Can We Talk About Israel? With Glenn Greenwald

25:21We did Iwo Jima. We can do this. Iwo Jima, there was something like 7 ,000 Marines died, right? 20 ,000 were killed. I guess my question about that specific statement he made is either he's just a bloodthirsty lunatic who's out there braying for more blood to be spilled, or he's priming the pump. He's working for the administration to prime the public opinion pump that, yeah, we're going to do a boots-on-the-ground mission, and yeah, there's going to be American casualties. But hey, we did Iwo Jima, right? We fought in the Pacific Rim. This is going to be that. Am I overthinking that, do you think?

26:02No, but that gets back to what we were talking about before with the boomer generation that was raised on World War II, which is like the ultimate war success. Yeah, good versus evil. Unconditional surrender. Yeah. Liberated the camps, et cetera. A lot more complexity to that, but that's the story. Victor has write the history, and that's what we've all kind of trained on, and there's a big element of truth to it as well. But that was the aberrational war, and so that's what Lindsey Graham's trying to invoke, and they always invoke that. One of the very first articles I wrote when I first started doing journalism back in 2005, was early 2006, was I started realizing how, and this was, again, at the height of the Iraq War, the war on terror, they were trying to get the Americans to go to Turan, that everything is always Nazism.

26:46Everything is always World War II. Everything is always 1937. If you support a new war, you're Churchill, and if you don't, you're Chamberlain. It is, though there's only one historical example to learn about, and we see the world in that way. It's a very deliberate neoconservative strategy that Lindsey Graham intentionally otherwise is invoking. I have seen a lot of people, including people who support the war, who are very hardcore supporters of Trump and whatever he does, including this war, start to express serious concern that Lindsey Graham is probably the worst single person that you could have out there.

27:14Truly the worst. Justifications for the war because he's such I don't really like to use psychological terms to to diagnose people in public life. But having seen him enough for many years, he is a sociopath. He might even be a psychopath. Yeah, like he take a sociopath like the one who just doesn't connect to the suffering of others or have any empathy for them. Psychopath is somebody who actually takes pleasure in the blood being shed. And I think he does that. I think there's something deeply wrong with his internal life, something missing that he uses and fills that with watching people die with some kind of assertion of what he considers strength to send other people to war.

27:51He so blatantly revels in it. Even if you want to be a war advocate, you're supposed to pretend like war is hell. It's terrible. It's a tragedy. It's the last resort. He loves it. It's like his only source of life and vibrancy is when he gets to talk about people dying. And it's incredibly disturbing to watch. Especially because, and again, I hate to make these sort of ad hominem personal attacks, but he's single and childless. It's easy for him to say, you and I are both fathers, right? When you have children, it is a different, your mindset immediately changes on this sort of thing, right? On everything.

28:31You can be as selfish as you want when you're childless. And not every childless person is a capable thing about the people themselves, self, but when you have kids, you instinctively start thinking about not just yourself, but more so like them and what the world is going to be like for them. Right. I also think in addition to the childlessness of it, I think age is an incredibly important factor. Once men start getting to be 80, which is Netanyahu approaching it, Trump basically there, they stop thinking about the world as much as they start thinking about how they're going to be remembered.

29:05Their legacy. They want to make their mark. Yeah. Their mark on history, their legacy. and that can be very alarming. Now, that's a good point. And I've always thought that, you know, a lot of Trump's, you know, sort of freelancing overseas can really just come back to that. He sees that, you know, to the extent that he's going to have a domestic legacy of any standing, it's going to be fairly minimal, right? He hasn't passed a whole lot of laws. A bunch of his policies will just immediately be, you know, swept under the rug when he's gone. But if he can be a great man of history overseas, that's where he, you know, that's where he has a chance to have that legacy.

29:39A couple others, just on the point of the neocons, because I really just can't get over some of these guys. Brett Stevens from the New York Times. I actually like this guy, some of the stuff he writes, but he wrote a piece last week titled, For Once We Fight With An Equal Ally. He's basically making the argument that Israel, unlike our other allies, I guess, finally pulling their weight. Trump was courageous to join this war, he writes. He argues that Trump has been... It didn't come out of nowhere. where Trump has been wanting to bomb Iran since the 80s, as though that's supposed to make this righteous.

30:12I'm not exactly sure what his point there is. But again, Bret Stephens, another one of these guys, you know, supported the war in Iraq, still supports his decision to support the war in Iraq. Also, John Bolton, we had John Bolton on the show the other day. John Bolton literally wrote a piece saying he has dreamed his entire life of bombing Iran. It finally happened. And he's not happy about it because, you know, he says it's because Trump's an idiot and he's not doing it the right way. But is it really that or is it just because Bolton's on the outside looking in when it's finally happening? Right.

30:44Yeah. Or it could be that he doesn't have confidence that Trump is really going to follow through and like really destroy the entire country and implant the puppet regime, as John Bolton has always wanted. But there are a lot of things about there. All those people you mentioned are people who have spent decades cheering for every war, but never themselves going to fight in any of those wars, never sending their kids or their family members to fight in those wars. That is also a huge factor. You talk to anyone who has served in combat, and even if they're for a war, which sometimes they are, they still understand the horrors of it in a way that you can't if you've ever risked your own life.

31:16And I do think there's something really, you know, European monarchs, if they wanted to start a war, you know, throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th century, they were obligated to put themselves and their kids on the front line. And they did, because the idea was, if you really think a war is just, you should be willing to risk your own life and not other people's. And that was one of the things that you called out with the Brett Stevens column is that Trump had the courage to do this. It does not take any courage to send other people to fight a war. It takes courage to fight in the war, to go to the war and put yourself at risk in your life, in physical danger.

31:49It doesn't take any courage to send other people. In fact, it can be cowardly to do as a way of compensating for feelings of insecurity about your own power, which I think Donald Trump has from having avoided Vietnam and a whole variety of other factors as well. And that's true of a lot of these people. And I've been writing about this for a long time. No, that's a very good point. I did want to ask you about, there was a report in the New York Times yesterday. The Mossad had a plan to spur rebellion inside Iran after the first wave of strikes. Obviously, that did not materialize here. So Max Blumenthal was positing on Twitter the other day, or I guess last night, that maybe Mossad was actually behind this January uprising that we saw in Iran, which was violently put down.

32:32Nobody really knows how many people were killed. The number out there goes as high as 30 ,000, I've heard. Make it 80 ,000. Yeah, 80 ,000. Okay, so, and again, it's very obvious it's very hard to get information out of Iran. 112. Do you believe it, or has any of your reporting suggested that the Israeli intelligence unit may have actually fomented that uprising in order to pull Trump in? That is out in the open. There's no reason. I don't need to investigate that in order to know that the Israelis have openly talked about the fact that they had Mossad on the ground, that there have been CIA on the ground.

33:08Of course, it has been their job to finance and organize an opposition, an armed opposition to Iran. They drew it in so many ways through threats, through blackmail, through people who just want power and think that they can position themselves into being favored by the Israelis and Americans if they lead the rebellion. There's no question. And that article talks about the fact that Netanyahu was convinced that it would be easier to overthrow the government because he thought that the Mossad had laid the plans better for a more natural uprising. And, you know, I just want to quickly add, like, it's incredible how propagandized we are.

33:46You know, there was this thing going around last week about this 19 year old wrestler who was executed supposedly because he was a protester. and the reality is that the Iranian state accused him and obviously with not very good due process, to put that mildly, convicted him of having murdered two police officers with a machete and there was videotapes suggesting that he might have done it. I don't know if he did it. I have no idea if he's guilty, but you cannot report on this and not include the fact that the Iranian state didn't say they're executing him because he participated in protests. They're saying that he killed two police officers.

34:20We have the death penalty for killing police officers as well in the United States. And imagine if we had some foreign power like China or Russia or whomever arming and funding a domestic insurgency to overthrow our government. And they were out on the streets killing police officers that were heavily well armed. Do you think that the armed agents of the state might react with violence against them? Not saying that the Iranians didn't kill any of the protesters. I'm sure they did. But there's a lot more complexity that you're not allowed to say or else you're accused of being on the other side or whatever.

34:49You're just trying to make sure that people understand the truth and not see propaganda. Which is so hard in this information environment, which is really what I want to get into with you now. I mean, you know, I was telling you before you came on, I've always admired your work because I, you know, you are an actual free speech absolutist. I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm sure you would agree to that. And you've spent your professional life advocating for free speech from, you know, Edward Snowden and the WikiLeaks era to the what we were just talking about, the sort of peak woke era when it sort of went the other way with the left.

35:23Now, of course, criticism of Israel for its stifling of speech, both within its borders, but also overseas. So these are the two things I want to talk to you about briefly. I want to ask you about what's happening in Australia, which is, you know, they so they expanded their hate speech laws there after October 7th. So a couple of years ago now, three years ago now. Now they're trying to expand them again after the horrific Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack in December. Hold the thought on Australia, because I also want to ask you about Ron DeSantis, who went to Israel in 2023 to sign a hate speech law applicable to people in Florida, to his constituents in Florida.

36:01Has that ever happened, to your knowledge? Has an American politician ever gone overseas to sign legislation that applies to their constituents back home? No. I mean, they might have. I don't know about it, but I also don't know about it happening in any other country either. I can't imagine it happening in any other country. Especially because the hate speech laws that he signed were about Israel. They were favored favoring Israel. They were demanded by Israel. They were restricting the the rights and and liberties of the people he governs in the United States and Florida who elected him. And he went to Israel to sign it in front of the Israeli government.

36:35I'd say I mean, I like inconceivable. And I should also add that this. Good. Good. No, no, no. Well, I was just going to ask you if you could sort of explain what's happening in Australia, because you are more read in on these hate speech laws and what they're doing down there than I think I am. So we talk a lot about AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. And there's been a lot of censorship since Trump was inaugurated at the hand of the administration regarding Israel. And as it applies to Americans, thankfully, we have the First Amendment that makes it difficult to do the more blunt and kind of direct censorship.

37:08But they don't have that in Australia. Well, Europe. Right. Right. The UK, Europe, anywhere, Canada. And all of those countries have a pro-Israel lobby as well. It's not just the United States. They may be stronger here because Israel needs the United States more, but they have a very strong pro-Israel lobby in each of those countries. We saw with the candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn when he was critical of Israel. They destroyed him with the anti-Semitism accusations that were completely fabricated. All of these countries have that, and Australia has it. And one of the things that happened after October 7th was they expanded their hate speech laws to constrain the ability to criticize Israel, to defend the Palestinian cause by just making it illegal to express certain views of Israel or to have certain political slogans.

37:50And then after Bande Beach, the Israelis demanded more. They said, you're not doing enough. And so they have now, as part of their criminal law, made it prohibited to utter the phrase from the river to the sea. Obviously, this is a political slogan that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But basically, it means that the Israeli state as it exists is illegitimate, obviously totally valid political opinions to have, even if you hate them and disagree with them. And so several young women protesting that law and in defense of free speech committed civil disobedience by walking on the street with a shirt that said from the river to the sea.

38:27That was it. And they sent the police and they got arrested. I mean, really arrested, you know, like not pretend arrest or fake arrest because it is now criminal in Australia to express these views about this foreign country on the other side of the world simply because they have a big, well-financed lobby in Australia that punishes politicians if they don't do it, just like we have in the United States. And that is the biggest threat to free speech in the West is obviously had been very critical of the effort to curb or suppress speech of right wing populism, dissent on covid, the 2020 election, a whole range of right wing speech that has been targeted.

39:02But especially after October 7th, it's been true for a long time, but especially after October 7th, by far the greatest erosion of free speech emanates from this desire to shield and protect Israel from activism and criticism. And as the unpopularity of Israel that we discussed earlier grows, the panic fuels the censorship crackdown even further. That is when censorship generally happens is when people fear that they're losing the political debate. And the only thing they have left to do is suppress the views that they don't like. As we saw in the early era of the global war on terror, of course, with the Patriot Act and all of the other ways in which that Republican administration tried to clamp down on dissent.

39:41It's just when you really put a fine point on it, it's like it's it's pretty amazing. Right. Israel is the only country that I can think of that can get other countries to pass hate speech laws in their favor. Is that fair? Yes. I and I think, you know, I know that it's a very touchy topic for a lot of people. People like to avoid it, as you said earlier. The first time this phenomenon was ever really dragged out into the daylight. And by the way, I think there's this perception that this is something that like only crazies on the Internet talk about, like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or weird.

40:17Like, you know, you can hear Richard Nixon saying this. There was an interview with Barry Goldwater, the standard bearer of the American conservative movement in the 60s in 1988, who said he was half Jewish, who said Israel runs our foreign policy. It was back in 1988. George H.W. Bush talked about this. This has been around for a long, long time. But the first people who really brought it out to the to the to the mainstream discourse were professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wald, who wrote The Israel Lobby, the book The Israel Lobby in 2007. It was actually an article first in 2006. I remember writing about it at the time.

40:49But if you go back and watch the way in which they were, they tried to completely destroy them. Thankfully, they had tenure. But I can't overstate the amount of character attacks on them as Jew haters and anti-Semites and bigots and all the rest. Because there is a significant portion of the population in these countries that are Jewish that prioritize Israel, that put their money where their priorities are, like a lot of groups do. But they have a lot of power. And it's been fused in the last two decades with this political evangelical Christianity where people who are evangelical, especially in the United States, have been convinced that to be Christian means that you have to support not Israelites in the biblical sense, but the modern nation state of Israel and their government's policies.

41:34And this has really strengthened the Israel lobby, even as compared to when Walton Mearsheimer wrote that book. That's another really good point that I hadn't even really thought of. And it's can you also just explain why we're talking about sort of the Israeli lobby in the U.S.? I heard you talk about this a little bit somewhere and I forget where now, but you were talking about the IHRA, which is the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Act, I believe. Stop me if I'm wrong. And it's sort of like it's international Holocaust Remembrance Act. Remember, yeah. And how the IHRA has this sort of like nexus with American academia and how, you know, there are now universities in the United States, including Columbia, uptown here in New York, that is using the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in terms of determining what does and does not constitute, I guess, protected speech on its campus.

42:22Can you can you speak to that at all? If you were to ask me, like, what is the biggest story of 2025 that didn't get the attention it deserves? I would say this. I would say it's this. I the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is one that was created in Israel and they started forcing and controlling and pressuring European states that have big hate speech codes in their criminal law to include in their criminal law that basically ban a whole variety of common ideas about Israel or Jewish people. For example, under this standard, you're not allowed to say that Israel as a country is a racist endeavor.

42:58Like you think Zionism necessarily imposes Jewish supremacy. You think that's racist or in some way bigoted. You're not allowed to say that Israel is a racist endeavor. That's anti-Semitic. You can say the United States founding is a racist endeavor. You can say it about Peru or Indonesia or Norway or who have Japan. You just can't say it about Israel. You can't say, you can't compare the actions of the Israeli government to what the Nazis did. You can compare American leaders to Nazis. You can say the American wars are like the Nazis or any other country. You just can't say it about Israel. You can't say that particular Jewish people prioritize Israel above their own country, even if they say things that make it clear that they do.

43:39This is also banned and off limits. You can't say that the Jews were the people who killed Jesus Christ, even though this has been taught in Christianity for centuries. a whole bunch of things that are not just declared wrong, but outlawed. And what the Trump administration did once it got into office was it began canceling the government funding that we give to our universities, not so that they can fund like gender studies programs, but so that they can fund the research that has made us the leaders and say like the Internet or medical research. That's where these research centers are. That's why we've always funded universities.

44:11Trump administration canceled all those that funding and said, the only way you'll get it back, one of the conditions is if you implement the IHRA speech codes on campuses, now at Harvard and Columbia and Brown and dozens of other leading institutions, these speech codes are in place, which means not that foreign students can't come and say it. It doesn't have anything to do with how they protest. It means American faculty members can be fired and American students can be expelled or otherwise punished if they express any of the views that are prescribed in that framework. Yeah. It sort of reminds me of another undercover story from last year, which is the FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, denying states and cities hurricane relief, you know, FEMA aid, if they boycotted Israeli companies.

44:57Now, they reversed that, I think, because the reporting came out, I believe, in The New York Times last August that, like, people were just like, that's not going to work exactly. But there was a brief period there where you could potentially have your house destroyed by a hurricane and not get your funding because your state or local government has some sort of Israeli boycott, right? Is that an accurate representation of something that actually happened in this country? Yeah. I mean, there were cities, including in Texas, that had hurricane aid packages. They were given by the federal government after hurricanes destroyed cities and towns in Texas that said, in order to be eligible for hurricane relief as a citizen of the United States, Texas, you have to come and sign a pledge that you do not support or participate in a boycott of Israel.

45:43You're allowed to boycott other American states, like people boycotted North Carolina and Indiana because of their bathroom bills or Georgia because of their Voting Rights Act. You can boycott any other country. You just can't boycott Israel. And you have to certify that you don't. That's also a condition for getting state contracts in 34 of our states. I actually profiled this woman in 2017. She was a speech pathologist. She worked for the Austin School District in Texas. and she specialized in a particular speech deficiency. She had worked with the school district as a contractor for 10 years.

46:13Everybody loved her. Perfect performance reviews. Texas passes this law that says, in order to work for the state, you have to sign this pledge that you don't boycott Israel. She did boycott Israel. She believed in a boycott of Israel until they eliminate the occupation of the West Bank, which a lot of people believe around the world is illegal. And she said, I can't sign this. I actually do support a boycott. She got fired. She got fired. Even though she was one of the very few speech pathologists capable of working with this problem, it's unbelievable how much our laws and politicians have prioritized Israel above the interest of Americans.

46:42That's really what it comes down to. And this is what I wanted to sort of end on is, is there a person, is there a candidate, is there a potential party that can be the standard bearer of this? Not to say that Israel is bad or they're not our allies anymore, but who can just say, look, as part of my administration, we are going to reassess our strategic relationship with our client state here. It is very clear that we have divergent interests in a lot of different things. It's okay to say that. There's nothing anti-Semitic about that. They're an important ally. We give them a ton of money every year.

47:18Do you think there's somebody out there who could who could make that argument or is making that argument in such a way that could potentially be a viable candidacy for president? I think you're seeing in the Democratic Party remarkably rapid and radical changes when it comes to how Democratic politicians talk about Israel. Democratic Party has always been pro-Israel. Joe Biden is who financed and armed the destruction of Gaza and has been, at his words, one of the most hardcore Zionists in Washington for decades. But the Democratic Party voting base has changed so dramatically, especially young people, but not only that you now see the most mainstream politicians saying, I won't take money from AIPAC.

47:59We don't want to send weapons and money to to Israel. That's happening in the Democratic Party already. I guarantee you in the Republican Party primary in twenty twenty eight. I don't know who it's going to be. Probably won't be Dave Vance because of how much he's had to do and defend for Trump. It's going to be a major candidate that's going to take off in some way that's going to generate a lot of youth energy, a lot of popular support who runs on this. What had been Donald Trump's message of America first. We have to stop involving ourselves in foreign wars, stop giving all this money to Israel and other countries.

48:28That is going to be a that is already a very strong undercurrent in right wing politics and Republican politics. And it's just waiting for the leader to come and grab that. They can't do it now because it's too antithetical to what Trump is doing. They don't want to make themselves an enemy of the Trump administration like Thomas Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene did or Tucker Carlson. You see what's happening to them. But there's definitely once Trump is out of the scene or going out of the scene, you're definitely going to see a Republican politician and a Democrat one grab onto that issue. Well, that's so I think that I think that you're absolutely right.

48:59I think it's going to be Tucker. I think he's the obvious, assuming he hasn't been arrested before then. But I the question I guess I have is, is could it actually be a Democrat? Could the Democrats, could a Democrat successfully, now that MAGA has been completely captured by the neocons, is there a Democrat who could actually take the America first argument from the left as an actual platform? Saying, MAGA was actually right, Trump was actually right about these couple of things, right? Keeping us out of foreign entanglements. And we're going to prosecute that from a position, we're going to take that from the left versus the right.

49:38um yes you know i was for a long time in in the first decade or so of my my journalism career associated with the left in terms of my foreign policy critique and when trump came onto the scene i immediately recognized in what he was saying a lot of things that the most influential left-wing thinkers in foreign policy had been saying for a long time in many ways he sounded like noam chomsky not saying that he had the same impulses, but the policies were very much the same, including like, why are we in NATO still? Why are we involved in all these foreign wars? Why aren't we focusing on the disintegrating communities in our own populations?

50:13It's a very natural Democratic Party message, but it's a populist message. And the problem is, is that the main change that Bill Clinton brought to the Democratic Party was he corporatized the party and cleansed it of its populism. Like the least populist politician in our lifetime is Barack Obama. He's a supreme institutionalist and elitist and a status quo adherent. Triangulator. No more populism. Total triangulator. Loves Wall Street. Loves Silicon Valley. Loves the Pentagon. You see, I... Populism was cleansed out of the Democratic Party, and so Trump saw the appeal of that. A lot of right-wing parties are seeing around the Democratic world, and he seized on it.

50:51It's just sitting there waiting for the Democratic Party to take back. The problem is that they have a donor base that's filled now with corporate donors APEC type people, people on Wall Street. This is who they align themselves with and they need to extricate themselves from those power factions in order to be able to really credibly present that message. But you see guys like Graham Planter in Maine who is completely messy and dirty and has all these things in his past that should make him unqualified. And I think he's going to easily win in Maine because that's what people are craving much more so than these Harvard and McKinsey types like Pete Buttigieg who everything is inauthentic about.

51:30Well, to your point, I don't know if you saw it because it happened just before we came on, but Gavin Newsom, who actually, I'm not a Gavin Newsom fan, but I think he would be a terrible candidate, and I pray the Democrats don't elect him. However, he was one of the few who came out after this war started. He called Israel an apartheid state straight up. Now, however, he's walking that back, which goes to your point that it is very difficult to run as an establishment Democrat and upset AIPAC or the Israel lobby, right? Yeah, I saw a video from him this morning. I think maybe the same one you're referencing where he was in an interview.

52:04And they asked him at Israel. And the first thing you said is, I love Israel. I love Israel. I just don't love the government. I revere Israel. Yeah, but I don't agree with the Netanyahu government because they're too right-wing. That's not going to fly anymore. Do you consider yourself a Zionist? Do I consider myself a Zionist? I believe I revere the state of Israel. I'm proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu's leadership. I know he thinks he's making these really clever concessions, but the Democratic Party voting base doesn't hate Netanyahu or doesn't hate Israel because it's right wing.

52:38They hate the whole project. They see the true face of the project. And that is going to come off not just as too pro-Israel, but even worse, just very opportunistic and insincere. I just don't think it's going to be enough anymore. So I was hoping that AOC was going to be the person to sort of thread this needle. She went to Munich, the Munich Security Conference, back whenever that was a month ago or so. Did not get very good reviews for her sort of like handling on, or her handle, I should say, on foreign policy. I believe you even wrote that she, quote, had serious difficulty speaking coherently on foreign policy.

53:15I mean, is it possible, you know, she's still young, she's still sort of getting her bearings on this stuff? Could she be the one? Or what did you see out of her in Munich that made you say no? She has no interest in foreign policy, no understanding of it, no concern about it. Every time she talks about it, it's embarrassing. And as a House member, that's actually, it's not ideal because you vote on wars, you vote on foreign policy. But as a House member, you can specialize in a few things. Yeah. As a journalist, there are things I can't speak very intelligently on. Like I read the New York Times and I read like independent media so I can I'm conversion in it.

53:51But I wouldn't go and enter like a health care debate about the finer points of health care because it's not my issue. I've not had a passion for it. I've not studied it. But you cannot be a national political figure and be that inept. And like the thing was, Munich, it wasn't like she was asked about, you know, like the opposition party in Uruguay or like government corruption in South Korea. Yeah. And she's like, look, she was asked the most basic questions about, you know, whether we should go to war with China if they invade and try to take Taiwan or what our goals and exit strategies were for Ukraine, like the most basic stuff that she just could not articulate.

54:27It was embarrassing and cringeworthy to watch. It was it was a disaster for her. The whole point of this was to show she had gravitas, like she had a competing vision of foreign policy that would be persuasive, put next to J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. And she just sounded like a seventh grader reading a book report, you know, on a book that she hadn't really understood. Yeah. Although I guess the only thing I would say to that, and I agree with you, is just like in the era of Donald Trump, does it even matter anymore? Like he doesn't he he will say and has said plenty of things that don't make any sense, that sound like it's just he's just talking out of his a**.

54:59But again, he is a specific person. He is able to get away with things that no other politician ever can or ever will be able to, right? Yeah, exactly. But also, I mean, yes, he's very misinformed about a lot of things, but he has a gut instinct for a lot of these things where he just has a consistent message. And AOC is too afraid, like Kamala was, to say anything on areas where she just isn't confident. And that's, I think, the big difference. No, that's very smart. All right, Glenn, I want to let you go, but I want to talk very briefly. You recently brought your reporting operation back to Substack.

55:34You were on the platform Rumble, I believe. You said that you left Rumble to come back to Substack just because it'll give you more chance, more time to pursue long-form investigations, which, of course, is your bread and butter. That's why everybody knows you. Has the Rumble audience – I'm just a little curious because I don't know much about Rumble. I know that it's you know, it sort of leans to the right sort of conspiratorial, I guess, in some ways. Did did did you learn anything from that experience on that platform and did it shape your journalism in any way? Well, it's always funny because I went to Rumble because I got to know and really admired the person who founded Rumble and still is the CEO, Chris Pawlowski, because his mission with Rumble was free speech.

56:20The only reason why it became associated with right-wing figures was because YouTube wasn't banning conventional liberals or even nice Democratic sporting leftists, especially with COVID and the 2020 election. They were banning conservatives, including mainstream ones. And so the market for, hey, we're a free speech platform. We won't ban you. Come say what you want, was on the right. There are a lot of leftists there now on Rumble. And I brought my own audience, which is one of the reasons why they gave me a contract to go there. So I had a lot of my own audience, but I also picked up a lot of people who were more on the right.

56:53And I always tried to find to break out of this like left, right, Republican, Democratic way of speaking, because it just obfuscates what people have in common so much more than than we really do. And being there, being aware that it was not just a right-wing audience but a MAGA audience helped me really kind of try and bridge those gaps. But also, you know, see what the differences are and how best to try and communicate to people in order to get them at least to open their minds and not change them. So, yeah, I enjoyed it there. I just didn't want to do a live nightly show every single night, Monday through Friday, because it was very draining and it prevented me from doing other things.

57:31People warned me. People warned me who did it, including on cable, and I ignored them. And I thought, oh, it's a lot of work for you, but I'm very fast and I do things very easily. But I was very there was a lot of hubris there. No, I mean, from one print guy to another, this video. Yeah, this video stuff is a whole nother ball of wax. Totally. Glenn Greenwald, everybody. I just I just want to say I completely agree. I'm nodding my head to what you were just saying in my own work. I mean, I'm you know, I'm a lib sort of in the classical sense. I have really no compunction about going after the Democrats.

58:00I think they're totally useless. But I think I think getting us out of these sort of like black and white thinking of, you know, Dems good, Republicans bad and vice versa is an important job. And you're one of the people who is who's doing it the best. So I appreciate your time. It's Greenwald dot sub stack dot com. Right. That's your that's your URL for your newsletter and video project. Yes. Greenwald dot sub stack dot com. Glenn Greenwald, everybody. Thanks again, Glenn. Thanks, Carl. Appreciate it. you