Glenn Greenwald: Iran War Updates, False Flags, and Netanyahu’s Plot to Imprison Americans

**Tucker Carlson** (0:05)
So for the last two weeks, you've probably been watching very carefully what's happening in the conflict with Iran. The United States and Israel are engaged in a joint war against Iran. And all of us are trying to figure out what's happening there. But as our attention is diverted outside of our borders, it's also worth paying attention to what's happening here and in the rest of the West that is not directly connected to this conflict, but still affected by it. And one of the things you notice is that our country, and certainly Europe and Australia and New Zealand and Canada, have all clamped down on their own populations in very unusual, unprecedented ways over the past year, but particularly since this war started two weeks ago. And that's a familiar phenomenon. Countries at war tend to become more authoritarian. It always happens. But we should be on guard against it. And one of the ways it is happening in the United States is that free speech is being curtailed. Your inherent God-given right to say what you believe in public. That's the basis of the United States. It's the very core of our Bill of Rights, of our founding documents. It's the reason that we are exceptional in the world. It's that one thing, our ability to say what we think, because that right comes from God, not the government. That's what our documents say. And so of all rights that we should be resistant to losing, that would be at the very top of the list. And yet there is a concerted effort, as our next guest is about to explain, to strip that right from Americans using both the pretext of war and the cover of war. And again, we should be on guard against it. Glenn Greenwald has spent his entire professional life advocating for the freedom of speech, has been punished for it. He has been analyzing carefully what's going on right now. He joins us now. Glenn, thanks a lot for doing this. How would you assess the state of free speech in the West right now?

**Glenn Greenwald** (2:01)
It is seriously in peril. It's often in peril, but it's more in peril than ever before. And there are a couple of different reasons. Obviously, there's been an attempt on the part of the EU to undermine the ability for people on this populist right to express certain views. And there's been a lot of attention paid to that, but the far more significant threat to free speech, and you and I have been talking about this Tucker since all the way back in 2023 after October 7th, is the very concerted effort on the part of the Israeli government. And in each of these democratic countries, they have pro-Israel lobbying groups, not as strong as the United States, but still very strong, that have overtly said that there's too much permissive language under the laws of these countries for what you can say about Israel. And Netanyahu himself, just a couple of months ago, said that we're warning Western states, you better do more to protect the Jews in your country, and you better heed that warning. And ever since, and even, you know, there's been a spate of these kinds of things before that, but ever since, there's been a lot of draconian changes to just obliterating free speech in the name of protecting this foreign country, the most brazen of which was, I don't know if you saw, but the Australians after Bondi Beach at the insistence of the Israelis passed a law banning a whole bunch of common political slogans that offend Israel, like to from the river to the sea and things of that nature. And a bunch of Australian citizens were angry that they're not allowed to express this political view any longer or else they'll be arrested. And they went as kind of civil disobedience wearing a t-shirt that said, from the river to the sea. And each and every one of them was arrested and processed through the court system. So when you see these sorts of things, these kinds of new speech codes that have been promulgated, including the United States, a whole bunch of legislative frameworks that really have no purpose other than to expand the definition of anti-Semitism that's existed for decades, to include a wider range of common criticisms of Israel or even of Jewish individuals, that is an extremely serious attack on free speech, not in the name of marginalized groups in our own country, but in the name of shielding this foreign country.

**Tucker Carlson** (4:15)
I just, the Australia story is so shocking that I didn't think it was real at first. I talked to a friend in Australia who confirmed that it was, but it leaves so many questions. The first of which is, how does a foreign prime minister have the power to tell citizens many thousands of miles away that they're not allowed to criticize him?