Podcast: The Politics of Trust with Glenn Greenwald

TRANSCRIPT: The Politics of Trust with Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald:

There is a permanent power structure in Washington that preserves and protects and defends its own prerogatives, its own policies.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television, where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. This week I sit down with journalist Glenn Greenwald, best known for his role in Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA's secret documents in 2013. But since then, he has sparred with officials and journalists across the political spectrum and around the world, including occasionally myself. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

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Ian Bremmer:

So I'm here in Brazil in Sao Paulo with Glen Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept. Glenn, great to be with you.

Glenn Greenwald:

It's great to be with you as well. Thank you for inviting me.

Ian Bremmer:

So the way you describe the US does not make it feel like a place I would want to go and live, and to be fair, you don't. Right. But I mean, is that the way? Is that the totality?

Glenn Greenwald:

I am somebody who was born in the United States. I lived there for most of my life. I'm still a US citizen. I go there all the time. My work is based there. My family is there.

Ian Bremmer:

You are in deep.

Glenn Greenwald:

I practice law there. So there are things about the United States that I think are admirable. I think, for example, it protects freedom of speech better than almost any other country I can think of. My husband, who's a politician here in Brazil, and I have political agreement on many things. But the thing that we spend our nights sometimes in bed fighting over is whether or not hate speech should be criminalized as it is in most countries, but not in the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

That's actually your pillow talk?

Glenn Greenwald:

It's occasionally our pillow talk.

Ian Bremmer:

Geez, man. This is rough.

Glenn Greenwald:

It's one of the things that we... It's the role of being a spouse of a congressman. What can I tell you? It's funny because when we started off, he wasn't in politics and I was, and he used to refuse to go out to dinner with people in politics and say, "I don't want to go out to dinner. You're going to talk about politics all night." And now he brings to bed talk about pending legislation, and I'm just wanting to close my ears. So the roles are reversed.

Glenn Greenwald:

But so I think that, and I think the Constitution itself, which I studied and spent a long time defending and advocating is something I still believe in. I think it's a brilliant, inspiring, and really important document in terms of what it symbolizes about individual rights and individual liberty. But on balance, in the post World War II era, and polls show this. If you poll the world and say, what is the country that poses the greatest threat to world peace? They won't say Iran or Russia or China. They'll say the United States. The United States has aligned itself with the world's most repressive, murderous, dictatorial regimes. Not just during Cold War, but still.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, North Korea would be the most.

Glenn Greenwald:

Well, I mean, if you look at Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, I mean, it's hard to say that there are countries that have done worse than those countries. So I think that...

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, push back a little bit on that, to be honest with you. I mean, I would say China's probably aligned with more murder. The most murderous regimes out there.

Glenn Greenwald:

I mean, there was genocide in Indonesia. A third of the left was extinguished while the US was feeding arms. You look at Egypt, and who's to say...

Ian Bremmer:

No. I'll take your point. Right?

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. I mean, it depends on what metric you use.

Ian Bremmer:

But the Americas are certainly willing to engage with a lot of regimes that do things that we would not be proud of.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right. I mean, the body count in East Timor under the US allies in Indonesia is higher than anything Kim Jong-Un has produced. But then you can look at a metric and say, well, maybe, certainly Kim Jong-Un is more repressive of individual liberties and is starving his people. So I mean, once you're starting to debate, is starvation worse than genocide? You're kind of in a...

Ian Bremmer:

It's a tough place. It's a tough place.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess what I'm saying is I don't think the US is the embodiment of pure evil. I think it's almost always misguided to talk about any person or any individual as being pure good or pure bad. But I do think that the United States has done a lot of damage to the world that's very serious and very profound. That has to be taken into account centrally when thinking about what the US represents. For the world, like you said, you think you think the US is a good place to live for you, and I think it is a good place to live for you. I think it would be a good place for me as well.

Ian Bremmer:

For you. Absolutely. It was.

Glenn Greenwald:

But we are not representative.

Ian Bremmer:

Not at all.

Glenn Greenwald:

Of the majority of people.

Ian Bremmer:

Not at all.

Glenn Greenwald:

Either on the planet or in the United States. And I think it's important to broaden our perspective and ask how do we affect the majority of people?

Ian Bremmer:

What I'm asking is, because again, you're a very intelligent guy and you have a big following. And when you talk about, I mean, there is a lot of sense in criticizing, I mean, true patriotism in many ways is not just the ability, but the reality of criticizing what you don't like about your country.

Glenn Greenwald:

Absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

No question. But it's interesting to me that when you talk about America's role in the world, so far, at least, you haven't brought up the fact that the US provides more humanitarian aid than any other country in the world right. Now, because we're the richest too.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

But I mean, in part, one of the reasons why a lot of countries don't like the United States is because we're the richest, the most powerful. So there's bad that comes with that, wars that are misguided and human rights that are run across. But there's also really good that comes across. After the Indonesian tsunami, the Chinese did virtually nothing. The Americans were there on the ground. And I say that because you just brought up Indonesia.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

So I just kind of wonder, do you think that you would be, I mean, is there a strategy that you have of, I want to be the voice of polarity on one side that is just beating on this great American bald eagle flag waving narrative? Or is there utility in actually showing both the good and the bad, knowing that there's a lot of both that comes from talking about a country like the United States?

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah, I think it's an important question, which is what do you regard as your role and how best can you impact the discourse? None of us can unilaterally shape how people think. We can only contribute what it is that we choose to contribute.

Glenn Greenwald:

And so as a journalist or as just a public voice, I do try sometimes try and assess how best I can contribute things. And one of the metrics I use is what ideas ought to be recognized and thought about that are being obscured by some kind of prevailing orthodoxy.

Glenn Greenwald:

So I think in general, as human beings, because from an evolutionary perspective, we're tribalistic, we're inclined to think of our tribe or our faction or our group. Whatever we identify with as Americans or as Christians or as whatever is part of our identity. It's very easy to see the good parts of that. We're kind of inculcated to do that. I think it's much harder to be self-critical, both as an individual, but also as a society correctly.

Ian Bremmer:

So you lean into that for that reason?

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. So absolutely. I lean into that because I think that's important.

Ian Bremmer:

So let's just say, let's stipulate for the purposes at least of this show, that Glenn Greenwald accepts that occasionally America does good things.

Glenn Greenwald:

Sure. Absolutely. Meaning, like I said, I think that one of the things the US does the best, that I hope, and that I use as an example all the time, is it's dedication to free speech and a free press for that matter. And just the constitution in general, the idea that checks and balances are critically important. I mean, here in Brazil all the time, one of the projects that I try and do actually is import American ideas about how freedom of speech to be talked about. The idea that Jewish lawyers at the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie. This is something really foreign to most other countries, including countries that do other things really well that I think the US is a leading model for. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

Ian Bremmer:

And continues to be.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah, absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

And continues to be.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

So let's now get you back into your sort of comfort zone. So Mueller report comes out, very clear that on the Russia story, they were not finding guilt of Trump or family in working with the Russians. Why do you think that narrative got the traction it did, because it was an extraordinarily big story in the US for a long time.

Glenn Greenwald:

I think there's really important reasons for it. So first of all, in general, the victory of Trump was just an extremely traumatic event for most Americans, even people who supported him, in part because we were told by the people who we rely on to be experts, to predict future, to analyze data, that the chances of it happening were infinitesimal. I think the last New York Times prediction was that Hillary Clinton had a 92% or 93% chance. I think there were a couple people like Nate Silver who moderated their certainty about it a little bit, which felt a little bit like safeguarding against the possibility, but most people believed it was almost inevitable that she was likely to win. And then he won and it kind of disoriented us. Almost like if we woke up and the law of gravity no longer applied. We would be very disoriented. That's obviously an extreme example.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, I was certainly surprised.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah, we were all shocked. But then even beyond just that, he doesn't comport himself the way that we think about how an American president ought to behave. He doesn't come from the same kind of background that we're typically accustomed to thinking about American power being exercised, the people who exercise it. And then there were just parts of it that were kind of shocking. And so I think the trauma of that election created a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of confusion about how the world's greatest power could elect someone who is essentially a game show host and a con artist. Somebody who has gone through his life scheming and lying and deceiving, and not exhibiting very many positive values.

Ian Bremmer:

Someone unfit to be president.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

Who won a legitimate election.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. And when complicated things in the world happen that we have difficulty understanding and that make us feel disoriented and dislodged from what we thought we knew, conspiracy theories, theories that offer a unifying explanation for why something happened, become very appealing. And what becomes particularly appealing is blaming a foreign villain. I mean, this is something that every regime around the world knows, that when you have discontent or disorientation, if you can focus their attention on a foreign villain and scapegoat a foreign country or a foreign leader, you can draw attention away from the things you don't want people to focus on.

Glenn Greenwald:

So I think the combination of this unifying explanation, the reason Trump won was because Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin intervened, combined with the appeal of blaming some foreign villain, which we've been doing for a long time. And I also think a very important part of it is, even though it's no longer the Soviet Union or communist regime, for decades, we've been inculcated with this script by politics, by media, by entertainment, to view Moscow as this grave adversary of the United States trying to infiltrate US politics. The idea that people are secret, have secret allegiances to the Russians.

Ian Bremmer:

Mitt Romney bringing this up, Obama laughing about it at the time.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right. He dismissed it as kind of this Cold War relic, which in a way it is, but it's still embedded in all of us. The idea that the Russians are trying to take over the United States. For decades, that was the predominant ideology of the US government, both Democrats and Republicans, was what was coming from Moscow, what was emanating from Moscow was this existential threat to American democracy.

Glenn Greenwald:

So that script, Russia has taken over, Russia's controlling our government, our leaders are beholden to the Kremlin. It just resonates in this primal and instinctive way. It was kind of like a prepackaged script that you didn't have to do much work in order to sell people in order to believe. And I think when they were in that state of uncertainty and confusion in the wake of Trump's victory, it all just kind of came together to override people's rational faculties in a way that was understandable. People were upset and afraid and scared, and they cling to anybody who sells them a way to understand things. I think that's what happened.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you did seem seriously pleased with yourself when the Mueller report became public on this issue.

Glenn Greenwald:

I mean, I will confess that I'm a human being, and having spent the last three years being vilified.

Ian Bremmer:

You will not.

Glenn Greenwald:

As if not a Russian agent, then at least an apologist for Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin or some kind of clandestine Trump supporter all because I looked at the evidence and just was unpersuaded that this conspiracy theory was true and felt somewhat isolated. It was an isolating feeling. I mean, the vast majority of my, not just colleagues, but friends in the media and in politics, were vehemently on the other side, including my own colleagues at the media outlet that I founded, that I co-founded.

Ian Bremmer:

At the Intercept?

Glenn Greenwald:

At The Intercept.

Ian Bremmer:

They were, at the time, they were saying, get with the program.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. There were some people who were on board with the skepticism.

Ian Bremmer:

But you're supposed to be on left here?

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah, precisely. And it was kind of like, why are you betraying us? And heretics are always more hated than people who you expect to be around.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely.

Glenn Greenwald:

Because it's kind of a sense of betrayal. So there is some vindication that comes from it. But I think that beyond the vindication, it's an important story to ask how it is that our leading media institutions, yet again, after the failures leading up to the Iraq War, when the vast majority of the media endorsed the idea that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and was in an alliance with Al-Qaeda. And then leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, which very few people in the media recognized or were warning about, to now yet another...

Ian Bremmer:

Very few economists were at the time either too.

Glenn Greenwald:

Right. But it's a major crisis that simply happened where the people who were overseeing our economy, like on Greenspan and Wall Street tycoons were more or less...

Ian Bremmer:

Everything's fine. Yeah.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah. It's created this crisis of authority where people are losing faith in the institutions that we all should want people to have faith in.

Ian Bremmer:

So should we have faith in Robert Mueller? Was he a fair arbiter?

Glenn Greenwald:

I mean, from the beginning was pointing out that Robert Mueller was George W. Bush's post-9/11 FBI Chief, who was rounding up Muslims in the first two or three months on very dubious claims of theories of material witness detentions who went before Congress and said, I've looked at the evidence and the fact that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction is not, he didn't use the term slam dunk, but it was along those same lines. So it always was odd to me that liberals decided to anoint somebody with this history as this man of integrity in whom we were going to place our unquestioned faith. But they did. And I think that the investigation, whatever else you want to say about it, was incredibly comprehensive. I mean, there were people who...

Ian Bremmer:

And fair?

Glenn Greenwald:

It seems to be fair. I mean, I thought that the report was pretty painstaking in its analysis of the evidence.

Ian Bremmer:

So an interesting point. I mean, again, earlier you said one of the things that's great about the US is we lead the world in free speech. People should look up to that. It also sounds like the most important political investigation that we've had in decades, you believe actually was held fairly and intelligently.

Glenn Greenwald:

Well, I think one of the reasons why I think the Constitution is such an amazing document is because it's central recognition is that checks and balances are necessary to prevent any one center of power from accumulating too much authority. So I'm a huge fan, obviously, of transparency, of shining a light on things that had previously been hidden. I was advocating vehemently the appointment of a special counsel or some kind of investigative body because I was so worried about the incessant leaks from the CIA that were coming from the Washington Post and the New York Times that couldn't be falsified or verified because they were unaccompanied by evidence.

Glenn Greenwald:

So I love when that happens. I grew up veering Daniel Ellsberg and the church committee. That was kind of one of the formative parts of my political perspective is when you subject these institutions that operate in the dark to a comprehensive examination and then disclose to the public, not just your conclusions, but the information on which they're based, that's a really healthy and instructive thing to do.

Glenn Greenwald:

So, yeah, I agree. I think that the Mueller report ended up being something, even though it had some victims, some innocent people who ended up being unfairly accused of some terrible things, some people whose lives got ruined in the process, as always happens in these investigations. On the whole, I think you're right, that it's something that America does well, which is...

Ian Bremmer:

And should be proud of?

Glenn Greenwald:

And should be proud of, which is say we don't have leaders who are beyond the realm of accountability.

Ian Bremmer:

That are above the law.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Glenn Greenwald, the United States and Brazil, it's not all a disaster.

Glenn Greenwald:

Exactly. It's all mixed. All very nuanced.

Ian Bremmer:

Good to be with you, Glenn.

Glenn Greenwald:

Good to be with you too. Thanks for much.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media, in which case it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Imagine a bank without teller lines, where your banker knows your name and its most prized currency is extraordinary client service. Hear directly from First Republic's clients by visiting firstrepublic.com.