Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Friday, Febraury 24, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify
It is the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the decision by the U.S. and its NATO allies to treat the war as its own proxy war, with the U.S. alone appropriating more than $100 billion thus far and counting – almost twice the entire annual Russian military budget – and sending so many weapons to that war zone that America's own weapons stockpiles are dangerously depleted. For months we heard from the media outlets aligned with the U.S. Security State that Joe Biden, with great diplomatic adeptness, had united the entire world against Russia and behind the United States in support of Ukraine.
Yet – and I know this will shock many of you – these media claims were false and propagandistic from the start. Major newspapers around the world this week, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, acknowledged finally the far different reality: that the world is deeply divided and most of the world refuses to join Biden's call for unity in support of his war policies in that country. The reasons for this are complex and revealing, and we'll spend some time analyzing what accounts for Biden's diplomatic failure.
Then, as we do regularly on our Friday evening show, we will welcome the independent journalist Michael Tracey to analyze the Week in Review. Michael is currently in Munich, where he spent the week at the annual Munich Security Conference, where –needless to say – the war in Ukraine dominated. We'll talk to him about what he observed, as well as a variety of other news events from this week, including an amazing Wall Street Journal article on how more than half of American colleges – more than half – now have a formal “snitch system” that allows – and encourages – students to anonymously report one another for using “biased” words and reading “problematic” texts. Many of these systems began as a way for students to turn each other in for violations of the university's very rigid COVID-era rules on masks.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
MONOLOGUE
So today is the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, or at least the part of the war in Ukraine that began when Russia invaded with a very large army on February 24 of last year. The war in Ukraine has actually been raging for at least eight years, ever since 2014, when Victoria Nuland - who seems to end up in charge of Ukraine for the United States no matter which party wins the election - got caught on tape essentially selecting who would be the new president of Ukraine. And there has been a war of independence being waged in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which don't want to be subject to the rule of a pro-Western, pro-EU government that the United States and NATO played a very large role in ushering in.
And we've spent a lot of time on this show reporting over the last year, on my written journalism and on the program since we launched, on the events of that war in Ukraine, always trying to ask the same fundamental question, which is why is it that the United States government, if its perspective and priority is helping to improve the lives of the American people, has sent over $100 billion to the war in Ukraine, which is almost double the entire Russian military budget each year – Russia spends almost half on the entire military, its own military, of what the United States has allocated just for that one part of the world. Russia spends 1/15 not even of what the United States spends on its own military. And the question always is how it improves the lives of the American people for the United States government to be engaged in a proxy war over who will rule regions in Eastern Ukraine, or whether those provinces will decide that they want to be independent or subject to the rule of Moscow. We've been asking that question for a full year and we have honestly never heard an answer.
So instead of revisiting all of that, I want to focus instead for tonight on one specific propagandistic framework that was fed to us from the very beginning of the war, namely that Joe Biden had essentially succeeded in uniting the entire world or the international community behind the United States in support of Ukraine and against Russia – that Russia has been isolated, it has barely any allies, its economy is going to collapse and everyone is on the side of the United States; and NATO, believing that we are on the side of right. They too want to see Ukraine succeed and Russia fail and that was what we were told for months.
This is something that happens in every war. We are always told that the international community supports the United States and its foreign policy. And there's a fairly amusing chart that has been circulated for decades about what the international community actually means. You can see it here.
This is what is genuinely referred to as the international community: the United States and Canada, tiny parts of Western Europe and Austria, Australia and New Zealand, and perhaps Japan. And then, sometimes, you can add into that mix whatever tiny little countries the United States succeeds in bribing in order to be on their side. Remember the coalition of the willing that supported the United States’ invasion of Iraq, which included such world powers as the Marshall Islands? Because sometimes whoever happens to be on board with the United States foreign policy also gets included, but only on an ad hoc basis, in the international community. This is what the international community really means when the United States media – and the U.S. Security State does the same thing – talk about the international community and how the international community is united behind the United States.
Something very odd happened, though, this week, which is that the two largest newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which have been steadfastly supportive of Joe Biden's war policy in Ukraine, both ran very detailed and emphatic articles making clear that that is a propagandistic fairy tale, that the world is nowhere near united behind the United States effort to isolate Russia and support Ukraine. Quite the contrary, the world is completely divided, that while there has been unity in the Native Alliance itself in Western Europe and then of course in Eastern Europe as well, which fears Russian domination, the rest of the world, the other continents that actually exist and matter, Latin America, South and Central America, Asia, Africa, many parts of those regions, in fact, the most important parts, are absolutely not in favor of the United States policy toward Ukraine, do not see the war that way at all, and for very interesting reasons have refused to get on board with the United States foreign policy in Ukraine for reasons that I think are really worth exploring. And I have to say that these two articles did, in some cases, quite a good job in detailing the true nature of how we've been deceived every time we've been hearing this fairy tale – often from these papers – and what the reality is, which is much different.
Let's take a look at why these two newspapers or how these two newspapers revealed the truth - something they sometimes do - they kind of did it on the same day in the same way. And they were also joined in their effort by newspapers around the world, including the largest newspaper here in Brazil, that published an op-ed making very similar points. And I think it's important to see how the United States is viewed from outside of the United States. So often this propaganda that is fed to us – that the United States is in Ukraine because it wants to protect and spread democracy and vanquished tyranny, or because the United States is angry that a country like Russia has violated the sacred rules-based international order – is propaganda that really is for domestic consumption only. The only people who believe that are American media outlets and their employees and then the people who trust and pay attention to those media outlets, which thankfully is a rapidly diminishing number. But around the Western world, when you say those things, you provoke a global laughing fit, and I think that for very good reason.
So, let's look at a couple of these articles. Here is the one in The New York Times. The headline tells the story in a pretty direct and blunt way “The West Tried To Isolate Russia. It Didn't Work.”
Have you been hearing this from the media over the last year? I know I haven't. I've been hearing the opposite, that most of the world is united behind Joe Biden, that he has done such a great job diplomatically in keeping everyone on board behind our policy. The reality is much different. The New York Times reports,
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the West formed what looked like an overwhelming global coalition. 141 countries supported a UN measure demanding that Russia unconditionally withdraw. But the West never won over as much of the world as it initially seemed (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
And let me just interject here. I've never seen that way to me, you can go back and look at articles I was writing and interviews I was giving and even tweets I was posting pointing out that, in fact, as this article is about to point out, many of the most important countries, in fact, many of the largest countries on the planet and the leading democracies were very much opposed to the United States foreign policy in Ukraine and were refusing to join in. The Times says,
Another 47 countries abstained or missed the vote, including India and China, [which, by the way, happened to be the two most populous countries on the planet.] Many of those “neutral nations” have since provided crucial economic or diplomatic support for Russia (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
And here you see a graphic on the screen which The New York Times published. Essentially, it is the group of countries that abstained and the circles indicate their population size. And here you see China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which essentially are the world's largest democracies in terms of population, right after China. You can now add Brazil into this list as well, which is the sixth largest, most populous country in the world. We're not talking about small countries. They're talking about the largest countries, mostly everyone in the top 20 in terms of the population other than the United States and a couple of its Western allies have refused to join U.S. foreign policy or are actively opposed to it. The New York Times goes on,
And even some of the nations that initially agreed to denounce Russia see the war as someone else's problem – and have since started moving toward a more neutral position (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
Here's the chart that I was just talking about and here you see again some of the rationales for why these countries don't see this war as their war. As I've mentioned before, when Lula visited Washington last week, he met with Joe Biden, he was pressured as he was when the German chancellor visited Lula in Brazil to provide munitions to empower the German tanks that are headed toward the German to the Russian border. I don't think it's ever a good idea when German tanks head to the Russian border, but that's what's happening now. And Brazil and its leader said, well, a lot of countries are saying, which is “that’s your war, not ours”. Our war is not with Ukraine or Russia. Our war is to improve the lives of our citizenry. So, we're going to stay out of the war. That's what so many of these countries, including in Africa and, increasingly, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, have been saying. The Times goes on:
A year on, it's becoming clearer: while the West’s core coalition remains remarkably solid [meaning NATO's and Europe’s] it never convinced the rest of the world to isolate Russia. And instead of cleaving in two, the world has fragmented. A vast middle sees Russia's invasion as primarily a European and American problem. Rather than view it as an existential threat, these countries are largely focused on protecting their own interests amid the economic and geopolitical upheaval caused by the invasion (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
Why is the U.S. not focused on its own economic prosperity, its own economy and its own interests and the interests of its citizens like these other countries are?
On Thursday, the UN General Assembly endorsed another resolution demanding that Russia withdraw from Ukraine's territory – but China, South Africa, India and many countries in the Global South continued to abstain, underlining their alienation from what they regard as the West's war.
A lot of world leaders don't particularly like the idea of one country invading another. But many of them aren't unhappy to see somebody stand up to the United States either. Throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East many governments with strong official ties to the United States and Europe don't see the war as a global threat. Instead, they've positioned themselves as neutral bystanders or arbiters, preserving as much flexibility as they can.
Nearly half of the African countries abstained or were absent from the vote to condemn Russia, suggesting a growing reluctance in many nations to accept an American narrative of right and wrong. Russia has won friends through mindless propaganda [as though the U.S. does not use that] and hard power, with a growing number of countries contracting with Russian mercenaries and buying Russian weapons.
In South Africa, ties to Russia go back to Soviet support to end apartheid (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
That was when the United States was supporting South African apartheid. The Soviet Union was opposed and now the black leaders of South Africa remember that and have greater allegiance to Russia than the U.S.
Its leaders have seen an opportunity to align more closely with Russia while filling in trade gaps left by Europe and the United States. But like many other African countries, South Africa appears careful to balance its growing ties with Russia against maintaining a relationship with the West. Latin America, with its longstanding relationship with the United States, voted largely alongside its northern neighbor to contain Russia. But cracks have begun to show more prominently in recent months.
Colombia recently refused a request from the United States to provide weapons to Ukraine, and when visited by Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany last month, President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil declined to speak in support of Ukraine, saying, “I think the reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine needs to be clearer” (The New York Times. Feb. 23, 2023).
This is essentially laying out what I think is a very interesting dichotomy between countries that are looking at the war in Russia and Ukraine and asking what is the best way for us to promote the lives and material well-being of our own citizens. And the answer is by not involving ourselves in this war on the other side of the world, which has nothing to do with us. These countries are concluding that their citizens’ lives will not be improved nor undermined based on the fight over who gets to rule the Donbas. Why would South American leaders or Middle Eastern leaders or African leaders be willing to involve themselves in a war over that? And I think the same question is one that we ought to be asking of our own government. Why is that such an important question for us? Who rules various parts of eastern Ukraine or whether the people of those provinces choose to be independent?
The Washington Post had an almost equally blunt assessment of Biden's failure to unite the world behind the United States and Ukraine, as the media kept claiming that it did. There you see the Post article from the same day, February 23. The headline is “A Global Divide on the Ukraine War is Deepening.” This is how they framed this:
Russia capitalizes on disillusionment with the United States to win sympathy in the Global South.
Russia doesn't need to do anything to gain sympathy in the Global South.The Global South regards the United States with great suspicion because of its own experience with the United States. And when they hear this propaganda that the United States is there to fight for democracy, to vanquish tyranny, to support the rule-based international order that not only remember things like the invasion of Iraq, but also the instability and coups and dirty wars that the United States behind the CIA has often brought to those countries. And so, they think it's preposterous that the United States would claim that that's what they're doing in Ukraine. Again, only American media outlets and the people who listen to them believe that. This propaganda is for domestic consumption.
The Washington Post article says,
In the years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a reinvigorated Western alliance has rallied against Russia, forging what President Biden has trumpeted as a “global coalition”. Yet a closer look beyond the West suggests the world is far from united on the issues raised by the Ukraine war.
The conflict has exposed a deep global divide and the limits of U.S. influence over a rapidly shifting world order. Evidence abounds that the effort to isolate Putin has failed, and not just among Russian allies that could be expected to back Moscow, such as China and Iran. India announced last week that its trade with Russia has grown by 400% since the invasion. In just the past six weeks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been welcomed in nine countries in Africa and the Middle East – including South Africa, whose foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, hailed their meeting as “wonderful” and called South Africa and Russia “friends” (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023).
Conversations with people in South Africa, Kenya and India suggest a deeply
ambivalent view of the conflict, informed less by the question of whether Russia was wrong to invade than by current and historical grievances against the West – over colonialism, perceptions of arrogance and the West’s failure to devote as many resources to solving conflicts and human rights abuses in other parts of the world, such as the Palestinian territories, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Western countries “are hypocritical”, said Bhaskar Dutta, a clerk in Kolkata, India. “These people colonized the entire world. What Russia has done cannot be condoned, but at the same time you cannot blame them wholly” (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023).
That is a very common view outside the United States. The post goes on:
This is not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often suggests (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023).
Oh, my God. It's not?
It's not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often suggests, said William Gumede, who founded and heads the Johannesburg based Democracy Works Foundation, which promotes democracy in Africa. He pointed to the refusal of South Africa, India and Brazil to join Biden's global coalition. The reluctance, he said, is the outgrowth of more than a decade of building resentment against the United States and its allies, which have increasingly lost interest in addressing the problems of the Global South, he said. The coronavirus pandemic, when Western countries locked down and locked out other countries, and President Donald Trump's explicit disdain for Africa [always have to blame Trump] further fueled the resentment (The Washington Post. Feb. 23, 2023).
So, these countries are doing what the United States government should be doing but isn't, which is asking, Why am I going to get involved in this war that has no bearing on the lives of my citizens? It's also because they understand that this fairy tale that the American citizenry is fed in every new war to garner support for their government's endless war posture is a joke, and they know that from their own experience.
Just to give you an outsider's perspective, there is this article in the Brazilian newspaper Folha of Sao Paulo, it's the largest newspaper in the country – and just for full disclosure, I have now become a columnist with this paper. I just published a column once every other week in this newspaper – and it is an op-ed by a professor of history, Philippe Guerrero. And essentially he is making the same argument. We translated the headline in a key paragraph. It says, “Western Double Standards Explain Global South Apathy Towards The War.” He's saying the reason why the Global South refuses to support the United States is that the Global South and the rest of the world see the hypocrisy of the United States as a condemnation of Russia. “History makes obvious the contradictions between rhetoric and action by Americans and Europeans.” That's the subheadline.
So let me just give you this little excerpt here before we bring on Michael Tracey.
If in the Global North, Ukraine is winning the battle for hearts and minds, in the rest of the world the situation is different. While most nations in the Global South supported U.N. resolutions condemning the Russian invasion and the annexation of portions of Ukraine, this movement has stopped there. No adherence to the Western sanctions against Russia and even less economic or military support for Ukraine. Even if we set aside the elephant in the room – the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 […] (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023).
Remember. that makes it kind of difficult for the same exact people that supported that war, like Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Queen of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, all of whom supported that illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and now turn around to the world and say we are morally offended by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Nobody buys that.
He goes on:
The balance is a history of systemic disrespect of international law. The UN charter is clear: unless in cases of self-defense, only the Security Council has the authority to authorize the use of military force (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023).
That's the rules-based international order. Do you think the United States believes that?
In spite of that, the U.S. and its allies and NATO, especially the UK and France, disrespected this rule numerous times in the last decade (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023).
Remember, when they just decided to bomb Libya and remove Gaddafi? Where was the rules-based international order in that? Or the dirty war in Syria that's ongoing?
The article goes on:
And all of that without taking into account the abuses of the self-defense principle by the U.S. in the context of the War on Terror, which would normalize the idea of preventative attacks against targets designated as “terrorists” in countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East with dramatic consequences.
Facing so many double standards, how can one expect governments and societies in the Global South to unite dispassionately in support of Ukraine? It's for good reason that Western rhetoric, based on principles and morals, like the one that has dominated the discourse around this war sounds hypocritical and brings back the ghosts of a colonial past (Folha de São Paulo. Feb. 23, 2023).
Now just to put that in context – we all know the long list of countries where the CIA during the Cold War and since has engineered coups overthrowing democratically-elected governments, all of which made all that sanctimony about Russia interfering in our sacred democracy in 2016 such a joke. When the U.S. interferes in the democracy of other countries, it does so through violent coups and destabilization regimes, not through a few Facebook and Twitter posts. Countries wish that was how the U.S. intervened. But Brazil is a country that doesn't get talked about much because they happened not to be among the most horrific invasions of the kind, for example, that was carried out in Chile or Indonesia or in Central America, where the United States supported all kinds of despots and truly brutal regimes. But in 1964, the Brazilians had a democratically elected center-left government that defied the warnings of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to cease being so left-wing and their economic policies, such as land reform and rent control. and because of their defiance, the CIA engineered a coup that overthrew Brazil's democratically elected government in 1964 and then proceeded to impose a 21-year brutal and savage military dictatorship that lasted until Brazil finally democratized in 1985. So, if you're a Brazilian and you hear the United States doling out lectures on the importance of the rule-based international order and the need to support democracy and vanquish tyranny, how do you think you're going to react? Having been on the other side of the reality of the United States foreign policy for so long, and not just the propaganda and the rhetoric that the U.S. media spreads on behalf of the CIA and the Pentagon, I think is such a crucial context. And it's good that a year into the war, the truth of what's happening is finally being revealed now.
I want to show you a couple of videos that I want to watch with Michael Tracey, who I'm delighted has joined us for our typical Friday night gathering for the Week in Review. Michael is in Munich where he's been covering the Munich Security Conference. He has a lot of observations. He's filled with all kinds of energy and excitement to share those with you.
G. Greenwald: Michael, welcome. Before we get into this, I just want to show you a video or two that kind of adds to the point and then get your reaction to all of this. How are you? Are you doing well?
M. Tracey: I’ll have some popcorn and watch the videos.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, you can sit back, enjoy yourself, and have a little buttered popcorn if you want. They're kind of short, so you're going to have to shut your mouth very quickly.
M. Tracey: I'm very good at that.
G. Greenwald: Yes, I heard. I think I've seen the two before. I'm going to show you two short videos that both involve different members of the Pelosi family. Let's start with the elder Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi. Here she is on C-SPAN, talking about how much admiration, deep admiration, she has for George W. Bush. First, let's listen to what she said.
(Video 00:33:44)
N. Pelosi: Once again, I'll just say this honestly, that the Bush family is […]
G. Greenwald: … a little trouble with her notes there. She's kind of stumbling around. Let's hope she gets there. So, let's listen.
N. Pelosi: Once again, I'll just say this honestly, that the Bush family is – because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion [...]
G. Greenwald: George W Bush – their humanity, their generosity of spirit and their compassion – George W Bush, who invaded Iraq and destroyed it, who instituted a worldwide torture regime, who created a due process free for a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay that 22 years later still has people in cages in the middle of an ocean who have never been charged with, let alone convicted, of a crime. This is Nancy Pelosi, heaping praise on the deep goodness and benevolence of this man whom liberals used to call a Nazi 20 years ago. Let's hear the rest.
N. Pelosi: Once again, it's an honor to be associated with President Bush in this. He said this was his second time to be here. I've been here many, many times. So, I've been here with him 100% of the times he's been here, as we were both here for the groundbreaking when I was a speaker and he was president. So, let us again work for peace, work for justice.
G. Greenwald: Just let us work for peace and work for justice, she said.
Her daughter is Alexandra Pelosi and instead of like someone might do if they have a very famous mother, try in, you know, kind of forge your own path. She has done exactly the opposite. She uses the name Pelosi to make sure everyone knows she's Nancy Pelosi's daughter and she has built her entire career around her mother, up to the point of having just released a documentary about the greatness of her mom. And she went on “The View” to promote it. And she talked about the actual relationship between the Bush and the Pelosi families. Listen to what she said.
(Video 00:35:54)
Alexandra Pelosi: I have been so, so depressed since this happened. And then, last week, I went to Washington to visit my old friend George H. W. Bush. I made a film about George W. Bush in 2000, and he's, I consider he was always a father figure to me [...]
G. Greenwald: Just in case you thought you misheard that George W Bush has always been a father figure to Nancy Pelosi's daughter.
Alexandra Pelosi: […] been very good to me in my life. Did she just call my Bush favorite? I don't.
M. Tracey: Did she disclose that she viewed Bush as a father figure while Bush was actually president?
G. Greenwald: No, no. That was back when they were accusing the Bushes of being a crime family going to war in Iraq in order to generate profits for the oil industry, of which the Bush family was a part. And Dick Cheney. Yeah. And they were constantly comparing George Bush to Hitler. Who knew that all along she considered the Hitler of that era to be her father figure? That seems to be pretty psychologically disturbing but listen to the rest.
Alexandra Pelosi: […] I consider him as always, a father figure to me. He’s been very good to me in my life. He's one of my favorite people, right? And I may not agree with him politically, but he's always been a source of support and strength. And we were laughing about the fact that he invites my mother to events and one time I went to “A Thousand Points of Light”, a George Bush event in Texas, and one of the Bushes gets up and says “And now a great friend of the Bush family, Nancy Pelosi. And the crowd is like, wait, what you don't know about these relationships? But people, even though they disagree in public about certain things like the Iraq war – that Nancy Pelosi voted against, they had a lot of fights about it in public – but they're still – you saw them together last week, you would have thought […]
G. Greenwald: So, the reason, Michael, I wanted to add that to the articles that I just read about why nobody buys the U.S. propaganda is because what they're all kind of cackling about the fact that they fight in public is theater, but in reality, they're all part of the same, literally the same family, practically. And people have forgotten as well that Nancy Pelosi, in 2002 and 2003, was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and therefore one of the members of the Gang of Eight, which gets very special, comprehensive briefings from the intelligence community. She was briefed on all of those War on Terror programs, including domestic spying on American citizens without warrants, the torture regime in Guantanamo, the due process for camps around the world, and the CIA black sites and approved all of them, never objected to any of it.
This is what the world understands and sees, that the entire American elite is actually united, that their fights are for the American public only. It's theater to pretend that there's some sort of grave difference between the establishment wings of both parties but, in reality, Nancy Pelosi, the liberal, reveres George W. Bush the supposed war criminal, because they all support the same policies. And that's why when they want to go around and say that they're there to fight for democracy and human rights, only certain sectors of the American public, including the American media, believe it.
I know Nancy Pelosi was in Munich where you were. So why don't you share some of your thoughts on sort of this actual divide that the American media is now admitting exists in the world regarding Ukraine?
M. Tracey: Yeah. I saw her staggering out of her car at one point, of course, I couldn't be allowed to approach her – very dangerous, potentially, because she might be actually asked a mildly skeptical question. But I did see her shivering in the cold of Munich and being guided into her next meeting for such affairs as being presented, as she was with a bracelet made of Ukrainian bullet casings. So, she proudly displayed that gift and talked about bipartisanship. Joni Ernst, the Republican senator, was also there and she had a big smile on her face, posing for a photo with a T[-shirt], with a stylized-like advertisement on it for F-16s to be deployed to Ukraine from the U.S. So that was the fashion style that was in vogue at the security conference with these, you know, sassy ladies. You know, one thought that […]
G. Greenwald: Let me just interject there because I think it's just so interesting. So here you have this Munich conference, all over the world the war in Ukraine is being debated – most countries actually want no part of it. And then you have someone supposedly on the very liberal end of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi, with somebody who's presumably a conservative Republican governor of Iowa, Joni Ernst. And on one of the most consequential and divisive questions that, as we just reviewed, is dividing the entire world, they could not be more united, as always. You can throw Marco Rubio and AOC into the mix, and you can throw Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders into the mix and there's absolutely no daylight of any kind between them. The American elite continues to be so united on all of these questions to the point that Joni Ernst and Nancy Pelosi are wearing clothing designed to express support for this war and, of course, the rest of the world sees that even if the American media doesn't.
M. Tracey: You know who I even encountered at this Munich Security Conference periphery, in one of the restaurants that they all sort of retreated to huddle and have their slightly tipsy banter about what's the next weapon system to send over to the Donbas - Joe Lieberman was there. He was holding court. Joe Lieberman was supposedly primaried out of the Senate in 2006 because of this vast ideological distance that had emerged between him and his fellow Democrats, particularly on foreign policy. You wouldn't believe what good spirits he was in with his fellow Democratic senators who were there. I saw him, he was like, hugging, [..] laughing and 100% on the same page with Pelosi okay? Here's one way to think of it. Even if you're of a mindset or if you have a worldview that is left-liberal, where you orient your priorities around these kinds of trendy cultural issues or political or ideology such as it exists – it is focused mainly on identity issues, whether it's gender, race, what have you – if you're of that mindset, well, there's plenty of fodder for you to dislike George W. Bush. George W. Bush and Karl Rove's schemes to propose a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage in 2004 to boost turnout among conservatives for Bush [...]
G. Greenwald: And 2002 as well. That's how they won the midterm election. That was their strategy, too, to get out evangelical voters who were going to go and vote for things like that. That was their mastermind strategy.
M. Tracey: Right. But that's not a deal breaker for Pelosi as much as she might in other circumstances posture her job [at the end] of LGBT rights. I'm not sure what [right] exactly she needs to be championed at the moment. But, nevertheless – but that tells you something because that's not a deal breaker for Pelosi, that Bush engaged in this, you know, anti-gay, homophobic, tyrannical past. But you know what would almost certainly [be a deal] breaker? If she and Bush diverged at all on this question of the Ukraine war, if there was a gulf on that issue, you can bet that she wouldn't be standing on stage wherever she was singing the praises of Bush as this [...] well, leader and her daughter praising him as this father figure.
G. Greenwald: This is, I think, such an important point. If you look at the people who were actually against the war in Ukraine – there are no people in the Democratic Party, as we know – but in the Republican Party, Matt Gaetz currently has a resolution pending to cut off funding for the war in Ukraine. I guess he thinks $100 billion is more than enough to spend on this country that the U.S. has no vital interest in. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been outspoken from the start. Donald Trump has been increasingly vocal about his opposition to this war. Ron DeSantis actually came out in a Fox interview and made clear that he thought that this open checkbook for [...]
M. Tracey: Give me a break. That's a total nonsense line. Don't fall for that.
G. Greenwald: I'm just telling you, you can either judge a politician's views based on what they claim they believe and tell the public they believe and advocate for, or you can try and divine their internal thought process. But all I'm telling you is, as a result of taking that position, he got promptly attacked by establishment Republican outlets like The Bulwark - as you say, nothing is a deal breaker except this. So, people like Rand Paul, who in the beginning has been saying the same thing. These are the people who end up marginalized and cast out toward the fringes. And what it shows is Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio have a lot more in common with Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff than they do with the members of their own party who are opposed to the war in Ukraine.
M. Tracey: Yeah. And just quickly, on DeSantis’ tweet, we don't have to get bogged down in this. I know you covered it this week. I wasn't trying to divine his motive. I just know that the same sort of furor was artificially whipped up when Kevin McCarthy, in September, ahead of the midterms, used the same term “blank check.”
G. Greenwald: Did you see it? He said a lot more than that in that interview. We covered that last night. He didn't just say I'm against an open check. He said I think this idea that Russia is some grave threat to the United States is preposterous. The idea that they're going to go and start invading, in a domino theory, Poland and then Hungary and then Western Europe is ludicrous. They've clearly proven themselves to be a third-rate power. There's no reason we should be considering Russia to be a threat. He said way more than just ‘I'm against an open book’. But anyway, it was actually I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say that. My only point is, as you said, that is the way that you get ejected from the kind of litmus test, the admission ticket to be accepted by the Washington establishment, his support for this war in Ukraine.
Let me show you a statement that was bizarrely issued today out of nowhere by the FBI. I really don't understand why the FBI decided to have its own foreign policy statement. But here you see it. I don't know if you saw it on screen. I'm going to read it to you. It included the name of Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and it's an FBI official whatever, with their logo. And this is what he said,
It has been one year since Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor but the FBI has been working with our Ukrainian partners for years to battle Russian aggression there – and we aren't going anywhere. The FBI's commitment to Ukraine remains unwavering, and we will continue to stand against Russia at home and abroad (Feb. 24, 2023).
So, this is the FBI kind of knowing that they're not.
M. Tracey: (laughing) Is that real?
G. Greenwald: Yeah, it's amazing. Like, what role does the FBI have to play in the war in Ukraine? But this is the admission ticket to gaining popularity. Look, the statement. It’s in blue and yellow, too. I'm not joking. It has a blue background and then the special letters that they want to emphasize are in yellow and the name, Christopher Wray, is also in yellow. So, you have the blue and yellow flag that's being subliminally waved by the FBI, because the FBI knows that they have a lot of problems with conservative voters and with conservative politicians and this is how they get to curry favor with at least the Republican establishment and the media – by declaring their support for Ukraine.
M. Tracey: That's amazing. I hadn't seen that. I would certainly like to know where in the charter authorizes the bureau to have its own autonomous foreign policy, seemingly, where it's pledging to fight Russia as a matter of federal law enforcement. Of course, there are times when the FBI goes to track down a criminal abroad somewhere but just as a matter of geopolitics, it's seeming like it has declared that it's at war with Russia and standing with Ukraine, which, again, is sort of, if you think about what you would expect, the purview of a federal law enforcement agency.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, it just has such immense propaganda.
Speaking of bipartisanship, this kind of bipartisan club that produces unity and consensus, there's no better example, I think, than Victoria Nuland, who amazingly stays in power no matter which party ends up winning. She was in the government when Bill Clinton was president and exercised a lot of influence. She then ended up as Dick Cheney's primary political advisor in the Iraq war. And you might think that that might have harmed her career, at least in Democratic circles but no, it did not. She immediately reappeared in the Obama administration, working at Hillary Clinton's State Department and then running Ukraine in John Kerry's State Department. The only thing that got her out of government was Donald Trump when she spent four years out of government when Trump was president. – this is why neocons hate Trump so much. And then Biden wins and she's right back, in Antony Blinken’s State Department, running Ukraine.
And as you've been pointing out, Michael, you've been doing a lot of kind of historical digging over that era and finding that all of the people who are running this war in Ukraine, beginning, of course, with Joe Biden himself, were all people who are part of the club agitating for the invasion of Iraq as well. They never go away. They always remain in power, no matter how grievous their errors. What is it that you've been finding that you think is interesting about a lot of these connections that I think history has forgotten?
M. Tracey: Yeah. I think the breadth of Nuland in Bush’s administration is not adequately understood because it wasn't just that she worked on the staff of the vice president's office when Dick Cheney obviously was the vice president. She was then the U.S. ambassador to NATO under Bush, during a very early period when the momentum around the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO at some points was beginning to jump.
So, I just happened to come across a clipping today where, in 2005, Donald Rumsfeld. Remember him?
G. Greenwald: I do.
M. Tracey: Great guy. He went to attend some sort of bilateral U.S. Ukraine meeting under the auspices of NATO, if you mind, in the press photo that was taken from that event, who's sitting right by his side? Sure enough, it's Victoria Nuland. And it was there that Rumsfeld affirmed that the United States was in avowed support of Ukraine being on a track toward NATO membership. And so, you can see why somebody like Nuland wouldn't just be ‘incidentally’ invested in this Ukraine war because it was just something that happened to pop up on her agenda and she has this real steadfast dedication to upholding the rules based international order. No. There's a long-standing ideological project that undergirds her sort of fervor. This is another amazing one that I actually hadn’t known and I wonder if you did, talking about her being one of these advisers to Cheney. That's true. But before that, she was dispatched to NATO headquarters to lobby the native member states to provide logistical and operational support to the United States ahead of the invasion of Iraq. And this was in January of 2003. She was the one who was picked, among everybody in the Bush administration, she was the one who carried out the plans that were set forth by Paul Wolfowitz, who is – if you had to think of anyone who was like the ultimate neocon ideologue, who was the neocon’s brain, to the extent that they operate with a brain – that was Paul Wolfowitz. She was allocated by him to go and make this appeal to the other NATO countries to provide complementary support to the upcoming Iraq invasion. So, she played a crucial role in the actual formulation of the logistics that went into launching the invasion of Iraq – she didn't just support it. She was involved in effectuating it.
G. Greenwald: No, she was critical of it. I mean, to do it, as was Anthony Blinken, by the way, as well. This is what I think is so important to understand. What has happened here is – if you look at all the policy, United States establishment, bipartisan policy over the last 20 years – you have these enormous systemic failures. The Iraq war is representative of just the broader wild excesses of the War on Terror – enormous amounts of money disappearing, all kinds of moral lines crossed; the war in Afghanistan, 20 years we were there, we walked out the very next day, the Taliban walked right back into power and accomplished nothing. Huge numbers of lives were lost. The entire thing was just a gigantic debacle from start to finish.
And then, on the foreign policy front, obviously the most important event was the 2008 financial collapse, which was then managed. The aftermath was first by the Bush administration – by George Bush's then secretary of Treasury, who had come right from Goldman Sachs, which was Hank Paulson. Then, Obama comes in and carries out exactly the same policies as he did with Bush's War on Terror that he had vowed to uproot – Tim Geithner and that old crowd, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, all of those same people from Goldman Sachs in those same economic circles that saved the Wall Street tycoons who had caused the financial crisis at the expense of everybody else. So you have, you know, at the same time that that's happening, elite media institutions are collapsing. So, everything is unraveling in terms of American elite circles, people are distrusting in the most fundamental ways – the bipartisan consensus, the people who are running our country independent of the results of elections. And then, that has been the value of Donald Trump more than anything: they got to say, look, however much you dislike us, this is something, an evil we have never previously seen. This is essentially a Hitler-like figure, and we're going to unite to protect you from this actual evil threat that the likes of which we've never seen. Even though Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war, to say nothing of not doing things like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and torture and the financial collapse of 2008.
And what this ended up doing is absolving all of these people of all of the crimes that they committed together and, as a result, they all are continuously in power. They're in power to this very day. The same group of people that gave you the Iraq war, based on lies; that gave you the abuses of the War on Terror; that gave you the 2008 financial crisis, they're telling you that they love each other. They're united, even though they were calling each other all kinds of names. They never believed them all along. They're part of that same club. As George Carlin said, it's a big club and you're not in it. And these people are. And they continue to exercise hegemonic rule over our politics with no accountability.
Donald Trump was the most important thing that enabled them to do that. It's what ushered in again these neocons who had been somewhat discredited. The reason why Bill Kristol and David Frum are at The Atlantic and MSNBC and are being cheered by liberals. Nobody even thinks twice about the fact that the war in Ukraine is the byproduct of a Democratic senator, Joe Biden, who is the single most important Democratic senator supporting the war in Iraq when he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Victoria Nuland, who just constantly appears among them all. It's this rotted establishment that everybody hates, and yet they were able to isolate Donald Trump and create this fairy tale that he was essentially the combination, the kind of unholy lovechild of Satan and Adolf Hitler. So that all you had to do is denounce Donald Trump and then immediately prove that you were on the good side of history and all of these people were able to rejuvenate their reputations and hold hands and remain in power and run the country, as they've been doing for the last 20 years, was such immense corruption and such immense failure.
M. Tracey: Let me give you another layer of that. Okay? So, at this Munich Security Conference, they started giving out as one of their most valued awards –they have these awards that they give out to accomplish, like aspiring young professionals who want to be national security operatives and write policy papers about which country's government to overthrow next. And so, this big, new, heralded award that they bestow yearly now, just recently, is the “John McCain Award.” Okay. So that's on behalf of the entire Western security establishment. They believe that John McCain, the personage of John McCain, rest in peace, best represents the ideological or temperamental or whatever sensibility that they want to transmit by way of this annually bestowed award.
And let's just think about what that actually indicates, right? Because hopefully there are at least some people viewing this who are old enough to remember when John McCain was actually in a position to be advocating foreign policy prescriptions, in 2008 – and we even talked about this on the show. I think what are the main things that the campaign running against McCain emphasized was that he was totally nuts in terms of just the seismic, world-altering hawkishness that he embodied. Right? And so, John McCain was an outlier to some degree, even, you know, during the Iraq war, before that, I mean, wants to bomb Iran – I think, you know, at one point when Mother Jones was still in somewhat opposition to this tendency, they tallied up all the countries that John McCain had suggested bombing over the course of his career. And it was like in the dozens […]
G. Greenwald: He wanted to remove Assad from Syria. He was behind Obama's regime and really Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice's and Samantha Power's regime change war in Libya. Then he got Lindsey Graham behind him and eventually Marco Rubio and Joe Lieberman. I mean, these were the people who essentially – their entire careers were about nothing other than demanding every single conceivable war that benefited nobody other than a tiny sliver of American leads that impoverished the country, made it debt-ridden and you're right, he is the symbol of aspirational values. The thing to which American and Western leaders are supposed to aspire. And he really stands for nothing other than all of these wars that the United States has fought in the name of changing governments around the world that have immiserated the American population.
M. Tracey: Yeah. And even going back to, you know, earlier in his career, you know, McCain was a die-hard advocate of all of Reagan's incursions and, you know, proxy wars […]
G. Greenwald: in Nicaragua, El Salvador and so forth.
M. Tracey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, think about this, okay? Remember during the Iraq war, when McCain was beating the war drums, even more bullishly than Bush at times, and Rumsfeld, to circle back, criticized old Europe, what he called old Europe, meaning Germany and France. Both France and Germany now have congealed into this same sort of fanatical war fever consensus in 2023, such that they're perfectly aligned now with the essence of what John McCain stood for. So, think about how bizarre that is to contemplate in terms of the scope and breadth of this new pro-war consensus that you could hardly have imagined. Not too long ago, I mean, Germany and France had been on the spectrum of the Western security establishment, where they would usually try to be at least nominally more conciliatory, or they'd be trying to push back somewhat on the more maximalist designs of like the U.S. or the U.K. or Poland or whatnot. Now, it's all the same blob of just total uninhibited aggression and they don't feel any discomfort at all with having, though, their current values, their current ideological fervor, represented in the personage of John McCain.
G. Greenwald: No, I'm sure the head of the German Green Party or like the prime minister of Finland, their dream is to win the John McCain award. And, you know, the politics are very similar. We interviewed Sarah Wagenknecht, the head of the actual left-wing party in Germany called Die Linke, the left. And it's a very similar dynamic in France, in Germany, obviously here, in the United States, where the only opposition to these kinds of globalist or NATO-based wars come from the populist right and the populist left. In Germany, you have figures like her working in a coalition now with the Alternative for Deutschland, the party that used to be deemed kind of white supremacist, neo-Nazi group because they opposed the war. I found it super interesting.
Michael, I'm interested to hear what you thought about that. The new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, was widely deemed to be this new Mussolini figure. I remember just by virtue of mentioning her victory on Twitter, and I kind of did it in a somewhat mocking way about identity politics, by saying, Oh, she's become the first ever […]
M. Tracey: Well, you would never do that.
G. Greenwald: No, I would never do that. I just don't know what happened to me on this particular day when I just started to trifle with something as important as identity politics. And I said something like, “Oh, the first ever female PM, she's broken the glass ceiling,” and they all, so easily provoked, started saying that I'm celebrating fascism and Nazism and she's the heir to Mussolini. All of that has disappeared. She's now in very good standing in Western security circles. I believe she's going to meet with Joe Biden soon. That narrative completely disappeared. You may have noticed, simply by virtue of her steadfast support for the war in Ukraine. So just like in the United States, although there's really no populous left to speak of in the United States where this comes from but you have to go to the populist right to hear from Trump and Matt Gaetz and, you know, Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene, opposition to the war. The same is true in Europe. But the entire center-left and center-right establishment of Europe, as you say, including in the countries that once kind of harbored contempt for neocons, like in France and Germany – where I remember one time I was in a security panel in Paris and I was on the panel with a French intelligence official who spoke with complete contempt in that very French way about, not the immorality, but just the stupidity of the war in Iraq and of neocons and how they sold fairy tales to the entire world.
I think part of it is the Internet. We're all now feeding on the same propaganda. I also think that the United States is so culturally dominant that this narrative about Russia ended up infiltrating so many of these normal liberals in Europe that these governments were kind of forced to adopt this mode of aggression. And it's only populist politics that's trying to push back against some of this stuff and say this is kind of an insanity, this unified belief in not only nobility, but the strategic wisdom of these endless wars against, you know, Russia and whatever the new enemy of the day is. I saw that there was a panel apparently talking about removing the Iranian regime, which if the people of Iran want to do was fine, but they had the son of the Shah of Iran who was on the panel, somebody who hasn't been to Iran since he was eight years old when his father was forced to flee by the revolution.
You know, that was like the classic vintage case of how the United States got blowback by overthrowing the government of Iran, replacing him with a brutal dictator in the Shah who was pro-Western and, of course, when the revolution happened, there were all kinds of anti-Americanism because of that. Now they're talking again about reinstalling Shah's son, somebody who hasn't even been to Iran in decades. You know, it's amazing that Europe has gone insane and is fully on board with this neoconservative consensus that dominates the establishment wings of both parties in the United States.
M. Tracey: Well, I mean, just to clarify, it wasn't simply that this Munich Security Conference organization had the son of the Shah there for a panel. They invited him as the de facto representation for the Iranian state, because for the first time, the conference explicitly disinvited, effectively barred, actual representatives of the existing Iranian government, as well as the Russian government, also for the first time. You don't need to be proficient in rocket science to comprehend that that was a de facto endorsement by this Western security order of regime change in both those countries, at least as an aspiration.
And it was stunning that this was actually being taken as a serious proposal.. He did this press tour where he describes this. He went around and personally lobbied all the countries’ delegations or whatever delegation said for external pressure to be applied on Iran specifically for the purpose of engineering regime change. And he plays coy about whether it's going to be him individually who takes over but, of course, that's the obvious, inescapable conclusion.
Now, quickly on the Green Party of Germany, right? Okay. So, here's an anecdote. I mean, the Green Party of Germany is like almost the most emblematic example, maybe even more so than the Democratic Party in the U.S., of this total narrative shift to the point where you can't even figure out what principles it's tethered to anymore.
G. Greenwald: They're total fanatics.
M. Tracey: […] because the foreign minister within the coalition government headed by Scholz, and in Germany is this woman, Annalena Baerbock – I think that's how you pronounce it – who is the most ardent and has been since the war started, badgering Scholz to be more aggressive in deploying weapons, totally abolishing the entire foreign policy philosophy that Germany had been maintaining since World War II. So that's out the window, as we know.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, because it has generally been kind of a bad thing when Germany and Russia end up in antagonistic positions regarding wars.
M. Tracey: No big deal, all right?
So, there was a panel that they posted for this Russian opposition faction that I guess they're trying to cultivate and present as the rightful steward to the Russian state because they're essentially endorsing regime change in Russia as an aspiration. So, it's headed by Garry Kasparov, of course, people may know the chess grandmaster – who's also a full-time anti-Putin activist and ran for president of Russia in 2008 – although it's sort of weird what exactly happened there, I'm not sure.
But on this panel, the point of this panel, it was with a couple of other people, including like the former richest man in Russia who was imprisoned by Putin, whom they were really casting as this, you know, saintly sort of reformer, even though he was like one of the oligarchs by a reputation for years and like had a private security force that would do that. I mean, it's a whole backstory. Right? But they were like trying to put this, you know, a noble sheen on him. But the point is that they were more or less in this panel calling for the only resolution to the conflict in Ukraine being ultimate, that's viable, being the removal of the current Russian government and the replacement with an entirely new system so that essentially the dissolution of the Russian Federation. And this guy stood up to ask the question, I didn't know who was at the time, but he said, “How can we convince our leaders to stop beating around the bush, to just come out and say and be loud and proud and demand, unfortunately, that we as a collective Western alliance are dead set up on imposing regime change in force? And it's a good thing and we should be confident in our advocacy of that. And I don't understand the reluctance on the part of some and I mean they know who this was. So I talked to him afterward, not his name. It turns out it's one of the most senior figures in the Green Party of Germany. He's not in office now. He was a senior official named Ralph Fuchs. You know, he was one of the most prominent figures associated with the party. And then he ran for a long time, like a kind of think tank, that's the central think tank tied to the party. So, like something like the Heritage Foundation with the Republican Party, but even more formalized. And yeah he was saying that Garry Kasparov and the people on that panel, as radical as Kasparov is in their desires for what ought to happen to Putin. This guy wanted him to be even more belligerently express and blunt and in-your-face. So, I mean, that's the Green Party […].
G. Greenwald: Yeah. You know, and we're just a little overtime, normally I wouldn't care but I have to be on Tucker Carlson's show in a few minutes, to talk about Ukraine. But I just wanted to underscore that because one of the things that Sarah Wagenknecht said to me is that I, you know, it's a sort of thing that you think about when you live in a certain country but don't if you don't. She said, obviously, that Russia has very deep trauma over any signs of aggression emanating from Germany – because of those two kinds of very nasty things that happened in the 20th century with those two World Wars, including the second one of which there's real trauma – If you're sitting in Moscow and you hear about German tanks rolling up to your border – imagine hearing a member, the senior member of one of the parties that compose the German government calling for regime change in Russia, Germany calling for a war of regime change in Russia. This is madness.
Now, just to conclude, Mike, I wanted to talk a little bit about – we're not going to have time but we'll follow up on this next week – the backdrop to all of this is the increasing levels of repression of free speech that are accompanying all of this. I've been doing a lot of reporting and we're going to devote a show next week to the fact that Brazil is about to – they're poised to become – the first country in the democratic world to implement the kinds of laws that exist in places like Saudi Arabia and Singapore and the United Arab Emirates that ban fake news that allowed the government to forcibly remove postings up online that they deem to be false and punish those who spread it, but will obviously immediately turn into the ability to prosecute dissidents on the grounds that they're spreading fake news. They're inviting other Brazilian leaders in journalism. Of course, the journalists are leading this effort. Europe is looking for laws like this as well. We know that they already made it illegal to platform Russian media outlets. And there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today that ties into that so well that 50% of American colleges now have a system that allows and encourages students to anonymously report one another to the faculty.
There you see it on the screen. The headline was “Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech”. They basically have a system that allows a student if they see – and this was provoked because one student saw another reading “Mein Kampf”, something that you kind of are supposed to do if you're studying history or just an interested person in the world – and reported that person for reading the wrong book. And a lot of these systems started to enable students to report other students that they didn't have their mask covered with their nose and just […]
M. Tracey: I was just going to bring that up.
G. Greenwald: Yeah. And that's where a lot of them began. But this whole climate is consuming the West, where not only are these insane policies proliferating, but the ability to dissent over them is becoming increasingly repressed, not through social stigma, but through formalized means of criminalizing and outlawing all sorts of dissent. You see it in academia, you see it in European institutions, and now you're going to see it in Brazilian law, this law that Brazil is about to pass under Lula's new government. They're looking at it as kind of the test case or the model of how the West and Western governments can seize the power to basically criminalize not just fake news itself, but those who spread it – deeply disturbing as these policies become even more fanatical.
Michael, we do need to run. I have a cable show to appear on. It's not as big as the show I'm currently on. It's a show, though, that I do try and go on when I'm asked because I try and help the host out as he develops his own audience – Tucker Carlson – I should be on in about 10 minutes talking about Ukraine, but thanks so much for […].
M. Tracey: Can I have like 30 seconds?
G. Greenwald: Go ahead. Go ahead.
M. Tracey: Yeah. First of all, I'm a little surprised that Lula is instituting this measure because – I don't understand the subtleties as well as you but I would have thought that he would be a bit more skeptical of, like, the novelistic power of the state to regulate speech – didn't he criticized the Twitter banning Trump and so forth? It’s very instructive because I hadn't fully appreciated how granularly they engage in online censorship. If you pull up Twitter and you see you look at the interaction that you had or a president of the United States with somebody who's seen as like unacceptably pro-Russia, they actually go through and they censored individual tweets or even the full accounts and it pops up with a notification censored at the behest of the German government or something to that effect.
G. Greenwald: The censorship regime that has taken hold in Brazil makes the U.S. and the EU look like bastions of liberty. We're going to do an entire show on it next week because this law is genuinely threatening not just to free speech in Brazil but to the entire democratic world.
Michael, we got to go. I think if you heard that Skype call, that was Tucker's producers neurotically calling. Thanks so much, Michael, for taking the time. Great job reporting this week from Munich. We will talk.
I do think it's important when critiquing any institution, including the corporate media, not to romanticize the past. 
