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April 15, 2022 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:06:45
20220415_TJDS_20220415_Podcast_-_41422_7.09_PM
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Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy, this is Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Ah, you mean former governor?
Yes, and future governor.
So let's average them out and just say governor.
All right.
How about no?
Suit yourself.
Anyway, I'm calling with some good news.
Actually, I'm here to correct some good news.
Oh, really?
As the mayor of New York just announced, quote, we got him.
Meaning the subway shooter.
He's in custody.
Right, and the cops didn't catch him.
A citizen did.
Just a regular guy who works at a bodega, I think.
No, I caught him.
What you know?
I distinctly read.
Jimmy, what now?
You're going to start believing the mainstream media narrative about something?
Come on.
You think some regular guy caught him?
No.
A fucking bull.
But neither I. But neither I nor the police want you to know that yet.
I like this quomo much better than the real one.
I'll tell you that.
Can you explain yourself here?
Jimmy, when I saw that tragedy unfold, I swore that I was not going to let that deed go unpunished.
Not in my beautiful New York City.
So I became a vigilante.
Okay.
I befriended the night.
I learned to live in the shadows.
Befriended them.
Reveled in the hunt.
Became one with darkness.
I've been watching a lot of these superhero movies.
Yeah, so you so you're a superhero now, Andrew?
Yes.
Well, I'm sort of at the origin story stage.
I got the idea just a few days ago after the shooting, but I already have a name and everything.
What?
What?
Please tell me.
Vendetta, the Italian Avenger.
Vendetta.
Wow.
How about how about for the costume?
Well, you know, I was pressed for time, and I'll improve it later.
But I went on Amazon and I ordered a Halloween costume of Mario from Nintendo.
But, you know, I spray-painted it black, so it was, you know, menacing.
That wasn't enough of a disguise you.
Well, it comes with that big fake mustache.
And that gave me the idea for my catchphrase.
Check this out.
What?
I jump out of the shadows in front of a criminal, and I say, it's a me!
Fucking vengeance.
And Jimmy and I just clobber them.
It sounds illegal.
Oh, highly.
What?
I caught the subway guy, so it's working.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
I don't know.
Is that the only act of vigilante, Justin, you've performed so far?
Well, I did sneak into CNN headquarters in the middle of the night and leave an upper decker in the executive ward.
But other than that, yeah.
I see.
But Jimmy, believe me, over the next few months, New Yorkers will become very familiar with Vendetta.
He will stop many crimes and become very popular with the people.
The media will scramble to determine his true identity, but will fail spectacularly.
He'll become a true folk hero, and then he'll call a press conference.
And it will be there that he reveals to himself, he reveals himself to the big apple.
Fucking me.
Okay.
Talk about an image rehabilitation.
They won't be in office they don't want me to run for.
All that shit in my past will be forgotten.
You really think so?
Of course.
After months of saving grannies and stopping robberies, nobody's gonna care that I used to play a little grab ass back in the day.
Hell, ass will be grabbing me.
There will be women flying through the air towards me, ass first, like I'm holding a giant ass magnet.
This doesn't sound realistic.
Of course it is.
Haven't you seen these movies?
That's how it goes.
Is this really your plan for getting back into politics?
You got any better ideas?
No, I don't, actually.
No.
Well, then there you go.
There's only one thing missing here.
What?
What's that?
I need a nemesis, a super villain.
Someone who terrorizes the city and that I defeat publicly.
Hey, how about you?
You already don't like me.
Look, I got a bad back.
You don't need to do physical stuff.
Scare people in other ways.
You already get worked up and yell a lot on your show.
You wear that fedora?
You could be Howell, the Irish yeller.
That's my evil superpower.
Well, I need someone I could beat.
Yeah, hey, that's a no for me.
Sorry.
All right, fine.
Be that way.
Well, I have to go.
I have to return to my secret lab/slash kitchen.
Okay.
I'm working on a special type of linguine that has super tensile microfiber strength, which I will use to bind the wrists of the bad guys.
Vendetta forever.
Are you even there, cheat crime?
Establishment media sucks.
All gaslighting, so good luck.
Bullshit we can't afford.
He's fomenting this.
Watch and see as he's jacked off.
The median speeds and jumps the medium and hits him head on.
It's the Chimitor Show.
you you you you you Thank you.
Well, here's our next story.
Let's do another story because this also focuses on the cops.
And I don't know if you remember, but there was a big plot that a bunch of right-wingers were trying to kidnap the governor, the Democratic governor of Michigan.
Do you remember this?
The FBI says it foiled.
Hang on, let me.
I'm pretty sure I have.
The FBI says it foiled, hang on, a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and this is from October 8th, 2020.
Do you remember that?
So when the FBI says it foiled a plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, it fails.
This headline fails to mention it was an FBI plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer.
Okay, that's the big, that's the spoiler alert.
Here's Keith Oberman.
You know, Keith Oberman has lost his mind.
He says, new video, how the terror plot against Governor Whitmer fits into Trump's plans to nullify.
Now, you know that Keith Olberman is exactly like Jonald Trump in his shadow, as the Jungians say.
You know that's why he's obsessed.
Anybody who's this obsessed with Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
And then they get to project all that stuff they hate about themselves onto Donald Trump.
That's called projection.
Everybody's heard of that psychological term.
That's what guys like Keith Olberman are doing because he's just like Trump.
He's just a big narcissist, just a big a megalomaniac, and just a big a liar.
He says new video, how the terror plot against Governor Whitmer fits into Trump's plans to nullify the election and why he'd run again in 24.
Two minutes of essentials below, the full 15 minutes of episode number two of the worst person in the world live at YouTube here.
So I have to say I agree that a show starring Keith Oberman should be called the worst person in the world.
That is fair.
That is fair.
Ex-FBI director Andrew McCabe, Trump is a person most responsible for Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.
This is amazing.
And Dean Obliter tweets it out like it's real.
Really, Trump is the most responsible more than the actual kidnappers?
No kidding.
Yes, that's what MSNBC will have you think.
Here's from the intercept.
Echoes of FBI entrapment haunt failed plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
It becomes really dicey when there are nearly as many informants as there are defendants, a former federal prosecutor told the intercept.
And that's from March 9th, 2022.
Oh, turns out FBI was the most responsible.
So it was more than Trump.
I'm going to say the FBI, more responsible than Trump.
Two men were found not guilty.
This just in.
This is from April 8th.
Just in, two men were found not guilty of attempted kidnapping of Governor Whitmer, and a mistrial has been declared for other counts.
Wow.
So the two men acquitted of plotting kidnapped Michigan governor in high-profile trial.
So let me just.
I mean, look what a great job they did on this.
Imagine how they must be handling Muslim terrorism.
It was one of the country's highest profile domestic terrorism cases, an alleged plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, eliminate her security detail, and perhaps touch off a civil war.
How would that touch off a civil war?
I've heard more realistic plans from Charlie Manson, but okay, here we go.
But after a trial in which prosecutors portrayed the four defendants as threats to democracy, jurors on Friday acquitted two of the men and said they were unable to reach verdicts on the other two.
Hmm, threat to democracy, and we just let them go.
The result was a major blow to the Justice Department, which during the Biden administration has made domestic terrorism one of its top priorities in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Well, at least they got, okay.
This was a major blow to the Justice Department.
At least they got blown, but I don't think they mean it like that.
The defendants in the Michigan trial were arrested weeks before the 2020 election, and the case was seen by some as revealing increasingly combative discourse among certain right-wing groups, really increasingly combative discourse.
Did they want to put the unvaxed in camps or something?
But a series of missteps during the investigation and the eventual failure to win any conviction against the men who went on trial raises questions about the ability of federal law enforcement when it infiltrates right-wing groups to develop convincing cases without infringing on the rights to speak freely and own weapons.
It sure does.
Can't we suppress those questions, though?
The midterms are coming up.
Prosecutors built their case off a trove of audio recordings and encrypted text from 2020 in which some of the men vented about COVID-19 restrictions, spoke about political violence, and debated the best way to kidnap Mrs. Whitmer, a Democrat, from her vacation home in northern Michigan.
Yet the very existence of those recordings and text conversations underscore defense lawyers' theory of the case, that the supposed plot had been conceived and nudged ahead by a network of FBI agents and informants who preyed on the worst instincts of those loose-lipped targets.
So we've seen this before.
What they do is they find the most easily influenced pawns and dupes.
Some of them are mentally defective usually.
The FBI encourages them to do some criminal terrorist activity, and then they arrest them right as they're doing it.
And they go, look, we foiled a plot.
Give us more money.
Aren't we great?
That's what they're doing there.
This is what happened.
The FBI cooked this plot up.
They found some dupes to go along with it.
There's more FBI agents and informants than there are criminals trying to work this plot into happening.
This is what's going on here.
Okay?
All right.
The defense lawyers describe the men on trial as big talkers who were never going to commit any kidnapping.
Words hurt you?
Words scare you?
Daniel Harris, who was acquitted of all the charges against him, said when he took the stand in his own defense.
Mr. Harris insisted that he never joined any plot.
He referred derisively to an FBI informant, Dan Chappell, who had testified earlier in the trial that he feared the group's anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric would escalate into violence.
The jury of six men and six women, which deliberated for nearly a week, did not reach any verdict on the charges against the two defendants, Barry Croft and Adam Fox, who prosecutors portrayed as having a leadership role.
A judge declared a mistrial for those men and ordered them held in jail.
Others have also been charged in connection with the investigation.
Two men, Ty Garbin and Caleb Franks, pleaded guilty before the trial to kidnapping conspiracy and testified against the defendants in the federal case.
Eight other men were charged with related crimes in state court.
During weeks of testimony of the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, prosecutors showed jurors inflammatory social media posts and chat messages from the defendants and presented audio secretly recorded by Mr. Chappell and other informants.
One former co-defendant who pleaded guilty testified that he hoped to set off a chain of events that would prevent Joseph Biden Jr. from being elected president and would perhaps foment a civil war.
That was the whole plan.
They wanted to kick that hat.
They wanted to kick that off by kidnapping the governor.
Niles Kessler, a federal prosecutor, said during, they're trying to, this is amazing.
They've got these mental defectives in Michigan, and they're trying to scare the country into that they were going to start a civil war.
What?
And if they didn't get Whitmer, they're going to get Frank Sinatra's kid.
But the prosecution's case was hampered by the lack of clarity and what exactly the men were accused of plotting.
No attack ever took place, and no final date for an abduction was ever set.
Testimony showed the details of the alleged plan sometimes differed drastically from prosecution witness to prosecution witness.
So the prosecution couldn't keep their own story straight on the stand.
That's how bad this was.
Their stories would vary wildly.
So the prosecutor's case against the kidnap plot was hampered by there being no actual plot.
That was what hampered their case.
Okay.
The FBI informant, Mr. Chappell, said he believed that the group planned to kill Ms. Whitmer, whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had infuriated the men.
Mr. Garbin, who earlier pled guilty in the case, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan.
Okay.
There was no plan to kidnap the governor and there was no agreement between these four men.
Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for Mr. Croft, said in closing arguments.
He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and an undercover agents and that without a plan, the snitches needed to make it look like there was movement toward a plan.
Geez, it's almost like always outsourcing everything all the time might be a small flaw in capitalism.
I'm just saying.
R. Michael Belota, a defense lawyer who previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, said that the sheer quantity of informants might have hampered the case.
Might have hampered the case.
I don't know what they needed to have.
I don't know that they needed to have as many informants as they had, Mr. Belota said.
That almost made it look like it was a government party as opposed to just having one informant reporting to the FBI.
As some of the defense lawyers acknowledged in court, many of the men were recorded making offensive remarks or statements advocating violence about law enforcement officers, Ms. Whitmer, or politicians in general.
One FBI agent testified that Mr. Caserta had posted on social media that the Second Amendment gave him the right to kill agents of the government when they became tyrannical.
Jesus Christ.
It's not like he mocked AOC's idiotic ball gown or something.
That's violence.
Literal violence.
That's literal violence.
The chief tension of the case was whether speech like that crossed a line into criminal activity.
If I don't like the governor and it's rough talk, I can do that in our country, Mr. Hill said after the verdict was announced and his client left the courthouse.
Yes, you can do that in America, but if only, only if it's against people the Democrat wouldn't like, that's when it's okay.
So here's what Glenn Greenwald said.
He said, note the enormous gap between A, the media coverage devoted to the FBI's pre-election announcement that it broke up a right-wing plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer and B, the jury's refusal to convict the key defendants following evidence that the plot was actually driven by the FBI.
Well, of course there's a gap, Glenn.
How are they supposed to beat Trump on the issues?
Remember when countless journalists, pundits, and politicians screeched with such righteous certitude about Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot as though it were established fact when the only thing that's now been established is that it was a botched FBI entrapment plot.
No, I don't remember that, Michael.
I forget things when I'm supposed to, when I'm supposed to like a real Democrat.
Okay.
And here it is.
Two years ago, if you suggested that Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot was potentially FBI entrapment, you were called a conspiracy theorist.
20 Buck says they still call you that now anyway.
So Max Blumenthal is here from the gray zone.
Let's get your take on that, Matt.
I'm a conspiracy factualist.
Uh-huh.
And, you know, I just wonder, like, if the FBI cooked up a plot to kill you and kidnap you, wouldn't you be mad?
I would be mad.
Gretchen Whitmer seems fine with it.
No problem.
Just like.
Isn't that wild?
Like, why isn't she screaming?
It would actually make me more mad if the FBI came in, rounded up a bunch of gun-toting militia members who were some of them mentally unstable and riled them up to kill me.
Right?
That's what they did.
I would be upset.
I would be demanding a federal investigation of the FBI.
I would be like demanding an independent prosecutor.
But Gretchen Whitmer went along with this apparently for partisan reasons because this was part of the it was part of what I would say was a plot against Trump to link his denunciations.
I mean, he was messing with Whitmer too.
He was denouncing her for her harsh lockdowns.
He thought that the lockdowns were a plan or part of a plan to tank the economy ahead of the election and that if he didn't resolve the lockdowns quickly enough, that he would lose.
And so you have these guys running up in the Michigan state capitol.
What they did was an act of pure intimidation with guns, trying to intimidate the governor, demanding the end of the lockdown.
It was the worst thing that could have happened also for COVID skeptics or people who are skeptical and critical of the restrictions because it framed it completely in a partisan and culture war light.
And they attached their informants onto that group in order.
And so it was just part of a much wider setup, not only setting these characters up, but attaching them to Trump because Trump had tweeted liberate Michigan.
That's why you saw those tweets claiming that Donald Trump was just as guilty as these characters were.
Like that was the secret code to enact the civil war.
And the informants were so central in this plot that actually One of them rose to vice president or number two in this Michigan militia.
He rose quickly through the ranks and found his way into a leadership role.
The entire plot was conceived by the FBI.
And it has far-reaching implications.
For example, as Christian Parenti pointed out in the piece he published at the Gray Zone on how the after the lockdown left lost its mind, it sees opposition to lockdowns and COVID restrictions in the light of intrigues like this and intimidating protests by these characters.
And so this put that on the national stage.
But this also is the FBI's MO.
This is what the FBI has been doing since the dawn of the war on terror, which is setting up mentally unstable and vulnerable people.
There was a guy named James Cromity who was a Muslim convert and the FBI was constantly trying to entice him into a violent plot.
This is back in 2009.
He refused again and again and again and then he lost his job.
So the FBI came in posing as al-Qaeda agents and said, here's $250,000.
Will you agree to do it?
Then they did it.
He's in jail.
So many people have gone down over fake plots.
Virtually every major terror bust was conceived by the FBI.
Why, if ISIS and Al-Qaeda were such a threat to the United States, did the FBI have to invent plots for them?
Why?
The answer is very clear.
The FBI was trying to justify its bureaucratic priorities.
It was trying, this is essentially a form of the FBI and the Department of Justice lobbying for their own budget.
And as soon as ISIS fades away, mysteriously, when the U.S. and the CIA cease their dirty war in Syria, which had created a weapons farm for ISIS and allowed them to seize territory, which became a base for their global propaganda operations, as soon as that comes to an end, then you have, what do we have left?
We have from ISIS, we have to go to Whitesis.
And they want to go after the far right in the U.S. So they have to cook up these plots.
And obviously, it helped.
I think it helped influence the election in a major way.
And then it flows into January 6th, where after January 6th, I was told by a journalist, actually, who's just a straightforward journalist, very like far less of an advocacy journalist than I am, who was visited by the FBI because this journalist covers the far right, covers the left as well.
He told me that every single grassroots far-right figure that he knows has been visited by the FBI since January 6th.
So there's no accountability.
You had a guy on your show I saw in Rockfin.
I don't know what his name was, but he was the one who talked about how the problem wasn't Trump, that the problem for the elite, the oligarchy, for the establishment, is the people who flex their muscle at the ballot box and actually put a thumb in the eye of the establishment.
And they voted for Trump and then they voted for Brexit.
And that they couldn't.
So that's the real problem.
And that's why all the energy is put in to demonizing Trump supporters and people who were for Brexit as racists and all this horrible thing.
So they can justify suppressing them, putting them in prison, doing stuff like this.
Is that right?
Yeah, I had two guests that would also be great guests for this show, C.J. Hopkins and Alexander McKay.
Both of them are leftists who framed the Ovidian regime in terms of the ongoing war on populism, whether it was the left populism that rose to the surface with Bernie's campaign or the right-wing populism that gave rise to Trump and breaks it.
And so, yes, this is of a part with the discrediting of right-wing populism to frame it as insurrectionism.
And we saw the insurrectionist narrative return with the trucker convoy in Ottawa, where Canadian leadership, pro, like the Liberal Party and the NDP, freely threw around the word insurrectionist and accused the truckers of trying to take over the government and stoke a civil war in Canada,
when in fact, what they were demanding was that the Canadian government respect the Charter of Values and that it lift this cross-border mandate that truckers had to abide by.
I mean, their demands are very clear.
They weren't demanding the government step down.
They weren't trying to drive their trucks through the Capitol building.
So this is the narrative going forward.
And pretty much anything that threatens the establishment right now, I mean, at some point it could come from the left.
Right now it's coming from the right and it is framed consistently in terms of civil war and insurrectionism, including the trucker convoy that attempted to enter D.C. two weeks ago and was blocked by the Department of Homeland Security working with the D.C. police.
I personally witnessed it.
I personally witnessed the National Guard bring close to 10,000 soldiers into D.C. They were set up for days and days in advance of these truckers trying to come in with permits or they were seeking permits.
And they were setting up massive like armored personnel carriers under bridges in D.C. They were blocking off highways in advance of them and they were preparing for civil war, but it was also perception management to condition the public in D.C. for this, you know, to cultivate in their minds the sense that they were under siege from right-wing populists.
In other words, the truckers.
I went to meet with the truckers.
Haven't had a chance to pull together my footage and put together like a short little video documentary, but I will.
I went up to Hagerstown and they were there, and I talked to their leadership.
The last thing they wanted to do was another January 6th.
That was their biggest fear.
And they were just trying to get permits and they wanted to have a peaceful protest.
Their only demand was getting rid of the cross-border mandates and getting rid of emergency law.
But they were framed as like literal terrorists.
Now they're on their way.
They're here in California.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we're going to cover that on Friday.
I'm going to put together a package because we were at that defeat, the Mandate U.S. rally that was last Sunday down in Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles, which was a big success and was a lot of great speakers.
And Max, you spoke, I spoke.
You were the best speaker.
I was like third best, maybe.
Well, I wouldn't, I'd definitely put you up there.
You're definitely top top three for sure.
Definitely, definitely.
Definitely.
I would say that 14-year-old kid who I had to follow.
Wearing the same suit coat I am.
He goes up and starts screaming.
Anyway, it was fun.
You got to play footage of that.
It was fun.
I will play footage.
I should play that, play some of his speeches and show how.
Yeah.
No, you were backstage and you were about to go up.
And all of a sudden, they move a 14-year-old kid with a suit like kind of like Alex P. Keaton, like a populist Alex P. Keaton.
They move him ahead of you.
I'm like, is this kid running for, you know, running against Newsom?
Like, he just starts screaming.
And he just started screaming.
And the crowd went nuts to see a little kid scream his head off.
And I was like, God damn it.
I got to follow.
Can't you have me just follow a regular boring person?
Like it was so I can look funnier than I am.
You know, that's how I like it because it's outside during the day, hard to get laughs and no roof, right?
But I like what you said at the end.
You know, you called the crowd white supremacists.
There were so many white supremacists there, especially the Islam people from Islam.
The Nation of Islam and the many brown and black people who were there as well.
But you said that you have more in common with them than you have with the oligarchy.
That's right.
Which represent the real winners of the pandemic.
That's right.
And you get attacked for going there.
They're like, you're, you know, hanging out with right-wingers.
And honestly, I talked to so many people there who were leftists and union members.
Me too.
But that's what this is all about.
You know, the focus on these militia members as the terrorists to focus on the threat of insurrectionists.
Like we've witnessed a coup year after year, and it's not being carried out by a bunch of backwoods rednecks with AR-15s.
It's been carried out by Goldman Sachs, by Goldman Sachs, by Bill Gates, by the oligarchy, by big tech, again and again.
And they control the Uniparty in Washington, which, you know, is basically just a bunch of marionettes.
I mean, you can't really tell the difference between Mitt Romney and, I don't know, Chris Murphy on most issues at this point, especially on foreign policy.
You can't tell the difference between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
No, you can't, especially when it comes to, you know, Ukraine and proxy wars abroad.
That's right.
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So, folks, do you remember when there was all those defund the police protests?
And then they even said they were going to defund the police.
Here's a headline from Vox.
Los Angeles voters just delivered a huge win for the defund the police movement.
That's from November 4th, 2020.
But they didn't really defund the police.
LA cut millions from the LAPD after George Floyd.
Here's where that money is going.
You ready?
One year after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Los Angeles city leaders on Tuesday finalized their plan for spending money that was moved last summer out of the police department and into programs aimed at helping communities of color.
The vote by the city council means some $89 million originally slated to pay for police services will instead flow to anti-gang activities, universal income programs, homeless services, education and jobs initiatives, and more.
Let's remember where this is from.
This is from May 26, 2021.
All right, just so you know.
So get ready.
There's a swing coming.
And then there's an update.
This is update.
At the peak of the defund era, LA received $600 million in COVID relief.
Half of that went to the LAPD.
So here they are touting $89 million that they took out of the cops' budget and gave it to the people.
But here we are finding out 300, they gave them 300 million more out of the 600 million in COVID relief.
I'm sure I have jokes for this somewhere.
Oh, I printed them yesterday.
Okay.
So California City spent a huge share of federal COVID relief on funds on police.
This is real.
Big cities in California spent large portions of their federal COVID relief money on police departments.
A review of public records has revealed with several cities prioritizing police funding by a wide margin.
Boy, can I tell you how unshocking that is?
Is that unshocking to you?
No, I mean, and this is, it goes back to a critique that I thought some people on the left should have about everything that happened with COVID and the response to the pandemic, which was that a lot of us did see that this was about policing.
This was about increasing the power of the national security state.
And so, no, it doesn't surprise me that money for COVID actually went to the police because how are they going to enforce any of the ridiculous, how are they going to arrest kids for playing in playgrounds and for all of the insane restrictions that they had, especially here.
The only way they can do that is with more police, which is why I was opposed, as were some thoughtful people on the so-called left.
I know you included, or were critical of that response because obviously it was the fear and the panic that was abound as a result of the pandemic was used in order to give our security state more power.
And this is just a clear example of that.
More money for the cops.
It's not like they could have spent the money on health care.
Right.
Because that's just off the table.
Big cities in California spent large portions of their federal COVID relief money on police departments.
A review of public records has revealed with several cities prioritizing police funding by a wide margin as part of the American Rescue Plan Act.
That's called ARPA.
ARPA.
Now, ARPA is a stimulus money to speed up economic recovery from COVID.
And in most cities in California, the largest portion went to police.
So their message is time to get back to serious crime and get that economy going again.
No more remote crime from home.
We've got to get this economy going.
No Zoom crime.
So that's no Zoom crime.
So that's, well, unless you're Jeffrey Toots.
Oh, my gosh.
The Biden administration's signature stimulus package, the United States government, sent funds to Citi to help them fight coronavirus and support local recovery efforts.
That's what ARPA was.
The American Rescue Plan in 2021, also called COVID-19 Stimulus Package or American Rescue Plan, is a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill passed by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden on March 11th, 2021, to speed up the country's recovery from the economic health effects of the COVID and the ongoing recession.
The money officials said could be used to fund a range of services, including public health, housing, healthcare, salaries, infrastructure investment, aid for small businesses.
But most of the large California cities spent that millions of ARPA dollars on the cops.
Some also gave police money from the coronavirus aid relief and economic security, that CARES Act adopted in 2020 under Donald Trump because the records actually show.
So it turns out COVID actually defunded the police and then they refunded them.
So the CARES Act, the relief economic, so that was the one that they first, that was the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history That every progressive, including Bernie Sanders, voted for.
That was $2.2 trillion in economic stimulus bill passed by the, and that spending includes $339 billion to state and local governments.
And what did they do with that money?
Well, San Francisco received $312 million in ARPA funds for the fiscal year 2020 and allocated 49% or $153 million to the cops.
13%, $41 million, went to the Sheriff's Department and the remainder to the fire department, according to the city controller.
San Francisco also gave roughly 22% or $38 million of its CARES funds to law enforcement.
Wow.
These motherfuckers.
Los Angeles, where I live, spent roughly 50% of its first round of ARPA relief funds on the LAPD, according to public records.
Yes.
Fresno spent $36 million of its CARES funds on the police, making up 67% of the CARES spending on its city's salaries and roughly 40% of all Fresno's CARES funds.
San Jose allocated roughly $27 million of its CARES and ARPA funds to police salaries and the police dispatch department representing about 12% of its relief money.
So how do they justify it?
Are they saying that it's to enforce the COVID restrictions?
Because that's what comes to my mind.
But otherwise, I don't understand how.
I don't understand how they do it either.
Long Beach allocated the majority of its 135 million ARPA funds to the cops, though a spokesperson said a detailed breakdown of the funds was not available.
Oakland allocated $5 million or 13.5% of its CARES funds to the police salaries.
Really?
Oakland, only 5%?
That's like you're defunding the police with how small that is.
Insulting.
It said Sacramento allocated $2.2 million or 2.5% of CARES funds on the police.
San Diego, roughly $60 million or 64% of its CARES funds on police.
Wow.
So in Fresno, the city allocated more than double of its CARES money to police than it did to COVID testing, contact tracing, small business grants, child care vouchers, and traditional housing combined.
So it gave more, all that stuff, COVID testing, contract, all that housing, double that.
They gave more to the cops than double that.
Holy effing F. Oakland's police allocation was greater than the amount spent on a housing initiative, a small business grant program, and a workforce initiative.
San Jose, meanwhile, spent significantly more on housing service and food programs than on law enforcement.
Look at that.
Good for you, San Jose.
And Oakland, well, with that 5% of Oakland's funds to police is greater than the percent spent on economic stimulus, it wasn't supposed to be spent on, really?
Okay, I apologize.
Oakland, clearly, you do fund the police.
So good for you.
And although Long Beach initially reported that it was allocating 100% of its 135 million ARPA funds to the police, a spokesperson said $11 million of those funds were now going to direct relief grants and that a portion was also supporting the city's parks.
Can you believe a city with beach in the title initially wasn't going to fund the Marine Department?
I just don't understand how what is the point of passing these bills and sending money down if it can just go wherever.
Is there not a process that it goes through where you'd think there's like a local council and a mayor that gets elected and responsible to their own citizens?
But this is called how when you tell me what this is.
This is police unions being really powerful.
Officials from Oakland and Anaheim both said that their ARPA awards were used as revenue replacement.
So that's what they're saying for their general fund and said it was not possible to specify where the federal money went, though both cities typically spend large portions of their overall budgets on police with Oakland going $22 million over budget last year for cops.
Wow.
Sorry, we can't tell you specifically where the money went, but we can tell you is that it won't be looked into by the police.
Cities have expanded their spending on police in a number of ways.
In a report for the U.S. government, Long Beach said police were heavily involved in the city's COVID-19 response.
Oh, really?
Including opening an emergency operations center and providing security and testing to vaccination sites.
Really?
Well, that makes sense.
If you've been to any one of the California's high-tech emergency testing tents, you can really see that money at work.
They have some string set up with a line partition, too.
It really works.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
We didn't have that even in D.C. Oh, really?
So there you go.
Stephen Walsh, Oakland's controller, said that claiming CARES funds for the police was an accounting strategy and that the relief money wasn't used to expand law enforcement, but rather to avoid cuts.
He said this allowed the city to pursue a greater variety of worthy projects directed at COVID relief.
Isn't that interesting?
I mean, there you go.
There you have a city official explaining it.
It's an accounting strategy.
I thought this was money that was allocated by the federal government for a specific purpose or you can just shuffle it around in order to, I guess, not fire cops is what he's saying.
Well, look at this crazy wording.
He says we're doing that.
He said this allowed the city to pursue great variety of worthy projects directed at COVID relief.
You mean those projects like funding the police?
Yeah.
That's the projects you guys are funding.
Those are the great projects.
A spokesperson for LA controller also said that ARPA funds were used for LAPD revenue that had previously been budgeted.
And a representative for the LA City Administrative Officer said allocations for public safety services were consistent with the intent of the funds.
Really?
Okay.
Let's go.
Cities using relief funds for police have typically funneled that money to salaries, although the appeal recently reported that some jurisdictions were using stimulus dollars to buy new surveillance technology and build new prisons.
No, you call them new prisons and surveillance technology.
I call them job creators.
The data in California matches national trends.
After the George Floyd uprising sparked a national debate around the role of law enforcement and calls for the U.S. to defund the police and reinvest those dollars in services, local governments across the U.S. use COVID relief to maintain and expand law enforcement, including Chicago, Philadelphia, and the state of Alabama.
There it is.
It's a money grab.
Billions in COVID relief going to fund police and prisons.
There it is.
So you get it.
I don't need to keep telling you this.
So they funneled their money from the COVID relief to cops.
To the accounting strategy.
To the accounting strategy.
That sounds like fraud almost.
Yeah.
An accounting strategy.
It's just a strategy with our budget where we take something that was meant for one thing.
And again, let's remember cops are the solution to all the problems.
Cops are the solution to violence.
Cops are the solutions to homelessness.
Cops are the solutions to no matter what your problem is, more cops.
It goes back to what you and Max were talking about earlier.
Also, the media running with these stories to make it seem as though in cities such as New York, and I'm sure you experienced it here in California too, on a local level, that there's the crime crisis.
And so we need more.
And it comes at the same time, like, oh, COVID is causing people to commit more crimes instead of a more holistic approach to people's mental health and economic situation.
But I just don't understand why anyone, I mean, AOC, again, any progressive Democrat on the Hill should be calling for hearings and an investigation into how COVID money was spent, not just with ARPA, but with the CARES Act as well.
Well, what those people are doing instead, Anya, is they're approving $2 billion more to the cops.
That's what all the progressives did.
Well, January 2000.
Yeah.
The cop who came to save her was the one coming to kill.
But no, seriously, anyone who works there on the Hill should be put on the spot.
I don't get why there aren't more, you know, back in the day, I feel like members of Congress would do these hearings.
They would have committees.
They would actually try to investigate the government or when huge money dumps happen like this.
Like, what actually happened?
Where was the corruption?
No, and said, the Democrats are the ones rubber stamping it.
And then the only person who was opposed to any of this was like Thomas Massey.
Oh, right.
He was opposed to the CARES Act.
Sad.
Yeah, that's right.
So there was a shooting in the subway in Brooklyn in New York.
And I think there's 11 people.
I'll get you the exact number in a second.
But it was crazy how the New York Times used this story to incite fear in the population, which, you know, which drives more newspaper clicks and more newspaper sales and more internet clicks is fear.
And that's what this corporate news is good at.
And so we're going to show you.
I'm here with Max Blumenthal today, and we're going to show you how this works.
And I want to remind everybody, we'll see you in Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh next week.
Single tickets are available in all those markets.
Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com for a link for tickets.
We'll see you there.
But here is the story.
Police have arrested Frank R. James, the Brooklyn subway shooting suspect.
So this guy was thought to have shot a bunch of people in the Brooklyn subway.
And they finally apprehended him.
Okay.
And this guy, Alec Karak Tanzanis, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but he's a civil rights activist.
And he put together a thread about this because he noticed how the New York Times was just doing propaganda for the police department in New York Times.
And we'll show you.
Here it is.
Today, the New York Times responded to a mass subway shooting with a relentless string of propaganda.
Let's look closely at how the New York Times used a crisis to boost police talking points and lies in some creative ways.
So this is he's founder of an executive director of Civil Rights Corp and author of Usual Cruelty.
So there he is, Alex Karak Tenzis.
I want a headshot like that.
Me too.
He's like a like a 90s gap model.
Okay, here he is.
And here's the article we're talking about.
Shooting in subway station heightens simmering fears about public safety.
Now, that's not a headline.
That's an editorial.
Mass is a headline.
So he points out, first, the New York Times uses the mass shooting to direct readers to unrelated articles awash with police talking points.
I've separately addressed the reporting that the New York Times tried to use the mass shooting to get more attention for here.
So here's one.
Shooting in subway comes amid rise in gun violence across the city.
Tuesday shootings is reminiscent of a string of other incidents in recent years.
Arise in shootings has rattled the city and colored perceptions of public safety.
So that's what they say you need to know.
This is subtle, but the New York Times is making a political move here.
It is linking a unique mass shooting event by a lone gunman to the kinds of daily crime stories it has been writing suggesting, contrary to the evidence, that neighborhood crime is out of control.
It's not in New York.
Second, did you notice that the New York Times markets these three propaganda articles as what you need to know?
So those were links to three different stories, and they say they're what you need to know about this shooting.
But a pernicious aspect of the New York Times is its decades-long effort not to just shape people's views of the world, e.g., more cops is good, but to tell them that it is all the news that fit the print.
The New York Times narrowly curtails our worldview and then convinces us this is all we need to know.
Third, let me quote a few of the many bad things with these pieces.
The lead article on the shooting today did not mention that the United States is an outlier in the availability of guns or poverty or inequality or the lack of mental health care or that New York just added more cops to the subways.
So they don't tell you any of that.
That's the context they should be providing to tell you about this gun shooting.
They don't give you any of it.
Nowhere in the articles about the shooting is the possibility raised that all of the investments in new cops didn't and can't stop events like this.
Nowhere is the scientific consensus mentioned.
This scientific consensus that more cops is not going to stop shootings like that.
Violence is mostly not a function of police at all.
Why is this missing?
Who benefits from this?
What does New York Times do instead?
Well, it points readers to a fabrication by the New York Police Department that a recent decline of nine months homicides in an arbitrarily selected three-month period was due to, quote, a surge of arrests.
Let me be clear.
The timing of this doesn't add up and not a shred of evidence supports it.
So here they say the New York Times will use every resource and opportunity to secure the city.
Commissioner Sawell said, while reversing years will not take, but reversing years will not take weeks.
She credited the decrease in homicide rates to a surge in arrests.
In March alone, she said officers made more than 4,000 felony arrests, more than double the number of those made in the same time last year.
Well, the same time last year, everybody was locked down.
So that's why there's probably no arrests.
But also, that was in March, and the drop in homicides was for January.
So this doesn't, that's what he means when the numbers don't add up.
The stakes are enormous.
The New York Times lets police make stuff up, suggesting a link between 4,000 arrests in March to shooting declines in January and February.
This would be laughable if it weren't leading millions of people to think there is some connection between mass arrests and murder prevention, which there isn't.
Fourth, the New York Times editors went in and altered the initial factual headline to create a narrative.
This was a choice.
Why?
And who benefits from creating this fear?
And here's the original headline was several people shot in Brooklyn subway station.
They got rid of that and they went with shooting and subway station heightens simmering fears about public safety, which is total editorializing, which you're allowed to do, but it's showing you that the New York Times is not trying to give you the straight facts.
They're trying to create a narrative that makes you read more stories so they can make more money.
They would, so as the kids would say today, they're doing that for clicks.
I mean, did it?
Do we have instant polling?
The original was a statement of fact.
The second is an editorializing empirical claim.
So we don't know.
Did the shooting in the subway station really heighten simmering fears about public safety?
Do you know that?
You're just guessing.
Do we have polling on this?
How do you know?
That's what this guy's saying.
Fifth, the New York Times also uses the opportunity to link to Eric Adams, that's the new mayor of New York, defending the return to brutal, illegal, and ineffective broken windows policing.
Incredibly, the New York Times asserts as a fact that the goal of such policing was to prevent more serious crime.
So here they talk about it.
Mr. Adams, former police officer, has sought to reassure residents and has made tackling gun crime a central focus of his administration.
He recently deployed seven new anti-gun police units.
Now, if you know anything about anti-gun police units, they're the most corrupt criminals in the world who join those things.
And if they're not corrupt criminals when they join them, they become them.
And that's why they've disbanded these anti-gun units all across the country.
Because they plant guns on people, they turn out to be the criminals.
That's what happens.
They violate people's rights constantly, and then they end up actually planting evidence.
That's what's going to happen here.
I'll guarantee you that's what's going to happen here.
They're going to violate people's rights.
And whose rights do you think they're going to violate?
White people from Wall Street or black and brown people from the Bronx in Brooklyn.
And then they're also going to plant evidence.
That's what they do.
So the police department began to enforce so-called quality of life matters, recalling the city's embrace of broken windows policing, the stricter enforcement of low-level offenses in an effort to prevent more serious crimes.
That's not how it works.
But that's what the New York Times will tell you.
This New York Times fact would come as a surprise to the generation of scholars who have demonstrated that such policing was about controlling certain populations, serving interests of developers, part of an explicit gentrification strategy, boosting overtime pay, racial control, etc.
So we've studied this.
We know what the results are.
And the New York Times is pretending like we don't know.
Like it's actually that propaganda is true about broken windows policing.
This is just pure political propaganda to couch the very specific goals of elite capitalists and police union enforcers as ostensibly about preventing crime.
It was never about that.
And the New York Times doesn't even suggest anyone thinks otherwise.
It's unreal.
So with all this extra clicks the New York Times gets from a breaking shooting, it used the opportunity to stoke fear, stare readers to policy police lies.
Highly dubious assertions are portrayed as fact.
And science denying suggestions that more cops and not less inequality is the answer to violence.
I feel like a broken record, but it's warranted because the New York Times is a broken record with all the breathless stories about violence, all types of crime in New York City and the United States are actually at near historic lows.
Crime is at historic lows.
People literally don't believe this actual fact because of news coverage like this.
An emergency focusing on interpersonal crime committed by poor people is being manufactured before our eyes.
And the same news institutions do not provide the same urgency to genuine threats to human civilization.
And he points out, for instance, 10 million people die each year from air pollution.
Nobody's talking about that, but they're talking about broken windows policy.
And so we're doing it again.
Let me bring in Max Blumenthal from the gray zone.
Max, what would you like to say about this?
Well, I think that anyone who questions how the NYPD has a $10.4 billion budget, which would make it one of the top 25 militaries in the world if it were a military of a sovereign nation, had no working cameras inside the 36th Street station,
had no officers with working radios, and had to rely on unionized subway workers to get people to safety instead of police officers, and then ultimately concocted the story that they identified the suspect by conveniently finding his credit card.
If you ask those questions, you are giving aid and comfort to Putin.
Yeah.
And I think that the only rational response to this that would frighten Putin and show resolve in the face of Russia's onslaught is to double the NYPD's budget to $20.8 billion,
which would make it then six times as large as the military of Ukraine, which is largely funded by the U.S. That's the only way because the NYPD has been doing such a great job in the subways of New York of cracking down on B-Boys who have entertained subway riders by breakdancing that I think we need to stop more b-boys to prevent ideological killers from going in and shooting people.
I think that's the only solution here.
Max, I saw, and could you look this up and if maybe you can find something on this, that the amount of money that they spend on policing the subway now in New York City is equal to the amount of money spent on people riding the subways.
I read that.
I'm pretty sure I read that.
Double check me on that.
Have you heard that same thing?
I've heard that, and I know that Eric Adams, the New York mayor who was a former cop, cut the homelessness budget by $650 million in order to increase the budget of the NYPD to carry out quality of life policing, specifically focused in the subway, which was always at the heart of the broken windows policing doctrine, focusing on the subways.
And the belief isn't that you eliminate violent crime by doing quality of life policing.
It's that the poor are the violent criminals.
And therefore, by eliminating the poor from public life, arresting them on petty infractions, Including by performing music in the subways or breakdancing, then you eliminate violent crime.
That's the theory of broken windows is that neighborhoods that have more broken windows tend to have more violent crime because there are more poor people hanging out on the corners, et cetera.
It was spun out of the Manhattan Institute, which is a corporate-funded neoconservative think tank in New York, introduced by Giuliani, brought back by Bill de Blasio, the Democrat.
And Eric Adams is doing it again, but it really has nothing to do with stopping mass shootings or violent crime.
It's been shown to fail, but it does do a good job of removing poor people.
That's really that, well, we know that's because we've studied it.
We know that that was the aim.
The aim really wasn't to lessen crime, it was to control certain populations.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Well, and this shooter appeared to have pretty ideological motives.
It wasn't just like some poor person who couldn't handle a handgun or something.
What was his ideological motives?
Do you know?
Well, he didn't seem to be a big fan of white people.
Oh, really?
Okay.
I didn't know.
I don't, I didn't, I didn't get to that part of the story.
I just found, I didn't know he was.
I mean, he obviously, I would say he's severely mentally ill.
I know you're not allowed to say that.
You have to say everyone's like a terrorist, but I think this guy had a few, he had some serious mental issues.
Well, he should swing over.
Well, in Brooklyn, I know John Hinkley is doing a set this Saturday.
It's sold out.
It's sold out.
Friends of mine tried to get tickets.
That's just amazing.
So John Hinckley, who shot the president because he was in love with Jody Foster, and he's probably still in love with Jody Foster, has been released and he's doing concerts.
Well, I was, yeah, he's doing musical concerts at a hotel in Brooklyn, and they're sold out.
What was the role?
So here is the, what's that?
I was just wondering what Jodi Foster role really stoked John Hinckley's interest.
Was it taxi driver or what film was it?
I bet it was taxi driver.
Understandable.
And yes.
So this is, says the, and the MTA is from Streets Blog, New York City.
MTA will spend $249 million on new cops to save $200 million on fare evasion.
So they lose $200 million on fare evasion every year.
So to fight that, they're going to spend more money than they lose on the fare evasion.
So that was the stat I saw.
Okay.
So I guess this is why they don't call the Mathematics.
They don't call it the Mathematics Transportation Authority.
Fair evasion, I mean, if you, I lived in New York for a long time, anyone who lives in New York, you can see what's going on there.
There's like the emergency exit door, and it's easy to just get someone on the other side to hold it open for you, or it's often just open because people are coming out with strollers.
And, you know, people, homeless people tend to walk in and they get on the subway when it's cold out.
Or they, you know, very poor people can still transport themselves.
And the fairs, that's not how the MTA is making its budget.
It's through taxes, including taxes from wealthy people who keep getting their taxes cut under governors like Cuomo.
So it's just, it's just cover for going after the poor.
And that's what this is about.
And the other thing, it's just so weird to me.
How are there no cameras with this budget?
No camera, no CCTV showing this shooting.
Right?
No officers.
The officers' radio is all malfunction.
This guy was apparently known to the FBI.
I mean, unless I'm wrong, he was known to the FBI.
He was known to be a dangerous individual.
And then the way that they say they nailed him was they found his credit card at the scene.
What are the chances of that?
Just like they found the 9-11 hijacker's passport.
Yeah, Muhammad Atta's passport was found at the base of the World Trade Center in all of this ash.
It's the flame-proof passport.
They found the passports of two other hijackers at the Pentagon.
And then Zacharias Mousawi, somehow they found that he had a crop dusting manual.
Then they found Muhammad Atta's suicide note and he said he shined his shoes before he went to heaven.
Like these guys, they were like really prolific writers.
They're like writing more than I do.
So there you go.
Now you know what's happening in New York City.
And now you know what happens when you elect a cop to be the mayor of your city.
They cut the budget to help people by $650 billion and they give it to the cops.
Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy.
This is actor, director, and producer, Alec Boldman.
I like how he gives all his titles.
Actor, producer, director.
Oh, hi, Alec.
Thanks for calling us again, buddy.
You are most welcome.
Well, why are you gracing us with your voice today?
I'm calling to voice my unmitigated, unattenuated support for the people of Ukraine and their brave leader, Vladimir Zemsky.
Okay, all right.
I see.
All right.
This war of aggression, as I am confident history will see fit to name it, is a war crime and a crime against humanity.
All possible effort must be put forth to end this calamity.
I stand firmly with my fellow celebrities in asserting this in public settings.
Having a little Ukrainian flag in my Twitter.
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 JimmyDorkComedy.com, sign up.
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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!
I'm not kidding.
Don't freak out!
Don't freak out.
Do not do not.
Do not not freak.
Do not freak.
Do not freak out.
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