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Jan. 9, 2020 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:04:12
20200109_TJDS_20200109_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore show.
So we haven't heard from Jake Tapper in a while, so let's see what he has to say about all this.
Jake Tamper!
Hi, Jake.
It's Jimmy Dore.
Oh, hi, Jimmy.
It's Jake Tamper.
Yeah, I know.
I called you.
from the lead with Jake.
Yes, from the lead with Tapper.
Yes, of course.
Right.
How are things over at CNN right now?
Well, things are tense, I'm not going to lie.
These are uncertain times.
That they are, Jake.
It's moments like these in American history when everybody, no matter their political affiliation or faith tradition, need to come together and pray for our best interests.
Okay.
Honestly, the events of today have me and everyone in the CNN newsroom shaken to our core.
The events of today, don't you mean yesterday when Iran retaliated for the U.S. assassination of Soliman by ordering airstrikes on U.S. military base?
No, I mean the events of today, when we learned that no Americans were killed, that this was probably the extent of Iranian retaliation, and that war, which seemed so certain for a brief period yesterday, now seems unlikely.
I'm not sure I understand.
Okay, Jimmy, I think we have a miscommunication here.
Earlier when I kept saying we and us, as in we need to earnestly pray, who did you think I meant?
The American people.
No, I meant us, cable news.
The prospect of no war with Iran would have devastating, perhaps disastrous consequences.
Oh, my God.
And right now, my thoughts and prayers go out to our brave men and women in uniform serving in the CNN corporate boardroom.
The uniform of Giorgio Armani.
Wow.
These were already uncertain times for us.
We had thrown all our resources at covering the impeachment, which worked on our behalf for a while.
But once the viewers began to realize that it was meaningless political theater meant to distract the voter base and leaven support for the Democratic Party, the ratings started to dip.
Right.
Right.
Especially in the mail 25 to 44 demo, which dropped nearly 7%.
That's an important demo, Jake.
Gravely important, Jimmy.
But then the prospect of war with Iran shot out of the sky.
A prospect that would have locked down that demo for months, if not years.
Spirits were high.
Nobody does war coverage like CNN.
It's our bread and butter.
It put us on the map.
We're the fucking best.
LAUGHTER LAUGHTER LAUGHTER LAUGHTER Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Ah.
I see.
But then this airstrike, really?
No Americans killed?
What do they miss?
What the fuck?
What do they need me to come over there and aim that shit for them?
Because I will.
Because I will.
Ah!
Ha ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha ha!
Don't do that, Jake.
But seriously, all we can do is our own part.
My humble effort today was to close my show with a segment about U.S. servicemen who were maimed in Iraq by weapons supposedly provided by Salalaman, thereby subtly validating Trump's assassination of him and subtly invalidating Iran's retaliation.
Hopefully the message was clear.
War is good.
Don't worry.
Don't worry, Jake.
Corporate News's ultimately pro-war stance is never lost on those of us who are paying attention.
Thanks, Jimmy.
I truly appreciate that.
I'm just one simple CNNian who is trying to do his part for his employer country.
His employer country.
You're a good boy, Jake.
Have yourself a piece of cake, pal.
Oh, is it someone's office birthday?
Is it Belinda in accounting?
Establishment media sets of artists fighting.
So good luck with bullshit they can't afford by momenting this boat.
Watch and see as a jack dog comedian.
Speeds and jumps the medium and hits him head on.
It's the Jimmy Door show.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Jimmy Door Show.
We'll see you this weekend in Portland, Oregon for the live Jimmy Door Show.
Tickets available for Sunday show.
Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com for a link for all of our tickets.
Let's get to the jokes before we get to the jokes, shall we?
I got to tell you, I can't believe it's 2020.
It's 2020.
And I'm still trying to come up with a variation on this checkwriting joke.
Come on.
You heard Biden's out.
He was in New Hampshire the other day at a rally, and he said he would consider choosing a Republican as his vice president.
Did you hear that?
Yeah.
I mean, why not?
He was vice president for a Republican.
Slamming Barack Obama.
Did you know that according to the Pentagon, President Trump was given only two sure methods of killing Iranian general Soleimani.
The first one was drop a bomb on him, and the second was convince him to file a lawsuit against Kevin Spacey.
You got to have some background info for that joke.
I don't know.
Did you see Megan McCain and Liz Warren go at it?
On the view?
Isn't that nice?
Megan McCain is like if hate and lip gloss made a person anyway.
Look, I was there at Pete's Wine Cave dinner.
Pete Buddhajit, I was there at his Wine Cave dinner, and everybody had to park their own Rage Rover.
I was there at Pete's Wine Cave dinner, and not once did any of his guests mistreat their slaves.
I was there at Pete's Wine Cave dinner, and the Dom Perillon and Caviar distributed equally.
Look, I was there at Pete's Wine Cave dinner, and not once did any of the local villagers have to wait outside in the cold while they were sourced for plasma.
Look, I was there at Pete's Wine Cave dinner, and I can assure you the roast ostrich with flamingo tongues were all served on reclaimed old-growth redwood platters.
What's coming up on this week's show?
We have Shahid Batar, who's running against Nancy Pelosi for her congressional seat, and he has an actual chance to beat her.
Plus, can we ever unwind the start of the Iran war?
The answer just may surprise you, or will it?
Plus, we have phone calls today from Jake Tapper, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Benjamin Netanyahu, plus a lot lot more.
That's today on the Jimmy Dore Show.
Thank you.
Hello?
Is this Jeb Bush?
Guess who this is?
Jeb Bush.
It's Jeb Bush.
Wow.
Donald Trump is so dumb.
He's even dumber than my dumb brother.
No why.
What?
Because he's starting a war with Iran.
He's starting a war with wait, huh?
Who told you?
It's been all over the news, Jeb.
Why do I always find out last?
Why?
But I'm sitting here at the compound all day and all night, every day.
Servants walking past me back and forth, bringing me stuff, cleaning up, dusting.
Might you be taking your Tim Speed out for a run today, sir?
No, I might not.
That's a dumb brother, not me.
How come nobody ever tells me anything?
Do you still have the Secret Service overseeing you?
Yeah, but I keep them in the other building with the cars.
I don't like the way they watch me eat.
What's your Secret Service code name, Jeb?
Wow, Jimmy.
Only a dickhead would tell you that.
Okay, it's dickhead.
Ugh.
What?
You're depressed.
What's wrong now, Jeb?
You were just brimming with joy over Trump starting a war with Iran.
Have you ever Googled your name?
Oh, so.
These sketches are the only thing that come up.
Sometimes I Google my name, yes.
Well, I just Googled mine.
Guess what came up first?
A story headlined: worst campaign slogans in history.
I mean, come on, right?
And what was your campaign slogan again?
Gosh, you don't even remember.
It was Jeb can fix it.
Remember now?
That sounds like a nice slogan.
What's wrong with it?
Because it sounds like a cleanup dog poop or something.
That's what.
Hey, George, Neil got out of his cage and pooped on the carpet again.
Oh, don't worry.
Jeb can fix it.
Or her mom ran over her ex-boyfriend again.
Don't worry, Jeb can fix it.
Or Dad woke up from his coma again.
Don't worry, Jeb can fix it.
Well, didn't you have any better slogans to pick from?
I'm so depressed.
We know, Jeb.
I'm sorry.
No, that was the other slogan.
I'm so depressed.
Then why didn't you go with that one instead?
Because I hold a mirror up to society and they resent that.
I remind Democrats of Hillary Clinton and Republicans of Donald Trump.
I am the existential canary in a coal mine.
What was George W's code name?
Oh, don't be a dickhead too, Jimmy.
Okay, it's dickhead two.
I'm so depressed.
So we all know what's happening with Iran.
Trump decided to listen to the craziest guys inside of his administration and knock off the biggest enemy of ISIS, General Soleimani.
Is that how we're saying it?
Soleimani?
And so then Iran struck back at a base, an American base, but they didn't kill anybody.
So that's the good.
That was so they had to have a response, right?
So all else, their own people would have.
So CBS News brings on this guy, right?
So this guy's a former deputy director of CIA, Mike Morrell.
He was the one who predicted that there would be no Russia Gate evidence.
Remember, we did a story about him, and he two years ahead of time, he predicted there ain't going to be any evidence of it.
And he was right.
And I wonder how he knew that.
Because he's at the top of the CIA and he knows that they made all this shit up.
So anyway, here he is.
They bring him on as their expert about war.
And now here he, you know, normally they bring on a guy from Raytheon on CBS to talk about war, but here they brought on the former guy from the intelligence community.
And it wasn't so horrible.
This is kind of interesting.
So let's all watch.
Overt war, which is us killing Qasim Soleimani, taking responsibility, and them now firing back from Iran, taking responsibility.
That's the overt war.
Hopefully that can de-escalate now.
But that doesn't mean the covert war is over.
In fact, I think there's...
The overt war, the wand out and open, is over.
We hit them.
They hit us back.
But he's saying there's still another COVID.
Now, this is what we talked about.
Even if we come to peace with Iran, the way that the Trump administration did this attack was to not only piss off people inside of Iran, but Shia Muslims all over the Shia Muslim world.
So even though you can make a deal and have peace with Iran proper, there's going to be Shias all over the region who aren't going to be in that deal, who still want to strike back at the United States because Soleimani was seen as a hero of theirs for saving them from the ravages of ISIS, saving Iran and other places from stuff like happened in Syria.
It happened in Libya, fighting against...
There are two things we need to think about here.
One is still down the road at some point, an assassination of a senior U.S. official somewhere in the world, could be months from now, to get revenge.
And then two.
Now imagine that.
Imagine they take out one of our generals anywhere.
Who knows?
In Iraq or in Syria, in Libya, or any of the other 80,000 countries where we happen to be occupying it or drone bombing at this time.
So that's what he's saying.
That'll probably happen.
That's what he said.
That's what we have to worry about.
But, okay, here we go.
We still have to worry about those Iranian proxies.
They may still attack U.S. military bases.
We've seen some rocket attacks since Soleimani was killed.
And we have to remember, Anne-Marie, that Iran has.
So what he's saying there, so I'll say this.
The way that Trump administration attacked Iran by taking out Soleimani, what that did, as I just explained, is going to make it impossible to reach a detente, a peace agreement.
It's going to be almost impossible because even though the Trump administration might get that deal with Iran, Shia's, he calls them proxies from around the region are going to be attacking the United States.
And so that's exactly what guys like john bolton want and pat clausen and the crazy neocons and pompeo that's exactly they want a conflict that we can't stop that's what the military do you understand they gave them an extra hundred do you know what the cash cow unbelievable cash cow the military industrial complex is they want to they need a conflict that can't be stopped And that's what they're,
that's what they're trying to get with this.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Yeah, when they need something vague, too.
So if it's just a bunch of a huge region of people that are ticked off, then you can just have this vague, like blanket, like, oh, we're against the terrorism, whatever that means.
We don't even know what terrorism is, by the way.
We don't even have that clearly defined.
But that's what we're against.
And that's what we have to fight indefinitely for another 20 years because this happened.
That's exactly right, Ron.
Now we get, now we were fighting ISIS, which is exported from Saudi Arabia.
And now we're just going to fight Shias, right?
Because why?
Because we provoked them.
That's why.
So let's hear what else he has to say.
Some control over these proxies, but not complete control.
So even though Iran may not want them to attack U.S. bases, they could still do that, and they could still drag us towards a war.
So what he's saying is exactly what we've been saying here and have said previously that the way they did this, the way they did this attack, was so that you couldn't unwind this, so that it would be almost automatically ratcheted up.
So that's what we're going to look for.
We're going to look for people outside of the control of Iran's government to be attacking the United States.
And that could take the form of anything.
Even a terrorist attack inside.
Not really.
The one issue, Anne-Marie, that nobody is really talking about is the Iranian decision to remove the restrictions on the enrichment of uranium, the restrictions that were put on it by the nuclear deal.
And the reason that's important is...
So he's saying that the Iranians decided to pull out of the nuclear deal they had, which kept them from limiting their enrichment of the uranium.
So he's saying the Iranians pulled out.
Well, you and I both, everyone knows that Trump pulled out of that.
It was Trump was the first one to pull out of that agreement.
And he's framing it.
He's saying it as of recently.
I mean, even simultaneously, Trump's like, yeah, that was bad, and I got us out of that.
Well, this guy's going, oh, no, it was them.
Yeah, now he's trying to say it was the Iranians who did it unilaterally.
Or he's framing it that way for sure to mislead people watching.
Here we go.
...important is because Iran will very quickly get back to a level of enriched uranium that so concerned Israel...
That Israel back in 2000.
So again, it's never going to stop.
So this is exactly what crazy people like Pompeo and John Bolton wanted.
They wanted a situation that you can't unwind.
So now Iran's going to start enriching their uranium again.
And now Israel's going to want to strike them for that.
And now Shias are going to want to strike the United States.
So they got what they wanted.
It seems like they're going to get what they wanted.
They wanted a conflict that you couldn't stop.
Yeah, and they want us to always be at war with Eurasia.
Yeah, this is it.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
This is it.
Anybody who voted for Trump because he was an anti-interventionist, you just saw him get rolled by the military industrial complex.
That's him trying to start a war and trying to start a conflict that, again, you can never stop or unwind.
So he let you down.
And if you think his second term, if he gets one, will be less militaristic than the first one, you're drinking Kool-Aid.
This is what's happening.
This is the way they did it.
And it's funny to see guys like he, this guy, I expected him to come up and be way more bellicose towards, I thought, but he actually sounds reasonable.
Like, well, maybe we could stop.
Maybe we can, maybe because he knows it's already too late to stop it.
I don't know.
But he seems kind of reasonable in this interview.
In fact, he goes on to say, ironically, this gives us a chance to have some peace talks with Iran.
This will bring them to the table.
I don't think so.
I think that the Iranians, what this teaches them is that it's useless to make a peace agreement with the United States.
And you better find a way to enrich uranium and get a nuke because that's what North Korea did.
And guess what?
We're not bombing them.
Libya gave up their arms.
And look what we did to Libya.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, compared to like the, you know, a lot of the corporate media just rehashing the Iraq soundtrack and just inserting different names, he does sound reasonable.
At least he's giving, you know, an analysis of what's going on.
But it's beyond discouraging.
Yes.
It is.
So there you go.
I mean, that's really the news so far on what's happening.
It's just ironic, too, because Soleimani was on a, he was on a peace mission.
It's just the dumbest.
Well, it's not dumb.
If you know what the military industrial complex's goal is, their goal is to have chaos in the Middle East forever.
Yeah, Iran was on the list of countries.
Yeah.
They were on the list.
Yeah.
And so they got it.
And why is Trump allowed to do this?
Because the Democrats are complicit.
Because the Democrats are also in bed with the military industrial complex.
Because every president since World War II is a war criminal.
That's why.
The Democrats, while they're screaming about impeaching him, were giving him the money to bomb these people.
Anything else?
And more.
And more.
And a new NAFTA, too.
And they gave him the new NAFTA.
All kinds of stuff.
They increased his spying powers.
They gave him new NAFTA.
They gave him money for his freaking border wall.
Yeah, they gave him $131 extra billion in the NDAA.
And they took out the provisions that would have stopped him from doing this specifically.
So I already talked about this in the other video we did on this with Max Blumenthal, but Democrats had placed into the NDAA, and it got bipartisan support to say Trump is not allowed to do this.
You're not allowed to take any of the money we're giving you and use it to attack Iran.
They took that out.
And the Democrats went along with it.
Well, not just went along with it.
Nancy Pelosi was vocally against all those amendments.
Was she?
She was vocally against them.
She was against them.
Really?
Like, she was not for them.
I did not know.
I did not know that.
I thought she rolled over, but she was actually against it.
Yeah, she was not for those amendments.
She was not for Rokana's or Barbara Lee's.
Really?
And Tulsi had a resolution.
Yeah.
Tulsi had a resolution that was in there also.
She was off on all those.
Wow.
That's all I can keep saying.
Wow.
It's just, it's amazing the unbelievable corruption inside of both our political parties.
But I grew up in a Democratic household.
We always thought the Republicans were corrupt and working for the business and that the Democrats were working for the workers.
And that was, we thought, turns out that, and that's not no longer.
They're both in bed with big business.
They both work for big pharma, health insurance, military industrial complex, Wall Street, and fossil fuels.
And the Democratic Party, they've done it so long and have become so corrupt, they lost to Trump.
That's how bad it's gotten.
Hey, baby, it's me, BB, the Bee Meister.
How's everybody doing in the house?
Not too well, Bibi.
The world's burning and we're bombing everybody.
No worries, my man.
It's all good.
What do you mean it's all good?
This could be the start of World War III, BB.
Just so we're on the same page here, we're talking about what now Trump assassinating.
Oh, that.
What?
Is there an echo in this bunker?
I mean, I mean, room.
BB, aren't you worried at all?
President Trump's a maniac.
Wait, the darn minute, fella.
Don't you give Donald all the credit.
He didn't even know who that guy was until I told him to kill him.
I mean, told him how to do it.
I mean, oh, you know what I mean.
Remember when Colonel O'Brien played with my dog?
This could be worse than Vietnam.
What?
Vietnam.
Oh, you mean Vietnam?
I'm still not following you.
Okay, this could end up being worse than the Iraq war.
Stop your whining.
If you take out Iran, Iran's regime, I guarantee you it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
You know, in 2002, you boasted the exact same thing about Iraq.
About where again?
Iraq.
No, I didn't.
Yes, you did.
We have you on video.
If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say the time of such regimes of such just bots is gone.
There is a new age.
Something new is happening.
See, you said the exact same thing.
That's not me.
Is that me?
That can't be good.
I don't know who he is, but whoever that man is, he was looking good.
Well, it is you, and it's from C-SPAN.
There's a Chiron under your image with the name Benjamin Netanyahu.
Look, just because there's an electronically generated caption of my name superimposed under my face on C-SPAN, it doesn't make it true.
That's you in 2002 speaking before Congress.
What is this Congress you speak of?
That's a hard one to answer.
You got me there, buddy.
Okay, let's just suppose for argument's sake that was me.
That's still not what I said.
All I said was: if you take out Iran, Iran's regime, I guarantee you it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
That is not the same thing as me saying, if you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
Do you see the difference?
Not really, buddy.
I don't.
That handsome guy on the tape puts a that into the mix.
Everyone knows that I never use the word that.
Anyway, that is all I have to say today about that.
Got that?
I have got to go now because I feel another bribe coming on.
I have got to go now.
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Speaking of the Democratic elite who are pro-war, we have someone who's running against one of those Democratic elites with us today.
Special guest.
He's a public interest advocate, writer, artist, and constitutional lawyer.
He's challenging Nancy Pelosi, my favorite 100 millionaire in Congress, and in the upcoming March 2020 primary and is running as a Democratic socialist congressional candidate for California's 12th district.
Please welcome to the show, Shahid Batar.
Hello, Shahid.
Thank you for being with us.
Did I say your name correctly?
You did, and it's so great to be with you, Jimmy.
Thanks for the invitation.
Well, it's really great to have you on the show.
San Francisco is not what people think it is.
It's a bunch of rich people, right, that live in Nancy Pelosi's district.
I mean, I could do it.
It is a lot of rich people.
It's more diverse than that.
It's more of a Hillary place than it is a Bernie place.
Well, not if I'm successful in my work.
I'm running precisely to deliver San Francisco for birthdays.
So that's why my question is.
So in my view, it's a Hillary, it's more of a corporate Democrat district than it is actually a progressive district.
Can you win?
Yeah, no, I have every confidence that we're going to win.
In fact, I would say that with every passing day, I grow increasingly convinced that Nancy Pelosi doesn't have a chance of retaining this seat precisely because she is so allied with the Trump administration that she is relying on political theater to convince her constituents that she's actually showing up for work.
And I have enough faith in my neighbors.
I think we all see through it.
You do.
As we're canvassing, you know, I'm out on the street.
I'm talking to people.
We're knocking on doors.
At least half the people we talk to, when we say we're running against Pelosi, they're like jumping out of their shoes.
And they're like, thank God, finally, we've been waiting.
The whole city's been over her.
You could think of Nancy Pelosi as a politician funded by corporate interests that are not based in San Francisco, who for the last 20 years has co-opted the voice of the country's most progressive city.
You know, her leading contributors include pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, fossil fuel extraction companies, weapons manufacturers.
None of them are based here.
San Francisco might be a wealthy community, but we're still a home of the peace and justice movement.
We're dedicated to climate justice.
We're a sanctuary city.
We're a welcoming city to people of all kinds, including people however they express their gender and orientation.
As a cis hetero-Muslim lawyer from the Midwest, I was fighting in the courts for marriage equality 10 years before Nancy Pelosi, with all the institutional privilege of the speaker of the house deigned to show up for the rights of my neighbors.
And when she did finally show up, it was on the eve of a decision by a conservative Supreme Court that took it off the table.
So she never, frankly, showed up at all.
And I see this pattern.
You know, she funded Bush's wars.
You know, she swept CIA torture under the rug.
The whole city, I think, for a generation has been waiting to shrug off the yoke of failed corporate rule.
And to zoom out from San Francisco to think about the dynamic nationally.
I can't tell you how many people I've spoken to since I started running in 2018 who said to me, I am with you.
We need to take over the Democratic Party.
I can't support you or she'll end my career.
Every sitting elected, from members of state legislatures to people who aren't running but think they might, who say, I can't touch you because you're running against the party leader.
And that to me demonstrates a crisis, another dimension of the crisis in democracy when the so-called Democratic Party is so anti-democratic that people can't even contemplate making their own choices because they have to demonstrate fealty to the leader.
That's a dimension of the problem that I also am agast by.
And I'll make it even sharper than this.
The Pelosi's plan for this seat, because Nancy Pelosi is in her 80s, they want to hand it off to her daughter.
And if there's anything that pisses me off more than the corporate co-optation of the nation's most progressive city, it is nepotism.
My family did not move halfway around the world so I could watch offices effectively be inherited by an aristocracy.
And I'm not willing to let that go down.
I mean, I'm here, again, as a voice of the Constitution and a defender of the future.
And the city is with me.
They already are.
I already represent San Francisco.
It's just a matter of time before we make it inescapably clear that Nancy Pelosi lost her mandate by aligning herself too closely with Wall Street and the Beltway.
Boy, I really hope you're right about that.
Wow.
I really hope you're right about that.
Which is why I, you know, I drag my feet on having you on the show.
It's just that I was so disappointed.
I just think that I just thought that that district was so wealthy and so out of touch with the progressives that would be so I hope you can do it.
You're, you know, you're a great speaker.
And so hopefully it'll work.
Now, are you afraid that so now in California, we have a weird system that the rest of the country doesn't have.
So go ahead and tell people.
The top two jungle primary.
Most people think of primary elections as each separate party having their own separate election and then the winners going to fight each other in the general.
And here in California, because so much of the state is effectively a one-party region, we decided that all of the parties and all of the candidates will run against each other in the primary.
And the top two, whichever party they come from, will go to the general election.
So if I'm successful in March, and frankly, I'm very confident about our position to take the second place in the March primary.
When I'm on the general election ballot against Pelosi in November, it will be the first time in this seat that there has been an intra-democratic general primary challenge.
And the idea of having an intra-democratic party challenge in the general election means that somebody like me coming from the left against Pelosi, I don't have to beat her in the primary.
I can take second and then I'll have the opportunity to face her alone in November.
And it creates a remarkable opportunity for people like me in this race.
In the past, one of the challenges of the jungle primary is that when a lot of people feel opportunity and they jump in a race and it gets crowded, it can be difficult to establish enough momentum to consolidate enough support to hit second.
And when I ran last year in 2018, I did lead the progressive field.
And frankly, I did so by a mile.
I wasn't able to consolidate enough support to get second place.
So I was edged by a Republican by a thousand votes.
Just a couple notes there.
I was only in that race for three months and I got no media attention.
And we got 17,500 votes because we ran in the strongest campaign for the seat that San Francisco has ever seen.
This race, you know, we've drawn support from 10 times as many people.
We've raised about eight times as much money.
We still have 10 months left.
We have literally thousands of volunteers who signed up on our campaign.
We have hundreds who are actively mobilizing at any given point.
These are among the reasons why I think Pelosi doesn't have a chance.
I appreciate your point about, I do know what to do with the microphone, but it's not on the basis of my skill that I think we're going to flip the seat.
The reasons we're going to flip the seat is just we're getting so much support.
A, B, Pelosi is veering so far to the right constantly.
And every time she does it, she pushes supporters into our arms.
C, Trump is doing such terrible things to the Republic that everyone is growing alarmed.
And people who'd never paid attention to politics before are growing woke.
And as they examine the facts and they examine the issues and they examine the history, they're discovering that Nancy Pelosi is no friend of theirs.
And you're totally right, just to press on a question that I hear you raising, that San Francisco has changed a lot, right?
It's not the same city as we were in the 1980s and 90s.
And frankly, if this were still 1990, San Francisco and I had the chance to run as who I am now with that electorate, we'd win this race blindfolded with my hands behind my back.
But even though the city is very different now and there has been vicious gentrification here and the housing costs are through the roof and it's a much wider city than it used to be and it is a much wealthier city and also a much poorer city.
You know, our homelessness problem has gotten much more visibly acute.
San Francisco, among the newcomers to San Francisco, are either people who are grappling with the empire from underneath the boot.
For instance, all of my neighbors who are unhoused and people who are struggling with the cost of housing and everything else, healthcare in this city.
And it includes a lot of people, and I think this is what you're pressing on, upwardly mobile, often very white, and predominantly technologists who have come into the city.
Those people, we can get them.
They will vote for us for a couple of different reasons.
One, they're empiricists.
They know that the climate chaos is coming for them and they know that no amount of money is going to insulate them from it.
And they recognize that the corporate Democratic Party is running our country and our species off a climate cliff.
And those technologists are not willing to be lemmings.
They are at least politically iconoclastic.
Now, a lot of them are atomized.
They're not necessarily engaged.
And so my project, our work over the next 10 months is to reach, engage, and involve those people.
And it's because of my faith in my neighbors, frankly, and my very profound belief in the wisdom of this city that I am so confident that I'll be representing it in a year.
So because we have this jungle primary, it doesn't really matter what party you're in when you run.
So why?
So, I mean, you're not you share no values with the Democratic Party as it is today.
So why not take this unique opportunity to run outside the party?
Because I want to take the party over.
I mean, beyond liberating one seat, if we knock out Pelosi, the value proposition here ultimately is to send a signal across the country that no Democrat who is a centrist is safe in any urban area.
Ocasio-Cortez started that in the last cycle.
I think if we, and she knocked out the number three Democrat in the corporate cabal, if we take out the leader, the signal that that sends, I mean, I'm playing for Marbles much bigger than one congressional seat.
And if I ran for some other party, it would just be for the seat that I would be contending.
But I'm contending much more than the seat.
I mean, we are here to remove the corporate Co-optation of the Democratic Party.
I often say that my candidacy proposes to end the bipartisan consensus on corporate rule.
In that respect, I feel a great deal of alignment, inspiration with the next president.
Bernie Sanders has been pounding this drum for 50 years.
And, you know, I've been doing it for 20.
I don't have his longevity, but I do have the same depth of commitment and the same demonstration of commitment to putting people before profit and communities before corporations my entire career.
And I've done that as a direct action activist.
I've done it as an impact litigator.
I've done it as a policy advocate, as an artist.
And I've done it as a national nonprofit leader.
And now I'm doing it as a congressional candidate.
And I hope to take that same voice into Congress.
And I think that we have an opportunity here bigger than a seat, bigger, even frankly, than just ending the bipartisan co-optation of our democracy.
I think at the end of the day, what we are talking about here is: will our species have a future or not?
And I think that the climate crisis and the need to secure a consensus on the Green New Deal and the need to secure a consensus on dismantling the Pentagon to ensure climate justice.
There's an interesting intersection there we can unpack.
Those are imperatives to the same degree as making sure that we, the people, aren't being fleeced by our criminal leaders.
These are all imperatives.
And the reason I'm running as a Democrat is because I hope at the end of this process, not only to be representing San Francisco and Washington, D.C., but also that the Democratic Party might be able to live up to its name finally.
Yeah, fingers crossed.
But so even if you guys, so let's say this happens.
Let's play it out.
Bernie Sanders wins the nominations.
He overcomes the cheating, which we can expect.
Right.
And the media smears and the thing and he somehow becomes president.
Well, the corporate Democrats, I mean, the Democrats are more conservative than they are progressive, right, in Congress.
And so they'll just align with the right wing to oppose your agenda.
So why not just start a new party anyway?
I mean, it's just think about AOC and Roe Khan and Pramila Jayapal and Bernie, right?
They're all running as Democrats because we share an agenda of creating a different poll.
And I totally think you're onto something here about recognizing that the Democrats are in the way of justice and they're not showing up for the values that they claim to stand for.
I think the solution to that, we could either, and we tried this with the Green Party, to build an alternative party.
I was a registered Green for more than a decade.
And faced with the option of confronting the corporate resources of the Democratic Party with a grassroots alternative versus just running within the party to take the reins.
You might describe the strategy that we are pursuing as much more audacious and bold.
You know, I'm not trying to build a new carriage to beat the one on the field.
I'm, you know, I'm trying to wrestle the person with the reins out of a seat to take it over.
And I think that there's a huge opportunity there because many Democrats, and I'm not talking about the electeds, I mean the rank and file, the base.
I think many Democrats want to see bolder representation.
They want to see more vision.
There's a reason that Bernie is leading the Democratic field.
It's because America has been waiting for voices to say that healthcare, housing, and food should be human rights.
We shouldn't be forcing people to compete for basic necessities.
It is brutal.
It is barbaric.
And in fact, maybe that's too mean to barbarians.
I think barbarians were more civilized than we have been.
They at least took care of their own communities.
We kick each other into the street if we get sick.
Think about how insane that is.
And Americans are over it.
They're over this paradigm that has been so vicious to human rights.
It's been so vicious to working families that is kicking the future off a cliff.
I think many Americans share our interests, yours and mine, in seeing a broad refashioning of our political landscape.
And only by contending for the reins of the Democratic Party do we have a chance, I think, to meet the needs of the future on the time scale that we need it.
If we're going to build an alternative party, that's going to take a generation.
And according to the climate scientists, we don't have that kind of time.
You know, it's throw down or get out.
And I kind of feel like with Nancy Pelosi, she's either going to show up for the interests of her constituency and our city, or our campaign is going to show her the door.
So how much does it hurt you?
How much of a gut punch is it to see people like AOC and people of the squad go to Congress to fight the power and then end up having to vote for Nancy Pelosi as their goddamn leader anyway?
After, by the way, after she moved to the right, she didn't move to the left to get AOC's vote.
She moved to the right to get the conservatives.
And the liberals just went along with, I mean, the progressives went along anyway because, you know, that's the what lip the progressives are not fighters.
And you say you want to be an assertive.
So can you talk more about that, that your idea of being assertive?
Yeah.
And just to press on the point at which Pelosi was chosen by the caucus to lead it, you might remember this would have been the beginning of, I guess, November 2018.
No, 19, just yeah, 2019.
No, sorry, 2018.
I'm scrangling my years.
So in November 2018, there was a debate.
Barbara Lee at one point was going to run for the speaker.
Right.
And she ended up just barely losing the race for the Democratic policy caucus chair.
So this is like the number, it's almost the sleep that Crowley got knocked out of in terms of the party leadership.
By removing figures like Pelosi and people like me going into Congress, we can shift the balance of those votes, exactly those votes.
I mean, the person who I, the set of people who I would most be eager to see serve as speaker would include Barbara Lee or Pramila Jayapal, perhaps someone from the squad in a future cycle.
I'm eager to support those voices.
And with the votes in Congress, to make them the speaker, we don't have to have Pelosi's.
And just to be to state something that I think is fairly obvious, the strongest way to make sure that Nancy Pelosi is no longer the Speaker of the House is just to make sure that her seat in Congress is occupied by someone else.
And to that extent, I offer the national movement an opportunity to unseat a corporate co-opter of our party and a key player in the corporate co-optation of our country, an ally of Trump, as you've noted, somebody who mounts theatrical resistance, claims the support of people inclined towards resistance while paving his road.
We can't let that go down anymore.
And San Francisco's with me.
I have 10 months to build the case and expand our support base beyond the 8,500 donors who are already fueling our campaign.
Just this morning, I was endorsed by U.S. Senator Mike Revelle.
I'm incredibly honored by his endorsement.
He's somebody who I've admired for, honestly, my entire life.
I mean, his legacy of reading the Pentagon papers into the congressional record, the reason that Daniel Ellsberg is a national hero and not an international exile like Edward Snowden is because there is no Mike Gravelle in Congress today.
And the opportunity to revive that constitutional legacy, and this gets to your question about being assertive.
I'll give you an example here.
One of the ways that Mike Gravelle was assertive, he challenged executive power by challenging executive secrecy.
He stood with whistleblowers.
And I want to take a minute here, if it's okay, just to unpack that.
Whistleblowers are conscientious career government civil servants who give up their careers to do the right thing.
They're people who, they're not radicals.
They're not flaming lefties.
They work for the government, right?
And they end up falling on their swords to alert the public because they discover things that are so alarming to them.
This is a perfect description of Edward Snowden.
And instead of standing with those people and just understand what whistleblowers do for Congress, usually the way Congress finds out what's happening in the world, you invite executive officials to come before us in hearings and they swear oaths and they say words and sometimes those words aren't so connected to reality.
And it takes whistleblowers to expose official lies.
Edward Snowden came forward and exposed official lies by Obama-era officials as well as Bush era officials.
And Democrats buried their heads in the sand.
I'm not okay with that.
I've spent 10 years fighting the surveillance state and it's not privacy I'm worried about.
It's democracy.
You can't have democracy when you can't have dissent and you can't have dissent when you don't have privacy.
It's not just the fact that surveillance makes people feel watched.
It's the fact that surveillance makes people silent, especially vulnerable people.
That kills our democracy.
That's one of the reasons I think Senator Gavelle sees in my voice an opportunity to revive and resuscitate the legacy that he once championed in Washington.
And I think the American people, again, are with us both.
So you're against them.
So you're against the surveillance state.
You're against this unconstitutional spying that the government is doing on every American.
And what a lot of people say, they go, well, if you don't have anything to hide, what are you afraid of?
I go, well, I have a lot of shit to hide, but I also have a lot of shit to say, right?
Like, I might have some shit to hide, but I'm onto some stuff that the government's doing too.
And that's how they can silence me, right?
Right.
That's exactly right.
And there's a big difference.
You know, one thing I appreciate about you is that you have an audience and a platform and you use it.
And many people don't, you know, or alternatively, many people don't have platforms and they particularly are especially vulnerable to being silenced.
Let's just take, for instance, let's say, let's say you're gay in Alabama, right?
Or, you know, you're Muslim in South Texas, or you're, you know, some brand of unfavored thing wherever you are.
The fact of surveillance diminishes your ability to speak your voice.
The fact that you have something to say and you're willing to say it, that, in my mind, makes you American.
It's so many people who need to speak up at a time like this to defend our neighbors.
That to me is the call of the moment.
And I'm somebody I wield a lot of privilege.
You know, I had a chance to train and teach when I was still a student at Stanford Law School.
I've worked for the world's most prolific digital civil liberties organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for six years.
I ran a national nonprofit dedicated to flipping the Patriot Act.
And I did that under the Obama administration when liberals, many self-described liberals couldn't be, you know, they couldn't care less about their own supposedly stated values.
And I'm eager across these different roles that I've had, whether it was working at EFF, whether it was leading the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, whether it was representing Jason West and bringing the first marriage equality case in the state of New York when other Democrats were nowhere to be found, or organizing anti-war demonstrations 15 years ago and now again today in all of these different contexts.
We have opportunities.
I think you're totally right to see how bad the crises are and how they compound on each other.
But I often feel moved to remind people: as bad as our crises are, our opportunities are just as immense.
If we're able to get on the other side of the climate crisis, if we ensure a just transition for all workers to be part of the new economy that is based on renewable energy and a green economy, that's going to be an incredible opportunity for a renaissance in our civilization.
Like, what's it going to be like when people don't have to make choices about where they live based on their jobs, where they don't have to make choices about how much time they spend with their families because they're pressed to put food on the table?
When we can actually care for each other in communities and we have a social policy that reflects that joint commitment to each other in the future, I think that we have a bright future as dark as the clouds that are looming not just on our horizon, but over us at the moment are.
I think there are huge opportunities for us in the United States of America going forward if we manage to reclaim our democracy from the corporate, the defenders of corporate rule who have taken it from us.
So do you think that the establishment sees you as a real threat or just as an amusement?
The reason I think they do see me as a real threat, one, is that Nancy Pelosi showed up for a theatrical impeachment process after a year of sitting on her hands.
The things that forced her hands included people around the country saying, get this criminal president out of office, a whistleblower from the intelligence community.
And mind you, there's an interesting irony here that at the same time that the speaker is relying on a whistleblower for her impeachment process, she also is kicking other whistleblowers down the stairs, silencing them.
This is a point I've made a few times, and I wish more reporters covered this.
Speaker Pelosi unilaterally imposes a set of house rules that deny every member of Congress, except for her hand-picked deputies, staff with security clearance.
That's why executive secrecy is able to persist.
We would know so much more.
Journalists would know so much more.
We, the people, would know so much more if Speaker Pelosi weren't the speaker actively enforcing executive secrecy on a Democratic Congress.
Have they smeared you yet?
It comes out in different ways.
Usually I hear people talking about my appearance, and I don't know how many of them were sent by the Pelosis or if it's just a generational sensibility that I'm going to have to fight around.
But the other way that I know she's taken heed of us, I'll give you two more.
One is the war powers resolution that Rokana and Bernie Sanders sponsored last spring.
I was speaking at a protest at Speaker Pelosi's office at the precise time that they announced that they were flipping positions to embrace the Conna Sanders war powers resolution.
And granted, just like impeachment, she only showed up halfway because then she refused to hold Trump's feet to the fire and actually defend that position in the conference committee.
And then I'll give you another one.
This is especially fun.
So we've been projecting nighttime projection actions around the city and we've projected our campaign logo, any number of memes on the side of the federal building in San Francisco.
Speaker Pelosi spent public dollars to install floodlights to block us from projecting messages.
So she's spending money to insulate herself from criticism by our campaign.
So I have a very clear indication that she knows we're there.
So that's good.
That's good.
That is a sign that that's good.
You have to have signs that they're afraid of you.
So I just want to just go.
I don't want to be a prick about it, but that guy in the White House is not a whistleblower.
That CIA guy is just a spook doing shit that spooks do.
If he was a whistleblower, he'd be blowing the whistle on the CIA and jeopardizing his job.
That's not what he did.
So he's not a whistleblower.
If he was a whistleblower, he'd be in prison.
That's right.
Because that's what we do to whistleblowers.
I'll get your point.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
I hear that.
Okay.
So, and so, you know, you, you, first of all, I want to show you this.
So, so, uh, you're, you, uh, I have a soft spot for you for many reasons.
One is that you actually were arrested for doing journalism.
Um, and so I'll show a little bit of that when James Clapper, uh, former head of our national security state, was lying to Congress about surveillance.
You want to see this?
Watch this.
What I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
No, sir.
It does not.
It raises me.
Every time I see that clip, how can he get away with that?
So he's just blatantly lying, right?
And so that's what another thing, right?
So we have this guy on, and now they come on, they come on to MSNBC and CNN, and they're spoken like they're real patriots when, in fact, they're criminals who lied to Congress, which means they lied to the American people.
And then so you confronted him after he said that.
Here, I just want to show that too.
What do you have to say to communities of color that are so hyper-policed that we're subjected to extrajudicial assassination for selling loose cigarettes when you can get away with perjury before the Senate?
Why is your agency above the law?
So that was a very cool thing that you did there.
That was great, brother.
I should be clear, it wasn't the same moment.
The hearing where he lied to Senator Wyden was about 18 months before I had the chance to question him.
And so that was you.
That was you making the point that why do you guys get to break the law on television?
And then, and but everybody else, but like you make the point there in what you were saying is Eric Garner sells Lucy's, which is a threat to no one, gets choked out before he even gets a trial.
Right.
On video.
I mean, he was he it's and think about this with respect to the debate about police body cameras.
A lot of people in the movement for black lives even were saying we want police body cameras.
Eric Garner is the proof that police can murder someone on tape, viewed by millions of people around the world, and there's still no accountability.
The only person involved in that incident who went to jail was the person who caught the video.
And like that should, that's not okay.
It's not okay either for public officials to lie to Congress about matters of grave constitutional importance.
It's also not okay for our supposed public servants to prey on and arbitrarily kill random people who are suspected, suspected of trivial acts.
But it's even worse when we allow both of those things to happen.
We have permissive justice, justice for the powerful, and we have predatory lethal justice for the powerless.
And I care too much about the principle of equal justice.
I care too much about due process.
I care too much about our Constitution.
I care too much about the values that we have stated on paper to just live my life while we're shredding those values as if there isn't a five-alarm fire going on.
And I think that one of the things about this political moment that I'm so inspired by, for most of my life, I've felt alone in reacting to the five-alarm fire that I've seen all around me.
But now with Trump in office, with especially the possibility of a war in Iran, I don't think there's an American around who doesn't feel a sense of alarm and crisis.
Everybody understands finally that it is time to show up.
We can't just lead our lives and put food on the table and pretend like our office holders have a handle on it.
The one silver lining of the moment is that the collapse of the system is so glaringly obvious that I think everyone is now reaching in to recover our democracy.
And in that act, profound possibility emerges.
So the one silver lining, or one of the silver linings from the Trump presidency is now that the right is skeptical of the intelligence community, which is unbelievable that it's happened in my lifetime, but it took Trump to do it.
Now the right is skeptical of the FBI and the CIA and of our foreign wars.
So would you bizarre, right?
It is, right?
Which is, I mean, people should make more of that.
Yes, and I've done that before.
So I helped organize the Fourth Amendment caucus.
It's a bipartisan group of House members that have come together across party lines in the past to challenge the surveillance state.
I'm proud of that work.
I did that in Washington as an organizer when I was leading the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
My work at EFF similarly worked with people from across the political spectrum.
I was working with Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Privacy Working Group, which was fighting surveillance policies at the local level in and around the Bay Area at the same time that I was working with Omaha Liberty ladies in Nebraska to fight the use of cell site simulators.
These are government surveillance tools that spy on cell phone networks, and we were fighting those in Nebraska.
I have long worked on both sides of the aisle in defense of constitutional rights at the same time that as a flaming leftist, I have challenged corporate rule across all of its different manifestations.
Another way to put that is that, and I'll even lay out the spectrum of issues, money and politics, legalizing cannabis across the federal system, dismantling mass incarceration and dismantling mass surveillance.
Those are all issues that there are transpartisan consensus already favoring.
And if we work across the aisle, I think that there's a chance to refashion the dynamic.
You know, we're told, and I think this feeds into part of the concern that I understand you have about the corporate co-optation of the Democratic Party.
We're told that it's left versus right.
And you and I recognize that it's often left and right against we the people.
The way that AOC has said this, that it's often top versus bottom, I sometimes describe it as center versus periphery.
And the periphery shares interests in preventing the ossification of power and money and politics and the way that it seized our system.
That's an issue that many libertarians are concerned about.
The way, particularly that weapons manufacturers and their economic interests drive international conflict.
Many libertarians share concern about that.
They're not going to see eye to eye with me on my climate agenda, right?
They're not going to see eye to eye with me on wanting to establish health care for all or expand human rights to include housing and food, but they will at least embrace the anti-authoritarian parts of my agenda.
And I think that there's a big opportunity there to outflank the corporate consensus among the Democratic and Republican parties by getting it on both sides with populists.
And I think we have a real chance to do that with the right voices in Congress.
As far as digital rights goes, what are some things that are definitely on your agenda?
You know, if we can talk about municipal broadband, net neutrality, stuff like that.
Thank you for the question, Ron.
And it's great to hear your voice.
Net neutrality is a human right.
If we don't have the same access to the global internet infrastructure, we're all basically going to be taken for a ride.
And the promise of the internet can't possibly emerge in a non-net neutral world.
This is one of the few areas where I'll actually give Nancy Pelosi credit for showing up.
Net neutrality is one of the areas, one of the issues that she has stood for.
And I do want to give credit where it's due.
Other areas of digital rights, I'm very concerned about antitrust enforcement and the failures of antitrust enforcement over the last generation.
This is going to go in a couple of different places.
One, under the existing antitrust statutory regime, there's a lot of pressure that members of Congress can put on the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to show up for work, show up for work by scrutinizing mergers where big companies acquire their would-be competitors like Facebook acquiring Instagram or WhatsApp, and also scrutinizing anti-competitive acts by companies with market power.
So like when Facebook with market power starts unilaterally eroding the privacy protections that it allows its users, those should be cognizable harms for antitrust enforcement.
uh good luck in your in your race against nancy pelosi and uh you know uh so in march now people need to keep in mind march is the primary that's an important date if you get in the top two then i think you'll have a real shot to knock her off so uh everybody uh what's your website shawhidforchange.us all right there you go shahidforchange.us all right thanks for being our guest and thanks for not uh beating me up for saying that stuff about you thank you so much for having me on brother it really is nice
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