Glenn Greenwald: Propaganda, Putin, AOC, and the New Movement Rising From the Ashes of MAGA

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
Glenn Greenwald, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so pleased that you're coming right now because I need someone smarter than I am to explain the connection that I feel but can't quite articulate, and it's this. So the Free Press, run by Bari Weiss, and financed by others, of course, just put out a video defending flock cameras. And rather than playing it, you can find it on the internet. I'm just gonna read you the description in the headline, and here's what it is. Ever feel like you're being watched? This is the Free Press headline. You might be right, but flock safety cameras aren't interested in you unless you're a kidnapper, a thief, or up to no good.
And it's like literally Soviet propaganda. You know, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. As long as your soul is right with the party, you're okay, don't worry about the panopticon.
So this is obviously disgusting. It's anti-American, it's totalitarian, but it's also not that surprising coming from the neocon oracle known as the Free Press. I can't quite explain why that's not surprising to me. Why is their support of flock cameras consistent with their support of say the war with Iran?

**Glenn Greenwald** (1:15)
Well, let's remember it was about 12, 13 years ago that we started the Snowden reporting that really was the first meaningful broad based reporting that showed that the goal of the US government was to create an absolutely ubiquitous surveillance state that monitored, collected, stored highly invasive and revealing information, not about terror suspects or potential pedophiles, but about every single one of us. A ubiquitous surveillance state is how they described it internally and what it was.
Obviously, it had all sorts of connections to the military and to foreign policy goals. In fact, its basis was in the NSA, which is a key part of the Defense Department, of the Military Planning Unit, the US Security State. All along, they also had a very close, really indispensable partnership with Silicon Valley, with the largest tech companies. In fact, one of the earliest stories we did was about how the tech companies were just handing over en masse whatever information the NSA wanted without warrants or anything else, because those companies need to keep a good relationship with the government because that's where they get most of their largest contracts from. There's really no separation between the private and public sector, but the companies and the sector that is most financially interested in this surveillance state are the people in Silicon Valley. The people who, for example, are running Palantir and have gotten unimaginably wealthy, multi-billionaire wealth from helping not only to create a surveillance state but then merging it with the US military. This is what the Israelis, of course, set up in Gaza. It's one of the reasons why a lot of people, one of the loudest ones being Charlie Kirk, were so incredulous that October 7th could happen, and the Israeli government just had no idea that it was coming because they have Gaza under one of the most extreme surveillance systems ever to exist in all of human history.
A lot of the reporting we did was about the partnership between the NSA and the Israelis and the amount of just raw intelligence the NSA turns over about American citizens to the Israeli government. So you have all these component parts, Peter Thiel in Palantir and Alex Karp, Andreessen Horowitz that is invested in a lot of these AI surveillance companies, also invested in Palantir, also a major investor in the Free Press. And this is all part of the same group that, as you say, is inextricably linked not just to building a domestic surveillance state, but also a foreign policy that is very neocon in nature, very warmongering in nature. They all wanted the war in Iran. They all love and worship and revere Israel. And of course, it is in the interest of people who wield the greatest power to find out and know as much about that they can as their domestic population, because that gives them the greatest control. And that's always been what the surveillance state is about.

**Tucker Carlson** (4:05)
But the irony of it is just is inescapable. I mean, we're fighting these wars abroad so we can be free here in the United States. We're fighting tyrants on behalf of freedom and democracy. And that's basically what we're doing. I mean, there's no one really making the argument that Iran was a physical threat to the United States. I mean, the fringe Mark Levin types do, but most people would not make that case. They would say, this is a tyranny. They're killing their own people, they're throwing gays off the roof, they're shooting protesters.