CARLSON: These people are craven buffoons and stupid, obviously, but it is notable that they are all saying exactly the same thing. It makes you think maybe everybody is on the same team, and you’re on the wrong team. Is that true?
Glenn Greenwald has been watching carefully. He is an independent journalist who writes on “Substack,” and you should read his stuff because it is excellent. He joins us tonight.
Glenn, thanks so much for coming on. What do you make of this? Is this realignment or was it a previous alignment? What are we looking at?
GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: I think it’s worth first of all remembering and I know that you remember, I started writing about politics in 2005, so I do how liberals used to be overflowing with so much hatred and contempt for George Bush. They frequently compared him to Adolf Hitler, claimed his family was crucial to the rise of the Nazi Party, claimed something I agree with that he’s a war criminal who belongs at The Hague.
He said he was so filled with racism that he purposely allowed New Orleans to drown because so many black people lived there, and every liberal I know believes that George Bush stole at least one election and maybe even two both in 2000 and 2004.
So basically, they concocted a person you can’t get much worse than that and suddenly, in the Trump years, as he began lightly criticizing Trump, they began saying things like, you know what, I didn’t agree with George Bush all the time, but I never questioned his character and his values and his patriotism.
But this weekend, it turned into this love fest. I mean, they dripped with effusive praise for him because what he said there that essentially the 9/11 attacks that he was there to commemorate are the same as the three- hour riot on January 6th, and more importantly that the people who did 9/11, al-Qaeda are similar or identical to kind of the same foul spirit as he put it, Trump supporters essentially and that they ought to be treated the same, a war on terror against al-Qaeda, now a domestic war on terror against your fellow citizens.
It is music to the ears of American liberals because they want nothing more than a new domestic war on terror than treating their political adversaries like the Bush administration treated al-Qaeda.
CARLSON: It’s such a lunatic and extreme thing to say, to compare. It’s like Hitler comparisons. I mean, to compare people whose politics you don’t like in the United States, who haven’t killed anybody so far as I know to Osama bin Laden, why is that not instantly disqualifying? Just because of the overstatement.
GREENWALD: The reason is because it is a political priority and I probably have spent more time reporting on this this year than any other topic. It is a political priority of the political class to launch a new domestic war on terror.
You can go back to before January 6 to November of 2020 and see articles in “The Wall Street Journal” where Joe Biden was saying, my top priority as President once I get inaugurated, will be to combat domestic extremism. Once January 6th happened, that became the pretext for doing it, like a lot of neocons wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11, and then 9/11 happened and then they got to use that as the pretext. That’s what they’re using January 6th.
It’s demented to compare 9/11 and January 6, but it’s so central to the agenda of the security state, the Democratic Party to essentially initiate a surveillance regime, a detention regime against people on the right who are against the establishment, and they’re already doing it.
They put people on the no-fly list, the kind of defining feature of the first war on terror, want to do new legislation that gives the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. new powers, spending lots more money on law enforcement. This war on terror is crucial to them.
CARLSON: I think you’re exactly right, and it’s not just going to be people on the right, it will — it’s any dissent, anyone who opposes the regime, I think that would include you, too, Glenn Greenwald so good luck.
Thank you for coming on tonight.
GREENWALD: Thanks, Tucker.
