Jimmy Dore Show - 20181003_1003_TJDS_Podcast

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Oct. 3, 2018 - Jimmy Dore Show

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20181003_1003_TJDS_Podcast

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	Hey, I'm here to tell you about News Voice.
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	Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
	The Jimmy Dore Show!
	The Jimmy Dore Show!
	It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
	The show for...
	Up-minded, lowly-lovered lapdies.
	The kind of people that are...
	It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper save.
	It's hard to talk to your TV.
	And now, here's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
	It's Jimmy Dore.
	Hey, everybody, welcome to.
	We have a special guest in the house tonight with us.
	It's Chris Hedges is here, ladies and gentlemen.
	Hi, Chris.
	How are you?
	Thanks for being our guest.
	Thanks, Jimmy.
	Let me just tell everybody who Chris is.
	If you're not familiar with him, he's a journalist, Presbyterian minister, a visiting Princeton University lecture.
	His books include War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, Empire Evolution, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, written with cartoonist Josako, which was the New York Times bestseller.
	America the Farewell Tour, which I just got done reading.
	And people, just so people know a little bit more about you, you're a columnist for the progressive and commentary website, Truth Dig, where I read most of your stuff.
	He's also a host for the television program On Contact on RT.
	He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, West Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans.
	He has reported for more than 50 countries and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
	And in 2001, he contributed to the New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
	And he also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.
	So that is pretty impressive.
	You know, nobody, I don't think, in actually frames where we're at as a society better than you do.
	I read you and I listen to your speeches, so it makes me very unpopular on news shows.
	So I just want to say thank you for being here.
	Welcome.
	Yeah, thanks for having me.
	And can you just, I love the story of, I don't know if you want to tell it, but how you knew you wanted to be a war correspondent.
	Do you remember the story?
	I remember that story.
	So that's a long story.
	You want me to tell it?
	Well, you can shorten it up.
	You're good.
	Just get to the good part.
	You're being chased.
	You're with this girl.
	Right.
	So I was fired from an unpaid internship on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because I was on the Carter presidency.
	It was just, I was in college, and I was investigating how Gulf and Western, which is now morphed into the Trump Tower in New York, was breaking labor unions in the Dominican Republic by murdering the labor union leaders who were being found in ditches.
	Two vice presidents from Gulf and Western came in, got me fired from my unpaid internship.
	I hitchhiked.
	I went around and collected $210 from all the other interns, hitchhiked to Florida, flew to the Dominican Republic.
	I had basic Spanish, but not good enough to do this, to finish the story, which I wanted to finish and publish.
	I walked out of the, I arranged for my church connections to stay in a dormitory for Haitian cane cutters run by the Episcopal Church.
	I walked out.
	I run into an American.
	She introduces herself as Mrs. Camano.
	And I said, Camano, you mean like Francisco Camano, who, after the Marines invaded the Dominican Republic in 65, went to Cuba and got a rebel force like Che landed and the U.S. Rangers hunted him down and killed him.
	Told her, and so she hooked me up with her daughter, who now I was like 20.
	Her daughter was in her 30s.
	She's come back from New Jersey where she got divorced.
	And we go out to these sweatshops where people are, as they are in any sweatshop, working under horrendous conditions.
	And at a certain point, I was taking pictures.
	They were beating some of the workers with these big truncheons, and they started chasing me.
	But I'd been a college runner.
	I'd been a really good track runner, and they couldn't get me.
	But I'm darting through the grass, and I think her name was Liliana.
	She was driving up and down between the sweatshops, screaming out the window, don't touch him.
	I'm a Camano.
	And then it started raining.
	I made a run for it.
	I jumped in her car.
	We drove back towards Santo Domingo.
	Maybe an hour outside the city.
	We stopped in one of these shacks that sold beer and drank quite a bit of beer and got out in the parking lot.
	And the rain had stopped.
	And you had that kind of feral vegetation with the steam.
	And I'm standing right next to her in the car.
	And she says, did I ever tell you I have a tattoo?
	I said, no.
	She said, would you like to see it?
	I said, sure.
	And she unzipped her pants and had this little butterfly tattoo.
	And it was at that moment I knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.
	LAUGHTER LAUGHTER LAUGHTER laughter One of the great all-time stories.
	So in your book, America the Farewell Tour, you know, people are always asking me, what is neoliberalism?
	Why is it so bad?
	Well, you, and I never really have what I consider to be a good, succinct answer for them.
	And they're always, it's never satisfying for either of us.
	Would it be correct to say another term for it would be corporate capitalism is what you talk about in your in your book.
	Is that a close, or just tell people what you think how corporate capitalism is?
	Well, corporate capitalism is about the destruction of democratic institutions and national economies to enrich a tiny cabal, a global oligarchic corporate elite.
	Neoliberalism is the utopian ideology that was created to justify the massive social inequality and misery and destruction of social service programs.
	I mean, right down through public education.
	So this is something Karl Marx got.
	Every ruling ideology, every ruling class creates an ideology to justify their own privilege, their own elitism, and their own right to hoard wealth, resources, and power at the expense of everyone else.
	So you had the divine Right of kings.
	Louis XVI was still trying to make this claim in the tennis court, you know, the famous when they walked out, the National Assembly that precipitated the French Revolution.
	You had systems like communism and fascism that elevated a certain elite.
	In the case of fascism, it was racial.
	In the case of communism, it was class.
	It's all there.
	So corporate capitalism uses neoliberalism, but it's an ideology that makes no sense economically.
	The whole idea, there's nothing in 4,000 years of settled society to convincingly argue that by enriching your oligarchic class, this is good for the economy or good for the working class.
	We know that it isn't.
	But we got spun this lie, courtesy of these courtiers, these kind of intellectual courtiers, Leo Strauss, others, and all the useful idiots like Greenspan and everybody else.
	But as a rational ideology, it was always absurd that you should make your entire society kneel before the dictates of the marketplace and that the primacy of the marketplace should determine how you structure your government, your culture.
	But we, and those who criticize neoliberalism, I'm going back to Sheldon Woland, who was our greatest contemporary political philosopher.
	They were ruthlessly shut out.
	Woland wrote the book Democracy Incorporated.
	I highly recommend it, where he uses the term inverted totalitarianism to describe our system.
	But once he started calling out neoliberalism for the con that it was, he and the other critics were purged from the universities, purged from the mass media.
	And so we were.
	So let me just, so you know, you put it very, and I'm already forgetting how you said it, but the neoliberalism is that your society should kneel in front of the dictates of the free market or the market.
	Right.
	And that everything should come from the free market.
	And that the free market is somehow equatable with democracy.
	Yeah, so that's a big mistake that a lot of people make.
	Well, it's antithetical to democracy, completely.
	Free market is.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	How so?
	Well, we've seen it.
	It's destroyed democracy.
	It's destroyed open society around the globe.
	It's why we are watching these troglodyte proto-fascists rise up, Victor Orban or Nigel Farage in England or Boris Johnson or Donald Trump.
	Or, I mean, when a tiny cabal seizes power, whether it's monarchical, communist, fascist, or in our case, corporate, and it captures the mechanisms and the institutions that once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible to redirect all resources,
	all power, and all wealth towards this cabal, then it eviscerates an open society because as the American population is pushed further and further into distress, probably 60% of this country lives in severe distress, it uses harsher and harsher forms of control.
	I mean, one of the interesting things about this moment in American history is that this peculiar ideology no longer has any credibility across the political spectrum, right or left.
	And so that's why the ruling elites, I know you've done a lot on voter suppression, voter fraud, are using a variety of mechanisms of which voter suppression is one to ensure that the anger that is now rippling through the American landscape is never expressed in a way that can remove them from power.
	I mean, that you fix electoral politics and the Democratic Party, as I know you have been one of the few to point out, is as culpable as the Republican Party in doing this.
	Yeah.
	So you're saying it's not Susan Sarandon?
	It's no, and it's not Vladimir Putin either.
	I thought all our problems were caused by Russia meddling or Susan Sarandon or a combination.
	No, it's called the Democratic Party of New York State.
	I saw a videotape of you giving a commencement speech and people started taboo because you were telling the truth about the Iraq war.
	And there were a lot of people who didn't want to hear it.
	Well, that was most of the crowd.
	That was, yeah, that was, and they started to taboo and yell.
	They stood up and started singing God Bless America to drown me out.
	During your speech.
	Yeah, and then they cut the mic twice.
	And then it was my first and last invitation to give a commencement address.
	So it was so bad that, you know, your suit coat was in the president's office.
	No, no, it was my jacket.
	I had one of those academic gowns.
	Oh, right.
	And so at the end, it's on YouTube.
	There's kind of a group of people.
	Yeah, I saw it.
	Right.
	So these two guys from the graduating class get up and try and literally push me off the podium.
	So campus security is freaking out.
	And they don't want me seated up there while the students come to collect their diplomas because they're worried that some of the students will attack me.
	Right.
	So they come before they begin the awarding of diplomas.
	The security comes and tells me that they're going to take me off campus.
	And I said, but my code, it's in the president's office.
	They said, we'll mail you your coat, which they did.
	I have to say they did mail it to me.
	And so then they drove me to my hotel room while I got my suitcase and then drove me to the bus station and put me on a bus to Chicago.
	And the next day, the Rockford Star Register, whatever the paper is, had a banner headline that said, Speaker disrupts Rockford graduation.
	That's American press at its best.
	So now the New York Times gets wind of this.
	Well, what happened was, I mean, the Times had been, I've been 15 years at the time.
	So, you know, I don't know that they were hugely surprised that I was running around.
	I had been the Middle East Bureau chief for the New York Times.
	I'd been seven years in the Middle East.
	So I don't know that they were, I didn't like it, but I had been denouncing the calls to invade Iraq for some time, publicly, and on shows like Charlie Rose.
	But what happened is the right-wing media got it.
	And what they do is they lynch you.
	Remember when they lynched Howard Dean when he screamed or they lynched.
	But that was the left-wing media that did that.
	Oh, was it?
	Oh, I missed that.
	Right?
	You mean Comcast?
	Yeah, that's what I mean.
	So, or they lynched Jeremiah Wright, who I admire immensely.
	I think Jerry's an amazing guy.
	So anyway, but they take a little clip and then they run it every hour.
	My daughter was in elementary school and they were, I don't know, watching Some PBS show, but they were flicking through the channels and all the students go, look, that's your dad.
	And it was ubiquitous.
	And then the trash talk radio was just, the Wall Street Journal even wrote an editorial denouncing me.
	What?
	Yeah.
	As, I don't know, a left-wing pacifist.
	It was ridiculous.
	So the Times hand was forced to respond.
	There was a lot of public pressure.
	And so they called me in and issued me a written reprimand.
	I mean, they called me in to give it to me.
	It was kind of like the Vatican or something for impugning the impartiality of the New York Times by attacking the calls to invade Iraq.
	Under Guild rules, you give the employee the reprimand, and then if they keep violating it, that's grounds for firing them.
	So they were just setting me up to kick me out.
	And so you had a choice to either stop telling the truth about the Iraq war and keep your job, right?
	Or keep telling the truth about it and lose your job.
	Right.
	And so when you, I mean, that's a big deal.
	You walked away from the New York Times.
	It is a big deal.
	And I don't want to pretend that it was easy.
	And, you know, I mean, I was in.
	I wouldn't do it.
	My hands were sweating.
	I mean, I'm not going to pretend it was an easy decision.
	I mean, I knew what I had to do, but I don't want to make light of it.
	Right.
	I mean, that's a lot of people are, you know, I mean, at some point in everyone's life, I think they come to a choice like that, but not probably not that huge where they have that much at stake.
	And then you did it.
	Now, do you think it was because your dad?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, because my dad had been a Presbyterian minister who had been very involved in the anti-war movement, although he was a veteran from World War II.
	He'd been a sergeant in North Africa.
	He was very involved in the civil rights movement, and he was very involved in the gay rights movement.
	His youngest brother was gay, who he was very close to, and he had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in America in the 50s and the 60s.
	And to his credit, he translated that into denouncing the homophobia of the Presbyterian church.
	Yeah, he himself was kind of pushed out.
	So that was, you know, I admired my father a lot.
	You don't teach anyone morality.
	You show them.
	And that's the real power of the moral life.
	I always remember one of the last times I saw my father, he'd gotten a job as a chaplain in a juvenile detention facility.
	He had had huge churches.
	He'd been very successful as a minister, sitting in a little office without windows in the basement.
	And I remember walking out of that building at that point.
	I think I was the Balkan Bureau chief for the New York Times or something, but I certainly knew who was the greater human being.
	So when the Times offered me that or gave me that reprimand and offered me that choice between muzzling myself to pay fealty to my career, I knew I couldn't because I couldn't betray my dad.
	And when I walked out of the building on 229 West 43rd Street, I kind of articulated for the first time what it was that my father had given me, which was freedom.
	That I didn't need any institution, including the New York Times, to tell me who I was.
	I knew who I was.
	I was my father's son.
	And that is the greatest gift you can give to a child or to anyone.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you were lucky.
	Yeah.
	You know, they say that the, well, I'm not, I don't have kids, so I never want to, I always want to say stuff about kids.
	I got four.
	I might give you one.
	Oh, you need one.
	That's just a joke to my children.
	It's not true.
	We would love one.
	We need one, especially if they're over five.
	Those are the first five years are the hard ones.
	Now, the people who are anchors of our pretend lefty news shows today, I would say the people on MSNBC and what have you.
	They had me once.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Once.
	But they would tell, they wouldn't take the, they take those jobs, telling themselves, I'm guessing the lie, that, well, if I, I'm going to do the best I can, like you could have told yourself that lie.
	Well, I'll stay working at the New York Times and I'll be as anti-war as is possible inside this system.
	And if I wasn't here, there'd be nobody pushing, right?
	So that's, you think that's what they tell themselves, the people who work for the corporation, who push the wars and who trash the progressive politics?
	Some of them.
	And the others are just craven careerists.
	Most people at the inception of the call to invade Iraq, you know, George Packard, the New Yorker, these kinds of figures who are running around being Bush's cheerleaders for the war, they knew what was good for their.
	I mean, this is what the liberal class, that's why traditionally the capitalist elites allow liberal liberals around because they set the parameters of acceptable debate and they serve as the attack dogs against those who question the motives and the values of the ruling elite.
	And when you question the motives and values of the ruling elite, you are immediately pushed out.
	And the way that you are discredited is by those figures within the society who hold themselves up as the moral voice of society.
	Chomsky writes very well about this.
	I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class, but almost everything I know or understand about the liberal establishment comes from Nome.
	But that's their role.
	And I think a lot of them are careerists, are kind of very cynical, and probably you're right.
	A lot of them tell themselves, better me than, I don't know, Stephen Miller or something.
	Right.
	Right.
	So it's got to be some kind of mental gymnastics.
	You travel around the country, which I did too for, you know, 20 years as a stand-up comedian.
	And I was in all those towns that you write about.
	So I was in Terre Haute, Andersonville.
	You know, I was in Flint.
	You know, I've been all those, I've been to worse places, you know, and it was, and I played in comedy clubs that were in malls that were dying.
	I saw all that stuff you describe.
	People desperate.
	And so basically what you do is in America, the farewell tour, you kind of show, you go around to these different communities and you show the effect of us organizing our society around the altar of free markets.
	Yeah.
	And so the effect of that, it's just, it's just over and over every story you tell in the book, which is just heart-wrenching stories, heart-wrenching stories that you tell.
	That, you know, we've all seen these people and the lives they live and how hard they work.
	And these, so these people are, their lives have been hollowed out.
	And why do we organize our society around a free market?
	So, you know, when we had Dr. Wolf on our show and he talked about the craziness of one person decides if you get to have an economy in its own or not, if they have the big company.
	And so why wouldn't the town get together and decide, why should we move our company to another place to make more money?
	Let's just keep a good.
	So I guess the point is what I'm trying to say badly, I guess, is that, so you visited these places, you know, the whole, or even like Rockford, Illinois.
	So the whole town just gets depressed because the business leaves or goes to Monterey, Mexico, or because of NAFTA.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so they're left with nothing.
	And we treat these things as if they're individual problems instead of societal problems.
	But it's worse.
	We treat it as if it's the individual's responsibility.
	So across the cultural spectrum, you've got, you know, from every angle, if you haven't become Bill Gates or something, although I wouldn't recommend being Bill Gates, you are a failure.
	And, you know, Tony Robbins is telling you you are exceptional, or Oprah is telling you how to find your inner core and strength and be who you can be.
	And the positive psychologists are telling you to think positively.
	And Hollywood is ramming this kind of American myth of a meritocracy down your throat along with this.
	And television is just bombarding you with this stuff.
	I mean, I look at television in poor households and poor communities as a form of violence because it is constantly showing you images of an unattainable lifestyle and blaming you for not achieving that lifestyle.
	And that creates deep despair, loss of self-worth, loss of self-confidence.
	And they've been very effective at it.
	And so you're right.
	We never ask the structural questions or people who do ask about how the society is structured.
	You know, the fact that there are no jobs in marginal communities unless you go into the illegal economy.
	And that feeds the system of mass incarceration, which is a primary form of social control in poor communities.
	That's why we have 2.3 million prisoners, 25% of the world's prison population.
	As the credibility of neoliberalism has declined, you've seen a harsher attack against the critics of imperialism and capitalism, both through the kind of new form of red baiting for Russia.
	And so you've used this, they use this shadowy anonymous group called Proper Not.
	Yes.
	Right.
	We still don't know who they are.
	Right.
	And the Washington Post runs a front page story on it and names all these left-wing sites.
	I mean, it's total bullshit.
	And then Google, Facebook, Twitter, they all impose algorithms so that they're called impressions.
	So if you type in imperialism, or if you typed it in a year and a half ago, and I had written an article on imperialism, maybe one of the articles that would come up.
	Now you'll direct it to a mainstream site.
	So referrals by impressions have gone into precipitous decline.
	Black Agenda Report, World Socialist website, Counterpunch, Alternate, down by 63%, Truthdig, where I write a column every Monday.
	And you couple that with the abolition of net neutrality.
	And it's a way of taking critics who already have been significantly marginalized, pushing them even further out of the outer edges of the digital universe.
	And that's, of course, why they go after RT, where I have a show, not because it's Russian propaganda.
	And the director of national intelligence report, which Clapper put out in January, I don't know, a year and a half ago or so.
	17, yeah.
	It was quite clear.
	I mean, they attacked RT for giving voice to anti-fracking activists, to people who attack the security and surveillance state, to Black Lives Matters.
	That's part of the whole picture.
	That is, as the situation deteriorates and as the ruling elites become more beleaguered, then they become harsher in terms of their forms of the control of information.
	So people don't seem to understand what's happening.
	So people will say things.
	People in news will say, well, Google's a private company and they're allowed to do that.
	And because the law hasn't caught up to where we are technologically doesn't mean it's right.
	You know, it used to be the law that Rosa Parks had to sit in the back of the bus.
	That didn't make it right.
	That meant that the law hadn't caught up yet to civilized society.
	And so right now the law hasn't caught up yet.
	When people are getting, you know, I saw Matt Taibbi quoted a statistic.
	It was 70% of people get their news from Facebook or Google.
	And by that, you mean when you want to find out about something, let's say I want to find out about imperialism, I type it in.
	Google decides what articles come up.
	And those algorithms are done in secret in the dark.
	Which should already be a scandal.
	Well, and there's, I think, 10,000 people at Google.
	I can't remember.
	It's either Google or Facebook.
	Facebook.
	Facebook.
	And they're all hired from, they're all like ex-military, ex-security.
	And they're that fusion between Silicon Valley and the security and surveillance state.
	It should be.
	So what do you say to the people on the left who are like, for instance, like Alex Jones?
	So I say if he's horrible and we have to get rid of him, there should be a transparent process with an impartial judge that we can all rely on.
	You can't just willy-nilly.
	What do you think about something like that?
	Yeah.
	I mean, the other problem is that, and then you have, and this comes out of the kind of far-left Antifa where you're deplatforming people and you're, this is really dangerous because this opens the door for state censorship.
	And the people we know from history who always suffer is the left, the critics of the systems of power, not the right.
	Not the proto-fascists who, the neo-Nazis, who in many ways the state relies on unofficially in times of turmoil to help maintain control and systems of oppression against people who defy the structures of power.
	So yeah, I find Alex Jones repugnant, of course.
	On the other hand, you're right.
	If we allow these institutions to begin to decide who has a voice and who doesn't, then we're not going to have a voice.
	Yeah, I can't, I just can't believe that people don't get that, that there needs to be a transparent process.
	And of course, they're going to use what, well, go ahead.
	But public relations, you know, these people, I mean, it's like Steve Jobs, who was truly an evil human being.
	And I was in Zuccotti Park when he died.
	And several, many of the, and I love these kids in Zuccotti.
	They wanted to have a memorial for Steve.
	Oh, boy.
	And I'm going, no, no, no.
	Well, you need to understand there are 700,000 sweatshop workers in China, some of whom are jumping off of roofs to commit suicide.
	But the public relations industry is so adept at manufacturing these personalities and getting us to build this false emotional relationship.
	They're out there.
	It's like Zuckerberg Zuckerberg out there with his t-shirt.
	I mean, they're very good at it.
	Yes.
	And the system, the media platforms disseminate it.
	We have created such sophisticated forms of propaganda.
	People confuse how they are made to feel with knowledge.
	And that's why we're in partly, we're in such trouble because these corporate media platforms, and I include MSNBC and PBS, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers, they are dependent on these personalities and the corporations that they run, and they serve as their public relations platforms.
	Hey, I'm here to tell you about News Voice.
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	You talk about, and we're here with Chris Hedges, the author of America, the Farewell Tour, as we're talking about right now.
	And, you know, there's a lot of ironies in what's happening right now with the left and the right.
	So I'm just going to read from your book.
	It says the radical left and the radical right, each made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war.
	Their marginalized lives, battered by economic misery, have been filled with meaning, have been filled with meaning now that they're activists, right?
	So we're touched this is on the, you're writing this talking about the heels of Charlottesville.
	Right.
	And they hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed, both the left and the right, Antifa and the Proud Boys.
	They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed.
	They claim the use, they claim the right to use force to silence those defined as the enemy.
	They sanctify anger.
	They are consumed by the adrenaline-driven for confrontation.
	These groups are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote, of those who engage in fraticide by the narcissism of minor differences.
	So you're saying, well, I'll just finish.
	It says, it was inevitable that we would reach this point where we are unable to address the rudimentary, where we're unable to address the rudimentary needs of its citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and was true in the Weimar Republic and Jarvis Russia.
	So what's happening is that the state is no longer able to meet the rudimentary needs of our citizens.
	And so people on the right, because you go into detail in the book where you talk about the economic situation of the people who are in Charlottesville and holding the torches and those, and the people on the left, they share similar economic deprivation.
	And I love that term about the narcissism of minor differences.
	So can you talk about that?
	And I think that the ruling elite are afraid of the left and the right realizing that they have common interests.
	That's why they assassinated Fred Hampton.
	Because Fred was the great Black Panther elite.
	Right.
	In the 60s, was uniting.
	I mean, he was addressing white Aryans in Chicago who were applauding him.
	No kidding.
	I didn't know that.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, I never heard that.
	Fred was building a poor people's coalition.
	Oh.
	And as long as he remained a Black Panther, they could deal with him.
	That's why the FBI drugged him, burst in there and assassinated him.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, he's 24 years old.
	So you talk about in the book that what people like Fred wanted to do in the 60s, you think is actually possible now because economics have gotten so bad, we've hollowed out, you know, there's millions of statistics that can give people examples of how bad it is.
	One of them that I like to use is that 80% of all workers are paycheck to paycheck.
	63% of Americans can't afford a $1,000 emergency.
	And half of all wage earners earn less than $30,000 a year.
	And there was, I just took a couple of notes on this the other day in the New York Times, had a couple good articles on the plight of the working class and the plight of the middle class.
	And these are just the statistics.
	These are just two or three days ago.
	A decade later, the typical middle-class family's net worth is still more than $40,000 below where it was in 2007.
	Black net worth is down 40%.
	Hispanic, 46%.
	Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77%.
	Hourly pay has grown by 12%.
	If the federal minimum wage was tracked to productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not $7.25.
	This is New York Times.
	This isn't some Trotskyite publication.
	41.7 million workers earn that, which is a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none have employer health insurance.
	So what we've seen since the financial meltdown of 2008 is this disastrous policy of printing money, creating money out of electronic ether.
	An estimated $26 trillion.
	And where did it go?
	Well, it didn't go to rebuild our infrastructure.
	It didn't go to invest in our public schools.
	It didn't provide universal health care for all Americans.
	It didn't forgive student debt.
	It didn't bail out the 800 people thrown out of their homes because they were cheated on their subprime mortgages.
	It went into the hands of the very people who committed the massive global financial fraud.
	And they bought back their own stock, which because their compensation packages are tied to it.
	Apple spent $100 billion buying back its own stock.
	They paid unsustainable debt.
	I don't want to.
	So what does that mean to people when they go, oh, they bought back their own stock?
	Why is that bad?
	What does that mean?
	People listen like, so what?
	I don't know.
	Because it's what Marx called fictitious capital.
	It's a giant Ponzi scheme.
	You buy back the stock as if the value of your company is actually worth more.
	Well, it's only worth more because you were given money by the Fed at 0% interest.
	And the other thing that they've done is because it has to be paid back, even though it's 0% interest, is ratcheted up the debt peonage on the American public.
	So that's where you get $1.5 trillion in student debt.
	That's where you get $13 some trillion in household debt.
	That's where you get, you know, if you're laid on your credit card, it's 28%.
	Even if you have insurance, I mean, a Million people a year in this country who go bankrupt have insurance.
	Health insurance.
	Health insurance.
	It's just that there are so many loopholes in the insurance policy.
	They could just slam you with this cost, that cost, this bill, this bill, until you can't pay for it.
	The situation, I mean, I just read those statistics.
	So we know economically they're worse than they were before the crash.
	But the predatory nature now of global capitalism, it's just completely unrestricted.
	There's no constraints.
	And Trump is this kind of turbocharged kleptocracy.
	And that's what the tax cut is.
	It's just unfettered pillage of the rest of the country.
	But we know where it's going to go.
	And this time around, they don't have a plan B. They can't lower interest rates any more than they've already lowered them.
	And then we're really in for it.
	We just had Stephanie Kelton on, and I presented her with that.
	And she said, oh, bankers are creative.
	They have a lot more.
	I said, I thought I can't do anything.
	She's like, they'll figure something out.
	That's what she said.
	I don't know.
	It doesn't seem like, you're right.
	It seems like they're out of shape.
	She has faith in bankers.
	Kind of the whole point of this show since 2016 is to fight against the narrative that Trump is the problem and that as soon as we get rid of Trump, everything will be good because Barack Obama was such a nice guy.
	And what they don't realize is if they did realize what Barack Obama actually did, which was, again, continue the policies of George Bush, made the banks bigger, made the wars more, made the Bush tax cuts permanent.
	They didn't even have to do that, just could have let him expire, kicked 5.1 million families out of their houses as he was giving trillions of dollars to the banks.
	He let the union go away in Wisconsin.
	So if they knew all those things, they would go, oh, now I get why we have Trump, but people don't know those things.
	And the way you put it, that Trump is not an anomaly, that he is a grotesque visage of a failed democracy.
	So, I mean, I've covered societies in disintegration, including Yugoslavia.
	So that's why you're good at this, I think.
	You've seen this before.
	I've watched it.
	So the meltdown in Yugoslavia was caused by the financial collapse of Yugoslavia, not ancient ethnic hatreds.
	And you had, as we do, an ineffectual and finally despised ruling elite that was slick in their language of democracy and inclusiveness and all this kind of stuff, the way Obama was.
	But with that economic collapse in the late 80s, and this is what terrifies me, is what will happen when our collapse comes.
	With that economic collapse, the rage at the betrayal across the ruling spectrum saw the Yugoslavs turn to Trump-like figures, crude, vulgar, racist imbeciles who incite violence.
	Because however uneducated and inarticulate Trump is, that belittling of the Jeb Bushes and the Hillary and Bill Clintons resonates.
	And in some ways, in a kind of dark way, is even cathartic because they hate these people.
	And they hate them, especially not only for what they've done, but how slick they are, how they keep speaking in tones of reasonableness when their lives have long since stopped being reasonable.
	And in this book, the focus of the book is the pathologies that are created by a decayed culture, that the human suffering, it's what Emile Durkheim calls the anime or the despair that pushes people to engage in self-annihilating activities.
	Heroin, gambling, suicide, hate groups, sexual sadism.
	I went to San Francisco and hung out with these BDSM cult-like communities.
	So that's typical.
	I mean, I studied classics.
	That's that all of those pathologies were part of the decline of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
	That's when societies seize up, when they fall into degeneration, it unleashes what Freud would call them the death instinct.
	And that's what's happening.
	And I focused on the pathologies, arguing that until we address the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, until we address that, these pathologies will only get worse and they find an expression in Trump.
	And if you can impeach Trump, but unless you confront those pathologies, you're going to get another figure like Trump or worse.
	And Noam Chomsky argues probably correctly that Michael Pence is worse because he comes out of our most authentically fascist movement, which is the Christian right.
	And I speak as a seminary graduate.
	I don't, you know, I don't not a new atheist.
	So, and they are fascist.
	You don't have to go to Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure out that Jesus did not come to make you rich.
	Jesus did not fuse the iconography and language of the state with that of the religion in order to sacralize imperialism and capitalism.
	And of course, it's a form of magical thinking because it's magic Jesus who's going to, and it gets right back to it's nothing wrong with the system.
	It's, I've just got to believe more and give more money to my mega church pastor who's already a multi-millionaire for seed faith and a prayer cloth.
	And then Jesus will come down and I'll be rich too.
	So the Trump supporters were already kind of primed at the pump because their leaders are these kind of hucksters, these religious leaders are all.
	I see there's very little daylight between Omega Church pastor and Donald Trump.
	Except maybe the sexual proclivities of the mega pastors are kinkier.
	Okay.
	So here's also from the book, you say, you know, you talk about magical thinking, but there's also magical thinking on the left.
	Yeah.
	That's right.
	So, but here's just one, you say capitalism can never be appeased.
	Liberal reforms are used to stymie resistance, but are later, when things grow quiet, revoked.
	Right.
	The past examples of labor in the United States, you know, the social reform does not constitute an invasion into capitalist exploitation.
	Well, that's such, I like, let me read that again.
	Social reform does not constitute an invasion into capitalist exploitation, but a regulating in order of this exploration in the interest of capitalist society itself.
	So you're saying social reform is also just like doing the bidding of the establishment.
	Well, that's right.
	You know, Roosevelt said that his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism.
	And yeah, people think he was a socialist, but what he did was, so he told the rich people there's going to be a revolution unless you give him some money.
	He wrote a letter.
	I read it.
	He wrote a letter.
	I think it's to his brother.
	This is in his private correspondent, which came out after his death.
	And he said, we better give up some of our money or we're going to have revolution.
	He used the word revolution.
	And you think we're there again today?
	I think we are.
	Except we don't have the movements.
	We don't have the progressive movement.
	We don't have the Wobblies.
	We don't have the old CIO.
	We don't have an independent press.
	Well, they've been hollowed out.
	Yes, and we don't have the Communist Party.
	And let's not forget, I'm not a communist, but we have so effectively erased them from our history.
	There's a reason Paul Robeson and W.E. Du Bois were communists.
	We don't even allow people to be environmentalists in this country anymore.
	No, they're called terrorists.
	Yes, they are.
	Yeah.
	AGAG laws.
	So people don't realize Barack Obama repealed basically habeas corpus.
	And you talk about this a lot in the NDAA section 1021, the National Defense Authorization Act.
	So now basically you can be disappeared on the streets of the United States.
	And people go, do you really think that's going to happen, Jimmy?
	Now, why do you think they passed the fucking law if they didn't want to use it?
	Well, what do you think happens to poor black people in cities like Chicago?
	They get disappeared.
	They had it in Chicago all the time.
	And then they were tortured.
	Yes.
	It's not just Chicago.
	So, again, people don't realize how bad things are, I don't think.
	Or the people in power, the people that I normally rub shoulders with don't.
	When I was touring as a comic, just playing clubs, those people knew how bad things were.
	I saw how bad things were.
	I remember I'll never forget.
	I did two weeks in Winnipeg, which is cold.
	But I immediately noticed, this has got to be, I don't know, 15 years ago.
	I immediately noticed that everyone was less tense, like the waitress, the bartender, everybody.
	And then it took me like a week to figure it out, but nobody was worried about losing their job because their kid had diabetes and they needed to keep their health.
	They had the same health care as their boss and the guy who owned the club.
	And so it kind of evened everybody out, which is maybe that's why they have all the guns like Michael Moore was trying to figure out, but not the violence.
	Maybe because they have a government that actually gives a shit about their well-being.
	Unlike what we have here is us worshiping the altar of free markets, which I have to remind people, there are no such things as free markets.
	Markets are created by people who have stuff to sell, and then they rig the rules to favor them, correct?
	Right.
	Comcast.
	Yes.
	Comcast.
	Is that an example of free market?
	Comcast?
	Oh, it's super free.
	And you talk about Jesse Jackson being booed in Ferguson.
	Can you talk about that?
	Sure, because so these young activists, some of whom I interview out of Ferguson, pretty impressive people, they're not buying that black, Glenn Ford calls it the misleadership class, the black misleadership class like the Jesse Jacksons and others who made alliances with corporate America and the political structure.
	I mean, of course, the Clintons in his case, but the young generation's not having it.
	So both.
	They did sell out.
	The L. Sharpton's.
	I mean, it's a.
	And that's why Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were driven out of Ferguson.
	Yeah.
	So Jesse Jackson's over there with a bullhorn screaming, no justice, no peace.
	And the people came up to him and said, get out of here.
	Or you're going to get hurt.
	Or you're going to get hurt.
	Yes.
	And he said, that's the problem.
	We've got to come together.
	They're like, no, you're the problem because you sold out to these people.
	We're supposed to be resisting.
	I think one of the big criticisms of yours coming from the left is that people say, you know, you don't have enough solutions.
	And so that's what people tell me too.
	They're like, oh, you're just crying.
	But I want to read, you say, this is great also.
	So I love this part.
	You say, only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react.
	Appealing to their better nature of the powerful is useless because they don't have one.
	Oh my God, that's awesome.
	We once had within our capitalist democracy, liberal institutions.
	We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions, the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded universities and liberal wing of the Democratic Party that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements.
	They did so imperfectly.
	They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s from revolution.
	And they never adequately addressed white supremacy, institutional racism, or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism.
	But they have the ability to mitigate some of the suffering that plagued working men and women.
	There was never enough social mobility, but there was some.
	Public education, including institutions such as the City College of New York, rivaled the private institutions, including prep schools and Ivy Leagues and Ivy League colleges where the wealthy sent their sons and daughters to be groomed for the plutocracy.
	These liberal institutions collapsed under sustained assault during the last 40 years of corporate power.
	They exist now only in name and they are props in the democratic facade.
	Liberal nonprofits from moveon.org to the Sierra Club are no better.
	They are feeble appendages to a corporatized democratic party.
	So I'll just go a little bit further.
	There are, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wollen reminds us, no institutions left in America that can authentically be called democratic.
	But even more ominously, the militant movements that were the real engines of democratic change have been obliterated by the multi-pronged assault of communist wish hunts and McCarthyism, along with the deindustrialization, a slew of anti-labor laws and deregulation and corporate seizure of our public and private institutions.
	This has left us nearly defenseless, forcing us to start all over again.
	And so you go on and then talk about what are we going to need to fight back against these bastards.
	You talk about how we're going to need to come together with people of political stripes and ideologies that we often find deplorable.
	Right.
	So you're saying we go ahead.
	What do you think?
	Well, I think it was Lord Salisbury who was a shit, but he said there's no permanent, there are no permanent alliances.
	They're only permanent power.
	Right.
	But we do have to, I mean, if you go into a Walmart and I mean, the Walton family is just, it's out of, you know, late monarchical France.
	I mean, it's just they sit around and, or maybe the Sackler family from Purdue making $11,000 an hour for doing nothing and having these sophisticated union busting.
	I'm talking about Walmart.
	But if you went to Walmart, which is hollowed out any small town, including the ones I come from, and you say we're going to organize for a $15 minimum wage and health insurance.
	You're Speaking to the very real economic issues of people who may have voted for Trump or people who may hold opinions and political beliefs that are distasteful to you.
	But we're going to have to build those alliances because as you point out, the goal of every ruling elite, especially as you veer towards a crisis, is to keep the working classes not only divided but pitted against each other.
	In America, that's done usually through race.
	Even the kind of anti-communist movement was racialized.
	I mean, I spent time with these white militias, the Knights of the Alt-Right, Proud Boys, the Three Percenters.
	At one point, I was actually around a bonfire in a rural part of upstate New York outside of Binghamton with all of these guys while they were drinking beer, praying to my Presbyterian God that none of them would Google me.
	But their stories of dislocation are real, and their suffering is real.
	And when I wrote my book on the Christian right, I came to the conclusion that we're never going to argue these people out of their magical thinking.
	The only way to break the movement is to reintegrate these people back into the society.
	But we've done the opposite.
	We've pushed them further and further out.
	And the further you get pushed out, the harder it is to cope with reality, the more as a kind of emotional mechanism, you retreat into magical thinking.
	Anthropologists call it crisis cults, which is kind of what the Christian right is.
	So in many ways, Trump, Trump's magical thinking, Trump's worldview, which is not rooted in verifiable fact, is not an anomaly.
	Tens of millions of Americans, including all of those in the Christian right, have preceded Trump in stepping into a non-reality-based worldview.
	So here's how you put it in the book.
	You say, when people say, what are you building around?
	I say, we're building around power.
	People who understand power tend to have the patience to build a base, do the training, raise the money.
	So when they go into action, they surprise people.
	If we are to succeed, we will have to make alliances with people and groups whose professed political stances are different than ours, than our own, and at times unpalatable to us.
	We will have to shed our ideological purity.
	The legendary organizer Saul Ilinsky, whose successor Ed Chambers was Deacon's mentor, argued that the ideological rigidity of the left, something epitomized in identity politics and political correctness, effectively severed the left from the lives of working men and women.
	This was also during the Vietnam War when college students led the anti-war protests and sons of the working class did the fighting and dying in Vietnam.
	The left often dismisses, dismissed Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots, often ignoring their betrayal and suffering, condemning all those who support Trump is political, condemning all those who support Trump is political suicide.
	There are no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only permanent interests, as you already said.
	So when I'm in Anderson, Indiana with all these old UAW workers, GM has moved all the plants to Mexico, where they're paying Mexicans $3 an hour without benefits.
	So all those union jobs are gone, $20, $35 an hour with medical benefits and pensions, and you could support a family on one salary and buy a house and send your kids.
	It's all gone.
	The city's a wasteland.
	They've actually ripped down the huge GM plants.
	So they're these massive weed-choked lots.
	They voted for Sanders in the primary.
	But they were never going to vote for Clinton in the general election because NAFTA destroyed their lives, the lives of their families, the lives of their communities, and the lives of their children.
	And so people don't realize that that's why she lost.
	Right.
	People really want to say it's racism.
	It's right.
	And the Democratic Party can't admit it.
	They can't do an autopsy on themselves.
	No, because it is, if they did an autopsy on themselves, they would have to confront their complicity in creating that system.
	And in order to fix the system, they could no longer be an appendage of Wall Street and corporate power.
	Pelosi, Schumer, all of these figures are creations of the oligarchs, creations of Wall Street money.
	The power of Pelosi and the power of Schumer and the party is that they are the conduits.
	They funnel that money to the anointed candidates.
	If we got that money out of politics and had fair elections, these people wouldn't hold power, and they know it.
	And so they'd rather take the whole thing down than give up their privilege and their status.
	So it's exactly the opposite of what they argue.
	They argue that the people who wouldn't vote for Hillary are doing it because of their white privilege.
	But the reason why they gave us Hillary is because of their white privilege.
	Well, and this gets into the whole Clintons who played that card of, you know, dog whistling, ripping apart Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, going after, was it Sister Soljo?
	Yes.
	The law and order.
	I mean, look, I teach in a prison.
	Upwards of at least half or more of my students wouldn't be there but for Bill Clinton.
	The Democratic Party is not our savior.
	So there's a lot of people right now claiming that there's going to be a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party.
	And I try to keep explaining to them that is not happening.
	I live in the bluest of the blue states.
	When we had a Democratic takeover of this state, which we have, we have a supermajority and Jerry Brown is our governor.
	And guess what we have?
	We have fracking.
	We don't have single-payer health care.
	They gutted net neutrality.
	We don't have a living wage.
	We also have, as the leader of the Democratic Party, a pharmaceutical lobbyist who we found out they have super delegates on the state level.
	So this idea that somehow the party is going to, you're going to, it's not, right?
	Am I wrong about that?
	Or do you think that it's, because people say it's, well, it's too hard to start a third party.
	Well, what the, how hard do you think it is to reform the Democrats?
	The Bible worked for Ralph Nader.
	They make it hard.
	They were terrified in Nader after 2000.
	He was filling stadiums like Bernie, too.
	Yeah, but he didn't have the money.
	Everybody had to pay $5.
	That's the only way he paid it off.
	Right.
	Like Madison Square Garden.
	Yes, he was.
	And yeah, they make it hard.
	I know.
	I watched it up close.
	But that's because they don't want, they have their, you know, their fingers around the ring, and they're not going to let go unless we make them let go.
	Look, Sarasa, which ruling Greece, Cyprus, you know, kind of sold out.
	But nevertheless.
	So they were nowhere.
	They were 4%.
	They were polling 4% 10 years ago.
	They were the equivalent of the Green Party in Greece.
	Yeah, except that was a functional party, unlike our Green Party.
	Right.
	So, I mean, my problem with Bernie Sanders is that we're not going to create a so-called political revolution in an election cycle, and we're not going to do it within the confines of the Democratic Party.
	And you could see it.
	So he could pull 10,000 people.
	But once he endorsed Hillary Clinton, went out on the campaign, he was getting 100.
	He was lucky to get 100 people.
	He went right back down to 100 people.
	Yeah.
	And I, so the day that he endorsed Hillary, Cornell West and I were helping to lead a march of homeless people on the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, where the Democratic Convention was being held.
	And afterwards, Cornell and I drove home to Princeton, and we were listening to Bernie Sanders' endorsement speech.
	And Cornell said, I think quite presently, he missed his historical moment.
	Oh, boy.
	You know, what would Eugene v.
	Debs have done?
	Endorsed Hillary Clinton?
	Jesus Christ.
	And I think that's right.
	He should have walked out.
	But he didn't.
	I mean, he did correctly assess, because I asked him, I talked to him before he announced, and I asked him why Ashama Sawan and I were with him.
	Why wouldn't he run as an independent?
	And he said, because he didn't want to end up like Ralph Nader.
	Well, he's not wrong.
	They would have done everything they could to destroy him.
	They did anyway.
	Yes.
	And, well, this is his folly.
	And with Debs, Wilson threw him in prison.
	Yes.
	But this is, if you really truly confront, these people are vicious.
	They're cruel.
	They're immoral.
	They're consumed by all of the pathologies of psychopaths and inability for remorse, unbridled narcissism, a lust for power.
	I mean, they got it all.
	And I don't say that from a distance because as a 10-year-old, I got a scholarship.
	I was one of 16 scholarship kids at one of these elite boarding schools.
	I grew up with these people.
	The rich, you mean?
	Yeah, including people like Lewis Scooter-Libby and stuff.
	I mean, these are classmates of mine.
	So I know them.
	They're even creepier in person than they are at a distance.
	And they're not going to let go, and they're going to play dirty.
	There's not going to be anything civil about this fight to wrest power from these people.
	But if we don't wrest power, it's not just what they're going to do to us.
	It's what they're going to do to the biosphere and the ecosystem in the name of short-term profit, which is destroy it and extinguish the possibility of human life.
	So I— So when Bernie Sanders, I can play videotape after videotape of him decrying the two-party system and for him saying that there has to be a rainbow coalition and it has to happen outside the Democratic Party.
	And the whole reason why he's not doing that is because.
	Because of his career.
	Because he wants to keep his seniority within the Democratic Party.
	He does not want to be seriously challenged for a Senate seat in Vermont.
	And he doesn't want to be a figure of ridicule within the corporate press.
	And he's not wrong.
	That's exactly what would happen.
	Yeah, but who cares about all that?
	Well, he obviously cares, which is why.
	That's what it kills me.
	Well, that's the difference between him and Ralph Nader.
	I mean, you know, I love Ralph.
	I just talk to him.
	I talk to him all the time.
	And I remember somebody saying something about, you know, destroying his legacy.
	And he said, what are they going to do?
	take seat belts out of cars.
	So I know you have to go.
	It's 3 o'clock.
	So do you have any?
	I mean, it's a great book.
	I want to tell people the book is just America, the Farewell Tour.
	And it just put words to all the stuff that I had seen.
	Can I read the...
	I didn't even write it.
	So, I mean, this is, it's Irving Howe, the great critic, writing about the Snopeses.
	Yes.
	So it kind of gets where we are.
	So this is initially me.
	When a tiny cabal seizes power, monarchist, communist, fascist, or corporate, it creates a mafia economy and a mafia state.
	Trump is not an anomaly.
	He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy.
	Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes Klan in some of William Faulkner's novels.
	The Snopeses fill the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated former slaveholding aristocratic elites.
	Phlegm Snopes and his extended family, which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality, are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government.
	They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.
	The usual reference to amorality, while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them as they should be placed in a historical moment, the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses.
	Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards, the creatures that emerge from the devastation with the slime still upon their lips.
	Let a world collapse in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible.
	Sons of bushwhackers or musics drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force.
	They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo.
	Scavengers without inhibition.
	They need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society.
	They need only learn to mimic its sounds.
	Wow, that's great writing, and that's where we are.
	And that's amazing.
	Wow.
	How would you like to end this interview?
	Let me ask you, because I have no idea.
	I'm not a good interviewer.
	So what would be you probably better than me?
	So what would be a good way for me to end this interview?
	Well, I just think people have to give up the false hope that any institution within the system, and we are at a moment in climate change alone, which can appropriately described as an emergency, as the greatest existential crisis facing the human species.
	And we have no time left.
	We have to react.
	And these elites will drive us over the precipice.
	They are so stupid, so blind, so self-consumed.
	I mean, they all think they're going to go off to bunkers, million-dollar bunkers in Utah and survive when the rest of us won't.
	They should read a little history because their guards in total chaos will off them in a minute.
	I saw that in Yugoslavia.
	We have to overthrow this system.
	We have to begin to think in revolutionary terms.
	These people have to go because we can't afford to endure much more of their destruction, not only what they're doing to human beings, but the ecocide that they are carrying out.
	And even the quote-unquote enlightened elites like Jerry Brown are not, They're greenwashing this problem.
	And if you doubt me, you should read these climate change reports, which I do.
	And they're very depressing because the constant theme of every report is that it's happening far faster than we predicted.
	We weren't too pessimistic.
	We were far too optimistic.
	And the reason climate scientists are terrified of getting above two degrees Celsius is because of feedback loops.
	And they know from studying climate conditions on planets like Venus, which once had lots of water and now is 800 degrees, that once these feedback loops start.
	And this means that this climate, this deterioration, the absence of the polar ice caps raises the sea levels, acidifying, there's no way you can control it.
	And that's where we're headed.
	And I do have kids, and I wouldn't give one of mine away.
	And I don't, you know, I may fail.
	We may fail.
	I think the hardest thing for those of us who are realists to do is face the bleakness of what's before us and rise up anyway.
	But I want my kids to say that he tried.
	And I do come out of a position of faith, not in any kind of orthodox way, but I believe we have a moral responsibility to resist and fight against radical evil.
	You know, I don't know if we're going to survive as a species, but I know that these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat.
	And in the end, I don't fight fascists because I'll win.
	I fight fascists because they are fascists.
	Hello, this is Jimmy.
	Hello, Jimmy.
	This is Christiana Mampoor from CNN.
	Oh, hi, Christiane.
	Nice to hear from you.
	How are you?
	I'm doing splendidly.
	I have a new show on CNN that airs on Saturday evenings.
	I hope you can check it out.
	Oh, is that so?
	Yes, it's called Sex and Love Around the World.
	In it, I travel the globe, interviewing women from Tokyo to Berlin, Timbuktu to Bali about relationships, love, and sex.
	laughter laughter I'm sorry.
	Wow.
	Well, that sounds very interesting.
	What gave you the idea for this?
	Well, I'm glad you are.
	Hey, you know, there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
	How do you hear the entire phone call?
	You got to become a premium member.
	Go to JimmyDorkComedy.com, sign up.
	It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
	Today's show was written.
	That's right.
	It was written by Frank Connoff, Jim Earl, Ron Placone, Steph Samurano, and Mark Van Landowic.
	All the voices today performed by the one and the only, the inimitable Mike McRae, who can be found at mikemcrae.com.
	That's it for this week.
	you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
	Don't freak out.
	Do not, do not, do not.
	Do not freak.
	Do not freak.
	Do not freak out.

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