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May 27, 2022 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:03:28
20220527_TJDS_20220527_Podcast_-_52622_12.08_PM
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Hey, we're doing stand-up comedy in Irvine, California, Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Louisville, all over the place.
go to jimmydork comedy.com for a link for tickets.
*Bell rings* Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy, this is Barack Obama.
Ah, Mr. President, how are you?
Jimmy, I am completely devastated.
About the tragedy in Texas?
No.
About the plot to assassinate George W. Bush.
I see.
Jimmy, as a former U.S. president myself, you have to understand we are under siege.
Really?
Is that so?
Yes.
We have our families have to have Secret Service around us 24-7.
We literally can't go anywhere without them.
And now this?
An actual assassination plot?
When is Congress going to act to protect former U.S. presidents and their families?
Okay, first of all, the FBI caught this guy, this Iraqi national living in Ohio.
So I would bet my bottom dollar that they were the ones who catfished him and radicalized him online.
All right, look, we'll never know why these folks turned a terrorist.
Okay.
Whether they're radicalized by ISIS, the FBI, FedEx, it doesn't matter.
What matters is they stopped him before they could do George any harm.
Yes, God forbid.
Michelle and I would have been devastated.
Yeah, I'm sure.
And supposedly, this was an Iraqi citizen, as he said, who was still mad about the Iraq war and the utter destruction that Mr. Bush unleashed on his country.
Can you believe it?
Yes.
Yes, I can.
After all these years.
I mean, when was that?
The 90s?
That was February 2003.
Oh, right, right, right.
I mean, I, you know, I oppose it all, but man, that was a long time ago.
I figured they'd gotten all that out of their system when that reporter threw a shoe at him.
Yeah, I doubt it.
Well, anyway, it's unfair to blame him for everything.
Meaning.
Well, I did some shit, too, you know?
Remember?
Barack Obama, the drone guy?
It felt like we weren't absolutely recognized in the 2010s.
I mean, where's my assassination plot?
Wait, you want an assassination plot?
Well, not really.
I mean, not exactly, but, you know, some recognition would be appreciated.
I mean, a rogue Libyan or Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, whatever.
I don't know.
It just seems like the FBI could radicalize one of those guys against me.
I have a legacy to uphold here.
Amazing.
Well, you know, it was all done to protect the United States and her interests abroad, of course.
But, you know.
Mr. President, sorry, I'm getting another call.
Hello, this is Jimmy Doer's show.
Who's this?
Hey, this is George W. Bush.
Oh, wait a minute.
Another former president.
How blessed is this show?
Is that Barack Obama on the other line?
Good soon as hell is.
How you doing, George?
I'm doing great, Barry.
Someone did me off since you were on a live stream talking trash.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Oh, I wouldn't say that.
Oh, he was, George.
Shut up, Jimmy.
No, George, I was just saying that I had a violent presidency as well.
As violent as mine.
Come on, Barry.
Don't be delusional.
Don't mire yourself in delusions.
I just had a different style.
Death from above, baby.
Drones.
Drones is where it's at.
That's nothing compared to a land invasion and occupation.
Nothing.
Complete devastation.
Failed states.
There's a reason they remember me and they've forgotten all about it.
Well, now, hold on a minute.
That's not fair.
That's a low blow.
That's a dirty pool.
I'm just busting your spurs.
You did some violent, inexcusable shit, my friend.
But nothing compared to the Bush years.
Hey, can I interject here?
Who are you?
I'm Jimmy Door from the Jimmy Door Show.
Can I just offer a peace branch here and say that you're both war criminals, both responsible for ushering in the darkness that is now the 21st century?
And you both should be tried at The Hague.
Okay, I like this guy.
Jimmy, I appreciate that.
Those are meaningful words from an old friend.
Thank you.
No problem at all, fellas.
Hey, George, when are you going to come up and see me at the see us at the vineyard?
Visit me and the family.
I don't know.
We're needing to come to Dallas.
Hey, how about we meet halfway?
Chicago.
We could visit Ram and see how he's doing.
Either way, we have to get together.
Our families.
I swear I'm going to beat you at Canaster this time over my dead body.
I'm sorry.
I got to duck out on this call.
I need to go projectile vomit.
Oh, okay.
You take care, Jimmy.
feel better guy I just met.
Establishment media sets of August fighting.
So good luck.
Bullshit.
We can't afford.
Why is fomenting this?
Whoa.
Watch and see as the jet go from medium speeds and jumps to medium and hits them head on.
It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
you you you Our guest today is Chris Hedges.
He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, activist, and the best-selling author of 12 books, including his latest release, Our Class, Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.
Until recently, he also hosted the Emmy-nominated show on Contact for RT America and RT International.
His work can now be found on his substack at chrishedges.substack.com.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Chris Hedges.
Hi, Chris.
Hey, thanks, Jimmy.
Good to see you.
You had a great article.
I just want to show people this article at your Substack, and it's titled No Way Out But War.
And I just want to show them a little bit of it.
The United States, as the year unanimous, as the near-unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism.
No high-speed trains, no universal health care, no viable COVID relief program, no respite from 8.3% inflation, no infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average, 68 years old.
So we could have fixed Every bridge that's structurally deficient in the United States, we decided to send it to the military industrial complex to kill people.
No forgiveness of the 1.7 trillion in student debt.
No addressing income inequality.
No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed hungry each night.
No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings.
No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses.
No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation.
No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
And the liberal class has retreated into boutique activism, where issues of class, capitalism, and militarism are jettisoned for cancel culture, multiculturalism, and identity politics.
Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine.
At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests.
Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler.
And so let me bring in, Chris.
That was quite a list of things that the United States is not investing in the United States.
So our government, our culture, has decided to not invest in our own country, but instead to fleece the treasury, which is what the CARES Act was.
It transferred $5 trillion upward to the richest 1,000 people or so in the United States.
And now we're sending $40 trillion in a grift or a fleece from our treasury to the military-industrial complex.
And whatever was left over, we put in cash on pallets and sent to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe.
So that's what the United States is doing.
And this seems like a joke, like a cartoon.
Like they could have ended homelessness in America for that $40 billion.
By the way, there was no debate on it.
And so the liberal class, you say, has retreated to boot.
Instead of actually identifying and addressing these problems, they're all caught up in boutique activism and cancel culture and identity politics.
So let me bring in Chris Hedges.
Chris, how did we get here and how can we get out of it?
We got here by the perpetuation of the permanent war economy after World War II, justified through the Cold War.
And I was in Eastern Europe in 1989.
I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe.
We thought naively, of course, that NATO would be disbanded.
NATO, which was formed in 1949, was created to prevent Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe.
I was there when they promised Moscow under Gorbachev that they would not extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany.
We actually all talked about the peace dividend, and the arms industry wasn't having it.
And I think that was one of the driving forces, probably the major driving force with the expansion of NATO because you have to refit.
All those countries have to refit to be NATO compatible.
And so 14 countries, or Ukraine, even before the war, was a de facto NATO country.
And a lot of this is now paid with debt.
So U.S. debt is $30 trillion.
That's $6 trillion more than GDP, which is $24 trillion.
We pay $300 billion a year just to service the debt.
And that, of course, is going up and up and up.
Biden's new defense budget, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, is more than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
And what's happened is, and this happens in late empire.
It happened in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It happened in the Roman Empire, is that it perverts the domestic economy, in essence, destroys it.
And Washington is the political class is hostage to corporations, and in particular, the defense, or they call them defense, let's call them the arms industry.
And the country is just morally, politically, and economically rotting away.
And there's no stopping it.
There's no control.
Both parties are completely in sync.
You had, you played a clip a couple of days ago I saw with Marjorie Taylor Green, and I used that quote at the end of my column.
You're in a really frightening state when somebody is demented as Marjorie Taylor Greene is speaking a truth about the $40 billion, while, of course, people can't get baby formula.
And I think that the establishment, it's really one ruling class now.
The establishment Republicans have just bonded with the establishment Democrats, who they didn't have much differences with anyway, except for maybe on cultural issues.
And I think this is going to play.
I think that the whole idea that the Democrats are going to ride the overturning of Roe v.
Wade, it allows the states to decide abortion control.
So states like Texas, which have virtually outlawed abortion at this point, are going to change.
States like New York or New Jersey, where I live, will remain the same.
But the idea that they're going to ride that or ride the Ukrainian war to some kind of comeback in the midterms, I think, is very foolish because people like Trump or people like, I hate to say it, Green, and I think you pointed this out quite correctly, are speaking a very important truth that the country is just being disemboweled.
That was a great quote by Carl Leibnick, the great German socialist who called the German military industrial complex the enemy from within.
And that's essentially true.
It's just stunning to me.
Why wouldn't, like, I mean, I've been asking this question for at least two straight years since the lockdown started and COVID started.
What?
So when they did the CARES Act and they gave $5 trillion, including Bernie Sanders and everyone in the squad, voted for the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history, which was the CARES Act, which was $5 trillion upward.
Why wouldn't they take $40 billion like they just did at eye blink and gave it to Ukraine?
Why wouldn't they give that to our own country also?
They act like it's come out of their own pockets.
It's not.
It's they're printing it and they're just handing it to their donors.
And is it because there aren't that homeless people like aren't donors or workers don't donate enough to candidates?
I mean, it would seem to be in the like what FDR told the people back then.
He didn't bring socialism to America.
He saved capitalism.
And how did he do it?
He told the rich people that if we don't give these people some of our money, they're going to take all of our money, meaning a revolution, Which he had just seen happen.
So, can you get inside their mind?
I asked this question to Dylan Radigan, who used to host a show on MSNBC, and he's a financial guy from Wall Street.
And he just, the only answer he could have is that we just live in a rapacious oligarchy.
But it's just like, what is, I just can't get past, like, what's stopping them from doing for the United States what they just did for Ukraine.
Because the people who suffer from these effects have been completely disempowered.
Half of the country lives in poverty or near poverty, but you never see these people on commercial networks.
They've been rendered invisible and even demonized.
And then there's no organization.
There are no unions.
We write the Communist Party out of U.S. history.
It was a very important and powerful force in the 1930s, as were the socialists, the old CIO, the Wobblies.
There was an independent press appeal to masses, was the socialist newspaper, had the fourth highest circulation in the country.
And all of that was systematically dismantled with the Red Scare after the Cold War and the deforming of liberals.
So any liberal politician, Henry Wallace, 1948, he'd been Roosevelt's vice presidential, had been his vice president.
He ran on an anti-militarist platform.
They crucified him.
Same with George McGovern in 72.
So it became impossible within the liberal wing.
We used to have an old liberal wing, Eugene McCarthy and Fulbright and others, who would at least challenge cost overruns and ridiculous weapon systems that were just boondoggles for defense contractors to make money.
That's all gone.
It's vanished.
We're completely helpless, completely powerless.
And it's a combination of forces, the consolidation of the media into corporate control, defense contractors.
Doesn't General Electric own Rachel Maddow and MSNBC?
They think it was a Comcast.
So, yeah, it was General Electric used to own controlling share, but then they sold it to Comcast.
Right.
There's another one of the most hated companies in America.
So, yeah, it's who are these?
You know, this has been you and Glenn and Taibbi and others have all written this, but of course, it's just the echo chamber from the military and intelligence industry, all of whom are raking in millions of dollars.
I mean, if you finish at a four-star general, I can't remember what your pension is, 180, 200.
I mean, it's really generous, but of course, it's not enough.
And Austin was working for, what was he on Raytheon's voice?
Yes, Raytheon.
Yeah.
I mean, so it's just become so patently corrupt within the system.
And we have been so effectively disempowered that, I mean, I think, wasn't it, 90% of Americans want gun control?
I think that's right.
Some form of background check.
It doesn't really matter anymore because we've lost the only power we had, which was organized power.
And we're just being taken for a ride.
And you've gone after the squad, I think, correctly.
It's just a public relations gimmick.
You know, and they all voted for this 40 billion.
That's more than 40 because they already got 13 billion.
So it's actually close to 54 billion.
And they're talking about a long, prolonged conflict and fueling $4 to $5 billion a month into the Ukraine.
And these idiots, the Kagans and all the others, blinking.
And they all think that when they finish with Russia, they're going to take down China.
That's what Biden was doing in Asia.
It's just utter insanity.
Yeah, if Trump was doing, like, this is the kind of stuff that people warned that Trump would do.
Trump, like, Trump is going to start war with two nuclear powers.
Could you imagine if Trump was doing that?
They'd be going crazy.
But it's Joe Biden and the establishment, and everyone's acting like it's their good Christian thing to do.
We have to start a war with, and they're printing headlines in places like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
We have to show that we're not afraid of a nuclear war.
Stuff like that.
It's the craziest stuff.
Like, that's the stuff you thought Trump was going to say.
And now the people, so, and you think that the people in charge are the grown-ups, right?
No, they're just smart enough not to tweet like a maniac.
That's all that Joe Biden.
They're not smart.
They're not grown-ups.
They're psychopathic, homicidal maniacs.
The people who are running this country, it certainly isn't Joe Biden.
If anybody thinks Joe Biden's making one decision, you're also demented because Joe Biden is demented.
And that's not hyperbole, right?
That's a fact, and no one wants to talk about it.
And so who is making the decisions?
We know it's not Kamala Harris.
We know it's not Joe Biden.
I wonder who it really is.
And so it's not Trump that is the maniac.
Trump right now, as Chomsky correctly pointed out, is the only statesman of any stature who's calling for peace right now.
It's Donald Trump.
So the exact opposite of the stuff that we were taught and we were told and we were bombarded with every day for six years that Trump is a maniac, homicidal maniac who shouldn't have his finger on the nuclear button.
No, it turns out Trump was actually the peace candidate and that and of course Joe Biden.
I mean, I'm not saying Donald Trump isn't a maniac.
I'm saying that in this situation, it turns out the reason why he was Russia gated was because he was going against the deep state.
Because he didn't, he did run on the Iraq war being a mistake.
He did run on pulling our troops out of the Middle East.
He did try to get troops out of places and Joe Biden's, like in Somalia and Joe Biden's sending him right back in or Ethiopia.
There was actually a pause in Africa during Donald Trump's administration.
And now we're right back in ramping it up.
And you have a very interesting part in your article at your Substack.
And I want to read this to the people so we can talk about it.
You say in 1992, defense planning guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolferitz, argued that the U.S. must enter a no-rival superpower.
And sure, a no-rival superpower again arises.
So in 1992, then defense planning guidance memorandum under U.S. Secretary Paul Wolfritz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises and that the U.S. should protect its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity.
So that was in 1992.
Okay.
And then later on in the late 98, on the Today Show, Secretary of State under Clinton, Madeline Albright, gave the Democratic version of this same unipolar document, a doctrine.
She said, if we use force, it is because we are Americans.
We are the indispensable nation, she said.
We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.
So this is, and so what was the result of that policy, which was both Democrats and Republicans coming together under the same unipolar doctrine, meaning that the United States should be the only superpower and there should be no check on us.
And what was the result of that?
Well, the military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare.
None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center, Twin Towers.
That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.
So I see them doing even worse things now than this, right?
So the stuff that they did in the 90s, the blowback from it was the World Trade Center and things like that, Osama bin Laden.
And now what they're doing is they're going to wreck the dollar.
That's happening.
So the dollar being the world currency, that's going to go away because of that.
And they're doing it right out in the open.
And they're starving our own country as we flood Europe with weapons and cash to the most corrupt people there.
So it makes me extra nervous that this is going to keep going and this will never stop.
And we're going to really, this, you know, this people talk about we're at the end of an empire, end-stage capitalism.
This is all real.
It's happening right out in the open and no one's doing anything about it.
And if anybody does stand up and say something, they're immediately marginalized, right?
They're immediately, or like, what could they do to Matt Taibi, Glenn Greenwald, yourself?
They took all your stuff off YouTube.
They call those people right-wingers to try to discredit them.
So I don't even know if there's a question in there.
It's just more of a fear.
If you want to respond to any of that.
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I wrote a column called The Pimps of War, which was largely on the Kagans and Victoria Newland, all these figures that never go away.
I mean, Victoria Newland, who's now working for Biden.
I think she's number three in the State Department.
She was Cheney's chief policy advisor.
You know, Obama had these people in the White House.
So it doesn't, you know, they serve both parties and all of these think tanks, the Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, Brookings.
They are lavishly funded by the defense industry, which is why people like Fred Kagan, remember these people are just wrong about everything.
I covered the, started as a journalist covering the war in El Salvador.
And that's when I first ran into these nutcases like Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan was working for him.
He was the director, State Department's public diploma in the State Department Public Diplomacy Office.
They were just propagandists for the death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Contras who were just drunken rapists and sadists and thugs and killers.
And their job was really to discredit, attempt to discredit all of the reporting that we were doing on the ground.
They've been wrong about everything.
They were wrong about Iraq.
They thought we were going to invade Iraq and democracy was going to emanate outwards across the Middle East and re-change the entire landscape of the Middle East, including Iran and American hegemony and power would be resurrected.
They were wrong about Syria, wrong about Libya, wrong about Afghanistan.
They're wrong about Russia.
And they're writing, I mean, you should read this stuff.
It's very frightening.
I mean, they are just so cavalier about taking or antagonizing a nuclear power.
And you've got Kagan, for instance, in the latest issue of foreign affairs, essentially saying, don't worry, Putin isn't going to use the bomb.
It's, you know, the fact that these people don't go away, it's like some kind of bacterial strain or something you can't get rid of.
Well, of course, they're perpetuated because they are the shills for the war industry.
That's it.
And I have far more experience in the Middle East than any of these people.
I've spent seven years there.
I spent months of my life in Iraq.
I speak Arabic.
I was the Middle East Bureau chief for the New York Times.
But because I won't parrot that narrative, I'm completely blanked out.
It's not a matter of picking anybody with any real world experience.
It's about people, self-identified experts and specialists who essentially work as pimps for the war industry, and they're lavishly paid for it.
And they have prominent platforms.
Who's that guy, David Frum?
Remember David Frum?
Yes.
I was invited to be on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, which surprised me.
And I said I would only go on if I had 20 minutes.
And they assured me that I would.
And I'm sitting there and they put that makeup on your face.
I'm sitting in the room with Frum.
And suddenly the producer comes in and goes, you're not on.
They gave all my time to From.
That's MSNBC.
And this is the guy, Axis of Evil.
I mean, this guy is awful, Islamophobe and everything else.
So, yeah, the rot is palpable.
And I think that, you know, I, of course, don't ever loathe Trump like many people.
But many of the supporters of Trump and supporters of people like Green, I mean, what happened when Green essentially said, we can't get baby formula for our kids and we're sending $40 billion, which they had no time to read.
I think they get it, like 3 o'clock or something.
3 o'clock in the afternoon and they did not have time to read the bill.
Yeah, they didn't even have time to read it.
It's just, and nobody even knows how it's going to be dispersed.
It's just like Syria in that sense.
And I, you know, I think that there is a feeling among a huge segment of the population, and they're not wrong, that they're being had.
And if the only people who are going to be honest about their being had come from these kind of proto-fascists, then we're in serious trouble.
I mean, the quote-unquote squad, even Barbara Lee, I mean, Pelosi, she made her trip to Kyiv.
And I like Barbara Lee.
I mean, she was the only person to stand up in the House or the Senate against unlimited authorization to wage war.
After 9-11, even Xi's Sunday, they've all signed on for this insanity.
And, you know, you're talking about repugnant figures who speak truth.
I mean, I think at the top of the show, you mentioned Kissinger.
Kissinger, because Kissinger comes out of that old kind of Cold War and that Sino-Soviet split, always the tactic was to keep China and Russia from ever forming an alliance.
And of course, what Biden has done is propel them into each other's arms because Russia has nowhere else to go and they're carrying joint military exercises off the coast of Japan.
I'm not an economist, so I'm not going to pretend to tell you when the dollar will collapse, but they're certainly working overtime.
I mean, to make sure, as you said, Italy's paying in ruples to sever their self from the dollar.
Once they replace SWIFT, which is the international money transfer system, once they can set up a system like that, then we go back and look at the 1950s in Britain when the pound sterling was dropped as the world's reserve currency.
That plunged Britain into a pretty severe depression, and we won't be any different.
Nobody's going to want to buy our treasury bonds.
The value of the dollar will plummet a third, two-thirds, who knows?
But it's going to be really, really grim.
Because we're running on fumes.
I mean, the empire runs on debt.
Yeah, I know.
And it runs on the petrol dollar, and they're doing everything they can to get rid of it.
And here is Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And let me just show a little bit of that.
Thank you.
A rise in opposition to the Ukrainian supplemental bill: $40 billion, but there's no baby formula for American mothers and babies.
So now, you mentioned this in the article, and I've already shown this on my show.
And my point is that, yes, when someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene easily gets to the left of the Democratic Party, including the squad and Bernie Sanders, that spells disaster for the United States.
That's the point.
And people get mad that I point that out.
Instead of, again, we're a nation full of adult children of alcoholics.
And one of the hallmarks of being an adult children of an alcoholic is that you don't get angry at the person who's abusing you.
You get angry at the person who points out that that person's abusing you.
I've experienced that my whole life.
And so that's what happens here.
So when people like Chris Hedges, Matt Taebe, Glenn Greenwell, myself, we point out stuff like this.
People then get angry at us instead of angry at the thing they should be angry at, which is that Marjorie Taylor Green is doing what the squad should be doing and Bernie Sanders should be doing.
And that's disgusting.
And imagine if they were joined together.
Imagine if the squad, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, any who else?
There's 100 progressives in the progressive caucus.
I mean, maybe we could have done something.
But no, and by the way, this was all show.
So what's weird about this is that she articulates the problem.
So it shows you that they all know the problem.
She went on to vote against baby formula relief.
So it just goes to show you they know what's going on and what should be done.
And they can articulate it when it serves their partisan purposes.
But when it actually comes to do something, nobody's going to do anything for you.
Nobody.
Isn't that right, Chris?
Yeah, it's all burlesque.
It's all political theater on both sides of the aisle.
You know, we have serious existential threats, new pandemics, the environmental emergency.
And the proposed budget for the CDC next year is $10.675 billion.
Proposed budget for the EPA is $11.881 billion.
Ukraine got more than double that.
Yes.
And this is, you know, the real crises that we face, the real dangers that we face are irrelevant.
War is all that matters.
And that is a recipe, as past empires have shown, for just collective suicide.
And I see no confrontation of, you know, there's, and you're right, that just because they speak a truth, I mean, just because Trump speaks a truth about the war in Iraq.
I mean, to be fair to Trump, he did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but then he ratcheted up the economic war with Venezuela.
He reinstituted sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended.
He also increased the military budget by 10%.
I believe he apparently wanted to carry out a missile strike on Mexico to destroy drug labs.
But he did articulate a truth that I think resonates.
And the cowardice or the kind of careerism that has gripped the supposedly progressive wing of the Democratic Party has silenced it.
And, you know, in the long term, that truth is the most powerful weapon they have.
And they're not using it.
It's why Bernie would, I think both of us were pretty critical of Bernie, but Bernie wouldn't go after the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party was as to blame for the debacles that were visited on the working class and the rest of the country as the Republicans, especially Clinton.
So that inability to speak the truth about what's happening to the society and ceding that to figures like Marjorie Taylor Green or Trump is really dangerous.
Even the Democrats all now project that they're going to get shellacked in the midterm.
And they don't care.
They don't care because they don't work for you.
They don't work for me.
They are self-interested dealers who work for the military industrial complex, big pharma, Wall Street, oil companies, and telecommunications.
And I mean, Silicon Valley.
That's it.
That is it.
And if you think otherwise, just look around.
Just look around.
Just look where they go as soon as they leave office.
That's right.
I mean, and that's just the insidious, flagrant, open corruption is staggering.
There's even no shame about it anymore.
Barack Obama has a 48-acre estate on Martha's Vineyard.
What the?
That's the guy.
That was the head of the Workers' Paired Party.
There you go.
Well, Clinton left office because of legal bills, owing a million dollars.
He and Hillary are now worth, what, $126 million.
Yeah, that's right.
And then, of course, they set up that found.
They all set up these foundations.
Yeah.
Which just becomes a way to kind of funnel money.
The Clintons were shameless about it when she was Secretary of State.
There's a figure I forget, but it's the numbers of donors to the Clinton Foundation who then got direct access to the Secretary of State was Saudi Arabia.
The good people.
The good people.
Everybody, check out Chris's article at his substack, chrishedges.substack.com.
It's a great article.
It's a great read.
You're going to want to pass it around.
Hey, we're doing stand-up comedy in Irvine, California, Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Louisville, all over the place.
Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com for a link for tickets.
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I'm here with Chris Hedges, and we're talking about what Kissinger had to say about Ukraine.
Kissinger says Ukraine must give up land to Russia, warns West not to seek to humiliate Putin with defeat.
And that picture looks like he just let out a very long fart.
So Henry Kissinger said Ukraine must concede territory to Russia.
How is this going to end?
How is this going to end?
Henry Kissinger, not known to be a soft lefty, says that Ukraine must concede territory to Russia to end the war and warned that West, the West, that a humiliating defeat for Russia could result in wider destabilization.
So Putin's gotten to Kissinger too, I guess.
That's what the statesman, now 98, made the comments in a conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the WEF.
You know those people.
On Monday, the Telegraph reported.
Ian Bremer says, I've never seen a Davos crowd give a standing ovation for a virtual speech before.
Zelensky, this guy, he's like the bono of politics now.
It shows up in his t-shirt because he's fighting a war.
And everybody loves this.
So Kissinger says that Kissinger was the architect of the détente with China under Nixon's administration.
And he's one of the world's foremost advocates of real politic, in which nations put morals and principles aside to achieve their aim.
So that's good that Kissinger is giving them a reason to seek peace that doesn't involve morals or principles, right?
He's just being real politic about it.
Prolonged war is a shitty idea outside of any concern for needless loss of human life or any of that other fake politic hippie shit, right?
You need a good non-moral reason to not do it.
He goes on: negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.
Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante.
That's Kissinger.
Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.
Wow.
Do you think the Davos guests were rolling their eyes at that?
Yeah, no shit, Kissinger.
The whole thing is a proxy war with Russia.
You think we give a shit about Ukraine?
Most of us just now found out that it's not called the Ukraine.
Okay.
Kissinger's comments imply that Ukraine should accept a peace deal to restore the situation to what it was before February 24th, where Russia formally controlled the Crimea Peninsula and informally controlled part of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
That's called the Donbass.
Okay.
And Ukraine officials have opposed the idea that they should give up any territory.
You know why?
Because the Nazis in Ukraine will kill them if they say they should do that.
Ukraine President Voldemort Zelensky said Ukraine would only accept Russia giving up all claims to land in Ukraine and staging a total withdrawal.
So he has to say that or he's going to be killed by the Nazis.
That's not how it's ending.
I'll tell you, I can guarantee you this is not how the war is ending.
It's not happening that way.
The way it's going to happen is whatever Vladimir Putin wants, that's how it's going to end.
And it's going to end with Ukraine ceding those territories.
Kissinger in his remarks said that Russia had been an essential part of Europe for 400 years, helping balance the power structure at crucial times.
He argued that the West should not risk pushing Russia into closer alliance with China.
I hope the Ukrainians will match the heroism that they have shown with wisdom, Kissinger said, adding that Ukraine's proper place was as a natural buffer state rather than a fully integrated part of Europe.
Wow.
So now he's quoting from the Soft on Putin playbook.
How does he not get that World War III is worth it if it hurts that one guy we hate named Putin?
Okay, hold on.
In recent months, cracks have been showing in the Western Alliance against Russian aggression, with isolationist Republican lawmakers in the U.S. opposing a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine and Hungary styming European Union attempts to blockade Russian oil.
As inflation creeps up, public opposition to the war may also increase.
Isolationists, isolationists, the anti-vaxxers of statecraft.
How I hate them.
The isolationists.
And here's what friend of the show, Jackson Hinkle, says, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Henry Kissinger said the Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to help end the invasion.
Kissinger made this claim not because he's a Russian asset, but because he understands that Europe's economy is beginning to implode.
So let me bring in Chris Hedges on this.
Now, Chris Hedges knows a thing or two about things.
And what do you make of Kissinger coming out and saying this?
Why would he be unleashed to tell the truth?
Because he comes out of a long history of detente and Cold War relations.
He, George Kennan, the great Sovietologist, they all understood that we shouldn't expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany.
At the time, Kennan lived long enough to decry the expansion of NATO as the greatest mistake of the Cold War era.
The balance of power, power, politics, which, by the way, is what was disrupted in the Middle East.
Iran and Iraq used to balance each other out.
And then, of course, we went in there and essentially gave the Iraqi governments to the Shia and made it a province of Iran.
And so Kissinger's going back to that old playbook of making sure that there are never is an alliance formed between China and Russia.
And during the old Soviet Union, especially when Mao visited, he felt that Stalin didn't treat him with appropriate respect and deference.
So that's always been part of the kind of geopolitical game.
And that's where he's coming.
I hate to agree with anything Kissinger says.
He, of course, alone should spend the rest of his life in prison for what he did in 1973 against Salvador Allende and the Chilean people.
But he's right.
He's right.
That's how it's going to end.
But this is, and I think even the very cynical policymakers in Washington know that's how it's going to end.
But they pump all these weapons Into the Ukraine to essentially degrade Russia's military to create a kind of another Chechnya or the old Afghanistan where the Soviet occupation forces fought the jihadists who became the Taliban, who we funded under Carter.
And so he's going back to that old playbook.
And he does happen to be right.
But these current neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, all kind of fused into one, see this as a wonderful opportunity to, if certainly cripple Russia, both in terms of sanctions and in terms of its military capabilities.
The sanctions are clearly imposed, by the way, to get rid of Putin.
But Kissinger's right.
If it backfires the consequences, and I think it will backfire, the consequences are really dangerous for the stability of Europe.
I mean, cutting off Russian.
You can't talk about war if you don't talk about markets, which I also write about in this column.
They want to stop Russian oil shipments to Europe because then Europe's got to buy from the U.S. at much higher prices.
All of Silicon Valley, U.S. manufacturers, although, of course, most everything is produced in China, there are heavy restraints in terms of their access to the Chinese market.
So there's a great hostility towards the Chinese Communist Party.
And they certainly are stupid enough to think the threat of war might be a mechanism to open up those markets.
It's very clear that in their vision, the idea is to take down Russia, and then they're going to take down China.
And that's, of course, insanity and dangerous.
I mean, incredibly dangerous.
And we just got a whole public relations display by Biden, where he's essentially, he's invited Japan and South Korea to the NATO meeting in Madrid.
He's trying to create a kind of NATO pact in the Indo-Pacific.
It's just, it's nuts, but it feeds the coffers of the war industry or, you know, once again, making more money than they know what to do with.
And the paid political class and the paid pundits who serve their interests are parroting what it is they want the public to hear.
But it's exceedingly dangerous.
Look, I mean, these people, Biden, the Clintons, all of them, they have no business running the country.
I mean, they've destroyed the country.
Ralph Nader calls them traitors.
He's not wrong.
They're traitors.
But they perpetuate themselves and they do it, and they know the growing unpopularity.
They do it by essentially shutting out third parties.
As you know, I work with Ralph and making sure that you have to be so highly funded that essentially you select, they select the Canada as Biden was selected.
Remember, I mean, Biden was a disaster, and so they went to their savior who was Michael Bloomberg.
And then that didn't work out really well.
And then Obama had to intervene and tell everybody that to drop out.
It's just, and meanwhile, we're paying very serious consequences for this.
Well, it's not.
And by the way, so we, you know, you like to make it out that it's, you know, Biden and the usual Warhawks.
But it's, guess who else it is?
So here's Matt Duss.
And what does he say?
He says, good for Kissinger to pop his head up to remind people why Putin thought he could get away with it.
Oh my God.
And do you know who Matt?
So that's Matt Duss trying to discredit Kissinger, Kissinger calling for peace and for diplomacy and negotiations and laying out what is going to, this is how this is going to end.
And we all know this is how it's going to end.
And there's Matt Duss cheering on the war machine.
And why is that important?
Who's Matt Duss, Jimmy?
Matt Duss was the foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders.
And now we know why Bernie Sanders sucks so much.
Because he filled his campaign with people like that.
I'm pretty sure Matt Duss came right out of the Center for American Progress.
I'm pretty sure, as did his campaign manager, Bernie Sanders.
And now you know why Bernie Sanders going along with this.
Bernie Sanders isn't saying a peep.
He's not doing anything.
He's not standing up against this.
$40 billion could end homelessness two times over in America.
Bernie Sanders voted for it.
And now you know why we live in a failed state.
Because the people who are supposed to be are the champions of regular people, he's supposed to be an independent Bernie Sanders, which is the biggest bullshit I ever heard in my life, is going along with it.
There is no left in America.
I keep telling people that.
And people say stuff like, well, the squad is the best chance we have, Jimmy.
You shouldn't criticize them so hard.
We don't have the squad.
We don't have Bernie Sanders.
The Democratic Party, which means the corporate donors, the corporate class, the oligarchs, they have the squad.
They have Bernie Sanders.
We don't have anything.
This idea that they're on our side is a fucking joke of all jokes.
And there it is right there.
There's Bernie Sanders, foreign policy guy.
You know, when Kissinger is to the left of you, I think maybe I would take a look at my position again.
By the way, Kissinger, you call yourself a war criminal?
It sounds like a pussy.
That's what Matt Dust is saying.
That's what he's saying.
And here's Max Blumenthal.
Good for Dust to pop his head up to remind people why Bernie has become more hawkish on Ukraine than Henry Kissinger.
Okay.
And Michael Tracy says, what's the alternative to Kissinger's suggestion, if not perpetual war?
Because I still remember when everyone claimed they were sick of that.
The only alternative to what Kissinger is saying is forever war.
Here's Matt Dust.
Folks, if your anti-imperialism leads you to not along with Henry Kissinger, it might be a good step back, good to step back and take a moment.
And I say, if you're to the right of Henry Kissinger, it might be a good time to step back and take a moment, Matt.
And here's what Glenn Greenwald says.
Your boss, Bernie Sanders, just voted with Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, and Liz Cheney to support this $40 billion war package.
So I don't really think these sorts of guilt by association tactics are helpful to you right now.
Please compare the tweet above from Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Dutt, the one Duss I just showed you, bitterly scolding unnamed anti-war leftists for citing Kissinger on Ukraine, with the exact same person below twice approving, citing Kissinger on Iran.
So what he's pointing out is Matt Duss just tried to discredit Henry Kissinger.
And here's his tweets praising Henry Kissinger when he agreed with some good quotes from Kissinger, Schultz on Iran deal, but notable that in a long article, they offered no alternate ideas.
Some criticisms aside, good Kissinger and Schultz op-ed on Iran deal.
So that's who these people are.
And let me just bring in Aaron Matte.
He says when Bernie Sanders got Russiagated in February 2020, Max Blumenthal asked Matt Duss why the campaign had not pushed back and demanded evidence for the alleged Russian interference in its favor.
Dust said the campaign accepted U.S. Intel claims having been briefed convincingly.
Holy F. And the last slide, Bernie Sanders becoming more pro-war than Henry Kissinger pretty much sums up 2022 as a whole for me.
Well, now you know what real politic means.
There's the politics you thought you were getting, and then there's the real politic, and that's it.
Chris Hedges, what do you make of someone like Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders, the entire left, being as hawkish as anybody, as Ronald Reagan?
I don't can't even think of anybody.
Well, it's a faux left.
I mean, it's not a real left.
It's a left that won't confront American militarism because their political career would end.
Even Bernie wouldn't confront militarism.
The fact is, if we don't radically reduce military spending and retreat from our, what, 800 military bases around the world, if we continue to essentially throw ourselves into unsustainable debt to carry out acts of feudal and military adventurism, one debacle after another, starting with Vietnam, going all the way through.
And these people are not, they're never held accountable, both in the kind of pundit class of the Tom Friedmans and George Packers and the others.
They're all the same, the Kagans, they're all the same cheerleaders for all of these disastrous military interventions.
They never go away.
They're never held accountable.
The people who oversee it, both politically and militarily, are never held accountable.
And you can't confront them.
If you do confront them, it's political oblivion.
And Sanders is smart enough to know that.
So he didn't do it.
He won't do it.
What if he did, though?
What do you think?
What if he did?
What if he tried to rally the progressives in the House and get people out in the street, all of his followers, right?
All of his millions and millions of followers.
What if he tried to rally people against this?
Wouldn't that be something?
Yeah, well, that would show political courage, which he doesn't have.
He would end up like Nader.
That's not conjecture because I was at an event with Bernie before at the climate march with Shauna Sawan, the socialist city councilwoman, and she kept pressing him to run as an independent.
This is before in the first presidential run, 2016.
And finally, Bernie said, I don't want to end up like Nader.
Well, that was the answer.
He didn't want to end up like Nader.
His career was, his political career was more important to him than doing what you just said.
And they're ruthless.
I mean, I mentioned Henry Wallace.
I mentioned McGovern.
And the elites conspired against both of those figures.
Remember that when McGovern got the nomination, the Democratic hierarchy immediately bonded with the Republican hierarchy to destroy McGovern.
And then they changed all the rules.
So there would never be a grassroots movement that would be able to nominate a Democratic candidate again.
So he knows his history.
He knows what would happen.
He doesn't want to pay the price.
It is amazing.
So demonizing Ralph Nader the way they did, they even got lefties to do it.
And I never fell for that shit.
So I'm very proud of myself.
I never turned on Ralph Nader and pretended like he was the reason that we got George Bush as our president.
By the way, those same people who hated Ralph Nader for giving us George Bush now love George Bush.
Right, there you go.
And they still hate Ralph Nader.
Isn't that?
You know, it was so frustrating.
This is factually untrue because they stopped the counting after two counties and they swung it to the Supreme Court and they overturned any legal precedent that I know of and appointed Bush president by judicial fiat.
It had nothing to do with Nader.
Gore ran such a shitty campaign, he couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee.
But they were frightened of Nader.
That's right.
Just like they were frightened of Ron Paul.
Ron Paul pulled 19%.
That terrified them.
That was the last time a third-party candidate was ever going to get in the debates.
And even in the Democratic primaries, if you remember, most of those when Kucinich was running, I like Dennis, he's a friend of mine, when he was challenging the healthcare industry.
Well, the healthcare end of the debates are sponsored by corporations, most of them by the healthcare, healthcare, you know, the pharmaceutical and insurance industry.
And so they had this rule that you had to be number four, I think, and the top four could only enter the debate.
And I think when Dennis got to New Hampshire, or one of these states, I can't remember.
New Hampshire was first, so it probably wasn't New Hampshire.
But anyway, one of the states, he was four, and they locked him physically out of the hall.
They wouldn't even let him in.
The whole game is fixed.
And if you play by the rules that they imposed and the squad does, Bernie does, then they'll let you spout off.
And I mean, the right-wing does it too.
I mean, it's a good point you made.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's no different.
It's all political theater.
Nobody, I mean, the cynicism of it is staggering.
And who was it who denounced Green?
It was Raskin, this great constitutional lawyer, gets up and starts going after her for spouting Putin propaganda.
I mean, you can't.
It's just a burlesque.
That's their only game plan, right?
So if you tell a truth, they smear you as a Putin puppet or they smear you as an alt-right or they, and that's all they got.
And so I try to remind people that they did exit polls in Florida when Ralph Nader ran.
And they found out that if Ralph Nader didn't win, George Bush would have won by an even greater margin.
That there was people, do you know that 200,000 Democrats voted for George Bush?
Nobody talks about that.
200,000 registered Democrats in Florida voted for George Bush.
So this idea that Ralph Nader swung the election, plus they kicked everybody off the rolls, and the Democrats didn't stand up against that stuff.
They kicked like 90,000 people off their rolls.
They were going to be Democrat voters.
The Democrats didn't stand up for that.
There's so many things that happened in Florida, and Ralph Nader had nothing to do with it.
And by the way, if Ralph Nader could make that happen, then he should make that happen.
If you're that weak of a candidate, the truth can drop.
And, you know, that's the whole reason we live through Russia Gate because the Democratic Party couldn't come to terms with the fact that they're so odious, they're so repellent to normal people in the United States that they'd rather choose a game show host.
And so instead of dealing with that, they decided to pretend the election was stolen by Russia.
Just like when Donald Trump lost, he pretended the election was stolen by whoever.
So anyway, Anything you'd like to say to close this segment out?
That's why the censorship, so they're not going to address the systemic or structural issues.
There's no interest on their part in doing so.
So the way that they're responding is censoring critics of the Democratic Party from the left and the right.
That's what's happening.
So we talked about YouTube and its open platform.
YouTube erased six years ago.
Let's get to that.
That's our next story.
So let's hold that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Censorship.
Yeah.
So you're saying, so that's what I've been saying at this show.
You're saying a version of it now is that because our political system can no longer deliver to the people of America, it's just broken.
It is seized up.
Even right now, they can't give people, even during COVID, for some reason, Joe Biden wouldn't give a $2,000 check to people as if it was coming out of his own pocket.
So they're so broken that they know that people are going to revolt unless they can control the narrative.
And now they're using censorship to do it.
So instead of helping you, what they're going to do is stop the person who's pointing out that they're not helping you.
And they're going to censor them.
*Bell rings*
Hey, it's Jimmy.
Who's this?
What's up, Jimbo?
This is former Governor Rick Perry of Texas.
Ah, Governor Perry, what are you up to?
Jimmy, you will never believe what I am up to.
Okay.
You know how after John Boehner left Congress, he became a spokesperson for illegal weed?
Wasn't that cool?
Yes.
After helping the GOP platform, which ensured for years that young black men would be imprisoned for decades for minor marijuana infractions?
Yes, that was very cool.
I know.
Well, I'm doing the same thing, but for psychedelics.
For psychedelics?
Yeah, dude.
Molly and mushrooms and stuff.
Isn't that groovy?
You're going to have to explain this a little more to me.
Okay.
Okay.
Here's the deal.
Recently, I went to the Texas State Assembly to voice support for a bill that was proposed that would fund research into the psychiatric effect of these cool drugs.
I gave a talk at CPAC about it.
I'm trying to expand the minds of my fellow conservatives, man.
So you, arch conservative Rick Perry, think people should be doing Schedule One psychedelic drugs.
Is that right?
Well, there's an angle.
I have an angle.
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.
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All the voices performed today by the one and the only of the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
Don't freak out.
Do not freak.
Do not freak.
Do not freak out.
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