tell you how many republican members of Congress or republican journalists or pundits I've interviewed over the last two and a half years who say we can't be financing the war in Ukraine because we don't have the money to be financing other countries wars, nor should we be doing that. Our focus should be on our own country. And every single time, well before even October 7, I would ask them, does that also apply to Israel? And they would kind of stammer and stutter and not want to say it. But now you say you don't care about Israel. And I totally understand that. The problem, though, is that Israel has received far more aid from the United States than any other country by far over the last three to four decades. We pay for their military. We pay for. Every time there's a new war, we send them billions and billions of more on top of the $4 billion a year that Obama negotiated with Netanyahu. Not only do that, but we arm them. The bombs that they use to kill gazan civilians come from the United States. And I think worst of all, we isolate ourselves from the entire rest of the world.

Do you know how many votes there have been at the UN over the past seven months where the entire world is on one side and Israel and United States stand alone on the other with a couple of those tiny little countries that we often bribe, like Micronesia and Marshall islands, the part of the coalition of the world.

Micronesia.

Yeah, exactly. Micro. It's like. So it's also just the standing in the world, like our sacrificing of soft power. So we give up so much for Israel in so many other ways that if you're an american citizen, you have to care about it, even if you don't want to. You know, one of the stories we.

Did, what I meant was I don't. I feel emotional. Like, I just have, like, gut level affection for it because I've had such a nice time there, and I'm. I like so many Israelis personally and know a lot, and I just like there's nothing more wonderful than having dinner in Jerusalem on a summer night. It's just, I just so I have a lot of affection, I guess that's what I'm saying. So I'm not sort of animated by, you know, any. Anything really. I'm just like, trying to. I live here. So do my kids, so did my ancestors. It's like I just care about this country. And if you're changing my life or stripping my rights from me that we've had for 250 years on behalf of any other place, you are my enemy. Like, it's just that simple. You are my enemy. I mean, I don't know what to say. I don't want even to even have this conversation.

Well, that's the amazing thing, is that. That the devotion to Israel is so great and so incomparable to devotion of any other foreign country that it's to the point that their supporters, supporters of Israel, are willing to deconstruct and erode and sacrifice the core basic rights that as Americans, by definition, we're supposed to enjoy. That is what's happening.

This is my country. I'm from here. I'm going to die here. I will not accept that. And I don't care what you call me. You can't take away my right to say what I think. That is the foundational right in the United States of America. And it's the only thing that prevents us from becoming, you know, stalinist, period. Who came up with the idea that you only vote in November in elections. No. You vote every single day with your time and your money. You show your preferences, you put your support, support behind things you believe in, and you withhold support from things you don't. You can do that with your cell phone, by the way. There's a wireless company that if you're not on board with what's going on in this country at the highest levels, you can make your preference known. It's called pure talk. It's probably something you should consider. It is proudly veteran led. It is led by veterans of the us military, and it supports american jobs by their customer service team. All of them are right here in the United States. Whether company can say that, by the way, not many.

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Well, I remember you and I talked about this on your show, I think three, four weeks, maybe after October 7, when all these calls for restrictions on speech were starting to emerge. And one of the things you said, which I remember, was by some weird inversion or collection of various events, it has been the american right over the last decade that has been defending the cause of free speech, which is absolutely true. It's one of the reasons why I've had more alignment with the right than with the left, because that's a primary cause of mine. Always has been, always will be. And you said, if the right now starts abandoning that and advocating for censorship, because now the views that are being targeted are no longer ones they love, but ones they hate, namely criticism of Israel, the right will never have credibility ever again to pretend that it believes in free speech. Because if you go to North Korea and you praise the government, you're not going to be bothered at all. You can go to any country, any tyrannical country, if you express the views that people in power want to hear, you're always going to enjoy the blessings of free speech.

Free speech is for dissidents. Free speech is for people who have opposing views, minority views, and so to watch the right wave the banner of free speech because it was conservative speech being targeted, everyone will always be in favor of free speech in defense of their own views. The only real task for the authenticity of a free speech advocate is when it comes time to defend free speech for the ideas you hate most, which is why what the ACLU did was so admirable. Of course, I search out on purpose the cases where the views I hate most are being assaulted and censored to defend free speech there, because that's the only way you can really defend that value in a meaningful way and defend your country.

Like, what does it mean to defend the United States? It means to defend the Bill of Rights, the thing that makes this country. It's on a market economy. It's our system of government is based on the idea that you have rights you were born with. They were not conferred to you by government and cannot be taken away by government. And that is, that's the unique idea that is the idea. And if there's any idea worth defending, it's that. And if that goes away and people who have more powerful computing power or more money or access to the levers of power or can use violence in a state sanctioned way, they can stop you from saying what you think. If they can force you to believe certain things, we're just done. We're done like that. You're not allowed to wreck my country. Actually, that's how I feel about it.

Well, and also, you know, we were talking about Snowden earlier. I mean, one of the real cause that motivated Edward Snowden was not so much the right to privacy. Obviously, that was a big part of opposing the surveillance state. What it really was was preserving this incredibly new and powerful innovation that had emerged in his adolescence that he became very enamored with, which was the Internet. The Internet is a remarkable weapon for citizens to communicate with one another, to spread information, to organize, without the ability of state and corporate power to intervene and control it. And he saw the degradation of the free Internet, which was always the principle. You go back to the mid nineties with the proclamations about the importance of the Internet was always a free Internet. Keep your hands off the Internet.

That was the whole point.

Yeah. And they degraded it into one of the most powerful systems of surveillance ever created. But this cause of free speech really means now mostly free speech in the place where we communicate most, which is the Internet. That was why the Biden administration's systemic attempt to force these big tech companies to remove dissent, two separate courts have now concluded where one of the gravestones on the First Amendment was so offensive to me, but the similar thing comes from the other direction. And if you take away the right of free speech, it not only means, it doesn't only mean that people who dissent lose the ability to express that dissent without being punished. What it means even more seriously, and I think more destructively, that we don't often think about, is that it enables power centers to propagandize without challenge. We drown in a closed system of information that power centers approve of because they've eliminated all these other ideas as disinformation or hate speech or incitement of violence or whatever theories they invent to erode free speech. And then we're hopeless. We're totally impotent. Every other right we have doesn't matter because our minds are controlled, what we believe is manipulated.

So we'll be obedient, we'll be conformist. Those other rights won't be necessary because we'll be good, conformist, obedient citizens who don't realize how propagandized we are. And that is what's at stake. And so when you see any group of people, especially ones who claim to be believe in free speech, suddenly abandon that and start cheering for censorship as a framework, it's incredibly dangerous, because even as a self interested matter, you know that this system will eventually be used against you, even if it's not at the moment. And conservatives of all people should know how easily it will be weaponized against them. And yet they're cheering for the very systems that they've spent a decade now claiming to hate, along with all these scripts about everyone's a racist who disagrees with me. And no, this isn't free speech. This is hate speech or hate speech hoax. Hate, hate crime hoaxes like Jesse Smollett. Hate crime hoaxes like Barry Weissensight pushed this idea that there are jewish students walking around and suddenly being attacked by violent hordes of anti semitic mobs and being stabbed in the eye with palestinian flags. And it all began with this one woman who is a longtime Israel activist, who claimed that it happened, and she went all over the media claiming, I was stabbed in the eye with a palestinian flag.

There was nothing wrong with her eye. There was nothing wrong with at all, because it didn't happen. Someone waving a flag was walking past her and it brushed by her. And that was a hate crimes hoax. And then Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, went two days later to the Holocaust museum and turned that one hate crimes hoax, that this one singular incident, and said, we are now a country where jewish students cannot walk out on the street without being endangered of being stabbed in the eye with a palestinian flag. So every single component of left wing culture that the american right has been heaping scorn on and viciously mocking and deriding for a decade are now their defining beliefs and tactics in defense of this foreign country.

So that, it's so interesting. So you mentioned Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss is, I think, pretty popular. I don't have strong feelings about Barry Weiss either way, but she seems very popular on the right and some parts of the right. So here's someone who's, you know, a liberal who's opposed to free speech and is a liar. How did she all of a sudden become, she's everything conservatives are supposed to dislike or oppose. Maybe not personally, she's very charming, actually. But, like, how did she become, like, a darling of conservatives?

Well, I think we talked about this before, but Barry Weiss got hired away from the Wall Street Journal by the New York Times on the same day that they also hired Bret Stephens away from the Wall Street Journal. And all the liberals were focused on and obsessed with Brett Stevens. They were all up in arms and angry that Brett Stephens was a climate denier. And now he was going to have the space as a New York Times columnist. But I was trying to get everyone to understand that the far more significant hire, the far more consequential person, was Barry Weiss. Because I had seen her. She's extremely shrewd. She's very cunning. She understands how media works. She's very smart. And I know I've gotten to know her personally, and she's impossible to dislike as a person. She's, like, incredibly charming and, I think, genuinely compassionate. You cannot dislike her as a person. I totally agree, and that's an important weapon. But one of the reasons why she became a folk hero is because she resigned from the New York Times was such a kind of denunciation of the New York Times ideological dogmen. There was a lot of truth to that, for sure.

But then if you actually look at. And I think this is one of the things that I've only come to understand recently, is that there's been a lot of focus over the last, say, decade under the banner of anti woke. And that's really Barry Weiss's kind of brand is like, I'm against woke ideology. I'm against media capture by ideology. And there was all this fixation on college campuses. And a lot of times people are like, why are 40 year old pundits and journalists constantly talking about what 19 and 20 year olds are doing on college campuses? Like, almost not just disproportionate, but a.

Little bit creepy, especially Ivy League college campus. Actually, who gives a shit in a country that's dying of fentanyl ods where people are so unhappy that life expectancy is declining, we're spending a lot of time talking about Columbia students.

Exactly. And like, you can say, well, those are future leaders. And it's true. But, like, 19 and 20. You know how fucking stupid I was when I was 19 and 20? Not as stupid as a kind of idealism and naivete. And just like, my view of the world was so simple because that's part of being young. Like, you kind of want that youthful energy. But the real reason is that the thing that is Barry Weiss's obviously animating cause is the cause of Zionism in Israel. That's. I don't think she would even deny that. And there has been this fear on the part of the israeli government and the pro Israel movement, that the greatest danger the israeli causes faces is the activism of students on college campuses, where it's the only place where robust criticism of Israel is tolerated. And it's the movement, as we were describing, where this boycott, divestment and sanction movement has taken hold. And that was in part the thing that brought down apartheid South Africa, which is a very close ally of both Israel and the United States. And they were petrified that if that took hold, and that would become a very effective movement against Israel, weakening its position, weakening its standing in the world.

And so there were all kinds of strategic memos of saying, we need to target college campuses and make sure that this is. That this climate is transformed. And the whole reason why people like Barry Weiss and Bill Ackman, who uses his billionaire status, suddenly become political activists, focus so much on college campuses wanting professors, wanting a university president. Inspired, Bill Ackman led the way of saying, any college student who signs an anti Israel petition will be permanently blackballed. And all his billionaire friends and hedge fund managers and corporate CEO's and people at Palantir joined in, is because they identified college campuses as the place where Israel criticism was bubbling over and was really being active. It's the same reason that tick tock got banned. You know, this tick tock ban, if you think about it.

I thought it was because of China.

No.

Okay, so I'm just kidding, right?

I know. So when it was first introduced, that was the idea, right? Like, we can't have the chinese communist party gathering data, as though, like, all of that data is not available on the open market. Like, there was a big scandal that the CIA and intelligence communities were buying on the open market huge amounts of data about american citizens.

They're listening to us on this right now.

Everything is tracked. You don't. Why would China need to create an app to get all this buying information that they can buy from anywhere else? So. And at the same time, like, the people who run tick tock are pure capitalists. Like, the guy who's the CEO was born in Singapore. He went to the London School of Economics. Then he went to Harvard. He worked for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. Like a classic. All he cares about is money. But this idea of banning TikTok has been around for four years, and it couldn't get passed. It was considered way too extreme. Like banning american citizens who voluntarily choose to use this app to find communion, to spread ideas, to make themselves heard, to read news. Taking that away from them or forcing a sale was considered way too extreme. And yet suddenly, after October 7, instantly an overwhelming bipartisan consensus formed in order to ban it, ran through Congress, and President Biden signed it. Why? You go and ask any one of the sponsors of this tick tock band. Wyatt finally got enough people to support it after spending so many years, not even near a majority.

And they will all tell you that the reason is because they became convinced that there was far too much Israel criticism being permitted on TikTok. That was the issue that became the tipping point for banning an app that 180 million Americans, a third of the country, voluntarily choose to use. It was because of the Israel issue. And I think, like, we're required so often to tiptoe around this. You know, you get accused of, like, pushing anti semitic tropes that, like, Jews are behind everything and have to live.

In a free country. Just leave me alone. I just want to live in a free country. That's also.

It's not just, I don't care. It's not just american Jews who are inculcated from birth with the idea that they have particular stuff with, like, evangelicals is people in the national security state. Like, this country has such a special status and a hold. And it's not me, like, speculating that Israel was the reason. The people who got the bill through Congress say that the tipping point was that all these members of the Democratic Party who previously resist, resistant to banning tick tock, became convinced that that was one of the major sources that was allowing Israel criticism and pro palatinian speech, meaning like, lots of videos circulating about, you know, gazan children dying. They wanted to ban the app or force it to be sold to an american conglomerate that would be far more susceptible to pressure from the administration, like Google and Facebook have been to censor it. That that was the reason they felt like the reason why young people turned against Israel because they were getting too much information on TikTok and it was too free. That should alarm everybody.

Well, it's, it's. Again, if you're an american and you just want to live in a free country, that's completely unacceptable. That's like, there's no way to describe that is anything but a state clamp down on free speech which is not allowed in the United States. That's totalitarian, just super simple. I'm really struck by how non obvious that seems to be to everybody. And I'm wondering, like, where's the. You don't have a bill of rights, you don't have a free country. Unless someone's fighting for it. And I don't see anyone with power fighting for it.

So, no, I mean, well, it's so interesting. I mean, first of all, I think we have to acknowledge the reason the founders, when they created the Bill of Rights, guaranteed rights that they knew would otherwise be vulnerable if they weren't guaranteed by Bill of Rights. That's the whole point. And the very first right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment is the right of free speech. That was for a reason. They were kind of children of the Enlightenment, the idea that there's no more ability for us to put our faith in centralized authority to decree truth. We were endowed with the capacity of reason, and we're supposed to figure that out for ourselves without being. It's so foundational to everyone.

If you are not a slave, that is the marker of being a human being, the right to think what you want and to say what you want. If you don't have that right, you are not fully human right. And I feel that way as a Christian. I'm just going to say I think God created people. There's inherent value in every person. And that's why it's so important to me. It's actually bigger than America. It's like, are we going to treat people like human beings with dignity or we're going to treat them like objects?

It's one of the things that ultimately distinguishes us from other animal species, our capacity to reason, to engage in critical analysis. And so, but conversely, the reason that right needed to be guaranteed is because we are all tempted to look at the views we find most threatening and to hate and to want those banned, and to kind of invent theories as to why they should be. Even if we believe that we're supporters of free speech, like somehow these views that we hate most and find most threatening, those are something different. And you see the left having done that for the past ten years by claiming that people who question gender ideology are inciting genocide against trans people, or people who are opposed to racial reforms or affirmative action, or people who hate black people, people opposed to immigration hate non white people. So this is how they created these justifications for supporting censorship. And now the american right, I don't want to say now in the sense that they suddenly started because, like I said, it's been predating October 7 for a long time. But that's, you know, I don't think it's like so conscious that, oh, we're political censored.

I think they view Israel criticism as very dangerous. And very threatening. And they don't fight the human temptation that we all have to want the ideas that we most hate to kind of be out in.

You cared about your own country, comma, which you run. Which you run. You have an obligation to care about your country since it's your job to administer and run the country and preserve what we have for our children. You can't reach these conclusions. Like, if you are an office holder in the United States, you have one job, and that's to preserve and improve your country. And if that's not your main driving desire, then you're betraying your country.

Yeah. And I mean, I think, first of all, you know, we are all inculcated with the idea from birth. I know I was that the United States is the greatest country in the world. It represents freedom. I mean, we were born into the cold war where it was really important to believe that. But even after, and we were given explanations as to why that was true, it wasn't just, you know, a declaration. And, like, one of the reasons was that we have freedoms guaranteed that other countries don't. That was free countries.

Remember, people would say, exactly.

Look, and we were taught to revere the constitution. Constitution and the bill of rights and all of the values that it represented. So if you're willing to abandon those and sacrifice those, and this is the thing it would like the left, the american left has been accused of being, I think, quite validly embracing censorship. But at least they're doing it. I don't mean to justify it. I'm just saying distinguishing it. At least they're doing it in defense of what they consider to be other Americans who live here, minority groups who live here. And they think censorship is important to protect the ability of other Americans who are part of minority groups not to be endangered. It's a totally misguided idea. They exaggerate the extent to which everyone's being endangered. I think race relations in the United States are better than they've ever been, but that's at least their idea. What the censorship we're talking about now is designed to do is to sacrifice the rights of american citizens in order to benefit this foreign country to which people in the United States have obviously more loyalty than they do to their own country. And I don't just mean american Jews, I mean a lot of evangelicals, I mean a lot of non people.

And that is the part that is so bizarre and disturbing that the reverence for this foreign country. I mean, you can say anything you want about american leaders, about the leaders of your own country. You can say they're evil, they're criminal, they're corrupt, they're burning, genocidal. You can do any of that, that. You cannot do that about the leaders of this one foreign country can leaders about any other country you want, just not the leaders of this one foreign country. And like I said, I think the time to stop tiptoeing around that has long passed.

Well, I agree with that. And I say that as someone who spent, I don't know, a couple of decades just sort of avoiding the topic just because, I mean, almost all my friends love Israel. I have no problem with that at all. Great. Love Israel. I mean, it doesn't bother me at all, as I've said three times, and I mean it. I just have great affection for the country and the people who live there. I'm, like, hardly anti Israel, like, not even a little bit. I just care about my country. And all of a sudden, there's like, such a massive threat to our foundational rights stemming from this issue. And I think, of course, you face all sorts of, I mean, I've had people I know and really like and have known for decades, many decades call me or text me. You know, you're, and really attack me, actually. And I've always, I say exactly what I'm saying to you because let me.

Ask you, do you, I perceive, and I'm wondering if you do. I do think, like, for the last, say, five or six years when you had your Fox News 08:00 show, I think it's not controversial to say that you were. If not, I think I would say, the most popular and influential voice in american conservative politics, maybe second only to Donald Trump. And I seen that for a long time, only in the past seven months when you started expressing some dissent on this particular issue. And it wasn't even anti Israel. It was just, hey, why are we doing all this for this foreign country? Something you've been saying about Ukraine and many other countries. Is there a real animus for the first time among certain factions of the conservative movement in the United States, including very prominent people, not just to criticize you, but to try and exclude you, to try and destroy your reputation? Like, we were talking about that fake report that you had launched a new show on russian tv. And I watched the people who are celebrating that and spreading that. They were people who a year ago would never have dared criticize you this one issue.

And same with Candace Owens, who, you know, was incredibly popular among conservatives as well. And you can point to other people, too, it's this one issue that can just, you know, be the ultimate wedge. And I'm wondering if you perceive that.

I get, you know, I really try not to think about it. I think I don't want to become angry at all. And I think that just being as honest as I can be, I do think, and I have noticed this, you know, if you start focusing on the Israel question, people get really angry about this stuff, really angry, and it takes over their brains. And I just don't want that. You know, I'm a, I think a fundamentally happy person. I have a wonderful family and wonderful friends and I live in a wonderful place and I don't want to focus. I don't want to go crazy and be, like, mad. Okay. And I also don't want the concerns of a foreign country or the arguments about that country to define my views. I care about where I live and my family and preserving what I grew up with. And I don't mean money. I mean your values and your rights and your structure. Yeah, exactly. So I just have really tried to ignore it and tried not to get involved. And I know that people love Israel so much, which does not bother me at all, but that it makes them super emotional, whatever.

But when you start to tell me that as an american, I can't say certain things in my country, I won't have it, I just won't grab it. So I just really feel like I was pushed into saying something. And I also have a special concern for Christians in the Middle east. And so I've only done one interview in my life that challenged any, which.

Was with that pastor in the West Bank.

I know nothing. I know nothing about him and I'm not caring water for him. I just think it's a totally fair question to say, how are christians doing in the Middle east? And the answer is not well at all. And maybe we should hear from them. That was my only agenda right there. And all of a sudden, like, you know, I get attacked personally as some sort of crazed Nazi or something. That was too unreasonable for me. But even then I was like, I'm not going to engage. I don't want to have these arguments. It's not worth it. I've got a million different interests. This is not a great interest of mine. And as I've said five times, I just don't care that much. But then the speech thing, when you're wrecking my country and lying constantly and encoding those lies into my laws, then just, it's my patriotic duty to be like, no. And yes. Do you get destroyed for that, or do people try to destroy you? Obviously. And all of a sudden, Barry Weiss, who's like, you know, I've always gotten along with Barry Weiss. I'm not a guy. You know what I mean?

Super charming woman. I totally agree. Done a lot of things I like. All of a sudden, she's like, telling Eli Lake, who I know I went to same college as him. I've always liked Eli Lake. Writes some hit piece on me saying that I'm anti american and Ben Shapiro.

And the whole daily wire network.

Totally. So I actually, I was shocked. I don't read anything about myself. I'm a little bit cut off. So I didn't even know this happened. Someone sent it to me. Eli Lake attacked you and Eli Lake, whatever. I don't, you know, not a huge part of my life, but I've never disliked Eli Lake. So I texted Eli Lake, and I was like, you said, I hate America in this piece. You've got my text. Of course I texted him, why don't you just call me and ask me my views on America? I would just tell you because I'm, I think, pretty transparent about my views. No response. I said, you wrote a piece about my views. When you have my text, when you know me, why don't you ask me what my views are? I'm happy to go on the record and tell you what I think of America. He didn't respond, so I hit him again. He's like, I guess I should have done that. I'm like, no, this is. I mean, again, I'm not gonna dwell on it, or, I don't want to whine. I have no cause for whining at all in my life, period.

However, that's so dishonest that I just. It. It's like, oh, that's how it works.

But I think. I think it's such an important point because. So just let me say two things on this. One is, I think the thing that you've talked about most on your show, when you had the Fox show, and probably things I've talked about most, too, over say, like, the last two to three years has been the war in Ukraine, and for very similar reasons. Not because, like, who runs eastern Donbass or the Crimea is of significance to me. It's really actually not me too. It's because our country has become so involved in it, not just with money, but with, like, our weapons and risking escalation, that you feel obligated as an american, given that these policymakers in Washington have decided that our country, that is now our war. And I think that's the same thing with Israel. It's not like I have some special. I mean, you know, I grew up very much an american jew. Like, all four of my grandparents were jewish. My parents are jewish. Most of the people I went to school with were jewish. I consider myself a jew. I think jewish accomplishment is something to be proud of.

I have family in Israel. I have no animus at all. To me, it's the same exact policy principles that led you to criticize the war in Ukraine that have led me to criticize lots of wars, including the one in Ukraine. But the reality is, and I think this is so important is that. But it just is the case. And as someone who grew up embedded in american jewish culture, my grandmother fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s to come to the United States. She was a jewish immigrant, literally a jewish german immigrant who had a big german accent until the day she died. And only she and her younger sister came, and the rest of her family stayed and were all killed in the Holocaust.

Whoa.

So these were the things I grew up with and fed on and all of that. And for that reason, I know she sent me to jewish summer camp. I went for five straight summers. And you sing jewish prayers, and you're indoctrinated with the principles of jewish culture. American Jews are told and indoctrinated from birth that one of their duties is to be loyal to and defend and protect the state of Israel. Even if you're an American, you're a jew in Argentina, you're a jew in wherever that is something that being jewish kind of you're told from birth, obligates you to do. And then recently, evangelicals have also taken on this view that Israel is this country of great special religious and theological value. And so we do have a lot of people in the United States who, for various reasons, have decided that this one foreign country has such great importance that that if forced to choose between the two, and, of course, we have different national interests and different strategic interests all the time, that protecting and venerating and elevating Israel is a more important goal than even defense to our own country. And that is just the reality.

And you see it manifesting in so many ways so that the emotion. And that's why people can tolerate disagreements of almost every kind, you know? But we lost, I think, like, 15% to 20% of our subscriber base and our viewership, like, in the first four weeks of the. After October 7, because of my position on Israel. And people will say, I can disagree without anything, but this is the one issue I just can't tolerate, like after running the opposite direction. And I think it's important to acknowledge how many people are inculcated from birth to believe that. And that's the thing I think is our greatest obligation as human beings, why free speech is so important as well, and the ability to access other information. Like, I want to read what Russia is saying. The EU made it illegal to platform Russia state media. Adults in the EU, even if they want to, can't read russian media because now it's illegal. I want to have different information sources other than what my own country is telling me. Because one of the things you have as adult, I think, is the greatest obligation is to go back and reevaluate what you were trained and indoctrinated, inculcated to believe, and not just reflexively continue to believe that in adulthood because it was indoctrinated, but to reassess whether or not those really are your views as a result of your own critical analysis, or whether you have different views, including the role of our own country.

All of these things are so important to not being a propagandized kind of automaton. And it is just true for a lot of american Jews that this indoctrination is so extreme. I think now for evangelicals as well, that it's become the paramount view, like the view that subsumes every other. And I think that's why when you see this conflict between a devotion to protecting the civil liberties and free speech rights of american citizens, when that comes in conflict with this other goal of shielding and protecting Israel, so often the shielding and protecting of Israel wins out, even when it comes time to protect. And so that's got to be the red line.

That's got to be the red line. And again, even for people like me, you know, again, I don't have any problem with Israel. Don't have any problem with people who love Israel, people think Israel's great. I know it doesn't great.

I love other countries. I love Brazil. I love Brazil. I love countries that I visit. You can. You can love other countries.

I love Israel as a place to visit. And I'm not against it. If you don't allow me to say what I think or think what I think, you are not treating me as a human being, period. In the defense of human dignity has to be the highest goal, period. And you cannot treat me like a slave. And it's just gotten to this point where, yes, of course, obviously, there are massive drawbacks to saying that out loud, but, like, you don't have a choice at this point. You just don't have a choice.

Well, and I also think this is what I really believe, too, is that, you know, you've obviously gotten to a place in your career where you have a lot of security, where you have, you know, even with this dissent on this issue, a lot of people who still listen to you and trust you and are going to pay attention to you no matter what. I feel the same way. I mean, if I have, like, a success in my journalism career, I'm at the point where, you know, I feel, I don't ever feel like I need to be captives of my audience or feed them what they want to hear. I've always tried to cultivate an audience that knows that they can't expect to come to me and hear what they want to hear. They're at times, they're going to hear things that they violently disagree with, and I'm always going to respect them enough to make an argument. But that's part of what I hope they're coming to me for. But for a lot of people in journalism, especially with the destruction of jobs and the erosion of job security, as every major media outlet is laying off people in huge numbers and it's kind of a collapsing industry, the pressure and need to conform is greater than ever because most people don't have that privilege or that security that you and I both have at this point in our lives and career.

And I can't tell you how many times during Russiagate when I was as vocal of a skeptic of Russiagate as I could possibly be, from the very moment I first heard that script get unveiled by the CIA through the New York Times and the Washington Post, so many journalists who work at major media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post and NBC News and others would write to me and say, I'm so thankful for this skepticism that you're expressing. And of course, at some point, I was like, why aren't you expressing it? But I know why. Because if they did even one time, they become the target of the liberal mob on Twitter that would put pressure on their editors to fire them. They'd be the first to get laid off, the last to get hired. And so our journalism profession has become one where conformity is by far the highest value. And I think for those of us who aren't quite as vulnerable or as insecure in terms of our, you know, career position or need to keep a job, it's almost like you have an obligation to create that space that a lot of other people can't create.

That's really what I feel. And so no one likes having people who are your readers or your viewers or previous supporters, like, kind of turn against you or denounce you. Nobody likes being called names. It's not fun for anybody. But if you're going to do a job and have some kind of meaning to it, some kind of purpose to it, some kind of value that it based on, I feel like if you are in that kind of position, you have the obligation to take those risks.

Of course you do. And to be as honest as you can be, and, by the way, to keep to the extent that you can. But try really hard every day to keep the hate out of your heart if you do find your. I mean, there are some people I don't talk about. Not many, thank God, but there are some people I don't talk about or write about ever because I'm too mad at them. And I just. I don't want to feel that way. And I can smell hate on other people. Hate is one of those words that's been weaponized, and, of course, hate. But hate is real, and we do feel it. And in my religion, you're not allowed to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Like it's us.

Like, hate the sin but not the sinner.

You absolutely are not allowed to hate people. You have to forgive people. So there are, you know, there are a few people, individuals who I feel, like, really betrayed by Bill Kristol. I don't talk about Bill Kristol because I'm, like, I'm not rational, because I work for him for so long, and he's gone insane, in my opinion. But on this topic, like, I. You're not gonna stop me from saying what I think is true by accusing me of hate when I know that there isn't any hate. I'm not motivated by some weird animus or something, you know, some irrational dislike of anything. I'm just not gonna be. That's not. You're not gonna stop me.

But I think that's such, that that is, like, the attribute of being secure in yourself and your own values, that you don't feel like you have to prove anything, or there's an accusation made against you that you know is false, that you have no, it doesn't affect you at all, because you know, deep down, how you live, how you feel.

How can you smell it on other people? Oh, I see people, and sometimes, like, wow, that guy. There's a lot going on inside, and I don't want to be anywhere near that because I may agree with some of his views, but he's this. This rage. It's just. Oh, it's.

Well, I always had, like, um. And I think this has been so important. Like, I used to be a lot more vituperative in my rhetoric, like, a lot more aggressive, my rhetoric. And I heard. Yeah, and you, too. I heard you in that show where you talked to Chris Cuomo, and you guys were kind of laughing, you in particular, talking about our friendship. But you were saying how, like, nobody was meaner to you. And I don't even remember that because I was equally mean to everybody. But I never felt it was like a per. I never felt like I was condemning the person because I didn't know the person. I felt like I was condemning their views, the role they were playing in the political. But so many times, people who I viciously condemned or denounced, I end up becoming friends with because I never. I never wanted to, even when I'm. I think it's important as a journalist to very harshly criticize and denounce, you know, especially people with influence and power. It's one of your jobs, but it's important not to let that affect who you are, because it's so corrosive to be harboring hatred.

And by the way, what matters is people, and I would argue animals also, but that's what matters. And that, I mean, that's why we're having these debates, because we're trying to figure out what the best way to govern people, to live our lives, best way to structure our country. But all of those tasks are designed to produce the same outcome, which is happier people. So if you cease to care about people, then, like, what is the point of the exercise, right?

I had this really fascinating, like, actually transformative experience when I was a law student at NYU. I was like, you know, in my early twenties. You know, I grew up in the eighties, came of age in the eighties as a. As a gay teenager. And, like, the moral majority and Reagan were like, you know, the things I was taught to hate like, that were the threat to me. So anything conservative or socially conservative. And I had a roommate, and she started dating when I was in law school. She started dating this guy whose family were, like, Rush Limbaugh fanatics. And she would go there on the weekend and come back. And then she told me, she came back once and said, there's this forum on the Internet, where all the Rush Limbaugh conservatives go. It's sponsored by the national review and the Heritage foundation. It was in Compuserve. It was some, like, political forum. She's like, you have to go in there and just, like, provoke them and troll them and, you know, create all the disruption. So I did. And I started with the all malicious intent of just, like, angering them and, like, creating, like, all kinds of division in there, you know, and just saying the most offensive thing as I could possibly think of.

And then, like, the more I stayed, the more I started, like, having debates with them and, like, conversations with them. And these were, like, hardcore social conservatives. These were not like, the nice conservatives who just believed in some conservative dogma are very socially egalitarian. This was in the early nineties as well, when these debates were much different than they are now. And just my being gay, my being a lawyer in Manhattan, these were very evangelical people in the most rural parts of the country. And then I got to the point where I had stayed there for so long and debated with them for so long and talked to them for so long that we started finding commonalities. And then they had this yearly event where everybody would go and meet in person. And they invited me to go. And it was in some, like, suburb of Indiana at some, like, hilton. And I was like, you know what? I think I'm gonna go. And my friends were like, don't go. You're gonna be killed. It's a trap like this. You know, this is how you're taught to perceive other people. And I went, and I spent the weekend there, and everybody was so warm, so happy to see me.

I was so happy to see them. And these were the people I was taught wanted me dead. These were the people I was taught that I was supposed to hate. And it doesn't mean, like, I agreed with their politics any more than I did previously or that they agreed with mine. But seeing them as, like, actually good human beings who have the same concerns in their lives. I know it sounds so simple, but it's such an important lesson to learn because our society is constantly trying to divide us. And I think that's very purposeful.

It's what? Well, actually, the real nugget in the story is the fact that you went, well, why did you do that?

Because I had been there, like, eight or nine months, and I felt like these connections were real. I just felt, you know, it was almost like I had become part of this community. And some of them are, like, around still. They're like, writers, like, some work for, like, conservative outlets, and we always, like, laugh about that. But it was like, my first introduction to, like, Internet debate. It was at the time when the Internet was still, like, segregated with AOL or Compuserve. It was like that. It wasn't, like, interconnected Internet. It was, like, very. The incipient stages. But I went because I felt like I like these people, and I kind of felt like they liked me. And I originally went in solely with the purpose to provoke their hatred toward me and to hate them as well. That was, like, why I went in. And just being around them daily, day after day, first debating and then convert, it made me see their humanity and they saw mine. I was just as anathema to them as they were to me. I was openly gay, and I was a jewish lawyer, and I was working in Manhattan.

And these were evangelical housewives or, like, businessmen in, like, you know, rural Georgia or, like, Idaho. And, I don't know. I guess we just discovered each other's common humanity. And it's a very transformative experience for me about how you look at other people.

What a wonderful story. Well, obviously in you, maybe latent was, like, that priority. Other people matter more than anything.

Yeah. And I also, I think that, again, like, so much of the reason why we end up with the political views we have, like, sometimes you see people with political views that you just can't comprehend, you think are, like, malicious and destructive and insane. A lot of times, it's because that's what they were formed to be. That's, like, the byproduct of their culture and of their upbringing. And if you had the same upbringing, maybe you would think the same things. And I think the people who do that for a living and keep these destructive ideologies, those people really weren't your contempt. Like the mill crystals of the world, the Victoria new ones of the world, those kind of people, the Liz Cheneys, but ordinary people who don't pay much attention to politics. Before I started reading male politics, I was just reading the New York Times and the Atlantic and the New Yorker, thinking I was highly informed. And then when I started writing out politics and had full time to go and read original documents, not having information mediated anymore for me, I realized pretty rapidly almost everything I believed about politics was based on a fraud.

That was not like my own process of arriving at things critically. I just was stuffed with all these ideas that were not mine, that I passively ingested. That, too, was a very eye opening experience because. Shocking. Yeah. You know, you think you're a very smart person. You think you're educated, and then you realize, like, wow, you're just as susceptible to propaganda as anybody.

And I do think smart people are people who believe they're smarter, who have high verbal iq. You're clearly in that category. To a lesser extent, I am also. They are better at self deception, I think, than any other group because they're smart. And they read the Atlantic in the New Yorker. And I read the New Yorker. I read every issue of the New Yorker from 1993 until 2017.

Me too.

Every issue.

Yeah. Yeah. And I thought it was so informed and so was it.

A really interesting magazine, the Atlantic, under Mike Kelly and after his death, even. Wonderful magazine like that. You know, younger people won't even know what we're talking about. But, like, magazines were the way that you sort of, they were like the.

Think pieces, and they had, like, a bunch of different ideas in them.

I'd get on an airplane with my bag, and I'd have, like, nine issues of, you know, the New Yorker, the Atlantic. I read every single word in all of them. And then as I got older, I realized, like, I had no fucking idea what was going on. I was actually more misled than someone who hadn't been told anything was coming at it cold, like, I was completely propagandized. I didn't even know that. And I thought I was a free thinker.

Exactly. I know there's other experiences. I don't want to romanticize these kind of things, but I was once in Milwaukee, and I, like, in a suburb of Milwaukee. And I don't mean to romanticize, you know, middle of the country diners, but I was in a diner, and it was right at the time that the intercept had this scandal because they very poorly mishandled this source reality winner and unintentionally outed her. But the whole story was like she had given a document trying to prove that the Russians were interfering in the election, and it made the front page of the New York Times. So these people who were sitting at this, like, adjacent table, who were obviously just like ordinary people now, but, like, on their phone, they saw the top story of the New York Times, and it was about this intercept story. Obviously, that no idea was sitting at the next table, but they were really, what they were really saying was like, yeah, with all this Russia stuff, it's so hard to figure out what's real and what's not because it's all anonymous and it seems like it's all driven by some agenda.

I was like, I almost know, nobody who's paid to write about politics, who writes about journalism, who has that recognition, and it's like, by, like, through that distance, they're able to see things so much more clearly than the people who are immersed in it.

That is absolutely the truest thing and the most dangerous thing, because the people who are immersed in are the ones making.

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

So I don't even really want to get into Russia. I just can't resist asking you about Navalny and his death. That happened the day I left Russia, right. Right before the Munich security conference was also perfect.

Perfect timing for you.

And I'm literally on a plane going through Serbia to Geneva or wherever, you know, like, I'm totally cut off, and all of a sudden, I land on my phone, is just exploding. You know, Putin just killed Navalny. What was that? I mean, I actually don't have full perspective on it just because I was so far away. But, like, what was that story?

Well, first of all, we did this on our show, actually, for two weeks after Nabani's death. It was definitively asserted over and over in the most authoritative tones on every cable channel and in every newspaper that Putin ordered Nabani killed. Like, he had. He was his murderer. He had ordered his death. And, like, you know, I think you talked about this before, but this was at a time when the House Republicans were holding up the $60 billion from Biden. There was no reason in the world that Putin would have. And by the way, like, you go back 20 years to every president that ever dealt with Putin, starting with Bill Clinton and going on, and every single one of them has said he's an incredibly rational, restrained, trustworthy person. It was only when he had to be turned into the new Hitler diploma, whole thing reversed. So he is obviously rational. Whatever else you want to say about him, he's very sophisticated.

He's very restrained, actually. We can say that conclusively.

Exactly. And so why would he just suddenly tell people, it's time for you to kill Navani? It never made any sense, but we were told this. And also we have this cartoonish idea that he not only is manipulating every event in the west, but also every event in Russia. He must never sleep, and he must have cloned 100 of him, given how much credit he gets for having manipulated and controlled every event in his country and in our countries. But it then turned out like, just, you know, three weeks ago. This happened so many times before that the intelligence community admits that there's no evidence whatsoever that he participated in any way let alone ordered or requested or wanted Navani's death. And we obviously have the, you know, we're always told, like, we have everything in the Kremlin, like, under this microscope of surveillance. And, you know, how many times this has happened where media outlets have made some kind of assertion? No. Russian prisons are incredibly brutal, like a lot of countries are. They're very, very cold. They don't get good medical care. So I have no, it's not surprising that a prisoner put in the most brutal russian prisons would die.

But that's a completely different claim than what they were saying, which was that Putin had ordered him killed. And if you look at how many times, you know, there was this, like, story in the New York Times, exactly when Trump was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan that the CIA planted with the New York Times and Charlie Savage, the claim that the Russians had put bounties on the heads of american soldiers and were paying the Taliban money for every american soldier that they were killed. And then when Liz Cheney and pro war Democrats were working together to prevent and block Trump's desire to withdraw from Afghanistan, that was the only story they cited. They kept saying, how can we leave when the Russians are, you know, paying to, we're going to reward Russia? And then three months later or two months later, the intelligence community has very little confidence that that even happened. That has been the story of Russiagate from the very beginning. I mean, every single claim that came out as part of Russiagate, I mean, they, they unleashed Robert Mueller for 18 months with the dream team of prosecutors, unlimited subpoena Power, unlimited amounts of money.

And he then submitted a report when he was done with his investigation, that said we could not find evidence to establish what became the core conspiracy. The whole thing that initiated this scandal that drowned our politics for three years, which was that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to break into or hack into the emails of the DNC and John Podesta, and everybody just was like, okay, I guess we'll just move on to something else. Like the editor in chief of the new, of the New York Times said, we have to confront the fact that what we've let our readers to believe was going to happen, that this information was going to be discovered, these smoking guns, Robert Mueller was going to unleash it all and everyone was going to go to prison. None of it turned out to be true. This whole story was a fraud. This was the scandal that the media drowned our politics in for three years, starting with the middle of the 2016, up until 2018 or 2019.

So again, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Way to explain, Navalny. I really want to hear that. But you just passed over one of the most interesting moments in the last ten years, which was the hack.

Hack.

I don't know what was the theft of emails from the DNC and from John Podesta's personal Gmail account that wound up on WikiLeaks and the Russians were blamed for that. I thought from the first day, I don't know, but I suspected that was not true. What is true about that?

So let me just preface that, because I know how people react to these things. Like, if there's something that gets presented and then implemented as gospel, and the minute you challenge it, you're accused of being like a crazy conspiracy theory, because it's something everybody knows is true. So let me just say, if you look at the last, say, 40 years of american history, the one thing that is a constant is that so many of the things we are told are not just true, but unquestionably true. The most consequential things end up being complete lies. The claim that led us into the Vietnam war, that caused the Senate to authorize the military force in Vietnam was a claim about the Gulf of Tonkin that was a complete and total fabrication. 1964. The claim about. But the claims that led us into the Iraq war that everybody was so certain of was a complete and total lie. The thing that drives me the craziest to this day that I feel has never got enough attention, is that when that reporting happened from the New York Post, based on the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop about what they were doing in Ukraine and China, everybody in the media united to say this was russian disinformation went all along.

That archive was completely authentic. It had nothing to do with Russia. And it wasn't just information. So many times were told things so definitively that end up being proven to be lies. Russia, get another example. So the question of how those documents made their way to WikiLeaks, obviously, WikiLeaks insists that they had nothing to do with the Russians and didn't get it from the Russians. Now, that may be true, and yet at the same time, the Russians say, used a middleman. Yeah. So WikiLeaks might think they're telling the truth, they might actually be telling the truth, but it doesn't say that Russia wasn't involved. The problem is that there are a lot of people who oftentimes won't say it in public, but will tell you in private. I mean, very well connected people that they radically disbelieve the claim that the Russians hacked it. And the thing is, Aaron mate is one of the best people, most knowledgeable people on this, but there really isn't a lot of evidence that the Russians did the hacking. You know, this firm that they got is a democratic party propaganda firm, which is Crowdstrike. The FBI purposely hid a lot of the information that would have been necessary to examine it.

I'm not saying the Russians didn't hack it, but I'm just saying conceptually, if you don't question, especially the truths that are most aggressively shoved down your throat, after everything we've seen, I think you're an extremely gullible person. And in this case specifically, there's also a lot of holes in that story. And I think the big problem, and this was always my problem with Russiagate from the start, was not that the Trump campaign and then Trump administration was being sabotaged by the us security state with a evidence free scandal. That did bother me journalistically, this evidence free assertion that promenade our politics. What bothered me much more was the real agenda, obviously, was to blame Russia for everything to such an extent that the Americans started once again viewing Russia as this existential enemy, to the point where american diplomats couldn't speak with russian diplomats. And Washington, everybody was petrified of meeting with the Russian because they would be accused of being a russian spy. You're talking about the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. And I believe there's a straight line from the Russiagate fraud, from convincing people to feed on this anti russian narrative to what we're doing in Ukraine, which.

Is sitting on the brink of nuclear.

War, which Joe Biden said has brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe than anything since the 1962 missile, cuban missile crisis. And for some reason, we're willing to risk what even Joe Biden says is this massive risk of nuclear war that the atomic, the bulletin of atomic scientists has said brought the world closer to midnight, which is extinction level catastrophe. We're willing to risk all that over what? I mean, it was Obama who always said we have no vital interest in Ukraine. We obviously have no vital interest in Ukraine. And so much of this kind of deliberate intent to once again convince Americans that Russia was our grave enemy, was the existential threat, was interfering in our democracy, based on so many lies, had a lot of geostrategic implications and goals, as well as domestic political ones.

What. What's the truth of Navalny's death to Putin? Kill him.

I mean, I can't pretend to know. I know that the us intelligence committee, the us intelligence agency, admits he had no role in Navani's death, or, like, at least what we were told, that he ordered it. Yeah. Again, I think it's very possible that Navani died from the kind of conditions that people often died from in prison. Yes, those are very brutal conditions. It's extremely cold in those parts of Russia, Siberia. Yeah, exactly. And you're not exactly, like, given heaters in your cells and blankets. I'm sure he was treated very poorly. And so you can make an argument, I guess, that, like Russia, the russian government ethically is responsible for that. But what we were told was that Putin ordered it. And that was a complete and utter lies, like so many of the things we were told definitively about Russia and the russian government over the last, you know, eight or nine years. It's one of the most insane disinformation campaigns sustained, enduring and consequential disinformation campaigns that comes from the very people who insist that they are the sole guardians combating the dangers of disinformation.

When does America become a free and honest country again?

I think that there are a lot of encouraging signs, even though they seem negative. I love the fact, for example, that Americans hate the media and distrust the media pretty much more than any group that exists, except for pedophiles. And the margin is not that large. I think it's incredibly well deserved. Like, Americans have an intuitive understanding that corporate journalism, that the dominant wing of the media has renounced their journalistic function and are propagandists. They don't trust them. They believe that they lie on purpose for political ends. All of that is completely true. So they're turning away more and more from these media outlets. They don't trust them any longer. They're still in. You know, they're gigantic media conglomerates. As you know, you work for one. They have a lot of influence and power, but less than they did before. And again, for me, the cause of the free Internet, it's the reason why I moved my show to rumble and moved everything to rumble. It's one of the few platforms truly devoted to preserving a space of free speech on the Internet, which for me, is the biggest cause, because the Internet and the ability to use it to challenge establishment orthodoxies to organize against corrupt power centers is, for me, the real cause of hope.

But that only can happen if the Internet is protected as a free weapon, and that's what's being assaulted. Establishment sectors always know the greatest threat to them. They always seek to destroy it or to commandeer it. And that's what this whole fabricated disinformation expertise that appeared overnight after 2016. Like, these are the people who are the disinformation experts, these groups that are now designed to identify disinformation that gets censored. All of that is about eliminating dissent from the Internet and disguising political censorship as some sort of apolitical expertise or science safety measure. Yeah, online safety experts or online disinformation experts. Like, where did this credential come from? It's a fake credential, but Nina Yankovic is an online disinformation expert. Have you ever heard her speak, like, would you trust that woman to, like, even identify truth of anything, let alone, like, a floating arbiter of what true is true and false to the point that what she decrees is false, gets censored? But that's the industry. What really happened is, in 2016, you had these dual traumas to western liberalism writ large. One was the decision of the british people to leave the EU, which was an extraordinary thing for a country to do, followed three months or four months later by Donald Trump's obviously traumatic victory over Hillary Clinton.

From a liberal perspective, I mean, like, real trauma. Like, psychologists were saying they've been flooded with patients who are neurotic and, like, can't cope with reality because of their devastation that Hillary Clinton lost. That's like, a real thing. And what they decided, meaning, like, liberal western elite, was that we could no longer afford a free Internet. Because when the Internet is free, they can't control how people think, how they behave, and how they vote. And that is when you can trace, you can follow the emergence of this extremely well funded disinformation industry that was designed to assert an authority over controlling what information is and isn't online. So for me, as long as a free Internet continues to exist, you see this all throughout the west. In the democratic world, people are abandoning their faith in institutions of authority. And that abandonment of faith and trust in institutions of authority, for me, is the most promising development.

I couldn't agree with you more. I would say it's followed in the close second position by the collapse of the neocon governor of South Dakota, Christine Ohm.

I mean, I've never seen a more instant act of self destruction.

So how would you describe it? Like, give me the timeline on Christine Ohm, who, by the way, is like a screaming neocon and sort of a conventional liberal posing as a conservative or whatever. I mean, I've had a lot of problems with Kristen over the years. Makes me sad that people bought her bullshit. But what happened to Christine? Oh, makes me think that Americans are really nice people, actually, it turns out, and that was reaffirmed for me. But describe what happened.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, she's always been an obvious lightweight. I mean, she got it, like, you know, elected to the house in South Dakota, working her way through the political system, and then from that became governor. And I think people attributed to her a lot more talent and substance because of that than she actually had. So she was never like, an impressive force at all. She's a very, like, mindless kind of herd animal who just follows whatever dominant ideology she has to embrace in order.

To advance her career.

But I think her calculation was this kind of culture work calculation, that if she talked about what she perceives to be these, like, farming values, that it was going to provoke the disgust and anger of the liberal elite, and that conservatives would rise in her defense and say, no. These are the kinds of traditional values that have been lost and that the american liberal elite are to divorce from. The problem is that not putting bullets into the skulls of puppies in order to kill them because you hate them isn't just a liberal elite value. One of the things that has happened is that Americans love their dogs for a lot of really interesting reasons. I think it gives people a sense of spirituality, of connection. All the things that have been lost when, you know, when we now live in cities and work in cubicles, people create this kind of connection. People don't have children. They don't like across the political spectrum. And dogs open people up. Dogs have evolved to love and be loyal, trusted companions of humans and humans. To dogs, it's a very deep bond developed over a hundred thousands of years of evolution.

So there's a lot of things she could have done that might have worked in that way. But talking about how she pumped this puppy's skull full of bullets because, quote, I hated that dog, is something that provoked almost universal contempt. And that was. Gave me a lot of optimism. And it was even a worse story. Like, if you listen to her audiobook, she has an audiobook where she tells the whole story. She shot the dog but didn't kill it. She had to go back to her truck while the dog was suffering and from a wound, she had to then kill it with a second shot. She then took a goat, like, minutes later that she also hated because she said it smelled and was mean, put him in the same gravel pit and murdered him. And then she tells the story that her brother and her uncle, or I think that's two close relatives, said when she came back, we heard about this, like, rampage of animal slaughter that you went on. We're gonna get out of here before you shoot us. And this was in her book that she read in her own voice.

Like, even the members of her family thought she was like a psychopath to the point where she was being endangered. They were in danger. They were endangered because she was off on some, like, murderous rampage. And how she thought that that would engender any sympathy for her of any kind, rather than making her look like this deranged monster is completely beyond me.

Well, she was trying to pose as some sort of rural hunter.

Exactly.

Or something.

Exactly.

And as someone who actually has bird dogs and hunts them a lot, it was preposterous. Like, she has no idea what she's talking about. She shot the dog. She killed her own puppy because the dog chased and killed chickens. Now it's a bird dog, right? Chickens are birds.

Its instinct is to do that. That's why you get those dogs.

Of course. And the idea that this is common in rural America, shooting your bird dog.

It'S a defamation against farmers. Like, oh, farmers just go around repeatedly murdering their dogs the minute that they don't like their personality. She could have obviously given a delay to all kinds of animal rescue groups. There were all sorts of things she could have done. But I do think it was that calculation, but it was a huge miscalculation. I do think there's this legitimate conflict between east coast cosmopolitan liberals and people in more traditional farming communities. That's a real issue. But it's not about murdering your dogs.

So it's. It's cruelty masquerading as strength. Well, I think cruelty is not strength. Strong people are not cruel at all. Why would they be? Strong people are compassionate, actually.

Right. I think we need to inflict gratuitous suffering or death on others is a sign of extreme physical and moral weakness. And this is why you see all these people in Washington, neocons like Bill Kristol and David from, but then also like people like Lindsey Graham. And you see this in the british commentariat, where they had this empire that they've now lost. There's this, like, weak, broken, impotent, irrelevant, marginalized empire. And they speak about the glories and importance of war more than anybody, because it's a way that they feel strong and purposeful. And you have all these people in Washington who constantly, whatever war is proposed, immediately embrace it, because it's a way that they get to feel strong themselves, like compensating for the internal weakness and cowardice that they have. I mean, if you live your whole life and you never display moral or physical courage, you know that about yourself, it pains you. And instead of then doing something that requires courage, you instead send other people to go risk their lives in a war that you cheerlead. But it's like such a psychologically warped way of finding. It's like stolen valor. It is obviously courageous to go and fight in war for cause, but not to send other people to fight in a war for cause.

That requires no courage at all. But that is the kind of courage that, in Washington, people constantly embrace in lieu of actual courage. It's really like a psychological pathology, and it's so transparent.

The weaker the leader, the more arbitrary and cruel to other people the leader is.

Yeah. And you see it on the interpersonal level, too. Like the way, you know, people who treat people who have less power than them, who have less influence in them, who have less control. There are a lot of people who abuse those kind of people, and it's almost always because those people are weak, and that's the way they feel. Strong people who are secure in their own strength treat everybody, as you say, compassionately. I think that extends to animals as well. How many dogs do 26 at home? And then realizing that that was unsustainable, we then started this shelter where we have another, like, 200 or so.

Why do you have so many dogs?

It just happened organically. I mean, both my husband and I love dogs. We started rescuing dogs. And then, you know, I remember when we had five, we were like, no, five is our limit. And then, like, you know, someone calls up and says, oh, I just found two dogs that were hit by a car on a street, and they needed, you know, surgeries or they're going to die, they're suffering. And we were like, okay, let's. Let's take those. Because what's the difference between five and seven? And then you're like, at seven? And you're like, yeah, what's the difference between seven and nine? And then that's how you get to 26 dogs. But, you know, there's, they're all rescue dogs. They're all dogs who have been found on the street by us, usually, but also by friends who are in various states of distress. Lots of them have been abandoned. They're like, you know, petrified and traumatized and abused. And when you have the ability of the blessing of financial security, you can use it for pure material consumption. Just buying more things, trying to get another house, a private plane, whatever. Honestly, it just provides me with no happiness or satisfaction at all.

It really doesn't. It just doesn't do anything for me. And the ability to use it to help those in need gives me so much more happiness and gratification. You can almost say it's like a selfish endeavor, because it just provides me a happiness that other things don't. And also, when you have a shelter, there's nothing more beautiful than connecting a dog with a family. And then hearing three months later about how the dog is integrated into the family's life. And seeing pictures of that dog laying on a sofa with this family. When they had been on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, like, virtually dead from starvation or from disease. And you nurse them back to health, and then you place them in a family. Like, you have to figure out, what are the things that actually give you meaning and purpose and happiness in life, and oftentimes they're not. The things that society tells us are the things we should strive after. And that was a lesson I had to learn by chasing all the things that society teaches you, you're supposed to chase. And then when I grabbed them and I thought it was going to make me happy and found it actually made me more vacant and emptier, then I knew that I had to find the things that actually gave me happiness.

I think it's one of the most important lessons you can learn.

How old were you when you made these realizations?

I mean, I always loved dogs. Like, when I was young, like, we had these two dogs that lived next door, and I was like, get home from school, and the first thing I would do is look for them and call them, and they would hang out in my house. And I remember they just opened things up for me, and so. Well, but it was really, like, in my late thirties and early forties, when I had, like, professional success and financial stability. And none of that was, you know, my work was known, and it wasn't really providing a lot of personal happiness. And so I was like, I don't want to keep chasing after things that don't actually provide me happiness. Even if society respects those that we started being open more to the things that gave us happiness. And, like, ultimately, I'll tell you this quick story, which is, I never wanted to be a father, ever. It was never part of my identity. I never thought I would be a good father. I hate imposing authority on other people. I hate telling other people what to do. And my husband was always like, being a dad was his dream.

It was who he was. And he spent years convincing, persuading, cajoling, pressuring, manipulating me to want to adopt kids. We would go out to dinner, and coincidentally, there'd be a couple at the next table who he had arranged to be there. And we would talk, and they had adopted kids and would tell, talk about all the joys of. It took years to convince me. And when I finally said yes, we miraculously found the two perfect kids in this orphanage in northeastern Brazil. And the transition, obviously, to our lives couldn't have been a more radically or abruptly different. It's like adopting a kid out of poverty in Mississippi and bringing them to a high rise apartment in Manhattan. It's obviously everything is different. And I think the thing that helped most in the transition was as soon as they got there, we were like, you have all these dogs. They had a dog at their orphanage, so they already like dogs. And we were like, pick one, and that dog is going to be your dog. You take care of it, you sleep it. And they picked, like, one of the sweetest, like, most affectionate dogs in the pack.

And she became, like, the thing they were always hugging. And I think she did more to, like, give them comfort and security and safety, being yanked out of one environment and putting in a totally new one. And so the capacity for dogs to, like, transform people or. Or, you know, there's all kinds of studies about how animals can reach autistic children when nothing else can, or to even, like, rehabilitate prisoners, you know, you get these, like, hardened, violent criminals. Now they have these dog programs where they take them in and they connect to these dogs and care for them in ways they've never done with humans before. Obviously, there's something, you know, that's the reason why, if you see cruelty to animals, not just dogs, it's the thing that, like, riles people up the most on the Internet. But obviously, animals are here. They're beautiful. They're majestic. We've always hunted them and killed them for food, but we've also obviously have something in us that makes us feel an extraordinary empathy to them. And to me, they're, like, one of the most beautiful things the planet has.

To offer, and especially dogs. I mean, I don't think we understand why dogs are here, why we have this relationship with them. Dogs are the only carnivore capable of killing people that people have ever domesticated. And that domestication occurred, like, much earlier than we ever thought. I think at the beginning of recorded.

History, you see those old fossil drawings of man and dog?

100%.

Yeah.

And it does make you think that there's some purpose, some supernatural element here. What is that?

I mean, that's the thing I've seen just over and over and over, not just in my work with dogs, but personally in my relationship with dogs. They can do things for you and reach you and connect you empathetically and emotionally in a way that other human beings can't. They obviously, you know, they perceive things physically that we can perceive. They hear sounds, of course we can't. They anticipate things. They feel things in the atmosphere that are threats and react to them before we even know that they're here. So we know they have perceptive abilities that human beings proven by, quote, science. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but I'm saying, even emotionally, like, you can deceive another human about the state of your emotion so much more easily than you can deceive your dog. Like, your dogs know when you're sad, they know when you're happy, they know when you're excited in a way that you can't hide that from them. Like, they just perceive it. They're so connected to you. And obviously, there's the whole thing about teaching about unconditional love and loyalty that we can learn from dogs as well. But, yeah, you just see.

And that's why I think the Christy nome thing was such a fat. Because there are very few things at this point that can unite everyone in America, all Americans, independent of political ideology or socioeconomic background or anything else. And the fact that she was so cruel to this dog created a revulsion that transcended almost every single category. She really united people in contempt for what she had done, and I found the ability of dogs to do that so fascinating.

It's one of the great joys in life. I've experienced it really intensely. Let me just ask you about Brazil. So you have this kind of fearlessness about you that puts you in these coalitions for a time, and then you're abandoned by them and attacked by your former allies, whatever. But you're in this weird position where you're living in a country that the former president, Gerbil Sonaro, at one point threatened to put you in prison now, and they brought.

I was criminally indicted.

I forgot about that. And now Lula is running your country, I guess, sort of, at least in name.

In name.

In name. And there's a very left regime in charge, left, whatever that is. But, you know, global type government. How has life in Brazil changed under this new government, and how has it affected you?

So there's this phrase, Brazil is not for amateurs, which is basically designed to indicate that there's really oftentimes no ideology or no, like, obvious political alliances, is very transactional. Usually the people running Brazil are not the president or the elected officials or these permanent power factions similar to in Washington. And, you know, my. I never wanted to be involved in politics, but my husband ended up as a, you know, elected official. He was first elected as a city council in Rio and then an elected member of Congress in Brazil. I started a brazilian version of the Intercept, the intercept Brazil. And I did a lot of reporting during the Snowden thing on Brazil, so I became very integrated into the brazilian media. He was obviously integrated into brazilian politics. And so we both were part of this kind of faction that we never really wanted to be part of. But life just takes you there. The most significant reporting I did was in 2019, where there was this sprawling anti corruption probe, and the judge who was leading it became this national hero. And when Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, a big break from prior brazilian elections, were usually center left or left wing parties.

One, he made that judge who led the anti corruption probe the most powerful person in the country. He was the minister of, not just minister of justice and national security. It was like kind of this fused position, specifically for him, that put the entire security service under his control. About two months into the Bolsonaro, he was a judge, but he then left the judge to become part of the. And he led the probe that put Lula in jail. When Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, Lula was in prison on corruption charges that this judge, Sergio Morrow, oversaw and convicted Lula. There's not a jury trial in Brazil. Convicted him and then sentenced him to eleven years in prison. I mean, Lula was a two term president, a giant on the world stage. Left office with an 86% approval rating, and they turned him into a criminal. And they arrested a lot of other people on corruption charges, like billionaires and oligarchs, in a way that a lot of people were supportive of at first, including me. Two months into Bolsonar presidency, I got a contact from a source who had hacked into the phones of that judge.

Prosecutors, the most powerful people in the country, said there was evidence of all kinds of corruption. Turned it over to me, the entire file, similar to what happened with Snowden. And we were able, based on that reporting, to expose this judge as one of the most corrupt people in the country. I mean, he used corruption and illegal means to put the people he wanted to imprison, including Lula. And so six months after we began the reporting, Lula was let out of jail. As a result of our reporting, I became enemy number one, along with my husband of the Bolsonaro movement. I mean, it's hard to overstate the level of threats we got, the attacks on our personal lives, like the fabricated stories, and then ultimately culminating in a criminal indictment that charged me with, like, 126 felonies as a co conspirator with my source. So it wasn't a game, and Bolsonaro hated me.

But did you ever consider just running away? You're not brazilian by birth, no.

But by this point, not only is my husband brazilian, but. But by now, we have children, and they're brazilian, so. And I'm a permanent resident. I consider America my country. I'm a citizen of the United States. It's the only country of which I'm a citizen ever have been. But, you know, the fact that my children are brazilian, I see it as their country in a country that I want to fight for, not flee from. I never for a moment consider leaving. I just. Absent some very imminent threat, I just would never do that. Even if you can't look yourself in the mirror, like, Snowden taught me that a lot. You know, Snowden did something, and so did Julian Assange that they knew had a serious risk of putting them in prison. Danielsberg, one of my childhood heroes, did the same. And so that, to me, became kind of the thing that I aspire to. And, like, the idea of running away from a threat because you're scared of something and sacrificing a cause you believe is right would just make me look at myself in a very negative way for the rest of my life.

I would not want that on my conscience. I wouldn't want to think of myself that way, or my life having been formed by fleeing or by running away out of fear.

Amen.

So it was very trying, though. But we stayed, and everything we did ultimately ended up having a huge effect. It changed the course of the country. I mean, Luo was allowed out of prison. His convictions were reversed. This judge went from universally beloved hero to a hated figure. He ended up leaving the Bolsonaro government. So that all happened, and we were heroes of the left, hated more than anything by the brazilian right. At the same time, when Bolsonaro was elected, there started to become this reaction to him, not just by the brazilian left, but by the brazilian establishment, by the brazilian center right. Very similar to the way that in the United States, those kind of never Trump center right establishmentarians, all of our institutions of authority, had this, like, extreme fear of Trump because he represented a populist uprising, this, like, challenge to establishment power. The same thing happened in Brazil, and you had this one judge on the Supreme Court and supported by a lot of others. He was never a leftist. He's not a leftist. He comes from this very center right politics. He's sort of like a Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell figure.

And he became the leader of this effort to crush the Bolsonaro movement and Bolsonaro himself, using extra legal means, just like we're seeing in the United States with these fabricated prosecutions of law fair against Donald Trump. And despite the fact that I was a hero of the left and utterly hated by Bolsonaro and his movement, to the point they really tried to imprison me or deport me, I began speaking out very vocally against this judge. And one of the main tactics he used was political censorship. They started imprisoning people for questioning Covid, but particularly for defending the Bolsonaro movement. He started having exiles like journalists and bloggers and activists fleeing the country for very good reason, to the United States to avoid prosecution at the hands of this one judge, who became completely lawless. But he became a hero of the left because he was basically imposing authoritarianism and tyranny against Bolsonaro and his movement. And this was a guy who, because he was on the center right, was hated by the left for years, you know, as a racist, fascist, all the things they call people when they hate them. But he became, through this consolidation of judicial power and his use of it in ways that are classically authoritarian, as a hero of the left and the number one figure of the hated right.

And I was the one of the only people who was not a Bolsonaro Easter who was not on the Bolsonaro right to speak out. And I didn't just speak out. I mean, I denounced it constantly. I'm a columnist with the biggest brazilian paper. I was using my column to just attack him constantly. And he was the same kind of hero as that prior judge was who had the anti corruption probe, who's reporting we were able, who we were able to use our reporting to expose. And so overnight, I started to become an enemy of the left and made a lot of new friends among Bolsonaro Eastas, including the ones who were trying to imprison me just two years earlier. And I have to say, like, you never really think you're going to see actual tyranny. And this was the closest I've ever gotten. Like, we've had authoritarian things in the United States that have happened. It's what impelled me to write about journalism, the abuses of civil liberties after the war on terror in the name of terrorism, but nothing like a figure of this sort. And this is the first time in my career as a journalist where I ever had a fear of what would happen if I actually criticize this political figure.

And, you know, you're living in a repressive regime when you feel a fear. Even somebody like myself, who has a lot of protection, a lot of platform, a lot of, like, international notoriety. But I really did worry about what would happen if I was going to criticize him, because other people who did were punished and put into prison. And I've been doing it very vocally and loudly since they've attacked similar people. He opened a criminal investigation into Michael Schellenberger and the journalists who did the Brazil Twitter files. They. They actually opened a criminal investigation into them. They've never done it against me. I think, again, because I have a certain kind of platform and protection, including the fact that. That the current president of Brazil is out of prison because of my reporting, something he's often publicly stated. The minute he got out of prison, the first person he called when he got home was me to thank me for everything I had done. So I think it's very difficult to do that. But again, like, if you have that kind of platform, I think you're obligated to use it in ways that other people can't because of their fear.

Because if you don't, then who will? Who is the judge? Alessandro Demarat is his name. It's the person that Elon Musk began attacking. Because Rumble, which is where my show is, is no longer accessible in Brazil unless you use a VPN. I can't watch my own show in Brazil because if you try and access rumble in Brazil, you'll get a thing saying, this site is blocked because of how many censorship orders Rumble was getting from the brazilian courts that they refused to comply with. And that was what Elon Musk vowed to do, was he said, we're getting so many unjust censorship orders that we're going to refuse to obey them, even if it means we get kicked out of Brazil. Now, he didn't follow through on that, but the fact that he made that a scandal, he talked about this judge, Alexander de Maris, being this kind of, like, repressive figure, created a kind of debate that was well needed. But Twitter didn't end up following through. They actually ended up saying, no, no, we will obey all the censorship orders in order to stay in Brazil. But, you know, this is real repression, but it's not a left wing kind of repression.

It doesn't come from Lula. This guy is not a leftist. What he is is part of that establishment power that was fearful of and contemptuous of Bolsonaro and used authoritarian power to stop the Bolsonaro movement, to protect establishment authority. Very, very similar to what's happening United States with respect to Trump and his movement.

How long can you stay there?

I mean, I'm going to stay in depth again. My kids are, you know, teenagers. They're. They're now teenagers. Their. Their life is in Brazil. They're brazilian. They've never known any of the country. I'm not going to uproot them to force them to live in another country. I'm obviously not going to abandon them. They're the thing, by far, most important to me. And I feel like the work I'm doing is in defense of a country that I want to be free because that's theirs. Um, I'm not saying there's never anything that could force me to leave Brazil if I really felt an immediate, imminent threat to my personal safety or my family's, who knows? But if you find yourself running away from those kind of fears, it defines the person that you are.

I completely agree. And as you, as you said correctly, you can't face yourself if you know.

That you're a coward.

On the other hand, Brazil, I think, is a wonderful country, for the record, is also the kind of country where they could, you know, have you killed and make it look like crime.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, obviously, during the Snowden reporting, we took a lot of precautions because we had an archive that was the most valuable archive, not just to the us government, but to every other government on the planet and to all kinds of non state actors I would carry around with me on my backpack, the archive on thumbnails, because I didn't want to leave them at home. That contained, you know, some of the most sensitive documents that exist on this planet. There were obviously a lot of security risk at the time. We had to have security at our house constantly, security everywhere we left. Same thing when I was doing the reporting that freed Lula from prison, we had constant threats to our physical safety. I couldn't leave the house without armed guards. Neither could my husband or my kids. So, you know, I don't just walk around freely on the street because I realize that there are threats, that I'm not paranoid about them. I don't want to turn our house into a fortress, but, you know, you take precautions against them, but there's never risk that you can completely eliminate.

Do you think that. My last question, do you think.

The.

Authoritarianism that's obviously descending on the world, is it a permanent state? Is this accelerating, or is this just sort of an interlude that we're gonna laugh about ruefully in ten years?

Well, this is the point I always make, because I talk a lot about on my show, which primarily has an american audience, about what's happening in Brazil. And I stress the reason they should care isn't just because Brazil is just very large country with huge resources and a lot of importance on the geopolitical stage, the second largest in our hemisphere, which would be reason enough. It's because the United States is on exactly the same trajectory, maybe just a couple steps behind. And what all these countries in the democratic world are doing in Western Europe, in Canada. You know, I was just in Canada because there's this shockingly repressive law that provides for prison sentences for hate speech on the Internet. Prison sentences up to seven years. Yeah. And actually, if you're accused of inciting or defending genocide, you can be put into prison for life under this bill. I mean, this bill is shocking. I went to Canada to do events against the censorship law, not because I'm canadian or care about Canada, because what's happening is every one of these countries is using the other as a laboratory for how far they can go.

So every time one country takes another step toward consolidating control over the Internet and what can and can't be said, that shows other countries the space that they now have to go forward as well. It's completely interconnected. Every time the EU or the UK or Ireland or Canada or Brazil take steps forward to consolidate censorship control over.

The Internet, the norms change.

Exactly. And it completely transforms what the population comes to think is normal.

Again, though, is it inexorable, this move toward 1984?

The Internet is such a fascinating innovation because it has such a dual edge potential. On the one hand, it can be this unique and unprecedented tool of emancipation and liberation that was its promise and potential. On the other hand, it can also be a tool of unprecedented coercion and control, because if it is no longer free, if it can be used as a method of ubiquitous surveillance and information control, I think it can become a closed system that is almost impossible to work your way out of. And that's why, to me, there is no more important battle than keeping the Internet free, free in terms of privacy and free in terms of speech, because it is increasingly the only way that we really communicate and spread ideas with one another.

Does AI technology make that more or less likely to happen?

I think it makes it a lot more likely to happen. And that's why it was so alarming to see those original versions of AI, like chat GPT that obviously had all kinds of political ideology imposed on it, where you couldn't even get factual answers to certain questions because the designers of Czech GPT wanted ideological lines to supersede factual accuracy. And so you would ask questions of it, and the answers that you got were completely dependent upon the ideological perspective of those who had designed it. And I found that extremely alarming.

Preston, is there any indication that that's going to change?

I mean, again, it goes back to what we talked about a little bit earlier, which is that I think there is this extreme unrest and dissatisfaction on the part of populations in western governments that even if they don't follow politics closely, even if they're not very engaged, and it's amazing that the biggest voting bloc in the United States are people who just don't vote, who choose not to vote because they don't think it matters one way or the other. And on some level, they're probably right about that. But even people who aren't very politically engaged have this intuitive sense that there's just something deeply corrupt about power, factions and institutions of authority. And I think that kind of dissatisfaction that is being exploited by some clever politicians in positive ways or in negative ways is obviously a prerequisite. If everybody is content and happy and believes they're free and that things are going well, then it's impossible to get people to uprise and change. But when they start really believing that things are radically awry, that's why there's all these politicians who have nothing in common other than the fact that they promise to hate and wage war against the establishment forces that are controlling people's lives.

And people want those agents of disruption and subversion in there because they know that the status quo is something that is kind of very evil and very repressive, and that sense is incredibly important to preserve.

Do you think that the forces of light have a chance against the forces of darkness?

I think everybody who does what you do or I do, who wakes up and talks about these issues and works on them, inherently has a sense of optimism. Because if you didn't, you wouldn't do it. What would be the point, the only reason to do any of these things is because you believe that what you're doing can actually have an impact and make a positive outcome and help to contribute to a positive outcome. So I really believe in the capacity of human reason, of human persuasion, but also just like an intuitive sense that human beings have to understand almost intuitively when they're being threatened, when they're being deceived, when they're being subject to corrupt and abusive power. And all of history is uprisings and rebellions and revolutions against establishment authority, including ones that seemed completely entrenched and vulnerable. I mean, the whole enlightenment was to overthrow monarchs and churches that had dominated intellectual life for centuries. And we've seen that over and over. And I think it's very hard to look at human history and conclude anything other than any kind of structure that is built by human beings can be warred against and torn down and replaced by other human beings.

And I absolutely think that the tools are here, and those are the tools we have to defend.

Glenn Greenwald, thank you.

Yeah, it was good talking to you. Always good talk to you.

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