Jimmy Dore Show - 20220408_TJDS_20220408_Podcast_-_4722_11.55_AM

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April 8, 2022 - Jimmy Dore Show

01:07:42

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	Come see a live stand-up show or be in Orlando, Tampa, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Omaha, Des Moines, everywhere.
	Go to JimmyDoorComedy.com for a link for our live show tickets.
	Also, become a premium member and get access to all our extra stuff and help support the show.
	See you in the live show.
	Single tickets now available.
	Single tickets available.
	This is Jimmy.
	Who's this?
	What's up, Jimmy Door?
	This is Vince Vaughan.
	Hey, Vince.
	How you?
	How are things?
	How you?
	Hey, how are you still having a blast over there on Truth Social?
	Oh, hell no.
	I did that hell site weeks ago.
	Really?
	You're not allowed to say anything.
	You can't swear or say anything dirty.
	Really?
	You can definitely say racist shit, but I'm not actually a racist, believe it or not.
	I just seem like a guy who probably knows some other racist guys.
	And it's too much MAGA over there.
	And, you know, honestly, I'm not even a big Trump guy or anything.
	So you're off social media again?
	Well, not exactly, Jim Jam.
	Today I started my very first Twitter account.
	What?
	I thought you hated Twitter, Vince.
	I absolutely despise Twitter, Jimmy Dore.
	It sucks.
	It's the birthplace and incubator of cancel culture.
	It's a scourge on our society.
	It's where libs and lefties go to whine and cry and play victim.
	I hate it.
	Well, then why did you sign up for it?
	One very simple reason, Jimmy Dore.
	Today it was announced that Elon Musk has purchased 9.2% of all Twitter shares.
	He now owns 9.2% of Twitter.
	That's almost an entire decile.
	Okay, so what?
	So the thinking here is that Elon's going to come clean that bitch up.
	Oh.
	Elon has been very critical about how things are handled over there at Twitter.
	Very critical in the past, Jimmy.
	I'm not sure he's the guy, though, Vince.
	Now, come on, Jimmy.
	You and I may actually agree here.
	You don't like deplatforming any more than I do.
	Even though I've never been platformed in the first place, I just still don't like the idea of it, quite frankly.
	No, I don't.
	You're right.
	I don't like it.
	Deplatforming and cancel culture, the same thing.
	All right.
	No, they're not, though.
	The platforming is a very specific thing where a tech company makes arbitrary decisions about users and removes them altogether with no due process.
	Cancel culture, the way people like you use it, means people being held accountable for their word and actions in any way, shape, or form.
	Right, which absolutely should not happen.
	This is about free speech.
	Elon is a big free speech guy.
	Me too, Vince.
	But.
	And free speech and cancel culture are inversely related.
	There are a lot of complicated threats here, Jim.
	But Elon is like a really smart guy.
	He's going to have this all worked out.
	I agree that it would be good if accounts weren't arbitrarily deleted.
	But if someone says something on Twitter that makes everybody mad and then they hear about it, that's just how Twitter works.
	I disagree.
	That absolutely should not happen.
	Free speech with no consequences.
	That's the dream.
	Elon Musk will use his shareholder leverage to make that happen.
	How, Vince?
	How?
	By making new Twitter the opposite of old Twitter.
	He'll turn it into a super engine designed to destroy cancel culture.
	What?
	What?
	Imagine, Jimmy, a promoted Twitter live stream of Louis C.K. giving the accepted speech for his Grammy win.
	He could do it on Twitter.
	Canceled, baby.
	Louis C.K. still performs all over.
	He was never actually canceled.
	He just went away for a little while because he did a bad thing.
	Or Twitter financing its very first Twitter movie starring Kevin Spacey.
	I find it odd you are honing in on sexual predators here.
	Okay, look, I'm just spitballing.
	All right, sorry.
	And the platform itself could be changed to stop mob rule and people getting dragged.
	How so?
	Okay, so you would drag someone because they said biological sex is real or some shit, right?
	So usually that's a quote tweet without a like, right?
	Or a response without a like?
	Well, if you do that, now the little tweety bird pops up and says, did you forget to like?
	And if you say no, you have to answer the question, why?
	With three options.
	Okay.
	One, are you a baby girl?
	Two, are you on your period?
	Is that the problem?
	Jesus, Vince.
	Or three, are you trying to do some performative woke bullshit that will make you look like a baby girl?
	Wait.
	You answer a question with one of three questions?
	Look, this is just how I talk, goddammit.
	Don't you see that by doing something like that, you yourself are limiting free speech, Vince?
	No, I do not.
	Free speech that is woke and lame, trying to stock true free speech, that is to say, unpopular opinions that may be offensive and incorrect at the same time, Jimmy Dore, at the same time, is no free speech at all, my friend.
	Agree to disagree, Vince.
	No, you have to agree with me.
	That's the ultimate free speech.
	You agreeing with what I say?
	And that's how Twitter's going to go once Elon is in charge, baby.
	And if you don't like it, you know what?
	You can go screw yourself.
	Me and Elon are going to go hang out and tweet and have drinks and dinner and just laugh and then go to space.
	And you can stay on the ground like a dumb, woke, earthbound libtard.
	Ha ha ha.
	I guess I'll just have to live with that then, Vince.
	Yes, yes, you will.
	And later you can thank me and Lonnie for making the world safe for everyone, including you, Jimmy Dore.
	He and I are going to save the future of the world.
	Man, I have to do it a lot of blow.
	All right, later, church.
	Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
	Establishment media sets on its fighting.
	So good luck.
	Bullshit we can't afford.
	Watch and see as a jet dog.
	Comedium speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head-on.
	It's the Jimmy Door show.
	I want to talk about this story by Christian Parenti, which is at the Gray Zone.
	And it's all about how the organized left got COVID wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind and autopsy.
	And so I just want to show you a little bit of everything.
	I'm going to bring the author in and we're going to talk to him.
	It says, it is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it.
	After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a I don't know what that word is.
	Volte face?
	What is that?
	Volt face.
	Volt face.
	I've never heard that.
	And I'm a bricklair.
	And embraced anti-working class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.
	So let's read that sentence again because it's important.
	After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volt face and embraced anti-working class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.
	So that's what those lockdowns and mandates and all those were anti-worker, okay?
	Just in case you didn't know.
	For two years, the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations.
	For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals, call them the lockdown left, cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class, those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
	Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained physically stuck in March 2020.
	Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and culminated as liars, grifters, and fascists, any and all who dissented.
	Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while striking, shirking public debate.
	I've been in a couple of those, they talk, they talk in circles.
	They talk in circles, the liberals who are the lockdown left.
	They talk in circles.
	If you try to debate them on mandates or anything, they just talk in circles.
	They just move the goalposts and they keep...
	We covered this.
	He called for the unvaccinated to remove themselves from society and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.
	And Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branco Marsetek demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation.
	One obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.
	Now, I remember us reporting that something like 73% of black, young black people in New York City were unvaccinated.
	And so that's who that would be aimed at.
	Keep them off public transportation so they can't go to work.
	Journalist Doug Hedwood has scolded the unvaccinated with get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.
	But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety while refusing to engage counterarguments, a combination that suggests a bloated self of self-importance of his own.
	Even the American Civil Liberties Union, along a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism, has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship after being 100% against them the year earlier.
	David Cole, the group's legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last hundred years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach.
	All of this unmasks the lockdown left's blue city provincialism.
	Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited, and faith-based as any group of small-down deplorables might be.
	Here, here, yes.
	If you don't agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are obviously insane.
	End of story.
	For this set, COVID vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman that to wave against the specter of contagion, while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions.
	Prominent left intellectuals have embraced the weaponization of solidarity and made it into a lifestyle via their obsessive masking, scolding, and hiding.
	They pretend to care for society while actually applauding deeply anti-social and scientifically ungrounded policies like the indefinite shuttering of schools.
	All of this is contingent upon the status of lockdown leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous frontline workers ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep.
	Prior to the pandemic quarantines, many left intellectuals already lived as if they were on lockdown.
	I know this because I am part of that class, says the author.
	Never mind that we are in the tightest labor market in 40 years and should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions.
	Instead, most of the left, including some trade unions, has supported measures that divide, distract, and intimidate the working class.
	It is a tragic and disturbing spectacle.
	The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital, has instead accepted the negative image of its goal, state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers.
	Richard Wolf, we spoke about this on the show.
	The left's embrace of COVID hysteria makes a mockery of the left's goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability.
	This left-wing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come.
	Indeed, the situation is worse than mere political fumble.
	I agree with this 100%.
	The left is now actively helping its own enemies.
	It is in its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship.
	The organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the 1%, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere.
	Which that is 100% true.
	So let me bring in the author of that article, which appears in Grey Zone.
	It's Dr. Christian Parenti.
	He is a professor in the Department of Economics at John Jay College.
	Previously, as a journalist, he reported from all over the world for publications, including The Nation, Fortune, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times.
	He's also the author of a number of books, including his latest Radical Hamilton, Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder.
	Please welcome Dr. Christian Parenti.
	Wow, that was a great article.
	Thanks for writing that.
	Thank you for reading it.
	Thanks for having me on the show.
	So I've been pushing back against this as best I can.
	I've been losing friends because of it?
	What's it like in academia to be speaking sense?
	Because what I'm actually doing is the thing that those people, and what you're doing is the thing that they claim to be doing, which is following the science.
	And as we've shown on this show, nobody is following the science in the government.
	Dr. Fauci has been lying about the science repeatedly over and over and over.
	And now Pfizer is being forced by a court order.
	finally to reveal what their vaccine trial said.
	They didn't want to have to get a court to do that.
	And still no critique from my friends in entertainment on the left about any of this stuff.
	What's it like in academia?
	Well, in academia, the pressure to tow the mainstream line is very intense.
	So, you know, most people who dissent keep quiet about it.
	But since publishing this article, I have been surprised by the number of people who have come out and written me positive emails about it, many of them, some of them at least in academia.
	But yeah, it's total orthodoxy reigns in academia.
	Really awful intimidation of staff and students is accepted as completely normal.
	At John Jay, where we have a fantastic master's program, one of the few kind of master's programs in radical political economy in the country, very cheap.
	You know, we have lost at least one student who didn't want to take the vaccine and was just forced out, and this was accepted as normal.
	Another former student who now teaches an undergraduate program was forced to take the vaccine despite their doctor saying, you know, you've got health problems, you shouldn't do this.
	And there's been no support by and large from the larger institution and not from our union.
	So, you know, and actually, I'm in many ways.
	I'm at one of the better schools.
	You know, the stories from other places sound even worse.
	It's just this total groupthink.
	And what it's revealed to me is the actually the kind of fraudulent nature of a lot of people's reading habits.
	I happen to be quite severely dyslexic, so I'm actually pretty insecure about claiming to have read things I haven't read and skimming in it.
	It seems to me that most people just listen to NPR.
	Most professors who support this stuff just listen to NPR or sort of skim New York Times headlines, and thus they are stuck in March 2020.
	And, you know, I say that with some sympathy for that, for the position of March 2020.
	In the beginning, I too was terrified.
	Me too.
	I was washing my groceries and told my mother that she wasn't doing the same.
	Yes.
	I was yelling at people.
	I was always freaked out.
	I was also watching very closely the developments.
	And it quickly became clear that, wait a minute, this is not, this is a serious disease, but it's not the second coming of the Spanish flu.
	And I kept waiting, thinking, oh, well, now comes the big rethink.
	When New York City opened five field hospitals and then had to close them because basically nobody used them, I thought naively, oh, well, here, now we're going to have a public discussion about wait a minute, where do we go from here?
	No.
	And we didn't because, as I explained in the article, the election was the larger context and Trump derangement syndrome was in the saddle.
	You know, that's very interesting because I remember they sent a Navy ship to New York City that was a hospital.
	As far as I know, nobody ever filled up one of those beds.
	They opened up five.
	So, and what I also reported on this show, people keep saying, well, you have to get even so after you say, hey, the vaccine does not prevent transmission and it does not stop contraction.
	All YouTube says that it slows both those things.
	That's what YouTube says.
	The FDA says they hope it prevents transmission.
	But now Dr. Fauci is saying that no matter if you're vaccinated or not, everybody's going to get COVID.
	And they've been, by the way, they've been saying that ever since I started looking into this, which was like last June.
	They've known, even with Delta, they were saying very quietly, everybody's going to get this, meaning that the vaccines are not going to stop everybody from getting.
	So they've known this forever.
	So how can you justify a vaccine mandate knowing that everybody's going to get it and that this vaccine isn't going to prevent you from getting it?
	And if you're, so you're going to get it, who do you care if you get it from a vaccinated person or an unvaccinated person?
	When I ask that question to people, they just immediately go, well, what about the hospital beds?
	So they never answer that question.
	And have you bumped up against the same kind of circular thinking or arguing?
	Yeah, constantly shifting to new positions.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Well, what about, you know, what about the most vulnerable?
	You know, doing it and protecting other people.
	Yeah.
	But it doesn't stop you from getting it.
	Yeah.
	And I mean, you know, I quote Rochelle Walinski in the piece or reference an interview she gave on August 5th of last year where she says that the vaccines don't stop transmission.
	There have been some studies that indicate maybe they slow it a little bit, but it's, you know, the effect is not enough to justify lockdowns, which we now also know have harms.
	Obviously, they have harms.
	You know, massive, 30% increase in murder, massive increases in drug overdoses, on and on and on, right?
	So part of part of how the hysteria is maintained is to refuse to allow public conversations about the cost-benefit analysis, which we do all the time.
	But to suggest that there's a cost-benefit analysis in this was just, you know, you're immediately accused of trying to kill people, kill people's grandparents or kids.
	But in fact, we're constantly making cost-benefit analysis.
	And with all medicine, that's the case.
	And doctors will tell you that.
	They say, well, there's certain benefits from this medicine.
	There's also certain risks.
	I mean, down to aspirin, right?
	We're like, you know, well, this is good for, you know, your cardiovascular system to take a little bit of aspirin.
	But, you know, there is also a little bit of bleeding that can happen.
	And, you know, right?
	I mean, I mean, no, medical intervention is without some risk.
	So you couldn't discuss the cost-benefit analysis of shutting schools.
	You could, yes.
	You know, masking people, et cetera.
	You know, the CDC, sorry, no, OSHA, this is not in the article, but OSHA prior to the pandemic, a friend of mine went on the Wayback Machine and looked this up.
	If you were an employer and you required your employees to wear a mask all day, you had to give them physicals every year proving that they were healthy enough to sustain that.
	Those rules were changed.
	So, you know, eliminate any room for doubt or questioning.
	That's how that's how the.
	And, you know, it was obvious that people like Fauci and Collins at the NIH and Malencia were manipulating data and they weren't, they were speaking like used car salesmen about natural immunity, for instance.
	And now we find out that Pfizer was covering up data about that revealed that there was natural immunity.
	And now I find a video, which I'm going to show in my next segment.
	I should probably put it in this one that shows that Dr. Fauci was asked, hey, my grandmother just had the flu.
	Should she still get the flu vaccine?
	And he said, of course not.
	And natural infection always gives you better immunity than the vaccine.
	That's what Fauci said.
	I'm going to show that video.
	In fact, please insert that video into her right now in post.
	And it's so it was just obvious.
	And it was some, so to me, what I loved about your article was that it just shows the failings of people who consider themselves progressive lefties and skeptics and critics of government and big pharma and corporations and all things lefty.
	So they know that the government is 100% corrupted by big.
	corporations.
	They know big pharma are the biggest criminals in the world.
	They just hooked half the country on opioid.
	They don't care.
	They paid the biggest fine.
	They know they're both evil and corrupt, but when they come together, I guess they make beautiful babies.
	And if you question any of it, you're immediately smeared as an anti-vaxxer, even when they admit that they were lying.
	Dr. Fauci has admitted that since day one, he's been lying.
	He's been lying about the origin of the virus, whether it could have come from a lab or not.
	He lied about that, whether it could have or not.
	He lied.
	And then we fought, we caught him.
	He lied about funding that research that could have led to that virus, which is called gain of function.
	He lied to Congress twice.
	He lied about wearing masks.
	You know how I know he lied about wearing masks?
	He told us he lied to us about wearing masks for months.
	He also lied about herd immunity over and over and over again.
	And you know how I know he lied about herd immunity?
	He told us he lied about herd immunity.
	And now we're finding out that they've been suppressing data about natural immunity.
	And when he was asked by Dr. Sande Gupta on CNN, why should somebody have to be mandated to take a vaccine if they've already gotten COVID and they have natural immunity, which is what the Israeli studies are showing?
	And he said, I don't have a really good answer for you on that.
	Yet we still mandate that.
	So your point of your article is that these people who considered themselves real lefties and progressives have really handed all their issues and pushed away people who maybe were their natural constituents over to being right-wingers.
	Because now anybody who questions big pharma or Fauci or the government or the COVID narrative is now called a right-winger and a Trumper, and you're pushing them away, just like they did to the Truckers.
	That should have been a moment of organizing for the left.
	Instead, they pushed them all into another party.
	Go ahead.
	I'm sorry.
	I'll stop talking.
	Yeah, you know, and there's also, I mean, the CDC has also not released data that it's been collecting, right?
	There was an article February 22nd in the New York Times about how the CDC is not releasing large amounts of the data.
	It's talking particularly about hospitalization by vaccination status, particularly for younger people, right?
	I mean, that suggests that, and there are reasons where it could be misinterpreted.
	That suggests that the data on that is not flattering to the vaccine.
	But yeah, my theory of the crime is that, you know, if you look at ever since the 1976 swine flu, there's been this kind of pandemic industrial complex in place, pharma and the regulatory agencies, the regulatory agencies.
	I quite, you know, I quote the CDC and FDA's websites where they explain how 45% of their funding comes directly from industry, right?
	So they don't hide this, right?
	So this symbiosis between the regulators and industry ever since the 76 swine flu, they've been pushing to hype every possible pandemic.
	In 76, 20% of the country was vaccinated before they realized that the swine flu was not that dangerous.
	It may have killed no one at all, and that the vaccine was creating autoimmune disease.
	And they suspended the vaccination campaign.
	And so there has always been a kind of enough critical capacity in the political class, both parties and the journalistic class to push back against this pandemic industrial complex when they get all hyped up about Zika or this or that or the other thing.
	This time, that didn't happen because of Trump derangement syndrome, right?
	The journalistic class was so united in their terror of Trump that they realized, okay, this time we've got him.
	And they were right.
	You know, his mismanagement of the pandemic was part of how he was, you know, how he was defeated.
	So that was the kind of purpose.
	And it came down from on high from the Democratic Party.
	It was picked up by the, whatever you want to call it, the left intelligentsia in the movement, left, the organized left.
	But then after the election, they couldn't let go.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Even when Gavin Newsom faces a recall, which was provoked by his excessively harsh lockdowns and mandates.
	While not following his own mandates.
	Right.
	So he faces a recall.
	That never should have happened.
	Democratic Party and pundits should have been concerned about that.
	They take the exact wrong lesson from that.
	They say, well, you know, this just shows Gavin Newsom won, right?
	So this is what, you know, we want more of this.
	And it's not until the election in Virginia, where Junckin, now Governor Junckin, comes out of nowhere and there's basically a 20-point swing towards the Republicans.
	And it's very clear that this is being led in large part by women and that one of their central concerns is the closing of schools.
	This is a state that had one of the harshest school lockdowns.
	People were getting arrested for using playgrounds in Virginia.
	And this was central to Yunkin winning.
	And then Governor Murphy in New Jersey, who was favored to win, almost lost.
	At that point, you begin to see a rethink, a kind of haphazard rethink coming from the Biden administration.
	But still, the lockdown left is really wedded to this whole lifestyle, the ritual of virtue signaling and shaming and I have to resort to psychology at a certain level.
	It's just that there's some sort of sadomasochistic thrill in all this, policing others and submitting.
	Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
	It's very authoritarian.
	And you see that in a lot of people who consider themselves lefties, they have an authoritarian in their shadow.
	And it was very easy to see people who hated the Trump most were the people who were the most like Trump, but they were denying it to themselves.
	And people like Keith Olbermann, who calls for everybody to be censored, he called for me to be censored from all social media because why?
	Because we pointed out that he's an idiot.
	Here is once upon a time, which once upon a time would have been like, oh, that's crazy.
	Someone's calling for censorship in the United States.
	And now this is happening routinely on a mass scale, as you've been reporting.
	All of Chris Hedge's videos gone.
	I mean, this is like a race.
	The president of the United States was taken down from the Republican National Committee's own YouTube page because they said Donald Trump spread misinformation on their podcast.
	The president of the United States.
	When doesn't a politician spread misinformation?
	That's what they do for a living.
	You should take down every politician then.
	So that should scare everybody.
	But let me show you, Dr. Fauci.
	Here's what he was.
	Here we go.
	But she's had the flu for 14 days.
	Should she get a flu shot?
	Well, no, if she got the flu for 14 days, she's as protected as anybody can be because the best vaccination is to get infected yourself.
	And if she really has the flu, if she really has the flu, she definitely doesn't need a flu vaccine.
	she really has the flu.
	She should not get it again.
	She doesn't need it because it's the most potent vaccination is getting infected yourself.
	Preach, Dr. Fauci.
	And I just want to show you one more thing.
	I'm going to play in my.
	I want to show you this.
	This came out today.
	This is from the first bomb.
	This is from The Hill.
	So Pfizer is being court-ordered to release their documents about the vaccine trials.
	They've been court ordered.
	They weren't going to do it.
	So a court had to force them.
	That's the opposite of how medicine should work.
	It should be transparent.
	And so now we have to get a court to force the vaccine makers.
	And you still are called an anti-vaxor if you don't trust them.
	Here we go.
	Shell in the document is that natural immunity works and Pfizer knows it.
	The clinical trial data showed those with previous infection of COVID had no difference in outcome than those vaccinated.
	In the limited trial, none of the vaccinated nor those with previous infection resulted in severe disease defined by either the FDA or the CDC.
	They were broken up into two different groups.
	The FDA and the CDC define severe COVID slightly differently.
	The CDC roughly defines it as anyone needing hospitalization, whereas the FDA defines it as anyone needing supplemental oxygen.
	Either way, there were zero cases of severe COVID in the natural immunity group, whether they were vaccinated or not.
	And their own data also showed that natural immunity was statistically identical to the vaccine against infection.
	That's what their data showed.
	Yet, rather than say people with natural immunity don't seem to need the vaccine, which is what they've been saying in Europe, for example, Pfizer instead spun their conclusion and said, quote, final efficacy results show that the vaccine provided protection against COVID-19 and participants with or without evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2.
	So that's the most recent.
	That's from today.
	I just saw that as I was coming on air.
	So what do you think?
	Can I just get you to what?
	What do you, you know, you talk about the deleterious effects of this on what do you think will be the effects of this on people who consider on the left.
	Or I know for Democrats, it's devastating because let's remember the biggest voting block is the people who don't vote.
	The next biggest voting block are people who consider themselves independents.
	The next smallest voting block is the Democrats and Republicans.
	So they're loot.
	So if you're, if the fight is always for those independents who vote and they lost, they're losing that, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, they're losing it big time.
	And I, even though I'm angry at the lockdown left and Democrats, I do not welcome this at all.
	I mean, I think the effect could be that the Republicans win so big that they could have trifectas in three quarters of the states, right?
	That the kind of the coke-funded ultimate goal is to have the governorship and both houses in three quarters of the states because then you can start passing constitutional amendments and you can do stuff like privatize the post office, privatize Social Security, basically make it illegal to form a union.
	This is their long-term goal.
	And it's always been just out of reach.
	But this electoral wipeout in the making could lead to that.
	That would be terrible.
	I mean, that would be really, really bad for a long time.
	Also, I mean, I know several people in rural New England where I live who are level-headed, voted for Bernie Sanders, and are going to vote Republican just to send a message.
	I don't get the impression, having looked into the polling a little bit, that there's any attempt to poll for this.
	I don't think that the Democratic consultant class and the kind of left liberal intellectuals have a handle on how really angry people are about this.
	And, you know, bodily autonomy isn't that important to you if you want the vaccine.
	It doesn't feel like an invasion to get it.
	And it's hard for people who were relieved to get the vaccine to imagine what it's like to be somebody else who doesn't want the vaccine for whatever reason and to be forced to get it.
	It's a really serious violation.
	The kind of anger that people develop from that is intense.
	I have received a lot of feedback from this article, really, honestly, more than I have from anything I've ever written.
	And the emotion and rage in some of these emails is kind of spooky at times.
	And so I think there's going to be a big surprise and there's going to be really bad consequences.
	And it just, I mean, it damages the left's brand, right?
	It's like, oh, you're the people who are against civil liberties.
	Yes.
	You're the people who are against freedom.
	And let's be clear about why that is so bad, right?
	The core of the left agenda historically is freedom, right?
	The anarchist and socialist left, you know, for 150 years, their whole agenda was to make the promise of the Enlightenment real, to make the false promises of sort of centrist liberalism into a reality by redistributing wealth and making human emancipation possible and not just a couple of catchphrases, right?
	So freedom, civil liberties, is not an add-on to the left agenda.
	It is historically at the heart of the left agenda.
	That is why there's a struggle by socialists around the world for 100 years to redistribute wealth.
	It's not just so that people can have a better standard of living, but so that people can be freed from want and exploitation and physical, economic oppression so that they can be free, right?
	So dismissing that is terrible.
	Also, civil liberties, you know, my first two books dealt directly with civil liberties, and I think all my work has touched on it to some extent.
	But, you know, the history of civil liberties is a history of the left pushing to expand these rights.
	So the First Amendment was not considered a national right for a long time.
	This was only a right you had on federal property and states didn't have to respect the First Amendment.
	The struggle to nationalize the First Amendment, as it were, was led by the left.
	It was socialists, communists, anarchists getting arrested, the wobblies, their free speech struggles, right?
	All the great landmark cases that make the First Amendment a national reality were led by the left.
	And now the left is turning its back on this, even pathologizing that whole history.
	This is bad in and of itself, and it's going to have very bad effects politically for the brand as you started.
	Well, it's good attractiveness of the left.
	Well, I mean, for me, RussiaGate was a big nosedive for the left.
	They embraced CIA talking points.
	They became the mouthpiece for Democratic propaganda, and they became the McCarthyites themselves.
	They turned into the thing we used to hate about the right.
	The left Became it and embraces it till this day.
	And now they embrace authoritarianism with these anti-science mandates because that is what they are.
	There is no science that you can show me that supports them without talking in a circle, right?
	And there's now, as you just laid out, there's science indicating the opposite, that you do not need these vaccines if you have acquired immunity.
	You're going to get nothing from it, right?
	According to Pfizer's own data, as reported by The Hill, that's what I can say that.
	I can't, but I, you know, of course.
	It's worth mentioning, right?
	You know, that I believe this, that these papers are coming out because of a lawsuit.
	The FDA was sued to release all the data that Pfizer gave it.
	That's right.
	And the FDA said, okay, we'll do that.
	75 years.
	75 years.
	And then the plaintiffs came back and they said, well, why don't you just take 108 days since that's the same amount of time you used to review that data that was submitted by Pfizer before you approved these vaccines?
	So the left is good.
	Well, the Democrats would be wiped out.
	The left would, I don't think they're ever going to restructure because people who considered themselves Bernie Crats have embraced the Hillary Clinton propaganda train and Joe Biden and the whole thing.
	And Trump has been their boogeyman and it's turned them into morons.
	And so the left is, there is no left.
	And now they're embracing authoritarianism.
	They're all embracing this war in Ukraine.
	Like more.
	It's amazing to watch this happen.
	The same people who have lied us into every war are lying us into this.
	And it's a Democrat and everybody just pretends it's not happening.
	I mean, there is no anti-war left.
	There's no anti-mandate left.
	There's no nothing.
	There's no anti-Russia gate.
	There's no anti-CIA left.
	They've embraced it 100%.
	And those people will never admit it.
	Just like the people will never admit that they were wrong about Russia Gate.
	They'll never admit that they were wrong about mandates or the COVID narrative.
	And they will never admit they were wrong to bite their tongue in criticizing Fauci and Collins at the NIH and for not discussing the Great Barrington Declaration and for making them think that people who are doctors at Harvard and Stanford who have a different view on how to handle COVID are somehow on the fringe crazy people.
	That's what the left media did.
	The left did the work of talking about ivermectin as some kind of horse poison instead of what it is, an essential medicine on the WH list of essential medicines and it's a Nobel Prize.
	And they're all dupes for big pharma.
	And I mean, these are people, people close to me, people far from me, people I work with, people I used to work with, people, it's everywhere and it's infected.
	People who could think, people who still don't think we landed on the moon aren't skeptical of the COVID narrative coming from Fauci, the government, and Big Pharma.
	That's just mind-blowing.
	Yeah, it's deeply depressing.
	It is deeply depressing.
	And it is, I mean, there's a lot in this that I understand.
	You know, okay, the smash and grab operation by Big Pharma.
	I mean, Pfizer has made 20 in 2021, they made 22 billion in profits, right?
	Their business grew by 92%.
	It's pretty clear, like the interests involved there.
	And then everybody who's, you know, got Pfizer in their stock portfolio, why they'd go along with it.
	There's lots of this.
	It makes real clear material sense.
	But there is an element of this left hysteria.
	And I hesitate to continually use that word, but there's a kind of mad quality to this that I really don't get fully what that is.
	And in some of the letters I've received from this article, people tell their stories about this.
	And it's like, that's what's chilling about it.
	People describing their close friend, you know, that they had to break up with because their friend was like calling the cops on their working class neighbors for socializing on a stoop outside.
	This kind of stuff, where it's like, what explains that?
	I don't.
	I don't know.
	They just found, I'm not kidding.
	People who are the biggest skeptics of everything in the world that I know personally, who come from comedy even, became propagandists, right?
	Shamed people for doing their own research.
	Oh, what are you doing?
	Your own research.
	When have you ever heard?
	Why don't you just tell them to stop reading?
	Because that's what you're doing.
	It's like, oh, what are you reading?
	Well, we got ourselves a reader.
	Like, I'm in the middle of a Bill Hicksman or something.
	It is crazy to see it happen to people on the left.
	People not only not question the COVID narrative, but shame people who did their own research.
	And you know why I had to do?
	I got injured by the vaccine.
	I had to do my own research because nobody else was going to do it for me.
	Go ahead.
	Yeah.
	I think some of that is like there's a cult around science, right?
	There's like scientism.
	People forget that like the history of science is a history of like one paradigm falling after another, right?
	Total certainty eventually crumbling, right?
	Constant revolution and, you know, critical thinking and undermining and attacking and debate.
	So people are unaware of that.
	And the science industry, as it were, has built this aura of invincibility around it.
	And so there's a kind of cult of scientism.
	And I think that part of what drives this is the fear that if you dissent from the herd of people who are embracing the science, that you're going to look like you're an idiot, right?
	And that's at the heart of it is a kind of politics of respectability.
	And that if, you know, and people just don't want to risk being shunned, right?
	That's right.
	Even though the real history of science is the history of dissidents being like, well, wait, excuse me.
	You know, I'm finding something different here.
	Like, you know, of course.
	I think there's that.
	I think that, and that's, that's also part of why I think, you know, what we're talking about here is really like that the left is a middle class formation, right?
	It's a professional, manageable, middle-class thing.
	And the politics of respectability are very intense in that class.
	More so than in the working class, where it's like, you know, you don't expect people to listen to you and respect your opinion if you're, you know, a landscaper or, you know, a line chef.
	And so and so people are actually kind of intellectually more free.
	I agree.
	Christian Parenti's been our guest.
	He's written a great article at the Gray Zone about the lockdown lockdown left.
	We'll put a link to it underneath there.
	Dr. Parenti, I really appreciate you coming on.
	Thanks for making time for us.
	Thank you.
	Good luck with everything.
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	Our next guest today is a New York-based journalist who hosts the news show Pushback for the Gray Zone.
	And he writes regularly for the nation.
	His writing also appears at his own substack, mate.substack.com.
	In 2019, Aaron received this prestigious ISI award for outstanding achievement in independent media from Ithaca College.
	Please welcome Aaron Matte.
	Hi, Aaron.
	Hello, JD.
	So I saw you tweeted this out.
	You said on February 19th, the Wall Street Journal said German Chancellor Schlotz proposed to Zelensky that Ukraine renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal signed by both Putin and Biden.
	Zelensky said no.
	And here is what it is.
	It says, so that's the German guy, Mr. Schulz, made one last push for the settlement between Moscow and Kiev.
	He told Mr. Zelensky in Munich on February 19th that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia.
	The pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine security.
	So this could have avoided a war.
	It sounds to me like this could have avoided a war.
	Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin couldn't be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.
	His answer left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.
	Now, Aaron, what does this look like to you?
	Does it look to you that for some reason he's being used as a pawn, Zelensky?
	Yeah, he's definitely being used as a pawn.
	Here he is being offered by Germany a proposal that he's going to be ultimately have to accept anyway, or else his whole country gets destroyed, unfortunately.
	That's just the grim reality of committing to Ukrainian neutrality and not joining NATO.
	And he knew, and we now, he's admitted this, and you might have the clip Zelensky admitted.
	Let's hear what he admitted.
	He was told by NATO that you're not going to join, but we're not going to admit that publicly.
	We're going to keep the door open publicly.
	So basically, keep the door open publicly to an outcome we're actually not going to accept in practice.
	Why?
	Just to bait Russia.
	So Zelensky chose to risk war to go along with that ruse.
	So, yeah, so this will be a translator speaking, but you can request that personally to say directly that we are going to accept internal or NATO in a year or two or five.
	So that's Zelensky saying he asked them directly, are you going to allow Ukraine into NATO in a year or two or three or five?
	And what did they say to him?
	They said this.
	Just say it directly and clearly or just say no.
	And the response was very clear.
	You're not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open.
	And so why would they keep the door?
	So NATO said, no, we're not going to allow Ukraine into NATO.
	Zelensky seemed to want that.
	He says the people of Ukraine want that.
	NATO said, you're not going to get that, but we will publicly pretend that the door is open.
	Why would NATO want to pretend that publicly the door is open for Ukraine to enter NATO, Aaron?
	Well, for one, especially the U.S., the people who run the U.S. are such fanatic Russophobes, Russia haters, that they don't want to give Russia any kind of win, even if it's just a completely symbolic one, like Ukraine not joining NATO, which they apparently agree with anyway.
	And the more sinister explanation, which I also think is true, is that they wanted to use NATO membership to bait Russia into invading, to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder to bait Russia into a war.
	And by the way, this is a policy that was set out in a 2019 RAND study.
	I read about it in my newest article at matsita.substeck.com, where this RAND study, a Pentagon Tide Think Tank, talks about the best ways to overextend Russia.
	That's the topic of the study.
	And the top strategy that they come up with is providing more weapons to Ukraine in order to basically compel a Russian invasion.
	And that would be a way to bleed Russia.
	So that is what I believe the strategy was.
	And that's why they wanted to use Zelensky and Ukraine to leave the door open.
	Basically, leave the door open to NATO publicly to leave the door open to a disastrous Russian invasion of Ukraine.
	And Zelensky went along with it.
	So even though NATO was never going to allow Ukraine into NATO, they publicly said they might in order to bait Putin into invading Ukraine.
	Why would Zelensky go along with that?
	Why would the president of Ukraine allow himself to be used as a pawn like that?
	Yeah, why would he reject just days before the invasion a measure that would essentially enshrine what he was told anyway, which is that Ukraine is not going to join NATO?
	Again, that proposal you read out from Germany was Ukraine, just commit to neutrality and not joining NATO.
	So why would he reject something that was already reality anyway, according to what he says he was told?
	Well, for a few things.
	One, he's sold out to the U.S. And also because, and this is where I have some sympathy for him, where it is true that if he did agree to make peace with Russia and basically accept neutrality, he would face a coup.
	The far right in Ukraine have threatened him with a coup and even threatened to kill him.
	There are far-right leaders who have literally threatened Zelensky's life if he makes peace with Russia, including accepting neutrality.
	So this is where Zelensky, the most generous interpretation you can make, is that he was scared for his life.
	And he knew that if he actually reached an accommodation with Russia along these lines, he would pay the price.
	Now, where the U.S. has a major responsibility here is that if the U.S. had stepped in and said, we have Zelensky's back.
	So if he makes peace with Russia, if he accepts neutrality for Ukraine, and if he also ends the war in the Donbass, which he had refused to do, despite being elected on a campaign of peace, recall that the war in Ukraine didn't start when Putin invaded.
	It began in 2014 when the U.S. backed a coup, and that coup government essentially launched an assault on Ukraine's ethnic Russian population who took up arms with Russia's support.
	And that led to this brutal eight-year-long war in which over 13,000 people died.
	Zelensky was elected on a mandate to make peace with the rebels in the Donbass to implement the Minsk Accords.
	What happened, though, he was immediately threatened.
	The far right held rallies threatening to kill him.
	And so the only force that could have saved him and actually pushed through peace would be the U.S., because the U.S., after the coup, has major leverage inside Ukraine.
	That's just obvious.
	Look no further than the fact that Hunter Biden got a parasma board seat to speak to how influential the U.S. is, especially Joe Biden.
	And so Joe Biden, after coming in, could have said he has Zelensky's back on neutrality, and he could have Zelensky's back on implementing the Minsk Accords and ending the Donbass War.
	Instead, he encouraged Zelensky to crack down on his opposition.
	That's why in early 2021, right after Biden took office, Zelensky banned three major opposition television networks.
	Soon after that, he went after the main opposition leader inside Ukraine who was tied to Russia.
	And meanwhile, the U.S. and Ukraine under Biden and Zelensky signed all these agreements, basically deepening U.S. Ukrainian military integration and enshrining NATO membership as a goal.
	So that's what the U.S. did.
	At every step of the way, the U.S. encouraged Zelensky to not make peace with Russia.
	And Biden effectively took the side of Ukraine's neo-Nazis, not the Ukrainian people who had elected Zelensky on an overwhelming mandate to make peace.
	And so why would the United States want to bait Putin and Russia into invading Ukraine?
	Well, one reason would be because they had a deal with Germany that if Russia did invade Ukraine, that Germany would stop that Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
	And so that's maybe why Biden wanted to, and the administration of the United States wanted to bait Putin into doing just that.
	And so now I don't know if you know, as we reported, the United States now has a deal to sell more liquefied natural gas to Europe.
	Right now, Russia provides 40% of the gas to Europe.
	And that's too much for the people in the United States.
	They figured out here the fossil fuel companies, Exxon has figured out.
	We can provide that for the people of Europe.
	So it looks as if they did that exact thing that would provoke.
	And of course, it's a fossil fuel war again.
	And I want to show you this.
	So there is Zelensky admitting that they will never allow him in NATO, but he's going to still publicly pretend.
	And now this is his political advisor.
	This is Oletski, Olesi, Oleksi.
	Anyway, here's what he says about this is from 2019.
	So this is the president of Ukraine's advisor in 2019, and he's going to tell you how they instituted or instigated this war.
	Watch.
	You know what?
	Turn it down and I'll read it.
	So take down the volume and then I'll just read it.
	So she says, so she says, she asked, so if Ukraine receives nuclear or weapons from NATO, what will that do?
	And he says, in this case, we can speak about some dates of termination of war in the East.
	No, we don't.
	Hang on.
	I got to back it up.
	No, we don't speak about any dates of termination of war, he says.
	Quite the opposite.
	It will most likely prompt Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine.
	Huh?
	Yeah.
	Because they'll have to degrade us.
	So if they get weapons from NATO, he's saying in 2019, it'll probably prompt Russia to invade them because they'll have to degrade us.
	Okay.
	Keep going.
	In terms of infrastructure and to turn everything here into a devastated territory.
	So they'll have to degrade them in terms of infrastructure, okay, so that the NATO would be reluctant in accepting us.
	So he's saying that Russia would then decimate Ukraine to make it not that attractive of a place for NATO to want to absorb into NATO.
	That's what he's saying.
	And then she says, you mean that Russia will dare to directly confront NATO?
	He said, of course, Russia.
	No, not NATO.
	They must do this before we join NATO, meaning Russia has to invade Ukraine before Ukraine joins NATO to make us not interesting for NATO.
	So you get it.
	He's saying, so that we become uninteresting as a havoc territory.
	So if Russia destroys Ukraine, NATO won't want to bring Ukraine into NATO, like we said.
	So now he says, with the probability of 99.9%, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.
	So this is in 2019, Zelensky's own advisor saying that if we join NATO, the price that we're going to have to pay for that is a big war with Russia.
	And if we do not join NATO, it's absorption by Russia within 10 to 12 years.
	So he's saying that our two options are we either go have a full-out war with Russia or Russia's going to absorb us into the behind the red curtain that doesn't exist.
	Here's the fork.
	Here's the fork we're facing now.
	That's the challenge.
	And now let's make a choice.
	But wait, if we put it on the scales, what better is the case?
	What's better in this case?
	Of course, large-scale war with Russia and joining NATO as a result of the defeat of Russia.
	That's the coolest thing.
	So that's what their choice is.
	Their choice, he doesn't want to be absorbed into Russia, which is BS, but that's this false dichotomy is either full-out war with Russia and then join NATO or be absorbed into Russia.
	And he's saying we are choosing a large-scale war with Russia and then joining NATO.
	That's what Zelensky's advisor is saying that they want in 2019.
	Okay, see if there's more to this.
	He says that's the coolest thing.
	A war with Russia.
	And what can a large-scale war with Russia be like?
	Well, if it's offensive, invasion of four Russian armies they created on our borders.
	So you get the pic.
	So I don't need to show you anymore.
	You got it.
	So let me bring in Aaron.
	Aaron, that part about Russia absorbing Ukraine, what do you say about that?
	No evidence for that.
	It is true that Russia took Crimea in 2014, but the reason they did that was obvious.
	And everybody across the Russian political spectrum supported it.
	You had a coup in 2014 backed by the U.S. The coup government was immediately talking about joining NATO.
	And so you had the prospect for Russia of its most important naval base in Crimea, where the majority of the population speaks Russian and identifies with Russia, falling into NATO.
	And so Russia acted quickly and absorbed it.
	And by the way, this was happening in parallel with the war in the Donbass beginning and the coup government essentially declaring an assault on the Russian-speaking population.
	But Russia didn't go beyond that.
	And even when the breakaway republics of the Donbass, Donetsk and Lahats, wanted to become independent, wanted to essentially join Russia, Putin refused to recognize them as independent.
	Russia was advocating for the Minsk Accords, which I talked about earlier, this agreement under which these Donbass regions would stay inside Ukraine's borders, but get some limited autonomy.
	And that would be the, and in return for that, they would be demilitarized, and that would end the Donbass War.
	It was Russia that was advocating for that to be implemented.
	So Russia was advocating For a peace deal that respected Ukraine's borders, with the exception of Crimea, which they took.
	And again, which according to all polls, the majority of the population in Crimea supported Russia taking it.
	And even Alexei Navalny inside Russia supported that move as well, just because Crimea was seen as so integral to Russia's security.
	So this notion that he has that if we don't join NATO, then Russia is going to take us over in 10, 12 years.
	There's no evidence for that.
	And in fact, look, if you go back to the coup of 2014, the problem there was the U.S. and the EU insisting that Ukraine make a choice between it was either Russia or the West, because the EU was trying to force Ukraine to sign this economic deal that would have essentially cut off Ukraine's ties to Russia and also accept really, really harsh austerity.
	And for Ukraine, that was just suicidal, especially when you have a large segment of the population in Ukraine, although it's declined because people have left and because of the war.
	A large segment of the population speaks Russian, identifies with Russia, and wants to maintain ties to Russia.
	And that's why it's suicidal in that situation to force Ukraine into one camp or the other.
	It would be crazy for Russia to try to force Ukraine into its own camp at the exclusion of all those who don't want to be a part of or want to be tied with Russia.
	But it's also just as crazy, which has been the U.S.-led policy to try to force Ukraine into the U.S.-led camp, essentially into NATO and the EU.
	And the answer in a divided country is to respect that division and keep the country neutral, because otherwise you're always going to have conflicts brewing up.
	And by the way, that's exactly what William Burns, the current ambassador of the CIA, predicted back when he was Russia's ambassador to the U.S. He wrote that famous memo that we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, warning that across the Russian spectrum, he was being told that NATO was a red line, that NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for Russia because it would force Russia one day to intervene if there was going to be an internal civil conflict, which is exactly what has happened.
	So here, who's this colonel?
	This is Doug McGregor.
	He served in the Gulf War.
	He was a tank commander and led a famous battle there where the U.S. was victorious in the first Gulf War.
	And then in the 1990s, he was a strategic military planner for NATO during its bombing of Yugoslavia.
	And then he served under Trump at the end of Trump's administration as a senior advisor.
	And so he's saying what we all know.
	Here he says it.
	The question is, what is it that Zelensky is going to do?
	The Russians have made it very clear what they want is a neutral Ukraine.
	This could have ended days ago if he accepted that.
	And then they can adjust the borders.
	But the eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands.
	But again, the Russians are not seizing territory.
	They're destroying Ukrainian forces.
	That's their focus.
	Colonel, it sounds like you don't approve of Zelensky's stand.
	Oh, I think Zelensky is a puppet, and he is putting huge numbers of his own population at unnecessary risk.
	And quite frankly, most of what comes out of Ukraine is debunked as lies within 24 to 48 hours.
	The notions of taking and retaking airfields, all of this is nonsense.
	It hasn't happened.
	He's not a hero when he's standing up for himself and his own people.
	You don't think he's a hero?
	No, I do not.
	I don't see anything heroic about the man.
	And I think the most heroic thing that he can do right now is to come to terms with reality, neutralize Ukraine.
	This is not a bad thing.
	A neutral Ukraine would be good for us as well as for Russia.
	It would create the buffer that, frankly, both sides want.
	But he's, I think, being told to hang on and try to drag this out, which is tragic for the people that have to live through this.
	I'm inclined to disagree.
	And he's dragging it out.
	We all know how this is going to end.
	We all know how this is going to end.
	Ukraine has to end up neutral.
	They're not going to beat Russia in a war.
	And this is what Russia's demands were.
	The Kremlin has announced its demand.
	Ukraine must change its constitution to guarantee it won't join any blocs, meaning NATO must recognize Crimea as part of Russia, must recognize the Eastern separatist region as independent, meaning the Donbass.
	And they have so the first thing would be to stop shelling and killing the people in the Donbass, which they were supposed to do according to the Minsk agreement, but they never did.
	So we all know this is how it's supposed to end.
	But the United States and NATO and Zelensky doesn't seem like they want an end to this, right?
	No, it doesn't.
	That's why the U.S. is shipping in weapons, even though everyone knows that no matter what the U.S. does, Russia will always have the military advantage.
	That's why the reason the Minsk Accords happened is because Barack Obama ignored and overruled all of his top aides, including Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, all of them saying we have to arm Ukraine to fight this proxy war that we began with the coup in 2014.
	And Obama refused.
	He worried that, first of all, the weapons would fall into the hands of Nazis, which is exactly correct.
	And he also pointed out that no matter what we do, Russia will always have military dominance.
	So if you pour weapons in, all you're doing is prolonging the war.
	All you're doing is sentencing more Ukrainians to die.
	So that's why the Minsk Accords happened is because Ukraine militarily was weak back then.
	But when Obama left office, there's that clip of Lindsey Graham and John McCain.
	They pour the front line in Ukraine.
	They say 2017 will be the year of offense.
	And they used RussiaGate to achieve that because Trump came in.
	He's being called the Russian puppet.
	He needs the support of Republicans in case he gets impeached as the Mueller investigation is going on.
	He caved pretty quickly and he sent the weapons to Ukraine that Obama would not send.
	And Biden comes into office and basically picks up where him and Jake Sullivan had left off, where they were urging Obama to arm Ukraine, use Ukrainians as cannon fighter.
	And now Obama is out of the way and they've picked that up.
	And here we are.
	Hey, this is Jimmy.
	Who's this?
	Jimmy's political strategist, David Axerai.
	Oh, hi, David.
	It's been a long time.
	What have you been?
	You are Barack Obama's former advisor.
	That's who this is.
	I just want to let people know who this is.
	Very big shot guy.
	People not know who I am.
	Yeah, some people might not know.
	You were a big shot advisor to Barack Obama, and then you were a fixture on CNN for a long time.
	In fact, I even gave you a show.
	I think it was called The Axe Files.
	Well, we'll hear about that later on.
	But it's been a long time.
	What have you been up to, buddy?
	Jimmy, I've been very busy with my own podcast, CNN's the Axe Files with David Axarai.
	All right.
	I assume that's a takeoff on the X-Files.
	Yes, exactly.
	As you know, I'm a big fan of timely references.
	Talk to the hand.
	Don't go there.
	Oh, stuff like that.
	I get it.
	Hey, you know, there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
	How do you hear the entire phone call?
	You got to become a premium member.
	Go to JimmyDorrComedy.com, sign up.
	It's the most affordable premium program in the business.
	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.

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