I think we're watching the most evil thing I've ever seen in my lifetime, which is the lame duck administration leaving the next administration with the world war, with the nuclear conflict, by allowing Ukraine, a proxy state of the United States, to strike within Russia. I'll just have one editorial comment, and then I'm going to still let you go. But I think that people in Washington misunderstand Vladimir Putin, and they think he's a monarch with absolute power, which is not true. Russian politics is complex and it's lively, and Putin is very concerned with his approval rating within Russia. He cannot appear weak. That's a huge threat to him. He feels that, I can confirm. If he can't hide attacks on him by the United States through Ukraine, either on Moscow or big civilian casualties, I think he will have no choice, in his view, but to launch a serious response against Ukraine or NATO countries or possibly the United States. This seems like the most reckless thing that's ever happened in my life.

I hardly have words for it. Let me just- Am I overstating it, do you think? No, not even remotely.

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Let me just say specifically what has been authorized. This is something that some NATO countries, including the United Kingdom, have been pressuring the Biden administration to do for quite a long time, for at least a year. But going all the way back to the beginning of 2022, this was an option that they had, which is we have these guided missiles called the TACOMs, which are very powerful for attacking inside Russia. You can guide them specifically and very precisely where you want them to go. Obviously, you have to get intelligence about where you want to strike. The reason we never permitted the Ukrainians to use them is because the Ukrainians can't use those missiles on their own. In other words, if they want to launch these missiles, it's not just the US giving them the missiles and then telling them no problem, go and use them. It requires the direct involvement of the United States and or a major NATO country like France or the UK or Germany, because the Ukrainians don't have the guiding capability in order to know how to launch these missiles. So this is not just us giving them missiles and saying, go attack deep inside.

Imagine if some major country, China, Iran, Russia, whoever, gave missiles to Canada, if we were at war with them, or Mexico or Cuba, and said, We're giving you these specifically to use them inside the United States. We would consider that a grievous act of war, not just on the part of the country shooting them, but on the part of the country giving them. What Biden did here is so much worse. He didn't just give Ukrainians missiles and say, Feel free to use them inside Russia. We are going to participate in the bombing of Russia, NATO and or the United States, because there's no way the Ukrainians can launch these missiles on their own, which means we are now, our military, our intelligence community, are participating in missile attacks inside the country of Russia. This is something that even the Biden administration, for all their hauchishness on Russia and Ukraine, feeding that war, fueling it, preventing diplomatic resolutions because they wanted this war. Even they were unwilling to do it because they understood the dangers of the escalatory risks. For Joe Biden, or whoever's acting in his name, to do this just two weeks after the country resounding increasingly rejected governance by the Democratic Party in the administration, and on his way out as an 81-year-old man, knowing that he has about six weeks left in office, to just say, I know that these are massive risks, but I'm going to take I'm 81.

I don't really care. Then to make it so much more difficult for the following administration to do what they promised to do during the campaign, which the American people voted for and wanted, which is to resolve this war. Instead, we're risking escalation with the world's largest superpower, nuclear power. Over what?

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

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

Why is it permanent, too? They hate you.

Oh, yeah, I know. That all happened in 2016 when out of nowhere, Russiagate appeared. I remember, like it was yesterday, the very first ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign with this menacing, baritone voice, What does Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have in common? What does Russia have on Donald Trump? Journalistically, I just couldn't believe it because it was so redolent of McCarthyism, which is a civil libertarian, as I found. I was taught was like one of the worst Civil Liberties that used the 20th century. Me too. By the way, I agree. Yeah. I mean, you go around just accusing people of being Russian agents with no evidence, destroying their reputation, their lives, like what they're trying to do to Tulsi Gabbard, now what they tried to do for Donald Trump for the last eight years. Just on that ground, I was offended by it. Journalistically, I was so skeptical of it because when you have intelligence Intelligence agencies leaking anonymously unverified claims to the Washington Post and the New York Times, and they put it on the front page and gather Pulitzer's for them. That's usually a sign that a huge disinformation campaign of deceit is underway.

That was the exact method used, for example, to sell the war on Iraq to the American people, was that process. That's why these intelligence agencies need to be read out. But what alarmed me most was that the climate was deliberately created in Washington, especially once Hillary lost, and they blamed Russia for it, that any communications with Russia, anyone who visits Russia, anyone who talks to a Russian official is automatically deemed sinister or treasonous. As you said, during the Cold War, which dominated our American life for 50 years, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. They were infinitely more powerful, more threatening, more everything than Russia is now. We always communicated with Soviet leaders. There were phones all over Washington that rang to the counterparts. They communicated constantly. After RussiGate, there's basically no communication any longer between the Russian leaders and the American leaders.

On either side, and I should just say, I mean- That Not because Russia wanted that.

That was something that in Washington got created because they blamed Russia and claimed that Russia was our existential enemy because of the claim that they interfered in the 2016 election. Before that, the Obama administration and the Putin government cooperated in all sorts of ways around the world.

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

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

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

I think it is important to say that this war has been 100% bipartisan, although the Biden administration, as the leader of the executive branch, is primarily responsible. The primary There's been about, I would say, five or six dozen anti-interventionists Republicans, typically more Trump supporters, both in the House and Senate, who have spoken out from the beginning against funding this war. But the vast majority of Republicans, to the extent they have a criticism or had a criticism with the Biden administration at all with respect to Ukraine, it was that they didn't do enough. They didn't spend enough money on Ukraine. They didn't give Ukraine enough weapons. They didn't get more involved, more heavily, and earlier than they should. But the thing that you said encouraging Mike Johnson to speak to Putin, which, of course, as the third in line to the presidency, as you said, when they're proposing it to escalate a major war, of course, you should want to understand the Russian perspective. This is what Tulsi Gabbar did in 2017 when she was a member of Congress and the Obama administration had unleashed this billion-dollar-year CIA Dirty War to change the government of Syria, to dislodge Basr al-Assad from the government.

We fought along among ISIS and Al Qaeda, who also wanted a Sadgan. We were told those were our existential enemies for 15 years. We fought alongside them to do it. So many of the weapons we sent ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and ISIS and other Islamic radical groups in Syria. And Tulsi Gabbard, as a member of the military, but also as a member of Congress with constitutional responsibility to authorize or disauthorize a war, wanted to go to Syria and see what was happening for herself. Then she spoke with Syrian officials and got an opportunity to speak with a Syrian President. Based solely on that, she's now accused of being a Russian agent, being some treasonous sympathizer of Bushal or Assad. This is the jingoistic climate that has been created, way worse than what prevailed in the Cold War. When Nixon went to China, Reagan negotiated all kinds of arms deals with the Soviets, this is now totally prohibited. It's like we live in a marble cartoon for children where there's good guys and bad guys where the good guys, and you don't speak to the bad guys.

The good guys are Al Qaeda and They're the good guys.

Yeah, we can fight with them because they're- So her point, I don't want to speak for Tulsi Gabbard, our new Director of National Intelligence, nominee, but my view was, I don't have any feelings aboutAssad or Syria, but it's a fact that that government protected religious minorities, including an ancient Christian community there in the Aloites, of which he's one.

In that country for a long time, he and his dad. So why are they my enemy exactly? I don't understand. Why should I be opposed toAssad in Syria? Why should I be opposed to Vladimir Putin. I was not supposed to be opposed to the Soviets who are anti-Christian, but now you have a pro-Christian president. I'm supposed to be against him. Tell me, why doesn't somebody explain to me why? As a 55-year-old American taxpayer, I should be against him.

First of all, I think the principle is that, and this is what Donald Trump ran explicitly in 2016, was that we shouldn't be involved in wars designed to change the governments of other countries, rebuild their governments, transform their societies, in part because it's not our place to do it, and in part because we're terrible at doing it, because they have very complex, rich, long histories that American intelligence officials and political leaders have no understanding of whatsoever. They don't speak the freaking language.

They don't know anything.

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

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

Yeah, to weaken that regime and to The thing is, though, what you said about Putin is so important, which is Putin's critics, he doesn't have very many liberal critics, meaning people to his left. Exactly. His real critics are hardcore nationalists. Exactly. Their criticism of Putin- Who see him as a liberal. Who see him as weak or insufficiently militaristic when it comes to confronting the West, but particularly on Ukraine. They wanted destruction of Ukraine. A lot of them are enraged. As you say, the Russian government has taken the position, warned the United States government, privately and publicly, that any use of these missiles involving, as they do, direct US or NATO involvement in their launching against Russia, will be seen as the entrance of the United States and NATO as belligerence in this war, as a war against Russia, as World War III. He will have to treat it as such. Even though he's been very constrained, even though he clearly doesn't want a broader war, there are a lot of people inside Moscow who do wield a lot of power who do, and who will demand he treated as such. Why wouldn't they? We are attacking Russia.

We're shooting missiles inside Russia.

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

Yeah. I think Blinken, Jake Sullivan, that's the brain trust as it is. Obviously, Joe Biden has no involvement in this whatsoever, which I think has It's been an issue which we've shockingly ignored. Everyone saw what Joe Biden was long before that debate. Yes. Everyone knew it. The only people who didn't say so were the media and Democratic allies. After the debate, it became untenable for them to deny it any longer that this is an old man who has lost his cognitive capabilities. Yet he's still the sitting President of the United States, and you had the vice President, understandably, doing nothing for the last four months, other than working on her own empowerment through the campaign. She obviously wasn't involved ever in any decision making, let alone when she became the nominee. So the question has been all these consequential decisions we made, deploying massive military assets to the Middle East, making declarations about when we would go to war in the Middle East and for whom, escalating the war in Ukraine, now authorizing the use of these long-range missiles. He's obviously not coming from Joe Biden. He barely understands where he is. It's not a character flaw in his part, but it's just a disability, a clear disability.

He's obviously not making any of these decisions. I do think that if you look at the national security crowd that emerge from the Obama presidency, especially the people who are associated with the State Department run by Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, even before RussiGate in 2016, they had an obsession with Russia. In fact, when Hillary Clinton left the administration as Secretary of State and wrote her book, Hard Choices, the only areas in which she was critical of Obama was her view that he wasn't willing to confront Russia sufficiently. Obama had this view, this realist view from Brent Scowcroft. Those are the people like Jim Baker, that why would we send lethal alarms to Ukraine and provoke Russia? Ukraine is not a vital interest to us, but it is to them. He wanted to work with Russia and did to facilitate the Iran deal, to bomb terrorist targets in Syria. There was a faction in the Obama administration led by Hillary Clinton. Blinken was there. All these national security woven into that Victoria Nuland was hired by Hillary Clinton. That's how she made her way into the Obama administration. They viewed Russia as this grave menace.

The reason Putin hated Hillary Clinton was because when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, The United States openly spent millions of dollars funding opposition groups and organizing protests in Moscow. I mean, we talk about Putin interfering in our sacred politics and our internal affairs. Hillary Clinton was openly funding protests and anti-Putin agitators inside Russia in the 2010 election, in 2012, 2011, rather. They were obsessed with Russia well before that. I do think that Russia is disliked by a lot of people in Washington because of the perception that they are detrimental to our interests in the Middle East and especially to Israel's interest in the Middle East, including their support for Ahmadshad al-Assad in Syria, the fact that they have a good relationship with Iran. It doesn't really always have a lot to do with the United States, but with the interests of other countries as well.

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

Yeah, that's their ally in the Middle East. It's been their ally in the Middle East for decades. Just like we support our allies around the world, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, very savage, brutal dictatorship, but at least to do our bidding, the Russians have theirs as well. They have a long term relationship with Venezuela, with Cuba, going back to the Cold War, and still do as well as with Syria. Yeah, the Russians operate in Syria. They protect Assad in Syria, and as a result, they end up being antagonistic to Israel, which ends up being defined as US interests as well. There's no separation between the two countries.

But strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with us whatsoever. I mean, I honestly, for the past- Unless you see Israel as a part of the United States. I'm not hostile toward Israel, but I think it's a separate country.

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

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

Tucker, there's nobody, I'm certain of this, in the United States, just an average ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules or who their province is in the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbas, let alone Eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kyiv. The question of what that territory should be, should it be semi-autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you all know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the East and the Western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU, the only concession they extracted in exchange for that was, okay, with reunification, NATO is now moving eastward, closer to our border.

In a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany. The United States agreed to that. Immediately in the '90s, the Clinton Administration started talking about it and implementing NATO expansion eastward toward Russia, exactly what was promised to Gorbachev, the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reidentification. Why? Why did we need to expand our influence eastward toward Russia? I never understood that. And now it's not just eastward in general, it's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia in both of those war wars. We also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is who the Ukrainians voted for, and replaced him. Victoria Nuland, constructed a government, and it was replaced by a government that was more pro-US.

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

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

Well, it's unimaginable. Yes.

I mean, it's- Like, they think it can't happen.

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

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

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

That we can change. That's such next That's crazy.

That's crazier than any schizophrenic sitting next to you on a public subway.

That's crazy. We constantly call RFK Jr. They call him crazy. They call Tulsi Gabbard or Mac Gage crazy, whoever. These people who have been in power, who have been generating American orthodoxy, especially on foreign policy, are the most insane people on the planet. It's because the United States has been the most powerful country in the world. No one could constrain it, no one could stand up to it. As is true with everything, that level of unconstrained power corrupt people. That is correct. And these people have been in control of this power for decades. That is correct. Passed on one to the other through this dogmen that gets increasingly out of touch and detached from reality.

Megalomaniacal.

Absolutely. Exactly. I mean, at least during the Cold War, I'm not saying it was a good thing, but the Soviet Union United States were of equal power. They were competing with one another. They were both very constrained in what they were. They both were petrified of a nuclear war. We almost came to nuclear apocalypse, at least twice, especially in the Cuban Missile crisis, through misperception and miscommunication, when a Russian commander of a submarine thought incorrectly that they were using nuclear weapons against the submarine and against Cuba, and almost launched the nuclear weapons at the sub, came about five minutes from doing so until someone intervened on that sub and said, I don't think that this is actually an attack. It's very possible. We've come to the brink of it before. It probably is the single greatest threat to the survival of the species. Not probably. Definitely is the use of nuclear weapons. Every time Trump talks about it, you can see the fear that he has he's trying to convey to others. Every time. Tucker, I'm amazed. This is like, impeachment-level stuff. For Joe Biden, on his way out of the door, to involve the US directly in a war for the first time.

We've been very involved in other ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a science. It's not just an argument that you make.

Yeah, and it's very powerful. We love to talk about how propagandized the Russians are and the Chinese are and how there's no dissent allowed. George Orwell, in the preface to Animal Farm, actually to 1984, wrote an essay where he was essentially saying that overt totalitarianism of the kind that was taking place in the Soviet Union is repressive, but it's not nearly as effective as subtle repression the kind where you give the illusion that people are free. But in reality, the flow of information is heavily controlled because at least when the guy is dressed in black with weapons, come and take you and put you in a gulag for criticizing the government, everybody understands the level of oppression. It often generates a backlash. But when you combine repression with the illusion of freedom, that's what's incredibly effective.

That's what we have. You tell people with an abundant consumer economy, like, Here are your edibles. Here's your Netflix, calm down. Yeah. You can basically get to do anything. Yeah.

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

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

And threat talking openly about expanding NATO to Ukraine. You can find memos from the highest levels of the US government saying, If you do that, it's not just Putin, it's every political faction in Russia that will see it as a war, and they'll invade They'll annex Crimea and invade Eastern Ukraine. Of course, the American government knew that. You can show documents where it says that. But the EU, the minute that war started in earnest with the Russian army invading, one of the very first steps they took legislatively was to ban the platforming, to criminalize the platforming of Russian media like Russia. Rt and Sputnik, they made it a crime, and YouTube immediately immediately pulled it off because they didn't want their citizens hearing any information from the Russian perspective. I mean, you can hate Russia, you can think Russia is evil, you can think whatever you want about Russia, but why wouldn't you want to hear from the other side? The New York Times used to publish all the time, like the speeches of Brejnev and Yuri Andropow and Khrushchev, and you could read what the Russians would say. They would come to the United States, they would speak openly.

Now it's practically criminalized.

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

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

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

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

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

No, talk about propaganda work, especially nationalistic propaganda, because human beings evolved over thousands of years to be tribal. We want to feel part of our group. We take pride in our group. It's why if you're born in America, you say, I'm an American. This is my country. This is what I'm loyal to. It comes from these tribalistic instincts. It makes sense because we evolved for thousands of years where if you got expelled from your tribe, you would die. You needed a tribe in order to survive. So we're tribalistic animals. So if you appeal to people's tribalism and say, We're the good guys, we're the innocent victims. Our enemy are the bad guys. They're evil. That appeals to people's most visceral instincts. And the The problem, of course, is the countervailing punishment, which is the minute you question it. From the beginning, I had on my show people like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and Jeffrey Sacks, and they were all saying, From the beginning, There's no possibility that Ukraine can win this war as NATO has defined it, which means the expulsion of every Russian troop from every enter of Ukrainian soil, just simply on size grounds alone.

Just basic understanding of history. Every one of them, I'm sure, I think it happened to you, too. I know it happened to me, were put on these official lists issued by the Ukrainian government of being pro-Russian propagandist. Everywhere you went, you get accused of being a Russian propagandist or some agent of the Kremlin, simply by questioning our own government's propagandistic views or simply trying to understand things from the Russian perspective. After 9/11, the big question on the minds of all Americans, after they were traumatized by this extraordinary assault on our soil, designed, obviously, to impose as much suffering and killing as possible, was, obviously, they asked, Why do they want to do that to us? Why would people hate us so much that they would devise a scheme as complex and deadly as hijacking planes, passenger planes with boxcutters, and flying them into major American buildings filled with people? Why would they hate us that much? The government had to give an answer to that because people obviously wanted to know the answer. That was when David Frum and Cheney and all the people said, They hate us for our freedoms. They just can't stand the fact that women are allowed to wear bikinis on the beach and that we have a Congress.

It's like no one ever thought, Well, there's like, dozens of countries around the world where women get to wear bikinis and have congresses in Japan and Korea and all throughout Latin America and Scandinavia. Why aren't they attacking those places? Then Bin Laden wrote a letter in 2002 to the American people saying, Here's why there's so much animosity toward the United States. There was, of course, some appeal to religion in it.

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

Oh, I know. Well, Tucker, I just wanted to- Oh, then I forget it. Not only does that surprise me, a lot of people have forgotten that this happens, but it's actually quite extraordinary. After 9/11, obviously, Osama bin Laden was one of the most important people in the world. He had just perpetrated the worst attack on the American soil since Pearl Harbor. A lot of people wanted to interview him or play clips of interviews. The United States government called all the network news agencies into the White House and said to them, You should not and cannot interview Osam bin Laden or show any interviews with him. They invented this excuse as to why, which is that he might put some code in his interviews that signaled to sleeper cells. Sleepers cells. He might wiggle his ear like Carol Burnet did, or raise his eyebrows three times or blank in a worse code in a certain way, and the networks all obeyed. The most amazing thing was this letter, which you could go read where he says exactly why all the different ways the United States has brought violence to that region has interfered in that region.

Even like our foreign policy is the bottom line.

We've been bombing that region and interfering in them, opposing dictatorship on those people for decades, and Specifically to suppress the things they believe in. We don't want popular opinion prevailing democratically in the Middle East because we don't perceive it in our interest. We've been imposing dictators on them, secular dictators. We've been bombing them, we've been sanctioning them, we've been invading them. Of course, we support Israel, which in that region people view as this grave assault on the rights of Palestinians. But we put bases in Saudi Arabia, which is the most sacred soil to that religion. We imposed a blockade and sanction regime on Iraq, which Madelon Al-Albricht admitted, killed 500,000 children, but nonetheless said it was worth it. We've been so active in that region, and that's the reason they wanted to attack back. That's the reason they had so much support. But They banned Osama bin Laden from being heard, just like the EU banned Russian state media from being heard, because of course, you don't want Americans being exposed to this. Then the amazing thing is that letter, which really didn't get much attention at the time, the only place that existed on the internet was on the Guardian's website.

Somehow, 22-year-olds on TikTok found that letter, and they started talking about it. They were like, Oh, my God, I was never told this before. He didn't attack us because he hate us for our freedom. He says specifically here why they're attacking us. In other words, they were reading a historical document and discussing it, things that you would want a free citizenry to do. But the fear that they were allowed to not only read but talk about that document with one another was so intense It makes sense that in 48 hours, they forced TikTok to ban every discussion of that letter, to remove the hashtags, to find it, to take down any poster accounts that were talking about it. Then The Guardian, a news outlet, removed that letter which had been there for 20 years, which was of obvious historical and journalistic importance, they removed it from their website because they were too frightened that people were going to be able to read it. Why? Because it prevents the propagandist narrative from being unchallenged. That's the same with Russia and Ukraine. That shows you how we think we're so free. We hear so much dissent because you have a Republican and Democrat bickering on a cable show about trivial things.

You're like, Oh, look, we have free debates, open debates. They don't get to have that in Russia and China. But the minute there's information that actually threatens the government, that they fear people understanding, they clamp down on it and suppress it, and that's what they did there.

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

Even the JFK files.

Well, especially the JFK file. But much more immediate. It was 23 years ago, but We're both adults. We remember it very well.

It affected our lives. I was traumatized by that. It was a horrible event. Exactly. Then a lot happened. Our country changed radically because of it. To this day, the Patriot Act exists.

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

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

That's the most important thing.

In fact, the whole point of the second an impeachment trial, which never made any sense. Why would you bring an impeachment trial against the President on his way out the office? Was because they were petrified that Trump was going to do certain things in that transition, pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, which he came very close to doing, but especially fulfill his promise to declassify things like the JFK files and other national security files that had been kept hidden with no justification from the American public, even though it happened decades ago, 9/11 JFK. They told him, If you do that, all the Senate Republicans are going to vote to impeach you. You're going to be convicted and ineligible to run ever again. That was the sword of Democles. They held over his head precisely to prevent him from bringing transparency to the government and allowing the American people to see what they have a right to know.

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

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

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

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

Conversely, we know almost nothing about what the government... When I got the Edward Snowden Archive, which was hundreds of thousands, if not more, of top secret documents from the NSA, obviously, what was surprising is what was in and what they revealed. But even more surprising to me was that the documents, so many of these documents, most of these documents that were marked top secret had no interesting information in them at all. They just reflexively put how to get a parking credential, how to ask your supervisor for a vacation. These were top secret because everything the government does reflexively is kept secret from the public.

You have no right to. That's the default. You have no right to. Exactly.

Everything is inversed. The government knows everything about what we do, and we know nothing about what they do.

I'm Tucker Carlson for ALP. Now, as you know, the FDA requires us to warn you. Well, I'll just read you the warning. Quote, Warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. End quote. We're required to tell you that by the federal government. But we don't shy away from that. It's addictive, and there's an upside to it. Yes, nicotine is an addictive chemical. That is true. There are a lot of things in life you forget, your car keys, your wallet. One thing you're never going to forget is ALP, because nicotine is an addictive chemical. You may forget to put your shoes on in the morning. You may forget to kiss your wife on the way out. You may come home and not remember your own dog's name. But one thing you're not going to forget is your ALP. Why? Because you're addicted to it. Because your body will tell you, Hey, better bring your ALP with you. And you will. I do. I'm never anywhere without my ALP. It's by the side of my bed when I go to sleep. It's there when I wake up in the morning. It's in the front pocket of my pants as I head out into the world.

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

A lot of people have very safe seats. Not everybody is desperate for donors. Exactly. Can I just give you an example?

It's not just the carrot. There's a stick in there.

I'm not saying this happened here. I'm not saying that at all. I have no basis for saying it. But I had Mike Johnson on my show about two months before, unexpectedly, he became the speaker, when he just became the 90th compromise.

You had Mike Johnson on your show?

Yeah, I interviewed Mike Johnson. The reason I interviewed Mike Johnson was because- He would not go on your show now. Oh, no. This is why.

This is so interesting.

I didn't know that. This is why. Yeah, just by chance, I interviewed Mike Johnson. The reason was because Christopher Ray went before a committee on which he sat in the house, and Mike Johnson grilled him about FBI spying, about the involvement of the intelligence communities in our politics, about the attempt to censor the internet coming from the intel agencies. He did it with this great intellect, but also this very effective demeanor. I could just tell that he passionately, felt passionately about these issues. Then I started following more and more what he was doing. He was almost single-mindedly on spying abuses, curbing spying power, curbing sonship.

You're blowing my mind.

We asked him, I said, Can you call me on my show? He's like, Yeah, I'm a big fan of Glens. I think the work that he's doing great. I'd love to come on. Mike Johnson from Louisiana? Yeah. He came on my show. Are you making this up? No, you could go watch the interview.

I'm hard to shock you or shocking me.

I had him on my show. After this interview, I was like, I love him. One of the things we spent the most amount of time on was Pfizer reform and the need for Pfizer reform. The fact that- Shut up. Come on, Glenn. Ducker, I'm telling you, Pfizer reform was coming up in about three months where they had to extend the FISA law that allows the FBI, the CIA to spy an American citizen as the NSA without really any reforms. He was determined. It was like his big issue. That's why he was on my show. That's why he liked what my work was. He was like, We cannot allow this fire as a law to be renewed. It is a grave threat to American democracy. At the very least, we need massive fundamental reforms. I'm totally blown away. I was like, Oh, my God. He's very smart. He's like a smart lawyer. He's very informed about these issues. I walked away super impressed. That is what we spent most of our time on. But also just the- Will you put these clips on the internet? The whole show is on the internet.

No, I know, but will you just post these on social media because you're free?

You're shocking me. I did, but I'll do it again because Mike Johnson become a speaker about two months later. I don't mean four years later or two years later, about two months after that, three months at the most, right when the FISA law is coming up. I was like, Oh, it's so great. He was made speaker. There's no way this FISA law is getting passed. Not only did Mike Johnson say, I'm going to allow the FISA renewal to come to the floor with no reforms, not allowing any reforms. He himself said, It is urgent that we renew FISA without any reforms. This is a crucial critical tool for our intelligence agencies. I put that clip everywhere when that happened, showing where just two months earlier- Did you butt them together? Yeah, of course. I was attacking the shit out of Mike Johnson. Then somebody finally asked him, But You've been saying all along for years, for the last two years, that you vehemently oppose this, and suddenly now you're for it. What changed your mind? He was like, Yeah, well, when you're a speaker, you get access to a lot of things. I was taken to this secret room in the CIA, and they showed me these very important things and these sensitive documents about how important these powers are and how devastating it would be if we put any reforms on them.

And so I realized that it was wrong what I had believed. And now I believe this law has to be passed with no reforms. You don't have smart people like that. He was already in Congress. He had access to classified information, getting briefings, secret briefings. You don't have people that invested in position who with one meeting... I can see someone really dumb being affected by that. Like, oh, these guys with big metals on their chest take you to a super secret room inside the CIA with all these locks and codes and things on the wall, and you're all impressed. Oh, my God, I can't challenge this. He's a very smart guy. I don't believe he changes mind. The question is, why did he? I don't know. I really don't. But I know that the person that was on my show two months earlier no longer exists.

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

No, great guy. He adopted kids. Totally. Everything he says about decency, respect for everybody. I was even saying today that he was with the whole thing about the question of whether this new was going to use the bathrooms. He was asked about it. He was just emphasizing the need for respect and decency and civility, even if things are used. I believe he believes that. I believe he is in connection with the best parts of Christianity and takes them seriously and conducts himself that way and always has. Nothing against Mike Johnson, personally, quite the contrary. But to watch that happen was as cynical as I am.

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

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

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

I saw those with Obama, too. You have to, especially for people who are new to power, not Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Mitch McDonald. People have been in these positions for decades. Mike Johnson went from a very backbend to a member of Congress to the third in line who controls the House of Representatives. You can only imagine the intense, just unlimited amount of pressure that comes from multiple directions to force him to align himself with whatever the agenda is of the people who rule Washington. Same thing happened with Obama. I believed Obama when he talked for two years when running for President about how he was a constitutional law professor, how he believed so much in the core rights of the Constitution, like habeas corpus, the right to contest your imprisonment, to have evidence presented against you by a place like Antonio and elsewhere, how he wanted to uproot the worst abuses of the Bush and New War on Terror. Then he gets into office and not only doesn't uproot them, but he starts extending them because, again, these generals come, including the ones he likes who went to Princeton, like David Petraeus, the ones who dazzle Obama and give him secret briefings about all the blood that's going to be on his hands if he does any of the changes he spent two years promising.

Then suddenly on a dime, he switches. There's a lot of other pressure you can imagine as well, like the stick, as you said. Anyone who thinks that our intelligence agencies are above these kinds of things, the naivete required to believe that is- Well, they're not above.

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

Why doesn't someone just call these people out? One of the things that made Trump so threatening, and that continues to make him so threatening, is that in a lot of ways, he was pulling the curtain open.

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

Yeah. I remember he just said openly, Yeah, as a billionaire, as a businessman, I just gave a candidate $50,000, and then They would automatically accept my call and do whatever I told them to do. Who says that in the top level of politics? Hey, I'm running for president. I want you to know, here's how the system works. You give a lot of money to some place that these lawmakers tell you to donate money to, and then they do whatever you want. They do your bidding. In that 2016 debate, when he started rallying against the evil and the stupidity of the Iraq War because his principal opponent at the time was Jeb Bush, who was backed by the establishment, and the audience started booing as though America was rising up in defense of the Bush family. He was like, Oh, these seats here, these are all the big Republican donors. That's the only people who are booing me because they're supporting Jeb Bush. Have you ever been to a debate? As I know you have, that's exactly how it is. The big donors, both parties, they put their big donors, the partisans, right behind where their audience here is only their reaction.

So Trump constantly was doing that. Here's how things really work. And then once he started getting targeted by these agencies, by the CIA, the FBI, starting with Russiagate, but the Steele dossier, what Jim Comey did, leaking that to the media, and then all those investigations, that's why he started saying, These intelligence agencies are corrupted to their core. They're filled with people who have their own politicized agenda. They were supposed to have an elected leader, democratically elected leader, who supervises these branches and these agencies and the executive branch, and their duty is to carry out his policies. But they don't. They subverted his policies. They sabotaged them because they didn't agree with them. They were like their own branch of government, completely powerful. He's the first one, I guess since Dwight Eisenhower, who tried to warn of this on his way out after spending eight years. Obviously, the intelligence and military-industry complex was way smaller when Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn of how much of a threat it was to democracy in his farewell address. It was before Vietnam, before the real buildup of the Cold War, obviously before 9/11. They're sprawling now. They're almost impossible to even analyze or quantify.

Trump is the only one who's trying to say these institutions are radically corrupted. At their root, they're rotted. That's why he's trying to choose people. He picks some comfortable institutionalists and status quo perpetrators like Marco Rubio, Elyce Stefanik, John Radcliffe, people like that, just to give Washington a sense of, okay, there's some people here we're good with. But then the people that he picked who share his view that these institutions require radical overhaul. They're just undemocratic, unaccountable, gruptive. There are three of them. Those are the ones they're trying to destroy. Well, there's Tulsi, there's Matt Gates, there's RFK Jr. A little bit, to some extent, Pete Hegsath. I mean, he's not really ideologically unaligned, but the problem is that he doesn't come from the Pentagon bureaucracy. That's what they care about most. That's a trillion-dollar agency. You know how many wheels that greases in Raytheon, in Boeing, in general dynamics? That's what they care about most, is making sure that money goes where it's supposed to go. That's why they're concerned about him. But the people who aren't the ones that Kamal could have picked easily are the ones who they're most out to destroy because that's what these permanent power factions are, is they are their own government and they wield the most power.

Sure, considered Mike Johnson, no threat at all. Let's take them and do what we have to do.

But you wonder, just... I don't know. I mean, look, these guys are under pressure that we probably can't imagine. If somebody knew the thing you were most embarrassed about that would destroy your life and make your kids not like you or whatever. I'm not speaking of Johnson specifically, but I know a couple of people who I know are compromised in the US government, and I feel sad them because how'd you like to be in that position? But all it would take is one brave man to give a press conference. There was actually a guy, Coki Roberts' father, Hale Boggs, who stood up in Congress. He was this majority leader in about 1970. He was on the Warren Commission, and he did not buy the conclusions at all. And he told other people that he was from Louisiana. And he stood up and made some noises on the floor of the house about how the CIA was doing things they were not supposed to do in domestic politics and had unchecked power, et cetera. He was immediately denounced as mentally ill, probably an alcoholic. Then he disappeared in a plane crash with Begich in 1972 in Alaska.

The plane was never seen again. I'm like, I'm saying that he was murdered for that, though. I would not at all be surprised if he was. But why is he the last guy to say anything like that?

More because he died in a plane crash and was declared mentally. Maybe. No, but I mean, this is the thing is I remember during the Snowden reporting when there was all this controversy about government spying on people. The big reaction that I got that had been cultivated for a long time, not just by the government, but by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg famously said, Privacy is an archaic value or whatever. Don't worry about privacy anymore. People are saying, I don't have anything to hide. I'm not a terrorist. I'm not a pedophile. I don't care what my government is spying on me. I would always say, Everybody has things to hide. There are things that you don't tell anybody. There are things you only tell your psychiatrist, only your spouse, only your best friend, things that you don't want any other people to know that you're petrified. If everybody knew about you, we are private. We're social animals. We need connection to society and other people. But we also create privacy. Without privacy, we go insane.

There's no freedom without privacy.

None, because that's where descent and creativity and exploration and a rejection of societal mores, that's where it resides in the private realm. Without that, if you're just being surveilled and watched all the time, that breeds conformity. Everybody needs privacy. Everybody values it. Everybody has something to hide. The ability to surveil people, to know everything about... I think what actually happens is we're so inculcated from birth to have this very idealistic image of our country and our government. In some ways, it's valid. I think I revere the Constitution. I went to school to study it, and I went to practice it. I believe in its values. I think it's a genius document. I do, too. Comes from the Enlight. Just a very intellectually-based, philosophically-based idea of how it was constructed very carefully. There are things very good about the United States. But if you think that the most powerful country on the planet, the richest and most powerful country, arguably ever to exist, doesn't have at its core, in terms of the people who run it, people who are willing to do anything to preserve their power, to augment their power. Again, it just takes a naivete that's almost impossible to fathom.

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

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

That's what I'm saying. The most powerful institution in human history- Doesn't have sinister things going on. What would people do to control that? No, the stakes are very high. I think the closer you are to it, the more often you forget that. You're like, Oh, it's just Secretary of whatever. Who cares? Well, people care. Understandably, people will do anything for power and money. Wow, that's so distressing. In your reporting, and I always forget that you were behind the Snowden thing, and thank you for that. What a wonderful guy he is. But did you ever get any hint of what the pressure is that's applied to politicians to comply and obey?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I do think we were just talking about people who, why don't people stand up? Edward Snowden is a perfect example of somebody who to believe the mythology of the government, believed in, he went to enlist in order to fight in Iraq. He broke both of his legs. He couldn't join the military, so he went to work for the CIA and the NSA because he really believed in them. And then what he saw was so horrifying, was so corrupting was so deceful that he risked his life and his liberty, which to this day he's deprived of, to inform everybody about what was going on by stealing under their nose documents that he could give to reporters so that reporters could tell the world what was happening. That is an example of that level of courage of somebody saying, Here's what's going on. What Snowding gave us was a tiny picture of what the NSA does. Obviously, if there had been in their specific blackmail documents about how they were spying a particular politician. That's something we would have reported on very aggressively and very early on. I can't say I saw that.

But what I did see is all sorts of incidents of people at the NSA abusing their authority to spy on people who they had no right to be spying on, including sometimes just things as trivial as ex-girlfriends or family members. But also when in other countries they wanted to impede or harm somebody, they spied on those people all the time and use that information in part to gain power over them. Of course, how can you expect human beings to resist that level of power when it's all operating in the dark.

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

It's budgets which are classified.

It's budgets which nobody... That was one of the things we actually were able to see. It was the black book of the intelligence budget. We were putting on the things that we thought were newsworthy about that. There's zero transparency to any of this. There's no oversight. You technically have oversight in Congress and the Senate, the Senate intelligence committees, these select committees that were created after the church commission found all these... What the church commission found just by itself, CIA developments of medications to try and make people lose control of their brains or inject people with diseases, really sinister dark stuff that the CIA was doing that nobody knew about, not even the President. They just did it on their own. It was a discovery of a secret government inside the government. The idea was, we need at least some oversight. This oversight, they tell nothing to these committees. The people who get put on those committees are people who are the ones who most support these intelligence communities. It was run in the Senate for years by Diane Feinstein. Her husband was a military contractor. She was embedded in these agencies. She defended everything that they did.

The one time she questioned them, which was when she wanted to investigate the use of torture in the CIA, John Brennan, CIA, spied on Diane Feinstein and on her entire staff. He got caught doing it. He lied and said he didn't. He finally admitted that it was done. He apologized, and there were no repercussions. Let's buy guns. We're going to go Google John Brennan spying on Diane Feinstein.

I'll never forget it. When that story first broke, it was years ago, it was at least 10 years. It was under the Obama.

He was CIA director under Obama.

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

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

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

But, Tucker, let's say that people had things on you that would, as you put it, destroy your reputation, make your kids think very poorly of you, would embarrass you for the rest of your life, would destroy whatever you value in life. It takes a very rare person to say, F it, I'm going to risk that happening. I think we have this self-preservation tactic. That's why those things like blackmail, extortion, are so effective is because they can force people to change behaviors.

No, I think you're right.

Look at how much these sexual misconduct allegations are used when Julian Assange really got dangerous, suddenly out of nowhere, appeared two women claiming that he, quote unquote, raped them because the allegation was they had consensual sex with him, but he didn't use a condom when they had not given their consent to no condom, and that became rape under Swedish law. That's what forced him to the Ecuadorian embassy and led to everything that happened subsequently. Now with Matt Gates, the minute Matt Gates, Pete Heggseth, too, out of nowhere appears this alleged rape that nobody had heard about, that nobody knew about. The thing that always amazes me, This is actually the best example, in case anybody thinks, Oh, our government doesn't do that. When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I remember when I first heard about this, I was confounded about why this happened. Obviously, they were saying the normal things you say about people like that. Like, Oh, he's a Soviet asset. He hates America. He put troops in harm's way because he showed the public that the government was lying for years about the Vietnam War.

Inside, they were saying, We can never win. Now, externally, they were saying, We're on the verge of winning. But what they also did, and it's the only reason Daniel Ellsberg ended up free, is they broke into his psychoanalyst's office because they wanted to steal all the documents about his most intimate admissions to a psychoanalyst about his psychosexual life and fantasies because that was the weapon of choice that they wanted to use to destroy him. That's a fact. The Nix administration broke into the psychoanalyst office of Daniel Alsberg when they couldn't find the documents they planned to break in at the guy's house. They finally put a stop to that. But they did break into a psychoanalyst office, and only because of that government misconduct did the judge dismiss the charges against Danny Alsberg, who otherwise was headed to prison for the rest of his life. Why would that be a response to a whistleblower Revealing to the press that then revealed to the public that the government was systematically lying about the Vietnam War? It's because if you can have that information over somebody and then use it against them, you destroy... I remember when it happened with Julian Assange, no one wanted anything to do with Julian Assange anymore.

No one wanted to mention his name. It's just like, oh, this person's guilty of accused of rape. I just don't want anything to do with that. If you could have shown that Daniel Alsberg had this fantasy or had done this or had done that in the intimacy and privacy of his own life, everybody would have wanted to avoid it.

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

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

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

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

But did you ever worry the intel agencies would try and hurt you?

Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. I think a lot of people remember, but my husband, who's now deceased, but at the time, he went to Germany because there was a part of the archive that was corrupted, and we knew there was a lot of there. It was with Laura Poitras, and she, using her genius, had figured out how to access it. No one else could. But she didn't trust anybody, including the Guardian, to give it to you to bring to me. The only person she trusted was David. I couldn't travel outside Brazil because there was a concern that I would be arrested by the US. So I had to stay in Brazil. So only David could go and get those documents. The way we talked about it was in a very secure, secret way. We were using the highest levels of encryption at the time that Snowden insisted on. When David went to Germany, he came back home through Heathrow. But at Heathrow, the British arrested him and detained him and threatened to prosecute him under an anti-charism law. The only reason they let him out was because the Brazilian government, it became It was a huge story in Brazil.

The Brazilian government was like, Give us back our citizen immediately. So they let him go. Then David sued the British government over human rights abuses because they were detaining him for journalism. The British government said in their papers when they defended their actions, we knew exactly what he was doing in Germany. We knew exactly what he was carrying. That's the reason why we detained him, because we wanted to prevent these secret documents from getting out into the public because it harms British National Security. Now, obviously, we got the archive anyway, and we reported on all those documents, but they admitted they knew and were listening to our conversations about why he was going there. They knew when he was going there. Everything was being tracked. So when you know- Did you ever figure out how? I knew they were using... I mean, part of the reporting that we did was that the NSA had cracked even the most sophisticated levels of encryption. So things that people thought were safe, there's nothing 100% full proof. At the time, we were among the most watched people in the world because we had in our hands the most secrets from the world's most powerful government that we were going around the world publishing to inform people of.

Journalistically, and so of course, we knew we were being spied on by probably a lot of people. It's just that the British were forced to admit it. When you get that confirmation as opposed to a belief or suspicion, the level of invasiveness you feel is hard to express because they're not just listening to the parts of your conversations where you're talking about the Snowden documents.

Oh, I know. Oh, I know firsthand. Yeah.

No, I know. Yeah, I mean, you had private conversations leaked as well when you were trying to interview President Putin, but a lot of other things.

We got followed and had massive problems with Ukrainian Intel Service, et cetera. But it's not about me. I don't hold any institutional power. It's just interesting if you see what happens in your own life just by talking about, I haven't done anything ever. Just sit around a studio, talk to people. But you see the pressure they apply to you. What would it be like to be the chairman of the Intel Committee or the speaker of the House or the President of the United States? I can't even imagine. It just shows you what a remarkable person Trump is. He's weirdly resistant to that stuff. That's why they hate him.

I mean, remember all the stuff that came out in the 2016 when they thought he might win, like the Access Hollywood tape that came out of nowhere, and the Stormy Daniels stuff, they threw everything out there. And Trump is a very rare person who's just shameful. He doesn't feel a of shame, and he doesn't back down no matter what. He gets more aggressive against people who tried to force him to. It's just his instinct, the two he is. I watched him for many decades when I was a lawyer in New York, when he was a big real estate mogul, constantly being sued in lawsuits. Everybody knew how he was, and that's what is so threatening about him. It's not his ideology or his beliefs of the fact that he's in Russia. Of course not. It's the fact that he's immune. Immigration, racism. Or that he's a racist. It's all bullshit. No one cares about that. No one believes that. It's the fact that he's immune to the type of control that for decades they've been able to impose on people who wield any power, let alone the power of the presidency.

Well, just to talk to the current state of US-Russia relations or the war that we're about to... How do you think this ends?

I mean, if you're sitting in Moscow, obviously, if there's a barrage of weapons aimed at and out of St. Petersburg, your major cities, that's one thing. If there's a limited number of missiles aimed in Kursk where Ukrainian forces are, that's another. And obviously, they know what we talked about, which is that in about seven weeks, there's going to be a new American President with whom they've dealt extensively. Despite claims that he's some lackey of Putin, he basically did the two things that were most threatening to Russian interest. He sent lethal arms to Ukraine after Obama refused to. Trump did. I didn't agree with it, but that's what he did. What he did even more so that was more threatening, damaging to Russia is he spent years trying to badger the Europeans out of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Press them on energy. He was like, Why would you be buying gas from Russia? You're getting dependent on Russia, and we're the ones who pay for your protection. You should be buying it from us. Selling natural gas to Europe was the anchor, the key to Russian vital interests, and Trump threatened those vital interests continuously.

The idea, anyone who's even a little bit rationally thinking would understand that this claim that he's being blackmailed by Putin while at the same time he's simultaneously doing the two most threatening things to Russian vital national interests, you would immediately recognize what a fictitious claim that was.

So he's being blackmailed by the US intelligence agencies. In fact- More so. Our government is the fascist state that they claim Russia is.

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

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Spend this Christmas working on something that matters, your relationship with God. Maybe the only thing that matters. We hope you will. Hallow. Among the many people Donald Trump has spoken to since winning a week and a half ago is Joe and Mika. Joe Scraper and Mika Broginski, they have a very low-rated show on MSNBC, which I do think has outsized influence. The numbers are really small.

People in Washington watch it.

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

No, their excuse is even more pathetic, which is, We're journalists. You have to go and talk to the people in power. We're a journalist. But I think those two in particular are singular pathetic. I realized saying singular pathetic in the context of employees of the corporate media seems like a designation that no one deserves alone. But I think in their case, they really merit that distinction because I think most of the people who work in corporate media, like the Rachel Maddow, and the Lawrence O'Donnells, and the Donald Lemons, and those people, I think they believe all the insane on hinge stuff. I think they really believe that Trump is a Russian agent, that Putin is blackmailing him, that Trump wants to put them in camps. I think it's insane, but credit for at least actually saying what they really believe is preposterous and laughable as it is. Is. Joe Scarborough has no beliefs other than his own advancement and self-importance. Okay, let's remember, in the 1990s, he was elected, not as a Republican congressman, but as a radical conservative one with a whole new Gingrish, like young firebrands were going to go in and radically reform, change the country and Washington.

No more of that anywhere in Joe Scarborough, like this radical transformation of institutional power. Then, as Megan Kelly said, No show did more to boost Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 in the Republican primary than Joe and Mika. They were down at Mar-a-Lago all the time. They loved Trump. They were best friends with Trump. They laughed with him. They let him call another show all the time, in part because it was very beneficial to that show. It was the only thing that rated. Trump saved all their jobs. But they also love just being proximate to power like that. That's the thing that they craved most. Then once, what really happened was Scarborough thought that he was going to be chosen as Trump's vice President. He really wanted to. When Trump rejected him in favor of Mike Pence, and then also MSNBC turned into this fanatical anti-Trump network where the only people who watched were Trump haters, both at a personal affront, but also at a survival, they had to turn into a full-on Trump-hating show. You couldn't have the morning show of three hours, be someone positive toward or neutral about Trump when the whole rest of the network, everyone who watched- May I just ask you to pause for a second?

I'm just suggesting this. Scarborough, who I used to know really well, he thought he was going to be VP.

Yeah. Remember how close they were?

No, I remember that. I didn't know.

Oh, yeah.

You should come to the United States more often. I learn a lot. I think by distance is what enables me to learn things.

Yeah, that was a big part of it. But also it was survival at MSNBC. They turned into these, Joe Scarborough, Mr. Radical, conservative, Let's Change All He worked, became Mr. Institutionalist. The people he had on his show are Richard Haast and Norm Ornstein, all these- The worst. Council on Foreign Relations. Dumbest, yeah. That thing takes people who were obsessed with hating Trump as well, and it became ground zero for Trump as Hitler. They were saying as recently as two months ago or a month ago, Trump is comparable to Adolf Hitler. He is a Nazi figure. Mika Brzezinski went on The View and cried and said, Trump wants to murder women. Women are going to die because of Donald Trump. He He's a fascist. He's a racist. They said it every day, over and over. Then Trump wins. Their whole influence was because they were Joe Biden's favorite show. Joe Biden would wake up at 6 AM, like many geriatrics do, because he went to bed at 7:00 PM, and he would watch Morning Joe, and then he would hear, Joe Biden is the greatest president in FDR. Joe Scarborough said that he personally can assure the country, having spent so much time around Joe Biden, that he's sharper than ever.

He runs intellectual circles around all the Republicans were claiming that he's cognitively impaired. This is like a month before the debate, he was saying that. Of course, Joe Biden watched that show every day. That's what gave Joe Scarborough his sense of importance was like, Oh, I'm close to the White House. He was at the White House all the time. Now Biden's gone. Biden's not an asset anymore. Trump is back in power. One of the things that has happened amazingly since Kamma's loss is that the MSNBC audience, which is already tiny, has basically completely disappeared. The number of people watching those shows when they're live in prime time with that big, gigantic corporate power behind them promoting it, it's less than a lot of YouTube shows. Oh, way, way. Yeah, including... I don't mean the cumulative audience of how many people watch a YouTube video at the end of the day. I just mean Live watching. Dan Bongino show has, I think Unrumbble, has five or six or seven times more- Oh, for sure. Viewers than MSNBC's primed time. This is on Rumbble, which a lot of people don't even know about, don't even watch. That audience is gone, in part because they feel disillusioned that the people they trusted who told them Trump was going to prison, the whole Trump family was going to prison, Trump could never win, he was going to be in jail before the election, all the women were going to rise up and vote for Kamala out of anger toward Trump.

None of that happened. They're like, I've been watching this show every day for nothing. None of it happened. None of it was true. That audience is gone, half out of disillusionment and anger, but half out of just checking out through impudence and helplessness. I think that they're desperate. The only way they think they can get people to come back on is to have Trump come back on their show, and Trump is going to make them crawl around on the floor multiple times. Work like a dog. Yeah. They were like, Joe and Mika were like, Trump was incredibly cheerful and happy. Of course he was. He loves seeing you humiliate yourself because he knows you need them now.

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

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

They're caught. Like Liz Cheney. I have to say, of all the reasons I'm so grateful that Kamala lost, seeing Democrats turn on Liz Cheney and seeing her stranded between the parties in no man's land. It's the best. Honestly, I can't. There was a piece by John Nichols in The Nation today. I don't read The Nation much anymore. But you know, occasionally, The Nation is true to itself, not always, but I don't agree with it. But John Nichols wrote this piece about Kamal Harris, where he goes through all the places that Liz Cheney went with Kamal Harris. The only thing did not work. She turned off Republicans. The idea was we've got Liz Cheney campaigning with us. A lot of Republicans are like, Donald Trump will vote for us. It's like, just the opposite happened.

It was so predictable and so obvious at the time. It was predictable. Also, what made Kamal as campaign for the six seconds that it seemed like it had some air to it was this vibrancy of young people celebrating the emergence.

Yeah, totally.

You then take Liz Cheney and send Bill to Michigan to lecture everybody in the Muslim community and the Arab community who already hates you because you've been buying Israel, about how the Israelis are totally right, and it's all the fault of the Arabs. Then you take Liz Dipcheney's daughter, with you through the Rust Belt where all those policies devastated their lives, all those wars. You think about... I mean, this is the thing. Think about how out of touch, cloistered, and in a bubble, you have to be to think I think that you're going to win an election depending on people who are in the working class who feel alienated from society, who feel like DC doesn't work for you, by taking the daughter of the face of the American establishment, Dick Cheney, around with you as if she's your running mate. People are craving change, and you have sitting there with Liz Cheney, who people only know because she was the vice president's daughter. Her dad was Dick Cheney. And not just Dick Cheney, somebody who supports a whole range of policies that Americans vehemently reject now. I think that's more than anything. What people in the media have finally had to come to grips with is, first of all, it's good that Liz Cheney actually isn't the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State.

That also is good, even I know there are a couple of people in Trump's campaign who have very similar views like Mark Ruby and Liz Cheney and Elise Stefanik, but be that as a side, it's good that Liz Cheney specifically is not any of those positions. But I think the best thing is that you have all these people inside these cloistered bubbles in Washington who really thought that they were the conscience of the nation, the voice of the nation. Not only were they applauding the decision to take Liz Cheney, but they have been spending eight years claiming that Donald Trump is a white supremacist who wants to put minorities in camp. Not only did Donald Trump win the election, but there was millions of non-white voters who for the first time left the Democratic Party and went to vote for Trump. Imagine you've wasted eight years of your life screaming and screeching like a who has been shot. Donald Trump's a racist. He's a fascist. He only likes white people. Then you watch millions of Latino people and Black people and Asian people and Muslims refuse to vote for Kamal Harris. You obviously like, I have No influence at all.

I'm completely out of touch.

But it's so good to know that about yourself. I mean, that's happened to me, by the way. They're all vehemently opposed to abortion, which I think is horrifying, but lots of people don't agree with me. I see this Roe v Wade comes down and you see these ballot initiatives and say, We're going to allow abortion until birth. I'm like, Wow, I'm so glad it's up for a vote. Then it turns out the voters just don't agree with me at all.

Even in red states.

It's true. It's true. That was hard for me to accept because I never talked about it, but I'm so sincere on the subject. I'm not for abortion, period. But you have to be real. Okay, sometimes people agree with you, sometimes they don't. But there's something about the Democratic base, which really is just basically just like unhappy, college-educated white ladies. That's really who it is, honestly.

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

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

That's okay. But the thing is, you were just saying you read the Nation sometimes. Yeah. I go out of my way to read everything, everybody. Me too. I try and have people in my lives who have very different views on... I have a lot of people in my life in Brazil, for example, who worship Lua. I have a lot of people in my life who hate Lua, worship Bolsonaro, people who are in between. I want that. I want to hear constantly from you. You want to be challenged all the time, not be ossified. I'm telling you, I know a lot of these people. I used to be on MSMBC all the time. I've been friends with a lot of the people.

Why do they hate you now, though?

They despise me with their burning passion. But in part because nobody hates things more than... The person always most hated is the one perceived as the heretic. Of course. But I was never really on their side in the way that they thought, actually, anyway. But Anyway, it doesn't matter. I know a lot of these people, and what has happened on MSNBC is that, or places like in the New York Times, a bed page, similar. People who support Trump don't exist in that world. There's not one op-ed writer at the New York Times of the dozens who is a Trump supporter, even though half the country is, more than half the country is. Ross 2000 is the person closest to understanding the Trump movement, but he certainly doesn't like Donald Trump at all. Other than that, It doesn't exist in the world. There's nobody ever on an MSNBC on their shows who brings that perspective of why they support Donald Trump. If you're only talking to people who are like-minded, and a lot of them have now left Twitter trying to go to some other platform where only They're only there. They really don't want to hear any dissent.

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

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

Yeah. What always amazons me is I really I did grow up in a working-class environment, but my whole life, that was my family.

You're the only one.

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

Didn't your mom work at McDonald's?

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

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

I guess my point is that, of course, that shaped me for a long time, but I realized now that that's not my life any longer. It hasn't been for 10 years, 15 years. My life has been very separate from that. I have a great amount of humility about my ability to speak for people who have a different life because, of course, the way you live shapes your perspective, shapes your understanding, shapes your priorities. It amazes me that these people don't have that humility at all. I think they're resisting it. That was what Obama did, remember, when he was like, Yeah, I know there's a lot of Black men who don't want to vote for a combo, who are going to vote for Trump. That's because you all hate women and you're misogynists. Then they're basically saying the reason a lot of Latino men- What an arrogant douchebag to say something like that. There's a perfect example. He spends all his time in Richard Branson's yacht. Yeah, I know. Just with the highest level of jet set, and then he thinks he's going to go and speak to Black working class men.

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

It's so alienating. I I think this condescension... But the other thing is the main argument is that they're all stupid. They're victims of disinformation. They're misled. They have all these alternative media they're listening to that don't have the controls that app with us. They're getting full. Basically, they're stupid. They're easily misled. They're gullible. So either they're racist or misogynist or stupid. That's their explanation. That's the thing they're clinging to. They don't realize how good they had it under Biden, how great the economy is, how much Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did for them. They just don't because they were told that it was untrue. They can't figure it out on their own. The condescension reeked out of… It oozes out of every pore of their being. Then they wonder why people despise them and their culture and their subculture. Who wants that? It is nauseating. But despite... What I'm saying is that they don't have the attitude you had, which is like, oh, it's actually good to be humbled, to realize that things that you about the world need to be reevaluated. There's no self-criticism, no reflection. In fact, every Democrat thinks like, Oh, yeah, I know why we lost.

It's been what I was saying all along. None of them were saying that, but they're like, Democrats did this and Kamala did that. They all are trying to pretend that if people had just listened to them, the Democrats would have won, even though all on, they were like, Oh, Kamala is running the most brilliant campaign ever. But what I'm saying is that the result is so overwhelming, so pointed devastating to their world view. As I said, I think the thing that has really shaken them the most, even though they're fighting it, they're not embracing it, they're fighting it, but they can't, is that so many non-white voters are, and Trump made huge gains in almost every non-white sector of society. I mean, Trump was saying that New Jersey and New York are swing states, and people were laughing at him, and he only lost New Jersey by five points and did the best any Republican has done in in New York City in many, many years because of how many Black, and Latino, and- Worse. Asians, and Muslims voted for Trump, non-white voters. When that happens, you don't even get to blame white people, but you have to accept that the people who you think you own, who have mindless loyalty to you, disobeyed you and didn't listen to you.

That's what makes them feel really shaken inside.

It's a slave rév. If you read the accounts of people who lived through slave révs, not just in the American South, but in Haiti or anywhere. They're always... Wherever you have slavery, you've got slave révs at some point.

They're always so shocked.

They can't believe that the nanny came after them with a knife. We thought you loved us.

It's so crucial to their worldview to believe- Do you know what I mean? We thought you loved us. No, it's the... I mean, those people, central to their worldview is that they're benevolent leaders of these people.

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

Just the subordinance alone.

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

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

Once you questioned... Before you were a member of the LBGT community, then you question, you were like a faggot.

Exactly. A marginalized figure. Yeah, exactly. A pedophile, whatever. All those things. Are you serious? Oh, yeah. Then the The way they have always talked about Clarence Thomas. I'm sorry to laugh. No, it's amazing. It's hilarious. The way they talk about Clarence Thomas. Oh, I know. Any Black person who's been a conservative, same with women who are... Gloria Steinem said about the people, the young women who were refusing to vote for Hillary and voting for Bernie when asked why they were doing that. She's like, Because young girls go where the boys are. The most demeaning, insulting thing you can say about women that they don't think on their own, they just mindlessly do whatever the boys are. Now you're seeing this like, Oh, yeah, Latinos are very misogynistic and primitive. So are Black men. They hate women. They're easily misled. They're low information voters. The amount of contempt that liberal elites have for these non-white voters who didn't do as they're told is almost scary.

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

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

Incredible. They're going to get... I mean, I will say to hispanics in the United States, you're about to be the subject of a hate campaign.

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

Attack the Hispanics.

Yeah, and Muslims and Arabs.

Well, so the best part about this is the language barrier, and so few liberals even bother to listen to what people actually think or say. They're not interested. It's like they treat everyone like a three-year-old. But when they find out the social views of your average Central American, which I find hilarious and great, but whatever, leaving my views aside, the average social views of a Central American just on the social issues are so far out of what's considered acceptable.

But they I have no idea. Which is so ironic because Democratic strategists used to openly boast about what, if you say you'll get called as a white supremacist, the replacement theory, that, Oh, we're going to import all these people into the United States, make them citizens, and they're going to be supporters of the Democratic Party, and we're going to reign forever, like a thousand years, because these are all our voters. When they get here and they find out that actually... But I have to say, there's a great article in New York magazine, which is words that pass my lips very, very rarely, where this writer, who actually wrote a very critical profile of me five years ago. Who is it? His name is Simon. I just talked to him today about this article because it's a great article. I'm embarrassed. I don't know his name, but I can't remember his last name. It's hyphenated, so it's just a little complicated. But anyway, I really recommend this article, he just went. What he did was he purposely went to Black, Latino, Asian neighborhoods where there was a lot of Trump votes, and he just walked around on the street and talked to as many people as he could who voted for Trump about why.

What I think people don't understand is that the Latino and Black NGO presidents who get put on TV, who are supposed to be there at a specific point, have less in common with the people on whose behalf they're speaking than the white host of these shows. Way less.

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

Exactly. But still, a lot of them were just far from being deceiving But by disinformation, they were like, there's a Democratic Party that supported NAFTA. We're having trouble paying for our health care or food for our kids, and they're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine and to Israel, to all these other countries. They're just talking about the struggles that they have in their lives and the way in which the government doesn't care. There's some social issue stuff, too. But once you get to the United States to become a citizen, you integrate pretty quickly. You don't sit around thinking about trans people or whatever, gay marriage. These are ancillary issues. Even If they don't agree with the Democratic Party on, that might contribute to the LA Nation, the fact that that's why that Kamala ad was effective, not because people are sitting around thinking about whether trans people should get government-funded sexual assignment surgeries in prison, but because it was like a proxy for explaining that these people have nothing in common with your lives. They don't care about you. They don't care about your values. Had they felt economically satisfied, I don't think that would have resonated because that's not what people care about.

But most of them are just worried about the same thing everybody else is worried Of course. They finally got to the point where they realized we've been voting.

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

Exactly. They're the people who get most affected, especially by immigration. Totally. I mean, the people who lose their jobs with immigration often are non-white people, Black working class, Latino working class, and they feel resentful about everything that's being done. There was a lot of, Oh, they're giving free housing and free meals to illegal immigrants while I can't feed my family. I really recommend the article. It's not done with caricature. It's not like handpicking a few comments. It's a very long article, and it just lets these people speak for themselves in a very revealing way.

What's just so funny is you live in Brazil, which is another continent. You've been there a while. How long?

Twenty years. Twenty years.

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

Yeah, I was talking about this- But you don't even live here. I know, but I lived here for the first 38 years of my life. It's the only country of which I've ever been a citizen. I'm here all the time. But I do think that- But how do you know that?

And they don't. That's the point.

I think that distance gives you a perspective. The fact that my friends are not media and political people in New York and Washington, that I'm not hooked into their worldview, that I'm not subsumed with it, that I'm not dependent upon it in any gives me, I think, a broader perspective. If you live in Northern Virginia and you spend all your time in Washington in green rooms or New York, you're going to be so distorted in the things that you think about the world. But also, I think you have to go out of your way to, Okay, I don't want to be told what people think by other people who are reporting to be their spokespeople. I want to hear from them directly. I want to look at the polling data. I want to understand what they're thinking. You could just see it. You could hear it. You could feel it. You could observe it analytically in That data. But I remember people on CNN saying, I think it was Van Jones or no, it was Bacari Sellers who was like, I don't care what the polls say. I can guarantee you there won't be more than 5% of Black men voting for Donald Trump.

I don't care what the polls say. There won't be anywhere near 15% of...

Bacari Sellers said that?

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

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

The only ones are in the media.

The ones that can put on the same thing. I just don't know any person. I've never even met one.

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

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

I remember the smartest Republicans like JD Vance, Josh Hotley, the ones who really understand that you can't have the same Republican Party as you did in 1980, have always been describing the future of the Republican Party as a multiracial working class coalition. To watch people identifying primarily based on their citizenship and their class- That's what you want.as opposed to constantly being divided by race- That's what you want.is.

So- Amen.

Promising to see.

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

But as you say, that gives them the idea of change. Hey, we can change the government. Well, that's exactly right. Exactly. Where's immutable characteristic? By definition, don't change.

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

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

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

That's it. Well, and obviously, millions of non-white people agree with these things. They just went and voted for the white candidate over the Black one. I know. The white candidate who they were told was Adolf Hitler and wanted to put all my white people in camps, they were looking around there like, That's not my experience.

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

I think you're right. They're obviously not going to do nothing. They're going to try and fortify everything as much as possible from the change the American people just voted for. The Party of Democracy is going to do that. Censorship, in my view, began, systemic censorship on the internet began as a reaction to 2016. Without question. Both to Brexit, but especially to Trump. That's right. That's when you saw the emergence of these highly well-funded disinformation experts, the concoction of this fake expertise called disinformation experts. How do people get to be that? Where do you go to school to be a disinformation expert? Like a floating arbiter of truth. But they needed to radically intensify censorship because they blamed free speech and the free flow of information. They blamed that for Brexit first, but especially for Trump's victory. They wanted to crack down on that. There's always now an ongoing effort to try and crack down on that. I think, though, what they're going to try and do is look at the areas that they believe Trump is trying most radically to change, beginning with foreign... That's foreign policy, the thing that they value most. That's the- By far.

Centerpiece of how America runs in their view. They're going to spend as much of their time subverting him and sabotaging him in advance, even though he just won the election by a pretty solid margin. There are some things that will be reversible, but if you escalate the war in Ukraine and Trump now is coming into a war that the Russians perceive accurately to be not just a proxy war with the West behind Ukraine, but where NATO is actually bombing Russia, it becomes infinitely more difficult to keep under control and to resolve. The problem is that the risks of this are so great that it actually sickens me more than almost anything I've ever seen. Me too. That they're willing to do this on the way out, to just prevent this war from ending and trifling with the risk of a nuclear exchange.

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

My friends do that, too.

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

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

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

Thank you, Tucker.

Glenn Greenwell. Always great to see you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson's show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson. Com.