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April 1, 2022 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:02:33
20220401_TJDS_20220401_Podcast_-_33122_6.58_PM
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Thank you.
Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy, this is Air Paco.
Oh, hey, friend, of the show, Al Pacino.
How you doing?
Jimmy, did you watch the 94th Annual Academy Awards?
Yes, I did.
What the fuck?
Wait, hold on.
Before we get to that, you were there, right?
Yes.
There was a 50th anniversary tribute to The Godfather.
So they wanted Francis Ford Coppola to come out on stage and mention Mario Pusso while me and Bobby De Niro stood beside him silently and awkwardly.
And that's what you did?
That is what we did.
I didn't say shit.
Okay, well, can we talk about the slap now?
Why not?
Everybody else is.
I know.
I was still backstage eating funions when it all happened.
Saw the whole thing.
It was truly unbelievable.
Right?
Free, unlimited funions.
Hollywood is truly an embarrassment of riches.
No, I mean the slap.
That's what I mean.
Oh, yeah, what a fucking psycho.
But we knew that.
Everybody in show business has been hip to Will Smith, being a goddamn nut job for 20 years.
Ain't nothing you can do about it.
Al, he straight up assaulted a comic for telling a joke on live television and was allowed to sit back down and then yell profanities.
Where was security?
Why was nothing done?
Help me understand this, El Pacino.
Oh, the place is crawling with security.
But, you know, they're for restraining people who want to yell about war or injustice or some shit.
Right.
Yep.
Actual violence is encouraged.
Yeah.
Violence is conflict.
Conflict drives plot.
Plot drives film.
The whole damn industry is based on violence.
That's a good point.
Not 10 minutes earlier, I was standing mute on stage amidst the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the most violent shit ever made.
Will Smith slapped a guy defending his wife?
Who gives a shit?
In Godfather 2, I slapped my own fucking wife.
Yeah, I remember.
Good.
So yeah, violence is always encouraged.
Like I said, it's the peace protesters that get shut down in a hurry at these things.
Uh-oh, Bony McBallgown is giving a tearful anti-war speech.
Better strike up the band, boys.
Play her out.
I see.
I see.
Now, cut to a commercial for Raytheon.
If we don't have war, half this industry would collapse.
All these superhero movies are big-budget commercials for the Pentagon.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
What did the Marvel Cinematic Universe start with?
Iron Man.
Two hours of the weapons manufacturing industry jerking off.
So yeah, a full-on bench clearing brawl on stage at the Oscars would be good for business.
It would really bring industry solidarity.
Also, I'm disgusted because I'm a comedian.
Is that what happens now if you tell a joke someone doesn't like or someone's wife doesn't like?
They just come up on stage and assault me.
Well, you gotta be honest, there was probably always a possibility.
People emulate things they see on TV, Al.
I don't know, Jimmy.
I think anybody who thinks I can do whatever I saw Will Smith do on TV is probably already in jail.
I still don't like it, Al.
Or dead.
I still don't like it.
Come on, I think it's a little funny.
I don't.
Come on.
You slapped him.
Went up there, big macho man defending his wife's honor.
And slap.
Not a punch, a slap.
Slapity, slap, slap, slap.
Yeah, it's not funny.
Hell, it isn't.
I almost choked on a funying.
Okay, I guess we'll agree to disagree, Al.
Fair enough.
I gotta go watch my favorite TV show now.
Oh, really?
What's your new favorite TV show, Al?
I don't know what it's called, but it's about murder.
I love that stuff.
All that killing stuff.
Slap.
All right, El Pacino.
Nicely done.
Nicely done.
Establishment media sucks, all gaslighting, so good luck.
Bullshit we can't afford, he's fomenting this world.
Watch and see as the jack off the median speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Chimmy Tor Show.
music Thank you.
Today's guest is Chris Hedges.
He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, activist, best-selling author of 12 books, including his latest release, Our Class Trauma and Transformation in American Prison.
Here it is right here.
And his work can be found in the New York Times and Truth Dig.
Until recently, he hosted an Emmy-nominated show on Contact for RT America and RT International.
Welcome back to the show, Chris Hedges.
Hi, Chris.
How are you?
From good, Jimmy.
Thanks.
Where does your writing appear nuts in a new place, right?
Isn't well, sheer post because we were all fired from Truth Dig.
That's right.
Sheer Post.
Okay.
And on Substack, I've moved to Substack now that RT is shut down.
Oh, you're on Substack.
That's establishment is not like that.
People get to subscribe.
No, they don't.
People get to subscribe.
That's where Glenn Greenwald ended up and had Taibbi.
So with enough subscriptions, then I can continue to write for Bob because he don't have any money.
Right.
And reconstitute my show.
That's the idea.
Okay.
Well, I'm just going to...
What happened was he's been censored on YouTube.
So here's the article you wrote.
It's called On Being Disappeared.
The entire archive of six years of his show On contact have been disappeared by YouTube.
The entire archive of the Emmy-nominated show Chris hosted for six years on RT America and RT International got disappeared from YouTube.
Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington, gone into the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, gone on the interviews with social critics like Carnell West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Joe Horn, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Naomi Wolf, Slavic Zizak.
Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including a human rights attorney, Stephen Donzinger, who we've had on this show, and the political prisoner, Mamu Abu Jamal.
None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube.
I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube.
I vanished.
In totalitarian systems, you exist.
Then you don't.
I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of Ulysses or biographies of Susan Tontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin.
Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia.
I was on RT because as a critic of U.S. imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the boycott divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted.
Are we more informed and a better society because of this censorship?
Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us?
If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative.
And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power of obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political social divides.
This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin's airbrushing of non-persons such as Leon Trotsky out of the official photographs.
It is a destruction of our collective memory and it removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate.
The goal is to foster historical amnesia.
If we don't know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.
So let me bring in Chris.
What was your reaction when you found out that this had happened to you?
Was this expected?
Yeah, I always expected them to shut down RT.
And I opposed removing Trump from social media for this reason.
I don't want to ever read another tweet that Trump writes, but they always pick the outliers, Joe Rogan or Alex Jones.
These are people I don't agree with.
And then they set the precedent.
And the left is very foolish to cheerlead this kind of censorship, which it has done repeatedly.
I mean, we saw the Democratic leadership in Congress bring in the CEOs of these big digital media outlets, Facebook, everything else, and demand more censorship.
This is insane.
So I did.
It's still, just because you kind of understand where it's going, it doesn't mitigate the kind of emotional trauma that comes with just seeing this wholesale eradication of your work over six years, especially since it had zero to do with Russia.
In fact, the very few times that Russia or Putin was mentioned, it was never in flattering terms, ever.
But this is part of the kind of march.
They refuse to address the real issues that have disenfranchised such a large segment of the United States.
And of course, they're frightened of the QAnons and the gun-toting militias and the Christian fascists, as I am and as everyone else.
But the response is not to shut down the critics, to silence the voices.
That only makes it worse.
And this is part of the kind of seizing up of the system where they cannot examine their own culprit.
I'm particularly speaking of the Democratic Party, their own culpability in creating these conditions.
The lies the Democrats told to the working class did far more grievous damage to them than any lie that Trump told.
I mean, abolishing welfare.
70% of the original recipients on welfare were children.
NAFTA, deregulating the FCC.
We now have about a half dozen corporations that control 90% of what Americans watch and listen to, ripping down the firewalls between investment and commercial banks that precipitated the global financial meltdown.
The whole omnibus crime bill, which Biden was instrumental in pushing through, which exploded our prison population, militarized our police, put people behind bars for life for nonviolent offenses.
This was all the Democratic Party.
And if they, you know, they wander off into this Alice in Wonderland universe where they somehow think that Trump was elected because of Russia.
And they're as guilty of self-delusion as the Republican Party.
And of course, now the effort is to silence voices like yours, like mine, which have already been pushed to the margins.
Look, I'm on Substack.
Glenn Greenwald's on Substack.
Matt Taibbi's on Substack because we can't go anywhere else.
Well, we just got demonetized from Facebook yesterday.
Oh, did you?
So they're done letting us use Facebook.
And I knew that was coming.
And the video that did it was we showed how Chuck Todd said that the Nazis in Ukraine were okay now because they weren't as bad as Putin.
So he said he had to make a choice between a lesser of two evils and he chose Nazis in Ukraine and that got us demonetized forever from Facebook.
So now, has anybody prominent said anything about this that you've heard?
Or is anybody, is there even any discussion?
Because what the lefty YouTubers mostly say, we've never said this.
We've always been absolutists as far as free speech goes.
But what they say is, well, it's a private company, Chris, and then if you break their terms of service, that they can do whatever they want.
You don't have a right to have a private company carry your stuff.
What do you say to that?
It's a monopoly, and they have crushed any kind of competition, Parlor, anybody else.
So that's why monopolies are dangerous.
And they're completely opaque.
They don't ever give a reason.
We don't know.
And then let's be clear, this has been precipitated by algorithms and shadow banning and everything else.
And that's not conjecture.
I mean, in my case, the last year I was at Truthdig, The IT people did a graph of referrals from impressions.
And so I would write an article on imperialism, and you would Google imperialism, and it wouldn't come up with anything else that was recent.
Well, they use the algorithms so that your article doesn't come up.
In fact, you're funneled to the mainstream media organizations like the New York Times, who are really in collusion with this.
And so referrals from impressions over a 12-month period declined from over $700,000 to below $200,000.
I'm sure it's lower than that now.
They've done that to Julian Assange.
They've probably done that to you.
Now, that's all hidden.
Nobody's ever told about this.
So those censorship mechanisms were already in place, but now it's become completely overt.
I mean, it is kind of like the old Soviet Union.
You're just suddenly not there anymore.
Well, that very much.
And so, again, I would have these discussions.
I would have these debates or arguments with people on the Young Turks on camera, and they never understood that you can't do this.
That you understood that if you do it to just to Alex Jones, it's going to happen to everybody.
And they never understood that there's a monopoly happening.
And meaning that I think 70% of the country gets their news from Google or Facebook, right?
Which, what does that mean?
That means now that two little companies or two giant companies the size of countries with GDPs the size of countries can now control the narrative completely in the country.
And that's bad for democracy.
And what you get is oligarchy out of that, right?
Would you agree?
Yeah, well, you know, and it's worse than that, really.
It's not just that they select the news.
If you have a major newspaper, L.A. Times, New York Times, and they don't select your story, it doesn't exist.
So in a sense, they get to pick and choose, even from established media organizations, what gets promoted and what doesn't.
So there's, you know, deep despair within the editorial meetings of the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, if that particular story just doesn't get picked up by these monopolies.
First of all, they should be public utilities, number one.
Number two, they should not be monopolies because they, and this is why antitrust laws were created.
Once you build a monopoly, it becomes unassailable.
And not only does it have total control, but it has the ability to crush any kind of independent challenge to that monopoly.
And that's precisely where we are.
But the problem is the Democratic Party, there's a quid pro quo.
Silicon Valley serves the interests of the Democratic Party.
So for instance, in the final weeks of the election, they pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Joe Biden's campaign.
We don't know how much because it's dark money.
They'll have to tell us.
They locked the New York Post out of its own Twitter account, and then they discredited what was in the Hunter Biden laptop.
The New York Times called it disinformation.
We got story after story about how this came from the Russian playbook.
It was all garbage.
What was in the Biden laptop, and the New York Times actually admitted that a few days ago, was factually, it was real.
It wasn't disinformation.
It wasn't created by Russian bots or whatever.
It was from Hunter Biden.
But they couldn't allow anything to damage Biden.
And that kind of censorship is really scary.
So the quid pro quo is they won't touch that monopoly.
The Democrats are not going to break it up, not going to break up that power.
And they are going to serve the interests of the Democratic Party.
And so people who consider themselves anti-fascists, people consider themselves anti-right wing, anti-authoritarian, meaning liberals.
The liberal class in America is cheering this kind of stuff on.
Yeah, very stupid.
I mean, it also shows an inability to understand how social movements work.
So if what you're doing is shutting down your critics and imposing censorship rather than dealing with the structural and fundamental problems that gave rise to these deformed political movements, then you're only going to make the situation worse.
Look, the Democrats now concede they're going to get shellacked in the midterms if nothing changes.
I mean, Biden's presidency has been an utter disaster.
Not surprisingly, it's why he was selected, anointed.
So you're going to, you will ensure the rise of a proto-fascist or a authoritarian movement.
I think this is really the last moment.
I think the Democrats have, I mean, I look at it as kind of 1932 in Weimar, Germany, when von Popen took power, the old aristocratic elite in fear of the Nazis, and thought they were going to bring back the ancient regime.
Well, that's what Biden and the Democratic Party, and let's be clear, the establishment wing of the Republican Party, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Crystal, they're all bonded.
It's all one group now.
And so that inability to understand the very real suffering and the egregious assaults that they orchestrated and are the architects of and carried out and the attempt to essentially shut down critics like myself or you or anyone else that is attempting to explain this reality is going to be very self-defeating.
And the difference between Trump, the first four years of Trump, and the arrival of a new Trump or Trump wannabe, a Mike Pompey or something, is that this time they're going to carry out acts of extreme vengeance.
And all of the forms of censorship and lies and marginalization that the Democrats have carried out, you've essentially justified the same kind of activity on the part of the Republicans.
I mean, I really found the whole response to the, I'm not defending it, the reaction of the Trump supporters after the election of Biden curious, to be kind, because if you go back to 2016, the Democrats called Trump's election illegitimate.
He was a Russian agent.
They were telling people in the Electoral College who were Trump delegates to vote for Hillary Clinton.
They're doing the same thing.
But this is really symptomatic of a deeply failed system.
And I think that the erasure of over 300 shows, not one of which had anything to do with Russia, but gave voice to exactly these kinds of critics is just another example of the kind of steady decay that is not going to end well for any of us.
So this is the game that's being played now because the joke I tell about identity politics is that they're not going to help you.
They want to distract you from your economic problems and insert identity problems into your life and act like that's going to help you.
And the joke I do is if it was 1860, the Democrats would be bragging about their first transgendered slave owner.
Right, exactly.
Well, it's like Clarence Thomas.
I mean, this is a man who thinks that banning all white lunch counters is illegal.
He thinks the minimum wage is the federal government has no right to mandate the minimum.
It's a total troglodyte.
Of course, his wife is out there trying to overturn the election.
But he's black.
I mean, is this an asset?
Are we a better country because we have, and remember who gave us Clarence Thomas?
His name is Joe Biden.
That's right.
Along with Scalia.
I mean, two of the worst.
These were Biden's.
These were Biden's picks.
It's nuts.
Biden is, I mean, he's almost a caricature.
I mean, he can sort of barely, you know, get out there at midday.
But that's who they wanted.
I mean, they wanted.
I mean, if you hear these rumors, they're going to try and recruit Hillary Clinton to run again.
They got nothing.
Really, that's the end of Rome.
I mean, at that point.
That's, so what do you, So this is just basically censoring.
So they never want to talk about the economic issues, right?
No.
No matter what it is.
Like there's an article in The Guardian today talking about how Will Smith slapping Chris Rock is a sign of white supremacy.
Who cares?
And I'm like, well, why would they print that article?
Because that distracts us from the real problems that are going on in the world, in the Western world, right?
Well, that's the whole trivialization of news.
Neil Postman wrote a pretty good book on it, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
It's that fusion of entertainment, as if celebrities are actually news figures.
I mean, it's this kind of cross-pollinization between celebrity culture and news, which has destroyed it.
I don't have a TV, so I don't see this stuff too much, but every time I see CNN, I'm just in shock.
It just burlesque, utter burlesque.
Well, I find it funny how people try to pretend they still talk like Fox News is the misinformer, solely, as if there's a difference really between Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.
And there certainly isn't.
And there's, in fact, the only person I see on network television telling the truth about what's happening in Ukraine or Syria happens to be a Fox News host that everybody hates Tucker Carlson.
And that's another big reason why they want you to hate him.
And they use every racist argument they can, true or not.
But they should be embarrassed that a guy who they think is that horrible does better reporting on Syria, Venezuela, and now Ukraine than the entire corporate news establishment.
And that's a thing people can't take, right?
And so they got to make sure they demonize Tucker Carlson sufficiently as a Nazi as they fund Nazis with $10 billion in arms to go fight a war for hegemony and money.
And it's all about fossil fuels.
Again, Ukraine.
This is all about us.
Now we're going to wreck our groundwater here in the United States doing fracking so we can now export liquid gas to Europe so that Russia doesn't get to sell it to them.
Isn't that correct?
Yeah, I covered a lot of wars.
And anytime you cover a war, you better start talking about markets.
We don't talk about that.
You know, I was also in Eastern Europe in 89, so with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a report.
And everyone understood.
Of course, we were all very naive.
We thought, oh, NATO's now obsolete, so we don't need it anymore.
Shows you how stupid we were.
And now we're going to have the peace dividend because we're going to have to pump all our resources into it.
I know, I'm embarrassed, into the arms industry.
And we don't have to build nuclear weapons so we can destroy the same Soviet city 20 times over.
And of course, the arms industry and the warmongers had no intention of reducing their production or their profits.
And the way to do it was to expand NATO.
So everybody, even Henry Kissinger, who's awful, said this was a unnecessary provocation.
George Cannon, Hans Dreet Genscher, Margaret Thatcher, they all promised Gorbachev they wouldn't expand beyond the unified borders of Germany.
Well, it was a multi-billion dollar bonanza, and they weren't going to keep their hands off it.
So I was in Warsaw a couple years ago, and there's like billboards from Raytheon all over the place because they're bilking the Polish people because you have to refit.
You have to refit a Soviet bloc military to be compatible with NATO equipment.
I mean, Poland just signed a $6 billion deal for M1 Abrams tanks.
It's nuts.
It's all about money.
And look where we are.
And just on Ukraine, so Russia was baited.
I mean, without question, I'm not defending what Putin did, but you can't even have this discussion.
And this is an opinion.
This is historical fact.
And there was, I published a story in Shearpost a couple of weeks ago where I quoted from a WikiLeaks cable of 2008 written out of Moscow where it predicted the kind of conflict that you get in the Ukraine.
And just to close on the Ukraine, they talk about Ukraine not being a NATO country.
That's a lie.
Ukraine is a de facto NATO country because we have pumped and they're now pumping staggering sums of weapons into the Ukraine.
We had 150 NATO military advisors.
We have to remember the trauma that Russia faced with the German invasion.
Half their country was destroyed.
A century earlier, Napoleon did the same thing.
These are real historical issues.
I mean, can you imagine if we had a missile base 90 miles from the, well, 100 miles from the U.S. border in Mexico or somewhere.
We almost went to nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba.
That was 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
So just this utter, and this is a failure of the reporters.
I was a foreign correspondent.
It was my job to look at how other people saw us, explain why they thought the way they did, and why they might have legitimate concerns.
And I mean, this is the role, but this is now jingoism and war fever.
And it's just, I mean, it was always bad, but now it's, and of course, that's the death of actually any kind of foreign reporting.
But I think a lot of it is a way to compensate with 20 years of carrying out one egregious war crime after another, slaughtering one wedding party after another.
And suddenly we get to resurrect ourselves as the moral arbitrars of the world.
You know, you want to haul Putin to The Hague?
Go ahead.
But George W. Bush better be in the cell right next to him.
Well, they love George Bush now because he went to the last 9-11 party, and he said that the people on January 6th were all terrorists.
And so now all the shitlibs have embraced him.
He's their hero now, even though he's a torturer and a war criminal and definitely has a bigger body count than Putin does.
Yeah.
And so does Joe Biden.
People don't realize that, right?
I mean, Joe Biden and Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George Bush and Dick Cheney.
People don't know that.
People don't know what they did in Libya.
People don't know what they really did in Syria.
People don't Know what happened in Afghanistan for 20 years.
I mean, this is.
Obama, the drone program, never took off until the Obama administration.
I mean, which had a drone program which killed 90% innocent people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Daniel Hill's in prison.
Prison for telling people.
And that's just another example of how inverted the entire system is.
I'm finding by watching what's happened with Ukraine and how people are willing to pay $7 for a gallon of gas because they think it's an own on Putin somehow, how easily Americans are still manipulated, even after Iraq and Libya and Syria.
It's just unbelievable the amount of propaganda Americans are willing to ingest and repeat and live with.
I've just come to their.
So the international security state, the military industrial complex, Wall Street and big tech are going to do their agenda.
And there's nothing we can really do about it because now they have private companies doing their censorship for them.
And so they can pretend that's not a monopoly.
They can pretend that's not really going against the spirit of the First Amendment.
And so they can do that forever, which means they're going to be able to do, they're doing their agenda right now.
They're actually trying to pick a fight.
They're risking a nuclear war so they can sell more gas to Europe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and weapons too.
I mean, right, of course.
Yes.
They're ecstatic.
I mean, and they want to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan where Russia was baited.
Yep.
Brushinsky, Carter's National Security Advisor, started arming what became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and they drew the Russians in and tied them down for, what, 10 years?
And that's what they want.
So they want to make Russia bleed.
But of course, in reality, the people are really going to bleed.
Oh, the Ukrainians.
That's the tactic.
So it's very, very cynical.
I think the media is effective because it's all about appealing to emotions and our self-agulation.
None of it.
It's not factual.
I mean, the fact is, I'm not saying every Ukrainian is a Nazi, but there's a long history.
I mean, read Bloodlands or any of these books.
I think, you know, a staggering number of the camp guards came because with the repression of, especially of Stalin against these nationalist groups, they very quickly gravitated into the ranks of the fascists.
And that became their political expression.
And of course, after the fall of the Soviet Union, this isn't just in the Ukraine.
I was there.
I saw it.
I mean, I was in Romania, the old Iron Guard, what was it called?
Antonesco's Iron Guard.
It resurrected itself.
I mean, literally, the head of it, I met him.
He couldn't make this up.
It was like out of a Hollywood script.
He was in a long black leather coat, huge guy who'd fought at Stalingrad.
So they all came back, including in the Ukraine.
I mean, that's just very real.
The numbers of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Ukrainian, Ukraine, Belarus, and all these other places were murdered, Latvia, and they already left.
And you go back into Ukraine, and there are these well-kept cemeteries for all these fascists, and the people they slaughtered are still in unmarked mass graves.
So, I mean, I'm really becoming cynical.
Skeptical is one thing, but cynical, I don't see this stopping, right?
I mean, there's never, I mean, we're not can't stop until we address the reasons for the perversions within the society.
And in fact, the opposite is happening.
Anyone who attempts to speak out about those perversions is being silent.
So the more decrepit and despotic a system becomes, and you see this in any totalitarian state, rather than examine, rather than actually look at the structural issues that create these kinds of deformities, the more the critics are silenced and demonized.
And we're not any different.
I mean, that is exactly the direction that we're going.
And still, people who consider themselves progressives or lefties or whatever, liberal, they're cheering this on.
And they're doing it right out in the open and they're not embarrassing.
You know, Jimmy, there was the same thing in Weimar where they censored the Nazis.
They banned the Nazi Party.
They banned Nazi propaganda rather than dealing with the suffering that Weimar was visiting.
Exactly the same thing.
And we'll get exactly the same result.
So the people will never rise up in America.
That's just never going to happen.
I don't know.
You're going to ruin my night.
I don't know.
I mean, I've covered revolutions, you know, and it's funny.
You can never predict them.
You know, the Tinder is there.
You never know what ignites it.
And then once it erupts, you never know what direction it's going to go.
They have this kind of spontaneous life force.
So I used to be pretty bleak.
And then Occupy happened.
Occupy got crushed, of course, courtesy of Barack Obama in a concerted national effort to shut down every single Occupy encampment.
I mean, I still hold out the hope.
Definitely there will be blowback.
But of course, and history has shown, it can very well be a right-wing fascistic blowback.
The blowback in Weimar was the Communist Party was, in fact, quite large.
But in the end, the oligarchic elites, when you have those kinds of divisions, they'll always side with the right to crush the left.
And that's, of course, the Social Democrats.
They created the Freikorps to crush the Spartacus and the uprisings after World War I. And then, of course, the Freikar became the Nazis that ended up shipping them all off to concentration camps.
So I've just been a reporter too long to predict, but things are very volatile.
There's a lot of anger.
That anger is legitimate.
These people have been rendered invisible.
That's the other thing the media has done.
The working class, the working poor are utterly invisible because you can't sell commercials if you're actually explaining what people are enduring in these urban hells terrorized by police.
I don't use that word lightly.
I teach in a prison.
Terrorized by police.
I mean, we'll see it when they erupt in Ferguson or something and their stores burning, but there's no context.
Nobody ever understands why people were pushed to that boiling point.
It's just, you know, the actions are kind of certified by the mainstream media as incomprehensible, and therefore these people are incomprehensible.
So we're in very, very serious trouble.
The establishment, the ruling elites no longer have any credibility.
And I'm talking about the establishment Republican Party, establishment Democratic Party.
You have liberal elites that are frightened, and their response is to engage in harsher and harsher forms of censorship rather than actually Holding political leaders to account for real social change.
If you want to break the back of the neo-fascism, which will come dressed in Christian garb, and I wrote a book on this called American Fascists, the Christian Right and the War in America.
And just as a caveat, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
I come out.
My father was a minister.
I come out of a religious tradition.
These people are heretics.
They're not Christians.
They've acculturated the worst aspects of American imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism with the Bible.
I mean, Jesus didn't come to make us rich just for starters.
So, but that will be its ideological veneer.
And I see us moving quite, you know, with quite frightening speed in that direction.
And, you know, a failed democracy is ultimately driven by the inability or an ineffectual liberal elite.
Richard Rorty wrote a book about his last book, Achieving Our Country, where he said that bankrupt intellectual, and I wrote a book called Death of the Liberal Class that also examined that issue, but that bankrupt liberal elite, which rhetorically mouths values, but in fact betrays them.
So, I mean, they talk about free speech, they want censorship, et cetera.
Then you build a counter-social movement from the right that not only turns on liberals, but turns on those values themselves, because, of course, those who espouse them don't actually mean them.
And that's kind of where we are.
Yes.
So our government, I don't know if you said it or Thomas Frank, but they pay fealty to democracy, our government-elected officials.
They know the words of democracy and liberalism, but they govern exactly.
Well, because we don't live in a democracy.
We live in an oligarchy, which means that capitalists are actually running the government.
And now, in the middle of what they considered a deadly pandemic, and I've been told that it was the most deadly thing, and hundreds of thousands of people are dying, and they still wouldn't give people health care.
The capitalists still would not give people health care in the middle of that.
And now they want you to be angry at Putin, who actually does give his people health care.
Isn't that weird?
And so, isn't that called end-stage capitalism?
Yeah.
What do we have?
A third of all global COVID deaths?
I think so, yes.
I mean, well, that in and of itself.
I mean, actually, you know, Biden's COVID policy is worse than Trump's.
Worse than Trump's.
That's ridiculous.
Well, you know, they say they did a study, this was almost a year ago now, that 200,000 deaths when the deaths were at 600,000, that 200,000 of those deaths could have been prevented if we had universal health care or Medicare for All.
And guess who never mentions that?
Nobody in power.
Fauci never mentions Medicare for all.
The guy from the NIH, the woman from the CDC, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, none of them.
Nobody on television, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, none of the Don Lemon, Eric Anderson, they never mentioned Medicare for All could save 200,000 lives.
And that's suspect to me, which tells you that they're just tools of the big pharma once again.
Well, you know, they're tools because what are they making?
How many millions of dollars?
Right, that's right.
Trust me, I've been a journalist my whole life.
You don't make millions of dollars when you're a real journalist.
Thank God I'm a fake journalist, Chris.
Hey, kind of a comedian.
So I wanted to ask you before you go what happened in Canada with the truckers.
It was chilling to me the way Trudeau handled it.
He instituted emergency powers, which were unconstitutional, and it was just about to be overturned in the Senate when he decided to rescind those.
And what they did was, even though they were peaceful protesters, they went and they locked their bank accounts out, which is what's coming for anybody else.
They all have to do is say you're a terrorist, which they did at Standing Rock.
And they did that also to Amy Goodman.
And they said that they're environmental terrorists.
So now you have no rights.
And now we can lock down.
So does that make you afraid of digital IDs?
Yeah, it makes me afraid.
Well, look, I mean, actually, Julian Assange wrote a pretty good little book about this: Cypherpunks.
He kind of nailed it.
I mean, he gets it.
He understands these systems.
Yeah, I mean, we're moving towards this kind of, I don't know, corporate totalitarianism.
You know, remember when this is also WikiLeaks, when they exposed on Clinton, she authorized the spying on Bon Ki-moon, but it wasn't just spying.
It was like passwords, IRIS scans, voice, everything.
So, yeah, they have these tools at their disposal, the tools the Stasi could never dream of, and they use them, and they're going to use them.
And the worse things get, the more intrusive those forms of control will be.
So, yeah, I also found it kind of bizarre that didn't the left turn on the truckers?
Of course.
Of course, they did.
You know why?
Because they were told to by their corporate media, which is owned by the people who those truckers were protesting against.
And those truckers, by the way, had a higher vaccination rate than the general population in Canada.
And nobody knew that, right?
But they couldn't make a living.
I mean, let's be clear.
Right.
That's right.
We're really talking about economic sabotage of their work.
That's right.
Yeah, I know you can't travel.
They can immediately, if you have a digital ID and your driver's license is on that, your passport is on that.
Your bank account is on that.
Your vaccine status is on that.
Then they can just disappear you.
You can be disappeared, which is what they did to those people.
Those people couldn't buy gas because they couldn't get money to buy gas, so they couldn't travel.
Those people couldn't pay their own bills.
They couldn't hire a light, couldn't do anything.
And that's how they first got Julian.
They locked him out of all of his credit card.
He had no money.
He was stuck in Sweden.
He had no access to money.
That's the first thing.
And they cut down all the ability to give money through PayPal or anywhere else to WikiLeaks.
They went after the money, which is crippling.
I mean, if you can't access any funds, it becomes you're paralyzed.
And they made people think that truckers were somehow not what they appeared to be, truckers, that they were somehow something else.
They were some secret right-wing millionaire or billionaire Kambal or something like that.
And again, what people don't understand who say we have to organize along class lines.
What they don't realize what they're saying of that is you have to, that means you're going to organize with people who voted for Donald Trump.
Of course.
That's what that means.
You can't.
I have to explain.
I had a union leader on my show once, and I had to explain to him how actual union organizing works since I've been in a fucking union since I was 19 years old.
All right.
So how it works is you don't go to the shop floor and go, who's here?
A proud boy?
You're out.
Who here is a Trump voter?
You're out.
Who's here as a boogaloo boy?
You're out.
Who here is a libertarian gunnut?
You're out.
Okay, who's left?
Now we're going to organize against the man.
That's not how it works, which is why How Fred Hampton hooked up with the southern racists in Chicago, which is why, which is why the Black Panthers in Las Vegas hooked up with the KKK to shut down Las Vegas Strip so they could get their welfare checks back.
Okay, so that's called class organizing.
You know, that also builds political consciousness because when you actually direct, when you understand power and you confront power, that inevitably counters whatever conspiracy theories about, you know, black people being responsible for your loss of a job.
But yes, that's the one thing they're going to stop.
I mean, I have, as you know, I teach in a prison and you mentioned my book.
But I've got students who, when they get a 3.1, they can matriculate to Rutgers.
They're helping to organize, they're all black.
They're helping to organize the food service workers, some of whom voted for Trump.
But that's it.
That's exactly what we have to do.
And it is exactly that kind of process that builds a kind of is the most effective form of building a form of consciousness and countering the kind of racist attitudes that happen when you are isolated from people and you allow them to be demonized.
But let's not let the left get off on this because they have been demonizing, especially though I come out of working class Maine.
They have been demonizing the white working class as egregiously as the Trump supporters have been demonizing.
They're as culpable in this.
And I saw someone tweet.
They said, hey, what do we do when Trumpers want to join our union?
And I said, you declare victory.
That's what you do.
Of course.
People have, like, there was Medicare for All marches here last summer.
There was like a 50-city effort to talk about Medicare for All.
And so a lot of people tried to discredit those marches because they said, oh, there's right-wingers involved.
Yeah, that's called Medicare for All.
It's not Medicare for the Left.
That's right.
They get Medicare too.
And that's what makes it.
Well, that's a bit of a shock, but they have a right to healthcare too, if they get sick.
And that makes your push for Medicare for all stronger.
Of course, of course.
Not weaker, which is why people who say that, of course, are infiltrators, right?
So that even when I tried to do Force the Vote, we had people from everywhere, people from the Young Turks, people from the Intercept, people from all different media outlets, the DSA, even, which is a corrupt organization on the national level.
They undermine it and they split that movement so it couldn't work.
And they protected politicians.
You've seen that happen all the time, right?
Yeah, of course.
So I don't watch the Young Turks and I don't read the intercept, so I probably sleep a little better than you.
You definitely sleep better than I do.
I'll tell you that.
All right.
Well, Chris, I really appreciate you coming on.
Not at all, Jimmy.
And I'm really.
Chris Hedges.
Wait, I got to make my pitch.
What's it?
ChrisHedges.substack.com.
That's where I am now.
ChrisHedges.substack.com.
We'll put a link to your substack in the video in the description.
And it's always a pleasure to see you.
I'm really sad to see that your work is being erased from YouTube.
Yeah, that was a shame.
And it is a real shame.
But onward and upward.
And we'll talk to you again soon.
Thanks, buddy.
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Hey, you know, here's another great way you can help support the show: you become a premium member.
We give you a couple of hours of premium bonus content every week.
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I'm here with Howie Skora, the author of the new play called Gaslight House, which is at the White Fire Theater in Sherman Oaks starting this weekend through June 4th.
And right now, I want to talk about the ADL and what's happening in Ukraine.
And as I remind you, single tickets are now available in Orlando and Tampa, single VIP tickets, single general admission tickets.
And for the rest of our schedule, too, we're now making single tickets.
You don't have to buy four tickets or six tickets or eight.
You can buy one single ticket to come see a live Jimmy Door show.
Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com for a link for all the tickets.
And so we've told you that Ukraine has a lot of Nazis baked into their military officially.
It's not, they don't try to hide it.
They're groups of Nazis.
The Azoff Battalion is one of them.
And there's lots of Nazis that are embedded in their government also.
And so that's not a Putin talking point.
People think, oh, Putin says that is propaganda.
No, that's for real.
And go look at our other videos.
We've documented it.
It's not a little problem.
It's a big deal.
And now the ADL, which is the, I always forget what ADL, anti-defamation league.
Anti-defamation league.
Got it.
Anti-defamation.
I always want to say American something.
It's anti-defamation.
That's right.
Got it.
So the Anti-Defamation League.
So, and what it and they are primarily there to defend people from anti-Semitism.
Am I wrong?
Isn't that what the ADL?
Yeah, that's their whole stick.
That's what they started as.
It was and the Jewish organization, right?
Yep.
Okay.
So that's why this is ultra ironic because the ADL is defending Ukraine neo-Nazis.
They, quote, don't attack Jews or Jewish institutions.
So that's how corrupt the ADL can be.
Well, as a Jew, I'm relieved to hear that.
They're the good kind of Nazis.
I'm so glad they're distinguishing that.
They're the safe kind of Nazis.
You can't.
That's why they're neo.
Can you get crazier than this, Howie?
I mean, as a Jewish guy, did you ever think you would see a day where the ADL?
They didn't teach us about good Nazis in Hebrew school.
They really didn't.
They just, they said, Nazis, bad.
That was that.
Nazis, bad.
Very simple.
Easy lesson.
The Anti-Defamation League, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group in America, published a QA defending Ukraine's neo-Nazi group groups on the grounds that they don't attack Jews or Jewish institutions.
Well, maybe they just, they're not good at their jobs.
What can you say?
Maybe that.
Maybe they're lazy.
Yeah.
They're just going after this going after who are they going after mostly?
Just the gypsies?
Who are they going after?
I wouldn't, I honestly wouldn't know how to be a Nazi that doesn't go after Jews.
It's just like it really, it takes so much off the to-do list.
Well, they've been going after the Russians in the eastern Ukraine and the Donbass.
That's what those Nazis in Ukraine have been doing.
They've been shelling them for eight straight years and they've killed 14,000 civilians, which is what led to Putin's invasion.
It's really off-brand.
It's just really off-brand.
That's all.
In an article titled, Why is Putin Calling the Ukrainian Government a Bunch of Nazis?
The ADL interviewed David Fishman, a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, to explain why Ukraine's neo-Nazis aren't so bad.
There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the United States and in Russia for that matter.
But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don't attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.
He's really doing this.
It is so strange to hear that Nazis are marginalized in that country.
Because when you think of marginalized groups, you definitely usually don't mean Nazis.
That's right.
You just don't.
But they're marginalized.
And that's a lie.
They're not marginalized in Ukraine.
The Nazis are embedded right in their government.
They're National Guard.
They have Nazi battalions, the Azov battalion.
We've showed you this over and over.
Mainstream news has written article after article about this up until we wanted to overthrow the Ukrainian government, which we did.
The United States overthrew the Ukrainian government, and now they have a Nazi problem in their government.
And that's not made up, but this guy is whitewashing it, this guy Fishman.
Russia has for years highlighted the activity of marginal group of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists as a way of trying to stigmatize all of Ukraine.
No, Russia hasn't done that, you liar fishmen.
You know who's done that?
Every Western media outlet has also reported on the Nazi problem in Ukraine embedded in your government, embedded in your military.
Not individuals, but entire battalions.
Go ahead, Howie.
Well, can't we call them a clique?
They're a clique.
They're a clique.
It's just nicer.
Yes, some members of these ultra-nationalist groups have used Nazi insignia, made Hitler salutes, and used anti-Semit rhetoric, but they are politically insignificant and in no way representative of Ukraine.
That's all fact.
That's not true.
None of that is true.
Go ahead.
Well, what's a little swastika here and there on your Twitter?
Like, so judgy.
The political parties, which the ultra-nationalists support, received just over 2% of the vote in the 2019 elections.
Ukraine is a flawed democracy, but unquestionably a democracy and in no way a Nazi regime.
Okay, they're not really a democracy because we overthrew their democratically elected government, and now their president has shut down all the opposition media and banned the opposition political parties.
So the calling of democracies at this point is a big stretch.
Fair enough.
Ukraine neo-Nazis are the good type of neo-Nazis because they're funded and armed by Israeli billionaires.
There you go.
Profile.
Who are Ukrainians' far-right Azov regime regimen?
The far-right neo-Nazi group has expanded to become part of Ukraine's armed forces, a street militia, and a political party.
So what is the Azoff regiment?
Azov is a far-right, all-volunteer infantry military unit formed as a volunteer group in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine gang and the neo-Nazi Social National Assembly group.
Both groups engaged in xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideals and physically assaulted migrants, the Roma community, and people opposing their views.
Here it is, winning hearts and the PR war, but Ukraine has a Nazi problem that NATO and the United States do not talk about.
That's from February 2022.
That's from February 2022.
The cartel of Western nations, who is otherwise swift and prompt in condemning anti-Semitism, look the other way.
Nay, openly arm and encourage fascist groups with neo-Nazi leanings if that helps them in thwarting their opponents and reasserting their hegemony.
So they'll get in bed with literal Nazis if it helps them politically.
Commentary, Ukraine's neo-Nazi program.
There it is from Reuters.
When is this from?
This is from March 2018.
That looks like the tiki mark in our country.
Yeah, it looks like what happened in, what was that, Charleston?
Yeah, it looks almost exactly like an exact replica.
Here's Time magazine getting in on telling you about the Nazis.
Like, share, and recruit how a white supremacist militia uses Facebook to radicalize and train new members.
The Azoff battalion inside Ukraine's white supremacist militia.
That's freaking Time magazine.
So again, this isn't Putin propaganda.
These are facts reported in the news.
But right now, if I talk to my old college roommate, he's going to tell me that, oh, that's Putin.
I literally, I said, well, you know, they're in bed with Nazis.
He goes, Jimmy, that's what Putin says.
Yeah, Putin also says the water is wet.
That doesn't mean it isn't.
That's how people, that's how propaganda works.
If I ever want to see how propaganda works, I have to do is call him a little roommate.
Here's Rokana.
Ever since the Orange Revolution began under President Bush, the U.S. has been complicit in the rehabilitation and spread of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
This is a congressman who's now arming those same Nazis.
That's why this is important because he tweeted this out before in 2018, before we knew that the United States wanted to overthrow Putin and do a proxy war in Ukraine.
That's before.
So before he was able to tell the truth about it, Rokana no longer tells the truth about Ukraine.
He's a lying imperialist.
Enough is enough.
Our government must stand up to the Azov battalion and other fascist groups.
So that was him giving you a head fake and letting you think he was a decent person who was also a progressive politically, who wanted to fight against Nazis.
He doesn't.
He wants political power for himself and he'll use whatever track that'll get it for him.
And right now, before it was standing up to Nazis, now it's arming Nazis.
So whichever way the wind blows, that's the way Rokan is going to go.
Because he's a politician.
That's what they do.
They're all like that.
They don't have morals or character or ethics.
The neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is just Russian propaganda.
There they are.
There they are.
And guess what?
This is the ADL.
This is what Ben and Jerry's decided to stop sales of ice cream in the Palestinian occupied territory to protest Israel's occupation and brutal oppression of the Palestinians.
We are disappointed by this decision from Ben and Jerry's.
You can disagree with policies without feeding into dangerous campaigns that seek to undermine Israel.
Yeah, that's the whole point.
You're trying to put an economic hurt on Israel's government so that they stop oppressing the Palestinian people.
That would be the whole point of that.
You know, like you guys are all doing now to Russia, like y'all did to Libya, like y'all did to Iraq, like y'all did to Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, any place you don't like the people.
I love this tweet.
It says ADL.
Well, they're not Nazi Nazis.
Exactly.
They're not the bad kind of Nazis.
Yeah.
ADL says the Ukrainian neo-Nazis ain't all that bad once you get to know them.
So that's how bad it's gotten that now.
The ADL, the group of Jews.
I just, I don't feel very defended by the ADL right now as a Jew that they're telling me there's certain kind of Nazis that are okay.
There are certain kinds of Nazis that are okay.
Apparently, you're not a good Jew, I bet.
Not a terrible Jew.
terrible.
I really did it.
Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
His President Joe Biden.
Oh, Mr. President, what's on your mind?
Jimmy, I'm calling for regime change at the Jimmy Dore show.
Excuse me, sir.
Jimmy Dore cannot remain in power over there.
It's madness.
Too many people are dying.
What are you even talking about?
Jimmy Dore has to be removed from power and replaced with Steph Samarano.
Mr. President, with all due respect, you do not have the right to interfere with private citizens like that.
That's not what I meant, Chirios.
I didn't mean that.
Well, what did you mean then?
I don't know.
Is this like when you said Putin had to go?
That was extremely irresponsible of you.
Lucky your team was able to walk it back almost immediately.
I didn't mean that either, honey smacks.
Yeah.
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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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.
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