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May 14, 2020 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:24:16
20200514_TJDS_20200514_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore show.
I wonder how Kevin Spacey is doing in quarantine.
Let's call him up.
Hello.
Mr. Spacey, it's Jimmy Dore.
Oh, my prayers have finally been answered.
Thank you, God.
How are you holding up during the quarantine?
My, these are strange times we are living in, aren't they?
Unprecedented, some say.
Others say uncertain.
These times are definitely all of those things.
People are stuck at home, unable to interact with others in public.
In many cases, unable to work.
To do the very thing they were put on this planet to do must be difficult, I would imagine.
Yes, yes, I imagine it would.
How about you, Jimmy Door?
Are you still allowed to work?
Yes, I'm fortunate.
I have my own garage studio, and I can just sit here and do my yelly-yellies and put them on the internet.
Oh, well, bully for you.
Jimmy gets to keep his career, everybody.
Did you hear that?
Let's give Jimmy a round of applause.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose.
Yes, I'm fortunate.
I'm saying.
Yes, you are, Jimmy.
Not everybody is as fortunate as you are.
Yes, I suppose you're right.
All of this profound isolation for such a tiny, microscopic, insignificant reason.
That's why I'm not working.
Yes, the virus is tiny, Mr. Spacey.
Right.
The virus.
So how are you keeping yourself occupied?
Oh, the usual.
Reading, charcoal on canvas, scrimshaw, staring.
Just trying to keep sane, really.
You know, people do what they do, Jimmy.
Under this kind of pressure, some people will turn to drugs, some to alcohol, and some people will turn to the gazebo in their backyard where there are several very confused teen boys who themselves are full of drugs and alcohol.
Oops, I'm sorry.
I'm at baking sourdough bread.
Okay, I'm sorry I even asked.
Yeah, I bet you are.
Well, it's too late to take back, Jack.
Jesus, this guy is such unbelievable.
Ugh, why are you like this?
Because I'm bitter.
But there is an upside.
Oh, yeah, what's that?
Because everyone who put me in this prison is now in here with me.
Nothing could be more satisfying.
I'm already used to it.
So forgive me if I'm experiencing a little schadenfreude, watching the rest of you squirm.
You better get used to it.
I'm your king because everybody is canceled now.
Wow.
What a nasty sentiment.
Very nasty indeed.
I have one more question for you, Jimmy Door.
Oh, yeah?
What?
Are you hiring at all?
Do you need like a sidekick or anything?
No, absolutely not.
Fuck you.
Establishment media sets of artists fighting.
Oh, good luck.
Bullshit, we can't afford.
Fomenting this world.
Watch and see as the jack off the median speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Jimmy Tore Show.
It's the Jimmy Tore Show.
Everybody, welcome to this week's Jimmy Door show.
Now let's get to the jokes before we get to the jokes, Sally.
Hey, did you hear that researchers say they've now found COVID-19 in semen?
This is true.
This is true.
The most difficult part of their study was finding volunteers willing to put that swab up their penis.
Come on, it's good for the good of the country.
And April saw the biggest increase in grocery prices since the early 70s.
The early 70s, that's when Americans started hoarding soap to wash their hands of Richard Nixon.
Come on.
You know, I don't know about you, Seth, but if there's anything I'll miss after this is over, it'll be those jet fighters flying over our cities reminding us there's another way we could die unless we keep our mouths shut.
Can I just say this to the vote blue no matter who's?
If you want Donald Trump out of office, don't support Democrats who do nothing to stop him.
That's more of a point of order.
Hey, what's coming up on this week's show?
There's a lefty direct from the corporation named Anon Jerihanis, and he's got a new show on vice where he's going to talk to regular people.
Well, he's going to tell you what's wrong with the media.
And everything he says is wrong with the media is complete garbage.
We invite Max Blumenthal from the gray zone on to break down Anon Jerihadis's critique of what's wrong with the news media.
It's fascinating.
Plus, we got phone calls today from Kevin Spacey, Matthew McConaughey, Harrison Ford, and Chris Christie.
Plus a lot lot more.
That's today on The Jimmy Dore Show.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Harrison Ford's calling me.
Hello.
Whoa.
What the fuck was that?
Hello?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I meant to say pilot to tower.
Whoa, what in the fuck was that?
Harrison, I heard you're in trouble with the FAA again.
The Federal Association of Actors.
Wow, was the secret life of pets really that bad?
No, no, Harrison, the other FAA.
Guess what?
The FAA needs to get the hell off my plane.
Well, what happened?
I know, right?
What happened?
And while we're at it, where happened?
And why happened?
And how?
You know, they say they're investigating another incident where you taxied across somebody's flight path.
Are they sure it was me?
I always wear my COVID mask.
That's why I'm asking.
You...
*crying*
Yes, they said pilot and actor Harrison Ford.
Ah, that must be somebody else.
I'm actor and pilot Harrison Ford.
I met at acting and method pilot planes.
This time I was rehearsing being a guy who repeatedly risks getting into deadly plane accidents.
Did you cooperate with the investigation?
What's that supposed to mean?
I'm a very cooperative person.
What were you doing Taxiing on a runway in Los Angeles.
Essential business.
I just got back from a toilet paper run.
There's a cost code down in Honduras that never runs out.
And before you start with your bullshit, I'm not hoarding.
I'm just being prepared in case this COVID thing lasts seven years.
I've got a hanger full of scot tissue and Pacololo.
I got it covered.
Are you sure you should still be flying, Harrison?
Okay, I'm a little rusty.
I usually don't taxi into the path of an oncoming plane.
No.
Yeah, I usually wait until they're on a golf course.
Whoa, did you see that?
Pilot the tower.
Request confirmation.
I want a golden globe for my flying scenes in Indiana Jones.
Over.
You know, as a lifelong Democrat, do you think it's safe for voters to go out and vote yet?
No, that's why I plan on voting by air mail.
Going to bank 30 degrees into a polling station.
Jimmy, go back to your seat and prepare for landing.
Pilot to tow.
Request Clarence to crash my helicopter and then joke about it on Allen.
Over.
So Max is here because I wanted to have a real smarty pass journalist guy who knows about how journalism is supposed to work to help me break down the clip that I teased yesterday of, no, I don't know if how to say his name correctly.
Anand, how do you say his name?
Gerahardis.
How do you say it, Max?
I don't know if I did my homework.
Okay, that's all right.
I don't know how to say it.
I'm reading it and I can't spell it.
But it's this guy.
Everybody knows if you think about Garrett Harmony.
Jarehardis, right?
So I'll just say that's pretty close.
We'll just call him Anand.
And the title of that segment he did on Rising was called How Bias Actually Works.
Now, if you don't know who he is, he's a guy who wrote for the New York Times for at least, I think, 10 years.
And he's been a contributor at MSNBC for the last five years.
And he also wrote the book Winners Take All, The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
Now, a couple of people that I know have said that they really liked that book and that that was a really good book.
I didn't read it.
Max, have you read that book?
I have not read that book.
And, you know, Anand Gira Hardis, and if I got his name wrong, you know, telemarketers, they always call me and say Mr. Blue Menthal, like I'm a brand of blue menthol cigarettes.
So I'm sure he can forgive me for not, if I don't get his name right.
People don't get my name right all the time.
But, you know, honestly, I haven't followed him that much.
He's managed to not attract my attention.
And, you know, there's a reason for that.
His book seems to be a critique of the kind of billionaire philanthropist charity industry and how it's basically provides cover for billionaires who don't pay taxes.
And, you know, it's good that someone else is out there saying that when people like Ralph Nader have been talking about that for decades, but Ralph Nader is not allowed on MSNBC.
That is correct.
Ralph Nader is not even allowed in polite society, it doesn't seem, because he actually advocates for people.
And so I just want to go ahead.
Go ahead.
You want to say something?
Well, he's just not allowed near Democrats because of the 2000 election.
That's right.
He was the original Jill Stein in Russia and what he said.
So it's only taken 20 years for people to continue to think exactly the same.
All right.
So anyway.
So he, this guy, so Anand wrote that book, which made him a favorite of lefties.
Now, every time I've seen him on MSNBC, he seems to be making the right critique.
Yet I'm always suspicious of him.
And I've even done a video or two where I think I made fun of him a little.
But he does have great hair, which I'm jealous of.
So he went on Rising with the Risers, Crystal and Sager.
And the first six minutes of the interview, I literally didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
I could not decipher what he was talking about.
He has a new show on vice, and it's called Seat at the Table.
And it sounds like the premise of it is he's going to talk to people who normally don't have a seat at the table, like regular workers and stuff like that.
And I was like, oh man, that's a great idea.
I wonder why.
Why don't I do that?
Oh, shit, I do that all the time.
So this is a big deal in corporate America.
He's going to talk to a postal worker.
Holy shit.
So this is a big deal.
This is a big deal.
He talked to a worker.
And so he goes on and they start to talk about bias and what have you in the media.
And everything he said just sounded off to me.
And I'm like, wait a minute, this guy's a super smarty pants.
I'm a dummy.
How come I think everything he's saying is wrong?
And I'm pretty sure because I think it is.
And that's how bad it is when a guy like me can see through it.
And so here we are.
We're going to go through it.
Now, I don't know this guy.
I do know he follows me on Twitter.
I don't follow him.
But I did, I did read, Ruby, our producer, did reach out to him to come on the show and he didn't respond.
This was a while ago.
We've reached out to him to come on the show and he didn't respond, but he follows me.
That's interesting psychology right there, don't you think?
So here we go.
So here's, we'll just break this down.
And Matt, you can jump in whenever you feel like it up.
It's 2020.
So I kind of got my start in cable news on MSNBC five years ago and never got fired.
To me, that's the sus I'm suspect immediately.
If you have a contract on MSNBC and you're a truth teller from the left and you get invited back, then you are manufacturing consent.
You are not actually doing what do you say to that, Max?
Well, I mean, you watch Anon talk and, you know, if you're kind of like a normie and it sounds like he really knows what he's talking about.
He sounds convincing.
He looks convincing.
He looks like sort of a wise academic with salt and pepper hair and he's always wearing dark clothes.
A lot like Thomas Friedman.
You know, if you don't know, if you don't know shit, Thomas Friedman, just the way he talks sounds really convincing and he makes things easily digestible.
And then if you actually pay close attention, as you apparently did, you're like, what the fuck is this guy talking about?
Because at the end, I mean, I don't want to ruin the ending.
I mean, you're going to probably get to it.
Yes, we're going to get to it.
Definitely.
We're going to get to it.
So I won't ruin the ending, but yeah, he was in media, in mainstream media for five years.
He was at the New York Times for 10 years.
I'll just say, like, so you probably never mentioned the Israel lobby, for example.
Like, if that happened, it would have been problematic.
If, you know, you hadn't been a humongous Russia Gator while being an MSNBC contributor.
I mean, you didn't challenge the big lie of the last three years while you're posing as this great left-wing truth teller.
In fact, when Donald Trump had his military parade, this obnoxious display of jingoism in Washington, I think it was last year, and there were tanks rolling on train tracks, like old World War II Sherman tanks rolling on train tracks just 10 minutes from my house on the way to Pennsylvania Ave.
Anand tweeted Putin's America.
Oh my God.
You know, it's Vladimir Putin's fault that we're having this jingoistic festival of American empire.
It's all Russia's fault.
Gamma rays from Putin's brain made Donald Trump do that and it made people actually want to come out and celebrate and have nostalgia for this awful, you know, for tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue for martial law.
So that's that's kind of how you manage to hang out in media while you offer a kind of milquetoast critique of billionaires and call for Medicare for all, which Barack Obama campaigned on in 2008.
That's right.
That's correct.
So let's all right.
So it's good that you're here so you can give that info so people can frame it.
Now you know who he really is.
Okay.
That's who he is.
He's a guy who poses as a real lefty, but of course he can't be a real lefty.
If he was, he wouldn't be invited to the New York Times to write for 10 years because you know what happens to guys who tell the truth in the New York Times?
They end up like Chris Hedges.
And he wouldn't be invited.
If he was really doing a critique of power, he wouldn't be invited on MSNBC because the people doing real critiques of power are Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, and they're never invited on MSNBC.
He wouldn't be allowed on Vice because Vice is just straight up corporate media.
Straight up.
It's the hipster arm of empire and it's promoting.
I mean, in this interview, Anand says, you know, we need to call out the Iraqi WMD lie of the day.
That's what Vice does.
They launder every Iraqi WMD lie of the day.
They're pushing, they pushed the Syria proxy war.
They pushed the white helmets.
They pushed the regime change operation in Ukraine.
They celebrated the Azov Battalion, the neo-Nazi wing of the Ukrainian National Guard as freedom fighters.
They pushed the new Cold War on China day after day, which, you know, unfortunately, I was watching your last guest, Dylan Radigan, and he was doing a little bit of that too.
But, you know, Vice basically exists to do just that.
And last year, it was announced that Vice wasn't making enough money and HBO was considering canceling it.
And it got bailed out by a billionaire named George Soros, who people on the left.
People on the left are not allowed to critique George Soros because people on the right, the far right, has taken that critique and made it anti-Semitic.
So you can't talk about the fact that George Soros is actually, through his Open Societies Institute, funding opposition movements in countries where the U.S. seeks regime change, including in Hong Kong, where they just had this phony color revolution, supported by the U.S. government, supported by the CIA, supported by Marco Rubio and Mike Pompeo.
You know, Soros is everywhere where the U.S. seeks regime change in Latin America, in Venezuela, in Nicaragua.
He's supporting the opposition movements.
And in fact, in 1991, David Ignatius, not exactly a radical leftist at the Washington Post, described George Soros as one of the billionaires doing what the CIA used to do covertly, doing it overtly as a private citizen.
This was in the Washington Post.
And so if Anand goes and critiques George Soros, he's going to be out of there and he'll be called an anti-Semite, even if he says nothing about George Soros's Jewishness.
Okay, so we're going to get to that WMD line and let's remember all that stuff when we get there.
All right, let's go.
To getting into a fight with Joe Scarborough on Twitter about something I'd written in the New York Times.
And to Joe's credit, he invited me on to say, let's actually have this argument, right?
Very rare spirit in these times when you disagree to say, like, let's actually have a conversation.
So we did.
And that kind of led to me being on MSNBC for several years and continuing, as far as I know.
And I've had a great time.
I've had, you know, enjoyed my colleagues, enjoyed a lot of things we've been able to talk about.
But it has felt in many of the conversations I'm in, and I'm sure that's sort of why you also, you both have created the show you have, that there were certain boundaries to the conversation.
Not enforced by some Comcast executive with a knife in his jacket, but just kind of intellectual boundaries of the conversation about issues of power and who America is working for.
And there were often moments where you're talking about Michael Bloomberg and Michael Bloomberg's money manager is at the table as a disinterested analyst and those kinds of things.
And so it seemed to me when I started having a conversation with So that's a great point he makes, but he kind of brushes it away.
He's like, I'll be on a panel at MSNBC critiquing Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest, most powerful men in the world.
And his money manager will be at that same panel as if he's a disinterested party giving his opinions.
And so that's a great point, actually, that he makes, but he kind of dismisses it.
And then he keeps going.
So here we go.
To think about, is it possible to create a show that tries to sit with a different relationship to power, that actually tries to decenter power.
And that means who we put on the show.
I just interviewed a panel of three civil servants who work sort of anonymously for the government, but do really things, put people like that on the show, including a political worker.
It also means just the mental framework of what we're covering.
I don't need to tell both of you that.
Yeah, there's, again, that's great that he's doing that.
There's lots of shows that already do that.
One's called The Gray Zone.
Another one is called Secular Talk.
Another one's called The Jimmy Doer Show.
We're doing that.
We've been doing that for a long time.
And he didn't invent it.
And I'm going to guess the way he does it isn't as good.
Kind of just the way a conversation is lined up decides what kind of conversation it is.
And a lot of what has happened on cable is things like the Iraq war are somehow in a normal lane.
And things like universal health care are in an abnormal lane, a deviant lane.
And that's actually not how most people feel about a lot of these things.
And so we tried to think about could we create a show that would reflect where most people are in the country on these.
Well, so I'll just say this, and we're going to get to it again, but he says where WMDs is normal.
You can talk about that, but you can't talk about Medicare for all.
So I like his critique actually there.
He again makes a good critique.
It's accurate.
The problem is you don't have to go back 19 years to WM.
You can go back right now to the current Red Scare, RussiaGate.
That somehow is normal.
That's okay.
So you won't tell the truth about what's actually happening right now.
He invents, he has to go back 20 fucking Years to act like that's the bad thing instead of the bad thing we're living in right now, which would be actually useful for him to call out since he's on the air at MSNBC right now.
But as you have already revealed, Max, he's a big Russiagator.
So his mind is already scrambled.
He's also, he's already a propagandist at the top of his lungs, and he's here gonna give us the truth about what's wrong with our system.
That's kind of ironic, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'll give him a chance, but I don't really expect that much given his performance during just the gigantic lie of Russia Gate, which he completely failed to challenge.
And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, the one person he kind of reminds me of in media is Chris Hayes, someone who has this kind of fake woke brand, but who manages to sort of survive in this suffocating corporate environment?
And Chris Hayes, he didn't have one single Russia Gate skeptic on.
I mean, why couldn't he have had Aaron Matte on just to show if he was so confident, just show how Aaron's arguments are all wrong?
He couldn't do it.
These people can't debate even the ideas where they feel confident.
And now Chris Hayes was actually, I mean, I'd like to hear Anand's explanation too for why he didn't challenge Russia Gate, why he pushed it.
Now that it's so obvious that the whole thing was a sham, it's so obvious that now in these transcripts, these congressional transcripts, we see the head of CrowdStrike, the private cybersecurity firm that was hired by the FBI to determine that Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta's emails, stating under oath that they have no evidence that Russian intelligence exfiltrated the emails.
Now, I can't say who did it or who didn't do it, but you have this is the foundation of Russia Gate.
And under oath, the person who is supposed to be the oracle, who's supposed to know who exfiltrated the emails, who was hired by the FBI to do it, says that he doesn't know.
So the whole foundation has completely crumbled, and yet it's not being touched by MSNBC.
But Chris Hayes was asked about this in an interview.
Yes.
So, Chris, we covered this yesterday.
Chris Hayes was asked about this.
And what Chris Hayes said, go ahead, Max.
What did Chris Hayes say?
Yeah, I mean, it's the same kind of like grad student language, you know, that you also hear Anand kind of using, you know, these guys when they talk, they always punctuate every point with the question right.
They're like, right?
Yes.
That's so annoying, and it's, it comes from grad school.
But anyway, you know, he says that, you know, if you look, he basically blamed Russia for himself getting it so wrong and pushing so much paranoia.
And he says, if you go back and look at COINTELPRO stuff, referring to J. Edgar Hoover's program of dirty tricks to destroy the left in the 60s and 70s, basically the same combination of dirty tricks and surveillance the FBI was using on the FBI and the Black Panthers that drove them nuts is what Russia was using on Chris Hayes and his friends in the media to drive them nuts.
And so he says, using that grad student language, we have to acknowledge Russia's agency, V. Agency.
Agency.
What about the Central Intelligence Agency and John Brennan?
What about their role in Russia Gate?
What about the fact that you hosted frauds like Malcolm Nance and Naveed Jamali falsely identifying Naveed Jamali as an FBI double agent every time he came on your show?
I read, actually, I'm masochistic enough that I ordered Naveed Jamali's book to catch a Russian spy.
I read it.
He was never an FBI agent.
He was at best an FBI dangle.
He got like a certificate for participating in an FBI operation.
Most of the book is about his love of sports cars.
He's about as much of an expert on Russian affairs.
And I would say this for Malcolm Nance too, who is just an intelligence fraud.
They're about as much of an expert on Russian affairs as Jeffrey Epstein and Jared from Subway are on the rights of children.
I mean, and these are the guys that Chris Hayes voluntarily chose to have on every night.
So maybe it wasn't Russia making him do it.
Maybe it was Phil Griffin in corporate management.
And maybe Phil Griffin and corporate management saw something in having a guy like Anand to maintain the left parameter and be the safe lefty and provide the safe critique, but never to go too far and touch Russia Gate or to touch the new sham that we're being introduced to, which is pushing the new Cold War against China, which is replacing Russia Gate.
Never touching the proxy war in Syria.
Never touching the Israel lobby, one of the most dominant forces in American politics.
These are the red lines.
And this is also about oligarchy because empire is the projection of oligarchy abroad.
So to me, he's Barack Obama in media.
But let's keep going.
Here we go.
So they go on to talk about the Republican Party.
Watch this.
I think, you know, clearly Trump has undammed and legitimated a lot of racism in people.
But people broadly are as racist more or less as they were before Trump, right?
Like what you can say is what has changed drastically.
What has truly changed, and the thing I'm talking about, is the behavior of the Republican Party, which has decided to stop being a reason and fact-based party in the age of Trump.
There were warning signs.
This was not, you know, this was not.
So I just want to stop it there.
And what a joke that they just stopped being a party of reason and science just now.
They just now did it.
And by the way, both parties, neither party is a party of science or reason or any damn thing you're talking about.
Neither party is.
Barack Obama opened the Arctic to drilling twice whenever Shell Oil asked.
He lifted the restriction on exporting fossil fuels, which is why there's fracking pipes underneath this country from coast to coast.
Barack Obama bragged that we had the highest petroleum output in the history of our country under his presidency.
Barack Obama doesn't give a shit about science any more than Donald Trump gives a shit about science.
The Republican Party all of a sudden stop.
This guy is so full of shit, I could smell it from Pasadena during quarantine.
What do you say to this?
Yeah, I mean, remember George W. Bush?
Yeah.
Seriously, like, and there's this whole campaign to normalize Bush now and make Bush, you know, just I'm George Bush and I'm just a guy you want to have a barbecue with.
I love hugging Michelle Obama.
I'm just friendly, smirking chimpanzee from Texas.
You know, we need to come together for the better future of tomorrow and put food on our families.
It's like we don't remember Bush basically putting the Christian right, one of the most extreme forces in the world in power in the White House.
Remember how Bush refused to fund stem cell research?
Yes.
Life-saving stem cell research?
That was as odious as any anti-scientific policy Donald Trump has.
And it was because he was a member of the Christian right.
Yes.
do you remember when Ronald Randall?
I wrote a book about all this, by the way.
It's called Republican Gomorrah and it's about how the Republican Party was overtaken by irrational, anti-science, homophobic extremists.
And Bush, you know, he was putting people in health and human services department positions who believed that AIDS could be spread by sweat and tears.
So here's a guy to tell us that, you know, Trump is broken with this great Republican tradition.
This tradition of science and reason in the Republican Party.
I mean, Ronald Reagan wouldn't even mention AIDS.
I mean, it's just.
Yeah.
He's responsible for that.
I mean, he's way more responsible for the AIDS crisis than the Chinese government is for spreading coronavirus to the world, but we don't call AIDS the America virus.
In any case, I mean, if you listen to this guy, you'd think that Lincoln was Trump's predecessor.
Yeah.
Nowhere Trump is not solely responsible for this, but there is a full-on decision, in my view, at the high levels of the party apparatus, not in regular people's hearts, to embrace the Trump route rather than the route of a party that actually has some history and has some, you know, a sensible, a sensible intuition the way every party does.
Okay, I just want to stop right there.
So the Republicans have decided to go down the road of Trump instead of a party of reasonable intuition that every party has.
He just said that.
Reasonable intuition that ever, what party in the history of the world has ever had reasonable intuition?
What kind of shit is this guy slinging?
And who does he think he's talking to?
For some reason, he gets it past them.
But I was high already when I was watching this, and it didn't slip past me.
I was lighting my bullet.
I'm like, what the fuck?
What?
Go ahead.
It's just a kind of bloviating boilerplate in Michigas that makes him such an conveniently ineffective voice of the designated left, which is, I think, another reason why he's put where he is when there's so many other people who actually are part of the movement, who actually are part of a real left-wing movement, who are more effective, who are out in the wilderness.
And, you know, I never seen him at an anti-war rally.
I would recognize him if he was there.
Yeah, I would love to see.
I would love to see him have Mike Preisner on to talk about some stuff.
That would be fun.
Or you, that would be great.
Or me.
He never will.
After this, it ain't happening.
No, it ain't happening.
It's not.
He won't come out.
He won't even return.
He follows me on Twitter, but he won't return a message to come on my show.
That shows me he's afraid of real questions.
That's the interesting thing on him, though, because, I mean, in terms of embracing the Trump route, as somebody like yourself, you want to challenge economic orthodoxy in both parties.
And I think that that's something very much that exists.
Isn't that part of the Trump route?
Don't you think that's so much of why Trump was able to succeed?
Just because orthodoxy needs to be challenged doesn't mean anybody challenging it is correct.
It's doing a good job.
Do I think that in a pre-Trump world, would you say it would be great to have a Republican coming in and saying, you know, this party's positions on free trade aren't serving the American people the way we say they are in either party.
Yeah, that would have been a good thing.
Would it have been a good thing to come in and say, you know what, this party's positions on China could be, you know, the Chinese are actually pretty smart about making sure their trade deals work for them.
We could be smart.
Like, yeah, there was space for that.
Unfortunately, the guy we got to do that is a semi-literate racist prick.
And that doesn't, the fact that he's challenging orthodoxy, I mean, every Thanksgiving uncle challenges orthodoxy.
It doesn't mean they're all right.
Challenging orthodoxy is the beginning.
It's still a responsibility to be intelligent and correct.
Okay, so I'll just make a quick assessment of that.
The fact that every uncle challenges orthodoxy, but that doesn't.
I don't care if Trump is right.
I don't care if Trump is whatever.
Again, he's the village idiot.
He's saying things that no one else will say.
And somehow you still denigrate him while he says the things that need to be said because you don't like him.
That's what he's saying, right?
Or maybe I'm missing it.
Maybe I'm missing it.
What do you think?
Go ahead.
The Thanksgiving uncles are usually like pretty orthodox.
Yes.
Yes.
It's another good point.
You know, I mean, I'm Jewish, so like my extended family, they're pretty liberal.
But there's like sometimes like a guy will come sort of from outside the family and he'll be like a huge Islamophobe and try to like corner the kids in the room.
But I'm like, this guy sounds pretty orthodox to me.
But, you know, what Trump did was transition from 2016 when he was challenging orthodoxy to promise his base things they genuinely wanted that no candidate had offered them before, like anti-interventionism.
He was challenging the case for the Iraq war.
He was challenging deeper U.S. involvement in Syria.
He was dismantling the Bush family on live TV.
He was saying they didn't protect America on 9-11.
He, you know, initially he was saying he would support, you know, a peace process in Israel-Palestine.
And then, of course, Sheldon Adelson entered the room.
But the point to make about Trump isn't that he's just fundamentally a racist prick, which he is, it's that he sold out on the 2016 Trump and got rolled by the neocons, which was largely, or not largely, but at least partly to do with Russia Gate and people like Anand who were pushing that kind of narrative.
The next thing you know, you got H.R. McMaster as the head of the National Security Council.
Then he's followed by John Bolton.
You know, you got Mike Pompeo running the State Department.
I mean, basically, the neocons are in charge.
And you're saying Donald Trump.
And you're saying, Max, that the reason why Donald Trump staffed up with neocon warmongers was because he was feeling the heat from the left and the intelligence community and the media as being a traitor and being in bed with Russia.
So his response to that was to become over right wing in his choosing of staff, correct?
Yeah, just the general inertia from media and Trump himself not being able to really resist it, not being intelligent enough to resist it.
So it's more about Trump not following through than something fundamental here.
But basically, my point is his whole critique of Trump is sort of simplistic red meat to the normie liberal resistance that he's claiming to stand apart from.
Yes.
Yes, right.
So your critique of Trump is actually a better one, the way Trump from 2016 sold out the people that voted for him instead of just his critique is this guy's an asshole and I don't think he should, you know, it's just, it's just stupid.
I mean, just, you know, Trump's a far-right president.
He's doing a lot of things I find odious, particularly his war on immigration or on immigrants, things like that.
But, you know, there were a few areas where Trump completely stepped out of the box on foreign policy, for example, in Korea, where you have 80% of South Koreans yearning for an end of armistice agreement to this war that has dragged on that's been imposed on them by the U.S. so they can see their relatives in the North and live in peace.
And Trump finally steps forward with Dennis Rodman of all people.
And, you know, there was definitely a push from powerful elements to try to broker some deal.
And every liberal on MSNBC and every Democrat in Washington is trashing him as some kind of dictator lover when this is something people on the Korean Peninsula have been dreaming of.
So there were some areas where Trump could have accomplished things.
He could have, you know, made some new treaties on intermediate ballistic missiles with Putin, but instead, when he sits down to talk with Putin, he's accused of collusion and being a Kremlin asset.
And now we're seeing those treaties just systematically ripped up, and we're living in a much more dangerous world because of Russia Gate.
Because of Russia Gate and something that the guys like.
And you have people on the left who are claiming to be populists who are pushing China Gate or a new Cold War with China, who really have no qualification to talk about China.
They've done the people that I see are the loudest voices in left media.
They've done very little scholarship or journalism on China.
And they're basically playing into Trump's hands here because Trump's going to run this campaign on resentment of China among many other wedge issues.
Oh my God, that's Chris Christie on the phone.
Hello.
Put it up your pie hole in your face, Jimmy Door.
I've been completely vindicated by the nacho Supreme Deluxe Court there.
What do you think of that?
Vindicated.
You've been vindicated.
It's pretty funny.
Is this about Bridgegate?
Vinny and Kate said I'm not guilty.
Is this about Bridgegate?
Bridgegate.
There was no gate on that bridge.
That's what the Extreme Court just ruled by your unanimous decision.
How does that make you feel?
You bunch of big shots with your little baby feet.
Pretty low, right?
Did you say the extreme court?
It's the supreme.
Anyway, it's been six years, Chris.
We're worrying about other stuff now, okay?
Nothing's more important than my stuff.
And I've been exonerated.
They still said it was an abuse of power.
You know that, right?
But that ain't federal crime, is it?
I received no monetary gain.
Don't tell me you ain't ever abused your powers.
Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, that's the first sign of guilt.
Not knowing what I'm talking about.
Don't tell me you never told somebody to shut the fuck up and they didn't do it, so you closed down a highway to show them what's what.
So you admit it.
I deny any knowledge of the before mentioned criminal scheme, what took place, and showed that two bit mayor who's boss the fuck.
I didn't have to reopen that bridge, you know, but I did it for the economy, just like we got to reopen all the stores and little dinky whatnot garbage shops on Main Street.
Why do we have to reopen the economy now, Chris?
Because there's going to be death no matter what.
Take your WW1s and your WW2s.
We sent young man into battle, knowing many would not come back alive even worse with their dick shot off.
Imagine that.
That's not a rational comparison, Chris.
Okay, what about this?
Every day more people die of old age than they do from the caramel 19 virus.
Maybe we should do something about that first.
Like shun old people and make them live in big buildings full of other old people so they don't spread to oldness and we don't gotta see them anymore.
But nothing's changed since the virus hit, Chris.
There's still no treatment and no vaccine.
Are you dismantled?
We have to stand up for the American way of life.
We're running seriously low on pork chops.
Pandemic scientists say these kind of viruses spread to people when they hunt and eat animals.
Maybe we should rethink our diets.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Excuse me.
Did you hear what I just said?
We're running low on pork chops.
These shutdowns are threatening our very way of killing cows and shit.
Once that's gone, we'll have to go back to eating people again.
Do you really want to have to snack on Charlie Rose during the playoffs?
What about the pork chops?
All right, so let's get back to this.
The best part is coming, by the way.
If you think we've gotten to the best part of this yet, it's coming.
Okay, here we go.
Let me ask you.
Okay, here we go.
I think what always felt alarming to me just in the chair is first.
I just love guys who talk like that.
What always felt alarming to me in the chair.
What he means when he's sitting on a panel on MSNBC in the chair.
Anyway, here we go.
It's like you're sitting with your friends who aren't in media and you're like, there I was in the chair.
In the chair.
I was leaning in.
I think what always felt alarming to me just in the chair is, you know, this whole question of what is normalized and what's abnormalized, if that's a word, or it is now brought to you by the Hill.
I think there's...
and it's not, I often don't even think people mean to be doing it.
I don't think it's actually because the analyst next to you is always texting with a billionaire under the table, although sometimes they may be.
I think it's habits of mind.
And I think journalists in particular.
Okay, maybe let me just let me play the rest of that and then we'll come back because this is a jawdropper.
He's saying the problem with journalism is habits of mind.
That's his own term.
I think he invented it.
But he's going to explain it.
Here it is.
A lot of the training is about sobriety and is about caution.
So I don't know what he's talking about.
I'm not a journalist, but none of them seem to be trained.
So here we go.
They go to $80,000 a year journalism schools at Columbia University where they meet other elites and network each other, network with each other, but there's no real training that goes on there.
That's that.
Yeah, and that's elite networking for like jackasses who want to have blue check marks and wear lanyards and get fellowships and things like that.
There are two kinds of people who go to journalism school.
Suckers and shitty journalists.
That's just a fact.
Okay, here we go.
Not the big sweeping thing and is about skepticism.
And that's good.
Those are good.
Those are good values.
But when a weapons of mass destruction, flimsy weapons of mass destruction story is able to get through all of those layers of skepticism.
Or when, you know, Trump does some.
So what I'm going to stop it again.
I can't help it.
But so what he's saying is that a story like WMDs, again, he goes, got to go back 20 years.
He could go right now.
He's not going to do it because he'll lose his job.
So he goes back to WMDs and he says, you know, it's troubling that a story that is so flimsy.
It's not actually as flimsy as Russia Gate.
Russia Gate's more flimsy.
And he says that a story like WMDs is so flimsy that it could get through all those layers of protection that journalism has embedded in its structure.
Oh my God, how could that happen?
I don't know, Anon, what fucking world you think you live in or who you think you're talking to.
But that's not an act.
What's that?
Habits of mind.
Habits of mind.
Hits of mind.
Habits of mind.
But that's not an accident that WMDs somehow slip through all these fact-checking filters.
Let's remember the primary function of the media, Anon, is what?
What is the primary function of the news media, the primary function of the news media in the United States?
The primary function is to forward the agenda of the elite.
That's their primary function.
In other words, to manufacture consent.
That's their primary function.
So this fucking idea that somehow they just have bad brain thinking, and it's not because of who owns them or who funds them, but somehow it's because of some personal peccadillos and personal failings inside each journalist.
That is propaganda.
He knows that's propaganda.
And Anon is fucking gaslighting you.
And anybody who thinks his new show is going to tell anybody any truth that you haven't known before is now who's being naive, Kay, because this guy is gaslighting you at fucking 200 miles an hour.
That is such bullshit.
Well, let me throw it to you.
Go ahead.
What is habits of mind?
What does that even mean?
Well, he'll explain it.
It's not a structural analysis of media, and it's completely just there is a left.
I mean, you referred to Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's analysis of propaganda, their propaganda model of manufacturing consent.
He just throws it completely out the window structural analysis of political economy and media.
He throws it out the window and he individualizes it and just says that journalists just, you know, they're in the wrong mind state.
You know, maybe they need like, you know, better feng shui in their houses or maybe they need to read his book.
That's what he said.
It's not structural.
That's, yeah, it's not a structural problem with the media.
It's individual.
And watch, he has a solution, Max.
Watch, he actually can fix journalism with his book.
Watch this.
Incredibly destructive of the rule of law.
And you have an article saying this is an interesting election tactic.
There's a kind of the skepticism is suspended sometimes.
But something like Medicare for all, which is, which should be, have less skepticism just because it's in place in so many countries that it can't be impossible, right?
and which so many people want, the tone around that is just kind of like dismissive.
So he's saying the problem is the tone around Medicare for all is dismissive.
And I know the, I know why that is.
Max knows why that is.
And I'm sure Crystal Ball knows why that is, which is why she asks him that question.
Why do you think that is?
What the fuck?
Let's get to it.
What's the real problem here, Dick?
And he doesn't.
Here's what he says.
You want to hear what he says is the real problem?
Here it comes.
I think there is at some level, in some moments, you know, the fancy corporate executive calling down to the newsroom and saying, never ask that question again.
I'm not saying that doesn't happen.
Don't cover Harvey Weinstein, for example, or Epstein, right?
We're saying that.
Or don't have that on a skeptic of Russia Gate, the number one story dominating the news for three years.
Don't do that either.
And we know enough to know that that does sometimes happen, right?
I will also say, I think people imagine that to be the issue much more than it is as a percent of the time, right?
So I will say, I think.
So he's saying, yeah, that happens, but it doesn't happen often enough to worry about.
That's not the problem.
He's saying that's not the problem.
He's saying it's not the problem that they didn't cover Jeffrey Epstein and they didn't cover Harvey Weinstein because of direct executive intervention.
That's not a problem.
He's saying that happens.
Not a problem.
That's really what he's saying.
And then he's going to tell you what the real problem is.
Here it is.
11 years of the New York Times, five years at MSNBC.
Not fired from either of them, by the way.
11 years at the New York Times, five years at MSNBC, never an employment problem, no human resources letters, no problem.
Just so you know, he's that kind of a lefty where he gets along perfectly inside of an oppressive corporate structure.
Okay.
Personal experience, that kind of thing has never been the thing.
It's never been anything I've personally witnessed, right?
I read about it in the Matt Lauer kind of thing.
But like, that's not, you know, people always when parties would be like, oh, New York Times, man, like, you must be getting these advertisers just telling you what stories you can write.
And that is just so wrong.
This is not how the New York Times works.
So now he's trying to pretend that advertisers don't have an influence over the content inside of the New York Times.
That's just not how it works.
Oh, you're, oh, look, I'm sorry, we're wrong again.
Oh, I'm sorry.
We're idiots.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you.
I'm so stupid.
I thought advertising had an effect on what gets printed in a newspaper because in manufacturing consent, it said it's the primary concern of what gets written in a newspaper.
But I'm sure your critique while working for the New York Times and now MSNBC and Vice is probably more accurate, right?
That is, can you, I just, go ahead, Max, say something smarter than me.
No, I agree.
And, you know, New York Times, for example, it has a partnership with Verizon.
It has a corporate partnership with Verizon.
So it ran a series of articles last year claiming that Russia was sort of covertly stirring up opposition to 5G in the U.S. Who would have an interest in the proliferation of 5G in the U.S.?
Could it be Verizon?
And their basis for that article was so shabby.
It was that my friend Dan Cohen, he was at RT America at the time as a correspondent.
He was just interested in 5G and potential harmful health effects.
And so he did a series of pieces on it.
And that was their evidence.
He's no longer at RT, but that was, you know, it was as if Putin planned this whole thing.
But, you know, there's so much more to say about the media we see in the New York Times.
I mean, one thing we should look at is the role of think tanks and who's funding the think tanks and how they're constantly quoted as experts when think tanks are basically pay-for-play for various foreign governments, for the arms industry on foreign policy, for billionaires like Bill Gates.
And, you know, if you look at anything written about RussiaGate or, for example, something about China and how they're this imperialist power that wants to take over the world and you look at who the experts quoted are, and then you actually look at the think tanks and who's funding those think tanks, it's the arms industry.
The Atlantic Council is funded by Saudi Arabia.
It's funded by NATO.
It's funded by the State Department.
You have this phony operation called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which helped influence RussiaGate on Russian propaganda.
And it's quoted as an independent entity.
It's run by a former Clinton foreign policy hand and a neocon named Jamie Fly, and they're funded through a third party by the State Department and USAID.
It's basically a lot of U.S. government propaganda.
And it's, you know, these journalists see themselves sort of as state stenographers to push U.S. empire.
And another factor that he's completely leaving out here is class.
Journalists tend to come from a particular class and they're advancing their class interests.
And they're also working their way up the ladder through many of their sources who are influential government officials or billionaires.
And then you have this kind of revolving door where journalists move into government or they go to work for billionaire foundations.
Again, he just individualizes the whole thing.
One good example of that, by the way, is Matthew Pottinger, who's helping to design Trump's extremely hostile policy towards China.
He was a former correspondent at the Wall Street Journal in China.
Let's get back to this.
Let's listen to the rest.
One thing it happens sometimes, but I think people way overimagine how much that happens.
I think then you start, as you go this way down the spectrum, look, are there things like, well, we're going to have a, you know, an urban revitalization conference and JP Morgan is a sponsor.
So we're just going to change what we put on the panel and not right.
Yes, that starts to happen.
So now, correct me if I'm wrong, Max.
He just contradicted himself.
He originally said, oh, it must be tough working at the New York Times because all your advertisers tell you what stories to write.
That's not how it works.
And then he says, so we're doing a New York Times is doing a panel and we're being sponsored by a bank.
So maybe we change who's on the panel.
You mean maybe you totally change the presentation of your fucking event because of the money that you're going to get.
You mean you're going to do that?
But that would never happen in the newspaper, you fucking more.
Of course, what is I get it?
It's just like, I can catch you.
I'm catching you and on me in my fucking garage.
I'm catching you.
It's because it's obvious you're fucking full of shit.
Am I wrong about that?
Didn't he just do what I said he did?
Yeah, and he's sort of obfuscating because that's what, I mean, what is the difference between that and advertising?
That's how corporate media works.
That's how just media, a lot of just mainstream media works.
For example, The Atlantic Magazine, which is considered sort of the highbrow publication for every smart urban liberal.
You know, you get the smart takes there.
The Atlantic holds a conference every year with gigantic corporations, including arms dealers like Boeing, and they pay for panels with Atlantic editors and Atlantic contributors and various experts.
And that's how the Atlantic takes in a lot of its money.
It's the same thing as advertising, and it completely colors the editorial parameters or sets the editorial parameters.
It's a good reason why you have someone like Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a former Israeli prison guard who has been wrong again and again, who helped push the Iraq war, who helped attempt to push war on Iran, who as the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, someone who's basically a cipher for the Israel lobby and who would never think of challenging corporate power in any meaningful way, let alone America's imperial foreign policy.
Okay, here we go back to him.
Kind of self-censorship.
Then you keep going this way down.
Okay, so now, so he, by the way, he's dismissing all these things as he goes along.
He dismissed the effect of advertisers.
He dismissed the effect of banks and whatever who's sponsoring their event.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He dismissed the executive directly interfering.
All those three things he directly dismisses.
And now he's going to tell you what the real problem is.
Spectrum, you get to what I think is the real issue in a way where I wrote my book.
It's habits of mind, right?
And I actually think there's something very optimistic about the idea that a lot of habits of mind are responsible for this.
So I'll give you my example of what I try to do in my book that I think shifted some of the journalists.
Just so you know, he's making up a term that doesn't exist in the world yet, habits of mind.
There doesn't mean anything.
It's an empty term.
And he's going to posit a theory that this is what's wrong with journalism.
And it's based on absolutely nothing but anecdotal evidence that he's amassed personally.
Absolutely no analysis of the structural problems of the media or how we gather news or what the fuck, nothing.
They don't even mention manufacturing consent.
They don't even mention Noam Chomsky.
They don't mention the most important seminal work on the topic.
It doesn't even come up in this conversation.
But he's going to tell you what the real problem with the media is.
After he dismissed every real problem, he's going to make up a phony one and convince you, try to convince you like he's like Barack Obama bullshitted you for eight years.
He's going to try and convince you that this non-problem is the, in fact, real problem.
Some of the journalists.
When people were writing about philanthropists making these big splashy donations three years ago, right?
A lot of people who make $40,000 a year were writing about this stuff in this like congratulatory way.
I don't think they were on the take.
I don't think advertising executives were telling them to do it that way.
I think it was honestly a habit of mind.
Here is how you write the philanthropic announcement story.
That's the real.
The real problem isn't the corporate money influence.
It isn't the ownership of the media.
It isn't the elite that are, it isn't the fact that this guy, and he doesn't even know it, has been groomed to work at the New York Times and MSNBC since he was in kindergarten.
What do you mean by that, Jimmy?
Because if you color outside the lines in kindergarten, they fucking put you in another group.
If you color outside the lines in first grade, if you start questioning shit, you don't get invited to Harvard.
You don't get invited to the New York Times and you don't get invited to talk at MSNBC.
If you're a normal natural, your instinct is to question power.
And that's why I don't sit in those editorial meetings, but a guy like this does, because he's been groomed for it since he was fucking born and he has no idea.
And I have more awareness than Smarty Pants' fucking beautiful hair does.
And that's, of course, why he is every time he turns around, another corporation is handing him a platform because he is manufacturing consent, a term he won't ever use in his critique of media, because that's what he's fucking doing while he critiques media.
He's literally manufacturing consent that media is okay and the problem is individual journalists, not a structural problem.
That's literally him manufacturing consent while he's trying to tell you that he's telling you what's wrong with journalism.
In fact, he's a gaslighting propagandist of the highest order.
Yeah, part of the part of the whole structure of manufacturing consent, it requires the appearance of dissent.
And that's where he comes in.
That's where he comes in.
He appears to be dissenting against this odious institution that almost all Americans hate.
The mainstream media is the most hated institution in American life.
And at the same time, he is posing as this kind of new age guru who can individually cure each journalist and their habits of mind if they go through some kind of workshop.
I don't know exactly what he's proposing, some kind of seminar.
But he actually offers substance here.
Let me play that.
And here's how he remedies it, this problem that he invented.
It's not a real problem.
He invented it.
Habits of mind.
He invented it.
Here's his solution.
It's his book.
I wrote my book.
I started talking to a lot of these journalists, sometimes on air, sometimes quietly, privately as friends.
And I started seeing a lot of these journalists were like, you know, it never occurred to me to write about how much taxes someone has paid in the philanthropic gift story.
I may have written that in the other story six months ago.
And now, if you look today, a lot of those same people include how much they pay workers, what strikes have been happening in the day one announcement of the philanthropic gift, right?
And so I think it's actually possible to rewire people's habits of mind.
I don't think it's going to give someone like Bernie an easy ride to the presidency.
There is a huge amount of power out there.
But a lot of the way that power works, in my view, is training people's mental habits.
And all of us participate in the fraudulent mental habits.
And the hope is that all of us can actually rewire ourselves for different mental health.
So, Max, do you agree with his theory that all we need to do is rewire the way journalists think because they've been wired to not think good enough?
Well, he completely just completely omits any mention of corporate control.
He omits any mention of the role of the kind of imperial permanent war state in infecting journalism and transforming it into part of the U.S.'s global information war.
He just doesn't offer any structural analysis of why, for example, as the, as fairness and accuracy in reporting showed in a survey of op-eds published about Donald Trump's airstrikes on Syria, missile strikes on Syria following a chemical attack that we at the gray zone, using documents from OPCW insiders and whistleblowers have shown was a phony staged event.
Why only one op-ed expressed opposition to those missile strikes?
Over 40 other op-eds across the country supported it.
Could that be about habits of mind or something structural?
Why is it that people like you and I and Aaron Mate or Ben Norton, you know, all of these people that have sort of been gathering together in this alternative media community, despite whatever audience we have, why we'll never get a hearing in mainstream media except when they want to smear us as Russian assets or something?
Could it be habits of mind or there's something structural taking place?
Why is it that the, you know, the critique of Bill Gates, who I don't think is behind some conspiracy to produce coronavirus, has been completely left to the far right.
And there's so little critique of him on the left or on the center left or in mainstream publications like the New York Times.
It couldn't be because he's donating millions of dollars to media organizations.
And in fact, reporters are on the take.
I mean, what is MSNBC?
That's something that was straight up founded by Bill Gates, Microsoft.
It was straight up founded by him, and he's not paying taxes.
The person that the New York Times has covering covering the pandemic, who actually produced this documentary, I think, called Pandemic, which was a vehicle for promoting Bill Gates, Sherry Fink used to be at the New America Foundation, which is funded by Bill Gates.
So a lot of these people in many ways are on the take, and he's wrong to say they're not.
And if you look at think tanks, the role of think tanks, you can start to see the real structural problem.
It's not going to be cured by some feel-good seminar.
Let me just say that habits of mind.
I guess Anand didn't notice that the New York Times endorsed every right-wing war in the last 50 years.
Is that what was the last war they opposed?
They've never opposed a war in my lifetime.
What was the last free trade agreement they opposed?
Right?
Hey, did you did Anand notice that the New York Times opposed all social movements from civil rights to Occupy Wall Street?
Was that habits of mind?
He forgot that he himself and everybody else at the New York Times is from Harvard or Yale.
Is that a habit of mind that they just hire from Harvard and Yale?
New York Times going from endorsing Hillary to endorsing Amy Klobuchar, that didn't ring an alarm bell for you?
Or is that a habit of mind?
Is that what's happening?
How about Chris Hedges getting pushed out for telling the truth about the Iraq war?
That didn't catch your eye?
Was that a habit of mind?
Or how about radically dissenting opinion is never generated or showcased at the New York Times for obvious reasons.
Is that a habit of mind, Anand?
Or are you fucking gaslighting us so you can keep your corporate position?
I'm going to say the latter.
I'm going to say you're gaslighting us because you're a corporate toady on purpose.
And in fact, it's not a habit of mine.
It's actually predictable.
And what do I mean it's predictable?
Well, if you look at Anand's, you know where he comes from.
So after graduating from college, Anand moved to Mumbai in 2003.
Why would he do that?
Oh, I know, because he got a consulting job for who?
McKinsey.
He was working for fucking McKinsey.
This guy, Mr. Lefty, was working for McKinsey.
That's that same outfit that everybody gave Pete Buttigigitz a hard time for because they're freaking, they hate anything progressive.
They're a corporate screw machine.
After that, oh, by the way, do you know who else worked at McKinsey besides him?
Do you know who else was a director at McKinsey?
Can I give you three guesses?
First guess is his father.
Yes, his father was a director at Kinsey.
He gets so do you see how this guy has been groomed his entire fucking life to come on TV and gaslight you into thinking that the only problem with the media is that the journalists' individual patterns of thinking, not the fact that those journalists are selected because they think a certain way, just like he's been selected and groomed his entire life.
And this is the kind of media analysis you get from that fucking guy.
And I'm better at media analysis than he is.
I'm a thousand times better.
And I'm a fucking idiot who isn't even trying.
Okay, well, let me just try to be fair to Anand, because, you know, his book builds on his experience in elite circles and being at McKinsey to kind of, you know, offer a critique.
I don't know if you want to call it class treason, but I don't think he totally embraces his inner McKinsey at this point.
But at the same time, when you come from that kind of background, you have to make a radical break.
And it appears from what I'm hearing that he's kind of trying to balance his MSNBC friends and New York Times friends with his role as the kind of designated safe left-wing truth teller.
And I'm reading a review of his book.
It's really interesting in The Guardian, Anand on elite do-gooding.
Many of my friends are drunk on dangerous BS.
He's talking about his friends from his privileged background and how he's trying to talk them, talk some sense into them.
And maybe he doesn't see the whole structure as dangerous BBS.
But I'm looking like right above the byline of the Guardian reporter.
And it says that the article is part of his section in The Guardian called Big Money.
Big Money is supported by the Ford Foundation.
So basically, the positive review of his book is sponsored by one of the big phony charity foundations.
And I guess, you know, this is their one kind of, oh, here's a book that kind of critiques us.
So, you know, The Guardian is still objective and fair.
Bill Gates also funds The Guardian's entire public health section.
So don't tell me these people aren't on the take.
I'm with you 100%.
Yes, these people are on the take.
I don't want to be totally unfair and say, you know, he's Pete Budajudge.
You know, this is much more sophisticated and insidious.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
This is my problem.
This is the problem we're facing right now: there's so much radical discontent built up among the population.
People are so sick of the way it is, and they're going to be even more sick of it whenever this plague is over.
They're just being shafted every which way.
And so the corporate media is putting up people who seem like radical truth tellers who are offering nothing, nothing even remotely close to a structural critique and are basically tamping down on dissent.
And then you have all these fake, alternative, seemingly adversarial publications out there that are sucking up a lot of the energy.
And then, you know, in an insidious way, they're pushing the color revolutions.
They're pushing the new Cold War on China.
They're pushing Russia Gate.
They're pushing these sort of half-assed critiques of billionaires.
So that's, I mean, and then they go and hang out with the same people in mainstream media that they claim to be critiquing and being adversarial against.
I know how it is.
I was in that, I was in the Brooklyn media world.
I live in Washington.
I grew up in Washington.
I know how it is, and we've seen this story before.
It's going to end up with the same consent, the same consent that's been manufactured every time they put up some phony adversarial voice.
You're 100% right.
What is this Brooklyn media?
What the fuck do people mean when they refer to Brooklyn media?
I always thought that they were talking about Trapo Trap House because I think they're from Brooklyn.
But that's what did people mean when they say that?
Yeah, I mean, it's really like a reference to Vice Media.
Oh, okay.
Vice media.
I mean, I went in their office once in Williamsburg, and it's like this gigantic sweatshop of like every kind of every wannabe media hipster just working in these little tiny cubicles.
It's just, it was this giant warehouse.
Then the executives sit on these great leather Chesterfield couches and hold meetings.
And, you know, Joe Biden visited there in 2015, received a very warm reception.
Former Obama officials are in executive and high-level positions at ViceNow.
And, you know, all of these people come to Brooklyn.
They have tattoos and they look kind of different.
They look radical, but they're basically advancing liberal status quo behind an adversarial aesthetic.
That's really the essence of Brooklyn media.
And you look at the Twitter pages of these people who populate Brooklyn media and they look, they definitely look more alternative than I do or you do.
But then you look at their buying, it's always like words.
And it's a bunch of mainstream corporate publications, which is where they really want to write.
They have a blue check mark.
And they're always suckers for regime change operations, especially in Syria.
They were all suckers for the white helmets.
They're falling for the whole anti-China Cold War.
And that helps them get ahead.
It's the way of them designating that they're safe.
It's like when all the liberals wore safety pins after Trump got elected, that's their safety pin to tell the executive, the corporate executives advice that they're safe.
They're not going to cross that red line.
Okay.
Now I know what the people.
I didn't know that's where Vice was headquartered in New York and Brooklyn.
And so, okay, now I get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Vice advice is.
I mean, he's the perfect example.
Yeah.
He's the perfect example of him.
He's a perfect example of what Vice is.
He's pretend radical, pretend truth-teller, hipster-looking, acting and talking, but actually just manufacturing consent for the establishment.
That's what he's doing.
And go ahead.
Another perfect example would be Molly Crabapple, who constantly attacks me over Syria.
She compared me to a Nazi for visiting Damascus.
She was advancing the regime change operation in Syria.
She's like drawn, she draws murals everywhere, and she basically plagiarizes Ralph Stedman and draws his style of art and politicizes it.
She drew Jamal Hashoggi on the walls of Human Rights Watch.
She has a mural in Brooklyn of Saudi dissident women, but she's for every regime change operation.
She's for the Democrats.
She's telling everyone they had to boycott RT when Russia Gates started, even though she used to go on there.
And she appeared in an advertisement for a Korean arms contractor called Samsung advertising their phones as a cool tool for artists.
And yet she runs around saying she's a socialist.
So she's really the essence of the Brooklyn left, not the Brooklyn left, but the Brooklyn kind of elite media world and just how ridiculous it is.
Yeah, I've come across her on Twitter, Molly Crabapples.
She's a real tool and willing.
She's part of that whole crowd that constantly smears you because you are creating new space on the left and you provide a platform for anti-imperialists and people who say forbidden truths.
And that's what happens to you when you do that.
Oh, I'd had it come for me from people attack me on social media who worked for the young Turks pushing regime change wars.
And I mean, yeah, I mean, that's how you get ahead.
That's how you get ahead in media is you push regime change wars.
And if you don't, you are immediately ostracized, just like Chris Hedges, just like anybody.
Well, this has been quite, I'm going to see if there's anything left to him.
I think he's done.
I hope he's done.
Let's listen if there's anything more.
It comes down to a question at the Overton window.
I guess the real question on it is, do you really Think that these people are capable of shifting their mind because they have so much of a skin in the game in terms of the current system.
Not only, as you say, texting billionaires on the table, literally taking their money, but the perpetuation of their power, of their ability to speak at Aspen, of their ability to go to Harvard IOP fellowship, all these things.
It all comes from the same root, ultimately.
So, is there actually a capability in order to change that?
So, what he's basically saying, and correct me if I'm misreading it, but I think what Sagar is saying is, you know, people get into journalism are just climbers.
They're just looking out for their own careers, and it doesn't matter what else, whatever you have to do to get ahead, that's what they're going to do.
And isn't that the real problem?
It's the corporate culture that incentivizes people to gaslight and not cover certain stories and cover.
Just like Chomsky laid out, there's a that you get rewarded for certain things, you get fired for others.
And everyone knows this, and that's what he's saying.
I think that's what Sagar's saying.
Would you agree?
It seemed like a good question.
So, let's kind of see how he answers.
You want to see all he answers?
Here we go.
Skepticism.
Yeah, I'm skeptical too.
That's why I decided to write a book about it and try to make a TV show questioning it.
Like, I think it's a formidable, it's a formidable set of odds.
That said, you know, if you look, if you take, I'm often comforted by a longer historical view.
My feeling is that when five-year-olds were still working in factories, it must have seemed like really, really hard to get five-year-olds out of factories or when women couldn't vote.
This is something that probably seemed pretty impossible because who was going to vote to give women the vote when they didn't have the vote?
And yes, you know, you look at the way we treated LGBTQ plus people 10 years ago, 20 years ago, certainly.
I don't think anybody would think we're where we are.
We would be where we are now.
So, in a way, history has the present is very depressing right now.
But, particularly in this pandemic, we're living through the kind of moment that has been known to change a lot of shit.
Right.
And I think that's actually very inspiring.
See, he said shit.
He's very radical.
He's very lefty.
But you know, Jimmy, we're no longer five-year-olds working in factories.
That's over.
If your whole world stops at American borders.
And by the way, we're not using prison labor here.
We are.
You know, prisoners weren't making hand sanitizer in New York State.
Prisoners aren't putting out fires in California.
Prisoners aren't making Victoria's Secret or whatever.
It's over.
So I look at the long arc of history and I'm comforted by it.
So that's his way of getting everybody to stop revolting because it's all going to look how fast things are going to change.
I'm here.
I wrote my book and I'm going to give it to you.
What?
He's, yeah, I mean, he, well, look, read my book and everything will be better.
Empire will end if you read it.
Can you imagine if I said that?
Like, you know.
Yes, I can, actually.
Such a fucking eagle maniac.
But the difference is if everybody did read your book, it probably would change things.
That's actually the difference.
It would change habits of mind, maybe.
You know, my habit of mind to accept everything a gaslighting bullshitter with a good head of hair on TV says to me, a hipster-looking guy who fucking was a McKinsey guy.
It's just, it's, it's unbelievable.
And they were friendlier to him than I expected them to be.
Maybe they know him personally or what have you.
It's hard to bag on someone you know personally.
But that was, that was, that was, I don't know what people usually mean by unadulterated, but it seems like it fits there.
Unadulterated bullshit.
I don't know what it means, though.
It was just benign.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have anything else you'd like to say at the end of this critique of journalism?
I don't know.
I just, I think we're doing real journalism at the gray zone, and we're just punching back at the lie of the day.
And that's, and we're just going to keep doing that.
Whatever these benign gatekeepers, or I guess I would say malignant gatekeepers, do.
We're just going to be there, thegrayzone.com.
And we're going to be challenging what I think the next Iraqi WMD-level deception is after Russia Gate, which is the new Cold War with China.
It's extremely dangerous.
We have to watch out for it because this is a narrative that aims to drive a new pivot to Asia.
And Obama's pivot to Asia was committing hundreds of billions of dollars to encircle China with aircraft carriers, battle fleets, ballistic missiles, hypersonic jets, stealth bombers, and nuclear weapons.
And this is something that could turn into a new hot war.
So that's one of our focuses right now.
And I think we need to think a little bit beyond the rhetoric we're hearing that's bipartisan that's stirring up this Cold War.
So, you know, when you think about Iraqi WMDs, think of the lie of the day.
And our main mission at the Gray Zone is to challenge it.
So we're doing it with pushback with Aaron Mate, red lines with Anya Parimpil, which you can see on our YouTube channel at the Gray Zone.
And me and Ben Norton are churning out articles along with our contributors every day.
Yeah, I mean, you guys are doing great work, especially, you know, you're my go-to for all foreign policy-related things, especially, I mean, you did a great debunking of the bullshit New York Times story on Venezuela in real time, and three weeks took them three weeks to correct it.
And I mean, you're the only one.
It's just, it's amazing how little real journalism is happening, and you're doing most of it.
And, you know, and that's another question we should ask.
Why is it so hard to do this kind of journalism?
I mean, it's we have a very similar model to you, and it's just people like who watch your show who support us.
But it's very hard for a young person in this economy to get into a career like journalism and to actually do it on the regular if you're not from an elite background.
I think that's, you know, part of the critique that's constantly missed.
It's that journalists tend to be able to go and work free internships in the summer that their parents pay for.
They get, you know, fellowships that come out of the elite connections they make at $80,000 a year journalism schools.
I mean, Columbia Journalism School literally costs $80,000.
And then they go out there and they advance their class interests along with other people who are working in government and both parties.
And we're all fucked.
You know, I remember they, you know, everybody has interns, unpaid interns.
And even at the Young Turks, I would walk in and I would say, oh, what do you do?
I'm an intern.
You're an intern for how long?
And they would say this summer.
And I'm like, well, what kind of fucking person can afford to take an unpaid job for an entire summer?
That's not a regular person, right?
I don't know.
I've never did an unpaid intern.
I would never do an unpaid intern unless my dad could fucking bankroll me.
I don't know how that works.
I had to fucking go a brick every summer when I was in college and most of the school year too.
I don't get this fucking unpaid.
I'm going to go work for no money.
What the fuck kind of exploitation bullshit is that?
Hey, this is the part where I tell you where our live shows are, but there aren't any.
And then I would tell you to go join our premium, but nobody has a fucking job.
So why don't you just enjoy the video?
Wow, Matthew McConaughey is calling me now.
Hello, hello, hello, Bandito, Bandito, Bandito.
All right, all right.
I'm not gonna do that third.
All right, all right.
That's not me.
I'm not like that.
Not like what?
Like that.
I know you're thinking, Matthew, performance comes in lots of flavors.
That's the sweet spot.
Just live it, man.
Living, you're living.
You gotta keep living.
Strip life down to the essentials.
Take the G off living and get to life's core of living.
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 JimmyDorkomedy.com, sign up.
It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
Today's show is written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landuit, Steph Zamarano, Jim Earl, Mike McRae, and Roger Rittenhouse.
All the voices performed today by the one and the only of 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.
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