Tucker and Glenn Greenwald: Epstein files, Israel, 9-11, JFK, Randy Fine
Good to see these ideas being expressed in the conservative mainstream. I agree with them it’s frustrating to see the continued secrecy on the Epstein files after all the talk about transparency and that Israeli interests in not exposing Epstein’s connections to the Mossad are the likely reason for the continued secrecy. IMO, that’s also the case with 9-11 where there is lots of evidence of Israeli foreknowledge—and with the JFK assassination where continuing Israeli interests are the only interests still remaining after over 60 years. As they note, the interest should be focused on Jack Ruby, not Lee Harvey Oswald. And the Iraq war and the fake WMDs.
The first part deals with Biden’s dementia, media cover-up, etc. Funny, but nothing new.
Glenn Greenwald: The Truth About Epstein, Jake Tapper’s Humiliation, & Insane New Push to Nuke Gaza
Do you want to talk about the Epstein files in relation to that as well? Yeah, sure. I just find the Epstein files so fascinating because all the people who are now in charge of the government under Donald Trump, particularly Cash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI, but others as well throughout the government, were over the last four years everywhere in the media, on their shows, on every other show, banging on the table. Demanding the immediate release of all the Epstein files. We’re now five months into the Trump administration, we haven’t gotten a single document that wasn’t previously published of the Epsteine files. They made a humiliating showing of pretending to release it when they called those conservative influence and they all waved around the binder, Epstein Files! We were like, oh my god what was in them? And then it turns out like nothing. You know, just every document that was in this binder was already previous release, it’s part of the litigation or journalism that was done. And the Pam Bondi’s new excuse, because I mean, I’m glad that there are a lot of people in the Trump movement and the mug movement who are not contrary to how they’re depicted in some sort of cult. Like they hold these people accountable. Like they wanna understand, like we were promised these things, like why isn’t this happening? And so Pam Bondy’s excuse now is, we have thousands and thousands of sex videos of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with minors, implying that it’s obviously gonna take a lot of time to go through these videos, and therefore we have to be patient before we get them. It’s like, I don’t care about sex videos of Jeffrey Epstein having with children because we already know that Jeffrey Epsteine had sex with children. That’s kind of the reason we know who he is. He’s been twice charged with that, once convicted, and then. Was ready to be charged again. For me, the two biggest issues are, are there people to whom he trafficked minors because he was charged with sex trafficking but nobody has been charged with being the recipient of that sex trafficking? But the much more interesting question for me is, and there’s a lot of reason to believe it’s true is, was he working with or for any foreign intelligence agencies? There is no way they don’t already have that answer. Maybe the answer is no. Maybe he wasn’t working with any, it would shock me, but maybe that’s their answer. Maybe their answer is he was. Why don’t we have those answers? Like have FBI agents for whatever reason, go through those sex tapes for the next three years. That’s fine. What stops them from releasing that question now?
Tucker [00:35:07] For people who may not be as familiar with the details, what leads you to raise that question? Is there evidence that suggests he might have been working with a foreign intelligence agency?
Glenn Greenwald [00:35:17] Well, first of all, the source of his wealth has always been mysterious. I mean, he wasn’t just very rich. He was living the life of a multi-multi-billionaire. He had, you know, $50 million properties in Manhattan and West Palm Beach, and bought that island, New Mexico, flying around on a 747. This is not just like somebody who’s very wealthy. This is somebody with essentially unlimited resources, right, like Bill Gates type well. And one of the ways, one of… His primary benefactors is Les Wexner, who is a multi-billionaire, somebody with whom he worked closely. And I guess the argument or the claim is, he was a brilliant strategist for how to save taxes, how to say money on taxes.
Tucker [00:36:03] He was like a highly competent accountant.
Glenn Greenwald [00:36:05] Yeah, like a tax accountant. That’s tax accountant, they tell you what strategies to use to save money. So maybe Les Wexner valued him so much that he gave him, I don’t know, $3 billion. In general, billionaires don’t like to give money away that they don’t have to. Maybe Les Wexxner is like super generous, like, oh, so gratefully, Jeffrey Epstein, here’s like $2 billion. But Les Weixner has all sorts of ties to, like his main non-money-making. Endeavor in life is supporting Israel and donating to pro-Israel groups and working closely with the Israeli government. Jazayn Maxwell, who’s now in prison as having been essentially his right-hand man, her father, Robert Maxwell, he died in a very mysterious way, he slipped off his yacht, was a known Mossad agent. He worked with the Mossad, he had very close ties to Israel. We all know even
Tucker [00:36:57] I was given a state funeral.
Glenn Greenwald [00:36:59] Yes, in Israel. And, you know, when I did the Snowden reporting, people, there’s a lot of documents that we released that in just because there were so many, not all of them got the attention they deserved. One of the set of files we released described the intelligence relationship that we have with Israel, the NSA has with Israel. Israel is the number one recipient of NSA technology and NSA intelligence. We share more with Israel even more than we do with the Five Eyes. Partners who develop this technology. We give more to Israel, more intelligence, raw intelligence about Americans as well, and more intelligence know-how. But at the same time, the documents that describe who are our greatest intelligence threats, who are greatest intelligence adversaries, who spies on us the most, who is capable of spying out the most. Number one on the list is Israel as well. Obviously the Israelis use, you know, some, I mean, the most dangerous spying programs like Pegasus. And others come from Israel, are developed by Israel, are controlled by the Israelis, by which I simply mean to say that Israel uses every weapon at its disposal, including gathering and incriminating information about its enemies. Some people have suggested that, oh no, it’s not Israel, it’s probably the Qatari intelligence agencies with whom he worked. Maybe it was Peru, maybe it was like Indonesia.
Tucker [00:38:23] People would say that Epstein was working with the Qataris?
Glenn Greenwald [00:38:26] They’re like, what hap- like, there’s mental-
Tucker [00:38:28] I want to keep a list of people who make that claim. Do you know any?
Glenn Greenwald [00:38:31] You know how like Israel, like supporters, like loyalists of Israel in the United States are now constantly trying to convince people that the real foreign government that is exerting extreme amounts of influence over our politicians and our institutions is Potter?
Tucker [00:38:50] I find it hilarious.
Glenn Greenwald [00:38:51] And I’m always like, you know what, let me know when Congress starts passing on a weekly basis pro-COTA resolutions or when like students are being expelled and deported because they’ve criticized Qatar. Let me know when like we start sending billions of dollars a year to Qatar. Let me when all that starts to happen and I’ll be receptive to the fact that maybe Qatar. But anyway, I’m not saying it’s Israel. I’m just saying the nature of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing, the amount of wealth that it required, the number of the most powerful elites on the planet who were with him, who were involved with him who were at his island too, despite knowing that he had been convicted in 2010. Of having sex with minors, hiring prostitutes who were underage, who continued to consort with him in the most proximate ways, something was going on there. It would be incredibly valuable. He had cameras in every part of his house. He had tapes of everything. Obviously, that would be of immense value to any foreign intelligence agent. Of course, and American. I mean, he was,
Tucker [00:39:59] He was close friends with Bill Burns.
Glenn Greenwald [00:40:01] Right, maybe domestic intelligence agencies as well, but it really is starting to inflame my suspicions a great deal every day that goes by when we’re not getting that information, particularly because the people who have it are the people who spent years demanding its release and promising to facilitate it if they got into power.
Tucker [00:40:21] Two facts, data points are now called that suggest to me that something’s up. One is the fact that Epstein was represented in his first tango with the authorities in Florida by Bill Kristol’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, and who I know. And the second is the statement by Alex Acosta, which I think maybe is at the top of your about why Epstein got off so easily.
Glenn Greenwald [00:40:47] How is this not talked about every day? Okay, so in Florida, in the United States generally, having sex with minors, hiring, you know, using minors as prostitutes is considered like a pretty terrible crime. Yeah, it’s- Yeah, you don’t know- Most people agree on that. We don’t allow it, yeah. Yeah, we don’t really have to debate that. That’s considered like something that deserves huge amounts of jail time and typically results in huge amounts jail time. Jeffrey Epstein barely went to jail for that as part of a plea bargain. They had enormous amounts of evidence. It wasn’t a question of, could they prove his guilt? They gave him a plea deal, a plea-deal, where he spent like six seconds in jail, and then like most of the time at home doing community service. And Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time, which was in charge of the case, that’s where Epstein was, ultimately ended up in the Justice Department and other roles inside the government. And so he was constantly asked, why would you give Jeffrey Epstein such a generous plea deal that nobody would ever get for those crimes? And he ended up saying, I was told that he’s intelligence and therefore leave him alone. That’s what Alex Acosta, the prosecutor says that he was told about what he should do with the Jeffrey, like leave him along because he’s intelligent.
Tucker [00:42:07] The conversation just ended. We know now. If the federal prosecutor in Florida says that, then I think we can assume that that’s true.
Glenn Greenwald [00:42:17] Right, so why don’t we know what that means? That’s what, you know, like, what would be the reason that people inside the Trump administration, who have long expressed vehemently, vocally, at the top of their agenda, demands that the Epstein files be released? Why are they not telling us that information?
Tucker [00:42:39] I think the net effect of this is to drive everyone insane and to make everyone like angry and suspicious and paranoid and conspiracy minded. I do think that. It’s like you expect that we’re gonna hear the truth and then it’s like, oh, by the way, no. Everyone assumes the worst. I mean, why wouldn’t you assume the worst? I don’t think that improves American society.
Glenn Greenwald [00:43:02] Whenever I talk about independent media, including from people who are supporters of it, believe it’s a positive development, they all say, oh, but you know, there’s so many conspiracy theories that end up being cultivated and spread that people embrace. And that’s true. Yeah, of course it is. There’s been a lot of conspiracy theories embraced by the credible legacy media as well. I mean, it wasn’t like Reddit that convinced American Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program. You know that Joe Biden was the best version ever. Right, or that like the North Vietnamese were the aggressors in the Gulf of Tonkin, right? That came from like CBS and Walter Cronkite and the New York Times. But in any event, of course there’s gonna be Americans who are now amenable to every conspiracy theory because what have we lived through? The Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, all of the lies from 9-11 itself. And then if you go back further, like the Vietnam War, but then also COVID and like one after the next, at best, massive fundamental systemic failure on the part of all the institutions we were taught to trust and probably at worst and probably more accurately, overwhelming deceit and lies and falsehoods and propaganda continuously disseminated by them in order to facilitate what they wanted. What is going to happen to a society where people lose faith and trust in institutions, not because, you know, charlatans are on the sidelines encouraging them to make that happen, but because rationally those institutions no longer merit trust or faith.
Tucker [00:44:34] If you lie too much I don’t believe you.
Glenn Greenwald [00:44:37] Kinda basic.
Tucker [00:44:38] So the only antidote to that is transparency, is revealing the truth. And I really worry right now especially that this is hardening people’s cynicism and rage and really at some point nihilism, like nothing is true. That is the conclusion a lot of people are going to, nothing is, I don’t believe anything. Like it’s all fake. Also, you know
Glenn Greenwald [00:45:01] Cash Patel and Dan Bongino are people who were among the most popular among the MAGA base. I mean, these were the people among the most respected. I mean Dan Bonginno’s show on Rumble, a platform that still maybe like 30, 40, maybe even 50% of the people in the United States who I’ve never even heard of, was getting bigger audiences than almost every daytime cable show. Cash Patal, you know, the surge of support for him when he was nominated to lead the FBI was massive because people thought, no, that’s who we need to like get in and root this out and clean it out. And I believe that they, I believe there is something to that. I think they are authentic and genuine in that way, but at the same time, something is constraining them. And so I asked myself what kinds of would people… Be determined to hide who are more powerful than they are. And when it comes to the Epstein files, I continuously zero in on that question of who was he working with or for whom. And I can see people in government not wanting that answer to be disclosed, just like the same reason we didn’t have the JFK files and still don’t. We still don’t For 65 years.
Tucker [00:46:21] I know Bongino well. I think of him as a friend. I think he is a man of integrity and I think his integrity remains pure because of his rage, like Dan’s mad at lying. And so I don’t know what’s going on at all. And to be clear, he said, I know that Epstein killed himself because I’ve seen the evidence. So I’m pretty confident in the case of Dan Bongino.
Glenn Greenwald [00:46:45] I don’t even mind that, but then the question still becomes, like they said, they know how their supporters are going to react to that. And they were among the people raising doubts about whether Epstein killed himself. I’m not that, I wouldn’t shock me if Epstein kill himself, like you live a life of great wealth and then suddenly you know you’re gonna spend the rest of your life in prison. It seems odd to me that you can go to a federal prison and kill yourself, like there’s not safeguards against that, but whatever, things that are run by the government failed. I’m not suggesting… That they’re lying about that. But even there, they’re saying like, look, I promise you, we read the files. He killed himself. So then my question is, well, why can’t we read those files?
Tucker [00:47:24] Well, that is my question too, and I would just say in the case of Bongino, I know Cash Patel, but I’m not like a friend of Cash Patel’s, I’m a friend at Bongino’s, and I do think that will come out. But I think big picture DOJ is making a huge mistake, huge mistake in promising to reveal things and then not revealing them. And that gives the whole country a kind of moral blue balls at that point. And it’s bad. It’s really bad. Like it’s gonna, it’s going to cause a lot of heat. And second, I think that we underestimate the physical threat that people in Washington face. It’s always like blackmail or ideological affinity that gets people, no, people are afraid of getting hurt. I do think that’s a, I mean, I know that’s a component.
Glenn Greenwald [00:48:07] Political assassination, political murder has been going on for as long as politics have and the JFK case is an example of the President of the United States having his head blown off. Exactly.
Tucker [00:48:18] And you think that that’s not ever present or constantly present in the minds of people in Washington? They killed the president and got away with it for over 60 years. So like, clearly there are forces that are above justice.
Glenn Greenwald [00:48:30] Oh, no, don’t worry, Lee Harvey Oswald was killed and Jack Ruby went to prison. Jack Ruby, the whole story is Jack Ruby by the way. The whole story’s Jack Ruby. I mean, he just walked up to the person they had claimed and just shot him in the stomach.
Tucker [00:48:45] And there’s no evidence he even liked the Kennedys. There’s zero evidence. He never campaigned for them, never gave them money. There’s not one person who’s ever come forward to say, you know, Jack Ruby was passionately attached to JFK, not one personal. So like, what was the motive there? He was clearly sent there to silence Lee Harvey Oswald. So by whom is the obvious question. There are very serious indications by whom, but whatever, I don’t know. But I don’t know why everyone spends all this time on Lee Harvey-Oswald. When the key to the story is so clearly Jack Ruby.
Glenn Greenwald [00:49:17] Yeah, I mean, this is, I think we are so indoctrinated to believe that this sort of thing happens in other countries. Like how much, think about how much we’ve heard, for example, about Putin and al-Bani. Right. And we’re all supposed to like obsess on the idea that in Russia, you know, if you get too much influence, you become too much of a threat to somebody, you get killed or imprisoned. The funny thing is, Putin didn’t even kill Navalny. I think everybody, the CIA says that. So like, no, we didn’t. There’s no, yeah, exactly. After months of- Well, of course.
Tucker [00:49:47] Well, of course, I got blamed for his murder. I was in Russia when he died, and I can’t believe you killed him all like that. Oh, yeah, that’s right.
Glenn Greenwald [00:49:53] I remember that timing. You were going to go, you had your big Putin interview and then like two days earlier, Putin killed Noamani and you’re like there with Putin. No, but that’s a big part of how that propaganda works. I grew up thinking that, like these kind of bad things happen, they just don’t happen in our country.
Tucker [00:50:09] It must be cool to live, you live outside the country famously, where you’re a foreigner living in a country, you’ve been a long time, you speak the language, you’re engaged in the politics, so you’re part of it, but you’re also from the United States, so you’re not coming at it with that baggage, you can see, you don’t lie to yourself about what it is.
Glenn Greenwald [00:50:28] I do think, I think one of the great, one of things for which I’m most grateful is that I was never embedded in the DC political and media scene. And obviously you removed yourself from it, which is why we’re here and not in Georgetown. It didn’t.
Tucker [00:50:44] Being a part of that at all.
Glenn Greenwald [00:50:46] Oh, I’ll tell you, there’s a I’ve had a friendly relationship with Alex Thompson for a while. I’ve been, you know, Jake Tapper’s co-author in that book.
Tucker [00:50:57] Foreign political reporter.
Glenn Greenwald [00:50:59] Yeah, so now works at Axios. And I’ve been very aggressive about praising him, like going back two years when he was one of the only ones working for these news outlets who was on the story of Biden’s cognitive decline, getting mauled and attacked by the entire democratic party. I was often praising him and defending him. You know, I mean, I wouldn’t say we’re great friends, but you know, he like sent me a copy of the book with very nice words. And so when I go to attack Jake Tapper, which is essentially attacking that book, Of course, there’s a part of my brain that like… You know, thinks about like, wait, what is that gonna do to my relationship with Alex Thompson? And then you have to be like, I don’t care. But if that is your life, you know what I mean, Alex Thompson is not like an important close friend of mine. But like, if you live in Washington and your whole social scene is integrated into, that is why there’s no adversarial relationship between the media. Do you know it’s so funny? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson were on. That shitty PBS show that is now hosted by Jeffrey Goldberg. So can you imagine the watch?
Tucker [00:52:01] Is Free Goldberg as a PBS show?
Glenn Greenwald [00:52:02] Yeah, it’s like the week in Washington. Jeffrey Goldberg hosts a TV show? Yeah, PBS, like the Week in Washington, just like, I know, I can’t find anyone less telegenic. But anyway, he is the person sits there like, anyway, Jeffrey Goldburg was defending the media saying like, I think it’s outrageous that we’re being blamed for this whole thing with Biden and cognitive decline when there was nothing we could do. And so at the end, he said to Jake Tapper, like, what is the lesson that we have to take from all this? And Jake Tapper was caught very serious. He like furred his brow, but he only like looked down at the table because he just, it was a very weird thing. Like he’s just kind of, you know, he’s on television every day. You know, you look up, you talk to people, you engage, he was like looking down, he had his head bowed, like the face of somebody who has a PR crisis firm. And he said, what I have realized is that You cannot trust. What people in power tell you. People in power lie. And when they tell you things, you have to take it with skepticism. You cannot take it on face value. So Jake Topper at 56 years old, after 30 years of working in journalism, has discovered what, if I were to teach college freshmen a class on journalism would be the thing that I would say on the first day about what the job is, right? Like why it’s important to have journalism because people in power lie to keep their power. And this is something that now that Trump’s in office, they’ve suddenly discovered it’s an important thing to do to be adversarial to people in power. And I think that is in their mind, like there is an element of truth to their revisionist history that makes them the victim. Like they are friends with Mike Donilon and like Anita Dunn. Their kids go to their same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they intermarry. You know, like half these couples are like one in the media, one in politics, and then they’re rolling door, they constantly switch and they’re at obvious firms Washington is like, you know, Versailles. And so it’s impossible to be adversarial.
Tucker [00:54:04] Man, we had dinner without naming names, but with a journalist last night, you and I did here, who I never met before, nice guy, actually, but from DC, grew up two blocks from me, mother went to the same school that I did, he went to same school as everyone I know. I mean, it’s like, if you’re from there, you are connected to every other person who’s from there. Of course. It’s like to a much greater extent than people understand, just physically. Yes, it is.
Glenn Greenwald [00:54:32] In this court, like totally incestuous. It’s unbelievable. But you know, this is what I think, I think a lot of times, you know because I’ve been a very harsh critic of media corporations and the like, people ask me like, when did this change or whatever? And I feel like there’s always been a lot of closeness between the media and it’s supposed to be heyday in the fifties with like with Murrow and Cronkite and all of that. But you look at Time Magazine and the New York Times, they were outposts for US propaganda and foreign policy during the Cold War. I think, you know, there was a long time when journalism was considered this like working class, outsider profession and the people who went into it didn’t want to be like wearing Armani suits and you know going to dinner at the White House and with like B-list celebrities. They were just like, you working class guys who just wanted to like throw rocks at power. That was their personality. That’s why they went into journalism. And of course, going back even further, like the first amendment says, you know, all Americans enjoy freedom of the press. There was no such thing as like this secret priesthood of called journalists, like professional. The press was literally the printing press that everybody could use and everybody did use. You didn’t have to be a journalist to use it. It was just a means of expressing and disrupting and informing and organizing. And that’s what they protected. And as huge corporations started buying media outlets, you know, like Westinghouse buys CBS, and then it’s owned by Biocom or Disney now owns ABC, you know that sort of thing, the corporatization of mainstream media. If you think about the kind of attributes that are required to succeed in large corporations, it’s never being disruptive to anybody who has authority, it’s conformity, it’s, you know, just sort of being a good soldier 4 people in power, which is the exact opposite attributes that make a good journalist. And the incentive schemes that journalists are now encouraged to follow to rise within media are the kind of people who worship power, who are obedient to it. Exactly. And that to me has become the most fundamentally rotted part. And that’s why. You know, what inspired me to become a journalist was like the blogosphere of like the early 2000s, which are like just all these angry people on the right and left, like hating the media, no credentials, but like seeing things that they weren’t seeing, you know, hating the Bush administration, but either from the right or from the left, hating mainstream media, same thing. And like you start realizing like, wow, like this mainstream media and politics is like a tiny little, like Obama once described it as, you know, like. Well like John Boehner is supposed to call me a communist but you know everyone knows the reality is we just fight within the 40-yard line. It’s like we’re basically on the same team we just the 40 yard line and you realize there’s this whole other space and way of looking at things and it was really the internet that gave rise to it which is why the internet is in controlling it and censoring it is the thing that is on the top of their agenda because it’s the biggest threat to them.
Tucker [00:57:33] Why do you see things, well, I should just say, I think your mom worked at McDonald’s, actually. Yeah, I mean, I think, which wouldn’t be shocking if you were in any other business, but I don’t think I know a single other person, I don’t think I a single person in our generation in media who can say that.
Glenn Greenwald [00:57:51] Yeah, I think like, I do, I mean, Richard Nixon had this as well, this, you know, I think Trump has it to an extent too, even though like Trump grew up very wealthy, but it was like outer borough wealth, which is not looked upon kindly by like old money in Manhattan. And then he comes into Manhattan and started building gigantic buildings and being all like flashy about it, you now. And so he understood that he was looked down upon by those people. Same with Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon always knew that like the intelligentsia on the East coast hated him, thought he was disgusting. And I think if you grow up feeling excluded from certain kind of power centers, there’s always going to be a kind of resentment that you have toward it. And I suppose in some way that could lead to like a desperation to be integrated into it, but I think more often than not, and certainly in my case, it made me want to deconstructed and showed like the facade that they use to glorify themselves, but the dirt and filth that really lay underneath. And I think that kind of distance really helps with clarity of vision.
Tucker [00:58:53] I totally agree and traveling, you were saying last night that you think that traveling is one of the most expanding things you can do.
Glenn Greenwald [00:59:01] I had this, I did that interview with Alexander Dugan, I know you’ve interviewed him too. And I know we’re all supposed to hate him and he’s a fascist, whatever. But one of the reasons I really loved him is, he’s philosopher. When I say I loved him, I mean, I love talking to him. He’s a philosopher. And I was like, that was, I know, sometimes I studied philosophy in college. It was my obsession. I wanted to teach philosophy. I ended up being more practical and going to law school. But thinking about, You know, things in terms of their first principles and always needing a rationale or a logical train that gets you from the start of your question to the end of whatever answer you think you’ve embraced is very important to me. And just thinking about not being reflexive. So one of the things he said to me was he said, I’m always accused of being a racist or a white supremacist because I’m so devoted to preserving Russian culture. Are Western liberals because they believe that their way of being is so superior that every single other culture should give way to adapting itself to their way of life like the whole world should be homogenized in their vision because they’re inherently superior. Like they find a tribe, some ancient tribe and they want to immediately like mold it into like Washington neoliberals. And What he was saying was like, what makes the world valuable and interesting and ultimately like the way you advance and think about things is that you have all these different traditions, all these civilizations like Russian civilization and Chinese civilization and Muslim civilization and Western civilization and preserving those is what ensures that we have this diversity of thought and everything contributes something. And so you are constantly told and maybe it’s as universal. When you grow up in a society that your way of life is, we’re always told the United States is the greatest country ever to exist in the whole history of the world. What a great coincidence for me that I was born in the objectively greatest country to ever be on the planet, not just now, but all of human history. And there are some parts of the United State that I love and I think are very uniquely valuable for sure, but the more you get to know other types of ways of thinking. And you have this experience, like if some neighbor has a politics different than yours and you think they’re crazy and then you go and talk to them and you understand them better. Yes. And then that makes you be more open to ways of looking at things that, that to me is what, you know, like intellectual vibrancy is, is going to places that you don’t understand, hearing ideas that you were taught to believe are crazy or evil or wrong. And then, you know, when you talk to the human beings who believe them, you understand that they actually have as much conviction about it or as much rationale for it as you do for yours.
Tucker [01:01:51] I just think that’s a beautiful sentiment and thank you for saying it. So what you’re really arguing for is diversity.
Glenn Greenwald [01:01:57] Yeah, like diversity, like not the kind that, you know, we’ve been told is diversity where everyone thinks the same thing, but like they have surface level diversity.
Tucker [01:02:04] The Indian guy, the black guy, and the white lady all went to Princeton, and they’re diverse.
Glenn Greenwald [01:02:09] Yeah, I remember this initiative where we wanted to diversify our newsroom at The Intercept. And so we hired like a black Harvard student whose parents were partners at Golden Saks and then like a Latino person who went to Yale and their partners were at JPMorgan. And then like, you know, and that was like diversity, like everything but like working class diversity or experiential diversity, you know, the most like superficial kind, the most easily accommodated kind. Yeah.
Tucker [01:02:34] I do know very much. So what did you think? So you interviewed Dugan in Russia, in Moscow, what did she think of it? When was the last time you were there?
Glenn Greenwald [01:02:43] I had been several times because I visited Snowden and, you know, in Citizen Four, the last scene of Citizen Four the film that was made about the Snowden, our work with Snowden that won the Oscar that Laura Poit just directed was her and myself going to Russia to interview Snowden about like a next sort of story that the other part of the film had to be done.
Tucker [01:03:04] Imagine a Snowden film winning an Oscar now.
Glenn Greenwald [01:03:10] I mean, at the time, it was, uh, we were, we, when we started winning the, all the awards and we did the whole like award circuit and we started winning, we we’re very shocked. Um, and at the time, I remember after they announced. Citizen four is the owner of the Oscars. It was Neil Patrick Harris, who was the host of the Oscars, we had gone on stage and gotten the award and he then said, Edward Snowden wanted to be here, but he was unable to for some sort of treason. You know, like playing, doing a word play on reason, but like with the word treason and it’s like, you fucking idiots, like you’re Hollywood. You went through like the McCarthy era. You went though all these things that you claim.
Tucker [01:03:53] Oh, he was told to say that?
Glenn Greenwald [01:03:54] was, yeah, of course it was part of the script. But it was a very, you know, war is a brilliant filmmaker. And I think it won because of the quality of the film, like in the drama inherent in the story, not because, because the politics of it were that we were exposing spying programs developed under President Obama, largely, almost entirely. But as you’re so right, this was before Russiagate. This was before, you knew, where anything connected to Russia was considered like-
Tucker [01:04:18] Yeah, there’s no chance you wouldn’t even get it here. I don’t think it would even, yeah, they wouldn’t consider it at this point. So you’d been to Moscow before, but you were just there this winter, this spring? Just, yeah. A few months ago, two, three months ago. What’d you think?
Glenn Greenwald [01:04:32] Whoa, I mean, you know, we talked about this before, but like, I remember the first time I went to Russia, I was so shocked by the immense disparity between what I had been taught to think what Russia was like and what I was seeing in front of my own eyes. And you know you can go anywhere, and like, you people come to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro, and they only go to the richest neighborhoods, and they’re like, oh, it’s, but you know there’s a whole undergirding of misery and suffering that you don’t see because you don’t go there. So I’m very cognizant of that, right? You can’t go to a country and spend like two days there and be shown the best parts and think like, oh, wow, nonetheless. It’s not only beautiful, it’s extremely well-run, it’s clean, but the thing that I felt like was most present was the richness of Russian history and culture and tradition. I mean, this is a civilization that has been around for thousands of years and that has produced the highest in like literature and music and dance and architecture and. And has been through wars of the most difficult kind. And you just feel the heaviness of all of that, like the greatness of it. And obviously I understand that there’s political repression there. I understand that there is a huge, all kinds of social problems. I’m not denying any of that. That’s true everywhere, right? Pretty much. But… You understand why Russians have this immense pride in their country and in their civilization. And…
Tucker [01:06:09] So it didn’t feel like a gas station with nuclear weapons, as McCain said. I mean, has there ever been an uglier thing that any politician, just a dumber, I mean McCain was dumb. I knew him very well, low IQ, wasp. He had to say that, but it’s true. Um, with good qualities, he had good qualities. But he was an idiot. But to say something like that, how loud is like, there’s just, I don’t Like If you’re an idiot, keep it to yourself. A gas station with nuclear weapons. I was just ugh.
Glenn Greenwald [01:06:40] Yeah, I mean, that’s what I mean. You’re taught in college even, the greatest literature is like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who are the greatest novelists ever. Which is true. I mean undoubtedly. Also, just the history, the role they played in World War II and the Bolshevik Revolution and the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. Like Moscow itself and St. Petersburg even more so are so, you know, beautiful and striking. Overwhelming. Like in a way that like the best Western European cities are, you know, like the history of it, the grandness of it. And so, yeah, I mean, that you have to go see things for yourself and you start realizing how much your, how much, you that, this, like, when I started writing about politics, I’ll just tell you this quick story. I never intended to be a journalist. I didn’t go to school for journalism. That was not part of my my life plan in any way, it was just after 9-11, as I saw these radical changes to our civil liberties and the name of fighting terrorism, but also just the climate became so repressive in terms of what you could question, what you can say. That’s when I started feeling a need to wanna say things that I felt like weren’t being said. And when I starting doing that more or less full time, it gave me the luxury of going and looking at things so that I wasn’t being told by the New York Times what a document said. I was able to go spend the three hours to read the document. And when you go and do that, you have the luxury of that time, which most people don’t have. They’re taking care of their kids. They are working, et cetera. You can’t fight propaganda if you don’t, you know, have the resources to do it, especially time. I started realizing how many things I had believed. And I had like a, you know, high opinion of my intellect. I thought I was like a high-end political consumer. You know, I like lived in New York. I like went to good schools. In many ways that makes it worse, not better. I have learned that, yes. Yeah, and so, you just going back and I basically decided I had to dismantle almost everything because so much of it was just ingested through no critical faculty.
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Tucker: This is a person who I confirmed is a real person, I didn’t believe it at first. Congressman Randy Fine. Of Florida and he said this the other day on Fox News last week quote in World War two We did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did. Not negotiate a surrendered with the Japanese We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender that needs to be the same here in Gaza There are something deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to Be defeated So we’re gonna nuke Gaza because of its culture. We’re gonna kill everybody because we don’t like the culture which by the way Lots of Christians in Gaza, Muslims in Gaza. people in Gaza of all kinds of course but like to say there’s some like Gazan culture that’s cohesive it’s like what but we’re gonna kill them all because we don’t like their culture and so i didn’t believe that was real i didn’t really think he was a member of congress i texted a friend
