[@TuckerCarlson] The Totalitarian Surveillance State Grows as a New Movement Rises From the Ashes of MAGA

Link: https://youtu.be/yoBTkpus8Iw

Duration: 76 min

Transcript: Download plain text

Short Summary

Tucker Carlson interviews Glenn Greenwald, the journalist famous for publishing the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, in a sprawling conversation connecting domestic surveillance, the new war against Iran, suppression of anti-war dissent, Russiagate, and the fortified two-party duopoly. Greenwald argues that US elites have replaced New Deal-era populist concessions with a surveillance-policing-pharmaceutical complex while manufacturing consent for wars with Iran and Russia, and that both major parties agree on roughly 90% of policy while serving the same donor class. The discussion highlights concrete episodes including a February 28th strike that killed 165 Iranian schoolgirls, the TikTok ban, Twitter Files censorship revelations, and DSA-backed candidates like Darisa Shabalier defeating pro-war incumbents.

Key Quotes

1. "people who, for example, are are running Palanteer and have gotten unimaginably wealthy, multi multi-billionaire wealth from helping not only to create a surveillance state, but then merging it with the US military." (00:02:32)
2. "And of course, every single person has something to hide. We all do things in secret and in private that we wouldn't do in public." (00:08:33)
3. "the only time the Tik Tok ban picked up enough steam and got votes in both parties in the support of the Biden White House was when the ADL came out and said the reason young people are being turned against Israel and the war in Gaza is because there's too many of these videos circulating on TikTok." (00:40:51)
4. "this is, you know, the biggest myth, the biggest lie of our political system is that the two political parties can't agree on anything." (01:15:09)
5. "I think this is so crucial that the easiest way to prevent public outrage about public policy or public behavior that deserves outrage is simply to hide it." (00:37:42)

Detailed Summary

Interviewee Background and Episode Overview

Tucker Carlson hosts a wide-ranging interview with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist famous for publishing the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. The conversation weaves together domestic surveillance, war-making with Iran and Russia, pharmaceutical social control, media censorship, and Democratic Party factional politics into a single thesis: the US political class has shifted from buying public consent for war (as in Iraq) to bypassing it entirely (as with Iran), while substituting a surveillance-and-medicine regime for the old populist concessions of the New Deal era.

Domestic Surveillance and the Free Press

• Greenwald frames The Free Press, run by Barry Weiss, as the "neocon oracle" whose investor base overlaps with Palantir (Peter Thiel, Alex Karp) and Andreessen Horowitz, which also backs AI surveillance firms.
• Carlson highlights The Free Press's defense of Flock safety cameras, quoting the line that the cameras "aren't interested in you unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good," calling it Soviet-style "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" propaganda.
• Greenwald places Flock cameras in the lineage of Snowden-era NSA reporting roughly 12-13 years prior, noting that Silicon Valley firms handed user data to the NSA without warrants in exchange for government contracts.
• He recalls that former East German Stasi publicly envied the NSA's capabilities, underscoring the scale of US digital surveillance.
• Carlson cites Griswold v. Connecticut (1967) as establishing privacy as a foundational right, contrasting it with pro-choice commentators who invoke the ruling but scold people wanting actual privacy from corporate and state surveillance.
• He quotes Eric Schmidt's response to Google critics: "if you don't want others to know, stop doing it," as an example of how surveillance is normalized by tech leaders.

From Iraq to Iran: The End of Public Consent for War

• The Founders required Congressional war approval because war raises taxes and endangers citizens' sons, but that requirement eroded gradually in a "frog in boiling water" fashion.
• The Iraq War was preceded by an 18-month Bush-Cheney PR campaign and won two-thirds public support at the outset; the Iran war had no comparable campaign, with polls showing overwhelming and growing American opposition.
• Both Trump and Democratic leaders backed the Iran war, which Greenwald dates to February 28th and calls the most consequential US war since WWII because it shifts the global balance of power.
• Greenwald cites a New York Times story on Iranian exiles in London, Toronto, Chicago, and LA who initially supported US bombing but became disillusioned when they realized Trump and Netanyahu were fighting for their own interests, not theirs.
• He reports that 165 schoolgirls were killed on the first day of the Iran war by a US missile strike on their school, followed by a second strike on rescuers, a tactic he says Israel has used constantly in Gaza.

Suppression of Dissent and Media Coverage

• Vietnam-era protests were fueled by body bags returning home; the Iran war generates almost no protest because coverage is scarce and prior Gaza campus protests were crushed via police violence, expulsions, and deportations, raising the cost of future dissent.
• CNN broadcast live from Baghdad during the 1990-91 Gulf War; the Iran and Russia wars receive almost no comparable access, and Russia's perspective is excluded from coverage entirely.
• A TikTok ban gained bipartisan and Biden White House backing after the ADL blamed young people's Gaza solidarity on TikTok videos; ByteDance lacks the defense/CIA/Pentagon contracts that make US big tech compliant with censorship orders.
• Young TikTok users circulated Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America," prompting the Guardian to remove the document and TikTok to ban the hashtag; Greenwald notes the letter cited Iraq sanctions killing "hundreds of thousands of children," US bases in Saudi Arabia, and US funding of Israel as drivers of anti-US sentiment.
• After Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the EU Parliament criminalized carrying Russian state media, and France IP-banned Rumble when it refused to remove RT and Sputnik content.

Pharmaceuticals, Therapy, and Social Control

• Greenwald argues benzodiazepines, SSRIs, and marijuana function as instruments of social control by suppressing the anxiety and anger that fuel demands for better lives, and notes psychiatric drugs can now be obtained online without seeing a doctor.
• He frames therapy culture as shifting blame for systemic problems onto individual patients rather than the systems that produce them.
• Greenwald calls the post-2016 surge in therapy-seeking a healthy response to unacceptable conditions, not a personal dysfunction, framing it as collective recognition of societal breakdown.
• He references Orwell and Huxley's 1940s-50s dystopian novels and a New York Times report in which Silicon Valley parents admitted they would never let their own children use the addictive products they design, highlighting elite awareness of the harms they profit from.

The Elite Class Project: Surveillance Replacing Concessions

• Wealthy elites historically feared populist revolt, which drove their acceptance of FDR's New Deal; the 2008 financial crisis ended that fear, with bailouts rescuing the wealthy while the middle class absorbed foreclosures.
• Greenwald argues elites now bet that paramilitarization and a surveillance state can preserve wealth inequality without concessions, with Peter Thiel cited as the prototype of the "private-island, surveil-everyone" mentality.
• He points to private equity firms that have bought veterinary clinics nationwide and doubled prices as an example of monopoly extraction with no public benefit, illustrating the broader pattern of financialization.

Russia, Russiagate, and the National Security State

• Greenwald calls Russiagate "a scandal with no evidence" that framed nuclear-armed Russia as the gravest threat to American democracy, comparing it to McCarthyism.
• He documents Hillary Clinton's State Department (2010-2011) funding anti-Putin protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg through the National Endowment for Democracy, and cites her book "Hard Choices" criticizing Obama for not confronting Russia in Syria and Ukraine.
• Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg the US has "no vital interests in Ukraine… never has and never will," comparing Russia's position there to Mexico or Canada for the US; Greenwald notes the Democratic Party pivoted to anti-Russia hysteria only months later in 2016.
• Russia refused to extradite Snowden, citing its identity as a haven for Western persecution targets and generational US-Russia intelligence hostility; under Obama, the two countries cooperated on the Iran deal and against ISIS in Syria.
• Greenwald argues many neocons are Jewish refugees or descendants from the USSR, Ukraine, and Russia who retain hostility toward Moscow, citing Jeffrey Goldberg, Torian Nulan, and Marco Rubio (Cuban immigrant parents) as policymakers shaped by ancestral foreign policy grievances.
• He claims Putin is more popular than Trump or any US leader since Teddy Roosevelt, that Putin speaks German from his KGB East Germany service, and that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama all once called him rational and trustworthy before re-demonizing him to justify war.
• The dollar's share of global reserves has hit a 25-year low, with Saudi Arabia and Gulf states increasingly selling oil in yuan; central banks have been stockpiling gold, with China's purchases moving the global price.

Democratic Party Internal Politics

• Greenwald says the entire Democratic caucus from AOC to Chuck Schumer voted unanimously to fund the NATO war in Ukraine, with Raytheon, Boeing, and Palantir as prime beneficiaries.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene argued AOC was a partisan fraud rather than a true radical; AOC defeated Joe Crowley, the Pelosi-protégé "back room" incumbent, and recently called wokeness "crazy" and abolish-the-police rhetoric a pandemic-era "Halloween costume."
• DSA-backed candidates like Darisa Shabalier have begun ousting pro-war incumbents; Shabalier beat an 8-year incumbent who headed the House Progressive Hispanic Caucus on a record of opposing NATO funding.
• Matt Taibbi testified about the Twitter Files showing continuous Biden-administration pressure to censor dissent; Rep. Colin Allred told Taibbi to "remove his tinfoil hat" about CIA and FBI censorship.
• Bernie Sanders and AOC endorsed former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, which Greenwald calls a sign the CIA has captured the state's Democratic Party.
• Pelosi's Taiwan visit went further than the Biden administration toward China, and she is described as an absolute hawk on Israel and Iran.

The Two-Party Duopoly

• Greenwald claims the Republican and Democratic parties agree on at least 90% of major policy issues, with media only spotlighting the rare areas of disagreement, creating a "lockdown" on most policy debates.
• He recounts that Barack Obama privately dismissed partisan combat with figures like John Boehner as theater, saying "we're all playing within the 40 yard lines."
• Greenwald claims the US electoral system has been progressively fortified each decade to make it harder for independent or third-party movements to compete with the two-party duopoly.
• As a contrast, he cites Brazil as a multi-party democracy with approximately 26 parties represented in its Congress.
• He cites Ross Perot's third-party anti-free-trade candidacy as a historical example, noting Perot drew support from voters aligned with both Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, warning that free trade would de-industrialize the country.
• Greenwald concludes that Americans are more open than ever to identifying with movements or parties not connected to the Republican or Democratic labels, because both parties and the system itself are increasingly hated.
• He argues that radical candidates who join the Democratic Party are more likely to be co-opted by the party than to transform it, limiting their ability to advocate anti-establishment positions such as those associated with MAGA or Trump-aligned populism.

Key Surprises and Takeaways

• The same investors (Thiel/Palantir, Andreessen Horowitz) back both AI surveillance firms and The Free Press, which defends Flock cameras as targeting only criminals, revealing an ideological-financial alignment.
• The Iran war started February 28th with a strike killing 165 schoolgirls, yet produced almost no anti-war movement in part because Gaza-style protest infrastructure was preemptively dismantled on US campuses.
• TikTok was targeted specifically because ByteDance does not depend on US defense contracts the way American platforms do, making it less obedient to government censorship demands.
• The Democratic Party's anti-Russia turn began months after Obama explicitly told Goldberg the US has no vital interests in Ukraine, marking a sharp rhetorical pivot.
• Putin, once praised by Clinton, Bush, and Obama as rational and trustworthy, was recharacterized as a madman only when war with Russia needed to be sold to the public.