The Kinshasa Interviews: Glenn Greenwald - the interview that breaks the internet

Glenn on broken media, the sociopathic elites, run-ins with Bolsonaro, sex with women, and being 'unpatriotic'


Why are you gay?

When I was quite young, I observed that most of the straight boys were similar to you: obnoxious, uncouth, plagued with stunted emotional development, an unwarranted sense of ego, and a sociopathic lack of empathy, all topped off with very thinly veiled fascist tendencies. I set out determined to find a way to not to be that, and settled on gay. Also, my mother was extremely beautiful and I knew early on that no woman would ever measure up. Her name was Norma Bates. Finally, have you seen pictures of my husband?

Anyway, the intent of this interview is to understand Glenn Greenwald: thinker, investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, sex symbol.  What is at your core?  What makes you the universally-loved and admired man that you are today?  I am a strong proponent of Age Regression Therapy, and take inspiration from brilliant minds like Hippolyte Bernheim, Theodore Xenophon Barber, and Sigmund Freud, who taught us that trauma in youth will significantly impact one's character development into adulthood.  More than formative, it is central to that person.  What I am trying to figure out here is what made you a seditious little shit?  What singular moment made you hate America?  Did you get vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate on the 4th of July when you were 5 five years old?  Is this what led you to hate America?  Why don't you get on the winning team, son?  Come in for the home run.  Help us with this final drive for the touchdown, YOU PINKO FAGGOT!

I absolutely believe that our personalities shape how we interact with and perceive societal institutions and therefore our political thought. As you suggest, the genesis of that perspective, or that relationship with authority, is formed in childhood.

The formative childhood experience for me was realizing I was something which society scorned and regarded as diseased and shameful: being gay, or to use the charming vernacular of yourself and many of your readers, a “PINKO FAGGOT.” It is an obviously monumental experience to realize that the society around you has long ago decreed that something that is inside of you without your having chosen for it to be there renders you irredeemably broken, dirty, immoral and dysfunctional, and that your only survival option is to desperately hide who you really are and present a false illusion to the world to manipulate them into not discovering the truth.

There are several identifiable ways young, largely defenseless gay children might react to that realization. One strategy is to construct one’s own internal world which resides in the imagination. A more pleasing and welcoming dimension to which one can escape and which replaces the harsh reality that has rejected them, which I think is what explains why gays have excelled in the creative arts. That’s how we get David Bowie, Elton John, Alexander McQueen, James Baldwin, Gianni Versace, Freddy Mercury, Handel and Tchaikovsky.

Others set out to prove to society that they are actually exactly like them, and adopt assimilation as their primary weapon: pleading with others to stop thinking they are different. That’s how we end up Pete Buttigieg, Josh Barro and Ellen. Others still tragically internalize this baseless societal condemnation as true, and that’s why so many LGBT youth end up committing suicide or suffering mental health pathologies.

Like others, the path I chose was to declare war on the structure that viewed itself competent to impose this condemnation on me. To do that, I first had to interrogate what moral and intellectual credibility this constellation of authorities possessed that justified its self-proclaimed right to formulate and issue such judgments. I found that credibility woefully lacking, and once I did, it permanently prevented me from blindly trusting authoritative pronouncements. My pre-adolescent and adolescent strategy was to set out to prove that those who adopted this conceit of moral superiority were far dirtier, more broken, and sickly than those they had condemned (including me).

This manifested as vicious warfare on institutions of authority and, fortunately for me, the skill set with which I was endowed turned out to be well-suited for such combat. I turned the judgmental microscope back onto those who I perceived had first directed it at me, and the amount of bacteria and disease and pathology I saw when doing so was stunning. And I made no secret of the judgment I had formed about my judges.

These attacks of mine, in their early years, were sometimes a bit sloppy and imprecise: lots of collateral damage as I attacked targets that seemed at the time to possess real power but, in retrospect, were just captive servants to it. But it was still excellent training for the work I would end up doing as a lawyer, activist and journalist. And that is the central experience that shapes how I navigate the world. Human institutions are inherently and invariably fallible, and the more certainty and moral superiority they claim, the more filth and deceit they are likely trying to conceal behind that clean, lofty veneer.

The reason why I believe that you are dangerous to God and America is because you are disordered.  You watched the 1993 Richard Linklater coming-of-age movie Dazed and Confused, and you identified with the wrong character.  You could have identified with Mitch the freshman, as the story centred around him.  Or Randall "Pink" Floyd because you wanted to be like him.  Or even Wooderson, the coolest character in the entire movie, which would have let you walk around saying "alright, alright, alright' all day long.  Cool as fuck.  You could have even chosen Darla Marks because she was funny...for a woman.  Instead you chose to identify with Mike Newhouse, the annoyingly high strung guy who got punched out and only wanted to dance, because his goal in life was to become a lawyer for the ACLU.  This makes you an oddball.  By this point in your life you were already too far gone.  You chose to go on a crusade to defend the indefensible.

I didn’t see that film, rendering your drawn-out theory embarrassingly pointless.

But it’s spot on.

You and your spouse, David Miranda, run a shelter for dogs in need, most of which have been sexually abused by white women.  This is very honourable and the two of you should be commended for your volunteer work.  You love dogs, you have talked about your love for them, and have written on this subject as well.  You are also a vegetarian and have spoken out about the cruelty involved in factory farming and why we should do our best to wean ourselves off of meat.  In these two ways you resemble another animal-lover and vegetarian who went by the name of Adolf Hitler.  Are you Hitler reincarnated? Both of you have declared war on America.

I’m a vegan, not a vegetarian: one of the few differences between Hitler and myself. The more I looked, the more astonished I became at the unspeakable industrialized cruelty we now inflict on sentient, emotionally complex, and highly intelligent animals. Many people instinctively oppose veganism because they believe in the nobility and beauty of family farms. Leaving that question to the side, the way we now consume food has nothing to do with family farms: industrialized agriculture is the exact antithesis of family farming; indeed, it is destroying family farms by consuming the entire supply chain. Commercial family farms barely exist any more, thanks to the Smithfields and JBS’s of the world.

By every conceivable perspective -- moral, ethical, religious, environmental, humanitarian, public health, and just basic human decency -- the systematized torture of pigs, cows, birds, and lamb by the billions is grotesque and indefensible. The toxic waste and sludge alone dumped into communities is nauseating and dangerous. The filthy conditions make them a breeding ground for zoonotic viruses and epidemics and the excessive use of antibiotics creates a large risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains that can kill humans. The U.S. Government and large corporations even breed dogs for no reason other than to conduct gruesome experiments on them. Many people find that repellent because they love dogs, but there is no conceivable moral distinction between abusing dogs and abusing pigs and cows.

Our shelter was originally motivated by our love of dogs -- we have 27 rescue dogs of our own, plus hundreds more we fostered (I know that sounds like we’re insane hoarder people but we’re not, or maybe we are) -- but it then morphed into a fascination with the uniquely profound connection between dogs and the homeless people who care for them. Most people who have dogs also have other things -- work, family, friends, etc. -- so they love their dogs but not so single-mindedly, whereas homeless dogs and homeless people have nobody and nothing but one another which creates a bond unlike anything I’ve seen.

Our shelter, now in several locations, simultaneously employs homeless people and helps them exit the street while paying them to do what they most love: caring for abandoned animals. I realize, for judging a person’s worth, it’s not as noble or important as putting a rainbow flag or a #BLM hashtag in one’s Twitter bio, but we’re doing the best we can.

The Part of the Interview Where I Let Glenn Act Like He’s Smart So As To Play To His Out of Control Ego

These past five years have witnessed a profound collapse in trust in the American political system.  Egged on by an increasingly hyper-partisan media, conspiracy theories have taken root on both sides of the traditional aisle in US politics.  Yet where QAnon is rightly rejected as being completely detached from reality, polite company pushed the equally false Trump-Russia narrative for years, blasting it on all media day and night.  Why do you think that the mainstream elite fail to see themselves as little different from your typical QAnon when it comes to dealing with reality?  Is it a case that their power is greater, and therefore their ability to mould and shape reality makes them right in their own minds despite all evidence to the contrary?

It has always been this way. Deranged conspiracy theories are spread most aggressively, prolifically and destructively by the guardians of mainstream thought. Such conspiracy theories are scorned only when they are endorsed by the unlicensed and uncredentialled. When they are disseminated by prestigious mainstream sources, they are widely treated as Truth.

The most respected and celebrated news outlets and foreign policy analysts spent all of 2002 and the first part of 2003 telling Americans and the world that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and an active nuclear weapons program: easily the most toxic conspiracy theory of this generation. Because of their lies, by September, 2003 -- six months after the invasion of Iraq -- roughly 70% of Americans believed that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attack. Yet other than the scapegoat Judy Miller, nobody suffered any career harm. The leading disseminators of this maniacal fiction were promoted and rewarded: Jeffrey Goldberg went from telling good liberal pseudo-intellectual New Yorker readers that Saddam was in alliance with Al Qaeda to running The Atlantic.

The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.

Yet the people who did this not only still have their media perches but now use them to posture with indignation about the conspiracies spread by MAGA boomers on Facebook and 4Chan teenagers. They don’t mind conspiracy theories at all. To the contrary, spreading them is their business. They just get angry when others -- especially the peasants -- intrude into their turf.

No 'pillar' of American democracy has collapsed more than media these past few years.  Trust is at an all-time low.  The country now has competing narratives that cancel each other out.  Gone are the days when objectivity (at least attempting it) in journalism was sacrosanct.  Advocacy journalism now rules.  Large parts of the mainstream media are little more than stenographers for the Biden regime.  One may claim that advocating on behalf of those without power is sensible and moral, but the main advocacy that we see today is done by corporate outlets that only serve to buttress the ruling elite.  Chomsky and Herman outlined this for us in their seminal work 'Manufacturing Consent', a book (and a documentary) that greatly changed my perception of the media.  Yet despite their efforts, most people continue to absorb media so long as it conforms to their preconceived notions.  Combine all of these factors and the situation is rather dangerous. No country with competing narratives can stay united.  One side will win out against the other, with or without violence.....but at what cost?

The dominant liberal sectors of the corporate media love to self-victimize, constantly complaining about the unfair loss of faith and trust by large sectors of the public in their pronouncement. Notably, they almost never seek to understand why this is beyond blaming others: we’re unfairly demonized; right-wing leaders call us Fake News; uneducated people want to hear what pleases them, not reality and the truth, etc.. It’s the playbook of Hillary Clinton after her humiliating 2016 loss: they blame virtually everyone on the planet other than themselves for their own failures.

Due to this steadfast refusal to look in the mirror -- and really, given what they would see, it’s hard to blame them -- there is no possibility for reform. The major cause of this loss of credibility is themselves. They aren’t trusted because they don’t deserve to be. But their pomposity and adamant belief that they are divinely entitled due to their superiority to control the flow of information will never permit them to acknowledge that. So they will continue doing what they’ve done, losing more and more trust and driving people away to other, often-unreliable sources of information, and that cycle will never end.

The only way out is for people to restore trust and faith in journalism by demonstrating that it can be done not to aggrandize a particular faction or ideology but by doing one’s best to find the truth given the subjective prism through which all humans see the world.

My view is that the lack of accountability in US media is what has brought us to this situation.  The neo-conservatives of the Dubya regime couldn't believe their luck when Trump began to wins primaries in 2016 because it allowed them to re-brand themselves as members of #TheResistance.  Overnight, Bill Kristol, David Frum and others who were responsible for pushing the WMD lie that laid the groundwork for the catastrophic US invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, were rehabilitated.  Regardless of that fact, they were STILL on the scene during the the interregnum between the Iraqi catastrophe and Trump's Presidency.  David Frum was hired by Woke IDF Prison Guard Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic Monthly, and Bill Kristol was a mainstay on cable TV news.  None of them were held accountable for what they did, and now they have been rewarded for attacking what was largely a scarecrow.

That is one of the many ironies of the Trump years: under the self-glorifying and unhinged banner of #Resisting fascism, American liberals marched behind and empowered war criminals, CIA and FBI goons, neocon sociopaths, the scummiest of the Bush/Cheney operatives who easily scammed them under the name “Lincoln Project,” and the long-discarded and disgraced McCarthyite script that everyone who opposes you is a Kremlin agent and a traitor. Even worse, they relied upon a union of state authority in the form of the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley monopolies, fearful of what Democrats would do when they ascended to power to systematically silence their critics and disappear them from the internet. As I’ve said before, this is the first #Resistance movement in human history that venerates secret security agencies and oligarchical power.

With trust in institutions at an all-time low, and with the political temperature set permanently to MAX, many claim that the USA is tottering and is headed towards collapse.  I take the opposite view.  My take is that the USA is shedding one skin and morphing into something else.  The elites have never been more united despite the sniping between R and D.  Time published a piece recently that detailed how the elites came together to torpedo Trump's re-election.  That in my mind shows resiliency.  Add to this the 4 year long constant drumbeat of TRUMP-RUSSIA, and attach to the increasingly loud anti-China noise from the right, and we have a situation in which half the country wants revenge against Russia, while the other half want to punish China.  This is an almost ideal situation for the military-industrial complex.  Failures at home can be channelled into foreign policy objectives that serve the interests of the elites.  And with the Biden regime re-assembling the Obama Era foreign policy team, we are well on our way to seeing what I call Turbo-America: a hyper-interventionist state that uses everything from sanctions to bombs to punish or coerce countries that fall afoul of its increasingly arbitrary rules.

In one sense, it is true that people in the U.S. are more “polarized” than ever, but it is true only in a limited sense. Take the typical self-identified leftist and stick them in a room with someone right-wing and they will viciously argue for days about race, gender, trans issues, immigration and abortion. But they will have almost no strong views one way or the other key U.S. power centers: the Pentagon, the CIA and intelligence community, Wall Street, Silicon Valley. Watch how often our discourse even mentions these things except in the most fleeting, superficial and reverential ways. To the extent that they talk about economic policy, they will likely find a huge amount of agreement on a wide range of issues without realizing it: how to treat the working class, the malevolent influence of centralized Corporatist power, the menace of monopolistic tech giants, the toxic nature of “free trade” agreements and globalist institutions.

The problem is that they’re trained — largely by media outlets, which rely on people being at each other’s throats constantly and immune to seeking common ground (see Matt Taibbi’s brilliant book Hate, Inc.) — to rush to those areas where they viciously disagree. It provides a sense of purpose and a rush of endorphins and adrenaline which becomes highly and quickly addictive. Those who benefit most from this dreary, lowly dynamic are the key power centres, who most people end up ignoring because they find agreement about those people when they think about them at all. The one thing media outlets and power centres work hardest to prevent is citizens setting aside their endless war posture against one another to realize the common interest they have against the U.S. ruling class, which is composed of the establishment wings of both parties and particularly their corporate funders.

For around a decade now I've been having debates with friends as to whether US elites actually believe what they say with regards to exporting democracy or identity politics, or whether they are a cynical move that serve underlying interests that revolve around power and money.  I imagine that the answer is somewhere between the two, but the idea that such a massive and powerful global empire contains true believers is difficult for me to digest.  I look at Biden's foreign policy statement from earlier this month

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and then see Anne-Marie Slaughter's follow-up

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and I can't help but think how neo-colonialist this is.  This is the polar opposite of realpolitik; it is ideological and fanatical, akin to Lenin and Trotsky's World Revolution.  American power continues to be unrivalled, and US media has become so powerful that it is able to craft narratives totally divorced from reality that begin to impact globally based on America's unmatched power.  Are American elites becoming increasingly detached from reality?

I’ll share with you something I learned from the dark days when I was a litigator. After doing it a few years, I noticed that I invariably believed that all of my clients were the pure victims, and the people against whom we were litigating were pure villains. Rationally, I knew that was highly unlikely; the probability that the people who happened to walk through my doors to hire me to represent them were all angels, and those who they claim had wronged them were all devils was extremely remote, almost non-existent. But emotionally and instinctively, that’s how I approached each case; that I was not just advocating for them in order to be financially compensated — as a job — but I was on a righteous crusade, on the side of Good against Evil.

I realized that in order to be an effective advocate or propagandist — and there is some of both in being a lawyer — you have to get yourself to believe what you’re saying. That’s necessary not only to be effective (though it is that). It’s hard to persuade people of things if you consciously know it’s bullshit, because people will sense that on an intuitive level and that’s where most persuasion happens….but it’s also necessary to be able to believe you’re on the side of good, something which all humans other than absolute sociopaths and psychopaths want to believe. I’m sure there’s no shortage of each of those categories in elite U.S. ruling class circles, but most people operate by the same dynamic as the rest of us. So I think, yes, they do get themselves to believe what they’re saying, that it’s not consciously cynical.

I’d respect it more if it were consciously cynical. The fact that these imbecilic media cretins and career State Department and CIA functionaries actually believe themselves when they say that they’re deeply offended by the repression of Putin or the CCP or Iranian mullahs or Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — right after they get off a call about the latest U.S. arms shipments to the Saudi monarchs or cash transfers to Egyptian despots or support for a coup against the democratically elected government in Bolivia — is frightening. How could anyone believe that the U.S. actually opposes domestic repression? That kind of self-delusion means humans can get themselves to believe literally anything. That’s more frightening to me than if they were knowingly lying for power.

All of us have watched the coalescing of the Deep State with corporate media and Silicon Valley.  Where once the internet promised freedom, we only got 24 hour surveillance.  Individual privacy is a thing of the past, but this three-headed beast is something worse.  Your work with Snowden (a certain bureaucrat from Chicago that I know insists that he is a CIA agent) and Manning blew the lid off of NSA spying, and the hope was that this would shift the battle in favour of privacy. But the opposite has happened: the security state managed to piggyback the outrage over Trump to convince people that not only are the CIA and NSA the good guys, but that the use of these surveillance tools are required to be used to punish Americans who fall outside of accepted parameters of thought.  Congress is dusting off a mammoth domestic terrorism bill that has been waiting for the right moment to be introduced (with that 'right moment' being a simple riot on Capitol Hill, far from an 'insurrection'), that creates the conditions for possibly treating large swaths of the American public as little different than members of al-Qaida.  How fucked are Americans?

Tell your Chicago bureaucrat friend he’s an absolute idiot (impolite -ed.). Also, Manning didn’t reveal NSA spying; she revealed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and systematic state corruption around the world, so maybe it’s no wonder that you two have forged such a beautiful friendship.

If you look at the political history of the U.S. over the last century, much of it is driven by fear: fear of Communism, of Muslims, of black crime, of immigrants, of the Chinese and Japanese, of white nationalists, etc. Or, at the very least, that’s been the tactic to induce the population to acquiesce to having the U.S. be in a posture of endless war, highly militarized, putting more of its population in cages than any other in the world, torture, rendition, internment, etc. Even if some of those fears had a grain of truth, they have been constantly inflated and exploited to allow the state — and particularly the undemocratic components which operate with no accountability i.e. the security state agencies — to acquire virtually unlimited power in the name of protecting Americans from what they have induced them to irrationally fear.

When you train a population for generations to be impelled primarily by fear, it is very hard to reverse. It becomes a cultural instinct. I don’t think Americans realize how aberrational, rogue and bizarre it is to just go around constantly bombing different countries, because they’ve been trained for so long to accept that as normal (one of many reasons I found anti-Trump fanatics’ obsession with returning to “normalcy” so repellent). Again, if you look at our supposedly intractable political differences, they almost never involve those agencies. As a result, they keep cruising right along with few people paying attention, which is how they like it. The one thing Americans have legitimately to fear — their domestic ruling class — is, amazingly, the one thing they seem not to fear. More often than not, they worship the ones on their team like teenagers worship their favourite girl or boy band. I don’t even want to think about how many media people have pictures of Kamala Harris, Mitt Romney or Nancy Pelosi on their walls.

Civil libertarians like yourself were at the forefront of the battle against the anti-terrorism laws that grew out of the Global War on Terror.  It was a rather simple binary: the state was encroaching on rights and civil libertarians would defend these same rights from encroachment.  Easy-peasy.  Fast forward less than two decades later and we are seeing significant cracks in the edifice of civil libertarianism, even within the ACLU which has prided itself on adhering to its principles to the point of fanaticism.  There are calls to rescind accreditation from law schools that do not conform to the ever-changing rules of diversity.  There is also growing pressure applied to law firms to not take cases of 'problematic' types, with Donald Trump being the best example.  Protection from harm seems to be winning the battle against the defence of individual rights.  Is civil libertarianism dying in the USA, and if so, why?

Civil libertarianism is definitely dying in the places where it once thrived: the ACLU and various sectors (though not all) of left-wing politics. But that does not mean it is dying. The reason we’re seeing the ACLU and media organizations abandon all but the most partisan goals (with rare exceptions, largely due to the intrepid efforts of some old-school lawyers and journalists still lingering within them) is two-fold: 1) in the Trump era, they profited greatly by positioning themselves as anti-Trump #Resistance bulwarks, and are now imprisoned by their overwhelmingly liberal donor and subscriber base who will not tolerate any work or ideas that subvert their partisan beliefs and goals, and 2) the clear reality that many people of the Millennial and Gen Z generation (the former of whom are now entering mid-management and middle age) largely do not believe in values like free speech and due process, and older Gen X and Boomer managers in these institutions are petrified of them — because they can end careers (and love to do that) — and so are coerced into acquiescence.

In the past, the natural allies of civil libertarians were leftists (in opposing McCarthyism and the War on Terror, for instance) and libertarians. But now it is the right that is often singled out as targets of censorship and other forms of recrimination free of due process, so many on the right are re-discovering, or discovering for the first time, the necessity of these values. Ultimately, the only way these values will be preserved is if everyone across the spectrum defends them not just when they and their allies are persecuted, but in all instances — in fact, even more fervently when one’s political adversaries are targeted, because that is what elevates and enshrines these values as a sacrosanct principle rather than a weaponized tactic of convenience.
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Deep Inside Glenn

Both of us were recently named in the top 10 list of media heroes of 2020 by RT.  Word has it that President Putin personally insisted that both you and I both be included in it.  And both you and I are members of the Substack Master Race.  Substack has launched what some are claiming to be a Silver Age of Blogging, and have secured big names like yourself, Matt Taibbi, Scott Alexander, Curtis Yarvin, and myself, and lesser lights like Matty Yglesias.  On Substack we are allowed to not only act as our own content editors, but have the ability to interact directly with our massive built-in audiences without interference from above or through middle-men. We also have removed ourselves from the environment of psychological terror that now stalks offices such as those of the New York Times, where the Red Guard is constantly on the hunt for the next sacrificial lamb.  There is an audience for honest journalism and writing, free of the ever-growing constraints of conformist elitist culture.  What I'm asking you Glenn is: how much do you love the freedom that we now have?

Everyday, I thank the supreme power of the Universe for the creation of Substack. It is the most important human invention since penicillin, and maybe even better than that (I far prefer rapidly spreading bacterial infections to censorious editors and woke millennial newsrooms). Even with the degradation the platform suffered from the arrival of Matt Yglesias and his endless carousel of banal, calculated observations delivered in the whiniest, most petulant and nerdiest manner possible, the ability of writers to find an audience without the constraints plaguing most other institutions is vital. I’m certain that the tattletale journalism brigade at CNN, NBC and the New York Times will soon be targeting Substack with their hall-monitoring censorship demands — fortunately, for now, they seem to be spending most of their time in Clubhouse waiting for someone to say a bad word so they can tell the teacher on them — but it’s only a matter of time before they train their little guns onto Substack. I believe Substack is devoted to resisting those repressive forces. (read more)