Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
From Waco to Today, Retracing the 30-Year Domestic War on Civil Liberties That Launched Gore Vidal's Political Transformation
Video Transcript
October 09, 2023
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Good evening. It's Friday, October 6. 

Tonight: One of the primary topics we cover on System Update is the abuse of the U.S. Security State and its vast powers – the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS – for domestic political purposes. When the U.S.. Security State was created in the aftermath of World War Two, the central taboo was that it would never turn its powers inward. It was permitted to operate in total secrecy and use often lawless methods because it was intended to focus only on foreign enemies and to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign adversaries but was never to be weaponized in American politics or turned against the American people. 

There is now abundant evidence that leaves no doubt that this taboo simply no longer exists. Whistleblowers within these agencies who risked their liberty over the last 25 years to reveal the agency's secrets did so because they said they were so offended and horrified that the weapons of the security agencies were now being regularly turned on the domestic population that the CIA directly and aggressively interfered in and manipulated. Both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections are beyond dispute. Both the Russiagate collusion conspiracy theory of 2016 and the 2020 lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation came directly from the bowels of the CIA and was fed to The New York Times and the Washington Post. Just last month, an appellate court ruled that the FBI and other agencies within the Biden administration committed one of the most egregious and systemic violations of the First Amendment in decades, if not ever, by systematically pressuring Big Tech platforms to censor the political speech of Americans that they dislike. That's just a small sample. The story shows grave and constant domestic repression by these intelligence agencies. 

It may sometimes seem that this is a fairly new development. After all, most people's adult political lives now are no longer shaped by the Cold War, but by the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror in which the CIA Homeland Security and FBI largely came to focus not on the domestic population, but on foreign terrorist organizations. As a result, most of our controversies over the last 25 years involving the U.S. Security State before the Trump age were typically about programs justified in the name of fighting foreign enemies rather than domestic ones. Controversies over torture programs, CIA black sites, due process-free zones at Bagram and Guantanamo, mass warrantless spying, drones and regime change wars were all typically justified by the need to stop foreign threats. 

This was always deceit – pure propaganda. Most of the key War on Terror controversies ended up having significant implications for the domestic civil liberties of American citizens, if not being principally about them. Radical programs like the Patriot Act and the NSA's warrantless surveillance program had a far greater impact in eroding the core of the civil liberties of American citizens on American soil than they did foreign terrorist groups. But the framework for how we debated and understood those controversies and the justification offered by the U.S. government for them were always focused on foreign threats rather than domestic ones. 

The 20-year War on Terror, with its ostensible focus on foreign threats, has thus created the misleading perception that the U.S. Security State's domestic focus and interference in our domestic politics is a somewhat new development. For so many reasons, though, that is simply false. The decade prior to the 9/11 attacks in the War on Terror and the Clinton years of the 1990s were driven at least as much by a civil liberties assault on the domestic political rights of Americans as was true of the Trump era. But for al-Qaida and ISIS and the Russians, we were told back then that the greatest threat we faced was not foreign threats, but domestic ones, specifically anti-government extremism on our own soil that questions the legitimacy of the federal government. Over and over, the multiple sprawling arms of the U.S. Security State in the 1990s were used to target, surveil and repress what the U.S. government considered anti-government, anti-establishment extremism, just as is true of today – you can draw a straight line from those controversy in the 1990s to the ones today. 

For that reason, it's really impossible to understand the multiple ways that the U.S. government today is attacking core liberties at home without understanding the foundation that was laid for all of this in the 1990s. The alleged threat posed by so-called domestic anti-government extremists was aggressively exploited by the Clinton administration to demand a wide array of new and previously unthinkable powers designed to control police and suppress domestic dissent, including things like backdoor access to all Internet sites and encryption protections, and even chips on phones that would trace everything we say and did. All of this became quite visible with two violent attacks by U.S. federal law enforcement agencies in that decade: One against a family said to be white separatists in Idaho, in which the FBI conducted an 11-day siege at Ruby Ridge and then killed Randy Weaver's wife, son and dog, and then, the notorious warlike assault against the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, under Janet Reno's Justice Department. A vicious and violent government domestic assault led to 76 members of that group, including 28 children, dead. 

There is no way to understand the Senate's grave and growing threat to the core of civil liberties and political dissent posed by the U.S. Security State without understanding the historical context in which this all emerged in the 1990s. It is the political transformation of Gore Vidal, one of the most celebrated liberal literary, cultural and political figures of the 20th century, who became an outspoken opponent of the U.S. Security State in the 1990s, and the liberal attempt to weaponize it against political enemies, that provides the perfect window to understand this crucial history. 

We're aware that, especially in today's Internet culture of immediate gratification, it's sometimes difficult to get people to focus on anything other than the fleeting news events of the last 12 hours. But we have seen repeatedly that our audience wants more than that, and some of our most watched shows have been the ones where we took the time to put events of today into their crucial historical and cultural context. So, regarding the current exploitation of the power of the U.S. Security State to limit and punish domestic dissent, a frequent topic of our program. putting it into its key historical context is what we're going to do tonight, and we think you will find it compelling. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
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We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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