https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T3h7pmhyIwg
There’s this constant breach, obviously, with gender ideology. There’s that breach with a lot of culture war issues, with the question of gigantic corporations between the views of the elite class and the views of the vast majority of people over whom they’re ruling. And when you have this kind of mass populist anger, traditionally, the elites can try and appease it or the society can say, you know what, let them riot. We’ll just militarize to the teeth. We’ll give ourselves every kind of power and weapon that we need so that even if they want to riot, they’ll be crushed immediately. I think the West is choosing that latter path. Hello, everyone watching and listening. Today, I’m speaking with author, journalist and political commentator, Glenn Greenwald. We discuss the war on miss and disinformation, how a false social moralism, religious rhetoric, conceptions of safety and false compassion have been used and misused to reshape the Western world into a good versus evil polarity. We also explore the human need for meta narratives, the basis of morality and the case, perhaps, for God in a world that offers nihilism and totalitarianism as stark alternatives. All right, so I was I was looking today through your biography and your books and trying to figure out what we could most productively discuss and discuss. And I thought that this comment by Rachel Maddow in 2014 might be a good place to start. She described you in theory as the American left’s most fearless political commentator. And so I have a bunch of questions about that. And the first one might be, what the hell is the American left? And and do you think that that’s an accurate portrayal of you? And I’m not being I’m not being smart asking that question. Like it isn’t obvious to me at all how the political lines are drawn now. I’m up in the air about it constantly. So were you the American left’s most fearless political commentator? Are you still and what do you think the left is? One thing I can tell you for certain is that that is not something she would say in 2023. My recollection is that was actually a little bit earlier. I think it might have been 2009 or 10 at the start of the Obama administration when I became a very vocal critic of the Obama administration. And there weren’t a lot of people who were willing to take the same critique that was being applied to George Bush and Dick Cheney regarding the war on terror and the assault on civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and apply it to Obama, even though Obama not only continued many of those policies that he campaigned on the vow to uproot, but extended a lot of them, strengthened a lot of them. And suddenly people on the left either lost interest in that or decided that actually it was now justifiable given that it was now in the hands of a benevolent leader rather than some swaggering evangelical like George Bush or this kind of caricature of capitalism like Dick Cheney, their views on the actual policy just switched overnight and mine did not. One of the things, though, that I always said from the very beginning, you know, I started writing about politics in 2005. I did so overwhelmingly as a reaction to the war on terror. I was writing not as a journalist, but more as a constitutional lawyer. That was more my interest. I was saying things like Americans detained on American soil and then detained for years without charges just based on this declaration. They were enemy combatants with no trial, no hearing, just based on the say so of the executive branch. I always thought it was odd that that kind of perspective got me labeled as somebody on the left because from my perspective, I was defending values like due process, free speech, free press, you know, I was concerned about the erosion of civil liberties. I never really thought of those as far left values, but it got interpreted as that because at the moment it took found expression as being critical of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And the perception was only people on the left were doing that. So to get to where Rachel Maddow’s ideas came from, I haven’t changed my views on any of those issues at all. Now, defense of civil liberties, opposition to censorship codes as right wing, you know, just 15 years later. And I think a lot of times people consider me on the right, even though, as I said, my views really haven’t changed. But I think that’s where that’s where that comes from. OK, so, yeah, in 2006, you wrote How Would a Patriot Act Defending American Values from a President Run Amok? And that was G.W. Bush, one of the many presidents who’ve run amok. But certainly that was what you were writing about. OK, so that’s how you got identified initially as on the left. Now, you started a First Amendment litigation law firm in 1996. And I guess so I’m kind of curious about why that was, why specifically concentrating on the First Amendment. And then I’m interested in how that tangled in with your rising suspicion and apprehension about the restriction of civil liberties after 9-11. When I got out of law school, I worked for about 18 months at one of the major Wall Street law firms and knew immediately that was not for me. I knew from the start it wasn’t for me. I grew up pretty poor. The lure of a big paycheck like that was something I just wanted to kind of get a taste of. I also wanted to demystify Wall Street, you know, kind of enter it. At the end of the day, those firms are filled with very competent, crafty, smart lawyers. And I knew I would learn a lot and I did. But 18 months was the most I could endure. What I really wanted to do, you know, I think my childhood heroes, I was sort of steeped in the politics of the 70s and 80s. This was the time when the ACLU was defending the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, a town of Holocaust survivors based obviously on the principle these were Jewish leftist lawyers at the ACLU defending obviously not the Nazi Party, but the principle that marginalized groups in particular need to defend free speech. I always viewed censorship as a tool of the establishment, as a tool of authority that was used to silence and suppress marginalized voices, dissidents and the like. And so the desire to use the tools I had gained in law school in defense of those kinds of political values, those kinds of causes was something that was probably at the end of the day, what made me go to law school more than anything else. I certainly didn’t want to defend Goldman Sachs and insurance companies the way I was doing. And so I was able to I think one of the very first prominent cases I took was there was this neo-Nazi leader in Illinois who was quite smart. He went to law school. He passed the bar exam and he applied for admission to the Illinois bar so he could practice law. And the Illinois bar rejected his application on the grounds of moral fitness and character, which is what they used to do to communists in the 1950s and 60s. They were barred from practicing law on the grounds that they lacked moral fitness. And a lot of Supreme Court cases that established these landmark First Amendment cases said you cannot bar people from professions because of their political ideology, however furnished that ideology might be. And so now to watch that happen from the other side, you know, kind of a left wing or a liberal attempt to define moral character and fitness, not on whether you steal from people or whether you assault people, but whether or not you have the right political views is very disturbing to me. So I represented him. I represented his, quote unquote, church and a couple of other cases that were designed to implant in the law the seeds of the censorship regime and kind of became a specialist in those kinds of cases. So, well, a couple of comments about that. The first is I don’t know what the situation is in the United States, but the professional colleges in Canada are increasingly taking a restrictive view of fitness to practice. I mean, I’ve been subject to, I think, 13 charges essentially by my professional governing board. They dropped seven of them recently, although they didn’t explain why they dropped those seven and kept the other six. But all of the other six are almost all of them, none of which, by the way, were made by clients of mine, are a consequence of my direct criticisms of political figures. And so I don’t know what the situation is in the United States. I know that in Canada, the professional governing boards have really taken a what would you say, they’ve allowed free speech for professionals to take a back seat. And it strikes me as extremely dangerous because I don’t see exactly what the members of the general public are, how they’re going to be served by therapists or physicians who are too terrified to say what they think. And I mean, I’ve had dozens of physicians tell me even more than psychologists, even though my battles with the psychology governing board, that they’re so terrified of their professional organization, that’s the Ontario College of Physicians, that they won’t say what they think about all sorts of things. So I don’t know what’s the situation like in the US on the professional regulatory board front. Well, in theory, it’s supposed to be more difficult in the United States to do those sorts of things because of the First Amendment. And on some level, it is mildly more difficult. But they are really finding all kinds of ways to circumvent that. We lost that case, for example, I lost that case. They did not win the right for this neo-Nazi leader to practice law, though it was basically on jurisdictional and technical grounds. So that’s oftentimes the way they’ll do it is you can see these judges very ideologically motivated, especially in the United States. Nobody wants to admit they believe in the virtues of censorship because it’s inculcated in the American spirit that anything that is called censorship is kind of instinctively or reflexively wrong. So it is a little bit, the First Amendment isn’t a real barrier in the United States, but I regard the kinds of trends you’re describing that happen to you in the West more generally. I know Canada is one of the worst places for it. I used to write a lot about the hate speech laws. I remember Mark Stein was dragged before one of those tribunals. There was Ezra Levant as well. And I remember back in 2007, 2008, when I was being called this leftist, I was defending them and a lot of people on both the left and the right think we’re surprised, but I could see this coming. And now it’s so much worse. All throughout Western Europe, increasingly in North America, I lived in Brazil for a long time as well where these censorship values are, people don’t even pretend to believe in free speech, even though Brazil is part of the democratic world and Western Europe is looking toward Brazil as a kind of laboratory for how far Brazil can go. Obviously the interest is in censoring the internet, but beyond that, you see people now being excluded from the financial services industry. People can’t open bank accounts or use PayPal or any of these mechanisms that in modern life we need to generate an income and sustain our families and pay our bills purely on ideological grounds. There’s not even a pretense. As you said, there’s no patient complaint in your case. It’s clearly designed to say you’re unfit to practice psychology because of your political ideology. And that is to me the most dangerous trend in the West beyond any other, because that not only punishes people in unjust ways, but it also breeds a conformist society. The message is very clear. We’re self-interested beings. And if we see that there’s a lot of rewards for espousing establishment pieties and a lot of punishments for questioning them or defying them, obviously a lot of people are going to be motivated to be as conformist as possible. And we’re going to become even more conformist as a society if that continues. And that I think is a huge loss just of the human spirit of the potential of human life to lose the right to engage in critical thinking and to question and err and to challenge. These are the things for me at least that make life valuable. Also, when you were formulating your defense of free speech, you mentioned the fact that marginalized voices, let’s say minority voices, need to be heard. But I would extend that too. I think often the majority voice isn’t heard and is subject to censorship. And I think that’s happening more and more often in the West. But there’s also something else, because people might be leery, let’s say, of your willingness to defend neo-Nazis, at least to defend their right to be as obnoxious as they generally are. But it’s also the case, as far as I can tell, and I really saw this in Canada, like back in the 1980s, we went after this guy named Ernst Zundel for hate speech. And this was the first emergence. We like to pioneer these things in Canada, by the way. We pioneered banking canceling, for example, thanks to our prime minister, who basically demolished our international reputation as a consequence of that. Even though Canadians don’t know it yet. Anyways, we went after this guy Ernst Zundel back in the 1980s on hate speech, and he was a neo-Nazi type. And everybody was up in arms about this hard hat wearing dimwit who proclaimed that the Holocaust didn’t occur and all these idiot chivalrous of the radical neo-Nazi right wing. And he did get pilloried for what he had done, I think by an early human rights tribunal. And I thought at the time that that was extraordinarily unfortunate because it’s, first of all, because I knew even then that persecuting someone paranoid generally is a very bad idea because you give truth to their paranoid claims that way. And second, if you take these people like Zundel and you drive them underground, then you don’t know what the hell they’re up to. And part of the reason that we need a culture of free speech is so that we can observe very carefully what the fringe is up to constantly and keep an eye on their machinations. And part of the reason that that actually turns out to be useful is because most people who are highly pathological can’t help telling you what they’re going to do. And so if you have a space for free dialogue, you can really keep an eye on the people who would otherwise destabilize things. You drive them underground at your peril, as far as I’m concerned. So, yeah, precisely. And I agree with that entirely, that on pragmatic grounds, censorship makes no sense from the perspective of those censoring, not only because you lose the opportunity to hear what they’re thinking, see what they’re doing. But so often you turn these people into martyrs. I mean, in the United States, you have the right to wear swastika on your arm if you so choose, because the First Amendment gives you that right. But if you do that, you’re going to be laughed at. You’re going to be regarded as a joke. You’re going to be social scorn works so much better than trying to prevent people from speaking. Social scorn isolates people. It turns them into an object of mockery. You try and you know, the neo-Nazi leader that I was defending that I referenced earlier, he was a loser. You know, he had maybe 10 followers who were all kind of various forms of sociopaths and psychotics, just kind of like aimless kids who were looking for some meaning. You’re not menacing people in the sense of gathering some movement or being strategically impressive by turning them into martyrs, by making them seem like they’re so much more powerful than they were because now you have to suppress them. Their power and strength grows that attracts people, especially younger people who see transgression as something appealing. They know I think the best thing that ever happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, is when the left started trying to prevent him from speaking on college campuses. That’s what made Milo a hero to the right. They turned him into that. And obviously now Milo has largely disappeared in part because he but more so because he lost a lot of his funding from the right. But what made him and so many others like that stronger was the attempt to silence them, the attempt to censor them. And I look in other countries where it’s illegal to question Holocaust pieties, most of Western Europe, in Brazil, I think in Canada as well. And those people can attract a lot more followers than, for example, in the US they can, because everything is open in the US and the idea is, well, at least it used to be, you’re free to express that view. No one’s going to try and stop you. And social stigma, social scorn, for me, is a much stronger way of marginalizing a nefarious ideology than having a state or corporate power, you know, invoked in order to crush it. Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. Thanks to Shopify, it’s easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow. Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products and track conversions. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a 1 billion. Whether you’re looking at a 1 million tax debt, they can help you with the settlement. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t filed in one year, five years, or even a whole decade. Tax Network USA is equipped to secure the best settlement for you. The expert attorneys and tax professionals at Tax Network USA can help resolve all tax cases, no matter how they started. Don’t let tax debt control your life any longer. Take the first step toward resolving your tax issues by visiting taxnetworkusa.com slash peterson. That’s taxnetworkusa.com slash peterson today. Now, you you made reference in our conversation here to the religious overtones, let’s say, that accompanied claims that Trump, for example, was, you know, the sum of all evil and going to instantiate a white supremacist totalitarian state that would rule to the end of time. And you wrote a book in 2007, A Tragic Legacy, How Good Versus Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. So I want to delve into that for a minute and share with you some thoughts I’ve been developing. And you tell me what you think about them, OK? I’m still working this out. So, you know, there’s a gospel phrase that you’re to render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is God’s. And the idea there that is one of the ideas there is that there are separate conceptual domains for different kinds of concerns. And that the and so the way I read that, at least in part, I’ll tell you a back story. You know, now and then, when I was working as a clinician, I would have clients tell me things that were truly terrible, like multi-generational murderous terrible, you know, long family histories of hidden sexual abuse, lies so deep that you can hardly imagine them way out on the pale, beyond the pale. Right. And I for me, that was the land of good and evil. And one of the things that would happen if I was discussing things that were deeply affecting enough to give the people who had had the experiences post traumatic stress disorder is that the the tenor of the conversation and the language itself would almost inevitably become religious. And it helped me understand that part of what religious language does is enable us to conduct a dialogue about about what’s truly malevolent. Right. Beyond the political. And that made me wonder, you know, if if the religious collapses so that you can no longer render unto God what is God’s, let’s say, because that entire belief system disappears, then maybe the maybe everything that should be attributed to God, so to speak, is now played out in the political realm, is that you get a collapse of the religious into the political. And the reason that that’s a catastrophe is because then you can no longer conduct the political as political. It degenerates into a war of good against evil and but but a very also a very I would say unsophisticated war. So I’ll just close with this and then you can comment if you would. So one of the things that happens as the Judeo-Christian corpus of of what would you say of conceptualization of good and evil as it develops. The notion is, is that spiritual battle between good and evil is something that should be conducted on an individual basis and within. So that if you want to constrain evil, you don’t search for it in the external world because that can make you a persecutor and an accuser. You attempt to bind its manifestation in the confines of your own life. And that’s partly what takes it out of the political realm. And so if you don’t do that and it collapses into the political, then you start looking for demonic enemies everywhere to account for malevolence. And the problem with that is that it turns you into a sensorial, self-righteous persecutor. Now, you wrote a whole book about, you know, the the the the good versus evil mentality destroying the Bush presidency. And you talked about the religious overtones that are associated, for example, with with justification of censorship on the oh, my God, this is finally the apocalyptic threat basis. I’m curious about what you think of the conceptual scheme that I just laid forward, that we need a language for dealing with good and evil per se and a separate political language. And if we don’t keep those separate, well, one collapses into the other. It doesn’t disappear. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I as I listen to that, you know, I mean, I grew up without a lot of religion, like many people these days in the West do. My grandparents were steeped in Judaism, but not very, you know, it’s not it wasn’t very extreme. It was more cultural, I would say, than religious. My parents less so. And then by the time we got to my brother and myself, it was almost nonexistent. And, you know, like in early adulthood, I kind of considered that a source of pride, like so many people do. It’s a hallmark of sophistication and modernity that you’ve discarded these archaic conceptions. And we’re now, you know, advanced and all of that. And obviously, technologically, we are more advanced than the generations that came before us. But I think a lot of times with that comes a certain hubris that because we’re more technologically advanced, it means we’re more advanced in every way. And one of the things that I have worked hard is to lose that hubris. And I think, you know, for me, when I see people who believe in censorship, believe in the idea that certain views are so wrong, they that it ought to be prohibited. To me, what’s driving that more than anything is hubris, because the whole history of humanity is error. What is considered proven truth in one generation is then regarded as grievous error the next. That’s true across every field of discipline and morality and ethics. And the idea that somehow we have escaped from that and we are now no longer prone to error, that we have apprehended truth that is just so absolute that no one should be even allowed to question it is just never an impulse I ever have. And I believe in a lot of things passionately, very strongly. It’s not like a walk around doubting everything. I just never would find the level of arrogance to believe that my convictions, even the ones I hold most strongly, are so self evidently and permanently true that any questioning of them should be prohibited, barred. And I think hubris is at the root of that. I think the same is true with the idea of religion. There is a reason, I think, that human beings across millennia and across culture and across every other conceivable line have sought out religion. I believe it’s something we need. It’s intrinsic to us, whether you want to call it religious or spiritual, however you describe it, it’s something that is a part of us and that we’re going to seek out one way or the other because it, I believe, is a human need. It’s something I’ve started looking for myself as I get older. Now that I have kids, it’s something that has become a bigger part of my life. And if you don’t have that in the form that people have traditionally had it with the established religions of Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or any of even smaller, more modern religions like Mormonism, I think people are going to find a way to express that. And these days they use politics as their vehicle for it. And that is what’s so dangerous is exactly what you’re describing, because the fanaticism and the faith and the righteousness that comes from that religious and spiritual expression can be extremely dangerous if imported into politics, which isn’t about, as you say, for me, this religious and spiritual exploration is about what we do internally, how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the universe and whether there’s something bigger than ourselves and our purpose. It’s a very introspective and personal endeavor, whereas politics is about wielding power in a way that controls and influences the lives of other people. And if you import this religious component into it and cease having empathy for other people’s experiences and ideas and just are always convinced that whoever is on the other side of your tribe is intrinsically evil and you’re intrinsically good, again, it’s going to devolve into that ends justify the means mentality. And in politics, that is historically an extremely dangerous way of navigating the world. So do you think… So I’ve been talking to Douglas Murray about this topic quite extensively, I would say, over a number of years. And Douglas was raised in a more religious family than you were, a Christian family. And his parents were avid church attenders, but he dispensed with all of that and toyed for a while, even with explicit allegiance with the Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris crowd, Dennett as well, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But Douglas has become more convinced that the humanist endeavor cannot maintain its ethos without it being embedded in an underlying, let’s say, narrative metaphysics, which is for all intents and purposes a religious framework. And the religious framework also, you know, it always borders on the transcendent and the unknowable. I suppose that’s a good way of thinking about it. So Carl Jung thought, for example, that the psychoanalyst, he sort of believed that our rationality was necessarily bounded by the domain of the dream. Right. And if you think about how we adapt to the world, we have our explicit ways of representing the world that can be encapsulated semantically. And those would be our stateable propositions. But that’s never complete. Right. And so outside of that is everything we don’t know. And from the perspective of Jung and the psychoanalyst who adopted his viewpoint, the dream was the mediator between what we knew explicitly and what we did not yet know. It was a buffer zone. And the transcendent characters of the dreamscape were essentially deities and religious figures. And that strikes me as correct. I think that’s in keeping with how we what we now understand about how the brain functions and about how we process information when we first come across it as anomalous, for example. But it does beg the question. You know, Douglas has told me pretty straightforwardly that he thinks that any ethical system that isn’t grounded in a transcendent metaphysics, whatever that means, is going to degenerate into a propagandistic ideology. And, well, I’m wondering, like, are those thoughts that you said that you’ve been seeking more now at this stage in your life than you had been previously? Do those sorts of reflections ring true to you? Or do you do you see a flaw in that line of reasoning? Yes. So this is an idea I have grappled with a lot. I think a lot of people who pass through a kind of atheistic passage in life have had to grapple with it as well. I remember being something even going back to studying philosophy in undergraduate school was always a question, which is if you believe there’s nothing to life but our material existence that is finite, that we’re born and then we die and that’s the end of everything, there’s no greater power. The challenge is how do you have any kind of an ethics or morals that make any sense if all there is is materiality? It seems like you could justify being driven by nothing other than material gain and no basis for any kind of ethical or moral constraints, since that’s what religion has typically offered, that there’s a God, that there’s a morality and an ethics that they pass down. And if you remove that, what is the basis for this ethical code or for this morality? And I do think I even remember when I was so sure of myself in my early 20s, being finding that a uncomfortable and difficult question because it is not an easy one to answer. And I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also started viewing spirituality and religion and I kind of use that interchangeably as necessary for a complete human existence. And I know that has become the foundation for my own ethics, for my own morality, the sense of empathy and compassion that you have for other people, my view that that becomes a necessity to honor that, to be guided by it. And I do really wonder how it’s possible if you live your entire life without that, to avoid turning to nihilism. I think a lot of people do turn to nihilism when Western society tells them there is nothing spiritual or religious that’s valid. And we see it in all the mental health industries, as you know better than anyone, in terms of the data you’ve studied and talked a lot about, just kind of a lack of purpose and higher meaning that people are left with in their lives when you strip away everything other than material existence. Yeah, well, the materialist atheist types, I suppose, would object and I try to make the argument as powerful as possible that just because you come up with a hypothetical, practical necessity for a certain kind of belief, let’s even call it a certain kind of delusion or illusion, right? That that doesn’t justify the hypothesis of something supernatural or transcendent. But I would respond to that perhaps as follows. The first is that we have some relationship with the whole and because we’re a part of a larger whole and we don’t know what that relationship is, but there has to be some relationship. And I suppose your relationship with that larger whole, you know, existence as such, could be positive or negative. And it’s conceivable, at least that that’s a decision of faith, you know, whether you’re going to act in accordance with the principle that being itself is essentially good and to try to understand from that what ethical obligations that lays on you. But I’ve also been going through the biblical corpus, trying to understand in some ways what it means to believe in a transcendent relationship. And so I’ve been writing about the story of Abraham. So let me just tell you what I’ve found in that and you tell me what you think about that. So what God is in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as something like the voice within that calls you to adventure. So it it it’s a proposition, right, that there is a an animating spirit. That’s a good way of thinking about it, that can unite people psychologically and socially. And that that uniting spirit, that uniting animating spirit has a canonical and immutable nature. And one of the manifestations of that nature is the call to adventure. And so Abraham is an old man by the time he leaves his father’s tent. But he hears a voice within back into him that says you should leave comfort and security and venture out into the world. Now, it seems to me that we do have a voice like that that speaks within us, so to speak. And it’s not exactly our voice personally, right, because it speaks to everyone. So it can’t be something that’s specifically subjective. And I think that you either listen to that voice, say, and venture out into the world in adventure or you don’t listen to it. And either of those choices is a choice of faith. And so that’s a little different than believing in a so-called, like, what would you say, a hypothetical supernatural reality, right? It’s more like the decision to orient yourself according to a certain animating principle. So in the story of Moses, I’ll just develop it with one more story and then leave it. The same spirit that calls to Abraham to embark on the adventure of his life is the spirit that calls to Moses to free his enslaved people from tyranny. And the hypothesis, the biblical hypothesis, is those are manifestations of the same central animating spirit. That’s Yahuwah in the Old Testament. So the hypothesis there is that there is a transcendent spirit that animates humanity. And one of its manifestations is the call to adventure. And another one of its manifestations is the call to resist tyranny and to move out of the domain of slavish habits. And so it seems to me that you either believe in those propositions or you don’t, but that either choice is a choice of faith, right? Because you could say, well, tyranny is acceptable and so is slavery. That’s a decision of faith. Or you could say that tyranny is not acceptable and neither is slavery. And that’s a decision of faith. And I don’t see any non-faith alternative. And the same thing applies on the adventure front. So I don’t know what you think about that, but maybe you could make some comments and tell me how that strikes you. It is, of course, the challenge of this conversation. And you’re absolutely right. The fact that there are positive outcomes from believing something. In other words, oh, if you believe in religion, it’s a lot easier to have a foundation for a moral code. Doesn’t make that belief true. There may be positive benefits from it and it could be completely false. That, of course, is logically true. We’re all with all of these questions, though, we’re dealing with a lack of dispositive proof, even concrete evidence, empirical evidence of the kind that we normally want when we’re deciding whether to affirm a belief. But that’s true from all sides of this perspective. If you want to believe there’s some supernatural force greater than yourself, some force of the universe, whether it’s a god or some other similar concept, of course, you cannot provide mathematical proof or anything close to that. But that’s the same for arguing it’s negation. You cannot prove the absence of it either. And this gets back to what I was saying earlier about, I think, sometimes because we are technologically advanced, we mistake that for being advanced in other ways that all of our wisdom is necessarily superior to those who came before us. And at the end of the analysis, I do feel a certain kind of humility when I look at the fact that human beings for millennia across cultural lines, across religious lines, have been seeking the same sort of fulfillment, the same sort of purpose. Now, maybe that’s just a psychological desire to believe that life can’t just be the 70 or 80 or 90 years when we’re on the earth and there’s no purpose to it. And we all kind of deceive ourselves into believing otherwise. But my perceptions about all of this ultimately can only be based in my own personal experience and the ability to connect with things that do seem very clear to me to be a spiritual presence, a part of a whole, a transcendent force are things that just feel very real to me. Didn’t previously because I can’t prove them rationally. And I think in the gospel and the stories are referencing and there are a lot of others, one sees a similar spirit in other religions as well. You know, obviously, people who believe in one religion believe it’s the true religion and the rest of the religions are by definition false. When I look at these religious doctrine that have been around for so long, I see a lot more similarity than I do. Differences are obviously dogmatic and doctrinal differences that are important. I think it’s all about the same human craving and the fact that we all want this and need this. And I think so many people come to feel it. I think it takes a lot of arrogance to just dismiss that all the way as the byproduct of illusion or superstition or deceit. What changed? Go ahead. What changed for you? Like, why did you start? Why did this? Why did this turn of attitude make itself known to you? What happened in your life? I had a list of things when I was younger that I thought if I acquired them would make me happy. And it was my conception of what happiness is very much derived from modern Western culture. Tells you if you’re successful in your career, if you become financially prosperous, if your work becomes well known. These kinds of things are the things that are going to ultimately be fulfilling. And the more I chase them and the more I acquired them, in a lot of ways, the less happy I became. And my husband, I was married for 20 years. My husband died in May this year to just a couple of months ago. Was somebody who, you know, tried very hard to get me to be open to other ways of looking at the world, including starting a family, you know, adopting children from an orphanage that would not have been adopted had we not. Done so and we did. And that opened my eyes to the fact that there’s more to life than I had previously thought. I just became a lot more humble once you once you see that the way that you’ve been looking at the world is incomplete or even on the wrong path. You start believing that maybe there’s things you’ve written off before that are things you ought to go back and reconsider. And then just being more open to things like meditation and spirituality, reading texts that are derivative of Hinduism. And then even, you know, one time, I think maybe 15 years ago, I did just start down, sit down and read the gospel from start to finish, because it’s something that you hear a lot about, that you form opinions about. And then when you go and actually read it, as you’ve obviously been doing and have done, it is something that makes you just connect to it in a different way than if you’re just looking at it in that snide, dismissive way where a lot of us are taught to view it. And then once I started traversing the spiritual path and then seeing that real happiness and fulfillment lies not in material gain or fame or any of those things. I mean, there are fulfilling things to those things, but you cannot be a complete person, I don’t think, without family and then the spiritual component and trying to understand where you fit into this broader picture. At least for me, that was the thing that finally enabled me to be happy, to be a complete person. And it just started forcing me to reevaluate how I understood our place in the world and our purpose in it. Right. Okay, so we’ve proposed that without something, some superordinate orienting structure, let’s say that the battle between good and evil collapses into the political. And that that poses the danger of the rise of something approximating totalitarianism, often justified by demonizing your enemies, let’s say, and also as a consequence of willingness to use fear in the face of the looming apocalypse. And you’ve also made the case that there’s a certain hubristic pride in the censorship movement that is a kind of intellectual pride that is predicated on the assumption that what I know now is everything that’s worth knowing and that what other people think can be easily dispensed with. And then the third thing we pointed to, pointing to the necessity of a metaphysics, let’s say, on the personal front in your experience has been that you pursued some of the things that were more materialistic and quite successfully that you were led to believe or did believe would produce a sense of continual fulfillment. But what you found in your life was that some more traditional ventures like starting a family and some striving for something transcendent made itself known as increasingly necessary as you got older. Is that a fair summary of where we’ve gone so far? Absolutely. All right, well, let’s leave that for the time being. I want to return back to your line of books. In 2008, you published a book called Great American Hypocrites, toppling the big myths of Republican politics. So you’re going after the Republicans again. You went after the Bush types for a good while. So what did you conclude when you were assessing the Republican political front? And why did you phrase it in terms of hypocrisy? And do you think there was more hypocrisy, for example, on the Republican side than there was on the Democrat side? If I’m being completely honest, and why wouldn’t I be, that book is not a book that brings me a lot of pride. I had actually, I had just started writing about politics in late 2005, 2006. And I wrote these first two books that I actually am proud of. I came from kind of a good place. And I was a constitutional lawyer. I moved to Brazil. I got married to my husband and we had to live in Brazil. We chose to live in Brazil. And I couldn’t practice law anymore. And I needed a way to kind of make a living out of journalism. And at the time, writing books was the way I was doing it. There was a lot of pressure for me. So this book, there are some good ideas in this book, but the book itself, the way it’s framed, the title, Great American Hypocrits, Topping the Big Miss Republican Party Politics, is very banal. It’s kind of traite. It’s a way more partisan treatise than anything I’ve written before or written since. But the idea was that there’s a kind of iconography in Republican Party politics. I remember when I was growing up, my father was mostly conservative, but not fanatically political. And he used to kind of revere this certain sort of male archetype that I think he felt was lacking in his life, like John Lane, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North. And I think Republican Party politics has relied in a lot of ways on these archetypes, often from people who don’t really exude those virtues in their actual life. People who purport to be very pious and yet in their private life seems not to follow that very well. People who seek courage and strength by sending other people to war but never have been near a front line themselves. They like to send other people to it and then kind of inflate their chest and feel powerful. So there were some seeds of some substantive ideas in the book, but the editor just wanted a kind of, they were always looking for the lefts and culture. And I think the way that book got framed, the way they kind of forced me into this attack the Republican Party was more a byproduct of that. So I don’t think I’ve ever gone back and read that book once it was done because it was just kind of a sort of a labor of necessity rather than a labor of love. So what do you think? Your comments on your book are interesting and revealing, I suppose. What is it that you are not particularly proud of in your words in relationship to that work? I mean there’s room on the journalistic front for criticism of political opportunists for example or of entire parties for that matter. And in some ways, in many ways, you could regard that as the appropriate purview of a critical journalist. So what do you think was wrong in your approach? You pointed maybe to what a kind of instrumental necessity. And what do you think it was that clouded your vision, let’s say, so that you’re not as happy with that book as you might be about some of the other ones that you’ve produced? I think it’s just the partisan nature of it. I think the critiques I made are by no means confined to the Republican Party. But book publishing, especially in politics, kind of the crudest way of trying to make a book successful from a commercial perspective. Is to feed a certain political camp with material that will validate their presuppositions, will tell them that they’re on the right side. So like I said, I do think the critiques were valid. Hypocrisy of politicians also though is a kind of low-hanging fruit. I think it didn’t require a lot of brain power to make that critique. I don’t think it was particularly insightful. I do think there were some parts, as I said, that were the seeds of some interesting psychological… It was a very psychological book about how political leaders try and create their imagery in a way that’s appealing. To confine it to a critique of the Republican Party, I think, was just a little bit cheap. And like I said, probably the byproduct of commercial pressures rather than intellectual autonomy. That’s all. There was nothing fraudulent about it. It felt like you had subverted your higher-order critical capacity to instrumental necessity. Let’s leave that then. Let’s go to the next one. With liberty and justice for some, is this a book you’re more pleased with? This was 2011. How the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful. Okay, so now you’ve returned to something more like an orientation that you feel allowed you to remain firmly grounded. While you were writing this. You’re looking back on this book with more pleasure than on the previous book. Right. This book was a more systemic critique. It was not in any way partisan. I think the origin of it was that the first book that I wrote in 2006, you mentioned Howard and Patriot Act, was a legalistic critique of what I thought were some law-violating policies enacted by the Bush and Cheney administration, often without congressional approval, sometimes in violation of congressional statute. I thought it was the kind of criminality that would typically be prosecuted. And when President Obama was inaugurated, one of the first things he did was announce this kind of amnesty for any high-level political officials or anyone at the CIA who had broken the law as part of the war on terror. And invoke what has now become this traditional elite-serving framework that prosecuting people for crimes if they’re from a prior administration or a prior government is too destabilizing. We have to look forward, not backward was the phrase that he used. It originated in Gerald Ford’s Pardon of Richard Nixon. And what bothered me about it, there was no prosecutions of anyone on Wall Street from the 2008 financial crisis, even though lots of scholars have written about why many prosecutions would have been viable. That was one of the most cataclysmic events of our lifetime. Certainly the 2008 financial crisis, the effects linger to this very day in terms of people’s economic stability all over the world. A lot of it was based on fraudulent practices. And you contrast that with the fact that the United States is the most pro-jail country on the planet. We have 5% of the world’s population and yet 25% of prisoners on the planet are in American prison. We imprison people for longer periods of time for crimes that ordinarily would not be punished. And that contrasts with this gargantuan prison state that definitely disproportionately falls on people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic perspective. And so it was kind of contrasting this idea that for elites there’s a kind of legal immunity and for poor people in the United States who can’t afford legal counsel, who rely on incredibly overworked public defenders and the like. People go to prison for very long periods of time, including for nonviolent crimes that have made the United States the world’s biggest jailer. And that contrast has been disturbing to me. And the book was largely about that. Right, so it sounds like a more classic left-wing take, I would say. I’m still trying to position you politically to some degree. I mean, not that I have a particular reason for doing so, but it’s one of the questions we’ve left unanswered is how you conceptualize your political stance. I mean, that opposition to law being formulated in a manner that preferentially benefits the wealthy, because you use socioeconomic status as the prime marker, that’s a continual, reasonable plait from people on the left, right? It’s that the structures of power get tilted in the service of those who have the power. That’s something that everyone should always be on the lookout for, because, well, if for no other reason, then just because you have power right now doesn’t mean that you’re going to have it in a year. So we should all watch out on that front. So can you walk through your conclusions in that book? What did you see as the causes? It’s about the proclivity of one administration to forgive the sins of the previous. You talked about the free pass that was given to people who were involved in the 2008 financial scandal. Are there other threats to the integrity of the law that you see as particularly germane in the US at the moment? I mean, I think that book grew out of a concern that has intensified in the last decade that the West in general is now a society that has a larger breach than ever before between elites on the one hand and the vast majority of people on the other. You referenced earlier, for example, the fact that many of the views that are now considered taboo were many of the beliefs that are considered unworthy of being aired or happen to be beliefs that majorities of people subscribe to. And those prohibitions are being imposed by an elite class that is so wildly at odds with the vast majority of people over whom they’re essentially ruling, which is a very destabilizing framework for a society to have. If you look, for example, at polling data about crime and you listen to black or Latino elites on television or people with newspaper columns, you would think that the vast majority of non-white people want the police defunded, want the police deconstructed, hate the police, don’t want the police in their neighborhoods. And of course, if you look at polling data, you find the exact opposite is true. Black people, Latinos, people of any race who live in poorer communities either want the same amount of police or more police in their neighborhood, there’s this constant breach, obviously with gender ideology, there’s that breach with a lot of culture war issues, with the question of endless warfare, with the question of gigantic corporations between the views of the elite class and the views of the vast majority of people over whom they’re ruling. And historically, if you were to look at how that breach has been addressed, there’s essentially two ways you can go about trying to resolve that. Namely, I think the election of Donald Trump, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Brexit, the rise of a lot of these kinds of populist parties are very much about the fact that huge numbers of people feel, I think, justifiably and validly that elite ideology doesn’t care about them at all, is willing to squeeze every opportunity out of their life in order to benefit a small minority of people. And when you have this kind of mass populist anger, traditionally, the elites can try and appease it by kind of throwing some more crumbs to people just to keep them just satiated enough that they’re not gonna go out into the street and cause political turmoil and protest and the like. Or the society can say, you know what, let them riot, we’ll just militarize to the teeth, we’ll give ourselves every kind of power and every kind of authoritarian weapon that we need so that even if they want to riot, they’ll be crushed immediately. I think the West is choosing that latter path of no longer trying to appease people, no longer trying to give them enough to keep them at a decent quality of life or the perception that the system is essentially fair and instead is paramilitarizing, is becoming more authoritarianism. I think that’s what a lot of the trends in the West are about and that book was really a way of saying that even the law, the kind of a linchpin of what is supposed to ultimately guarantee that even though we were supposed to have material differences, the founders were capitalists, they expected and anticipated that there would be differences in material wealth, that the law would ultimately be the guarantor of the fairness of that inequality, that people would accept its validity or its legitimacy because we were all operating by the same set of rules and increasingly, the law has become something that’s the exact opposite, just yet another weapon for elites to use against people who are powerless, to keep them in line, to keep them kind of neutered and toothless and that’s really the ethos out of which that book grew and the fact that elites have given themselves a kind of broad scale immunity that our prisons and our courtrooms or criminal courtrooms aren’t for wealthy people, aren’t for powerful people with some exceptions, but are overwhelmingly for poor people even once you are addicted to drugs, committing nonviolent crimes, that was the critique of that book. So let’s segue from that into your 2014 book, That’s No Place to Hide, Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State and so, well that obviously developed some of the themes that you were just discussing, which is the proclivity of the elite and I have some questions about who you think the elite are exactly because that’s an interesting issue. Tell me what you discovered and what you were attempting to accomplish with No Place to Hide. That basically told the story of the work I did with Edward Snowden. He had contacted me anonymously at the end of 2012 saying he had access to a huge trove of top secret documents that demonstrated that the US government and its allies were engaged in a kind of ubiquitous surveillance that would shock people, even such as myself, who had been writing about that and had long suspected that was the case. The kind of final straw for him was when he heard James Clapper, President Obama’s senior national security official, who was the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate in early 2013. He was asked by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, does the NSA collect dossiers on millions and millions of Americans? And James Clapper lied and said, no, sir, it does not, not wittingly. And Snowden had in his hands the evidence because he had worked for CIA and then the NSA is a contractor. The evidence proving that when Clapper denied the NSA was doing was in fact exactly what the NSA was doing. In fact, to an extent that nobody would have suspected. The motto of the NSA was collect it all. They really wanted to and were well on their way to converting the internet into a tool of ubiquitous surveillance. That everything done on the internet, set on the internet by ordinary people, American citizens suspected of no wrongdoing. These were suspicionless. This was suspicionless surveillance was being collected and stored with the potential when they wanted to analyze and utilize this information. Incredibly comprehensive pictures of our lives based on who we were speaking to, what we were reading, the content of our communication. And so I went to Hong Kong that was Snowden along with the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who filmed it. That became the film that won the Oscar in 2015 for best documentary, Citizen Four. Very kind of high drama, but I think journalistically consequential. And to me, that’s what those materials revealed was just how unaccountable the US security state had become. That this was a part of our government that was created to operating complete secrecy, but it was always supposed to be attached to some form of democratic accountability. There were lots of abuses discovered in the mid 70s. There were supposedly reforms done. And yet we have a part of our government that is now huger than ever, more powerful than ever, operates so much in the dark that I was getting contacted when we were doing this reporting by members of Congress who are on the Intelligence Committee in the US, in Great Britain, in Australia, in Canada, saying I had no idea any of this was taking place. And it was kind of a radicalizing moment for me because it wasn’t for me a book or an episode in my life that was about surveillance and privacy. Although of course it was about that, as much as it was about democracy, the fact that these incredibly consequential choices had been undertaken about how the government was going to utilize the internet, convert it into a system of mass, indiscriminate, ubiquitous surveillance with no democratic accountability of any kind, no transparency of any kind. And it made me realize that there really is this kind of part of the government, as Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about in 1961, before Vietnam, before the war on terror, that essentially is the real government, is the government that is immune to elections, that does what it wants with very little constraints. And I find it very, very alarming, very menacing. Well, and how do you feel about that now? I mean, do you think we’re farther down the rabbit hole than we were when you wrote that book? I mean, it’s nine years later and our technological reach has expanded tremendously. I mean, when you’re looking at the state of freedom, let’s say in the West today, what are your observations on that front? I actually think it’s worse, which might be paradoxical because there were some benefits from this reporting that made people aware for the first time of not only the extent to which the US government and its allies are spying on, again, not Al-Qaeda cells or ISIS cells, which everybody would support, but entire Western population, including American citizens. And that awareness made it possible to take precautions against it. So people using encryption more than they did before, big tech companies like Facebook and Google were pressured to demonstrate they were protecting the privacy of their users by also using encryption. So it did construct some barriers to what the government had been doing. But one of the interesting thing was at the time we did the Snowden reporting, you’re talking 2013, the fear that had once been inspired by the mention of Al-Qaeda had really worn off. This is now 12 years after the 9-11 attack, there had been no mass casualty terrorist attacks in the United States anywhere near 9-11. Even the ones that had happened quickly in Madrid and in London in the years following, those kind hadn’t happened. And so there was a sense that, okay, the war on terror has gone way too far. This is kind of an extremism that we should not tolerate. And then very quickly, ISIS emerged in 2014, 2015. ISIS was presented as this threat worse than Al-Qaeda. And then 2016, in the 2016 election, suddenly Russia got kind of revitalized as the existential threat that America and the West faces. Brexit was blamed on Russia. Trump’s election was blamed on Russia. And it reinstalled this, instilled this kind of sense that no, we actually like the CIA, we like the US security state, we believe it needs to kind of operate without limits because the enemies we’re facing are so great. That was going back to what we talked earlier about how people have been convinced to think about Trump. They also began thinking of that about Vladimir Putin in Russia, even though American presidents from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump had talked about Putin as this kind of rational figure with whom they could do business, and then suddenly got converted into this, the new Hitler. And this ability of the US security state and its allies in the media to always give people this new frightening enemy that convinces them that they need to acquiesce to authoritarian powers is almost impressive. And the way in which American liberals in particular, the Democratic Party started feeding on this hatred for Russia and this belief that Vladimir Putin was this kind of Hitler-like figure, along with Donald Trump, pushed them into the arms of these agencies because they perceived correctly that these agencies were trying to sabotage the Trump presidency. This is where Russiagate came from. It was a CIA concoction. They fed it every day to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which gave themselves Pulitzer’s for it. It revitalized these fears. And I think these agencies, I don’t just think, if you look at polling data, you’ll see they are held in higher regard than at any time since the peak of the Cold War, particularly by adherence of the Democratic Party. I think one of the best things that Donald Trump did was usher in a kind of skepticism about these agencies that had never previously gotten a foothold in mainstream Republican Party politics before, but for exactly that reason, the establishment wing of politics and media and the Democratic Party views these agencies as more benevolent than ever. And that is a really alarming mindset. You tweeted, and this might be relevant, well, it’s relevant to what you just said, but it might also be relevant to maybe what we’ll close this discussion with, which is how do you characterize this elite, let’s say, that things are being done in service of? So you tweeted out, the cultural left, meaning the part of the left focused on cultural issues rather than imperialism or corporatism, has become increasingly sensorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant, joyless, self-victimizing, trivial, and status quo perpetuating. Now I’ve had the opportunity to ask 20 or 30 congressmen and senators on the Democrat side when they think the left goes too far, and I asked Robert F. Kennedy that actually in our interview, and that was the one question he declined to answer, saying that he wanted to put forward a vision of unity, especially on the Democrat side rather than disunity. And fair enough, but I’ve been struck by the fact that the Democrats in particular can’t see the danger of their radical fringe and seem utterly unwilling or unable to dissociate them from what I see as behind the scenes manipulators with an almost psychopathic bent. That’s the increasingly sensorious, moralizing, controlling, repressive, petulant crowd. You talked a fair bit about the elites today, and the elite from the leftist perspective has historically been those who are wealthy or who occupy higher positions on the socioeconomic ladder, but it isn’t exactly obvious that the elite on the left are characterized by those descriptors precisely. I mean, when you’re trying to conceptualize who constitutes the sensorious tyrants or this increasingly repressive force, what do you conclude? Where exactly are the enemies of freedom, so to speak, the enemies of free speech, at least let’s say? Where do you think they’re primarily located? And is there a new conceptualization necessary that makes a mockery of the old political divisions? Yeah, this term elite, you’re absolutely right to interrogate this. It is obviously a somewhat ambiguous term, and that ambiguity sometimes allows a kind of reckless use of it. You just throw that word around, you’re not really sure exactly to whom you’re referring. It almost has this kind of melodramatic lure to it, like, oh, we’re always against the elites, everybody we just like is the elite. And so I think it is important to ask that question and have at least a concrete sense of who you’re talking about. I think it maybe even differs based on what kind of policy debate you’re having. So maybe the elite is a little bit different when you’re talking about economic policy, where I think probably large corporate power cares most about economic policy and uses their weight and throws their weight around most there, the tax code and regulation and things of that kind. Then you have a kind of foreign policy elite that has some overlap with that, but probably is different in a way as well. And then you’re talking about the culture war, the cultural kind of debates that increasingly, I think unfortunately have come to dominate our discourse. And in large part, it’s because the left has prioritized the culture war. If you go and watch left-wing YouTube shows, the most popular ones, or read, or listen to the left-wing podcasts, which I do, it’s part of my job and I think it’s necessary for me to kind of stay in touch with every political sector. The extent to which the culture war generally and gender ideology and trans issues in particular received the bulk of the attention is almost shocking to me. I mean, left-wing politics, initially in the 20th century was about opposing imperialism and militarism and corporatism and oligarchy, and now there’s almost none of that. I mean, there’s, on the left, you wouldn’t even know there’s a war in Ukraine. You wouldn’t even know there’s a foreign policy. That is almost entirely ignored in favor of this kind of fixation on trans issues and gender ideology. Right now, one of the longest standing and biggest left-wing YouTube shows, The Young Turks, is in the process of being utterly decimated and canceled. And they’ve had views over the years that, from a left-wing perspective, are completely anathema. But since they’re about war, they love Madeleine Albright, no one cares about that. They’re being canceled because they cross the one line you can’t cross on the left, which is questioning some of the most outer fringes of extremism, trans ideology, including whether or not biological men should be able to compete in women’s sports, whether puberty blockers are safe for children, where even in Northern Europe, they’re debating those things. And the intolerance for any kind of vibrant questioning or dissent, even from people who say, I think trans adults should be able to live their lives with total dignity, with full legal rights. That’s nowhere near enough. You have to affirm every last element of that agenda in order to even be deemed acceptable. It is incredibly repressive. And I think, at the end of the day, when you’re talking about who the elite is, it’s kind of, on the one hand, a vague term, but it’s also not that difficult to identify. It’s the views that are permitted and the views that are suppressed. And if your views are among the views that are suppressed, that’s a pretty good indication that you are not in the elite. You seem to be making, well, you seem to be making, I would say, a two-fold categorization. On the one hand, we have what we’ve always had, and it’s something that always poses a threat to the integrity of states that have to continually adapt, which is the tendency of those who have been successful economically to bend and distort the system in a manner that supports their continued hegemony, independent of their continued productive activity. And I kind of think about that in general as the problem of out-of-control gigantism. And you can see that on the government front just as much as on the corporate front. You know, famously in 2008, the mantra was too big to fail. And I always thought that the mantra should have been so big, you will certainly fail. And then there’s this additional element that you point to, and use the example of what’s happening to the young Turks at the moment on the gender front, pointing out that there’s an elite that are possessed by a set of ideological ideas that have degenerated in recent years into an almost monomaniacal fixation on gender and identity. And then there’s some unholy alliance between the two, which I don’t quite understand, although it seems to be manifesting itself. You know, it’s a variant perhaps of the willingness of the coercive left, not that the right wing was like without error on this front, to ally themselves, for example, with big pharma. And as you pointed out, to increasingly adopt a positive attitude towards the very secretive and background gigantic government operations that the left would have been historically opposed to. So I don’t understand the alliance exactly. Like I don’t exactly understand how the ideological possession that manifests itself as emphasis on the primacy of group identity can be in bed with the people who are using their economic power on the regulatory capture front. Maybe you see something like this on the ESG front, eh, is where the power elite, so that would be Larry Fink and the BlackRock types, are willing to use the moralistic ideology of the radical left to hide their, what, to hide their guilt and to hide their machinations on the power front? Is that a reasonable way of construing it? I’m so glad we’re talking about this at the end here, because it’s so fundamental to these changes in the political landscape. The fact that you, for example, were censored by Google while you were interviewing RFK Jr. and had been censored before, and people who believe, who believe on the question of trans ideology and gender ideology are censored routinely by Google and Facebook and the pre-Elon regime of Twitter, whereas nobody would ever be censored by big tech for being as extreme as you wanna be on trans issues, urging that 12-year-olds be given puberty blockers or that young girls get mastectomies the minute that they decide that they’re dysphoric. Obviously, no one’s getting censored for being on that side of the debate. You see the manifestation of the elite there, so suddenly you are this left-wing culture warrior who likes to think that you’re antagonistic to capital, and yet the largest and richest corporations are completely on your side on these debates. In fact, they’re your enforcers. And I noticed this for the first time right after we did the Snowden reporting in 2015, so it was about two years after it began, the British version of the NSA, which is the GCHQ, really probably the most extremist in this Five Eyes Alliance, they’re sort of the ones that do the things that not even the NSA will do when they can’t go far enough under the law or ethics. The GCHQ steps up and does it. In 2015, they bathed their futuristic headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag, declared LGBTQ Day, apologized for their treatment of some of the gay code breakers, including Alan Turing during World War II, and then suddenly began embracing the left’s cultural agenda. Now the CIA does it, the FBI does it, they all celebrate Women’s Day and LGBT Day, and every one of the corporations obviously do it too. And therein, you can see exactly what these institutions of power perceive as in their interest, who to side with and who not to side with. And you look at who gets censored, you look at who corporations are endorsing, what these institutions of militarism and surveillance are, the flags they’re waving and the ones they’re not waving, and it’s not difficult to see what is elite opinion and what isn’t. And whether it’s because it’s cynical, maybe there is part of that, like, oh, we know if we wave the rainbow flag and we’re the CIA, that will get the left to embrace us more, or whether it’s just the fact that the new elite leaders in Western institutional authority have become true believers of these causes, probably some division of both. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is that establishment power, including capital, is on the side of the left in the culture war, and as a result, they have become this kind of bullying faction that no longer really opposes large-scale financial institutions or corporate power or militaristic power, because they perceive correctly they’re on their side and they’re their allies. Well, I think that’s probably a good place to end. You know, we managed to tie things together there at the end. I mean, I guess I would maybe add one more comment. You know, it struck me that the best camouflage for psychopathic manipulators, and those are people who will do anything instrumental to advance their own narrow self-interest, a well-documented group, let’s say, on the psychometric and psychological front, the best camouflage for assiduous instrumental self-promoters who are willing to manipulate others, say, using fear and to accrue power to themselves is compassion, is the guise of compassion. You know, and what that means too is that corporate malfeasance can cover itself up by allying itself with the useful idiots of the compassionate left. And I don’t mean the people who are using compassion necessarily on the left as a manipulation in and of itself. I think there are plenty of people who do that, but the people who are naive enough to assume that a show of compassion means the real thing. And the fact that those enablers exist, and I think the Democrats, by the way, are rife with such people, means that the real manipulators at the levels of operating at the levels of undeserved and untoward corporate power, governmental power for that matter, can manipulate entire populations by claiming to be compassionate while going about their normal business, which is the accrual of power to themselves. And I think that accounts for that unholy alliance, and that strange alliance between, because it is a strange alliance, between the left, which historically in its best manifestations did provide a voice for the dispossessed, for the unholy alliance between the modern left and the corporate and gigantic government, well, between the corporations and the gigantic forces of government and media. So that seems to be where we’re at now. It’s not obvious how you conceptualize that or oppose it within the confines of the classic divisions between right and left, right? It’s a whole new landscape that’s presenting itself to us, and it seems to require new conceptualizations. Exactly. I mean, you know, that’s why I think there’s confusion sometimes about my ideology and others’ ideology. The Atlantic just called RFK Jr. the first MAGA Democrat, whereas, you know, when RFK Jr. is critiquing a lot of the institutions that had long been the primary targets of the left, including the US security state and Big Pharma and the US war machine, but now that code is right-wing. I also think, too, we just add very quickly to what you said as the kind of just to tie it all together, is I think identity politics is used very similarly to how you just described these social justice causes in the way that they’re cynically employed by these institutions of power to give the appearance that they’re on the side of the left, and they become actual allies of the left. Obviously, if you just change demographically the people who are running these institutions so that now you have a black woman who’s in general, or you have a Latino man who’s the CFO of a major corporation, it casts the appearance that there’s been some kind of a radical change for those who are casually looking when in reality it’s just kind of the costume that they’re donning in order to continue doing exactly what they’re doing and just to win new supporters. And it’s incredibly effective because ultimately so many people are satisfied with the most superficial of changes and are willing to embrace and cheer any institutions of authority as being their allies, even though they’re continuing to do those things that they always have done when they were once their enemies. And that is exactly what is causing this new political landscape. Hey, well, you know, that seems like a very good place to end. So for everybody watching and listening, I’m gonna talk to Glenn for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side. We’ll conduct some investigation into the manner in which the interests that he’s displayed, fairly consistent interests really over what? Almost, it’s a long period of time now, 30 years really, pretty consistent interests in protection of free speech, for example, that looks like it’s your paramount concern and then associated interests of all sorts on the political and cultural front. So we’ll delve into the genesis of those preoccupations on the Daily Wire Plus side. And if you’re inclined to go over there and have a listen or a watch, you know that that might be useful for you and productive for us. As Glenn mentioned and I mentioned during this podcast, YouTube has been on our case to a fairly intense degree in the last couple of months, me to some degree, because they’ve censored three of my podcasts and I suspect we’ll censor a number of the other ones that I have in the can and really had gone after a number of the people that I’m working with or alongside of at least at the Daily Wire Plus. So if you’re inclined to throw them some support, this is probably not such a bad time to do it. In any case, we’re gonna head over there. Thank you to the film crew here in Northern Ontario for facilitating this and Glenn for talking to me today and for sharing what you’ve been investigating with everybody watching and listening. And to everyone who is watching and listening, thank you very much. And well, we’ll see you on the next podcast. Thanks, Glenn. Thank you, appreciate it. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]