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Feb. 18, 2021 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:02:17
20210218_TJDS_20210218_Podcast
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show.
Hey, Barack Obama's on the phone.
I hope he has some reassuring words during this trying time.
Hi, Jimmy.
Don't worry.
I'm confident Smoke and Joe is going to build us back better to a new era of peace and prosperity.
And mark my words.
But under your presidency with Biden, the war budget increased by $80 billion.
Stop with the butt underism, the whataboutisms, Jimmy.
It's fake news.
I mean, which war are you even talking about?
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I'm not talking about the dumb country, you big dummy.
I want the name of the war.
Otherwise, I can't help you.
What do you mean we need the name of the war?
What I'm saying is I simply can't help you unless you narrow it down a little.
Remember, we have operations in more than 80 locations around the world to better serve our customers.
This is stupid.
Would you like to speak to a manager?
Because if you're going to get abusive, I can just put you on hold while I transfer you to another associate.
Associate of what?
Our Overseas Contingency Operations Warehouse.
Look, can you at least give me your account number, please?
For what?
I don't have an account number.
With your account number, I might be able to locate what war operations you're referring to.
Was it by any chance Operation Enduring Freedom?
It sounds familiar.
I'm not sure.
Okay.
How about Operation Freedom Settle?
Or maybe Operation New Dawn?
New Dawn.
Yeah, that sounds like it new dawn.
Now I know you're fucking with me.
Everybody knows Operation New Dawn started out as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Oh.
You asked about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That's like saying Operation Inherent Resolve is the same as Operation Pacific Eagle.
You sure you can't remember your password to war on terror?
Jesus.
How about the last four digits of your social security number?
A driver's license, proof of current address, or a current utility bill.
I have a weed card.
Will that do?
What's your date of birth?
Hey, I just want to know how Biden is going to stop our wars now that he's president and backing a second Patriot Act.
Maybe I can help you by listing the wars, and you tell me if you recognize any of them.
Okay.
Operation Noble Legal.
You just said that one.
That was Pacific Eagle asshole.
Pay attention.
Operation Endurance.
Operation Enduring Endurance.
Operation I Need a Nap.
Operation Bad Sandwich.
What happened with Operation Bad Sandwich?
They've turned into Operation Tapework.
There's Operation Vigilant Resolve, Operation Freedoms Resolve, Operation Freedoms Resolve 2, and Operation Operation Operation.
What was Operation Operation Operation?
That was the second version of Operation Operation.
Any of these ring a bell?
No.
How about Operation New Way Forward?
What was that?
What was that about?
A big fuckload of bombs.
I know.
How about Operation Bombed Everything to shit?
Who told you about Operation Bomb Everything to shit?
That's classified.
If he refuses to stop any of this, how is Biden going to build a new era of peace and prosperity, Barack?
It's like I told a maskless lady Gaga this morning at the inauguration when we all hugged and rubbed up against each other.
This will be an administration that respects science.
Hey, I gotta go.
I feel a cough coming up.
Yeah.
Establishment media sets of farmers fighting.
So good luck, bullshit, we can't afford, like fomenting this, whoa, watch and see as the jack off the median speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Chimitor Show.
Chimitor Show.
I don't know what if you I don't know if this is Brave New World.
I don't know if this is 1984, George Orwell.
I don't know what this is exactly, but this is what's coming.
You're right.
So you already know we don't live in a democracy.
The Princeton study proved that.
Okay.
The bottom 80% of Americans have absolutely zero impact on legislation.
There's a new bill, a Nevada bill, would allow tech companies to create their own governments.
This is from the AP, February 3rd.
This is the real story.
Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create their own governments.
Tech companies can create their own governments, just not Native Americans.
Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments.
Because who hasn't wondered what would happen if we let stone college kids make laws?
Hey, which Google grade are you in?
I pledge allegiance to the Gigabyte.
I pledge allegiance to the Gigabyte.
There's more.
Carson City.
Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.
This is real.
This is a real thing.
I'm not making this up.
Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments.
The proposed zones would permit companies, would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts, and provide government services.
This sounds like a joke.
This sounds like some kind of a joke.
I mean, hopefully they'll build their new governments on old atomic testing sites.
Hopefully.
This is real.
The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of groundbreaking technologies without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla Inc.
And plus, if you ever feel like you want to just get back to normalcy, you can just drive your car to Las Vegas, a normal city.
Zone requirements would include applicants owning at least 78 square miles of companies of miles, and companies would have at least $250 million and plans to invest an additional $1 billion in their zones over 10 years.
I can't think of anything else we could be doing with that money.
I cannot.
The zones would initially operate with the oversight of their local location counties, but would eventually take over county duties and become independent governmental bodies.
We will let the machines in and soon the machines will rule.
The zones would have three member supervisor boards with the same powers as county commissioners.
The businesses would maintain significant control over board membership.
Wow.
Thank you.
Wow.
That's from the AP.
That's the real thing.
That is unbelievable.
So there you go.
Get ready for your dystopian future.
You're not even going to have a government anymore.
It's going to be a corporate board that runs.
I mean, that's basically what we live in anyway.
Honestly, that's basically what we live in.
We live in a country with a government that is completely run by corporate interests.
Completely.
Not a little.
Why do you think we don't have health care?
That's because our government isn't run for the people.
It's run for the corporate interest.
That's why.
Why do you think we don't have a $15 minimum wage?
Okay.
Why do you think there's fracking pipes underneath this country?
Okay.
I could keep, I can go on.
Why do you think we spend more money than the next 45 zillion countries put together on bombs?
Why do we do that?
So we already are.
This country already is run by a corporation, but this is literally going to cut out the middleman of an actual government.
They're just cutting out the middleman, which is, I guess, more efficient, actually.
Because right now it's a little clumsy.
You got to get your corporate guy.
He's got to hire the lobbyist.
He gives the lobbyists a bunch of money.
The lobbyist gives the politician a bunch of money.
The politician then gives it to a news network.
And then they put commercials on and then he gets elected.
So that's how that all works.
So they're just going to cut out the government guy.
And then they don't even have to give money to get elected to the news media.
They're just, they disappoint them.
This is awesome.
So they're just cutting out the middleman.
You don't hit no government now.
It just goes right from Raytheon.
We'll be running this county in Nevada.
We'll have Google running this.
Tesla will be running this county.
And if you have a problem, you fill out a form and send it to the corporate manager.
This is a real thing.
Hey, it's great to see you, Max.
Thanks for making time.
Were you able to catch this story?
I was.
I was.
I always thought that corporations were people, and now we learn their governments.
So that's kind of my takeaway.
I mean, whether that happens or not, the fact that people have that feel comfortable enough to propose something like that is chilling, right?
Like, how far have we come or fallen?
Like, do you find this chilling?
Well, I do.
And stupid.
I mean, monumentally stupid.
And it's sad that it's a Democratic governor proposing it in one of the actually one of the most heavily unionized states, Nevada.
People flock from around the country to get unionized blue-collar jobs in Reno and Las Vegas.
And it's ridiculous that, you know, this Democratic governor is proposing what would be the wet dream of Ludwig von Mises and like the Austrian economics school.
I don't even think the Austrian economic school would support this because it's kind of like government guiding these government-free autonomous zones.
But the stupidity of it is, I mean, if you create these towns, which have to be created in the desert, it's like some like big tech, like Mark Zuckerberg plays the role of the Bundy family and takes over land.
But where is the water going to come from?
Where will the, you know, the natural, the natural gas for heating come from?
Or, you know, maybe they'll have to ship in propane, but where will the public resources come from?
It's going to come from those blue-collar folks working real jobs in Las Vegas and the main cities of Nevada.
Their tax dollars are basically going to pay for these towns to exist just to bring in what apparently is the future economy of this dystopian country, which is big tech, is ridiculous.
So I don't see, I don't even see how that's economically viable at all.
It sounds completely non-productive.
And they're going to be able to run their own school systems.
I mean, that completely erodes the state's public school system, which it's like a backdoor for the privatization of public schools.
It's a total Trojan horse.
And it's just absolute abandonment of the social contract by a Democratic governor.
Again, the Democratic Party, it's a one-party rule, folks.
We have one party.
Well, Democrats are more, obviously, more in line with big tech.
Big tech, yeah.
And I honestly, I mean, I read the story.
I kind of like laughed about it.
And this is the first time I'm coming back to it.
So I haven't really done any research on this governor's relation.
I forget what his name is, like Sislak or something, what his relationship is with tech.
But I mean, you can see big tech bending over backwards for the Democratic committee chairs in Congress to censor whatever websites they don't like.
So it's obvious that's where the power center is.
You know, the Republicans have always traditionally been funded by the extraction industries, the, you know, mining, coal, oil, and the Democrats have, you know, taken ever since they, you know, in the 80s and 90s when they really started turning their backs on labor, they were raking in the bucks from the financial industry, Goldman Sachs.
And now big tech is a real source of Democratic funding.
Kamala Harris, her whole career was fueled by big tech.
I mean, she wouldn't exist without them and pro-Israel money.
And so that's the real center of power now.
And, you know, apparently they're just going to take the mask off and say, we're not just going to control government from behind the scenes.
We are going to be the government.
The zones would have three member supervisory boards.
What does that remind me of?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
The TPP, which is going to create a panel of three corporate lawyers that could award unlimited sums to corporations, including for loss of future expected profits to be paid by American taxpayers.
I remember that.
That was within the TPP.
Businesses Would maintain significant control over board membership.
Again, you mean what we already have?
That's what I'm saying.
We already have corporations are controlling everything, but they're just going to be doing it more out in the open.
I don't think Americans will stand for this.
I hope not.
We'll see.
They're standing for a lot right now.
They're actually just kind of on their knees.
Yeah.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah.
Yeah, it reminds me of education privatization where these charter schools would set up their own parallel school boards that wouldn't have public control.
And the only people who would have input would be parents who won the lottery to be part of the charter school.
So they were basically weakening municipal control and the public was paying for it.
And they were doing what's called co-locating, where basically the charter schools, they couldn't get space.
So they would actually come in and take over part of a public school.
And then they were backed by hedge funds.
And so that their part of the public school would start to look really good.
And the public school would be dilapidated.
This guy, I forget his name.
He was the head of KIP, K-I-P-P, which is one of the biggest charter school rackets in the country, completely backed by hedge fund money.
He compared co-location to Israel and Palestine.
He said, you know, our side tends to look more like Israel and theirs looks like Palestine because when we come in, we bring all the money in.
And it's not just because, and it's just like it is an apt analogy because Israel's exploiting Palestinian labor and land and they're exploiting public schools or exploiting public money.
I mean, you can see the same dynamic with us, you know, city dwellers paying hundreds of millions of dollars for some ultra-wealthy Republican hedge funder who owns a professional sports team to have an arena in the middle of the city.
And like the Oklahoma City Thunder, Oklahoma City, that's a, I mean, if there are any young journalists who really want to make an impact, move to Oklahoma City and cover all the corruption there because there's no media.
The media has been just completely destroyed by corporations.
They have like one monotonous voice that's in favor of corporations.
The whole city is controlled by Aubrey McClendon, who owns Chesapeake Energy.
And he got the public to pay like $400 million for a new stadium for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
So last year, in November, there was a giant rainstorm and it knocked out the city's electricity, not just for like a few hours, but actually for days and days because they hadn't retrofitted the electricity grid or repaired the electricity grid.
And actually on election day, a lot of the vote polling places had to shut down because they couldn't power these new voting machines.
That's the kind of world we're living in.
And so this kind of really distills it all perfectly, where they just take the mask off and say, hey, we're going to just let the corporations openly be governments instead of just controlling the government and having us pay for them to be there.
It's stunning.
It's stunning.
I mean, Dylan Radigan said on this show in May that America, he predicted America will just, without a real revolution or an uprising, that we're most likely just going to slide into being like Brazil.
And I think he's right about that.
I don't know.
Well, we'll see.
Washington Post published this story.
And the headline is a majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble.
Wow, you don't say.
You know, as the riot was happening, we were saying at this show, I wonder if this would be this much unrest in the country if those people just had gotten their third $2,000 check.
And then people made fun of me for saying that.
Like, oh, yeah, that's what this is about, $2,000 checks.
Well, here's the Washington Post owned by the world's Jeff Bezos is telling us that the people who were there were in financial trouble.
Trail of bankruptcies, tax problems, bad debts raises questions for researchers trying to understand motivations for the attack.
I said that about the riots in the summer too, or not the riots, but the protests.
In the summer, I said, do you think those people would be out there risking COVID if they just received their second $2,000 check?
Because they would feel that the government is acting, somebody's actually trying to help them.
Someone actually is looking out for them.
I said, if they gave everybody health care and a $2,000 UBI during the pandemic, do you think there would be people protesting?
My theory is they wouldn't have been.
I could be wrong, but that seems to be what the Washington Post is getting at here.
That seems to be what the Washington Post is getting at, what we were saying all along.
And a year from now, I have a prediction for the Washington Post.
I'm not great at predictions, but here's my prediction.
A year from now, the headline on the Washington Post is going to be groundbreaking analysis.
Most Americans are struggling financially.
It's going to be a year, not now, in a year, that they're going to have a breakthrough headline.
The headline, this actually should be the Washington Post just figured out why Trump was elected in 2016.
That should be the headline.
Desperate people cling to demagogues.
Desperate people cling to.
So here's a little bit from this.
Now, Max, you were there.
So I just want to read a little bit and then you can jump in whatever you want.
Nearly 60% of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of evictions or foreclosures, bad debts or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to an analyst, analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group's bankruptcy rate was nearly twice as high as that of the American public.
A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor, and one in five of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters, many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories, were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president's rhetoric, painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
How tone deaf could you be?
Hmm, we need potential clues as to why people would cling to a con man like Trump.
I wonder if it's because they're desperate.
Maybe 40 years of failed neoliberalism.
Hmm, we might be onto something there.
I mean, this is a little bit more.
While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, experts say Donald Trump and his brand Of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.
By the way, it might not surprise these people that this paper is owned by someone who's about to become a trillionaire.
In 2011, a study found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported extreme far-right in Germany.
But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parents' unemployment.
Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes even years earlier could provoke a similar response.
They know it can be lost.
They have that history.
And then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen, says Cynthia Miller Edris, a political science professor, said, and it taps into the same thing.
So they're making the Washington Post is making the correlation between people having hard economic times or even their parents and them being right-wing, being attracted to extreme right-wing stuff.
Just as everyone's always said.
And just so you know, a California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack on the Capitol.
A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a $2,000 state tax lien.
And several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.
Now, that's the Washington Post saying that.
That's not me saying that.
That's not Max.
That's not some Jill Stein or some lefty or a socialist newspaper.
That's the newspaper owned by a guy who's going to be a trillionaire.
That's who's saying that.
And so why do you think people are upset and they don't feel like their government's taking care of them?
Because this is how the rest of the world is taking care of their workers during COVID lockdowns.
How are they, because as I say over and over on the show, this isn't happening in any other Western country.
I mean, them not giving us a UBI and paying, if they close your business down, they'll pay your salary.
In Germany, 87% of your salary is paid for the duration of COVID.
In Sweden, 90%.
Singapore, you get $422 per adult for the duration.
$2,000 a month in Canada.
Canada, they already have Medicare for all.
And now they get a $2,000 UBI.
And now you know why everybody's nicer up there.
South Korea, 70% of wages.
Japan, $950 a month for the duration of the COVID.
Australia, $750 a month to the low-income earners for the duration.
Nigeria gives you money.
UK, 85% of your wages are being paid for the duration.
Netherlands, 90%.
The USA, nothing.
And those countries have healthcare.
And these countries have healthcare, by the way.
The United States, the richest country of all of them, giving their people nothing and no health care.
Here's from the Gravelle Institute: the number of citizens who lost healthcare coverage since the pandemic began.
14 million in the United States, zero in the rest of the world.
So, and then you have Nancy Pelosi saying she's backing an even smaller stimulus because Biden won.
So we're going to give you even less.
They're going the other way.
And then, of course, what does that lead you to?
Thousands of cars form lines to collect food in Texas.
Thousands.
That's a food line.
These are food lines.
1.2 million workers filed for unemployment amid COVID-19 spikes, pushing the total in crisis above 55 million.
And then, of course, Congress heads home for Thanksgiving without giving anybody any relief.
And that's what they were given this whole year, $1,200.
That's what the government gave people this whole goddamn year.
By the way, Trump was calling for $2,000 stimulus checks, and our blue house could only cough up $600.
Trump was calling for $2,000.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were pushing $600 until Trump came in and said $2,000.
And $1,200 was already a joke.
$600 is begging for riots.
That was December 17th, tweeted by Dylan Cook.
And then we got the riots.
So let me bring in Max.
So, Max, just what is your response to this article?
Because it seems like it's news to everybody at the Washington Post that people are in desperate financial times.
Their government has turned their back on them, and that leads you to right-wing demagoguery.
We've known this my whole life, yet everyone's pretending that they don't.
Max, what do you have to say?
I mostly agree with that take.
And it was interesting to browse around Twitter and look at the responses to that article, especially the ones that kind of made it through the algorithm.
And they were these rich liberal personalities with blue check marks who were really upset by this article because it contravened their narrative, which was that this was simply about race and racism.
And I can tell you I saw racists and racism at the Capitol for sure.
There were members of white nationalist groups there who were present, like Matthew Heimbach from the traditional workers was there.
I mean, this was someone who had been a neo-Nazi over the years.
I mean, they were there.
I saw people call black police officers monkeys, but there were also lots of families there who were coming from the exurbs and rural areas, and they were facing these kind of economic conditions and playing out their anti-system, anti-establishment rage through a fake social rebellion leading them to nowhere.
And, you know, I also was struck by how many black and brown people there were there.
I mean, there were not a lot.
They were very much in the minority, but they were there.
And they'd been taken in by Trumpism for whatever reason.
It is a significant phenomenon that needs to be acknowledged.
Race was a factor, but what I think these liberals, like wealthy liberals, people like Joy Reed, who just like go out and basically lie for a living and get millions of dollars, who are upset about this article.
I saw David Cross, you know, he's a comedian.
I used to think he was funny after 9-11, but his response to the article was just, this was irresponsible.
He's Like one of those comedians who became unfunny in the Trump era.
Like Trump was just like too crazy for them to mock, like Colbert and these characters who just become these boring whiners.
But I don't know, maybe David Cross still is funny, but his response was: this was irresponsible to publish.
It was irresponsible to merely state these facts.
And I thought maybe he could have mustered a funny joke, like, you know, these people are all in debt.
Maybe they shouldn't have paid for such expensive tactical gear.
But the issue is that they, I mean, you should really have Tom Frank on to talk about this because this is really what he's been writing about for years.
The issue is that many of the people who came to the Capitol came from deindustrialized regions and areas and places where the economy is just gone to crap.
And they're angry at the system.
And they've been led astray and hoodwinked and bamboozled by a right-wing demagogue as they have for decades.
Tom Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas, is the best book on this phenomenon where he goes around Kansas, his home state.
I mean, he's from Lawrence, I think, which is like the college town.
But he goes around Kansas and tries to understand why this state abandoned its sort of radical tradition and why the liberal Republican wing got destroyed and why far-right figures like Sam Brownback, who really fueled, I mean, they were like the predecessor to the MAGA movement, the Christian right.
Why did the Christian right get so strong in Kansas?
And he showed that as people's economic conditions declined and the factories went away and their jobs were outsourced, instead of turning to the classic heartland populism that defined Kansas politics for hundreds of years, they turned to the Christian right and got into anti-abortion politics.
And these wedge issues were funded by who are Kansas's most prolific oligarchs, the Koch brothers.
The billionaire class was funding wedge issues and they funded white nationalism as well to distract people.
So you can imagine all the anger I saw on display, like to just directly take cops down, to storm into the Capitol, if that anger was not this misdirected, mindless, directionless, agenda-free insanity about a stolen election and was about actually gaining something in terms of material change from their government, that that would have been revolutionary.
And many people from the left would have joined them.
It wouldn't have been what it was.
But that's not what's happening.
That's not what's happening in this country.
That's not what that's not the mentality on display from the liberals heaping scorn on this article.
I think the proper response to this article is that, yes, these are people who are experiencing economic pain simply because they're Americans.
And where I live, I live in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., that's being gentrified out of existence.
I grew up in this city, and everybody's experiencing the same economic pain here, but their politics are completely different.
Everybody's in debt.
The repo man's showing up down the street and towing people's cars away.
People's furniture, you see it out on the street, they're being evicted.
I mean, imagine if they could get together with people who participated in this idiotic stop the steal over this common issue of being driven into debt by a capitalist system.
It would be truly revolutionary.
And that's the issue as I see it.
And just one more point about what I saw on display at that rally, this fake social rebellion at the Capitol, driven by a billionaire, an oligarch, Donald Trump.
Anti-communism was in the air.
More than racial resentment, more than people using racial terms of abuse, I would hear them call the cops communists who sought to get in their way.
That was the first thing that people would say, you commie.
Or they would say, you're under the control of the Chinese CCP.
China controls you.
Anti-China hysteria.
Just like the Russia gate hysteria I heard from Democrats in 2017, I heard there.
And that's also very useful.
Anti-communism is like the American national religion, and it's designed to lead people away from true revolutionary solutions and movements that aim to change their material conditions.
And we haven't seen this level of anti-communism in my generation because the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
But why did we have a new deal in the 1930s?
It was because Franklin Roosevelt was afraid of a communist revolution and the threat of a good example of the Soviet Union actually giving workers things.
So he said, we have to have a social democracy.
We have to give people things.
Truman doing the infrastructure projects, LBJ doing the Great Society and creating community colleges.
It all started to end as the Soviet Union and the threat of communism began to collapse.
And then when did all the jobs go away in the heartland?
When did it become deindustrialized?
When did our billionaire and millionaire class begin outsourcing everyone?
Immediately in the 1990s, at the so-called end of history, after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Well, we're in a unipolar world.
We can do whatever we want.
The capitalist technocracy will take over.
But now, the American empire is beginning to recede.
It's in a state of decline.
And there is a country that is rising and that threatens to be, that poses the greatest threat to American hegemony since the height of the Cold War.
And that country is China.
And for all you hear about China in the media, all the human rights deceptions, China has an anti-poverty, a poverty alleviation program, which has been extremely successful.
And under Xi, China has wiped out extreme poverty.
It's been wiped out.
So PBS actually produced a documentary documenting China's poverty alleviation program.
An American reporter and China expert went over and showed how villages that were just mired in poverty for years were being transformed and people were being moved for free into free housing and into jobs and given vocational training.
And PBS, under pressure from right-wing media, was forced to pull that documentary.
You can't find it anywhere now.
And it's just that that's the real threat that China poses.
So beware of anyone who is spouting anti-China propaganda because they're playing into this dynamic.
And I think the international situation that is taking shape here poses a great threat to the American oligarchy because of the threat of another economic model challenging this failed American one.
Yeah, so I mean, that's why we immediately overthrew any socialist government in our hemisphere is because we can't have a good example of how socialism actually works for everybody.
So we got to get rid of that, have the capitalists come in, exploit everything, and create a two-tiered society.
We call it a failure.
And call it, and yeah, that's right.
And then call it a failure.
So I didn't read, I didn't see, I haven't been on social media.
I've been trying to stay off social media as the recommendation of my therapist.
And so I have been, I've been saying, I actually took the Twitter off my homepage and I put it into another thing on my phone so I can't see it when I look at my phone.
And I'm so anyway, so I didn't know that.
I just thought, I thought everybody was going to read this auto and go, oh, of course.
But that's not.
And you were talking about David Cross, the comedian to me from Mr. Show, that David Cross?
Yeah, I think so.
That guy's funny.
Unless it was another David Cross.
His responsibility.
Oh, you know what?
I thought David Cross was like a Bernie bro.
And I thought he was like a lefty.
Bernie's tenor supporter.
But everybody gets sucked into that Russiagate stuff, Max.
That's what I think.
Even guys like that, they get sucked into that.
I mean, look at all of them at Conan, Colbert, and Conan and Andy Richter.
And they all, everybody's, they're all fucking Russia gators, right?
I mean, yeah, if you're a comedian and you are on the side of the establishment, I know, you're not funny anymore.
You're just not funny.
And those guys, they're not, they don't realize the only reason they have these shows and these jobs is because they're manufacturing consent behind the guise of comedy and they're just running on fumes and the echoes of the jokes they once told back when like Andy Richter and Conan were doing in the year 2000.
But like it's it's the year 2021 and this guy is like just this this condescending boar or Colbert crying on January 6th.
I mean that was that that event was so filled with comedy and so there were so many things that could have been said about it.
Have you ever watched Trevor Noah?
I watched it.
I like suffered through it.
I was feeling masochistic.
It was like it's like the most unfunny.
I mean, how is this not career suicide?
He's one of the highest paid comedians in the country.
It's as if comedy was being produced by the government.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
That's what it seems like.
When I watch the Daily Show Now with Trevor Noah, it's literally as if the DNC was producing a comedy show.
That's what it seems.
These are literal court gestures.
I mean, or Eminem.
I mean, what the hell happened to this guy?
I thought he was like, you know, the new Lenny Bruce.
And then he comes out during the BAT awards.
And it's like he does this freestyle that might have been written by like James Carville and a bunch of DNC consultants.
And it's like the first words of it are, I mean, besides that, and then, you know, your comedy gets bad.
If you start to embrace this mentality, your rhymes get really bad too.
The first lines were, that's an awfully hot coffee pot.
That was the first line.
Should I drop it on Donald Trump?
Probably not.
Like, what happened to Eminem?
I mean, just quit.
It really ruined a lot of comedians.
Donald Trump ruined a lot of news people, ruined a lot of comedians.
It broke late night television.
I mean, late night television is a joke.
I mean, yeah, Stephen Colbert weeping about Donald Trump saying something about the elections.
It was just, it was just, he's just a, and then, and then him sitting there, and then he, a week later, he's with Barack Obama.
He's like, I just want to drink you in.
Oh, my God.
You know, he's a war criminal at a kill list.
You know, you know that Barack Obama had a kill list, literally had a kill list, and he killed a 16-year-old kid on purpose.
And then he joked about it.
Do you know this, right?
Yeah, let me dream.
Larry Wilmore actually had a good joke about that.
What was it?
Do you remember that?
No.
He said, you know, Barack Obama's like Steph Curry likes dropping bombs from long range or something.
It was at the last White House press correspondence dinner with Obama, and Obama was not happy with that joke.
And we never heard, I mean, Larry Wilmore's show wasn't that good, but we never heard from him again.
Oh, you think he pissed him off with that joke?
Look at Obama's expression.
Watch Larry, Larry Wilmore took it to Obama.
I mean, it was.
Good for Larry Wilmore.
Good for, I didn't see that.
How did I miss that?
Oh, no.
Good for Larry Wilmore.
Okay.
I didn't know that.
And that, you're right.
He's gone.
I haven't seen, I haven't seen Hyde Norhare of him since then.
I mean, can you imagine what would happen if anyone made a joke about Michelle Obama, like any one of these comedians, they'd be disappeared.
I mean, this is like royalty you cannot touch.
Hey, you know, we no longer have an Amazon link because we're not doing that.
We're not playing that game.
But here's another great way you can help support the show is you become a premium member.
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Thanks for your support.
And now, Max, I just want to remind you, we're talking about the Espionage Act and Julian Assange.
So if you could try to keep it light, try to keep it light.
All right.
As many jokes as you could possibly.
Here's this is from Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters and sources in jail, and Trump could be even worse.
Well, guess what?
Biden's administration plans to continue to seek extradition of WikiLeaks Assange.
He's even worse than President MyBoss on this one because President MyBoss, Barack Obama, decided to drop the charges against Julian Assange because they had concluded his Justice Department had concluded that if we prosecute Julian Assange for leaking materials that was provided by Chelsea Manning, that we'd also have to prosecute the New York Times, which also published that information.
And so they had to drop that.
Well, Biden's not doing that.
Isn't that something?
Okay.
Well, President Joe Biden's plans to continue to seek to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to the United States to face hacking and conspiracy charges.
Justice Department spokesman on Tuesday said the U.S. government will continue to challenge a British judge's ruling last month that Assange should not be extradited to the United States because of the risk he would commit suicide.
Okay.
Civil, there it is.
Civil Liberties groups asked Biden's Justice Department to drop the Julian Assange case.
A coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and prosecute him, calling the Trump era case against him a grave threat to press freedom because it is.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the Letter and the other signature signers include the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Project of Government Oversight on Government Oversight, and Reporters Without Borders.
In other words, Julian Assange was doing his job.
He was doing the job of a reporter.
Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day, said the executive director of the Human Rights Watch.
In other words, Julian Assange was doing journalism.
He was doing Jets It.
He was doing his job.
President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.
Yeah, you think?
But we're actually the Justice Department remains committed to appealing the denial of its request to extradite Mr. Assange because we are committed to torturing journalists in the United States.
What a great commitment to have.
Too bad they're not committed to peace.
Too bad they're not committed to the environment.
This is a great way to spend their energy trying to freaking kill a journalist.
There he is.
And Daniel Ellsberg tweeted out: I join all defenders of freedom.
Now, Daniel Ellsberg was the one responsible for the Pentagon Papers.
I join all defenders of freedom of the press in demanding that the Biden administration drop the unconstitutional indictment of Julian Assange and accept, not appeal, the decision of the British judge not to extradite him.
Edward Snowden, Joe Biden told countries there'd be consequences if they granted him asylum.
That's a true story.
Joe Biden and they threatened other countries.
Don't let that, so they could have Edward Snowden go to Russia.
They wanted him to be there so they could say, look, he's working with Putin.
And that so he told other countries there'd be consequences because he was supposed to go, I think, to, I forget where he was supposed to go.
He was supposed to go to Spain, maybe.
He was supposed to go somewhere else, Edward Snowden, and they stopped him because Joe Biden threatened those countries.
And then Joe Biden threatened those countries to push-ups.
I don't know if you know that.
That's a true story.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and then Secretary of State John Kerry pressured countries that protect whistleblowers and asylum seekers to deny Edward Snowden entrance.
Snowden applied for asylum to countries such as France and Germany, but every time it got pulled.
Why?
Because Joe Biden and John Kerry, nothing says, hey, world, the America is back like a tour of Joe Biden and John Kerry.
I mean, who's not stoked, am I right?
So let me bring you in on this, Max.
Now, you're an actual journalist and Joe Biden, everybody made a big deal out of Donald Trump, was an enemy of journalism because he was rude to Jim Acosta.
But at the same time, he's trying to prosecute Julian Assange, but nobody was really making a stink out of that.
It was all about Jim Acosta's feelings.
And so what do you make of this?
Yeah.
Well, John Kerry is on a private jet to Iceland to save the planet from climate change.
So we're not hearing much from him about Assange either.
And, you know, our State Department is freaking out about dissidents in Russia, like Alexei Navalny, but saying very little about Assange.
The Biden administration really took the judge's ruling, Vanessa Breitzer in the UK, that Assange would be a suicide risk if extradited to America's maximum security supermax prisons like Terre Haute, Indiana, or this one in Kansas, sorry, in Colorado, where he would be in a windowless cell for 23 hours a day.
And he is already suffering immensely in Belmarsh in the UK.
And the Biden administration just shrugged, ignored it, and said, we are going to continue to try to extradite someone who's not even an American citizen.
And one important thing to note here is that the Biden Justice Department is not fully coherent right now.
So it was really nice to see all of those human rights groups finally step up when they spent like half like Human Rights Watch and like its permanent leader, leader for life, Ken Roth, spent the last like four or five years hyping up Juan Guaido and like all these like fake dissidents in Venezuela and countries he wanted to topple.
He finally said, put in a good word for Assange.
It was really nice to see them come together and do this.
It was very helpful.
But this isn't the end because the Biden administration does not have an attorney general and it's nominated Merrick Garland.
I don't know if you remember.
This was the guy that Barack Obama put up for Supreme Court justice when he wanted to not have a Democrat on the Supreme Court and wanted to like not do anything while Trump just like rammed like one frat boy after another through and just like wanted to win by one vote by any means.
But so Merrick Garland was the guy Obama put up because he specifically because he wanted to frame the Republicans for delaying a vote on someone who was actually kind of a center right justice.
He was definitely law and law and order Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland.
Yeah.
But one area where Merrick Garland's been pretty good is on the issue of free speech.
He's issued some very strong free speech rulings over the years as a federal judge.
And I think when he, if he's approved, and I expect him to be, I mean, if Neera Tannin can get in, then like pretty much anyone can.
But if he's confirmed, then the question becomes, does the Biden administration believe in the First Amendment?
Does it believe in press freedom?
If it seeks to extradite Julian Assange, then we can clearly and conclusively say the Biden administration opposes a free press.
And you have all these mainstream human rights groups and press freedom groups and the New York Times now calling for him to not be extradited and to be released.
So that will be a really interesting conflict for the Biden administration once they get their Justice Department together.
But now I think they're using the excuse of the fact that there are still Trump holdovers and they weren't really ready for this decision yet.
I don't know how can they, how can they keep kicking the can down the road and just leaving him rotting in this COVID-infested prison in London?
It would be sick, but it would also just mean really the absolute end of the Constitution.
I agree.
And it's all happening right out in the open.
That's the craziest thing.
They're doing it right out in the open.
They're not spying on journalists in secret.
They're prosecuting a guy who everyone knows is a journalist doing journalism because they didn't like that he told the truth about The government's crimes.
Julian Assange told the truth about the war crimes that the United States was committing in Iraq and the Middle East.
And they don't want to, they want to kill him because of it.
They want to send a message to anybody else who's going to do that.
This is what's going to happen to you.
And they're doing it all out in the open.
It's about, it's part of this wider atmosphere where the managers, the national security state, the political elite, the Beltway political class, they've completely lost confidence in themselves and their own ability to command the public's respect.
They've lost any belief that they have any credibility.
They know they have no credibility.
So they're using coercion to maintain control.
I mean, that's what the social media censorship is about.
But that's also what making an example out of Julian Assange is about, because Assange did one of the most revolutionary acts in a generation, which is to expose the secrets of the national security state and provide them to the public for everyone to see what the U.S. was up to abroad.
And it wasn't just the U.S., other countries as well, including Russia.
And this was a revolutionary act of transparency and just pure national security journalism.
And he's being there, they're just, it's a medieval punishment.
They can't crack down on all the reporters.
They can't jail everybody who's doing this, but they can make an example of him.
And that's what they're doing because they've lost confidence in their ability to actually command the public's respect.
That's what the, you know, that's what every all the freak out over January 6th is about in so many ways that the Congress fears a large section of the public now.
They feel like there's a large section of the public that's wild and out of control and has to be put in some kind of political cage.
And it fears journalistic organizations as well.
You know, if I were to do another book now, if I had the time to do it, it would be called something like the management of democracy.
If you actually cross the red lines, the invisible red lines, then the First Amendment goes out the window.
I mean, Americans don't know Julian Assange isn't even an American.
He's an Australian citizen.
And Australia, their foreign office is speaking up every day for Alexei Navalny, who is really the West's man in Russia.
And they don't say a word about their own citizen.
They say nothing.
Sweden, you know, they're doing nothing.
They've done so little to drop the charges against Assange.
And, you know, when I went out to these rallies on the day of the decision of Judge Breitzer in UK, in the UK, in D.C., first at the British Embassy and then at the Department of Justice, I mean, I was one of the only journalists out there.
There were a lot of podcasters, people who, and then the podcasters, these are people who watch you.
And, you know, there weren't a lot of podcasters who I would identify with the kind of like red rose social democratic Jacobin left who are basically a wing of the Democratic Party.
These are people who are like politically unaffiliated.
They're hard to pin down.
And it was a motley crew of like 40 of us, but there were no journalists there to protest for Assange.
There were no members of any NGO human rights groups there.
These people really aren't putting their money where their mouth is.
They're not actually getting out there and organizing for Assange.
And these statements really aren't enough.
They're not going to be enough.
But this is the most important press freedom case of our time.
This is the trial of the century.
And it's going to be up to the Biden administration to determine whether the First Amendment matters or not.
Same with those, what about those conservative cancel culture people, the Barry Weiss's, who are always whining about, you know, someone who supports apartheid Israel on campus.
And then they get shouted down by a bunch of Palestinians whose grandparents were ethnically cleansed.
And then they say, oh, they're trying to cancel me, the radical multiculturalists on campus.
They never say anything for Assange.
And that matters so much more than their ability to like, you know, speak at the Commonwealth Club or whatever without being like mildly protested by their victims.
So there's so much hypocrisy on display.
Yes.
The gray zone.
Everybody check out Max Blumenthal at the gray zone.
That's great.
Now, why an A instead of a E gray zone?
I don't know why we chose A, but I know that once the name kind of caught on, we captured the Google SEO, the search engine optimization, and there were no other gray zones out there.
And there was a debate that we had about whether we should change our name.
I actually wanted to call ourselves the Mockingbird as a tribute to Operation Mockingbird.
And it would have been such a tight name, but like there were all these restaurants in like Charleston, South Carolina called The Mockingbird.
And there was a film called Mockingbird.
So it really just came down to search engine optimization.
And a funny thing happened since our work has been getting a larger audience, which is that these right-wing think tanks have developed their own little like gray zone initiative, CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is an arms industry and U.S. government-funded militaristic think tank in Washington that we've exposed.
We actually exposed them for hosting a meeting on whether to militarily intervene in Venezuela.
They started their own gray zone initiative.
And so when you Google us, they're like challenging us for Google SEO.
And I feel like it's like a deliberate attack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you'll know for sure if they start, if they call their next operation the Jimmy Dore show.
Yeah, or they just like change their name to Jimmy Doer.
Jimmy Dore.
JDIS or something.
It'll help them trend on Twitter.
I'll tell you that.
It would be a big improvement for them.
Hello, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
This is Hillary supporter.
Oh, wow.
Hi, Hillary supporter.
We haven't heard from you in a while.
I've been very busy with managing my anxiety, if you must know.
You worried about getting COVID?
I hear you.
No, actually.
Since, because of other unrelated anxiety problems, I'm rarely able to leave my apartment and I wear a mask for comfort and self-soothing.
The fact that everybody else is also quarantined and wearing masks makes it.
So my condition is less unique.
And I'm receiving much less sympathy and validation online for my uniqueness than I am accustomed to.
And that is causing me great anxiety.
I see.
I'm sorry to hear that, Hillary supporter.
I hope you die.
Why are you calling Hillary supporter?
I am calling because for once I am thankful.
Oh, really?
For what?
For Joe Biden and his staff of badass bitches who will get shit done.
That's what.
Especially Nira Tanzan.
Oh, really?
Yes.
If we can't have Hillary in the White House, at least we can have a fierce Clinton loyalist in there.
Somebody who put loyalty to the Clinton dynasty above all else, including party and this stupid, stupid country.
If we have to have another dumb man president, at least it will be gentleman Joe Biden.
He will be surrounded by powerful women of color.
So finally there will be respect for bodily autonomy in the White House again.
Bodily autonomy?
Nira Tandon punched a reporter for asking Hillary Clinton about the Iraq war.
Oh, walk it off, pussy.
I'm serious.
Some stupid journalists has no business interrogating Hillary about her record, least of all the Iraq war.
What was that, like 20 years ago?
Get over it.
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?
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Today's show was written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landuit, Steph Zamarano, Jim Earle, 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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