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

Permanent Washington decides nuclear war is preferable to Donald Trump. Glenn Greenwald on the nihilism of our ruling class. (00:00) Permanent Washington Dangerously Misunderstands Vladimir Putin (23:06) We Are on the Verge of Nuclear War (28:11) The Concerted Effort to Control You (46:06) Intel Agencies, Blackmail, and Mike Johnson’s Shocking Flip-Flop (1:15:09) Has Greenwald Been Targeted by the Intel Agencies? (1:20:31) How Will the Russia/Ukraine Conflict War End? Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN Get 3 months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Alp Pouch Shop now at https://AlpPouch.com Public Square https://PublicSquare.com/ Get the Hallow prayer app 3 months free https://Hallow.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tucker Carlson?

  I think we're watching the most evil thing I've ever seen in my lifetime, which is the lame duck administration leaving the next administration with the world war with the nuclear conflict by allowing Ukraine, a proxy state of the United States, to strike within Russia. And I'll just have one editorial comment and then I'm going to let you go. But I think that people in Washington misunderstand Vladimir Putin and they think he's a monarch with absolute power, which is not true. And Russian politics is complex and it's lively and Putin is very concerned with his approval rating within Russia. He cannot appear weak. That's a huge threat to him. He feels that. I can confirm. And if he can't hide attacks on him by the United States through Ukraine, either on Moscow

• 0:41Tucker Carlson?

  or big civilian casualties, I think he will have no choice, in his view, but to launch like a serious response against Ukraine or some or NATO countries or possibly the United States. So this seems like, seems like the most reckless thing that's ever happened in my life.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I hardly have for words for it. Let me just-

• 1:01Tucker Carlson?

  Am I overstating it, do you think?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  No, no, not even remotely.

• 1:15Tucker Carlson?

  Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  So let me just say specifically what has been authorized.

• 1:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  This is something that some NATO countries, including the United Kingdom, have been pressuring the Biden administration to do for quite a long time, for at least a year. But going all the way back to the beginning of 2022, this was an option that they had, which was that we have these guided missiles called ATACMS, which are very powerful for attacking inside Russia. You can guide them specifically and very precisely to where you want them to go. Obviously, you have to get intelligence about where you want to strike. And the reason we never permitted the Ukrainians to use them is because the Ukrainians can't use those missiles on their own. In other words, if they want to launch these missiles, it's not just the US giving them the missiles and then telling them, no problem, go and use them. It requires the direct involvement of the United States and/or a

• 2:22Speaker 01

  major NATO country like France, or the UK, or Germany, because the Ukrainians don't have the guiding capability in order to know how to launch these missiles. Right. So this is not just us giving them missiles and saying, go attack deep inside. Imagine if some major country, China, Iran, Russia, whoever, gave missiles to Canada, if we were at war with them, or Mexico, or Cuba, and said, we're giving you these specifically for you to use them inside the United States. We would consider that a grievous act of war, not just on the part of the country, shooting them, but on the part of the country, giving them. What Biden did here is so much worse. He didn't just give Ukrainians missiles and say, feel free to use them inside Russia. We are going to participate in the bombing

• 3:06Speaker 01

  of Russia, NATO and/or the United States, because there's no way the Ukrainians can launch these missiles on their own, which means we are now, our military, our intelligence community, are participating in missile attacks inside the country of Russia. This is something that even the Biden administration, for all their hawkishness on Russia and Ukraine, feeding that war, fueling it, preventing diplomatic resolutions because they wanted this war, even they were unwilling to do it because they understood the dangers of the escalatory risks. For Joe Biden, or whoever's acting in his name, to do this, just two weeks after the country resoundingly rejected governance by the Democratic Party and the

• 3:48Speaker 01

  administration, and on his way out, as an 81-year-old man, knowing that he has about six weeks left in office, to just say, ah, I know that these are massive risks, but I'm going to take them. I'm 81. I don't really care. And then to make it so much more difficult for the following administration to do what they promised to do during the campaign, which the American people voted for and wanted, which is to resolve this war, instead we're risking escalation with the world's largest superpower, nuclear power.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Over what? Over what?

• 4:21Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, placed in context, too, this is without precedent. And I think it's blink, and I want to ask about that in a second. But so 1956, Soviets invade Hungary and murder a ton of people. 61, they put nuclear weapons in Cuba. 68, they invade Slovakia, murder a bunch of people once again. These are all incredibly provocative acts, far more provocative than invading Eastern Ukraine. And this was in the middle of the Cold War, and no American president, Democrats and Republicans, in charge during those periods, they didn't respond by attacking Russia? I mean, there's nothing like this has ever happened. No one's ever been this crazy.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Well, this is, you know, my big breach with the laugh, my big permanent split with whatever they thought I was in terms of association with them.

• 5:07Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, is it permanent, too, they hate you.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I know. And that all happened in 2016, when out of nowhere, Russiagate appeared. And I remember, like it was yesterday, the very first ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign with this menacing baritone voice, you know, what does Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have in common? What do they, what does Russia have on Donald Trump? And journalistically, I just couldn't believe it because it was so redolent of McCarthyism, which is a civil libertarianism, I found, I was taught, was like one of the worst civil liberties of the 20th century, right?

• 5:40Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you go around just accusing people of being Russian agents with no evidence, destroying their reputation, their lives, kind of like what they're trying to do to Tulsi Gabbard, or now what they tried to do for Donald Trump for the last eight years. So just on that ground, I was kind of offended by it. Journalistically, I was so skeptical of it because when you have intelligence agencies leaking anonymously, unverified claims to The Washington Post and The New York Times, and they put it on the front page and gather Pulitzer's for them, that's usually a sign that a huge disinformation campaign of deceit is underway. That was the exact method used, for example, to sell the war on a rock to the American people, was that kind of process. That's why these intelligence agencies need to be rid out.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  But what alarmed me most was that the climate was deliberately created in Washington, especially once Hillary lost and they blamed Russia for it. That any communications with Russia, anyone who visits Russia, anyone who talks to a Russian official is automatically deemed sinister or treasonous. And as you said, during the Cold War, which dominated our American life for 50 years, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. They were infinitely more powerful, more threatening, more everything than Russia is now. We always communicated with Soviet leaders. There were phones all over Washington that rang to the counterparts. They communicated constantly. After Russiagate,

• 7:06Speaker 01

  there's basically no communication any longer between the Russian leaders and the American leaders.

• 7:11Tucker Carlson?

  On either side, and I should just say, I mean...

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Not because Russia wanted that. That was something that in Washington got created because they blamed Russia and claimed that Russia was our existential enemy because of the claim that they interfered in the 2016 election. Before that, there was all kinds of... The Obama administration and Putin government cooperated in all sorts of ways around the world.

• 7:34Tucker Carlson?

  Of course. But it's the leadership of the Republican Party, too. I had a conversation with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and he was about to appropriate tens of billions more for Ukraine. And I said, well, why don't you check with Putin? You're the Speaker of the House, number three in line for the presidency. Well, what? I can't. I said, well, I'll see if I can facilitate that. I'll call the press office, kind of set you up. Why don't you talk to Putin? No, absolutely not. Will not. Why?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Imagine if he had, though, and that leaked. I'm not excusing him.

• 8:01Tucker Carlson?

  But why wouldn't he just say, I mean, I'm not attacking Mike Johnson. I guess I am attacking Mike Johnson. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just reporting what actually happened. I said, you know, like, don't you have a moral duty to get as much information about this war before you fund its continuation and the killing of all these people? Like, shouldn't you know more? No.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  I think it is important to say that this war has been 100% bipartisan, although the Biden administration as the leader of the executive branch is primarily responsible. The primary... There's been about, I would say, five or six dozen anti-interventionist Republicans, typically more Trump supporters, both in the House and Senate, who have spoken out from the beginning against funding this war. But the vast majority of Republicans, to the extent they have a criticism or had a criticism of the Biden administration at all with respect to Ukraine, it was that they didn't do enough. They didn't spend enough money on Ukraine. They didn't give Ukraine enough weapons. They didn't get more involved more heavily and earlier than they should. But you know, the thing that you said about encouraging Mike Johnson to speak to Putin,

• 9:02Speaker 01

  which of course, as the third in line to the presidency, as you said, when they're proposing to escalate a major war, of course, you should want to understand the Russian perspective. This is what Tulsi Gabbard did in 2017, when she was a member of Congress and the Obama administration had unleashed this billion-dollar-a-year CIA dirty war to change the government of Syria, to dislodge Bashar al-Assad from the government, and we fought along ISIS and al-Qaeda, who also wanted Assad gone. We were told those were our existential enemies for 15 years. We fought alongside them to do it, and so many of the weapons we sent ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS and other Islamic radical groups in Syria. And Tulsi Gabbard, as a member of the military, but also as a member of Congress with constitutional

• 9:47Speaker 01

  responsibility to authorize or disauthorize a war, wanted to go to Syria and see what was happening for herself. And then she spoke with Syrian officials and got an opportunity to speak with the Syrian president, and based solely on that, she's now accused of being a Russian agent, being a some sort of, you know, treasonous sympathizer of Bashar al-Assad. This is the jingoistic climate that has been created, way worse than what prevailed in the Cold War. When Nixon went to China, Reagan negotiated all kinds of arms deals with the Soviets, this is now totally prohibited. It's like we live in a marble cartoon for children, where there's good guys and bad guys, where the good guys, you don't speak to the bad guys.

• 10:28Tucker Carlson?

  And the good guys are al-Qaeda and ISIS. They're the good guys.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can fight with them because they're...

• 10:32Tucker Carlson?

  So her point, I don't want to speak for Tulsi Gabbard, our new Director of National Intelligence nominee, but my view was, I don't have any feelings about Assad or Syria, but it's a fact that that government protected religious minorities, including an ancient Christian community there, the Alawites, of which he's one. In that country for a long time, he and his dad. So why are they my enemy exactly? I don't understand. Like, what does, why should I be opposed to Assad in Syria? Why should I be opposed to Vladimir Putin? I was not supposed to be opposed to the Soviets, who are anti-Christian, but now you have a pro-Christian president, I'm supposed to be against him? Tell me, why doesn't someone explain to me why? As a 55-year-old American taxpayer, I should be against him.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  First of all, I think the principle is that, and this is what Donald Trump ran on explicitly in 2016, was that...

• 11:20Speaker 01

  We shouldn't be involved in wars designed to change the governments of other countries, rebuild their governments, transform their societies, in part because it's not our place to do it, and in part because we're terrible at doing it, because they have very complex, rich, long histories that American intelligence officials and political leaders have no understanding of whatsoever.

• 11:41Tucker Carlson?

  They don't speak the freaking language. I mean, they don't know anything.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  They know nothing. And we've proven that over and over in all these failed attempts. But also, when it comes to, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard's entire worldview, and I have spoken to her about this, I've interviewed her about this, so I feel comfortable saying this, is that she's not in any way anti-war pacifist. She believes that we should be very militarily aggressive against, say, terrorist groups that actually want to attack the United States or have done so, or American assets or American interests around the world. Her argument is, is that we should not be involved in regime change wars of the kind we did in Iraq, that she fought in, of the kind we did in Syria, of the kind we did in Libya, of the kind that we did in Ukraine in 2014, when we actually engineered a coup on the most sensitive part of the Russian border.

• 12:23Tucker Carlson?

  Of the kind that we're trying to pull off in Russia right now. The point of this is to knock out Putin.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, to weaken that regime. And to, the thing is, though, that what you said about Putin is so important, which is Putin's critics, he doesn't have very many liberal critics, meaning people to his left.

• 12:38Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  His real critics are hardcore nationalists.

• 12:41Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And their criticism of Putin.

• 12:43Tucker Carlson?

  Who see him as a liberal.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Who see him as weak or insufficiently militaristic when it comes to confronting the West, but particularly on Ukraine. They wanted destruction of Ukraine. A lot of them are enraged. And as you say, the Russian government has taken the position, warned the United States government privately and publicly, that any use of these missiles involving, as they do, direct US or NATO involvement in their launching against Russia, will be seen as the entrance of the United States and NATO as belligerence in this war, as a war against Russia, as World War III, and he will have to treat it as such, even though he's been very constrained, even though he clearly doesn't want a broader war.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  There are a lot of people inside Moscow who do wield a lot of power, who do, and who will demand that he treated us such. Why wouldn't they? We are attacking Russia. We're shooting missiles inside Russia.

• 13:36Tucker Carlson?

  So I think, as you've said, I don't think we can say it enough. So much of this has been conducted in bad faith, but also so much of that bad faith has been informed by ignorance, or uninformed by ignorance, not informed at all. And I think that people really think that Putin is an absolute dictator who can do whatever he wants. And that is not the case. It's just not the case. Super complex place. A lot of smart people in Russia, complicated political situation. So I agree completely. We're pushing him toward that. The view, I think, I know, from Putin is that Blinken is driving this. And that Blinken has a lot of hostility, is reckless, but has a lot of hostility toward Russia that has nothing to do with the United States at all. Do you think that's true? Do you think Blinken is driving this?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Blinken, Jake Sullivan, that's kind of the brain trust as it is. Obviously, Joe Biden has no involvement in this whatsoever, which I think, you know, has been an issue which we've shockingly ignored. Everyone saw what Joe Biden was long before that debate.

• 14:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Everyone knew it. The only people who didn't say so were the media and Democratic allies. After the debate, it became untenable for them to deny it any longer, that this is an old man who has lost his cognitive capabilities. Yet he's still the sitting president of the United States. And you had the vice president, understandably, doing nothing for the last four months other than working on her own empowerment through the campaign. She obviously wasn't involved ever in any decision making, let alone when she became the nominee. So the question has been, all these consequential decisions we've made, deploying massive military assets to the Middle East, making declarations about when we would go to war in the Middle East and for whom, escalating the war in Ukraine, now authorizing the use of these long-range missiles.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  He's obviously not coming from Joe Biden. He barely understands where he is. It's not a character flaw on his part, but it's just a disability, a clear disability. He's obviously not making any of these decisions. I do think that if you look at the national security crowd that emerged from the Obama presidency, especially the people who were associated with the State Department, run by Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, even before Russiagate in 2016, they had an obsession with Russia. In fact, when Hillary Clinton left the administration as Secretary of State, And wrote her book Hard Choices, the only areas in which she was critical of Obama was her view that he wasn't willing to confront Russia sufficiently. Obama had this view, like

• 16:03Speaker 01

  sort of this realist view from Brent Scowcroft, those are the kind of people you like, Jim Baker, that why would we send lethal arms to Ukraine and provoke Russia? Ukraine's not a vital interest to us, but it is to them. He wanted to work with Russia and did to facilitate the Iran deal, to bomb terrorist targets in Syria. And there was a faction in the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, Blinken was there, all these sort of national security people woven into the, you know, that Victoria, Victoria Nuland was hired by Hillary Clinton, that's how she made her way into the Obama administration. They viewed Russia as this grave menace. The reason Putin hated Hillary Clinton was because when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State,

• 16:44Speaker 01

  the United States openly spent millions of dollars funding opposition groups and organizing protests in Moscow. I mean, we talk about Putin interfering in our sacred politics and our internal affairs. Hillary Clinton was openly funding protests and, and, and, and anti-Putin agitated, agitators inside Russia in the 2010 election and 2012, 2011, or rather, and they were obsessed with Russia well before that. And I do think that Russia is disliked by a lot of people in Washington because of the perception that they are detrimental to our interests in

• 17:27Speaker 01

  the Middle East and to especially to Israel's interest in the Middle East, including their support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the fact that they have a good relationship with Iran. It doesn't really always have a lot to do with the United States, but with the interests of other countries as well.

• 17:42Tucker Carlson?

  So you think that's the prime mover here? Because it is true that Assad is only there because of Russia. I think, I think that's a fair statement.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's their ally in the Middle East. And it's been their ally in the Middle East for, for decades. And just like we support our allies around the world, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, you know, very savage, brutal dictatorships, but at least who do our bidding, the Russians have theirs as well. They have a long-term relationship with Venezuela, with Cuba, going back to the Cold War and still do, as well as with Syria. And yeah, the Russians operate in Syria. They protect Assad in Syria. And as a result, they end up being antagonistic. To Israel, which ends up being defined as US interests as well. Like, there's no separation.

• 18:21Tucker Carlson?

  But strictly speaking, this has kind of nothing to do with us whatsoever. I mean, I don't, I honestly

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Unless you see Israel as a part of the United States.

• 18:30Tucker Carlson?

  You know, I'm not hostile toward Israel, but I think it's a separate country.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  It seems to me to be a separate country as well. It's often not treated as that. I'm just saying, but.

• 18:37Tucker Carlson?

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

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Tucker, there, there's nobody, I'm certain of this, in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter, who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of, who rules or areas provinces in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be. Should it be semi-autonomous? Should it be used as a buffer against the West? The, the whole framework, as you all know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany,

• 19:45Speaker 01

  which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened the Berlin Wall and they allowed the East and, and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the, the West and become part of the EU, the only concession they extracted in exchange for that was, okay, with reunification, NATO is now moving eastward closer to our border. In a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens, the only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond

• 20:26Speaker 01

  what was East Germany. And the United States agreed to that. And immediately, in the 90s, under the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration started talking about it and implementing NATO expansion eastward toward Russia, exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why, why, why, why did we need to expand our

• 20:47Tucker Carlson?

  I never understood that.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  eastward toward Russia? And now it's not just eastward in general, it's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia in both of those, those world wars. We also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is who the Ukrainians voted for, and replaced him. Victoria Nolan constructed a government and it was replaced by a government that was more pro-US. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to the US and put in a hardline, pro-Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

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• 25:24Tucker Carlson?

  So what I find it so terrifying. I'm not, no, I don't think I'm sort of overstating that. I mean, we are on the brink of a global war.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  But can you just say one thing about that? Don't you think, aren't you kind of amazed by how impervious and dismissive media and political elites are of the prospect of nuclear war?

• 25:47Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I, it's unimaginable. And, and yes. And I mean, that's

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Like they think it can't happen.

• 25:52Tucker Carlson?

  Source of ongoing frustration. Yeah. And I will say the one thing that Trump has said repeatedly over the, over the past, certainly since he left the presidency, four years, that he's received no credit for and should get enormous credit for is that nuclear war is the worst thing. He was, of course, been briefed on it as the person who controlled the launch codes. He knows what it means. And anyone who spends five minutes looking into what a nuclear exchange would actually, you know, do is, is terrified of it. But only Trump seems worried about it. I don't understand.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've said this, I've talked about this so many times. And I think it goes back to when Trump was president, in the early stages of presidency. Every time Trump talks about the prospect of nuclear war, he knows that he's limited in what everything he can divulge, but he's so clearly trying to signal, and he often says it, these weapons are of a different universe than even the ones we dropped in Japan.

• 26:50Tucker Carlson?

  That's correct.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And he's obviously, as you said, understands and been briefed on.

• 26:54Tucker Carlson?

  But you see these morons at the Atlantic Council, or AEI, or HUD Center, or these, this cluster of the dumbest people in the world, all implicated in the Iraq disaster, say, well, you know, maybe tactical nukes are fine.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  That we, that the nuclear war can be contained.

• 27:08Tucker Carlson?

  That's like such next level crazy. Like, that's crazier than any schizophrenic sitting next to you on a public subway.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's crazy.

• 27:14Tucker Carlson?

  We constantly call like RFK Junior, they call him crazy. They call, you know, Tulsi Gabbard or Matt Gaetz crazy, whoever. These people who have been in power, who have been generating American orthodoxy, especially in foreign policy.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Are the most insane people on the planet. It's because the United States has been the most powerful country in the world. No one could constrain it. No one could stand up to it. And as is true with everything, that level of unconstrained power corrupts people.

• 27:41Tucker Carlson?

  That is correct.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  And these people have been in control of this power for decades.

• 27:45Tucker Carlson?

  That is correct.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Passed on one to the other through this dogma that gets increasingly out of touch and detached from reality. And

• 27:53Tucker Carlson?

  Megalomaniacal.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Abs- exactly. I mean, at least during the Cold War, I'm not saying it was a good thing, but the Soviet Union of the United States were of equal power. They were competing with one another. They were both very constrained in what they were. They both were petrified of a nuclear war. We almost came to nuclear apocalypse at least twice, especially in the Cuban Missile Crisis through misperception and miscommunication. When a Russian commander of a submarine thought incorrectly that they were using nuclear weapons against the submarine and against Cuba and almost launched the nuclear weapons at the sub came about five minutes away from doing so until someone intervened on that sub and said, I don't think that this is actually an attack. It's very possible. We've come to the brink of it before. It probably is the single greatest threat to the survival of the species.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Not probably, definitely is the use of nuclear weapons. Every time Trump talks about it, you can see the fear that he has he's trying to convey to others.

• 28:45Tucker Carlson?

  Every time.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And I'm, I mean, Tucker, I'm amazed. This is like impeachment level stuff for Joe Biden on his way out of the door to involve the US directly in a war for the first time. We've been very involved in other ways.

• 29:02Tucker Carlson?

  They should impeach him. Why doesn't the Speaker of the House impeach him right now?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  On the president's ability to involve the US in a war without congressional authorization, which is exactly what has happened through the use of these missiles, which, as I said, we need to help direct. And the question is, yeah, why? The answer, though, is that the vast majority of the Republican caucus in the House and in the Senate supports what Joe Biden is doing, thinks he should have done this a year ago. And there's probably not a lot of anger in the House and Senate over this, except the question that it's called lame duck for a reason. A lame duck is supposed to be a duck that really doesn't do much, can't do much, doesn't move much. It's by design, pretty limited. It's like this transition period.

• 29:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, he's floating in the water because he's been shot.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. His legs are broken. And so he's lame. This is not a lame duck decision. And it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't, there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

• 30:07Tucker Carlson?

  It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person we've been told is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer, can't be trusted. Like, the only reason we're not, I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, this is, this is what amazes me is that I sometimes propaganda, and propaganda is, you have to respect it. It's a very potent field of human knowledge that has been refined over many decades, using every field of disciplines, social sciences and psychology and psychiatry. I mean, propaganda is not just some, you know, intuitive thing that people do.

• 30:49Tucker Carlson?

  It's not just an argument that you make.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's very powerful. And we love to talk about how propagandized the Russians are and the Chinese are, and how there's no dissent allowed. You know, George Orwell, in the preface to Animal Farm, wrote, actually to 1984, wrote an essay where he was essentially saying that overt totalitarianism, of the kind that was taking place in the Soviet Union, is repressive, but it's not nearly as effective as subtle repression, the kind where you give the illusion that people are free, but in reality, the flow of information is heavily controlled. Because at least when, you know, the guys dressed in blacks with weapons come and take

• 31:33Speaker 01

  you and put you in a Gulag for criticizing the government, everybody understands the level of repression. It often generates a backlash. But when you combine repression with the illusion of freedom, that's what's incredibly effective. And that's what we have.

• 31:45Tucker Carlson?

  And you tell people with an abundant consumer economy, like, you know, here are your edibles, here's your Netflix come down.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Tucker Carlson?

  You can, you can basically get them to do anything.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And at the same time, there has been a concerted effort to control what was supposed to be the one innovation that was going to break the centralized control of information, which is the internet. That's why there's so much attention and energy. It's why it's the number one priority of Western power centers to control the internet, because it's the one threat to their ability to maintain this propaganda system control. You know, I still can't believe this, that it's not talked about as much, but right after Russia invaded Ukraine and Western governments decided they wanted full-on support for Ukraine and this very simple-minded narrative that they fed their public.

• 32:29Tucker Carlson?

  After they started the war, when the Biden administration started, that's my view of it, they knew that Russia would invade if they publicly pushed Zelensky to join NATO. So they did that. Kamala Harris did it and Russia did it. My view is they started this war.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And threat, talking openly about expanding NATO to Ukraine. You can find memos from the highest levels of the US government saying, if you do that, it's not just Putin, it's every political faction in Russia that will see it as a war and will, they'll invade, they'll annex Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Of course, the American government knew that. You can show documents where it says that. But the EU, the minute that war started in earnest with the Russian army invading, one of the very first steps they took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media, like Russia RT and Sputnik, they made it a crime and YouTube immediately pulled it off because

• 33:25Speaker 01

  they didn't want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective. I mean, you can hate Russia, you can think Russia is evil, you can think whatever you want about Russia, but why wouldn't you want to hear from the other side? You know, the New York Times used to publish all the time, like the speeches of Brezhnev.

• 33:40Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  And Yuri Andropov and Khrushchev, and you could read what the Russians would say. They would come to the United States, they would speak openly. Now it's practically criminalized.

• 33:52Tucker Carlson?

  Putin's speech in February 2022 to his country, nationally televised there, right before the invasion, was absolutely just a remarkable speech, which I, by the way, never got around to even looking at before I got to Moscow. And I was like, I can interview Putin. I think I should watch that speech. I'd read about it, never watched it. And I think, I mean, you can agree or disagree, you can hate Putin. I mean, it's totally fine. I don't care how people feel about Putin, but. To, most Americans had no idea his thinking in invading Ukraine. Like, no idea. What, why wouldn't people want to know?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  It was just the cartoon for it. He's an evil Hitlerian figure who wants to reconqu- re- re- re- reconquest all of Europe the way Hitler did. Putin has been in office for 25 years. He has gone through six different American presidents. Every single one of them, until you were not allowed to say it anymore, always said, "You meet with Putin, he's incredibly shrewd, he's incredibly smart, you can trust Putin. If you do a deal with Putin, you can count on the fact that he will adhere to it."

• 34:55Tucker Carlson?

  Other heads of state still feel that way and say that.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, American presidents said it all the time, starting with Bill Clinton, that he's rational, that he acts in his self-interest, that he's calculating in terms of, and careful. And then suddenly, this is what amazed me propagandistically, is that overnight, everybody was forced to say that Putin invaded Ukraine simply because suddenly he became this psychotic, evil Hitler-type figure who just wanted out of the blue.

• 35:19Tucker Carlson?

  But they all believed it, though. A lot of them, but the people who screamed at me at airports for being pro-Putin, which, of course, I'm not, I've never been pro-Putin, I don't have strong feelings either way. But they really had been convinced, not just by MSNBC and CNN, but by the entire oligarch-controlled internet, that like, anyone who talked about Putin or raised questions about the war was like, for Putin. It, like, that worked. The propaganda worked.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  No, propaganda, talk of propaganda, especially nationalist propaganda, because human beings evolved over thousands of years to be tribal. Like, we, we want to feel part of our group. We take pride in our, our group. Like, it's why, if you're born in America, you say, "I'm an American. This is my country. I'm, this is what I'm loyal to." It comes from these tribalistic instincts, right? It makes sense, because we evolved for thousands of years where you, if you got expelled from your tribe, you would, you would die. You needed a tribe in order to survive. So we're tribalistic animals. So if you appeal to people's tribalism and say, "We're the good guys. We're the innocent victims."

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Our enemy are the bad guys. They're evil. They're, you know, that appeals to people's most visceral instincts. And the problem, of course, is the countervailing punishment, which is the minute you question it, you know, I had from the beginning, I had on my show, you know, people like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Jeffrey Sachs, and they were all saying from the beginning, there's no possibility that Ukraine can win this war as NATO has defined it, which means the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, just simply on size grounds alone, just saying, just basic understanding of history. Every one of them, I'm sure, I think it happened to you too. I know what happened to me, were

• 36:58Speaker 01

  put on these official lists issued by the Ukrainian government of being pro-Russian propagandists. Everywhere you went, you get accused of being a Russian propagandist or some sort of agent of the Kremlin, simply by questioning our own government's propagandistic views, or simply trying to understand things from the Russian perspective. Like, this is, you know, after 9/11, the big question on the minds of all Americans after they were traumatized by this extraordinary assault on our soil, designed, obviously, to impose as much suffering and killing as possible, was, obviously, they asked, like, why, why do they want to do that to us? Why would people hate us so much that they would devise a scheme as complex and deadly

• 37:40Speaker 01

  as hijacking planes, passenger planes with box cutters and flying them into major American buildings filled with people? Why would they hate us that much? And they had to, the government had to give an answer to that question, because people obviously wanted to know the answer. And that was when David Frum and Cheney and all those people said, they hate us for our freedoms. They just can't stand the fact that women are allowed to wear bikinis on the beach, and that we have a Congress. And it's like, no one ever thought, well, there's like dozens of countries around the world where women get to wear bikinis and have congresses, like, in Japan, in Korea, and all throughout Latin America, and like Scandinavia, why aren't they attacking those places? And then Bin Laden wrote a letter in 2002 to the American people saying,

• 38:23Speaker 01

  here's why there's so much animosity toward the United States. And there was, of course, some appeal to religion in it.

• 38:29Tucker Carlson?

  I made the mistake of reading part of that letter on the air at CNN at the time, not to make a kind of point, but just because super interesting, you know, and 9/11 changed everyone's life, very much including mine, lost a friend that day, like, just like every American who was an adult on 9/11. It was like you felt like it was an event that you participated in or it affected you. So I felt like I had every right to read that letter, like, hey, this is good. He, he's now saying why he did it. I almost got pulled off the air for doing that.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. Well, Tucker, I just want, I just have to say, Tucker, I, I, not only doesn't that surprise me, a lot of people have forgot, forgotten that this happens, but it's actually quite extraordinary. After 9/11, obviously Osama bin Laden was one of the most important people in the world. He just perpetrated the worst attack on American soil, at least since Pearl Harbor. And a lot of people wanted to interview him or play clips of interviews. The United States government told, called all the network news agencies into the White House and said to them, you should not and cannot show, interview Osama bin Laden or show any interviews with him. And they invented this excuse as to why, which is that he might put some sort of code in his interviews that signaled to sleeper cells.

• 39:40Tucker Carlson?

  Sleeper cells.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Like, he might like wiggle his ear like Carol Burnett did, or like, you know, raise his eyebrows three times or blink in a, Morse code in a certain way. And, and the networks all obeyed. And the most amazing thing was this letter, which you could go read, where he says exactly why all the different ways the United States has brought violence to that region, has interfered in that region.

• 40:00Tucker Carlson?

  And that our foreign policy is the bottom line.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we've been bombing that region and interfering in them, imposing dictatorships on those people for decades, specifically to suppress.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  The things they believe in. We don't want popular opinion being prevailing in democratically in the Middle East because we don't perceive it in our interest. So we've been imposing dictators on them, secular dictators. We've been bombing them. We've been sanctioning them. We've been invading them. Of course, we support Israel, which in that region, people view as this grave assault on the rights of Palestinians. But we put bases in Saudi Arabia, which is the most sacred soil to that religion. We imposed a blockade and sanction regime on Iraq, which Madeleine Albright admitted killed 500,000 children, but nonetheless said it was worth it. So we've been so active in that region, and that's the reason they wanted to attack back. That's the reason Al Qaeda had so

• 40:52Speaker 01

  much support. But they banned Osama bin Laden from being heard, just like the EU banned Russian state media from being heard, because of course, you don't want Americans being exposed to this. And then the amazing thing is, that letter, which really didn't get much attention at the time, the only place it existed on the internet was on the Guardian's website. And somehow, you know, 22-year-olds on TikTok found that letter, and they started talking about it. And they were like, oh, my God, I was never told this before. He didn't attack us because he hates us for our freedom. He says specifically here why they're attacking us. And in other words, they were reading a historical document and discussing it, things that you would want a free citizenry to do. But the fear that they were allowed to not only read, but talk about that document with one

• 41:37Speaker 01

  another was so intense that in 48 hours, they forced TikTok to ban every discussion of that letter, to remove the hashtags to find it, to take down any post or accounts that were talking about it. And then The Guardian, a news outlet, removed that letter, which had been there for 20 years, which was of obvious historical and journalistic importance. They removed it from their website because they were too frightened that people were going to be able to read it. Why? Because it prevents the propagandist narrative from being unchallenged. And that's the same with Russia and Ukraine. That shows you how we think we're so free. We have, we can, we hear so much dissent because you have a Republican and Democrat bickering on a cable show about trivial things. You're like, oh, look, we have free debates, open debates. They don't, they don't get to have that in Russia and China.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  But the minute there's information that actually threatens the government that they fear people understanding, they clamp down on it and suppress it. And that's what they did there.

• 42:30Tucker Carlson?

  You wonder why we put up with that. You wonder why we put up with a government that continues to keep secret files about 9/11. It's been 23 years. What, what could possibly be the justification for not telling me information that I own and have a right to see, which is what the hell was that? And they constantly lecturing.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Even, even the JFK files.

• 42:49Tucker Carlson?

  Especially JFK file, but, but much more immediate. It was 23 years ago, but I mean, we're both adults. We remember it very well.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I lived in Manhattan. I mean, it was like, I was traumatized by that. It was a horrible event.

• 42:59Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  And then a lot happened. Our country changed radically because of it. To this day, the Patriot Act exists.

• 43:05Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's not, never been the same country. And in some ways, you know, it was much more successful in its aims than, than I even want to admit to myself because it's so sad to see what it did to this country. But here's the point, they're constantly, they, meaning the media and the intel agencies, which work together, as you know, um, they're constantly attacking other people for being conspiracy theorists and crazy and discrediting the memory of the 9/11 victims, et cetera, by coming up with explanations that are not authorized. Okay, then why don't you just tell us what actually happened? Why not just declassify it? What, I don't, what's the answer? It's going to jeopardize sources and methods? That's, that's not true. And we all know that's not true.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And you know that this, the importance of protecting those secrets, keeping those documents that might show the truth, not just about 9/11, but JFK.

• 43:49Tucker Carlson?

  That's the most important thing.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  It's the, it's in fact, the whole point of the second impeachment trial.

• 43:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Which never made any sense. Why would you bring an impeachment trial against the president on his way out the office? Was because they were petrified that Trump was going to do certain things in that transition, like pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, which he came very close to doing, but especially fulfill his promise to declassify things like the JFK files and other national security files that had been kept hidden with no justification from the American public, even though it happened decades ago, 9/11, JFK.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  And they told him, if you do that, all the Senate Republicans are going to vote to impeach you, you're going to be convicted and ineligible to run ever again. That was the sword of Damocles they held over his head precisely to prevent him from bringing transparency to the government and allowing the American people to see what they ought to have a right to know.

• 44:38Tucker Carlson?

  But if your greatest fear is transparency, then you're a criminal. I mean, that's basically proof. I can't think of a better indicator of behavior than the crazed desire to keep that behavior secret, right?

• 44:52Speaker 01

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

• 45:15Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, Normandy a week before, we can keep it quiet.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  They don't have to tell everyone that they're going to do that. But outside of those very rare exceptions, we're supposed to know everything about what they do.

• 45:23Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Because they're doing it in our name.

• 45:25Tucker Carlson?

  Their employees.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're supposed to be accountable to us, but they can't be if we don't know what they're doing. Conversely, they're not supposed to know anything about what private citizens do. They're not supposed to track us, or eavesdrop on us, or keep dossiers on us, or know where we are, where we're going, unless, again, very rare circumstances, we're a criminal, there's probable cause to spy on us, because we've convinced, they've convinced a court, as the Constitution requires, that there's probable cause to believe, but except in those rare circumstances, that's why they're called public officials and we're called private citizens. We're supposed to have privacy, they're not. They're supposed to have transparency. Our society is completely reversed. If you're a private citizen, the government knows everything about you. They keep all kinds of data on you. That was the Snowden reporting, obviously, that's what Edward Snowden revealed, was the extent to

• 46:09Speaker 01

  which we are being surveilled by our own government. Conversely, we know almost nothing about what the government, you know, when I got the Edward Snowden archive, which was hundreds of thousands, if not more, of top secret documents from the NSA, obviously, what was surprising is what was in them and what they revealed, but what even more surprising to me was that The documents, so many of these documents, most of these documents that were marked "top secret," had no interesting information in them at all. Like, they just reflexively put, like, how to get a parking credential, how to ask your supervisor for a vacation. These were top secret, because everything the government does reflexively is kept secret from the public.

• 46:47Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, you have no rights to know. That's the default. You have no rights to know.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So, everything is inverse. We, the government knows everything about what we do, and we know nothing about what they do.

• 46:55Tucker Carlson?

  I'm Tucker Carlson for ALP. Now, as you know, the FDA requires us to warn you, well, just read you the warning, quote, "Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical," end quote. We're required to tell you that by the federal government. But we don't shy away from that. It's addictive, and there's an upside to it. Yes, nicotine is an addictive chemical. That is true. There are a lot of things in life you forget, your car keys, your wallet. One thing you're never gonna forget is ALP, because nicotine is an addictive chemical. You may forget to put your shoes on in the morning. You may forget to kiss your wife on the way out. You may come home and not remember your own dog's name. But one thing you're not gonna forget is your ALP. Why? Because you're

• 47:38Tucker Carlson?

  addicted to it. Because your body will tell you, "Hey, better bring your ALP with you." And you will. I do. I'm never anywhere without my ALP. It's by the side of my bed when I go to sleep. It's there when I wake up in the morning. It's in the front pocket of my pants as I head out into the world. ALP is always with me. It's on the desk as I do interviews. Everywhere I am, ALP is, because it's an addictive chemical. That's exactly right. And we're not afraid of that. We're not ashamed of it. It's addictive in the same way that air, water, and sex are addictive. They're so great, and you want to do them every day. Thankfully, it's easy to have the ALP with you at all times. Just go to our website, alppouch.com, and never be without it. Nicotine, yes, it's addictive. That's why we like it.

• 48:36Tucker Carlson?

  So a long time intel official told me not that long ago, I guess I should have known this, that the big pornography sites are controlled by the intel agencies, they have access to the data on those sites. And the reason that they do, and I think the dating sites too, and the reason that they do, of course, is blackmail. And once you realize that, once you realize that like the most embarrassing features of your personal life are known by people who want to control you, then you're controlled. And you look at the behavior of some of these people who I know personally, and particularly in the Congress, you're like, why are you doing that? You don't agree with that. And you're out there doing it anyway. We always imagine that it's just donors. They're getting paid to do that. I think it's more than donors. I've seen politicians turn down donors before.

• 49:20Tucker Carlson?

  I've watched it, you know, I don't believe that I'm not doing that.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  A lot of people have very safe seats. Not everybody is desperate for donors.

• 49:26Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Okay, just give you an example.

• 49:28Tucker Carlson?

  So it's not just the carrot, there's a stick in there.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I'm not saying this happened here. I'm not saying that at all. I have no basis for saying it, but I had Mike Johnson on my show about two months before unexpectedly he became the speaker, when he just became like the ninth compromise.

• 49:45Tucker Carlson?

  You had Mike Johnson on your show?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I interviewed Mike Johnson. And the reason I interviewed Mike Johnson was because...

• 49:51Tucker Carlson?

  He would not go on your show now.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Oh, no. This is why. This is so interesting. I didn't know that. This is why. So yeah, just by chance, I interviewed Mike Johnson. The reason was, was because Christopher Wray went before a committee on which he sat in the House, and Mike Johnson grilled him about FBI spying, about the involvement of the intelligence communities in our politics, about the attempt to censor the internet coming from the intel agencies, and he did it with this. Great kind of intellect, but also this very effective demeanor. And I could just tell that he passionately felt passionately about these issues. And then I started following more and more of what he was doing. And he was almost single-mindedly focused on spying abuses, curbing spying power, curbing censorship.

• 50:37Tucker Carlson?

  You're blowing my mind.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  And so we asked him, I said, you know, can you call my show? And he's like, yeah, I'm a big fan of Glenn's. I think the work that he's doing great.

• 50:44Tucker Carlson?

  Mike Johnson from Louisiana?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he came on my show. No, go, you can go watch the interview.

• 50:50Tucker Carlson?

  I'm hard to shock you or shocking me.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  I had him on my show. And after this interview, I was like, I love him. One of the reasons, one of the things we spent the most amount of time on was FISA reform and the need for FISA reform.

• 51:03Tucker Carlson?

  Come on, Glenn.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Tucker, I swear, I, this is, I'm telling you, FISA reform was coming up in about three months, where they had to extend the FISA law that allows the FBI, the CIA to spy on American citizens, the NSA, without really any reforms. And he was determined. It was like his big issue. That's why he was on my show. That's why he liked what my work was. He was like, we cannot allow this FISA law to be renewed. It is a grave threat to American democracy. At the very least, we need massive fundamental reforms.

• 51:31Tucker Carlson?

  Blown away.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, my God. I, and he's very smart. He's like a smart lawyer. He's very informed about these issues. I walked away super impressed. That is what we spent most of our time on, but also just the-

• 51:42Tucker Carlson?

  Will you put these clips on the internet?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  The whole show is on the internet.

• 51:45Tucker Carlson?

  No, I know, but will you just post these on social media?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did, but I'll do it again because Mike Johnson become a speaker about two months later. I don't mean four years later or two years later, about two months after that, three months at the most. Right when the FISA law is coming up. And I was like, oh, it's so great. He was made speaker. There's no way this FISA law is getting passed. Not only did Mike Johnson say, I'm going to allow the FISA renewal to come to the floor with no reforms, not allowing any reforms. He himself said, it is urgent that we renew FISA without any reforms. This is a crucial, critical tool for our intelligence agencies. And I put that clip everywhere when that happened, showing where just two months earlier.

• 52:27Tucker Carlson?

  Did you butt them together?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I was attacking the shit out of Mike Johnson. And then somebody finally asked him like, but you've been saying all along for years, for the last two years that you vehemently oppose this and suddenly now you're for it? What changed your mind? And he was like, yeah, well, when you're a speaker, you get access to a lot of things. And I was taken to this secret room in the CIA and they showed me these very important things and these sensitive documents about how important these powers are and how devastating it would be if we put any reforms on them. And so I realized that it was wrong when I had believed. And now I believe this law has to be passed with no reforms. You don't have smart people like that. He was already in Congress. He had access to classified information, getting briefing, secret briefings. You don't have people that invested in position,

• 53:10Speaker 01

  who with one meeting, I can see someone really dumb being affected by that. Like, oh, these guys with big medals on their chest take you to like a secret, super secret room inside the CIA, like with all these locks and codes and things on the wall. And you're all impressed. Like, oh, my God, I can't challenge this. He's a very smart guy. I don't believe he changes mine. So the question is, why did he? I don't know. I really don't. But I know that the person that was on my show two months earlier no longer exists.

• 53:38Tucker Carlson?

  Wow. I can honestly say that's one of the most shocking things I've heard in a long time because I didn't, um, I should also echo what everyone else who's ever met him will say, which is nice guy, you know, not a, not a mean man or anything like that.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  No, great guy. Like he, you know, he adopted kids. He like,

• 53:53Tucker Carlson?

  Totally.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Everything he says about decency, respect for everybody. I totally, I was even saying today that he was, you know, with the whole thing about the question of whether this new trans lawmaker was good to use the bathrooms. He was asked about it. He was just like emphasizing the need for respect and decency and civility, even if, you know, things, and I believe he believes that. Like, I believe he is in connection with the like best parts of Christianity and takes them seriously and conducts himself that way and always has. Nothing against Mike Johnson personally, quite the contrary, but to watch that happen was, I mean, as cynical as I am.

• 54:27Tucker Carlson?

  I don't even know how to respond because I didn't, I have interviewed Mike Johnson over the years, but he was like some guy from Louisiana, whatever. I wasn't paying close attention. And it was only after he became speaker on the FISA question and on the question of funding.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Ukraine. That was the other thing. You go on, I talked about that too. He was like, you know, he did say, he wasn't at all like, uh, You know, say like a Matt Gaetz type, or, um, you know, Tom Massey, like, we can't fund that war, that war. He wasn't saying that. He was, he was like, we can't let Russia win, but he was still pretty skeptical. But it was really on these questions of FISA and the CIA and the FBI and spying powers and internet censorship powers where he was passionate vehement. That's why I had him on.

• 55:13Tucker Carlson?

  You're making me hear my arms go up because I agree. Look, I'm not alleging anything because I don't know anything. I didn't even know that he was that invested on precisely the opposite side, but you know, he's made all these things possible. And, you know, I had a conversation with him off camera, so I probably shouldn't be too detailed about it, but he said something that I thought was like, not only nonsensical, but like insane, crazy. And it's to make any, it was internally incoherent. And he's not stupid, as you said, and I, and I got upset. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense at all. And, um, and he just kind of said, no, it does make sense. It does. It was like, there was no answer. It was just like, wow, this is a guy.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw those with Obama too. You have to like, especially for people who are kind of new to power, right? Like, not Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell, people have been in these positions for decades. Mike Johnson went from a very backbench member of Congress to the third in line who controls the, the House of Representatives. You can only imagine the intense, just unlimited amount of pressure that comes from multiple directions to force him to align himself with whatever the agenda is of the people who rule Washington. Same thing happened with Obama. I believed Obama when he talked for two years when running for president about how he's a constitutional law professor,

• 56:35Speaker 01

  how he believes so much in the core rights of the Constitution, like habeas corpus, the right to cast your imprisonment, to have evidence presented against you, but places like Guantanamo and elsewhere, how he wanted to uproot the worst abuses of Bush, Cheney, Warren Terror. Then he gets into office and not only doesn't uproot them, but he starts extending them. Because again, these generals come, including the ones he likes who went to Princeton, like David Petraeus, you know, the ones who dazzle Obama and give him secret briefings about all the blood that's going to be on his hands if he does any of the changes he spent two years promising. And then suddenly on a dime, he switches and there's a lot of other pressure you can imagine as well, like the stick, as you said. And anyone who thinks that this is that our intelligence agencies are above these kinds of things, the naivete required to believe that is

• 57:20Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they're not above them.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Of course, they've done it.

• 57:22Tucker Carlson?

  This is their currency. It's just amazing having spent, you know, all this time in Washington with all these people I have just who I know. And by the way, in some cases, like Mike Johnson, I like it. You can't really reach another conclusion other than there's something very heavy duty going on behind the scenes, like really profound going on. And I just don't know why no one has ever emerged from the system to say what it is. Is there not one courage? There are very few courageous people. You're one of them, but there just aren't many in this world.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean.

• 57:54Tucker Carlson?

  Why doesn't someone just just call, call these people out?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  One of the things that made Trump so threatening and that continues to make him so threatening is that in a lot of ways, he was pulling the curtain.

• 58:04Tucker Carlson?

  He is that guy. It's the fourth wall's coming down.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember he, he just said openly, yeah, like as a billionaire, as a businessman, I just gave a candidate, you know, $50,000 and then they would automatically accept my call and do whatever I told them to do. Who, who says that in the top level of politics? Like, hey, you're running for president, I want you to know, here's how the system works. You give a lot of money to some place that these lawmakers tell you to donate money to, and then they do whatever you want. They do your bidding. When in that 2016 debate, when he started rallying against the evil and the stupidity of the Iraq war, because his principal opponent at the time was Jeb Bush, who was backed

• 58:48Speaker 01

  by the establishment, and the audience started booing, you know, as though America was rising up in defense of the Bush family. He was like, oh, these seats here, these are all the big Republican donors. That's the only people who are booing me because they're supporting Jeb Bush.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  If you ever been to a debate, as I know you have, that's exactly how it is. The big, both parties, they put their big donors, the partisans right behind where they get, where their audience hears only their reaction. So Trump constantly was.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Sort of doing that, here's how things really work. And then, once he started getting targeted by these agencies, by the CIA, the FBI, starting with Russiagate, but the Steele dossier, what Jim Comey did, leaking that to the media, and then all those investigations, that's why he started saying, these intelligence agencies are corrupted to their core. They're filled with people who have their own politicized agenda. They were supposed to have an elected leader, democratically elected leader, who supervises these branches and these agencies and the executive branch, and their duty is to carry out his policies. But they don't, they subverted his policies, they sabotaged them because they didn't agree with them. They were like their own branch of government, completely powerful, and he's the first one, I guess since Dwight Eisenhower, who tried to warn of this on his way out, after

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  spending eight years, and obviously, the intelligence community and military industrial companies is way smaller, when Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn of how much of a threat it was to democracy in his farewell address, it was before Vietnam, before the real buildup of the Cold War, obviously before 9/11. They're sprawling now, they're almost impossible to even analyze or quantify, and Trump is the only one who's trying to say, these institutions are radically corrupted. At their root, they're rotted, and that's why he's trying to choose people. You know, he picks some like, comfortable institutionalists and status quo perpetuators like Marco Rubio, Lee Stefanic, John Ratcliffe, people like that, just to give Washington a sense of, okay, there's some people here we're good with.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  But then, the people that he picked, who are, share his view, that these institutions require radical overhaul, they're just undemocratic, unaccountable.

• 1:00:52Tucker Carlson?

  There are three of them.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Those are the ones they're trying to destroy. Well, there's Tulsi, there's Matt Gaetz, there's RFK Jr., and a little bit, to some extent, Pete Hegseth. I mean, he's not really ideologically unaligned, but the problem is, is that he doesn't come from the Pentagon bureaucracy. That's what they care about most, that's a trillion dollar agency. You know how many wheels that greases in Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics? That's what they care about most, is making sure that money goes where it's supposed to go. That's why they're concerned about him. But the people who aren't the ones that Kamala could have picked easily, are the ones who they're most out to destroy, because that's what these power, permanent power factions are, is they are their own government, and they wield the most power.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  And they have, sure, considered Mike Johnson, no threat at all, though, so let's take him and do what we have to do.

• 1:01:41Tucker Carlson?

  But you wonder, like, just... I don't know. I mean, look, these guys are under pressure that, you know, we probably can't imagine. You know, if somebody knew the thing you were most embarrassed about that would destroy your life and make your kids not like you, or whatever. I'm not speaking of Johnson specifically, but I, I know a couple of people who I know are compromised in the US government, and I sort of feel sad for them. Because how'd you like to be in that position? But it does, all it would take is one brave man to give a press conference. You know, there was actually a guy, Koki Roberts's father, Hale Boggs, who stood up in Congress, he was this majority leader in about 1970, he was on the Warren Commission,

• 1:02:23Tucker Carlson?

  and he didn't buy the, did not buy the conclusions at all. And he told other people that. He was from Louisiana. And he stood up and made some noises about, on the, on the floor of the House, about how the CIA was, you know, doing things they were not supposed to do in domestic politics, and had unchecked power, etc. And he was immediately denounced as mentally ill, probably an alcoholic. And then he disappeared in a plane crash with Begich in 1972 in Alaska, and the plane was never seen again. So, I mean, look, I'm not saying that he was, he was murdered for that, though. You know, I would not at all be surprised if he was. But why is he the last guy to say anything like that?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Well, because he died in a plane crash and was declared mentally ill.

• 1:03:01Tucker Carlson?

  Maybe!

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  No, but, I mean, this is the thing is, you know, I remember doing this Snowden reporting, when there was all this controversy about government spying on people. And the big reaction that I got, that had been cultivated for a long time, not just by the government, but by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg famously said, "Privacy is an archaic value," or whatever. "Don't worry about privacy anymore." People were saying, "I don't have anything to hide. Like, I'm not a terrorist, I'm not a pedophile, I don't care what, my government is spying on me." And I would always say, "Everybody has things to hide. There are things that you don't tell anybody. There are things you only tell your psychiatrist, only your spouse, only your best friend, things that you don't want any other people to know, that you're petrified if everybody knew about you." We, we are private, we need, we're, we're social

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  animals, we need connection to, to society and other people, but we also crave privacy. Without privacy, we go insane.

• 1:03:52Tucker Carlson?

  And there's no freedom without privacy.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  None. Because that's where dissent and creativity and exploration and a rejection of societal mores, that's where it resides, in, in, in the private realm. Without that, if you're just being surveilled and watched all the time, that breeds conformity. And so, everybody needs privacy, everybody values it, everybody has something to hide. And the ability to surveil people to know everything about, I think what, what actually happens is we're so inculcated from birth to have this very idealistic image of our country and our government. And in some ways it's valid. Like I think I revere the constitution. You know, I went to school to study it and that I went to practice it. Like I believe in its values. Like I think it's a genius document.

• 1:04:37Tucker Carlson?

  I do too.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Comes from the enlightenment. Like, I mean, just a very like intellectually based, philosophically based idea of how it was constructed, like very carefully. And there are things very good about the United States. But if you think that the most powerful country on the planet, the richest and most powerful country arguably ever to exist, doesn't have at its core, in terms of the people who run it, people who are willing to do anything to preserve their power, to augment their power. Again, it just takes a kind of naivete that's almost impossible to fathom.

• 1:05:11Tucker Carlson?

  People risk death every single day in this country to rob liquor stores for $300. So you can't tell me that control of a trillion dollar federal agency or of a multi trillion dollar government with, you know, vast nuclear arsenal.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Or just the power to, to decide who gets bombed, where wars start.

• 1:05:29Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I'm saying. The most powerful institution in human history.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Doesn't have sinister things going on.

• 1:05:34Tucker Carlson?

  What would people do to control that? No, the stakes are very high. And I think the closer you are to it, the more often you forget that. You're like, oh, it's just secretary of whatever. Who cares? Well, there's, you know, people care. Understandably, there's people will do anything for power and money. Um, wow, that's so distressing. Did you, um, in your reporting, and I always forget that, you know, you were behind the Snowden thing, and thank you for that. What a wonderful guy he is. Um, but did you ever get any hint of what the pressure is that's applied to politicians to comply and obey?

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first of all, I do think like we were just talking about like people who, why don't people stand up like Edward Snowden is a perfect example of somebody who believed the mythology of the government, believed in, you know, he went to enlist in order to fight in Iraq. He broke both of his legs. He couldn't join the military. So he went to work for the CIA and the NSA because he really believed in the, and then what he saw was so horrifying, was so corrupting, was so deceitful that he risked his life and his liberty, which to this day he's deprived of, to inform everybody about what was going on by stealing under their nose documents that he could give to reporters so that reporters could tell the world what was happening. That is kind of an example of that level

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  of courage of somebody saying, here's what's going on. What Snowden gave us was a tiny picture of what the NSA does. So obviously if there had been in there like specific blackmail sort of documents about how they were spying on particular politicians, that's something we would have, you know, reported on very aggressively and very early on. So I can't say I saw that. But what I did see is all sorts of incidents of people at the NSA abusing their authority to spy on people who they had no right to be spying on, including sometimes, you know, just things as trivial as like ex-girlfriends or family members. But also

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  when in other countries, they wanted to impede or harm somebody, they spied on those people all the time and use that information in part to gain power over them. So of course, who, how can you expect human beings to resist that level of power when it's all operating in the dark?

• 1:07:50Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:08:33Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:08:56Tucker Carlson?

  So, I mean, you can't have anything like representative government with that system in place.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  The whole idea of having a national security apparatus and intelligence community that operates in complete secrecy, and that just does what it does permanently without end, and constantly expands its authorities and powers because there's no political gain.

• 1:09:19Tucker Carlson?

  And its budgets, which are classified.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  And its budgets, which nobody, you know, that was one of the things we actually were able to see was the black book of the intelligence budget. And we reported on the things that, you know, we thought were newsworthy about that. There's zero transparency to any of this. There's no oversight. You technically have like oversight in Congress and the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committees, these select committees that were created after the Church Commission found all these, you know, what the Church Commission found just by itself, you know, CIA developments of medications to try and like, you know, make people lose control of their brains or inject people with diseases, like really sinister, dark stuff that the CIA was doing that nobody knew about, not even the president. They just did it on their own.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  It was a discovery of a secret government inside the government. The idea was, well, we need at least some oversight. This oversight, they tell nothing to these committees. The people who get put on those committees are people who are the ones who most support these intelligence communities. It was run in the Senate for years by Dianne Feinstein. Her husband was a military contractor. She was embedded in these agencies. She defended everything that they did. The one time she questioned them, which was when she wanted to investigate the use of torture in the CIA. John Brennan CIA spied on Dianne Feinstein and on her entire staff. He got caught doing it. He lied and said he didn't. He finally admitted that it was done.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  He apologized and there were no repercussions. Like let's buy guns. We're going to go Google John Brennan spying on.

• 1:10:50Tucker Carlson?

  I'll never, I'll never forget it. And when that story first broke, it was years ago. It was at least 10 years.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  It was under the, he was CIA director under Obama.

• 1:10:58Tucker Carlson?

  And I remember thinking, I don't think the CIA would ever dare spy on the select committee, on the Senate Oversight Committee of the CIA, of the intel community. I mean, I can't imagine they would have the balls to do something like that. That's insane, but I had no idea.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  And they did it on somebody who was one of their most, their blindest loyalists. The one time she stepped a little bit out of line because she wanted to investigate exactly what happened in the torture program.

• 1:11:23Tucker Carlson?

  At that point, like, why don't you, why have people put up with that? I mean, I guess Frank Church did die of incredibly fast acting cancer. So maybe that's why, I mean, people must be afraid because you'd think out of 435, 535 with the Senate, there'd be somebody who was like, this is not democracy. This is totally immoral. Like I'm going to just stand up and take them on like.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  But, but, but Tucker, just, just let's say that, you know, people had things on you that would, as you put it, destroy your reputation, make your kids think very importantly of you, would embarrass you for the rest of your life, would destroy whatever you value in life.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  It takes a very rare person to say, ah, F it. I'm going to risk that happening.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think we have this self-preservation tactic. That's why those kinds of things like blackmail extortion are so effective is because they can force people to.

• 1:12:21Tucker Carlson?

  No, I think, I think you're, you're, you're right.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Look at how much these like sexual misconduct allegations are used when Julian Assange really got dangerous. Suddenly out of nowhere appeared two women claiming that he quote unquote raped them because the allegation was they had consensual sex with him, but he didn't use a condom when they had not given their consent to no condom and that became rape under Swedish law. That's what forced him to the Ecuadorian embassy and led to everything that happened subsequently. Now with Matt Gaetz, the minute Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth too, like out of nowhere appears this alleged rape that nobody had heard about, that nobody knew about. It's always, the thing that always amazes me, this is actually the best example, in case anybody thinks, oh, our government doesn't do that. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  I remember when I first heard about this, I was kind of confounded about why this happened. Obviously, they were saying the normal things you say about people like that, like, oh, he's a Soviet asset, he hates America, he put troops in harm's way, because he showed the public that the government was lying for years about the Vietnam War. Like, inside, they were saying, we can never win. externally, they were saying, we're on the verge of winning. But what they also did, and it's the only reason Daniel Ellsberg ended up free,

• 1:13:34Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  is they broke into his psychoanalyst's office because they wanted to steal all the documents about his most intimate admissions to a psychoanalyst about his psychosexual life and fantasies, because that was the weapon of choice that they wanted to use to destroy him. That's a fact. The Nixon administration broke into the psychoanalyst's office of Daniel Ellsberg when they couldn't find the documents they planned to break in at the guy's house. And that was, they finally put a stop to that, but they did break into a psychoanalyst's office, and only because of that government misconduct did the judge dismiss the charges against Daniel Ellsberg, who otherwise was headed to prison for the rest of his life. Why would that be a response to a whistleblower

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  revealing to the press, that then revealed to the public that the government was systematically lying about the Vietnam War? It's because if you can have that information over somebody and then use it against them, you destroy... I remember when it happened with Julian Assange. No one wanted anything to do with Julian Assange anymore. No one wanted to mention his name. It's just like, ooh, this person's guilty of, accused of rape. I just don't want anything to do with that. So if you could have shown that Daniel Ellsberg had this fantasy, or had done this, or had done that, in the intimacy and privacy of his own life, it just, everybody would have wanted to avoid it.

• 1:14:51Tucker Carlson?

  It's totally, it's totally true. Did you ever find yourself on the wrong end of any of that since you were very high profile?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the important thing is that if you want to confront the government, if you want to spill secrets, if you want to bring unwanted transparency, which happens to be the job of a journalist, I know people forget that, but that is the job of a journalist. If you're going to journalists, that's what you're supposed to try to do. You have to, as best you can, guard against that. Like, you have to protect yourself, make sure that your own house is in order as much as possible, because that will be a huge vulnerability. But as I said before, everything has, everyone has things to hide. There's no one who doesn't.

• 1:15:36Tucker Carlson?

  100%. And, and it's also true that if, you know, you get really attacked in a, in a scary way, you don't want to talk about it. I mean, I feel, I feel that I have been, that has happened, you know, not sex stuff, but I've definitely felt a lot of pressure and you don't, you don't want to, you know.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  It's not just sex stuff. Yeah, there's, there's all sorts of things in our past that we do that we're embarrassed by.

• 1:16:04Tucker Carlson?

  Did you ever worry the intel agencies would try and hurt you?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:16:08Tucker Carlson?

  Dumb question.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, like, I, you know, I think a lot of people remember, but, uh, my husband, who's now deceased, but at the time, he went to Germany because there was a part of the archive that was corrupted and we knew there was a lot of documents there. And it was with Laura Poitras and she, using her genius, had figured out how to access it. No one else could, but she didn't trust anybody, including The Guardian, to give it to you, to bring to me. The only person she trusted was David. I couldn't travel outside Brazil because there was a concern that I would be arrested by the US. So I had to stay in Brazil. So only David could go and get those documents. And the way we talked about it was in a very secure, secret way. We were using the highest levels of encryption at the time that Snowden insisted on. And when David went to Germany, he came back home through Heathrow, but at Heathrow,

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  the British arrested him and detained him and threatened to prosecute him under an anti-terrorism law. And the only reason they let him out was because the Brazilian government, it became a huge story in Brazil, the Brazilian government was like, give us back our citizen immediately. And so they let him go. And then David sued the British government over human rights abuses because they were detaining him for journalism. And the British government said in their papers, when they defended their actions, we knew exactly what he was doing in Germany. We knew exactly what he was carrying and that's the reason why we detained him because we wanted to prevent this, the secret documents from getting out into the public because it harms British national security. Now, obviously we got the archive anyway and we reported on those documents, but they admitted they knew and were listening to our conversations about why he was going there.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  They knew when he was going there, they, everything was being tracked. And so when you know-

• 1:17:43Tucker Carlson?

  Did you ever figure out how?

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  I knew they were using, I mean, part of the reporting that we did was that the NSA had cracked even the most sophisticated levels of encryption. So things that people thought were safe, there's nothing 100% foolproof. And at the time, we were among the most watched people in the world because we had in our hands, the most sensitive secrets from the world's most powerful government that we were going around the world publishing to inform people of journalistically. And so of course we knew we were being spied on by probably a lot of people. It's just that the British were forced to admit it. And when you get that confirmation as opposed to like a belief or suspicion, the level of invasiveness you feel is hard to express because they're not just listening to the parts of your conversations where you're talking about the Snowden documents.

• 1:18:30Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know. Oh, I know firsthand. Yeah. No, I know.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you had private conversations leaked as well when you were trying to interview President Putin, but a lot of other-

• 1:18:38Tucker Carlson?

  Followed and had massive problems with Ukrainian intel service.

• 1:18:44Tucker Carlson?

  Et cetera, et cetera. It's not about me. I don't hold any institutional power. It's just interesting if you see what happens in your own life just by talking about it. I haven't done anything ever. Just sit around the studio, talk to people. But you know, you see the pressure they apply to you, like what would it be like to be, you know, the chairman of the intel committee, or the speaker of the house, or the president of the United States?

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:19:05Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I can't even imagine. And it just shows you what a remarkable person Trump is. He is just so, he's weirdly resistant to that stuff. And that is, that's why they hate him.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  I mean, remember all the stuff that came out in 2016 when they thought he might win? Like the Access Hollywood tape that came out of nowhere? And I'm, you know, the Stormy Daniels stuff, you know, they threw everything out there. And Trump is, is a very rare person who's just kind of shameless. Like, he doesn't feel a sense of shame, and he doesn't back down, no matter what. He goes, he gets more aggressive against people he tried to force him to. It's just his instinct, it's who he is. I watched him for many decades when I was a lawyer in New York, when he was a, you know, big real estate mogul, constantly being sued in lawsuits. Everybody knew how he was. And that's what is so threatening about him. It's not his ideology or his beliefs to the fact that they think he's in Russia. It's the fact that he's immune.

• 1:19:59Tucker Carlson?

  Immigration, racism.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Right. None of, no one cares about that. No one believes that. It's the fact that he's immune to the type of control that for decades they've been able to impose on people who wield any power, let alone the power of the presidency.

• 1:20:15Tucker Carlson?

  Well, just to type the, the current state of US-Russia relations or the war that we're about to get, like, how do you, how do you think this ends?

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're sitting in Moscow,

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  obviously, if there's a barrage of weapons, you know, aimed at Moscow, St. Petersburg, your major cities, that's one thing. If there's a limited number of missiles aimed in Kursk, where, you know, Ukrainian forces are, that's another. And obviously, they know what we talked about, which is that in about seven weeks, there's going to be a new American president with whom they've dealt extensively.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  And despite claims that he's some sort of, you know, lackey of Putin, he basically did the two things that were most threatening to Russian interests. He, he sent lethal arms to Ukraine after Obama refused to. Trump did, I didn't agree with it, but that's what he did. And what he did even more so, that was more threatening, damaging to Russia, is he spent years trying to badger the Europeans out of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

• 1:21:16Tucker Carlson?

  Press them on energy.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  He was like, why would you be buying gas from Russia? You're getting dependent on Russia and we're the ones who pay for your protection. You should be buying it from us. That's the, selling natural gas to Europe was the anchor, the key to Russian vital interests and Trump threatened those vital interests continuously. So the idea, like anyone who's even a little bit rationally thinking would understand that this claim that he's being blackmailed by Putin, while at the same time, he's simultaneously doing the two most threatening things to Russian vital national interests, you would immediately recognize what a fictitious claim that was.

• 1:21:47Tucker Carlson?

  No, he's being blackmailed by the US intel agencies and in fact,

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  More so.

• 1:21:50Tucker Carlson?

  Our government is the fascist state that they claim Russia is.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, so, and that's not just that.

• 1:21:55Tucker Carlson?

  So distressing.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  But, but, so I think they know that, you know, they obviously know Trump's coming in and, and they feel like he wants to go in a different direction with the war. And so even though there is going to be pressure on Putin, as there would be on the United States and any other country, to respond in kind to NATO and the United States now bombing Russia, basically. I think as long as it's limited, as long as it stays limited to Kursk, as long as it's not, you know, in large numbers, knowing that Trump is coming into office, I think they understand that that's an opportunity to try and end this war without its escalation. I hope. Again, as you said, we're depending on Putin's restraint and rationality.

• 1:22:35Tucker Carlson?

  So is Christmas really about buying stuff? You'll be forgiven if you assumed it is because that's the message you receive. But most people sense deep down, there may be a little bit more to Christmas. Maybe this is the time of year to focus on growing your relationship with God, to remember there is a God and reach out to that God. Well, to do that, you can check out Hallow, the Hallow app and its Advent Pray 25 Challenge. Hallow is the world's number one prayer meditation app, and for good reason. It's amazing. It's fantastic. We use it, we're proud to use it. This Advent, we highly recommend you join Hallow's Prayer Challenge for God so loved the world. Boy, that'll put meaning in your Christmas for sure. You've got spiritual stories, reflections, musics, testimonies. It's really well done.

• 1:23:20Tucker Carlson?

  You're not going to get it anywhere else in as easy a form. Just go to Hallow, download it, and bam, it's right there. So this is an opportunity to be transformed by God this Christmas. Don't wait, get there. Three free months right now when you sign up at hallow.com/tucker. My wife comes home and tells me all about it every day. Spend this Christmas working on something that matters, your relationship with God. Maybe the only thing that matters. We hope you will. Hallow.

• 1:24:01Tucker Carlson?

  So among the many people Donald Trump has spoken to since winning a week and a half ago is Joan Mika. And Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, they have a very low rated show on MSNBC, which I do think has outsized influence. The numbers are really, are small.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  People in Washington watch it.

• 1:24:21Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly it. That's exactly right. And so I think the show does have influence. I disagree with every single word ever uttered on that show, but I don't think it's totally insignificant. You know, it's not Joy Reid. So they went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. Like, what do you make? And then now they're saying, well, we went because we were afraid that we were going to be persecuted if we didn't kiss the ring or something like, what?

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  No, it's what their excuse is even more pathetic, which is, we're journalists. You have to go and talk to the people in power. But I think those two in particular are singularly pathetic. And I realize saying singularly pathetic in the context of employees of the corporate media seems like a designation that no one deserves alone. But I think in their case, they really merit that distinction because I think like most of the people who work in corporate media, like the Rachel Maddows and like the Lawrence O'Donnells and the Donald Lemmons and those kind of people, I think they believe all the insane unhinged stuff. Like, I think they really believe that like Trump is a Russian agent, that Putin is blackmailing him, that Trump wants to like put them in camps. Like,

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  I think it's insane, but like credit for at least actually saying what they really believe is as preposterous and laughable as it is. Joe Scarborough has no beliefs other than his own advancement and self-importance. Okay, let's remember in the 1990s, he was elected not as a Republican Congressman, but as a radical conservative liar, the whole new Gingrich, like young firebrands, we're gonna go in and like radically reform, you know, change the the country and Washington. No more of that anywhere in Joe Scarborough, like this radical transformation of institutional power. And then, as Megyn Kelly said, no show did more to boost Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 in the in the Republican primary

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  than Joe and Mika. They were down at Mar-a-Lago all the time. They loved Trump. They were best friends with Trump. They laughed with him. They let him call another show all the time, part because it was very beneficial to to that show. It was the only thing that rated. He, Trump saved all their jobs. But they also loved just being proximate to power like that. That's the thing that they crave most. And then, once, what really happened was Scarborough thought that he was going to be chosen as Trump's Vice President. He really wanted to. And when Trump rejected him in favor of Mike Pence, and then also MSNBC turned into this fanatical anti-Trump network where the only people who watched were Trump haters, both out of personal affront, but also out of survival, they had to turn

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  into a full-on Trump-hating show. You couldn't have the morning show of three hours be someone positive toward or neutral about Trump when the whole rest of the network, everyone who watched.

• 1:27:04Tucker Carlson?

  May I just ask you to pause for a sec? I'm just suggesting this. Scarborough, who I used to know really well, he thought he was gonna be VP?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's what they remember how close they, I know, I remember that. I didn't. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He that's.

• 1:27:16Tucker Carlson?

  You should come to the United States more often. I learn a lot.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  I think my distance is what enables me to to learn things. So, yeah, that was a big part of it. And but also, it was survival at MSNBC. And so they turned into these, you know, Joe Scarborough, Mr. Radical Conservative, let's change all of Washington work, became Mr. Institutionalist. You know, the people he had on his show are like Richard Haast and like Norm Ornstein, like all these these like Council on Foreign Relations and think takes people. Who are obsessed with hating Trump as well, and it became ground zero for Trumpist Hitler. They were saying as recently as two months ago, or a month ago. Like, Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler. He is a Nazi figure. Niko Brzezinski went on The View and cried and said Trump wants to murder women. Women are going to die because of Donald Trump.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  He's a fascist. He's a racist. They said it every day, over and over. And then Trump wins. And their whole influence was because they were Joe Biden's favorite show. Joe Biden would wake up at like 6 a.m. like many geriatrics do. Because he went to bed at like 7 o'clock P. M. And he would watch Morning Joe. And then he would hear, you know, Joe Biden is the greatest president since F. D. R. Joe Scarborough said that. He personally can assure the country, having spent so much time around Joe Biden, that he's sharper than ever. He runs intellectual circles around. All the Republicans were claiming that he's cognitively impaired. There's like a month before the debate, he was saying that. So, of course, they Joe Biden watched that show every day. That's what gave Joe Scarborough his sense of importance was like, oh, I'm close to the White House. He was at the White House all the time.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Now Biden's gone. Biden's not an asset anymore. Trump is back in power. And one of the things that has happened amazingly since the since Kamala's loss is that the MSNBC audience, which is already tiny. Has basically completely disappeared. Like, the number of people watching those shows when they're live in prime time with that big gigantic corporate power behind them promoting it. It's it's less than a lot of like YouTube shows.

• 1:29:11Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, wait, wait.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, including like, I don't mean like the cumulative audience of how many people watch YouTube or YouTube video at the end of the day. I just mean live watching. Again, Bongino's show has, I think, on Rumble, has like five or six or seven times more viewers than MSNBC's primetime. This is on Rumble, you know, which a lot of people don't even know about, don't even watch. That audience is gone, in part because they feel disillusioned that the people they trusted, who told them Trump was going to prison, the whole Trump family was going to prison, Trump could never win, he was going to be in jail before the election, all the women were going to rise up and vote for Kamala out of anger toward Trump. None of that happened. And they're like, I've been watching this show every day for nothing.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  It was, I was, it, I, I, like, none of it happened, none of it was true. And that audience is gone, half out of disillusionment and anger, but half out of just like, kind of checking out through impotence and helplessness. And I think that they're desperate. The only way they think they can get people to come back on is to have Trump come back on their show and their, Trump is going to make them crawl around on the floor multiple times.

• 1:30:18Tucker Carlson?

  Bark like a dog.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were like, Joe and Miko were like, Trump was incredibly cheerful and happy. Of course he was, he loves seeing you humiliate yourself because you know, he knows you need them now.

• 1:30:32Tucker Carlson?

  I don't think that, you know, weekly interview with Trump, which is not going to happen anyway, but even if it did, was going to save MSNBC.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  No, because who would watch it? Because no conservatives are going to trust that show or MSNBC. And no liberals want to see MSNBC host. Do you know how angry liberals are about just even the fact that Joe and Miko went to Mar-a-Lago? So who, who's the audience for that?

• 1:30:56Tucker Carlson?

  They're caught, like Liz Cheney, what, you know, I have to say, of all the reasons I'm so grateful that Kamala lost, um, seeing Democrats turn on Liz Cheney and seeing her stranded between the parties in no man's land.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  It's the best.

• 1:31:11Tucker Carlson?

  Honestly, I can't, there was a piece by John Nichols in The Nation today. I don't read The Nation much anymore. But you know, occasionally The Nation is like, kind of true to itself, not always, but sometimes, and I don't agree with it, but. John Nichols wrote this piece about Kamala Harris here where he, he goes through like all the places that she went with Liz Cheney went with Kamala Harris and like the only thing did not work, she turned off Republicans. Like, the idea was, you know, we've got Liz Cheney campaigning with us. A lot of Republicans who are like Donald Trump will vote for us. It's like, just the opposite happened.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  You know, it was so predictable and so obvious at the time.

• 1:31:45Tucker Carlson?

  It was predictable.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Also, like, what made Kamala's campaign like for the six seconds that it seemed like it had some like air to it.

• 1:31:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Was this like vibrancy of young people, you know, like celebrating the emergence.

• 1:31:58Tucker Carlson?

  Right, right, yeah, totally.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  And so you then take Liz Cheney and like send Bill Clinton to Michigan to like lecture everybody in the Muslim community and Arab community who already hates you because you've been buying Israel about how the Israelis are totally right and it's all the fault of the Arabs. And then you take Liz, Dick Cheney's daughter with you through the Rust Belt, where like all those policies devastated their lives, all those wars. And you think Liz, think about, I mean, this is the thing, think about how out of touch and cloistered and in a bubble you have to be to think that you're going to win an election depending on people who are in the working class who feel alienated from society, who feel like DC doesn't work

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  for you by taking the daughter of like the face of the American establishment, Dick Cheney, around with you as if she's your running mate. And people are craving change and you have sitting there with Liz Cheney, like the people only know because she's, she was the vice president's daughter. Her dad was Dick Cheney. And not just Dick Cheney, but somebody who supports a whole range of policies that Americans vehemently reject now. And I think that's more than anything what people, like people in media have finally had to come to grips with is, first of all, it's good that Liz Cheney actually isn't the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State. That also is good. Even though there are a couple of people in Trump's campaign who have very similar views like Mark Rubio and Liz Cheney, but, and Elise Stefanic, but we'll be that aside, it's good that Liz Cheney specifically

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  is not any of those positions. But.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  I think the best thing is that you have all these people inside these cloistered bubbles in Washington who really thought that they were the conscience of the nation, the voice of the nation. And not only were they applauding the decision to take Liz Cheney, but they have been spending eight years claiming that Donald Trump is a white supremacist who wants to put minorities in camps. And not only did Donald Trump win the election, but there was millions of non-white voters

• 1:33:55Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  who for the first time left the Democratic Party and went to vote for Trump. So imagine you wasted eight years of your life screaming and screeching like a petulant bird who has been like shot. Donald Trump's a racist, he's a fascist, he hates, he only likes white people. And then you watch millions of Latino people and black people and Asian people and Muslims refuse to vote for Kamala Harris. You obviously like, I have no influence at all, I'm completely out of touch.

• 1:34:21Tucker Carlson?

  Well, but it's so good to know that about yourself. I mean, this happened to me, by the way, they're all kind vehemently opposed to abortion, which I think is like horrifying and but lots of people don't agree with me. And so I see this, you know, Roe v. Wade comes down and you see these ballot initiatives say, you know, we're going to allow abortion until birth. And I'm like, wow, I'm so glad it's up for a vote. And then it turns out the voters just don't agree with me at all. And even in red states. It's true. It's true. Like, that was hard for me to accept because I am, I never talked about it, but I was just so, I'm so sincere on the subject. I'm just, I'm not for abortion, period. And so, but you have to be real, like, okay, sometimes people agree with you, sometimes they don't. But there's something about the Democratic base, which really is just basically just

• 1:35:04Tucker Carlson?

  like unhappy, college-educated white ladies, that's really who it is, honestly.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Honestly, I mean, and they say that they're like, we're relying on affluent women in the suburbs. That's their base.

• 1:35:12Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. But the unhappy ones, I mean, I'm related to some happy ones that are not voting for Kamala Harris, but the unhappy, the ones who are sort of disappointed in their husbands and are in their lives or whatever, I get it, I'm not being mean, but it's just true. But they should know that they're in the subset of a subset and that not everyone agrees with them. I think that's the beginning of wisdom. I mean, it has been for me, like, not everyone agrees with me, that's okay.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  But the thing is, like, you were just saying you read the nation sometimes.

• 1:35:36Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  I go out of my way to read everything, everybody.

• 1:35:40Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  You know, I try and have people in my lives who have very different views on, you know, I have a lot of people in my life in Brazil, for example, who worship Lua. I have a lot of people in my life who hate Lua, worship Bolsonaro, people who are in between. I want that. Like, I want to hear constantly from you. You want to be challenged all the time, not be ossified. I'm telling you, I know a lot of these people. I used to be on MSNBC all the time. I've been friends with a lot of the people.

• 1:36:01Tucker Carlson?

  Or do they hate you now, though?

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Oh, they despise me with burning passion. But in part because nobody hates things more than, no one, the person always most hated is the one perceived as the heretic.

• 1:36:12Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  You know, but I, but I was never really on their side in the way that they thought, actually, anyway. But anyway, it doesn't matter. The, I know, I know a lot of these people and what has happened on MSNBC is that, or, or places like the New York Times op-ed page, similar. People who support Trump don't exist in that world. There's not one op-ed writer at the New York Times of the dozens who is a Trump supporter, even though half the country is, more than half the country is.

• 1:36:40Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Like Ross Dufus is like the person closest to, like, sort of understanding the Trump movement, but he certainly doesn't like Donald Trump at all. And other than that, they just don't have, it doesn't exist in the world. There's nobody ever on MSNBC on their shows who brings that perspective of why they support Donald Trump. So if you're only talking to people who are like-minded, and a lot of them have now left Twitter, trying to go to some other platform where only, they're only there, they don't want it, they really don't want to hear any dissent. And you're living a certain kind of life, you know, they're well-paid, they like are cloistered in these like affluent places, the United States, like in the, in the East Coast, like Brooklyn and Manhattan and Washington and Northern Virginia.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  How do you not realize that the life you're leading is so fundamentally different from the people on whose behalf you claim to be speaking? And I do think a lot of them, even though they're going to resist it and battle it. Have to swallow this election as a complete repudiation of not just themselves, but their entire purpose in life, their entire function.

• 1:37:38Tucker Carlson?

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

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, what always amazes me is like, you know, I really did grow up like in a working class environment, but like my whole life.

• 1:38:06Tucker Carlson?

  You're the only one.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, there are other people who grew up like, you know, I wasn't like poor, but I was not even near middle class.

• 1:38:13Tucker Carlson?

  Didn't your mom work at McDonald's?

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, my mom worked at McDonald's. She like, my parents got divorced when I was seven. My father was an accountant. He had three marriages.

• 1:38:19Tucker Carlson?

  Well, actually, you are alone. Like, I don't know anybody, and I mean this, I don't know anybody in journalism. I know people whose mom worked at McDonald's. I don't know anyone in journalism whose mom worked at McDonald's.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm just, I guess my point is that like, of course, that shaped me for a long time, but I realize now that that's not my life any longer. Like, and it hasn't been for, you know, 10 years, 15 years. Like, my life has been very separate from that. So I have a great amount of humility about my ability to speak for people who have a different kind of life because you're, of course, the way you live shapes your perspective, shapes your understanding, shapes your priorities. And it amazes me that these people don't have that humility at all. And so I, I think they're resisting it. Like, they're, you know, that was what Obama did. Remember when he was like, yeah, I know there's a lot of black men who don't want to vote for Kamala who are going to vote for Trump. That's because you all hate women and you're misogynist. And then they're basically saying the reason a lot of Latino men-

• 1:39:12Tucker Carlson?

  What an arrogant douchebag to say something like that.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, and there's a perfect example. Like, he spends all his time in, like, Richard Branson's yacht.

• 1:39:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, just with the highest level of jet set, and then he thinks he's going to go and speak to, like, black, working-class men.

• 1:39:27Tucker Carlson?

  If you disagree with me, you're a bigot? That's like, that's such a crazy place to start any conversation.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  It's so alienating. And I think, I think this kind of condescension that, but the other thing is, like, the main argument is that, like, they're all stupid. Like, they're victims of disinformation. They're misled. They have all these alternative media they're listening to that don't have the controls that have with us. They're getting false, you know, basically, they're stupid. They're, they're like, they're easily misled. They're gullible. So either they're racist, or misogynist, or stupid. That's their explanation. That's the thing they're clinging to. You know, like, oh, they don't realize how good they had it under Biden, how great the economy is, how much Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did for them. They just don't, because they were told that it was untrue. They can't figure it out for their, on their own. Like, the condescension reeks out of, I just, it oozes out of every pore of their being.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  And then they wonder why people despise them and their culture and their subculture. It's, who, who wants that? It is nauseating. But despite, so what I'm saying is that they're not, they don't have the attitude you had, which is like, oh, it's actually good to be humbled, to like, realize that things that you thought about the world need to be reevaluated. There's no self-criticism, no reflection. In fact, every Democrat thinks like, oh yeah, I know why we lost. It's been what I was saying all along. None of them are saying that. But you know, they're like, Democrats did this and Kamala did that. You know, they all are trying to pretend that if people had just listened to them, the Democrats would have won, even though all along, they were like, oh, Kamala's running the most brilliant

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  campaign ever. But what I'm saying is that the result is so overwhelming, so kind of pointed and devastating to their worldview. As I said, I think the thing that has really shaken them the most, even though they're fighting it, they're not embracing it, they're fighting it, but they can't, is that so many non-white voters

• 1:41:15Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Are, and Trump made huge gains in almost every non-white sector of society. I mean, Trump was saying that New Jersey and New York are swing states and people were laughing at him. And he only lost New Jersey by five points and did the best any Republican has done in, in, in New York City in many, many years because of how many black and Latino and

• 1:41:39Tucker Carlson?

  Worse.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Asians and Muslims voted for Trump, non-white voters. And so when that happens, like, you don't even get to blame white people, but you, you, you have to accept that the people who you think you own, who have mindless loyalty to you, disobeyed you and didn't listen to you. That's what makes them feel really shaken inside.

• 1:42:00Tucker Carlson?

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

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  It's so crucial to their worldview to believe.

• 1:42:25Tucker Carlson?

  We thought you loved us.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  No, it's the, I mean, those people, central to their worldview is that they're benevolent leaders of these people.

• 1:42:33Tucker Carlson?

  It's like that scene in Animal House. Otis, he loves us. Sure he does, drunk frat boy. No, people always imagine that the people they control, their employees, their serfs, love them. And what they need to understand, and I think this is just true in life, is that the people subordinate to you resent you. They may like you, but they also resent you.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Just the subordinates alone.

• 1:42:55Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:58Tucker Carlson?

  And it's one of the reasons you see hostility among women toward men, just in general. It's not a defining characteristic, but there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of that. If you're in the subordinate sexual position, you're like a little mad about it. I'm just, I'm sorry, I think that, sorry to like channel Dr. Freud, but there's some truth in that.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And I, I mean, it's what we were talking about before about you. I've said this so many times, like, just, if you belong to one of these so-called marginalized groups that liberals think they own and have an entitlement to control, you will never see more naked and unadorned bigotry, contemptuous bigotry, than you will see toward individuals within that group who disobey. Obviously, like, I remember when I really started splitting from the left, I'd never had real homophobia in my entire life before. I only started seeing it like once I had that breach with the left.

• 1:43:49Tucker Carlson?

  What, once you questioned, before you were a member of the LBGQ community.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. A marginalized figure. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And a pedophile, whatever, you know, all the things. And then.

• 1:43:59Tucker Carlson?

  Are you serious?

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And, and then, you know, like, the way they have always talked about.

• 1:44:04Tucker Carlson?

  I'm sorry to laugh.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Clarence Thomas. No, it's, it's amazing.

• 1:44:07Tucker Carlson?

  It's hilarious.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  The way they talk about Clarence Thomas.

• 1:44:10Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  You know, any black person who's a, who's been a conservative, same with like women who are, you know, Gloria Steinem said about the people, the young women who were refusing to vote for Hillary and voting for Bernie when asked like why they were doing that. She's like, because young girls go where the boys are. You know, like, the most demeaning, insulting thing you can say about women, that they don't think on their own, they just like, mindlessly do whatever the boys are. That, and so now you're seeing this like, oh yeah, like Latinos are very misogynistic and primitive. So are black men, they hate women, you know, they're easily misled, they're low-information voters. You know, the amount of contempt that liberal elites have for these non-white voters who didn't do as they're told, is almost scary.

• 1:44:56Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it is scary because it's a psychological condition. That's, of course, why they hate whites. That they've been, because they're losing the white vote. And the second they started to lose the white vote, then whites became the problem in the country. It's like, where's all this anti-white hate coming from? Well, it's coming from the Democratic Party institutionally, because they're being rejected by white voters.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they were ready to, they thought they were gonna get white women, that they were gonna get to embrace, like, white women were gonna rise up and join them against Trump, but a majority of white women voted for Trump.

• 1:45:20Tucker Carlson?

  Incredible. So they're gonna get, I mean, I will say to Hispanics in the United States, you're about to be the subject of a hate campaign.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Oh, and like, and Muslims too, who didn't want to vote for Kamala because, you know, because they were feeding Israel. I can't tell you how many times I've seen, "I can't wait till you people are deported." "I can't wait to see you blown up in Gaza." There's this sentiment, like, "You're gonna get what you deserve, and I'm gonna laugh about it, and I'm gonna cheer it." Same with Latinos, "I can't wait till you're deported, you're gonna get what you deserve when your abuela is deported." Like, really sick stuff. Joy Reid, I'm not talking about obscure people on the internet, like, she's gone on the air almost every night and talked that way.

• 1:45:59Tucker Carlson?

  Attack, attack the Hispanics.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Well, and Muslims and Arabs.

• 1:46:03Tucker Carlson?

  Well, so the best part about this is the language barrier, and very, so few liberals like, even bother to listen to what people actually think or say. They just, they're not interested, you know, it's like, they treat everyone like a three-year-old. But when they find out the social views of your average Central American, which I find hilarious and kind of great, but whatever, leaving my views aside, the average social views of a Central American, just on the social issues. Are so far, far out of what's considered acceptable, like, but they have no idea.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Which is so ironic because democratic strategists used to openly boast about what if you say you'll get called as a white supremacist with the replacement theory, that, oh, we're going to import all these people into the United States, make them citizens, and they're going to be supporters of the Democratic Party, and we're going to reign forever, like a thousand years, because these are all our voters. And they get here and they find out that actually, but, but I have to say, like, there's a great article in New York Magazine, which is words that pass my lips very, very rarely, where this writer, who actually wrote a very critical profile of me like five years ago, so.

• 1:47:05Tucker Carlson?

  Who is it?

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  His name is Simon, I just, I just talked to him today about this article because it's a great article. I'm embarrassed, I don't know his name, but I can't remember his last name. It's hyphenated, so it's just a little complicated. But anyway, I really recommend this article. He just went, what he did was he purposely went to black, Latino, Asian neighborhoods where there was a lot of Trump votes, and he just walked around on the street and talked to as many people as he could who voted for Trump about why. And what I think people don't understand is that the Latino and black NGO presidents who get put on TV who are supposedly there to speak for, have less in common with the people on whose behalf they're speaking than like, the white host of these shows.

• 1:47:51Tucker Carlson?

  Way less.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  And so you go there.

• 1:47:53Tucker Carlson?

  Certainly less than me. I mean, I have like attitudes that are pretty popular in those communities.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. But still, like, you know, a lot of them are just like, far from being like, you know, deceived by disinformation, they're like, it was the Democratic Party that supported NAFTA, like, we're having trouble paying for our healthcare or food for our kids, and they're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and to Israel, to all these other countries. They're just talking about the struggles that they have in their lives and the way in which the government doesn't care. There's some social issue stuff, too. But once you get to the United States to become a citizen, you integrate pretty quickly. And the thing you you don't sit around thinking about trans people or whatever, gay marriage, or these are ancillary issues, even if they don't agree with the Democratic Party on they might that might contribute to the alienation, the fact that, you know, they had that's why that Kamala ad was effective, not because

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  people are sitting around thinking about whether trans people should get government-funded sexual assignment surgeries in prison, but because it was like a proxy for explaining that these people have nothing in common with your lives. They don't care about you. They don't care about your values. Had they felt economically satisfied, I don't think that would have resonated because that's not what people care about. But most of them are just worried about the same thing everybody else is worried about. And they finally got to the point where they realize

• 1:49:05Tucker Carlson?

  They have less power, so they're even more worried.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're the people who get most affected, especially by immigration.

• 1:49:12Tucker Carlson?

  Totally.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:49:40Tucker Carlson?

  What's just so funny is you live in Brazil, which is another continent.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:49:45Tucker Carlson?

  You've been there a while.

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  Twenty years.

• 1:49:47Tucker Carlson?

  Twenty years. But I bet if I had called you the week before the election, which I should have done, but I got busy. But if I'd said, like, what do you think black and Latino people, men, married people in New York City around the country, what do you think they think politically? I bet you would have been pretty cool. I know you would have figured this out.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was talking about this.

• 1:50:07Tucker Carlson?

  You don't even live here.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  I know, but I lived here like for the first 38 years of my life. It's the only country of which I've ever been a citizen. I'm here all the time. But I do think that

• 1:50:17Tucker Carlson?

  But how do you know that? And they don't? That's the point.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:50:45Tucker Carlson?

  Tell me about it.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  But also, I think you have to, like, go out of your way to, to, to, okay, I don't want to be told what people think by other people who are reporting to their spokespeople. I want to hear from them directly. I want to look at the polling data. I want to understand what they're thinking. And you can just see it. You could hear it. You could feel it. You could observe it analytically in that data. But they just, I remember people on CNN saying, you know, I think it was, uh, Van Jones, or, no, it was Bakari Sellers, who was like, "I can, I don't care what the polls say. I can guarantee you, there won't be more than 5% of black men voting for Donald Trump. I don't care what the polls say. There won't be anywhere near 15% of, you know..."

• 1:51:24Tucker Carlson?

  He, Bakari Sellers, said that?

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Just like, "I don't care what the polls say..."

• 1:51:27Tucker Carlson?

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

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  The only ones are in the media. The ones that can pronounce it...

• 1:51:50Tucker Carlson?

  I'm just saying, I just don't know any person. I've never even met one.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Right. And, so, like, what is this? But this has been, if you think about the Democratic Party, the thing you fear most is that these groups that have been voting for you for generations and have been passed, had loyalties passed down from their parents, their grandparents, who don't even think about not voting for you at the election. Once that breaks, I'm not saying that those people who voted for Trump will never vote Democrat again, but now they know there's an option. They're free people. They get to decide for themselves who they want. And nothing is more alarming or, or, or petrifying to Democratic Party elites than seeing that.

• 1:52:31Tucker Carlson?

  I think it's really good. It's good for the country. Um, the Democratic Party in its, you know, current iteration is just, is almost purely destructive, um, and shouldn't be. You, you, you need a two-party system where both parties are...

• 1:52:45Speaker 01

  Represent, have, it's integrated. Like, I, I remember, like, the smartest Republicans, like JD Vance, Josh Hawley, like, the ones who really understand that you can't have the same Republican Party as you did in 1980. Have always been describing the future of the Republican Party as a multiracial working class coalition. And to watch people identifying primarily based on their citizenship and their class.

• 1:53:10Tucker Carlson?

  That's what you want.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  As opposed to constantly being divided by race.

• 1:53:13Tucker Carlson?

  That's what you want.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Is so.

• 1:53:15Tucker Carlson?

  Amen.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Promising to see.

• 1:53:17Tucker Carlson?

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

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Well, as you say, that gives them the idea of change. Like, hey, we can change the government.

• 1:53:41Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's exactly right.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. Whereas immutable characteristic by definition, don't change.

• 1:53:45Tucker Carlson?

  No, that's like, that's like Albanian blood feud that last 800 years. Like, you can't do that.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  But that has been the predominant liberal.

• 1:53:52Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Mindset is to encourage people to see themselves as part of insulated factions who hate other factions based on those characteristics. And there's almost nothing more offensive to me about what American liberalism writ large has done than try and impose that framework on people, to divide people based on things that in fact don't divide them.

• 1:54:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, yeah, especially since the experience of just like living in this country, you know, is so different from what they describe. I'm, have always been on the right. I've never had anybody, anybody who's black or Hispanic or non-white ever attack me one time in public as a racist. I've only had affluent white women attack me that way. I don't see people hating each other on the basis of race. I don't, I'm sure there's racism. I know that there is because people are flawed, but it's not a defining fact in this country that I have ever known. I don't know what the hell they're talking about. I mean, they're trying to scare the shit out of people to get their votes. That's it.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Well, and obviously, millions of non-white people agree with you since they just went and voted for the white candidate over the black one.

• 1:54:51Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  And the white candidate who they were told was Adolf Hitler and wanted to put all non-white people in camps. They were looking around, they're like, that's not my experience.

• 1:55:01Tucker Carlson?

  So I gotta, one last question, like that we began the conversation with the war that we're now in, I were in a war with Russia. And that really is something that the Biden administration is doing to punish the incoming Trump administration, I think, and to prevent it from acting, you know, with the autonomy any administration should have. But they're also going to leave all behind all kinds of, I mean, they're not going to spend the next seven weeks doing nothing. And one of the things they're going to try to do is increase censorship, I think, over the next seven weeks. Or am I just being paranoid?

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  I think you're right. They're obviously not going to do nothing. They're going to try and fortify everything as much as possible from the kind of change that the American people just voted for. The party of democracy is going to do that. Censorship, in my view, began, like systemic censorship on the internet began as a reaction to 2016.

• 1:55:56Tucker Carlson?

  Without question.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  Both to Brexit, but especially to Trump.

• 1:55:58Tucker Carlson?

  That's right.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  That's when you saw the emergence of these highly well-funded disinformation experts, the concoction of this fake expertise called disinformation experts. How did people get to be that? Where do you go to school to be a disinformation expert? Like a floating arbiter of truth? But they needed to radically intensify censorship because they blamed free speech and the free flow of information on, they blamed that for Brexit first, but especially for Trump's victory. And they wanted to crack down on that. There's always now an ongoing effort to try and crack down on that. I think, though, what they're going to try and do is look at the areas that they believe Trump is trying most radically to change, beginning with foreign, but that's foreign policy, the thing that they value most. That's

• 1:56:43Tucker Carlson?

  By far.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  You know, centerpiece of how America runs in their view. And they're going to spend as much of their time subverting him and sabotaging him in advance, even though he just won the election by a pretty, like, solid margin. And

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  There are some things that'll be reversible, but if you escalate the war in Ukraine and Trump now is coming into a war that the Russians perceive accurately to be not just a proxy war with the West behind Ukraine, but where NATO is actually bombing Russia, it becomes infinitely more difficult to keep under control and to resolve. The problem is, is that the risks of this are so great that it actually sickens me more than almost anything I've ever seen.

• 1:57:30Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  That they're willing to do this on the way out to just prevent this war from ending and trifling with the risk of a nuclear exchange.

• 1:57:39Tucker Carlson?

  And with the lives of every person on Earth.

• 1:57:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. I just got to close by saying, there's been in journalism my whole life. I, you know, spent a lot of time around journalists bragging about the risks they take. I've never known a journalist who's been threatened with prison more times than you have. Probably once every six months, I just check to make sure that you're not in prison.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, my friends do that too.

• 1:58:03Tucker Carlson?

  I'm always assuming you're going to wind up in prison for challenging the powerful and revealing what they're actually doing. So I just want to say congratulations on remaining free.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate that. It's not always been such an easy task. There have been times when I've gotten pretty close, including recently, but I feel like if you're not hated by and feel and perceived as a threat by people in power, you're not doing your job.

• 1:58:27Tucker Carlson?

  That's for sure.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  That's what I really believe.

• 1:58:28Tucker Carlson?

  Well, then by that measure, you're the most successful journalist of our generation, which I already thought of anyway, but congratulations.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tucker.

• 1:58:34Tucker Carlson?

  Glenn Greenwald.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Always great to see you.

• 1:58:36Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 1:58:38Tucker Carlson?

  Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.