Jimmy Dore Show - 20210826_TJDS_20210825_Podcast

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Aug. 26, 2021 - Jimmy Dore Show

01:02:43

20210826_TJDS_20210825_Podcast

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	Hey, this is Jimmy.
	Who's this?
	Jimmy, this is former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
	How are you?
	I'm fine, Governor.
	But with everything going on, why in the world would you be calling me?
	Jimmy, I'm Italian.
	We are very communicative people.
	It's who we are.
	We call people on the telephone simply to chat.
	It's what we do.
	I see.
	I see.
	Very good.
	I assume you're calling to discuss your resignation?
	No.
	Maybe the fact that the new governor announced 12,000 previously unreported COVID-19 deaths?
	Of course not.
	Then what are you calling about?
	OnlyFans.
	Mr. Cuomo, we don't talk about stuff like that on this show.
	Well, you do now.
	Well, I want to congratulate the powers that be over at OnlyFans on their wise decision to walk back their ban on sexually explicit material.
	OnlyFans provides a safe and legal platform for sex workers.
	Okay, okay.
	I'm going to stop you right there.
	I'm not having this.
	This isn't about what I'm talking to you about, buddy.
	What?
	This...
	This...
	This show is about politics.
	Well, I'm not in politics anymore, am I?
	I was pressured to resign.
	That means I'm not governor anymore, which means none of this shit is my problem.
	If you don't like it, tough stromboli.
	I'm an OnlyFan now, and that's what I talk about.
	My favorite account is Kitty Cat420.
	She's got a lot of tattoos, and I'm usually not into that, but hey, buddy.
	No, no, I'm still going to hold you accountable.
	What do you have to say about what I said earlier about the Governor Holtchell's announcing 12,000 unreported COVID deaths?
	Look, if there is a through line connecting the events of my life over the past five months, it's that women exaggerate.
	No!
	Mr. Cuomo, please.
	I know you aren't going to argue with me about that one.
	Listen, listen, listen.
	All these accusers of mine have exaggerated the events they're describing, turning innocent hugs into the grasping of buttocks.
	And now New York has its first woman governor.
	And guess the fuck what?
	She's exaggerating the amount of dead people like it came right out of a script.
	Jesus Christ.
	Okay, she's providing numbers, though.
	That's not exaggerating.
	Those are actual deaths counted.
	Women can exaggerate anything.
	And yes, their penchant for hyperbole is so powerful that it can warp mathematics itself.
	Don't believe these numbers.
	It's a smear campaign concocted by my political enemies in Albany.
	So, I just can't believe this.
	Do you know where women don't exaggerate?
	No, where?
	OnlyFans.
	Sure, they can use deceptive lighting and flattering camera angles, but generally speaking, what you see is what you get.
	Those cans and those bazongas are really there.
	As is my monthly subscription to Kitty Cat 420 and many, many more.
	This is absolutely pathetic, Mr. Cuomo.
	You simply refuse to take any responsibility for any of this?
	Nope.
	Sorry.
	Not interested.
	I'll be over at OnlyFans.
	Interacting with women in what appears to be the last safe way to do so.
	Digitally transferring them money so that I may view their artisanal homemade pornography in the comfort of my own home.
	That's the only safe way to interact with women anymore.
	Don't you think you're exaggerating now?
	Jimmy, I'm Italian.
	We are prone to dramatic overstatements.
	We are an effusive, performative people.
	That's culturally different than exaggerating.
	I'd love to use this.
	I love how you use the same three excuses for every pile of shit you get caught stepping in.
	Jimmy, I'm a man.
	Which means instead of exaggerating, I'm resourceful.
	Yes, I recycle the same talking points over and over again, repurposing them for each vicious attack on my character because I am a proud Italian American.
	Well, it doesn't look like we're really going to get any concessions out of you, are we?
	Fuck no.
	I'm giving zero concessions, zero apologies.
	You know why?
	Because I'm still a bull.
	Fucking stugats.
	I must say, your pro-political fall is one of the most pathetic I've seen in my lifetime.
	Whatever.
	Vote blue no matter who.
	That reminds me, I'm going to go over to OnlyFans and check out what Blue Bonnet 69 has uploaded lately.
	She does this whole little house on the prairie type of thing.
	It's fucking sick, man.
	But goddamn.
	God damn.
	I love this shit.
	Oh, jeez.
	Ew.
	Establishment media sucks, all gaslighting, so good luck.
	Bullshit we can't afford, he's fomenting this world.
	Watch and see as the jet golf, the median speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
	It's the Chimitor Show.
	Chimitor Show.
	Excited to speak with our guest.
	He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
	And boy, does he throw that in your face?
	He was pushed out of the New York Times for telling the truth about the Iraq war.
	He's a columnist at SheerPost.com and the offer of many bestsellers, including his most recent America the Farewell tour.
	He's one of the most important voices in contemporary journalism.
	It's Chris Hedges.
	Hey, Chris, thanks for coming on.
	Thanks, Jimmy.
	So I just want to, they had a Medicare for All march in 50 cities, and nobody showed up from the establishment.
	Bernie Sanders didn't show up.
	None of the squads showed up.
	Nancy Pelosi, who said she wanted us to vote on single payer in 1994, didn't show up.
	The nurses didn't show up.
	The DSA didn't show up.
	What does that tell you?
	Well, it tells you that the self-identified left is largely divorced from everything that's relevant that's going on in the country.
	And in fact, spends most of its time critiquing and attacking itself.
	So, yeah, I think it's a signal that the left itself has kind of retreated into a boutique kind of activism that doesn't really have any, is utterly disconnected from the lives of working men and women and the working poor.
	Yeah, I think it's even worse than that.
	I think that I keep wondering, like as I drive around the country, I toured the country for 30 years as a stand-up comic, and I've seen all those places you wrote about in America, the Farewell Tour, and I saw it happen.
	Places like Anderson, Indiana, and Rockford, Illinois, and all those places.
	I've been Minot, North Dakota.
	I've been all of those places, and I just kept wondering, well, eventually the people will rise up and they will revolt.
	And now there's people in California.
	We have a supermajority Democratic Party and a Democratic governor, and there's people living under every bridge.
	And there's nobody has a plan to do anything about it.
	And so I just kept wondering, well, sooner or later, people, and then there was the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history called the CARES Act that every progressive voted for in Congress, including Bernie Sanders.
	Nobody did anything to stop it.
	And the reason why this keeps happening is because there is no left.
	Every time there's a lefty organization, they immediately get, they're invented to co-opt the energy of revolution.
	Like, for instance, like the Justice Democrats started a super PAC last year.
	Now our revolution is ditching Bernie and the progressive movement signature issues, and they're rebranding like they're Hillary Clinton.
	It started with, remember the Working Families Party was founded in 1998 by unions and not profits to reform the Democratic Party, and it followed the same trajectory.
	Kucinich's staff formed Progressive Democrats of America after 2004, and it followed the same trajectory.
	Howard Dean formed the Democracy for America in 2004, and it followed the same trajectory.
	Brand new Congress was formed by Bernie's staff after his 2016 presidential run, and it followed the same trajectory.
	The DSA blew up in 2016, and it's following the same trajectory.
	They all end up moving right and sucked into the corporate Democratic Party, reduced to controlled opposition.
	And the Justice Democrats and our revolution are just the latest in that cycle.
	So how do we break out of this?
	That's why there's no left.
	That's why, because every time they take all that energy, and Bernie Sanders did it for two election cycles.
	How do we break out of this?
	Well, by not investing a lot of time in the brands such as Bernie and AOC and everyone else and investing in radical movements that march for Medicare for all or that stop the Enbridge pipeline or, you know, that get out in the streets to protest police violence.
	That's where all of our energy has to go.
	And unfortunately, there is a significant amount of energy directed upwards or invested into these figures who you correctly point out are full members of the establishment.
	And I include Bernie Sanders.
	We should never forget that Sanders campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1996.
	That was after NAFTA.
	That was after the omnibus crime bill.
	After all of the assaults that Clinton carried out against my students I teach in the prison.
	I mean, half of them wouldn't be there but for Clinton and Biden.
	So Sanders has always had a very dirty quid pro quo with the Democratic Party.
	They wouldn't mount a serious opposition to him in Vermont.
	He wouldn't foster third party movements in Vermont.
	He caucuses with the Democratic Party, indeed has seniority with the party.
	Between 2016 and this election, he carried Schumer's luggage.
	You could see him.
	What was he?
	Director of Outreach or something.
	So I don't, I think Bernie was a positive force in that he actually spoke about the reality that Americans are confronting and one of the very few politicians who did.
	But this whole thing of political revolution was a campaign slogan.
	It wasn't real.
	It was to raise money for his election cycle.
	And then, of course, everything evaporated or vanished as soon as he didn't get the nomination.
	We were all supposed to trot out and support Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
	So, you know, history has shown.
	Howard Zinn, I think, did the best job of this in a people's history of the United States, that real change only comes through movements.
	It's nice to have figures in there that aren't completely tone deaf to what we want, but without any kind of pressure, and this is just something Ralph Nader has been speaking about for decades.
	The fact that there's been no pressure from the left has just seen this kind of forced march to the right.
	The Democratic Party in Europe would be a far-right party.
	There's no daylight between them on all of the major issues, austerity, this gargantuan Pentagon budget, wholesale surveillance.
	I mean, Edward Snowden laid out the facts.
	What did they do?
	Nothing.
	The whole infrastructure bill, which is just going to transfer money to large construction corporations and the states, the fact that the unemployment benefits are running out.
	They will lift a moratorium on the moratorium on foreclosure and evictions is going to be lifted.
	They won't address the issue of student debt.
	And let's not forget that when we built a mass movement around the Occupy movement, it was the Democratic president that in a coordinated national effort shut it all down.
	Yeah, and Democratic mayors from Coast to Coast let union cops crack the heads of peaceful protesters and ended that.
	So, you know, I just had a brief taste of I engineered this thing, forced the vote to try to get the squad in Congress who ran on doing such a thing, opposing Nancy Pelosi, and to just get something for their vote for her as Speaker, because, well, as here's what the Punch Bowl says.
	Now, Punch Bowl is a very mainstream newsletter in Washington, D.C. I just want to read to you what they sent out a few weeks ago.
	It said the squad, which has expanded to seven members this Congress, has been generally supportive of the leadership in Biden this year.
	There was a moment last month when it looked like they were going to bring down a $1.9 billion Capital Security funding bill due to concerns about more money going to the U.S. Capitol Police.
	In the end, AOC, Tlaib, and Representative Jamal Bowman voted present, while Omar Presley Bush voted no.
	Representative Mondair Jones voted yes.
	The bill ended up passing by a single vote, but the episode showed that the leadership is essentially powerless without the squad.
	In fact, the squad, if it chooses to, could run the house.
	Now, that's not crazy lefty Jimmy Dore saying that.
	That's not some socialist website.
	That's Fastball Down the Middle Mainstream News Punch Bowl newsletter, and they know that.
	So how are they getting away without coordinating their votes?
	I'll tell you, but I would like to hear what you think.
	Well, because they're frightened.
	They want to stay in their particular perch.
	Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership has made it very clear that if they do that, their careers are finished.
	Pelosi's power, like Schumer's, is that they are the funnel for the money and they'll take them down.
	And in fact, like Bernie, I mean, they are kind of spineless.
	They won't confront power because they're too frightened about losing their political position.
	And that's what's happened.
	Why are there so few people like us, Chris?
	Why are there so few people like us standing up to make them do something or deliver on their promises or exercise?
	The Freedom Caucus didn't pull this garbage.
	The Freedom Caucus did.
	Why was the Freedom Caucus allowed to drive John Boehner out of business and into alcoholism and selling pot when the squad isn't and they actually have more power with less people?
	Well, they do have voting power, but they don't have economic power the way the Freedom Caucus does.
	And so they, you know, they don't have any, they don't represent any major constituency within the Democratic Party establishment.
	So they actually have no power base, either financial or political.
	You're right.
	They have the voting power to obstruct, but because they feel so vulnerable, they won't use it.
	And I think they've kind of exposed who they are.
	I mean, they're media creations.
	I mean, AOC does this very well, but in terms of being effective legislators, I don't see that they've accomplished very much.
	So Corey Bush staged that, boy, that is an understatement.
	Corey Bush, Corey Bush staged a protest on Capitol Hill for extending the eviction moratorium.
	I'm sure you're aware of it.
	And then Biden offered a limited, narrow extension, and it was credited as a huge victory.
	So my question is this: if a poorly attended five-day protest could get your demands met, why aren't they doing protests every day for a living wage, a Great New Deal, Medicare for all, student debt?
	Why would you ever stop doing protests?
	Well, because they don't want to pay the political price.
	They're too frightened.
	And there's a long antecedent.
	I mean, Ralph Nader speaks about this, and he's watched it.
	So Nader writes 24 pieces of legislation, the Mining Safety Act, the Clean Water Act, all this kind of stuff.
	But he had a liberal wing of the Democratic Party that pushed it through the House and the Senate.
	You go all the way back to Congressman Tony Quello out of California, who allies with Clinton.
	And they say, look, you know, we can get corporate funding.
	We can do corporate bidding too.
	And part of that process is pushing out those, the true liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and replacing them with faux liberals.
	I mean, remember, like Tony Blair is a perfect example of that faux liberalism.
	Margaret Thatcher said our greatest creation was Tony Blair.
	You know, Reagan's greatest creation was Bill Clinton.
	So it dresses itself in a liberal garb on cultural issues.
	But again, if you look closely at the voting, there's very little difference between both the Republican and the Democratic parties on all of the major issues.
	They don't have any daylight.
	So that's what's happened.
	I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class that spends 250 pages talking about this.
	But the self-identified liberal establishment isn't, in fact, liberal at all.
	Yes, it's more receptive to GBLTQ rights and women.
	But again, it's also inverted.
	If you go back to the first or second wave feminist Andrea Dork and these great radicals, they talked about empowering oppressed women.
	Well, this got twisted to essentially electing Hillary Clinton president or having a woman CEO of Hewlett Packard or something.
	But it's a complete inversion of radicalism itself.
	I mean, it's a mockery of radicalism.
	And that's the problem.
	And the left is utterly bankrupt in this country.
	I would go back and look at Weimar in the late 1930s, 1932.
	You have a liberal government.
	They actually cancel unemployment benefit benefits.
	The Nazis were polling in the single digits in 1928 before the crash.
	And so the self-identified liberals betray the working class.
	And of course, they go into the hands of the fascists and the powerful Communist Party.
	We don't have a powerful left.
	But I think that that failure on the part, the betrayal of the Democratic Party of the working class and the working poor is so egregious.
	The lies that the Bidens and the Clintons and the Obamas told were far more destructive to the well-being of Americans than any lie that Trump told.
	And I think the Democratic Party and Russia Gate was kind of used to cover this up, still to this day has not confronted their culpability in creating the mess that we're in and this yearning for fascism or Christianized fascism, which I lay directly.
	I mean, I think Obama bears a tremendous responsibility for this because people were sick of the system.
	He promised change and ran right into the arms of Wall Street as fast as he could.
	The reason we got Trump was because Barack Obama, the way he governed.
	So I am making the, I'm telling people, because Ralph Nader realized way before, 20 years ago.
	Yeah.
	Ralph Nader realized that the only way and what Lawrence O'Donnell told us was that the only way you could ever hope to get the Democratic Party to even listen to you is to show them that you are willing to not vote for them.
	And Ralph Nader figured this out, and his idea was to get 10, 15 million people Outside of the Democratic Party to use as leverage.
	And I've been trying to say this since I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton.
	And I tell people that imagine if the people who were cheated by the DNC and Hillary Clinton in that fraud they committed in the primary, which it was, if they actually made the DNC and the Democratic Party pay a price for that by not voting for Hillary Clinton, she would have lost by 10 or 15 percentage points.
	We still would have got Donald Trump anyway, but we would have not gotten Joe Biden.
	The Democratic Party would have had to have changed or collapsed right then.
	It didn't happen.
	They all rolled over, voted because there's a boogeyman.
	They voted for Hillary Clinton.
	We got a worse Hillary Clinton in 2020.
	Joe Biden is worse than Hillary Clinton.
	And this idea somehow also that people say, well, why did Ralph Nader run against Al Gore?
	Al Gore would have obviously better president than George Bush is such a farce.
	That is such a farce.
	And I'm going to tell you why.
	Because do you think Bill Clinton was the better president, a lesser of two evil with George Herbert Walker Bush?
	He was not.
	George Herbert Walker Bush could not pull off the garbage Bill Clinton pulled off.
	He tried to pass NAFTA, which cut the legs out from underneath labor, and he couldn't do it.
	It took Bill Clinton, a blue dog Democrat, to come in and give cover to those blue dog Democrats and throw labor over the, and they've never recovered.
	It took Bill Clinton to deregulate Wall Street.
	It took Bill Clinton to explode the prison population as he put 100,000 more cops on the street and gutted welfare.
	Only Bill Clinton could do those.
	A Republican would have been opposed.
	And that's what only, how about Barack Obama kicked 5.1 million families out of their houses during a similar economic situation, gassed immigrants at the border and departed, deported more Mexicans than any president in the history since 1890, all of them combined.
	You know, Trump deported less Hispanics, like by almost half than Joe Biden.
	And so this idea that we have to vote for the Democrat, that somehow they're going to be better, that is bullshit.
	Do you agree with that?
	Well, completely.
	I was Nader's speechwriter.
	I haven't voted for Democrats since before 2000.
	I think Ralph has been fighting corporate power longer and with more courage and integrity than probably any other American.
	Ralph is not a particularly political figure.
	He knew he wasn't going to win.
	He wasn't trying to win.
	He was trying to do what you said, which was pull 5, 10, 15 million votes away and use it as a weapon to bludgeon the Democratic Party into at least beginning to address the disenfranchisement of working men and women in this country.
	That's why Ralph did it and also to raise the issues.
	And of course, look what they did to Ralph.
	You know, I had a very interesting moment.
	I was with Shama Sawan.
	It was a climate march.
	And Shama was really pushing Bernie was there.
	He spoke there with Bill McKibben and a few others.
	And she was pushing him.
	You know, you got to run as a third party candidate.
	And finally, Bernie said, I don't want to end up like Ralph Nader, which means I don't want to pay the political price.
	I don't want to be a pariah.
	I know what they did to Ralph.
	I don't want them to do that to me.
	And I think that is the fundamental failing of Bernie and why he is both politically and morally unfit to lead this kind of resistance.
	So my message now, which turns out it's controversial, I didn't know, is that I'm telling people, if you're of conscience, you have to stop voting for this duopoly.
	You can't keep doing it and thinking it's going to get better, just as Lawrence O'Donnell has told us, who was Monahan's chief of staff, told us that until you're willing to not vote for us, we don't even listen to you.
	And that's been proven over and over and over.
	And I'm telling people that it actually hurts the cause for progress and the revolution needed.
	It actually hurts that to have members of the squad or progressives who are elected as Democrats in Congress and to have Bernie Sanders there.
	If they weren't there, then people, because right now people get the idea that, oh, no, they're in there fighting for us when you and I both know that they are not doing that.
	And that what they're actually doing is voting along with Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi, who they'll never cross.
	And so who does Nancy Pelosi serve?
	She serves Wall Street, the military industrial complex, big pharma, and fossil fuels.
	So when you vote for AOC or Rashid Tilbury, are any of those people who consider themselves progressives who agree with that?
	They give you lip service.
	When you vote for them, you're actually voting for Goldman Sachs.
	Is that true?
	Yeah, it's even worse than that because they will raise the issues.
	They have this kind of empathy for the suffering.
	And then when every election cycle rolls around, they go out and carry water for the Democratic candidates.
	It's repeated over and over and over.
	And in fact, what they're doing is betraying their constituency, using what credibility they have to funnel that energy back into the Democratic Party establishment, which is why the Democratic Party tolerates them.
	They don't like them, but it tolerates them because they're useful, or to coin a term from Lennon, they are the useful idiots.
	So let me just play you just a short piece of video.
	And this is from the five-day protest that Corey Bush and AOC were doing at the Capitol Steps to get the eviction moratorium reinstated.
	Now, it didn't get reinstated in full.
	In fact, they didn't have any plan to how to help people to get rent forgiveness.
	And they have no plan for about 10% of the people who weren't covered by this eviction moratorium, which was over 1.1 million people.
	So there's only 600, there's 600,000 people homeless right now.
	And 1.1 million people are on the verge of going homeless.
	So they were asked about this.
	So if you can't hear it, I'll tell you what it said afterwards.
	But let me play this.
	And we showed up.
	People said, how are you going to do it?
	What's your 10-point plan?
	What are you doing?
	My Grand VM on Saturday.
	How many days are you going to be here?
	Yeah, but what about?
	But what about the, what about, but, what about?
	And we said none of that.
	None of that matters.
	We're going to figure that out.
	So somebody just asked, what about people's rents being forgiven?
	And she's goes, we're going to figure that out.
	They never did.
	Here we go.
	What are you going to do?
	You asked us what we're going to do.
	What are you guys going to do?
	So here's what we're going to do.
	The CDC just announced an eviction moratorium.
	And what we're here, here, is for our reasons known and unknown.
	So our reasons known was to make sure that we extended this moratorium.
	What about the 10%?
	So now she's asked about the 10% that aren't covered by this moratorium, the 1.1 million people.
	And watch her non-respond.
	Now, I just want to get your reaction to this, what this tells you, because I know what it tells me.
	What about the 10%?
	Okay, we want to turn on some music now.
	How about the 10%?
	We can't celebrate.
	We cannot celebrate.
	So to me, that's the equivalent of Hillary Clinton and the DNC turning sound cannons on the Bernie wing at the DNC convention.
	What does that tell you?
	It's political theater.
	It's why they threw Max Blumenthal out when he asked Booker about force the vote, because it's choreographed political theater.
	And it's meant to seduce and essentially co-opt self-identified liberals who want to feel good about themselves.
	And this is not particularly anything new, but it's empty political theater.
	Yes, it's it's well, to me, it reveals that they're there.
	That was all theater, in fact, and that they don't really care about fighting or fighting against the establishment or the power.
	But as you have said, is that they know the way and Thomas Frank that they know the words.
	Right.
	So that's what that was.
	They're paying fealty to activism.
	They're paying fealty to protesting.
	They're paying fealty to democracy and freedom of speech.
	But they're not ever actually going to cross power to do it.
	Well, because, Jimmy, if they actually.
	actually cross power they wouldn't be there they would be crushed people who actually cross power end up like julian assange uh those are the people who cross power or daniel hale uh who's now in prison or jeremy hammond or Edward Snowden or Ralph Nader.
	I mean, you actually confront power.
	I mean, look at what Enbridge cops and their goons in the private security did to indigenous leaders who actually tried to stop the pipeline.
	When you actually confront power, there's a pretty draconian price to pay.
	And these people are never going to pay it.
	They are part of the power establishment.
	So would you encourage people to stop donating to the Democratic Party also and stop?
	Democratic Party, that's for sure.
	I mean, there are a few figures like Dennis Kucinich.
	I like Dennis.
	I mean, Nina Turner.
	I mean, so I don't want to be hard on them.
	I think I know Dennis pretty well.
	I think his heart's in the right place.
	I think that's also true with Nina, but they're absolutely emasculated unless there are movements behind them.
	So our priority has to build radical alternative movements that begin to put pressure on the centers of power.
	And without those movements, without that pressure, no matter how well-meaning certain elected officials may be, they can't do anything.
	The Jimmy Door show is coming to a city near you August 28th or in Las Vegas at the Plaza.
	And we just added another show in Portland.
	We're there in Portland on September 10th and 11th, October 3rd.
	We're at Harlow's in Sacramento.
	More dates being added.
	Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com for a link for all tickets.
	See you at a live show.
	Ever since I started advocating and organizing along class lines, I've been getting hit with the weirdest attacks.
	I've been attacked for having a house, attacked for talking to conservatives against imperialism.
	They just attacked me for tweeting a mainstream medical research paper.
	How real do you think the American left is about creating a class consciousness and solidarity?
	I think I read Thomas's book, his book before last on the liberal class.
	I think he kind of gets it.
	It's the classic attempt by self-identified liberals to feel good about themselves.
	That's what this is really about.
	It's about validating themselves.
	It's about kind of celebrating their moral righteousness and purity.
	It's not about political effectiveness.
	It's not really about helping anyone.
	And the energy of the left, there's a kind of circular firing squad where they spend most of their energy and time attacking you, Glenn Greenwald.
	He's guys just attacked right and left.
	Matt Taibbi, and I admire all three of you.
	And that's where all of their energy goes.
	And that, again, feeds into this notion of their own kind of moral superiority.
	But of course, they're not attacking the real centers of power because if you do that, as my friend Julian Assange did, there's a real cost.
	So when did what do you want to be?
	I want to be optimistic that at some point the people will be able to throw off the chains of their co-opters and all the garbage that has happened with all these organizations that I just gave that litany of that have now been co-opted from Bernie's Our Revolution to the Justice Democrats to Progressive Democrats of all DSA, all of them nowhere to be found at a Medicare for All March.
	It's just amazing.
	That shows you that.
	So is there going to be a trigger?
	I mean, I thought these lockdowns, because no other country did it like this.
	Every other country, if they locked you down, they tried to pay most of your salary.
	They didn't do that here in the United States.
	What do you think?
	If that didn't do it, will something do it, you think?
	Well, there already is a backlash.
	The problem is the backlash is a right-wing proto-fascist backlash.
	And that backlash has the same kind of roots.
	The rupture of social bonds, the insecurity, the lack of a future, the frustration, the feeling of neglect.
	And unless the left begins to address that very real, what Durkheim calls anime, but that angst, and that suffering, and it's a legitimate suffering, then we're finished politically.
	And that's why I really blame the left, and in particular, the self-identified left or liberal class within the Democratic Party for feeding this kind of proto-fascism.
	I mean, never forget that Trump didn't create this.
	This was really created by the Christian fascists.
	I wrote a book called American Fascists, The Christian Right in the War in America, and I got a lot of heat for using the word fascist.
	But I'm a seminary graduate.
	I grew up in the church.
	I'm both biblically and theologically literate, and these people are heretics.
	Jesus did not come to make us rich.
	Jesus does not bless the white race above other races, and in particular, the American white race.
	Jesus wouldn't bless the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs and drone militarized drones in the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera.
	So they've sacralized the worst elements of American capitalism and American imperialism.
	Trump tapped into that.
	And what comes with it, of course, is this kind of magical thinking where people are so beaten down by a reality-based universe that has discarded them in many ways that they walk into this world of God will address their material needs and take care of them and all this kind of.
	And of course, this movement is bankrolled by the most retrograde elements of American capitalism, Purdue, Walmart, Hobby Lobby, all these people, because if Jesus takes care of you, then you don't need universal health care.
	You don't need a union because Jesus is going to take care of you.
	So it's a very pernicious movement.
	And it's only going to grow.
	I mean, at the end of that book, and I spent two years on it, I came to the conclusion that the only way to thwart it was to reintegrate these people back into the economy.
	We're not going to win an argument about creationism or whether Adam and Eve rode a T-Rex with a Saddle in the Garden of Eden, as I saw in the creationist museum in Peterborough, Kentucky.
	And this is the failure.
	The left in this country has forgotten the fundamental importance of economics and the fundamental issue, which is class warfare, which we're losing.
	And of course, they've written all these people off, and many of them are my own family.
	I come from rural, lower class Maine on my mother's side.
	And many of them support Trump and they hold opinions that I find repugnant about all sorts of people and issues.
	But the suffering that they endure is real.
	And we have to go in and address that suffering, address that economic assault.
	And by not doing it, by essentially celebrating ourselves as moral arbitrars and as righteous people, and a lot of this has to do now with kind of linguistic shaming and all this kind of stuff.
	You know it better than I do.
	We're finished.
	We're finished.
	We're ceding the ground to very, very dangerous forces that may indeed, after the next House elections, take control.
	So I hear a lot of people who, I call the establishment left, the boutique left also say things like we have to organize along class lines, organize along class lines.
	And they don't mean it for a second.
	They don't mean it because what that means, organizing along class lines, means organizing with Trump voters.
	That's what that means.
	And they won't ever allow you to even talk to them, right?
	If I go on Tucker Carlson to talk to half the country, I get pilloried for it, even though I'm bringing a progressive message, even after Tucker Carlson credited me with changing his mind about Julian Assange, which means half the audio country now hears that message.
	I mean, so they don't want, so that's what drives me crazy, right?
	We have to, when you organize along class lines, that means you find common ground.
	A lot of people on the right want to end the wars.
	They're now for single payer.
	A lot of them are for student debt relief.
	A lot of them are always for a living wage.
	That's enough stuff to organize a political party around.
	And now, if either side wants to get elected, they have to come to us.
	That's my idea.
	I'm trying to do that with Nick Brana over at the People's Party.
	What do you think of that idea?
	Of course, Lord Salisbury, who was a shit, but I mean, he said there are no permanent allies.
	There's only permanent power.
	Saul Olinski picked this up, too.
	When I sued Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, there were a series of amicus briefs from libertarians, Ron Paul, all those kinds of people.
	There are many issues I disagree with them on, but on that we found common ground around civil liberties.
	So, yes, of course we do.
	I mean, that's the point.
	But I think we have to understand that the motive of the left is not to be effective.
	The motive of the left is to celebrate themselves.
	And if you understand that, then everything, how ineffectual they are, everything they do and say makes sense.
	It's not about political effectiveness.
	It's not about building a monument to themselves.
	And they've certainly done that.
	So let's talk about speaking to Alan Dershowitz.
	He is also named in the Epstein scandal.
	He wrote a book called The Case for Vaccine Mandates.
	I'd just like to get your thoughts on the vaccine mandates and passports.
	So I got the vaccine.
	Uh-huh.
	Me too.
	Me too.
	And you had health issues over it.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the fact is, these things were rolled out without proper vetting.
	That's real.
	And I think people's concerns are real.
	And that was a decision that I made to get it.
	But I also understand how people are wary about it because these things were turbocharged.
	And of course, these corporations are making staggering profits from disseminating it throughout the market.
	And I am quite certain in the history of pharmaceuticals, the tobacco industry, the animal ag industry, everything else bears this out, that they work very hard to bury the negative consequences.
	And so I have a certain sympathy on the other hand with the Delta variant now.
	And I think perhaps we should call it a new name rather than a variant.
	It's more virulent and more dangerous.
	So that was a decision that I made.
	What do you I've seen the politicization of COVID around because of Trump?
	Not only by Trump, but by people anti-Trump.
	I remember when Trump was pushing for Operation Warp Speed to get the vaccines as fast as possible, people like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were on debate stages saying that they were skeptical of it, right?
	Because it was Trump.
	And same thing with hydrochloric queen or whatever, anything.
	And they're still doing that, right?
	So it's like the left is willing to be anti-science to somehow dunk on Trump.
	And do you see that ever end?
	When does that ever end?
	Well, let's remember that the left.
	So what is the left?
	The left is that anointed left that you hear Rachel Maddow supposedly on MSNBC.
	The radical left doesn't have a voice on the supposedly liberal media outlets.
	It doesn't have a voice.
	When I worked for the New York Times, Noam Chomsky's name was unofficially, there was nothing written, never appeared in the newspaper.
	Now, Noam Chomsky is, I would argue, America's greatest intellectual, although there are issues that I disagree with Noam on, including third parties, but I admire him.
	My whole understanding of the liberal class of manufacturing consent, his fantastic book on Israel, the fateful triangle.
	I mean, he's a giant.
	And so, you know, where's Noam?
	Where's Ralph?
	Where are all the people who were right about the war in Afghanistan?
	Danny Shorsen graduated from West Point, did combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, had the courage to call it out.
	Matthew Ho, where are they?
	They may be on alternative media, your show, the gray zone, something else.
	But these are the voices, and I know because I was the Middle East Bureau chief of the New York Times, spoke out against the invasion of Iraq.
	And I'm watching all these Yahoos cited as experts on the Middle East.
	I speak Arabic.
	I spent seven years there.
	I don't think they've, you know, maybe they did a junket to a beach resort off of Tel Aviv paid for by the Israeli government, but they don't know anything about the Middle East.
	But they were parroting back the dominant narrative.
	The journalists parroted back, George Packer, all these kind of people, because it was good for their career.
	They didn't know anything about the Middle East.
	I mean, they were attacking me by name.
	And so, in fact, We have to also concede that the real left with a spine, with a backbone, with a real critique has been banished from the mainstream media landscape.
	Yeah, I think that I think that real left should get together, and I bet we could fit in a phone booth.
	I really don't.
	We don't, yeah, everybody's going to get to sit in the front seat.
	It'll make it easy when they come to get us.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Well, you know, in your book, Unspeakable, you address many issues that are deemed too radical or true for public consumption.
	And one of them is animal agriculture.
	And you even talked about how George McGovern took on the meat and dairy industries, and you said his career was finished.
	So can you speak about the harms of this industry and how much power this industry has?
	Well, I became a vegan, not so much for health issues, for environmental reasons.
	I mean, the health and the speciesism, I'm not against it.
	But the animal ag industry is a major contributor to global warming.
	I think 70% of the Amazon is cut down for soy to feed cattle, the runoff from pig farms, the industrial ag industry in the Midwest.
	And of course, they're all shot full of antibiotics.
	And this is contributing.
	I think 80% of antibiotics are used for animals.
	This is contributing to all sorts of diseases now that are antibiotic resistance.
	This comes out of the animal ag industry.
	And it's like the tobacco industry.
	I mean, they're very effective at, and they co-opt all these groups, the American Heart Association, everything else, the same way corporate money has destroyed all of the organizations that you listed, starting with moveon.org.
	Remember, that was a single-payer outfit.
	Next thing you know, they're saying we can't be against Obama's Obamacare, which was a corporate giveaway, because it'll hurt Obama.
	I mean, so, yeah, the animal ag industry is another one that kind of gets away with all this stuff.
	And it is interesting that after the Democratic Party leadership and the Republican Party leadership united to destroy McGovern, McGovern remained a senator, and then he had hearings on the animal ag industry, and that's when they went after a Senate seat, and he never held political office again.
	So in your article, Dying for an iPhone, you write of horrendous conditions at Foxconn Factories, Foxconn's largest customer is Apple.
	Yeah.
	But it also produces products for Amazon and other large companies.
	And you write that workers in these factories got to organize globally.
	What is the pro why can't now I remember after the 2016 election and Trump got elected, I turned to Jack Ugar and I said, hey, let's do something tangible and big.
	Why don't we go organize the Walmart workers in California?
	Of course, that's when I found out he was anti-union.
	But what is stopping someone from freaking doing that?
	The power of Walmart.
	I mean, so if AOC and the squad want to do something useful, that's exactly right.
	I mean, Walmart's one of the most evil corporations in America, not only because it uses slave labor in China to produce its products, but because it goes into towns, creates these big box stores that destroys the local economy.
	So much of my family comes from Norway, Maine, and there's a big Walmart and the Main Street in Norway is just empty, boarded up stores, and they pay minimum wage.
	They keep people working 28 hours a week because then they qualify for food stamps.
	So we get to subsidize the Walton family fortune.
	They stagger people when they come in for employment because they have very effective union busting.
	In fact, they have union busting teams that as soon as they smell any kind of organism, these vultures come in on Learjets to break it and they vacuum all the money out of every community they're in.
	So that's a useful role for the left or the recent organizing attempts by miners in Alabama.
	That's where we have to go.
	That's it.
	And you know what?
	Some of those people are going to be Trump supporters.
	And I've dealt with them.
	We don't have to embrace and we can even be public that we don't embrace it.
	But the primary, as Ralph always said, if you went into a Walmart and you told a Walmart worker who was making $10 an hour, we want to raise your wage to $15 or $20 an hour, whatever political divide or cultural divide you have is going to vanish around that issue.
	The primacy of economic issues, basic security, universal health care.
	I mean, look what's happening to public utilities.
	Kucinich writes about this in his memoir, are all being privatized.
	Prices jacked up.
	People are about to be thrown out on the streets.
	Schools, whether it's Arnie Duncan under Obama or Betsy DeVos under Clinton, are being turned into money-making charter militarized schools that teach people basic numerical literacy so they can stack shelves and stay exactly in the kind of lower echelon of the working class they're meant to stay in.
	I mean, these are the real issues.
	But that means confronting entrenched power.
	It means organizing.
	And I would add that it's the opposite of what you see, for instance, in that clip with AOC, because real organizing is not about the cult of the self, which has infected the left as it has infected the rest of the society.
	It's about self-effacement.
	It's about empowering the other.
	It's about building real relationships, which takes time, as organizing does.
	And I think that, you know, the whole, I'm not connected with social media on purpose.
	There is a Twitter account, but I don't run it, not on Facebook.
	That's how I don't see your tweets, Jimmy, because I don't read any Twitter.
	And so much of that use of social media is really about, it's not about truth and it's not about communication.
	It's about self-presentation.
	It's what Neil Borstein calls, you know, the me, the life movie in whatever, whoever watches it.
	And all of these political figures, especially AOC, have this, you know, have imbibed this particular culture and that cult of the self.
	And they're quite adept at it, but we have to see it for what it is.
	So do you know, I saw you do a show recently with Richard Wolfe.
	Do you know if he is single and does that explain his apartment?
	He's not single.
	Oh, okay.
	I also saw in that same show, I saw a reflection of a dog in the glass.
	Do you live with the dog?
	I have two rescue greyhounds.
	Oh, nicely done.
	Do they bite?
	No, no.
	They love everybody.
	They're useless as guard dogs.
	They sleep 18 hours a day.
	The only thing they don't like are little dogs.
	So I have to be kind of careful when I walk them because they'll go for the little, you know, the little boutique, the little designer dogs.
	They think they're rabbits.
	And do you know that you share a birthday with Fred Willard?
	I don't.
	I share a birthday with Samuel Johnson.
	That's a little more meaningful.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, not to me.
	But anyway.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, I didn't get to ask you about Fauci yet, but I think we talked a lot.
	So I really appreciate you making time.
	Thanks for coming on.
	Unless you have something you'd like to say about Fauci.
	We've proven him to be a pathological liar on the show.
	I'll let you handle Fauci.
	Okay.
	All right.
	We'll do.
	All right, everybody.
	Anything you want to tell where people can find you at SharePost, any place else?
	Yeah, the only thing I would mention is I have a book coming out in October about the prison students that I teach that I care a lot about.
	It's called Our Class, Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.
	And yeah, my heart's on every page of that.
	That comes out in October.
	Now, that is a fascinating aspect of your life that you teach inside a prison, Rutgers course, right?
	And you constantly say how smart these kids are that they can outthink anybody at Princeton or Rutgers.
	And how could that possibly be?
	Well, because they actually understand the configurations of power.
	They know how social control works.
	They don't have any illusions about the justice system or political oppression or neoliberalism.
	First, so the whole basis of their understanding of the world is at an exponentially higher level than any of these kids at Princeton who go to Princeton because they all want to be part of the 1%.
	That's why they're there.
	Talk about branding.
	And they turn their cells into libraries.
	I mean, they are really impressive intellectuals.
	A few years ago, the BARD prison team debated Harvard and clubbered them.
	And everyone said, oh, how could that happen?
	That's amazing.
	All of us who teach in the prison weren't surprised.
	So they have, they come out.
	They're what Ramshe calls organic intellectuals.
	And intellectuals are in every class, but they never had a chance.
	And so they are incredibly impressive.
	I mean, my students, they either, they can finish their BA degree in the prison, or if they get a 3.1, they can matriculate.
	My students graduate summa cum laude from Rutgers.
	I mean, I had one, I didn't teach him, but he was in the program.
	He graduates summa cum laude, a great guy from Rutgers, and then he gets the first Harry S. Truman Fellowship any Rutgers student has gotten in over a decade.
	And he goes to the University of Cambridge in England, and he gets a master's degree in philosophy.
	And he's, you know, six, he's huge, six foot eight black guy, 310 pounds.
	And I was with another guy.
	These guys all in the 400 club, which means they bench over four.
	And we were walking down a street in Princeton.
	He's another great intellectual, a great writer.
	And we're walking down the street.
	And I said, you know, I'm sure that guys, people wonder, what's that like dweeby white guy doing with his two black?
	I said, what they don't know is what I know is that you're nerds just like me and you go home and read every night just like I do.
	No, they are, they're real.
	And that's where my hope lies.
	So, I mean, I've got students who get out, they go to Rutgers, and they're organizing, maybe because of COVID, it's on ice, but they were organizing the service workers at Rutgers.
	And they're black.
	And a lot of those workers are at least some of them, I can assure you, voted for Trump.
	And that's where my hope lies, in real radicals and real intellectuals who are invisible to the main, are made invisible by the mainstream.
	So those are the kind of people that I wonder why you aren't around more often, like people like Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, you know, real revolutionaries.
	And I, it's got to be because, I mean, I think in 1980, there were like 300,000 people in prison, and now there's a couple million.
	And I think that's the big difference.
	We're the world's largest penal colony.
	So the next Fred Hampton is probably in prison right now, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	No question about it.
	And, you know, August Wilson wrote about it.
	He said all of the real warriors are in prison because they went and tried to get for their families what their families needed when the world around them denied them.
	And that's right.
	That's where they are.
	And, you know, that's the people I hang out with.
	Because number one, there's an intellectual bond there, but also there's a toughness and an understanding.
	I mean, you don't push these people around.
	They don't, first of all, they can't vote because they're ex-felons.
	So they don't have any illusions about the system at all.
	No, that's where hope lies in those people, none of whom you're ever going to see on Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, or anywhere else.
	Can you tell the story, if you have time, about the action that your students took when they were required to not make eye contact with their eyes with the guards?
	Right.
	So prisons, I think, you know, what most people don't understand is that prison are plantations.
	I think mass incarceration is a civil rights issue of our time.
	They are run like plantations with white overseers largely.
	There are black corrections officers, but even the black corrections officers oftentimes are subject to racist.
	I mean, for instance, in the mess hall in one of the prisons I taught at, the white officers, the blacks officers would sit at a table and they came for breakfast and they'd taken special K, three special K boxes and put them all together so they read KKK.
	So there is that racial dynamic is very strong within the prison system.
	My students, you know, they pay a heavy price for resistance, like Julian, like Edward Snowden, because they're captives, but they resist anyway.
	And so there was a rule in one of the prisons that they had to keep their heads down, like on a plantation in the South.
	You couldn't look at a white person in the eye.
	And so they refused.
	And they walk through the halls with their heads up.
	And of course, what they do is they go and find the leaders and throw them in solitary confinement or ship them to another prison and throw them in solitary confinement, often for months.
	I mean, the leaders of the Free Alabama movement, which did prison strikes, they will call me on clandestine cell phones.
	They're in indefinite solitary confinement.
	So I taught a class.
	They took away their water heaters, the food.
	Much of the food's unedible.
	It's unhealthy.
	So they like to heat up their ramen noodles.
	That's what most prisoners live on, along with their instant coffee.
	And they took those little water heaters away.
	And so they did a sit-down strike.
	And of course, what they did is strip search the cells and went to find the leaders and ship them out of the prison and put them in solitary confinement.
	That is a constant within the prison system.
	So I admire these people for having the courage to stand up against such monolithic authority.
	And they stand up anyway and fully aware of the consequences just to assert their own dignity as a human being.
	And these are the people I respect.
	These are the people I spend my time with and invest my time with.
	I've been teaching in the prisons for 10 years.
	These are the people I admire.
	I gave a commencement address a couple years ago.
	It's on YouTube.
	I encourage people to look at it.
	It's only 10 minutes where I talk about my students.
	I think if you go to YouTube, type in Chris Hedges, Rutgers Commencement, it should come up.
	I don't know what the heading is, but these are real people and people of great integrity, worth, dignity, intelligence, and courage.
	And, you know, it's a privilege, you know, it's a privilege for me to be able to be their teacher.
	Chris Hedges, thanks for being our guest.
	You can read his work at SheerPost.com, his most recent book, America, the Farewell Tour.
	And he has another book coming out in October.
	And hopefully, you'll come back on and talk to us about that.
	Anytime, Jimmy.
	Thanks for doing it.
	And thanks for doing what you do.
	Right back at you.
	Hey, this is Jimmy.
	Who's this?
	Hello, Jimmy Door.
	It's me.
	Oh, what did Bernie Sanders?
	No, it's Prince for some squiggly simple shit.
	And I've come back from the death to sing about some more purple shit.
	Of course, it's Bernie Sanders.
	Is this what I have to deal with now?
	It's bad enough trying to talk to Joe Biden, but now this.
	I apologize, Bernie.
	I was just trying to be nice, pal.
	By acting like you don't recognize the most recognizable voice in America, you wouldn't do that to Gilbert Gottfried, I bet.
	you wouldn't have the guts.
	Jesus.
	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 JimmyDorrComedy.com, sign up.
	It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
	Today's show is written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landowitz, Steph Zamorano, 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.
	Do not freak out.
	Don't freak out.
	Do not, do not.
	Do not not freak.
	Do not freak.
	Do not freak out.

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