All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 7, 2017 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:14:38
20170107_The_Jimmy_Dore_Show_1-6-17
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hello.
Jimmy, Mitt Romney here.
The Mitt Man.
Mittens.
NetRom.
Mittany.
Hey, do you know what Mitt is short for?
No.
Milton.
Get out of here.
But wouldn't that be Milt then?
My son's name is Tag.
That's short for Karen.
That's how we do things here in Utah.
Or the Ta, as we call it.
You did the T to the Ta, babe.
I'm hit to it.
Hip hat flaming on the flim flam jam, Hepcat.
Oh, Jesus.
By the way, Happy New Year, Mitt.
Thanks.
Happy year 14.
Year 14.
I'm sorry.
I'm speaking to one of the uninitiated.
Okay, 2017 or whatever.
Hey, assholes, remember 2012?
That's when I said Russia's our biggest threat back in 2012.
I said it.
And Obama made fun of me for that.
Yeah.
Yeah, you did, and I remember that.
Do you still believe Russia's our biggest threat?
Of course not, because I want a job in the Trump administration.
Head missionary.
Oh, okay.
You know, I'm confused.
I'm very sick today, Jimmy.
I should let you know.
I'm not feeling well at all.
I hear you.
You know, I'm a little confused, though, Mitt.
In 2012, you accused Russia of being our biggest geopolitical threat, whatever that means.
That's exactly what the Democrats are saying about Russia now.
I know.
Even I'm confused, and I'm a Mormon.
Have you read our Bible?
It's the most confusing piece of gibberish I've ever read, and I'm a Republican, I think.
Let me put it this way.
Both of us are either wrong or we're right.
Either way, it's a good way to ignore global warming.
And the fact that you lose or still let Chuck Schumer walk around free.
No shit.
No shit.
I respect the Obama of the past because he was right then about Russia not being a threat.
But the Romney of the present does not agree with the Romney of the past.
Let's keep America for Americans or those who pay taxes.
Fuck, now I'm confused again.
I barely pay taxes, right?
It's time to repeal and replace Romney Care with, I mean, Obamacare, with Romney Care.
Fuck.
No, wait.
America for Americans.
Wasn't your father born in Chihuahua?
Why do you pung dolts keep bringing up the dog thing?
It wasn't a Chihuahua.
It was a big dog.
And he kept vomiting all over my Uriah Heap 8 tracks.
That doesn't make for a fun family outing, okay?
That's where we stuck him in a cage in the car roof.
He was grateful to be there.
No, I mean your father.
He was born in Mexico.
We don't see it that way, Jimmy.
He was born in a Mormon colony that's still within the sphere of influence of weird American religious cults and therefore comes under United States protection.
I'm just like you, Jimmy.
I attended Cranbrook Private Boys Prep School.
Then I quickly joined the pep squad and terrorized gay kids in what could only be described as classic Freudian projection.
Nah.
I wasn't particularly athletic, but I did jerk off a lot.
In the Mormon religion, that's not a sin as long as you don't think about another human when you do it.
Then, like you, I spent two and a half years in France as a missionary spreading the gospel of liberty and equality.
But didn't your church ban black people from entering your temples?
Define ban.
Black people weren't allowed in Mormon church for over a century, Mitt.
Define century.
And define weren't.
And define define.
Never mind, Mitt.
Look, don't try and pull any of that 47% kill trip on me, fella.
Just because Brigham Young called slavery a divine institution doesn't mean he was a racist.
And besides, I get all my news from Lester Holt.
He's a very well-kept, non-threatening colored fellow.
And I'm all for that.
Look at my record.
You get your news from Lester Holt?
Oh, sure.
Lester has lots of informative stories, mostly about the weather.
He uses words like slammed and hard front and devastation.
Very compelling.
This is followed by a nice story about ice cream or an amputee overcoming adversity by not whining to the government for helping purchase his fake arms and legs.
Stuff like that.
Really?
Yeah.
Yesterday, two toddlers got trapped underneath a big piece of furniture.
It was a learning moment.
Did they survive?
I don't know.
Anyway, always bolt your furniture to the wall, Jimmy.
You never know when your nitty-cam may catch something dangerous happening to your toddlers and open up a whole new world of monetizing personal tragedy on YouTube.
So nothing about climate change or the rise of American fascism?
There was this cute white girl, blonde, but that's not important, who started her own ice cream business, even though she once had a brain tumor.
That's pretty inspiring.
Yes, Jimmy, you could say that ice cream story was a real scoop.
Laugh, you stupid fucker.
My people will come to your house and make you piss at Mason chars like we did Howard Hughes.
What?
Nothing.
See everybody at the inauguration ceremony for the big pussy grab.
Remember, unions are our greatest geopolitical threat.
Hail Satan.
It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
The show for Glucky.
The kind of people that are comments may be on tearing down our nation.
It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper save.
It's hard to talk when you're T-Value.
And now, here's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's Jimmy Dore.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's Jimmy Dore show.
I'm sick with the flu.
It's my ninth day of being sick.
Everybody's hoping, everybody's hoping for the best, aren't we?
Listen, I want to remind everybody, January 30th, before we get to the rest of the show, January 30th is our next live show.
People are loving the live shows, so I'm giving you a heads up.
There's a link for tickets over at JimmyDoorComedy.com.
It's January 30th, 8 p.m.
Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank.
And we sold it out early last time, so a lot of people were disappointed.
So get your tickets now.
There's a link for tickets over at JimmyDoorComedy.com.
That's January 30th.
That's a Monday.
We'll see you there.
It's going to be a laugh ride, as always.
Okay.
Coming up on today's show, two great interviews.
Glenn Greenwald.
We had a conversation with him last week.
I'm going to share with everybody.
Very insightful and very thrilling to have a guy like that on the show.
Also, Nick Smith, you know him from the Fight for 15 in Virginia.
He's a 21-year-old sage, and he's laying down some more knowledge.
In fact, we have an extended podcast today so you could listen to the Nick Smith interview.
There's a lot coming up.
We got Harrison Ford is going to call in, and he's going to talk about his relationship with Carrie Fisher.
So let's not waste any more time.
Let's get to this week's show.
everybody, we're really excited to have our guest, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept.
Listen, I'm so thrilled to have you on.
I really am.
I was aware of you way before Edward Snowden, and I loved your writing then.
And in fact, I even reached out to you once to get you on the show, and you responded, and I never got back because I was just scared that I would look dumb.
So here we are.
I got over my fear.
Have I said anything dumb yet so far?
No, it's pretty dumb.
I just want to ask you, but I'm really nervous about the state of journalism.
Like, I always understood that right-wing journalists weren't honest actors.
But now that seems with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and the presidency of Barack Obama, I find the same thing happening to half the lefty press, if not more.
And I find that very disconcerting because if the lefty press is going to be defending power instead of exposing it, that's like the death knell for our democracy.
What do you think?
It's interesting because I actually had an up close, really first-row seat watching the transformation of what we might call the liberal part of the media or the left-wing part of the media, because when I began writing about politics and started my market, it was 2005.
And so there was this kind of unity among everybody in the Democratic Party and to the left of it against the horrors of George Bush, Dick Cheney, the whole war on terror they had ushered in.
And it was very much adversarial to power.
It was sort of the animating force was anger over the media for not being critical enough of Democrats.
And in fact, those are the people, Democrats and liberals who built my platform, who enabled me to have a voice because they were saying, oh, look, Glenn Greenwald's so fantastic.
Look at this great critique of George Bush he wrote again today.
And starting, I guess I would put it right around, I don't know, maybe January 20th, 2009, the whole world changed.
And a huge segment of that Democratic liberal commentariat, by no means all of it, but a huge segment of it, devoted itself no longer to being adversarial to those in power, but to being servants of those in power, to no longer critiquing the Democratic Party, but attacking anybody who critiqued the Democratic Party, whether from the left or from the right.
And so it co-opted a huge part of what had been this kind of liberal media.
And they were defending Obama, not just in terms of his liberal policies, but all of his policies.
So he'd use the CIA to overthrow leaders and assassinate people without trial using drones, and they would cheer for that.
He would be close to Wall Street, and they would cheer for that.
It became this almost mindless project where they ended up supporting virtually everything that he did.
And that put them in bed with all the factions that for a long time, they not only claimed, but I think conceived of themselves as opposed to.
This election really kind of, I don't know, I feel badly about it.
Like, I feel the same way I did.
I had the same feeling during this campaign as I did in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Like, I couldn't believe we're doing this.
I can't believe we're doing this.
And I can't believe that the media is going along with this and they're not talking about what they should be talking about.
Where do you see going forward?
Like, we have people, there are good people out there still doing real journalism.
Unfortunately, most of the country doesn't get to see, read, or hear any of it.
And what do you see going?
Like, for instance, like, people don't even know that MSNBC is owned by Comcast, which has been voted one of the worst companies in the world to ever work for.
And they're pro-TPP.
And they fired Phil Donahue because he was against the Iraq war and they never bring him back on.
But all the people who were for the Iraq war and got it wrong, they're all over the TV.
So where do you see going forward when even what's considered our lefty outlets are co-opted by corporations?
What do you think?
I see doom in our future.
What do you see?
You know, I think it's hard to say for this reason.
I mean, what I just described having happened, I sort of ended my story with the advent of the Obama presidency, but you're right, it did get worse.
And it got worse for a couple of reasons.
Number one was that the candidate that they then rallied behind, who was Hillary Clinton, to the extent that she had differences with Obama at all, it was almost always to the extent that she was to the right of him.
Her critiques were, even though he bombed seven Muslim countries in the last seven years, that wasn't enough.
He should have been also involved more in Syria.
He should have been more aggressive against ISIS, all of that.
So she was always to the right of him in critical ways.
Beyond that, the primary ended up being this ideological contest between a sort of traditional FDR kind of New Deal socialist or liberal who now, because of the shift, is on the very left edge of the party, which is Bernie Sanders, against not just Hillary Clinton, but Bill Clinton, the Clintons, who kind of pioneered the idea that in order for Democrats to win, they have to move to the right.
They have to corporatize the party.
They have to move away from labor, move away from populism, and kind of get into bed with Wall Street.
And so in order to be a Clinton supporter, which most people in the establishment liberal media were, you had to embrace a whole litany of hideous right-wing policies that Bill Clinton had enacted and Hillary Clinton had defended in the 90s.
And then the ones that Hillary Clinton, up until today, defends as well as her window into how she does politics.
And so I think the fact that she was the right of Obama, the fact that this primary was an ideological split moved all of them even further into the lapse of these powerful factions, which means, you know, you have now not only a Republican Party that's overtly devoted to that, but also now a Democratic Party, the establishment link of which is as well.
As far as the media is concerned, I think it really is inextricably linked.
I think corporations of the Comcast are pretty comfortable with the kind of range of opinion that, say, goes from like Harry Reid and Mother Jones to kind of Jeb Bush and National Review.
And anything outside of those realms, meaning even Bernie Sanders is sort of outside of that realm, but certainly independent media.
And then on the right, you know, certainly like a Trump figure.
Glenn Beck got jettisoned from Fox, even though his ratings were very high because he wasn't within this range.
Anything outside of that is what makes them very uncomfortable.
So within that range, you can be a Democratic Party hack.
You can sort of be like an Nancy Pelosi liberal.
You can be, you know, a Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio kind of figure, and everyone will be completely fine with you.
That's the demand that it makes.
And, you know, I think the reason why I say I'm not sure what's in our future is because I do think with the arrival of Trump, nobody knows what Trump is really going to be.
And as a result, I think there's going to be this kind of scrambling that you already see and a realignment of factions.
So you see, you know, establishment liberals very comfortable, for example, with neocons joining not just in their opposition to Trump, but in their recognition that they actually have a lot more in common than they were ever willing to admit previously.
And so if Trump does some really hideous things, I think you'll probably see a unifying of these factions on the left that have been worrying for the last few years, especially the last 18 months.
But if he kind of is this, you know, ideologically ambiguous figure doing things like getting rid of TPP and genuinely like unraveling The free trade and globalism framework as he's promised to do, reducing the extent to which the U.S. does regime change, along with some horrible standard conservative policies.
I don't know quite how that's all going to play out.
I think that's going to be interesting.
So I had this theory before the election that if Hillary Clinton was elected, it would get even worse for the left, that in fact, that Congress would turn Sol even more strongly to the Republicans and off-year elections.
And then coming 2020, we would get a guy who was worse than Trump, but smooth on the outside and more evil on the inside, because Trump isn't an ideologue.
He's just a maniac or a narcissist who kind of like got elected as a goof, it looked like to me.
But so my theory was it would be worse and then in four years, things would be, we'd be so wiped out.
And then that comes the redistricting in 2020.
So this, in a sense, gives the left a chance to regroup.
It pulls the ugly face off of neoliberal policy.
So now everybody can be upset at the stuff that we've already been doing under Barack Obama.
Like, I think if it was Donald Trump who did Libya and then is doing Syria and all, I think people would be more upset.
If it was Donald Trump, like that, who was ramping up NATO forces on the Russian border, I think people would be more upset.
So that's what I'm hoping.
I've talked to people who they go, well, I didn't know who was in Barack Obama's cabinet, but I know every appointment that Donald Trump is making.
So we're, see, he's being overly scrutinized.
And that's a good thing.
Things have gotten so bad that the Democrats are so much like the things we're supposed to be opposing that if we don't make a clean break now, it's going to be even worse.
What do you think of that?
Well, I definitely think that you're going to see something now that you haven't seen for the last eight years, which is an actual anti-war sentiment among Democrats.
You know, you haven't seen any of that as Barack Obama has gone around the world bombing and droning and invading.
There's been barely a peep on the Democratic side of the ledger.
And not just that, but his civil liberties abuses his continuation in a lot of cases his intensification of the Bush-Cheney framework for how terrorism should be dealt with.
And the corresponding civil liberties abuses have not only been overlooked, but endorsed and sanctioned as polling data shows.
So I think Democrats are suddenly going to rediscover anti-war beliefs.
I think they're suddenly going to rediscover their alleged belief in civil liberties.
I think they're going to suddenly, you're going to see re-emerging this kind of populism of what Trump's in bed with corporations and Wall Street and all those things that they just kind of put into the like sort of a nap time for the last eight years because their overriding objective was to cheer for whatever Barack Obama did.
The problem is, is that the problem is twofold with that is number one, I saw in the, you know, as I went from the Bush years to the Obama years, how worthless conditional or circumstantial beliefs are as espoused by the Democratic Party.
It makes no difference if they're only going to have these anti-war, pro-civil liberties, or anti-corporatist views when it comes time to use them opportunistically and politically, but not when it really matters, namely when they can hold their own leaders accountable.
If they're just partisan cudgels to beat Republicans over the head with, which they've demonstrated is all they are, I don't really think they have that much worth.
Everybody knows that Democrats are going to oppose Trump.
And if they're doing it really hypocritically, I think it's going to be kind of irrelevant.
The other issue is, I actually worry that Democrat, first of all, I just have to say that I think like genuinely, I'm not just saying this for a fact or to be dramatic or whatever.
I actually think that there is the Democrats have gone completely insane since November 8th.
Yes.
Like completely divorced from reason, that kind of collective mania.
Their obsession, for example, with accusing everyone they can get their hands on of being a Kremlin stooge or a follower of Vladimir Putin or a Russian agent or whatever is so far off the deep end of derangement.
And it's also incredibly politically stupid because Americans just don't wake up in the morning scared of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
And the stuff that the Democrats are talking about has no relationship whatsoever to any to the return path that they might have to any kind of relevance or power.
So, you know, if they continue on this kind of road of insanity where they just get over the fact that they lost to someone like Trump, where they're angry at everybody, where they blame everyone and don't take any responsibility for themselves, then all bets are off.
I mean, I actually think that Trump will just be able to do whatever he wants.
Like, I don't want to see Democrats completely fractured and crazy that way because they are needed to serve as some kind of pushback against Trump.
So let's assume that they find their way back to something like resembling minimal levels of cogency and reason.
You know, I think that what I worry about is that they're just going to be reflexively opposed to anything Trump does.
So for example, if Trump blocks TPP, they're suddenly going to start finding their reasons why TPP is a good thing.
If he refuses to interguing for intervention, how can you let Syrian rebels suffer under Assad?
How can you let the Ukrainians linger without assistance under Putin?
They're going to just oppose whatever he advocates.
And politically, he can lure them into terrible positions that way.
And I just think substantively, they might even get worse because they'll just refuse to go along with the actually good things that he does, regardless of whatever warped or malignant motives he might have for doing them.
Yeah, I literally, I saw a journalist from Al Jazeera.
He was interviewing Noam Chomsky, and he said, you know, Trump is all for making friends with Russia, but do we want to do it this way?
And Chomsky was like, are you crazy?
Any reason to avoid a nuclear war is a good idea.
I did not vote for Hillary Clinton, and I couldn't bring myself to do it because I can't vote for a war candidate like that.
And to me, I remember when being for the Iraq war was a disqualifier, and then all of a sudden, ignoring the Iraq war became the progressive thing to do.
Did that freak you out as much as it did me?
Right.
So, okay, first of all, it is very strange to say that the most significant decision, political decision of the generation, of her career, not only did she get fundamentally wrong because she went around arguing and advocating for this war, but she was a really vocal booster of it.
And she was a vocal booster of it for a good amount of time, even once it became apparent that weapons of mass destruction were a pretext, which she had invoked and said were there.
So I think that the sentiment among Democrats is, look, she already got punished for that by losing in 2007 to Obama.
So she is sort of like the sin is cleansed.
So, you know, we don't want to hold this against her forever.
Okay, that is repulsive, right?
I mean, hundreds of thousands of people die to write that off as just sort of like a nice mistake that you kind of grow beyond, I think is really amoral.
But let's leave that to the side.
If she really had learned a lesson as a result of what she did with the Iraq war, had really come to terms with just the wrongness of putting faith in intelligence claims and being extremely skeptical of the use of American power As a result of having gone through that process, I would be more receptive to the idea that she had evolved, that she had become this different figure as a result of having done that.
She didn't.
She did not.
She was the one who led the way in saying Obama to intervene using NATO in Libya, which turned out to be a heinous disaster for the people of that country.
She also was extremely critical and still is critical of Obama's refusal to have done more to intervene directly in the attempt to remove Bashar Assad in Syria.
In fact, Obama did allow the CIA to wage a proxy war for a couple of years, which turned into a disaster and he refused to really unleash them.
And she was obviously critical of that, had intended to clearly wanted to impose a no-fly zone, which would be incredibly risky and dangerous, given that it would entail direct military confrontation or the high possibility of it with Russia in Syria.
And so not only didn't she learn her lesson, you know, she sort of, in words, acknowledged what she had to acknowledge to survive politically, which was that she was wrong about Iraq.
But not only didn't she learn a lesson, she seems to have become even more of a militarist, more of a believer in the necessity and justification of the use of force.
And so, you know, I think that the idea of just ignoring or pretending that Libya, that Iraq never happened, is particularly intolerable given that it's still very much a part of her worldview.
Yeah, that was the thing.
I had Robert share on the show and he said that she has shown the capacity to learn nothing.
She has no growth.
It's obvious in how she's conducted herself.
So I've been talking a lot about Syria on the show, and I've come to the realization that everything John Kerry, Barack Obama, and our UN ambassador says about Syria is not true.
Why are we in Syria?
Why do you think we're in Syria?
And why do you think Barack Obama keeps lying about it?
I think Syria is an extremely complicated topic.
And it's not simple.
There's no, you know, Monikian morality script that you can use of who's good and who's evil that clarifies things.
I think that what happened in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring in the kind of first two years of the rebellion against Assad is much different than what has happened in the last two or three years.
And I think U.S. policy has changed as well.
So I think that there was a genuine uprising of certain factions in Syria against Assad, which is understandable given that he and his five imposed really tyrannical power for decades now.
They've been brutal and oppressive in lots of ways, although you could make the case not nearly as bad up until that point as a lot of close U.S. allies.
But certainly if you're a Syrian of certain religions or certain sects, you can certainly understand why they would want to do an uprising against Assad.
And once that instability happened as part of the Arab Spring, which is what the genesis was, a whole group of other actors began to see opportunity in Syria to advance their interest, including Israel, including Iran, including Russia, which is a longtime ally of Syria, and the United States.
And I do think that the CIA, for a year and a half or two years, and the Obama administration believed that removing Assad, a kind of regime change policy like they had for Iraq in Libya, was something that ought to be pursued, that that would advance U.S. interest.
It would remove an ally of Iran, which became the key prism through which the United States views everything, the Saudi-Iran competition.
And of course, the Saudis are a close ally, so weakening Iran helps us.
It helps Israel.
I think removing Assad, installing a U.S. leader that the U.S. could do business with, even though they get a lot of business with Assad, including sending people that they wanted tortured to Assad, but he was complicated and he was kind of never a reliable ally the way they like dictators to be.
So I think originally the idea was let's remove him.
Once that didn't work because he had too many powerful allies and because Obama never really committed to it, what they did after that was kind of the worst of all worlds, which is Obama allowed the CIA to continue to arm certain factions in Syria, some of which were clearly aligned with, if not actually al-Qaeda, and others of which were kind of whatever you want to call them, like pliable or moderate or whatever.
By this point, the citizen uprising had really fell into the background, and now it was just proxy groups and foreign fighters and terrorist organizations fighting against Assad.
And I think that then what Obama did was he allowed enough weapons to flow in that were dangerous, keeping the civil war kind of going, but never allowing any side to win.
But then at the same time, the real use of force became kind of, if not for the benefit of an alliance with Assad, for his benefit.
You know, this counterterrorism, let's bomb ISIS, let's bomb the parts of al-Qaeda that we, for whatever reason, don't like.
So it's been this constant intervention almost on all sides of the conflict with very muddled objectives.
Other than, I guess, what I would say is to just keep the war going, but not removing Assad.
So it's almost like ensuring that people continue to die, ensuring that people continue to live under war without any strategic goal.
But it's almost like the worst of all worlds that the United States ultimately ended up committing to.
Oh January 30th is the next live Jimmy Door show.
Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com, get your tickets.
It's a Monday.
We'll see you there.
It's at Burbank at the Flappers Comedy Club, January 30th.
We'll see you there.
Right now, big thanks to everybody who thinks about the Jimmy Doer show.
When they buy something from Amazon.com, you know, we don't encourage anybody to shop on Amazon, but we say if you're going to shop there anyway, have some of that money go to a good progressive cause like the Jimmy Dore show.
It's real easy.
How do I do it?
Yes, the next time you want to buy something from Amazon, you swing by JimmyDoorComedy.com.
You click on our Amazon box.
It takes you to Amazon.
Then when you buy something, they send us money.
It's just that easy.
It is just that easy.
A lot of people, what they do is when they click on our Amazon box, it takes them to Amazon.
They bookmark that page.
So then they have to come back to JimmyDoorComedy.com.
You see what I'm saying?
You know how bookmarks work.
Thanks, everybody who does that.
It's a great way to help support the show that doesn't cost you any money, and it doesn't change the way you shop.
All right, we got a phone call from Harrison Ford's going to call in.
And Nick Smith, our interview is going to be picking up in the second half.
More from Glenn Greenwald.
Let's get to it right now.
Let's get to it.
Jimmy and Tarrison Ford from the movies.
So Carrie Fisher died, and I'm pretty bummed about it.
I mean, I knew her for a long time.
We did those Star Wars movies together and all that.
And of course, we had sex for like three months.
We would have had sex for longer, but she was, you know, super bonkers.
I'm not talking out of school.
I mean, she talked a lot about being crazy.
It kind of became her thing there for a while.
And that ugly dog she brought with her everywhere, who, between you and me, shit pretty much everywhere.
And then she always had that weird friendship with her mom.
What's her name with the red hair?
She died too, you know, which is more than just more weirdness from that family.
I mean, I went to dinner there once.
Jesus, there was chanting, and Debbie Reynolds splashed me her tits.
And they served red wine with fish.
It was fucking crazy.
I'll tell you, sex with Carrie was pretty great.
I mean, look, Jimmy, if you ever get a chance to have sex with a hundred-pound woman in a manic cycle, you take it.
It's everything you'd hope in more.
I mean, I've had sex with a lot of tiny, crazy women, but this was like the Ferrari of tiny, crazy women.
But you definitely want to get out before the hyper-manic part of the cycle starts getting going, unless you don't mind having your pets mysteriously murdered.
Am I kidding?
I'm even going to kind of miss that about Carrie.
Anyway, I got to go shoot a movie in which a 73-year-old man does stunts because I don't even know anymore.
Carry forever, man.
Carry forever, man.
So, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that Qatar and Iran are in competition to send a natural gas pipeline through Syria to bring fossil fuels to Europe.
And Russia sells a lot of fossil fuels to Europe, and that's why they don't want.
So, I think there is something to that.
Also, you know what?
But maybe you could explain to me why would Israel want to get rid of a secular dictator in favor of what are we going to put every time we get rid of one?
We, you know, it seems like we're going to get something worse and someone who's even more hostile to them.
Because right now, the people were the rebels are all Sharia law people.
That's who we're backing over Assad in Syria.
So, if they actually, if Assad actually got taken out, what are we going to replace it with?
Okay, so first of all, I just have to object a little bit to the premise.
I don't think all I don't think all the rebels are Sharia law to begin with.
I think a lot of them are ordinary Syrians who want basic civic freedom or who are otherwise depressed for religious and sectarian reasons.
I also think that we have to be a little bit careful not to adopt this kind of like, I don't want to say Islamophobic, but this kind of like war on terror framework where just because a Muslim is religious or believes in Sharia law, it somehow means they're kind of like terrorists that we ought to just view as bad.
I mean, there's a lot of religious Muslims who believe in some version of Sharia law, who are not looking to harm people or kill people who also want to just have religious freedoms and be out of the thumb of tyranny.
So, but a lot of the more effective fighters against Assad are what we've been calling for 15 years al-Qaeda or terrorist.
Oh, I don't know.
As far as Israel is concerned, I think Israel in the beginning, I think Israel has sort of tracked what the U.S. did, which is in the beginning, I do think that Israel and neocons of the U.S., who do their bidding to a large extent, wanted Assad gone.
And the reason they wanted Assad gone was because Israeli leaders are obsessed with Iran and weakening Iran.
It's one of the most underdiscussed facts that Israel has now a pretty good working alliance with the Gulf states, with the Sunni states like Saudi Arabia and Emirates and Qatar and Kuwait.
Even though it's not public, even though those governments continue to sort of have an official policy of hating Israel and not recognizing their existence, operationally, they're kind of allies.
So I think they want to see those governments strengthened at the expense of Iran and removing a critical ally like Assad from this country that does, for the reasons you said and others, have incredible geopolitical importance was of interest to Israel.
I think now the fear that you just articulated, which is what comes after Assad, is it ISIS?
Is it al-Qaeda?
Is it, you know, some utter fracturing that spills over into the borders of other countries, that I do think there's a sense that that's worse.
And that's why I don't think the U.S. and Israel any longer are truly committed to removing Assad.
I think they've come to terms with the fact that Assad is going to stay and probably view that.
Certainly Trump views that.
And I think even Obama have used that as the beast bad of the options.
So I don't know if you get as frustrated as I do about this.
We just touched on this topic of Sharia and Islam and people being afraid of it.
And I saw you recently on Bill Maher's show, which I, you know, I love Bill Maher.
But he seems to fall into that trap of whenever the United States does something, it's okay because we're not religious crazies.
But whenever someone who happens to be of a different religion, a Muslim, that it's all because of that and there's something wrong.
And they can dismiss our imperialism and all the wars.
I mean, right now, Barack Obama's bombing seven different countries.
Now we just went into Yemen and Somalia.
We're still in Afghanistan 15 years on.
Five more years, we get a gold watch.
And then we did Iraq, Libya.
I mean, we're doing more destruction than anybody else in the world.
Chomsky calls our drone program the biggest terrorist program in the world.
So the excuse, are you flummicks like I am with the ease that smart, intelligent people who are usually on the right side of the issues are able to dismiss America's imperialism and our violence because it's quote unquote not religious?
Does that blow your mind like it does mine?
It used to.
I feel like they have figured it out just by looking into the face of that evil, ugly monster for so many years.
I feel like I've been able to apprehend its soul.
It's really, I think there's like a huge irony at the heart of it all.
What makes, you know, you use this phrase religious crazies, which Bill Maher likes and the people that he reads that he thinks are smart who influence him to think these things, what they say too, this idea of religious crazies.
What makes that behavior crazy, this kind of religious fanaticism, is really it's a form of tribalism.
It says the people who are in our group, who share our defining beliefs, who are on our side of conflicts, are justified in doing anything because ultimately we're the ones who are right.
We're the ones who are the victims.
We're the ones who are battling for good.
And therefore, whatever we do, we blow up pizza shops.
We put bombs on buses.
We fly planes into buildings.
We drown people in cages.
All of those things are justified because our ultimate cause is good and we're fighting against people who are doing evil.
That's tribalism.
That's a really primitive instinct that human beings have.
That's one of the organizing principles of humanity from the time we began sort of having society.
And what people like Bill Maher are saying is exactly the same thing.
It's just the other side of the coin.
They're saying my tribe, the tribe into which I was born, the tribe that has defining beliefs that I share, We're justified in doing anything because the other tribe is the bad evil tribe.
And we have to, we're victimized by them.
We have to defend against them.
And so no matter what we do, we napalm countries and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
We invade and occupy them.
We bomb them.
We prop up their dictators.
We set up torture camps around the world.
We put them in prison with no charges for 15 years and counting.
Whatever it is that we do, we're justified in doing it.
It may not be the right thing to do, but we ultimately have good intentions.
And so it's not like we're trying to harm anybody.
We're just trying to defend ourselves in our way of life.
So the rationale of the two sides, you know, ISIS and Al-Qaeda and whatever Bill Maher might call religious crazies, and Bill Maher and all of his, you know, imperialism-loving atheist mentors, they all sound exactly the same to me.
They're all pure primitive tribalists.
And their only difference is they just belong to different tribes.
And so, you know, no, I don't think it's surprising.
I think they've never moved beyond that primitive instinct of removing themselves from the group into which they were born and to which they were to which they belong and critically assessing it.
They just are like people who are born into a college community where college football is all the rage and are taught to love this team and they love it through childhood and then they get to be adults and they go to the games and they cheer and they could never really articulate a reason why they're doing that other than the fact that this is what they were taught to do from childhood.
That's their team.
And that's what Bill Maher and ISIS are like.
Not to say that they're comparable in every way, but certainly in the specific way that you've asked me about it, I think they are.
I really appreciate you spending this much time and I'll let you go soon.
So let me just get you to this question because I keep trying to make the point that if Donald Trump is as crazy as everyone fears on the left and is a maniac and all this stuff, why wouldn't Barack Obama try to cut off some of the damage ahead of time?
Like, why wouldn't he try to reinstate, I don't know, habeas corpus, right?
So people don't even know that.
So if he's so crazy, why wouldn't Barack Obama be rushing around to end these wars?
Why wouldn't he be like, hey, we can't let Trump take over Syria, Afghanistan, and we can't let him.
We got to end these wars.
Of course, the answer is you can't just stop killing people willy-nilly.
You got to take some time to do that.
You got to wind it down slow when you're killing people.
That's the thing I don't understand.
And why isn't anybody in the media even bringing it up like habeas corpus or the surveillance state?
So he's handing over to Donny Tynehan's Trump the ability to look at my emails, your emails, all our phone calls, all our text messages.
That means Rudy Giuliani.
That means Steve Bannon.
That means all those people can have all the access to all of our private information.
And nobody seems to be screaming about it.
And Barack Obama seems a little too comfortable with the idea of a Donald Trump presidency.
There's this vast difference between what Democrats are saying they believe Donald Trump is and what he will do, and then what Democrats are doing.
So not only is Obama not dismantling any of these unlimited authoritarian powers that he and George Bush spent 15 years together or in succession building up and then fortifying, but he's actually been strengthening some of them even since we found out Donald Trump was going to be president.
Just today, the Obama Justice Department defended this expansive definition of the surveillance powers that the president uses.
So let's say, okay, Obama is just an institutionalist.
He believes in the executive branch.
He's been co-opted.
That's why he's not going to dismantle these powers.
He believes in what about all of the liberal pundits and Democratic Party operatives who have spent, you know, six weeks now saying that Trump is a fascist, Trump is Hitler, Trump's going to open camps, Trump's going to dismantle our democracy, who said we should do a recount to see if there was cheating, who wanted to do an electoral college coup.
Why aren't they demanding that Obama dismantle these powers?
And more to the point, like, you know, they're calling themselves the resistance.
Like they're co-opting, you know, the language of like actual self-sacrificing, risky, putting your body on the line, civil disobedience of the type they've generally sporned.
But they're not actually doing any of the things that constitute resistance.
I mean, why aren't they in the street getting arrested?
And why aren't they planning mass disruptive civil disobedience?
And I think the reason is because they're just, they're spouting bullshit and they know it.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Glenn, you didn't see Keith Olbermann out in North Dakota.
You didn't see Keith Lowerman in North Dakota at Dapple?
I did.
I thought that was him.
Maybe it was Josh Fox.
I'm not sure.
I can tell you the funniest tweet I think I've ever read in my entire life was, I don't know if you've seen it, but like Keith Oberman, who, you know, along with like David Frum and like Republican consultants who helped George Bush get elected and Clara Jeffrey and Nira Tandon.
They're the leaders of our resistance.
So they're the leaders that are.
And I think I think Keith Oberman's like actually like the leader.
So anyway, there's this, you know, he gives his like completely deranged broadcast where he does his baritone and talks about like, you, sir, are a fascist, Nazi, whatever.
And the logo, the motto for the show is him wrapped in the American flag.
And then it says like the resistance.
Somebody on Twitter said he's calling himself the resistance, but his body posture is much more like the people who end up wrapping themselves in the blankets that EMTs give you after a traumatic car crash.
Like he's sitting on the side of the road, hunted over with a flag wrapped about like, I'm the resistance, but he actually looks like he's in shock, like he's traumatized and scared sitting on the ground.
And I think it's a great metaphor for what liberals are.
I mean, they've become so coddled.
You know, they're so ultimately liberals are institutionalists.
They believe in properly constituted authority.
They don't believe in defying institutions.
They certainly don't believe in breaking the law.
And so I think their resistance is going to amount to a few hashtag campaigns and some angry tweets.
Maybe, you know, I don't know, like Mother Jones will do some kind of like fundraiser where like the resistance hashtag is on the wall and stuff.
And that's going to be it.
So I, you know, if Democrats are willing to follow through to the logic conclusion of their rhetoric, I would have more respect for the things they were saying.
But as it is, you know, they're just spouting this with no actions to back it up.
Do you think that the left will finally stand up to their surveillance state and want the reinstitution of habeas court?
But what is it going to take for us to get back to being the democracy and the liberty-loving country that we always espouse to be?
So right now, we're just giving lip service to these things.
And that's what's kind of driving me crazy.
You know, I try to point out to people that Barack Obama, he was the one who made Bush's tax cuts permanent.
And he took Bush's defense secretary, put him right in his goddamn cabinet.
And then the rest of his cabinet came from an office at Citigroup.
And so all those same things people are upset about for Trump for doing.
And I think it's almost brilliant and it's helpful that he's choosing as Secretary of State the CEO of Exxon because now We don't have to pretend what our foreign policy is about.
Like, that's actually a benefit.
That actually helps us now.
So, we don't have to put the puzzle together and make a leapfrog to go, well, hey, you're doing this for us.
Now, we know exactly why people are doing that.
So, in a sense, isn't that better?
Yeah, I agree.
You know, I agree completely.
I mean, I've been amused at all of this hand-wringing over the last four weeks.
Oh, my God, Goldman Sachs and Exxon are going to have huge influence in our government.
Like, wow, there is the thought.
You know?
And so, I do think it's healthy to make hidden corruption more visible and more manifest.
But, you know, I think that part of the reason I haven't been speaking about Trump very much since his election or writing about Trump is because I genuinely think it's a huge open question how this is all going to play out.
And the reason I think that is twofold.
One is, as we discussed, Trump is not ideologically more to really much of anything.
He has, you know, this kind of like racist view of criminal justice that I think has been pretty consistent going back to when he called for the death penalty for the five African-American falsely accused Central Park rapists.
I think he's actually had like a pretty consistent philosophy about trade deals and this kind of like Charles Lindbergh putting America first framework.
But beyond that, those very broad strokes, I don't think that it's clear who's going to have influence on him, what he's going to care about, how he's going to go about just being president.
And so I don't think we know that.
And then I also don't think that we know how the entire system is going to react, how the population is going to react with institutions.
Because like I was saying before, I think American institutions are really good at managing any kind of threat as long as people stay within that establishment, Democrat establishment, Republican range.
And whatever else you want to say about Trump, he falls outside of these norms.
And so institutions don't know how to deal with him.
We've seen that over and over.
I mean, all the power factions that tried to destroy him, the GOP consulting class, the GOP funders, the American media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the American media, every newspaper in the country literally endorsed Hillary Clinton except for one Sheldon Adelson paper in Nevada, and he still won.
So this is an extraordinary shock to the central nervous system of American elite power.
And I think that's going to continue.
And I don't honestly think we know how it's going to play out.
But what I will say is that had things gone on the way they were going, and Hillary Clinton become president and done exactly what we all know she would have done, which is just perpetuated the status quo, upheld establishment power, embraced all of the prevailing political orthodoxies.
I don't think the implosion that we're seeing would have been averted.
I think it would have just been delayed.
And I think that the system that America has embraced and that more broadly the West has embraced of extreme income inequality, of stripping tens of millions of jobs from people and making them work two jobs at McDonald's and Walmart and not send their kids to college and not have health care and die at younger ages and be addicted to pills.
I think this has become unsustainable.
We've seen it with Brexit.
We see it with the rise of nationalistic parties and we see it now in the U.S. And so I think that this re-scrambling of all the factions and all the assumptions and all the orthodoxies does give us an opportunity.
You know, he's going to be president.
We might as well look for the opportunities in the silver linings to try to recreate factions within the citizenry that can unite in defense of common interests.
Whereas before we were always so divided by these impenetrable left-right, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democratic walls.
I think and hope that some of those are going to break down now in response to the Trump presidency.
And I hope that more people will be mobilized and engaged by the political process, given that it's now in flux and it seems like it's interesting and like it's moving and like there's something you can actually do to influence it.
Whereas before it was just so static, you know, so entrenched.
So I think there's been an uprooting that can be healthy.
And so I don't know how that's going to play out, but I do think there's a positive there.
Yes, I think that now people are becoming awake to the things that they have been asleep to because Barack Obama knows all the rhetoric.
He knows all the words that populists speak while he's doing the exact opposite.
And so now it's like what Malcolm X said about when Johnson was running against Goldwater.
Goldwater can't hide his disdain for black people.
And that's the same thing about Donnie Trump is that he can't hide who he is like the neoliberals can hide who they are.
And so I'd rather have a wolf in wolf's clothing than a wolf in sheep's clothing like we've had for the last eight years and like we would have had going forward.
So I really appreciate you taking time for our little show.
I really appreciate it.
We're big fans of yours and we loved all the work you're doing.
And if there's anything you want to say on your way out.
No, I just happened to see because a friend of yours, Kyle Polinski, sent to me a video that you did of Tucker Carlson interviewing Adam Congressman Adam Schiff about asking him for evidence about this claim that Russia was behind the hacking and Adam Schipp basically did what I don't know if you saw, but Howard Dean did the same thing to us today.
He went on Twitter and said, I really think it'd be interesting to find out whether or not the intercept, who was reported on negatively, whether we receive money from Russia and Iran.
And that's basically what Adam Schiff did to Tucker Carlson simply because Tucker Carlson asked him for evidence.
Yeah, Howard Dean said on Twitter, just out of nowhere, you know, straight by if I went on Twitter and said, I think it'd be really interesting to find out whether or not Howard Dean is like a tax cheat and a drug addict and a pedophile.
Like, I'm not saying he is.
I have no evidence.
It'd be interesting to find out.
That's what he did.
And that's what Adam Schiff did with Tucker Carlson.
You know, and it's what's done to me every single day.
So, which is, you know, oh, if you want, if you ask for evidence, if you challenge Democrats in any way, you're basically a traitor.
You're a loyalist to this adversary government that we regard as our enemy.
You're controlled by the crime.
All the things that the far right said about Democrats and liberals for five decades of the Cold War, they all sound like the love child of like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn.
Like they, like, those two fucked and had a baby.
And then that baby was cloned and they like all registered as Democrats.
And now like that's the prevailing mentality.
So I really enjoyed watching you dissect that on video.
It was funny and insightful and probing and just like kind of cathartic to watch, given how much I confront that as well.
Oh, well, I thank you for the compliment.
You know, it was a heartbreaker because I've actually done benefits for Adam Schiff.
It was such a heartbreak to see him do that.
Oh, I could just, I cringe, cringe the whole way through that that's what's happened.
And he's one of the better Democrats, and that's how bad they've become.
So listen, I really do appreciate you taking time with us, and I don't want to bend your ear anymore, but I hope you come back on sometime because, of course, I have a ton of questions I'd love to get to.
But yeah, no, anytime, just feel free to ask.
I'm happy to come back.
Okay, we'll do.
Thank you very much, buddy.
Take care.
How you might recognize Nick Smith, who's our guest from previous appearance on our show.
Eric Beiler from TYT Politics interviewed him at a Fight for 15 rally in Virginia, and he laid down some truth for everybody.
And today's his birthday, so we decided to have him back on and get some more insights.
Hi, Nick.
How are you?
I'm doing all right.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Happy birthday.
And I just had a few quick questions.
Now, I understand that you kind of see through all the bullshit of politicians.
I was told you were a Bernie Sanders fan.
So I did vote for him.
So you voted for Bernie in the primary.
Now, what was it about say, because everybody said that people like you would be afraid because they would call him a socialist.
Did any of that bother you?
Well, no, because I call myself socialist, so I don't think that bothers me one bit.
Now, what really appealed to me about him was he was not funded by major corporations.
The entire problem we have with our politics, you know, Democrats and Republicans, both, not just the Republicans, is the fact that they're corporate funded.
So, I mean, here it is, you know, private campaign finance.
And if I have all this money and I know the government regulates me, well, shit, I'm going to put my money into whatever politicians going to regulate in my favor.
So it's a self-regulating oligarchy.
And that's one of the things I liked about Bernie Sanders is I didn't have that concern.
Why aren't you afraid of socialism?
How did you get clued into socialism?
Well, I guess through looking around in my surroundings, I see, you know, capitalism, especially this ridiculous trickle-down corporatism, just does not work.
I think it's wrong that, you know, a man who bakes bread for a living has to, you know, work to afford a slice of bread.
You know, I think the workers should have more say in their workplace and people should have more say in their politics.
And I can't see that as being possible under capitalism.
I believe in freedom.
And the really only way that we can have freedom is through collective bargaining and socialism.
In the general, if you don't want to tell me who you voted for, you don't have to.
But did Hillary Clinton appeal to you at all?
It really depends on how you would define the word appeal.
You know, was I scared enough of Donald Trump that I'd rather take the corporate Democrat over the corporate Republican?
Oh, yeah, she appealed to me in that sense very much.
But no, she was very much a business as usual, you know, neoliberal Democrat.
You know, she is very much an establishment corporate politician.
And I don't know, just overall, I think I'm not alone in this at all, but a lot of American people feel largely disenfranchised by the entire establishment.
And, you know, she represents the establishment better than any of the candidates that ran this year.
So that's why you think maybe working people didn't connect with her because she's just a representative of the establishment that's been screwing you guys over.
And, you know, she didn't come out for Fight for 15, right?
So was everybody pretty much aware of that, that you knew that she wasn't backing the fight for 15?
Oh, no, she made her opinions very clear.
I mean, you know, she didn't really talk about the minimum wage until debates with Bernie Sanders.
And then, what was it?
Fight for 12, 5 for 10, 5 for $8, whatever the hell it was she said.
You know, I mean, it took a far left candidate, you know, well, not far left, far left as far as the realm of acceptable, appropriate politics here in this country, you know, to challenge that in the debates for her to even really address that issue.
You know?
Yeah, I know.
I saw it.
I watched it.
Now, keeping with the 15, now, when people say $15 an hour is too much, what do you say to those people?
Well, I say, you know, $7.25 is not enough.
I mean, no, I think it's wrong that any person working 40 hours a week should have to live in poverty, period.
And I know a lot of people, I've seen a lot of them online say, you know, well, you know, if you're not, you know, you can just get a better job.
Now, I'm not even going to discuss the issues, the obstacles that we working people face in upwards mobility.
I'm just going to talk about the fact that, okay, let's just say I get a better job.
I get a degree.
I get a job skill.
I get, you know, better off.
Well, that job that I had, While House, for example, that job's still got to get done.
Now, are you saying that the person that takes my place deserves living poverty?
No, not every single person can go up to these higher positions.
I've heard some people say stupid, I'm just going to call it stupid shit.
Like, you know, high school kids, college kids should be working these jobs.
And I'm thinking, well, these places are open during school hours.
So you tell me how feasible that is.
So, no, I don't think $15 is too much.
I think $15 personally isn't enough.
I just believe, you know, I can't remember the FDR quote exactly, but I can paraphrase here something to the effect of we need a minimum wage that not only covers cost of living, but gives you a little bit extra, you know.
I just think it's morally wrong to oppose a strong minimum wage, strong workers' right.
I agree with you.
What I tell people is that the United States is the richest country the face of the earth has ever seen, yet we have a system that renders half of its residents poor or in poverty.
And what I call that is that's called a broken system.
It's not that we don't have the wealth in America or the natural resources or the ability to make a good life for everybody.
We just make decisions on purpose to not make a life for people.
Like when we say no to a $15 minimum wage, that's a decision that a society makes to keep people poor because we have the money to pay it.
So there's a $15 minimum wage right now in Seattle.
And you see all those Taco Bells and McDonald's, they closed up and left town.
Oh, wait, they didn't.
They're still there.
And everybody's making a living.
Yeah, so everybody's still making money.
So what does that tell you?
That tells you that we have a screwed up system.
And what used to be a buffer against the brutalities of capitalism was strong unions, right?
We used to have that in America.
Well, they've been dismantling unions since Ronald Reagan fired Patco.
And I don't know if you remember that, but Patco was the air traffic controllers were so overworked and it was so unsafe that they went on strike.
Well, that was illegal for them to strike, technically.
And so Ronald Reagan just fired them all and replaced them.
And that was the death knell for, that was the beginning of the end.
And then Bill Clinton came in and passed NAFTA, which was the next knife in the back of working people.
And so when Hillary Clinton was out there trying to get working people to vote for her, and everybody knew that she was a part of NAFTA and her husband passed NAFTA at the same time they gutted welfare and exploded the prison population.
Barack Obama was also pushing the TPP at the exact same time she was coming asking for people's votes.
Did people notice that was happening, that the leader of her party was pushing another crushing, job-crushing trade deal at the same time she was asking for your vote?
Well, you know, people like me, people like you, you know, just from hearing, you know, what you're saying, absolutely saw through that bullshit.
But no, no, Democratic Party is corporate party B. Corporate Party A, Republican Corporate B, is Democrat.
No, I don't expect anything more from Barack Obama.
Barack Obama has always sided with big business.
Just look at the Wall Street bailouts.
Where's their Main Street bailout?
Exactly.
No, and I actually do disagree with you when you say we've got a broken system.
I think the system is working exactly the way it was intended to work.
I think it was specifically designed to, you know, keep us working class people in our place.
That's what it was designed to do.
And I also resent the comment you made that we as a society decided against these things.
No, I don't think that we as a people have enough power, enough of a say in our politics right now to make these decisions.
We have the choice between a candidate who supports this very limited, limited spectrum of acceptable platforms and another candidate with slightly, you know, basically slight differences.
And really, it creates this false dichotomy, you know, that there's more change being done than actually is.
I think we, the people, don't have enough power to decide.
It's, you know, companies like Monsanto, companies like Walmart, companies that have the big money, Halliburton, that have more of a say in our politics.
They are the ones that are really, you know, keeping us from it.
In fact, news media, I'm going to make an exception for you.
So y'all aren't corporate-backed or anything like that.
Other ones aren't either, but a lot of the places where we get our information from, it's very much intentional misinformation, you know, to get us to support these mainstream ideas that keep us oppressed.
So, no, I don't think that I think we need to seize power, actively resist, and try and have more of a say in our politics.
But I don't think we as society decided against $15 an hour minimum wage.
We as society decided against these things because, you know, people who are just working day to day, not spending all this time looking into politics, they're only saying what they hear on the radio, what they see on the TV, what they see on the very surface issues presented to them online or whatever.
I've not seen 5 for 15 on MSNBC or CNN.
No, so I can't say we as society decide against it.
We as society are being misinformed, misled, and outright lied to.
Yes, I agree with you.
I think what a better, more exacting way to say it was that our corporate political, our leaders who are bought by corporations have made these choices when they put together these trade deals.
Absolutely.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, and I don't mean that the people, of course, if the people got to choose, what happens is we showed what we would choose.
We would choose somebody who's a populist like Bernie Sanders.
And what the establishment showed us is that even if we want to choose that, they will try to screw him over and cheat so that we can't get what we want.
And that's what happened.
But no, we're very much lied to about it.
There's a lot of fear, a lot of fear-mongering.
And you have a lot of divisiveness really in the working class too, especially across color lines and cultural lines, things like that, that they choose to impose on us.
They very much do.
I mean, really, we, the people, don't control the media.
We, the people, don't control our textbooks.
We people don't control any of that.
It's big money interests, and they're afraid of $15 minimum wage, you know.
But, you know, there is, again, a lot of the same bullshit arguments.
And there is a kind of stubbornness among people in the working class who have achieved.
These people who work harder and make above minimum wage, make, you know, now $10 or $15 an hour.
That they really are taught to, and it is kind of a knee-jerk reaction to resent people who don't work as hard as them that are demanding as much as they're or more than they're getting paid now.
And, you know, I hear this all the time here in Virginia, you know, here in my part of Virginia, that, you know, I'm a manager and I don't, I don't make $10 an hour.
Or, you know, I'm a factory worker.
I only make, you know, $1,150, what have you, you know.
Why should people flipping burgers make $15?
And the only thing I can say to them is, well, you're being screwed over getting paid less than $10.
You're getting screwed over getting paid $11.50.
You should be getting paid $18, $19, $20 and up.
So they don't realize that if the minimum wage is raised, that everyone else's wages get raised, just like when unions are strong, people who aren't in unions also have higher wages.
Like, they haven't been able to make that connection.
Yeah, and I think some of the information just isn't, it's becoming more readily available than it ever has been because of internet, because a lot more free media out there.
But there's been misinformation for a long time.
And really, there's these false flags about fake news, fake news, fake news.
And I think, and this is sound like conspiracy theorists here.
I think that's just trying to get us to be suspicious of non-corporate media personally.
Yes, I agree.
I agree.
That's exactly what that is.
They want to be able to control the narrative.
They want to be able to control the story that people accept.
But that's very perceptive.
Nick, when are you going to run for office?
You should run for political office because I'm not kidding.
No, bully.
You have an uncanny bullshit detector.
Well, I think the biggest thing is I'm 21.
I don't have a college degree.
I'm trying to get one.
I think that's really the first step.
But as far as going for office, I'm not so sure if I really feel like being part of some effort to be one vote for changing the system while everyone else is voting to reform or keep things as they are instead of completely restructuring.
No, I'd rather have a job, say, as community organizer or a union rep or something where I'm out there educating people, agitating people and organizing people.
I think that's a lot more effective than being a politician.
Yeah, well, I agree with you.
I think that's what, in fact, that's exactly what we need these days: we need direct action.
I like what you said in that video.
You said, you know, we, or I don't know if you said it, maybe someone else did, that we have to make it harder for them to resist us than it is for them to go along with us.
That's me.
Yeah, that's you.
So that's exactly what we need to do.
And do you so do you feel like people are waking up?
I'm talking about working people, working class people.
I'm a working class guy.
I was a bricklayer for 20 years or everything.
So I mean, I know those people, I know how we think, right?
I come from a blue-collar neighborhood.
My parents didn't go to college and stuff like that.
And so I know most of them, my siblings, most of them didn't go to college either.
There's this thing.
Are working people, what I'm trying to get is, are they still suspicious of unions or do they understand it now?
And do they embrace it?
And do they understand what's going to have to happen for them to get the $15?
I'm meaning direct action.
Do people get that unions and what they need to do?
Well, I think the vast majority of people really don't.
But I think more people now than since turn the century, you know, because back then you had major, major exploitation, a lot of alienation of labor, a lot of, you know, because they didn't have the regulations back then.
They didn't have the unions and such.
You saw entire towns like the town I grew up in, Tramville, Virginia, was built by a car company, you know.
And what we saw then was people were being very blatantly exploited, so they rose up.
Well, we're starting to see people raise up now, but we have more obstacles now than we had then.
I think another thing about that is people are living more comfortable than they were 100 years ago.
It's kind of hard for some people to see they're being as oppressed as they are.
It's bread and circus.
They, you know, if they're fed and entertained, and it's kind of hard to see that, you know, they're being as exploited as they really are.
What do people think about Trump in general?
I'm talking about working class people that you know in Virginia who are out there for the fight for 15.
What do they think about Trump and do they think he'll bring better jobs or a better pay rate to them?
Oh, people in Fight for 15, people in Fight for 15 know exactly what's going on.
They know that he's not going to pass it on a federal level.
You know, they know that there's a Republican-held House and Senate, and they know that's not going to, you know, they're not going to push it.
Really, the only thing we can really see is trying to flip over the House in two years and try and get it on a state level is the only thing, or on a citywide level, local level, what have you.
I'm not going to speak for 515 overall, but everyone I know in 515 is real conscious of these issues.
They have an idea of what's going on.
But no, I can't think of a single one that voted for Trump.
As far as outside of 515, there are people that really do think that it's the regulations, it's the unions, things like that that are actually keeping us in the shitty state we are.
They see Trump as actually the savior because, you know, they are sick of this business as normal status quo politics, and they see him as the exception of the rule.
Because guess what?
He don't talk like politicians.
He talks, and I think that's where a lot of, you know, a lot of people listen to me.
I'm not saying anything new.
I'm just saying it with a slight bit of twang.
And I say it very bluntly.
I try to stay away from big words to fluff up my language because I know that what I say has power.
They see that with Trump.
So they see, oh, this guy's not establishment.
This guy says he's going to bring back our jobs.
Well, I don't have any reason to believe that he's not going to.
So that speaks to a lot of people.
It doesn't speak to 515 people, but it speaks to a lot of Virginians.
It speaks to a lot of coal miners, a lot of factory workers out in Martinsville, Danville, Virginia, Southside, Virginia.
They had a manufacturing and started going away in the 80s.
But really, like you said, NAFTA kind of put the nail in the coffin of all the manufacturing in Southside Virginia.
They know that.
They know, oh, a Democrat pushed that.
They kind of have an idea.
And Trump, Trump's outright, you know, said, oh, well, I think NAFTA was a bad decision.
Now, of course, if NAFTA would have been looked on favorably, he'd be saying he's all for NAFTA.
Donald Trump's probably one of the more ever bullshit artists in town.
But now they see hope in this crazy, crazy guy because exactly what I've described.
They don't see him as business as usual.
So now you and I know that Donald Trump most likely will institute policies that don't help people in the fight for 15 and probably hurt them.
So that's probably what's going to happen.
And do you think that the people who aren't in the fight for 15, but are also working class people, the people you know, do you think that they'll wake up to the fact that he's not on their side?
Or do you think that they'll be, they won't?
Well, I think a lot of them won't.
I think some of them will.
I'm not a fortune teller.
I can't tell which way they're going to swing, but I've usually seen, if you look at the history of American politics, anytime we swing too far right, we tend to swing kind of far left.
Like, okay, let's just take Reagan, for example.
Like you said, all his union busting, all his deregulation, things like that.
What we saw right after him is Bill Clinton, who's, I would say, pretty damn right wing.
He comes up and says, oh, yeah, no, Reagan policies didn't work.
You can see the suffering.
Let me point to Exhibit A, you know, trickle down, don't work.
You know, let's try something new.
So if he does bad enough, you will see that.
You know, I mean, look at George Bush.
George Bush messed up big time.
And the result of that was we had Democrat for eight years.
Right.
Obama was business as usual.
Didn't, I mean, Guantanamo Bay is still open.
People are getting droned all the shit.
You know, he's sending troops every which way.
You know, he's always backed big business.
And guess what?
We have a Republican.
So, no, if things get bad enough, you will see change.
But I don't know if it's going to be as far left as we want it to be.
Well, Nick, I really appreciate you taking time.
I really look forward to talking with you more and hearing your stories about your organizing and your community activity and whatever you're doing with unions.
And if you ever want to come out on the show to get your word out about something, just let us know and we'd be glad to have you.
Well, thank you so much, Jimmy Dore.
I really do appreciate you giving me this opportunity, giving me this platform.
Nick, you're a solid dude.
You're a solid dude.
Happy birthday, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
Bye-bye, buddy.
I hope you enjoyed the extended Jimmy Door show this week.
I hope you did.
I know I did.
All right, that's it for this week.
We'll see you January 30th.
That's a Monday at the Flappers Comedy Club.
Get your tickets at JimmyDoorComedy.com.
$10 tickets.
Isn't that nice?
$10.
We all have a great time on a Monday night.
Okay, today's show was written by Jim Earl, Mike McRae, Mark Van Landuit, and Robert Iasamura.
All the voices today performed by the one and the only of the inimitable Mike McRae, who can be found at mikemcrae.com.
That's it for this week.
Until next week, this is Jimmy Dore saying you be the best you can be and I'll keep being me.
Do not not freak out.
Do not freak out.
I'm not getting it.
▲
Export Selection