Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:

Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

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While We Take a Break from Fighting Wars, We Fight Proxy Wars Cheered on By the News Media

Dave Smith:

I just I hate them so much and I really think they deserve it. And it's not just that they lie about everything. It's like they lie about everything and then they have the nerve to morally judge us. If you just watched even just the last few weeks of the Trump election, they're not in the business of reporting the news. They're totally just in the business of making you feel like you're a bad person if you don't fall in line with the regime.

America has this giant war machine, right? We're always at war. We're the most war-hungry country in the world. Even if we're taking a little bit of a break from a war, we'll fight two more proxy wars while we do that. America looks back at the 90s--Bill Clinton--as the time of peace and prosperity. We call it peace because we only fought a war in Serbia and had a blockade around Iraq, and we're bombing the crap out of Iraq, with a few other military interventions in there too. You know, the UN estimated that Bill Clinton's sanctions and bombing regime of Iraq--everyone just thinks of George H.W. Bush's war and W's war--but Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq and he had a full blockade around the country. The UN estimated that 500,000 children died of starvation or malnutrition due to the blockade. Now, I've heard people argue, by the way, that that number is exaggerated. Maybe it wasn't 500 that maybe it was only 100,000. So that's the time that we consider "peace" when we were just starving 100,000 children to death in Iraq. And everybody in the corporate media are in the business every single one of those wars. You've sold them. Everyone. My entire life. The media sold those wars and you're gonna morally look down on me. You're gonna judge me, motherfucker? You're in the business of baby murder. Get the fuck out of here. You're looking down, judging an American because maybe I'm going to vote for Donald Trump? Or maybe I dare to question the results of the last election? Fuck you!

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Why the U.S. Has Ukrainian Blood on its Hands: Jeffrey Sachs Offers this Primer

So many people I know proudly ignore the indisputable history of US meddling in Ukraine. Because they are ignorant, they deny that the US is responsible for the needless deaths of 600,000 Ukrainians and 70,000 Russians (and the squandering of the U.S. treasury). The Neocons in the Biden-Harris cabinet (including Biden and Harris) have blood on their hands, but you wouldn't know it because the corporate media has been covering it up and lying to you. The history of Ukraine did not begin in 2022. Please consider listening to Jeffrey Sachs for 10 minutes. These facts are not disputed by anyone who has been paying attention.

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Democrats Embracing the Warmongers

This wasn't on my Bingo card either . . .

The NYT did a mea culpa for its Iraq war lies:

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.

But now the NYT is back to lying with vigor:

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