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Feb. 24, 2023 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:01:24
20230224_TJDS_20230224_Podcast_-_22323_10.25_AM
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Doing live stand-up comedy in Tempe, Palm Springs, Milwaukee, Nashville, Northampton, Massachusetts, Syracuse, co-host New York, and Hartford, Connecticut.
Go to jimmydoor.com for a link for tickets and become a premium member.
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*BEEP*
Hey, this is Aaron Matte sitting in for Jimmy Door.
Who's this?
Aaron, this is President Joe Blyden.
President Biden, thanks for calling in.
Well, I've been busy as the Dickens.
I'd be remiss if I failed to make my weekly call to the Jimmy Door show.
Something my aides have been begging me to stop doing.
Well, we're glad you did.
How do you feel about your recent state visit to Ukraine?
Aaron, I am over the moon.
Totally over it.
It's just a giant orb that doesn't even provide heat.
What matters is my recent state visit to Ukraine, which I may say, if I may say, was a rousing success.
Is that so?
How exactly?
Aaron, my presence in Ukraine showed the people of Ukraine and of the world that our commitment to countering Putin's agenda is strong and unwavering.
We will stand with Ukraine until the bitter end.
And when will that end come?
Aaron, that is up to Vladimir Putin to decide, and him alone.
As I've said, he could end this war tomorrow with the word.
And what if he doesn't?
Well, then we will keep on fighting.
Or, I mean, Ukrainians.
You know what I mean?
I'm afraid I do.
So what it sounds like to me is you're describing another endless war.
Aaron, no one knows how long a war is going to go on until it's done, till it's ended, sometimes suddenly.
Do you think the 30 years war broke out?
When that happened, they called it the 30 years war.
Hell no.
And even if they did, no one would have signed up for that mess.
They'd be like, 30 years, fuck that.
I got shit to do.
Right.
Same in Afghanistan, I assume.
How enthusiastic would the American populace be in 2001 if they knew that the war was going to be a 20-year morass?
Exactly.
That's why it pulled out.
I figured we had to stop that endless war and give it about a year or so until I started another one.
You are aware that these endless wars are extremely unpopular, right?
Even these proxy wars like the one in Ukraine.
Aaron, proxy wars are a time-honored American tradition.
We wouldn't be here if it weren't for proxy wars.
The American Revolution was the definition of a proxy war against Great Britain.
France and Spain came in as our allies.
The American Army drew its officer clash largely from continental European aristocrats.
That's why we are even a country.
So when we lend our military to others, we are paying that favor forward.
War after war.
Endless war.
It's beautiful.
Not sure I agree with that.
Well, agree with this.
Get bed, Jack.
Well, all right then.
Sorry, sorry.
I just, you know, I just gotta, I get a little testy when people question whether I'm doing the right thing with these endless wars.
I've been taking a lot of guff lately, and it's chapping my ass, pal.
Guff about how you went to address the citizens of another country when in eastern Ohio, there is a massive ecological disaster unfolding in real time.
Yes, exactly.
How'd you know I'm getting guff about that?
Because I'm giving you guff about it.
Oh, for Christ's sakes.
I thought you were just repeating some talking point you heard from a lunatic.
No, it's a very obvious misstep for an American president to make.
The optics of it are unfathomably bad.
Okay, Mr. Wise guy.
I'm assuming you don't follow me on Instagram.
What?
Why?
Because I made a post, or maybe it was a story.
Anyway, it was a pic of me on the phone with Ohio.
And the caption said, giving them everything they need.
So there you go.
I don't need to physically be there.
Social media says I'm helping.
That's what matters.
I'm sure that will be very comforting to the people of Ohio.
Perhaps you could at least go there soon.
No, it's too late.
Why?
Because Trump is going there now.
I can't go somewhere.
Trump is.
It looks like we're competing.
It makes me look bad.
So it's just going to be a Trump thing now.
You know, Ukraine is my thing.
That's where the chips have fallen, my friend.
Is that really how this works?
Yeah, yeah.
But you have to be pragmatic.
That was Trump country anyway.
It was always going to be.
But there are a lot of big donors.
I mean, are there a lot of big donors in fucking East Palestine, Ohio?
Fuck no.
Nope.
Do big donors support the war in Ukraine?
Fuck yes.
R and D alike.
As far as donor money, I still win the jackpot, and Trump is picking up crumbs.
Enjoy the rush belt, you one-term loser.
This is incredibly disheartening to hear an American president say.
I know.
That's why my aides and staff are begging me to stop calling us so insane this shit.
Well, we appreciate you doing so and showing us so explicitly what a sham our political system really is.
It's my pleasure, Aaron.
You like that I haven't screwed up your name once this entire phone call?
I wasn't going to say anything, but yes, I'm very impressed.
Thank you.
It took every ounce of my cognitive abilities and a forbidden cocktail of mind-enhancing drugs to pull that one off.
So I need to go lie down now.
Once the other guy comes back and I have to relearn his name over again, I'm going to have a stroke.
You mean Jimmy Door?
I don't say it.
All right.
My left side's going numb again.
God damn it.
Bruce, get in here.
Bring the thing.
I gotta go, Anthony.
I'm Aaron Maté sitting in for Jimmy here with Misha Pollan and Americans comedian Kurt Metzger.
And there was just recently a big anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., Rage Against the War Machine, voices on the left and the right dennis kucinich tulsi gabbard uh jill stein ron paul many others calling out the proxy war in ukraine demanding peace well it got some attention from msnbc uh specifically msnbc's most popular host rachel maddow uh the top Russia gator in corporate media of the last seven years.
And check out how she reported, quote unquote, this rally.
And I mean, truly random rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A rally in support of Russia, I guess, given all the Russian flags.
There was like a few Russian flags there.
None of the organizers had anything to do with that.
And that's what she's focusing on to paint this as some sort of pro-Russian rally, even though you had many speakers like David Swanson condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But that's why they said somebody's sending someone with flags for that very reason so that this union can go, whoa.
Remember Trevor No at the Trucker thing?
He goes, if there's even one Nazi flag at the parade, then it's a Nazi parade.
You don't say about Ukraine, but he'll say it about Truckers.
Exactly.
Exactly.
At least a rally against the U.S. supporting Ukraine.
What?
It's a rally against the U.S. using Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian against Russia, to use Ukraine for a proxy war and to call for the thing that the Biden administration has been sabotaging since even before Russia invaded, which is diplomacy.
That's what this rally was for.
She's got a funny definition of support.
Exactly.
Trying to stand up against the Russian invasion of their country.
This was a tiny event.
It was small.
It was a weird assemblage of Americans.
There were proud boys there.
There were some of the white supremacist groups she recognized.
The blue harem gentleman, that's a proud boy.
Okay.
Yeah, so I don't know what she's talking about here.
There were, I think, a few people who've been associated with some white supremacist groups, but they weren't invited by the speakers.
And I'm not even sure if they were there to support the rally.
And again, the irony of trying to call attention to a couple of people who might be associated with white supremacist groups when Maddow is supporting the policy of arming a Ukrainian military that has a neo-Nazi militia incorporated into it, the Azov Battalion.
I'd rather have a full nuclear war than even one proud boy being five feet of a thing I was having.
The Night the Right rally in Charlottesville a few years ago.
Was that a peace rally, though, Rachel?
Was that a thing of we need to end war no matter who?
I thought that was a kind of a racist thing.
In Charlottesville, you had people there who were supporting the Azov battalion inside Ukraine because they're a neo-Nazi battalion.
There was a brother, a brother of Tiki March going on in Ukraine at the same time is what she just brought up.
Also represented prominently the remains of the bizarre Lyndon LaRouche cult.
There were a lot of people gate culture around.
Even weirder than Blue and On.
Yes, there are some LaRouche people there.
And some LaRouche people, I have to say, although I'm not a LaRouche person, I don't agree with Lyndon LaRouche and what they're saying.
I think we're moving into a machine tool society.
Not yet.
But still, some members of the LaRouche movement have done some really brave actions standing up to all these warmonger politicians.
No one.
That's great with that.
Yeah, they've done.
So it's like, I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to diss them because they're a part of the movement.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Ew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, peace.
I don't like peace then.
Weird.
Flags, also the occasional flag of the former Soviet Union.
Also, at least one person who guest hosts for Tucker Carlson on the Fox News channel was there as a featured speaker.
So that's how she defines, or that's how she characterizes Tulsi Gabbard as someone who guest hosts on Tucker Carlson.
In a second, we're going to show why that's so disingenuous, because Rachel Maddow knows very well who Tulsi Gabbard is because she used to have her on back during a different era of Rachel Maddow and MSNBC.
There were anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, a lot of them.
There were cryptocurrency crypto.
Oh, my.
She's calling out conspiracy theorists.
She was the leading promoter of the conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had a secret conspiracy and that Trump was blackmailing Putin.
That's why she warned, for example, that Putin was going to get Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe because of the P-tape.
There's no one who spread conspiracy theories more than this person.
She's calling out conspiracy theorists and calling people anti-vaxxers when she's the one who spread misinformation, as you can know about by watching this show when she said that the vaccine stops transmission.
That's a straight up falsehood, which she's never actually retracted.
And we've shown that clip a million times on this show.
Jimmy has.
So she's calling, she's accusing other people of spreading misinformation and being conspiracy theorists, when really in corporate media, no one spread more conspiracy theories, more dangerous conspiracy theories than she has.
Promoters, it was a really weird group.
It was a small rally and a weird one.
How many times has she said weird?
It's weird to go like, yeah, peace, like only this many people want peace.
That's a strange thing to be like, ew.
But that's what it looks like.
That's the assemblage of short straws and split ends and loose change and loose electrons that's advocating in this country that Russia's in the right in this war and America should be on Putin's side as he keeps invading other countries.
Ukraine can't defend itself.
You don't want Ukraine to defend itself with 100 billion of our dollars.
They're advocating that the U.S. should be on the side of peace rather than a proxy war.
That's what Russia wants.
That's why you had many people condemning Russia's invasion.
It's not about supporting Russia.
But of course, this is the most, this is just so dis every word in here is basically.
I don't even like Russia, but I like it better than Rachel Maddow.
Like a genuinely, Putin I've never had feelings about, but I like him better than Rachel Maddow.
I can say that without any reservation.
I mean, no disrespect to the Americans who turned out.
Yeah, you mean disrespect.
You mean a lot of disrespect.
You just accuse them of being short of electrons.
Exactly.
They're short of electrons or short circuits.
I mean no disrespect.
It's so disingenuous.
I'm part of this small event this weekend, but it's not like they represent a big constituency that is arguing for this pro-Russia point of view.
So that's a pro-Russia point of view to want peace in Ukraine.
You know what?
Just real quick.
Overton texts me.
She's programming her viewers how to respond word for word.
That's exactly what that is.
Because every time I hear people say the same stupid, the same dumb shit like that, I'm like, oh, that's a trickle.
They probably didn't even watch Rachel Maddow.
The girl they're dating watch it and told them, and then they say it to me.
Here's Jimmy Dorr.
Maddow is a straight-up psychopathic warmonger.
That's actually not hyperbole.
She's pretending that NATO and the U.S. did not intentionally provoke this war.
And she focuses on some rando holding a Russia flag to discredit the peace rally.
Of course she did.
Jimmy, Russia can't just invade a sovereign nation.
You know how bad that is to go into a nation that's sovereign?
Never.
The horror.
Jax Page, dirtback leftist, says no interviews, no on the ground reporting, just a few shots, hyper-focused on a Russian flag and labeling it a pro-Russia rally to no talk about being anti-war, no discussion about what endless war costs us just lies because MSNBC Rachel is brought to you by Boeing.
Because Boeing believes in girls in STEM.
So a Twitter user, I didn't catch the username.
I apologize to you.
I will credit you when I can.
There was a Grimes, I think, in the name.
Is this a joke?
so what this person did is he put together how Rachel Maddow would cover the anti-Iraq war rallies if they were happening today.
This is a truly random protest in the UK.
A rally in support of Iraq, I guess.
Saddam Hussein, judging by all the Iraqi flags in the audience.
This is a pro-Saddam Hussein rally.
Oh my God, you guys, it's so random.
Look at all the Iraqi flags.
It must be a Pres Saddam Rally.
Look at all these Pras Saddam people waving flags.
Politics.
So remember when Rachel Maddow showed Tulsi Gabbard speaking at the rally and said, and also a guest host on Tucker Carlson?
She uptulsed.
Like, oh my God.
I guess or whatever.
So wouldn't even say Tulsi Gabbard's name.
Well, that's all the more strange given that Tulsi Gabbard used to be a guest on the Rachel Maddow show.
This is from back when Tulsi Gabbard was in Congress.
America gets our first ever Asian American woman senator from Hawaii.
Her seat in the House, I should note, gets filled by this woman, a Democratic Iraq war veteran.
I'm going to tell you right now that her name is Tulsi Gabbard because she is on the fast track to being very famous someday.
Tulsi Gabbard.
So that's Maddow praising Tulsi Gabbard on track to be very famous.
And of course, the reason why Tulsi Gabbard is no longer welcome on shows like this anymore is because she not only called out the proxy wars first in Syria and then in Ukraine and then stood up against the Cold War mania of Russia Gate, but also because she called out the DNC for rigging the primary against Bernie Sanders.
And that made her non-grata at places like MSNBC.
She's an Assad Today.
She's an Assad Today.
Barry Weisert from Rachel Maddow.
But before all the shift happened, there was a time when Maddow would even let Tulsi Gabbard on to criticize proxy wars.
Here is Tulsi Gabbard criticizing the proxy war in Syria.
This is back, I think, in 2014, around that time, 2013.
Now, is Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard?
She's an army combat veteran from the Iraq War.
She's also a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Congresswoman Gabbard, thanks very much for joining us tonight.
Nice to have you here.
Thanks, Rachel.
Aloha.
How, I guess, how serious is a very general, wide-ranging question, but how serious do you think the situation is?
How concerned are you about these latest reports?
I'm deeply concerned, Rachel, with what's happening there in Syria.
But for it's reasons that go deeper even than all of the news reports that we're hearing.
The real concern that I see here is that our leaders continue to lose sight of what our mission really is, what the United States mission really is.
And this is something that we saw started after 9-11 with President Bush when he went into, rather than focusing on defeating Al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and these other Islamic extremist groups, instead he was distracted by removing secular dictators like Saddam Hussein.
We saw this continued with President Obama and then Secretary Clinton in the removal of Gaddafi and Libya.
And in both of those situations, Rachel, we have seen the results.
The results are countries that are overrun with chaos and Islamic extremists.
And this is the danger that we're seeing now with this lack of focus on mission and who our enemy really is in Syria.
And here's the irony in all of this.
And the thing that's deeply concerning to me is that the United States is actually partnering with these Islamic extremists on the ground, al-Qaeda, Nusra, ISIS, and others, in supporting the removal of Assad, rather than focusing on defeating our enemy, those who attacked us on 9-11.
Because what happens is, as the United States and others are focused on saying Assad must go, if Assad is overthrown tomorrow, these Islamic extremist groups who are united by one purpose, and that is to take over Syria, overrun the country, and present a greater threat, not only to the Middle East, but to the world.
So that's Tulsi Gabbard, back when she was allowed on MSNBC, laying out why she was opposed to the proxy war in Syria.
And she's carried that over now to the proxy war in Ukraine.
So Tulsi Gabbard on this issue has been consistent.
It's Rachel Maddow that's changed that would never allow this kind of point of view on her show anymore and now pretends to not even know who Tulsi Gabbard is.
Oh, yeah.
So Tulsi Gabbard just has her same principles before and didn't change them along with Twitter.
That's lazy.
And now she reduces her to just being someone who guest hosts for Tucker Carlson, not being a former member of Congress.
I think she fought for Russia in Iraq.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
She's an Iraq war veteran too.
And people like Rachel Maddow talk about how much they respect the veterans.
Kenny even also mentioned that Tulsi is an Iraqi.
They call her a Russian traitor is what they were calling her.
Remember when Trump talked about John McCain goes, I like people who don't get captured.
And they're like, oh, how could you say that about John McCain?
And then Hillary Clinton called Tulsi a Russian asset.
And people like Rachel Maddow applaud because they support that kind of McCarthyism, as they're doing now to the anti-war rally.
And I found, okay, so the person who made that mock clip of how Rachel Maddow would now cover the Iraq war, that is Rode Grimes on Twitter.
So well done, Rode Grimes at Rode Grimes.
That was a great little bit.
You made one.
Yeah.
And so Rachel Maddow goes from interviewing people like Tulsi Gabbard, letting her critique proxy wars, in this case in Syria, to now mocking anti-war activists like Tulsi Gabbard and saying things like this.
This is recently Maddow mocking the idea of diplomacy inside of Ukraine.
This was not a meeting of two clashing forces.
This was not, you know, Ukraine provoking Russia when they knew they ought not to, but blah, blah, blah.
You know, like the Russian mindset.
This was us pushing them to provoke Russia because we want them to.
People who are like, oh, we need to facilitate peace talks here.
Really?
I don't know, because it kind of seems like Ukraine was minding its own business and Russia came in and stomped into their house and started setting things on fire.
Oh my God.
Give her credit for not using a homophobic slur about people who want peace.
These people that want peace, these, you know.
It's so, yeah, like she sounds like Archie Bunker or whatever.
Like it's so neocon.
And of course, this idea that Ukraine was minding its own business.
Well, Ukraine was actually minding its own business in 2014 when the U.S. came in and backed a coup.
That new coup government encouraged assaults on ethnic Russians inside of Ukraine.
Dozens of people in Odessa in May 2014 were burned alive protesting that coup.
And events like that set off this war in which the U.S. and Russia were on opposing sides.
Russia backed the people who rose up against the coup government.
The U.S. backed the coup government.
And that's been going on for eight years.
She completely ignores that from her rendering because it's inconvenient to her narrative that we need to not have any peace talks and just keep pouring in weapons.
Yeah, well, she's like if Don Lemon was into chicks.
So there's not like a negotiation between the homeowner and the home invader at that point.
So the outcome has to be specific to Russia.
And we need to do our best to save and to save the Ukrainian people to the extent that they can be saved and protected.
To the extent they can be saved to protect.
First, we got them.
We got other problems, but if we can save them.
If someone lived, that would be great.
What she means is that we can save them to the extent we can as long as we're using them to fight Russia.
So that's the number one priority.
Nice qualifier from Rachel Maddow.
So to the extent we can kill less of them or sacrifice less of them, we'll do that, but not at the expense of abandoning our proxy war.
Did you rush this douchebag nodding like, yeah?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And to help the Ukrainian government and military stand up what they need to do to take care of their own people, but Russia needs to lose.
Because otherwise, the lesson of this is that Putin can Putin can keep doing this.
It's not like this is his first invasion, and it won't be his last.
Wait a minute.
What are his other invasions?
The Georgia?
Georgia, he invaded Georgia after the U.S. encouraged Georgia to attack South Session.
Outside his hemisphere, his whatever their Monroe doctrine is.
They did intervene in Syria, but they intervened in Syria after the U.S. spent billions of dollars arming sectarian death squads.
And as John Kerry explained, the reason Russia came in is because ISIS was threatening to go to Damascus, take it over.
And the U.S. was sitting back and watching because they were trying to use ISIS's advance as leverage against Assad to force Assad to basically let in a U.S.-backed leader and negotiate his exit.
And so then Kerry says the reason Russia came in is because they didn't want an ISIS government.
And also, Syria asked them to come in.
So technically, Russia's intervention there is not illegal because that was done at the request of the government that was facing a regime change war backed by the U.S. How does the lack of long-term thinking, I guess it is long-term thing, like, well, it's cool.
There'll be ISIS government and we'll have a new war one day.
Exactly.
Yeah, they're willing to risk that.
They were so committed to regime change inside Syria that they were willing to risk an ISIS government because that's who was on the screen.
That's in Iraq.
Yes, exactly.
Their next president was Saddam Hussein to ISIS was the next president.
And the same thing now in Ukraine.
They're so committed to weakening Russia, maybe causing regime change inside Moscow that they're willing to sacrifice Ukraine to do it.
And Maddow's making that very clear there to the point where she mocks people who want to have peace talks.
Wow.
I guess East Palestine, Ohio should be grateful.
And there's the same kind of mentality that can produce comments like this, where during the height of Russia Gate, Maddow went and called a alleged Russian troll farm, putting posts on a Bernie Sanders Facebook page.
Check out how she described it.
But the important thing here is that that Bernie Sanders lovers page run out of Albania.
It's still there.
Still running.
Still operating.
Still churning this stuff out.
Now.
This is not part of American politics.
This is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats.
This is international warfare against our country.
That's right.
So Maddo, some alleged Russian trolls on a Bernie Sanders Facebook page is international warfare against, in the words of Jimmy Dore, of a psychopathic warmonger to believe that some memes and trolls amount to international warfare, no doubt you're going to want to encourage international warfare for real against Russia and mock anybody who tries to advocate for peace.
Okay, do you think it she's a psychopath, no doubt, like most of these people that just read whatever the hell they give them.
But if they were like, for some reason, they're like, hey, we want peace of Russia because we're making our money at a different conflict, she'd probably go along with that wholeheartedly, right?
She'll just say whatever she's paid to say and she doesn't care.
She does hate Russia, though.
You can see it.
She's got this visceral hatred of Russia.
Well, you know, she got Geraldo Riverid by Trump's tax thing.
Remember that?
Oh, yeah.
That's right.
And she's like, she has a personal grudge and Russia Gate wasn't real.
And she went to court like an idiot.
So she probably feels personal.
The one that got away.
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I'm Mary Matte sitting in for Jimmy Dore here with Americans comedian Kurt Metzger and the miserable liberal Steph Samarano.
And there was a big rally in Washington, D.C. this weekend.
Rage against the war machine.
Voices from the left and the right calling out the proxy war in Ukraine.
And among the speakers was our very own Jimmy Dore.
Do you know we could end this war today through diplomacy, but our politicians want to enrich weapons manufacturers, so they keep donating to them to the tune of $100 billion.
Chris Hedges has called America a mafia state.
Systems of governance that are seized by a tiny cabal become mafia states.
The military-industrial complex and the Ukraine war represent an orgy of looting and corruption.
And here's more from Jimmy.
America is so corrupt.
Even our war, our peace prize winners are war criminals.
Barack Obama won a peace prize and he immediately ramped up the war in Afghanistan, starting bombing Libya, put a hit on an Osama bin Laden, dropped 26,000 bombs in Syria.
And that's the thing about those peace prizes.
Nobody ever tries to win a second one.
And here is another speaker, Max Blumenthal, editor of the Grey Zone.
Here he is.
Our corporate media, which is just a megaphone for our oligarchic elite, is constantly telling us who our enemies are.
They said our enemy was in Serbia when I was a teenager.
Then they said our enemy was in Afghanistan.
Then they said our enemy was in Iraq.
And maybe our enemy was down the street in the local mosque.
And we are here today to say that we know who our real enemy is.
Our enemy is not in Russia.
Our enemy is you, the corporate media, and the oligarchy that you speak for.
Our enemy is the empire that's robbed us of our rights.
That's looted our treasury for its insane imperial regime change wars.
And that has hounded and jailed real journalists like Julian Assange.
Dude, they say.
How much do you want to bet somebody who's paid money to go fly a Russian flag every time?
I'm asking you.
He's so right.
Every time Matt says something, oh, like.
You are so right about that.
I mean, like, because the very next thing you're like, oh, because it was Russia.
I saw some Russian flags there.
Yeah.
I keep people literally false flag, like completely literally.
They, we need to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here.
We say that we will fight the neoconservatives over here before they kill millions more over there.
Can you dig it?
Can you dig?
I can dig it.
I can dig it.
That's not our war.
Whether in Ukraine or the war they're planning over the straits of Taiwan, their war is not our war.
Our war is for the hundreds of thousands of homeless people sleeping in the cold.
Our war is to clean up our rivers.
Our war is to fix our crumbling schools and roads.
Our war is to fight for the minds of our brothers and sisters, subjected to a nonstop tidal wave of corporate media propaganda.
Our war starts here.
Our war starts today.
Can you dig it?
Can you dig it?
I can dig it.
I can dig it.
That's very dangerous.
Thank you.
All right.
That was Max Blumenthal.
That's annoying, dude.
They're waving the flag every time he says he got to fix our roads.
As if that's a Russian race.
Russia wants our roads fixed.
Well, let's bring in the man himself, Max Blumenthal, editor of the Gray Zone.
Very involved in this rally.
Max, first of all, let's address those flags behind you.
What did you think after watching the video back of seeing people waving the Russian flag as you were speaking?
Well, first of all, I don't know if anyone watching saw the Warriors.
Yeah.
So, you know, Cyrus from the Warriors.
He's united all the gangs.
You get Cyrus talking like that.
All right, right on.
I didn't hear you.
So, all right, somebody caught me.
So I was just doing, I was, that was my Cyrus thing.
And another, like, years ago, I did my Mel Gibson freedom at the end of a speech.
So from Braveheart.
Nice.
Yeah.
And I was really hoping I was hoping I could do that without a Russian flag behind me.
But well, that's why they would do it.
Every time you said a point, that would be a rallying point that no one would be able to disagree with.
They got, oh, that's wave Russian flag.
So, yeah, I investigated this.
And to address this, I mean, it's sad that we even have to start out addressing it.
I don't think it's the right way to go.
But yeah, they ruined the visual of my speech for sure.
And, you know, if you looked out on the rally or in the rally, there were a lot of American flags.
And there were some few scattered handful of freaks alongside the outskirts, the periphery of the rally, who were holding the kinds of flags that would be perfect for like corporate media or pro-war propagandists to photograph and use it to tarnish the entire rally.
So this cat did everything he could to deliberately put that flag behind me.
It's just exactly the kind of look that like the neocons would want.
And I looked into it.
I have some pretty good intelligence, and I will publicly retract this if I'm wrong.
But I've been told pretty good authority that that was a senior member of Caleb Maupin's Center for Political Innovation, which, you know, they didn't participate in the rally.
Like Caleb didn't speak.
And I don't know what that guy was thinking.
I don't know if he, but, but they like to do like this LARPing cosplay stuff and they do it at their conferences and they discredit themselves as much as they can in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already agree with them.
So if that's what they want to do, fine, but just don't do it on my time in my space.
And that's what they did.
And I really think that's like idiots.
That's not that so much look like a log cat.
What is it?
The Lincoln, the Lincoln Project project.
You know, like a TG.
It looks like some LARPing idiot, but it could be, honestly, I thought it was a Lincoln project thing.
Then my second guess would have been that this was some like Russian guy who's actually Russian, who was just trying to throw the gauntlet down before America and Washington because the Russian symbols have been banned across the West.
And it turned out it's just some white dude from America who's like maybe got a few screws loose.
I don't know what his problem is, but definitely played a destructive role.
And in dissident movements, it's a magnet for people who are like a few cards short of a deck.
And so that's what I think we got there.
At the same time, again, it sucks that I have to address this at the beginning of what a talk about what was really, I think, a very successful event.
But there was this character, Matthew Heimbach, that all the haters of the rally are talking about.
And he was a former neo-Nazi who's a very suspect character from a group called Adam Waffen, which actually had people fighting in Ukraine at certain points.
I remember hearing about them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he, so he was, he was like a Nazi who would show up dressed in Nazi uniforms at rallies.
You know, the perfect kind of person whose organization would be heavily infiltrated.
And he suddenly switched and just declared himself some kind of patriotic communist.
And he brought like five of his, you know, five members of his group to stand around on the periphery of the rally waving Soviet flags and Russia.
I was wondering what that was.
When Russian imperial flags and Soviet flags completely clash, if you know anything about Russia.
Anyway, they attracted all the attention of people who wanted to discredit this rally, but they weren't even a part of the rally.
They were scarcely ever in the rally.
And they were doing everything they could to lap up media attention on the periphery.
And they were doing recruiting.
And my understanding of these organizations, the ones that these frit, really fringe organizations that have very few members and they show up while wearing Danda masks at rallies is when they're doing the recruiting and they're so infiltrated, they're basically collecting data on people for the feds, whether they know it, whether they know it or not.
So that was that was like the sad element.
I told the organizers, like the one way they're going to attack this is they're going to send in some like fake Nazis who have all have masks on and then try to paint the rally as synonymous with them.
And that's sort of what happened.
But really they mainly just ruined this one character just ruined the visual aspect of the future.
I thought it was Ray Epps waving the flag in the back.
That's who I thought.
I mean, if you're going to do that, don't you got to stick with one side?
Because if you have a bunch of like Nazi and Soviet flags and imperialism, like now you're creating a peace.
Now you're having like them all getting along.
I think that's like that Russia thing.
So you shake it every time you say a point is right where the camera is, dude.
Yeah.
Like that's somebody's doing it on purpose.
Well, look, I think we've given them enough attention.
Let's talk about what this rally was about.
It was about bringing together people with all sorts of differences on economic, social issues, but who are united to rage against the war machine.
And that's what this was.
And you had people from across the spectrum.
You had Ron Paul.
You had Dennis Kucinich, two former members of Congress on very opposite sides of the spectrum.
So, Max, talk to us about what this rally was about and how it went.
Well, I went first.
I was designated to go first.
And the organizers asked me to set the tone for the rally.
And I tried to do that.
And I did that by invoking the bonus army, which encamped just a few blocks from where I live here in Southeast Washington, D.C., on the banks of the Anacostia River.
In 1932, these were veterans who'd been betrayed and denied their benefits and their bonuses from World War I at the dawn of the Great Depression.
And they were massacred and brutalized by General Douglas MacArthur, White Eisenhower, and General George S. Patton, the future heroes of World War II.
They sent the U.S. Army against these veterans of World War I, who they had fought alongside in the trenches of Europe, killed, I think they killed hundreds of them.
And what MacArthur said of them was that they pose a threat well beyond the demand for benefits when the government is basically out of money because of the depression.
They present the threat of pacifism and behind it, communism.
And they also, and some of them were influenced by communism, which was very popular at the time during the Great Depression, as well as a kind of America-first isolationism, which was gaining popularity at that time.
So they were coming from what we would consider the left and the right.
They were also black and white men living together in these Hoovervilles.
And they had fought in a segregated army, but they were integrated.
So they were seen as a threat to the Jim Crow policies and policies of racial segregation.
So the army killed veterans in the heart of Washington, D.C. And I invoke that in light of all the attacks on this rally because it's bringing together people who identify with left and right.
It's bringing together people who are defying these artificially imposed cultural barriers.
And then the other point that I wanted to make in my speech was that the people I've met as a journalist on the other side of the U.S. guns in the targets of empire, whether it's Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, in the Gaza Strip,
where I've sat with people in the rubble of their homes where their families had been slaughtered by U.S.-supplied bombs by the Israeli apartheid army, whether it was in Damascus, where they're suffering so harshly under U.S. sanctions right now during an earthquake, and they saw their city surrounded by U.S. and Gulf-backed jihadist death squads.
Those people don't care what our political affiliation is here.
They don't care if we're boosted and masked or unvaccinated, vaccinated, if we support Trump or if we support Bernie Sanders.
They don't care about that.
All they want us to do is what we were doing there, which is to rage against the war machine that's killing us to stop the bombs, stop the sanctions.
And so it should have been very simple for everyone to support that rally.
And I think despite all the attacks and all the ridiculous sideshows, the rally was very successful at a time when it's really difficult to organize anti-war activity specifically against the Ukraine proxy war.
I saw estimates of the crowd between one and 5,000.
I have no way of estimating, but I would definitely say there were more than 1,000 people.
And that would make it one of the largest rallies since 2007, which was when Obama began to enter the fray and destroyed the anti-war movement along with the Democratic Party.
So I think it was a huge success there.
And it was also, the numbers would have been higher if other anti-war organizations or groups that fancy themselves as anti-war had actually participated instead of attacking and undermining this rally.
Three important former presidential candidates, Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Dennis Kucinich, they were the last three presidential candidates who put opposition to U.S. imperial policy or interventionist policy at the front and center of their platforms.
And Ron Paul's 87 years old, so this is really significant for him to actually come out to a public event when he rarely appears in public anymore.
That's how important it was to him.
Tulsi Gabbard gave a great speech about how Hawaiians were terrorized by a fake early warning of an incoming, I believe it was a Chinese missile strike or North Korea, sorry, a North Korean missile strike.
They're basically being prepared for a war psychologically and what it's like to live there in the Pacific and to actually be on the front line of a response to a potential U.S. attack on China over the Taiwan Strait, which is what could be next.
Dennis Kucinich talked about the Nord Stream pipeline terror attack carried out by the U.S. and the need to address Seymour Hirsch's investigation and for congressional action and to consider impeaching Joe Biden for the worst act of industrial and environmental sabotage ever.
And Ron Paul talked about means of defunding the war state.
And then there were so many great speakers in between.
So I thought it was a success given all the obstacles we face.
Well, among those obstacles, as you mentioned, is the fact that there were some leftist groups who were campaigning basically against this rally, didn't support it for many reasons, including they didn't like some of the speakers' views on economic and social issues because there were libertarians there and other voices on the right.
And so there was an effort, I think, by some people, and you were very vocal about this, to undermine this rally.
And overall, I think it speaks to on the left, there's been an inability to challenge this proxy war.
Some leftists have even been listed in supporting it.
So just as an illustration of this, I want to show you, Max, how Democracy Now, which for a long time, I used to work there, it set the standard, I think, for being a progressive in the U.S. and what it's about.
And when I was there, whenever there was an anti-war rally, we'd be sure to cover it and play clips from it.
This is how Democracy Now covered rage against the war machine.
Sunday in Washington, D.C., there was also a rage against the war machine protest at the Lincoln Memorial, where former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and others spoke.
That's it.
10 seconds of coverage on democracy.
10 seconds.
That's it.
Did she used to be good at one point?
When I was there, yes, absolutely.
There was a commitment to covering actions like this.
And we'd be showing clips of people like Dennis Kucinich and Jill Stein all the time, because that's what being a progressive once was about.
But in this era, a lot of progressives have been enlisted to support things like the Ukraine proxy war.
So, Max, I mean, talk to us a bit about, you know, you traditionally come from the left, you identify with the left, what this experience was like for you and the attacks, seeing the attacks that this rally faced from people who identify with the left.
Well, there's so much to say there.
First of all, Amy Goodman's segment or news bit on the Ukrainian children's chorus singing for peace in a no-fly zone was a lot longer than and more passionately delivered than that one.
So we can see where Amy Goodman is at.
And she, her betrayal of the anti-war movement is consistent with what we're seeing across the traditional professional activist left, which presents a lot of radical rhetoric, recruits a lot of alienated young people on college campuses with the promise of radical action and even revolution, and at best only superficially challenges the state.
And if anything, especially during the pandemic, they reinforced the state.
They were the left wing of the World Economic Forum.
So, I mean, let's get into some of the details here.
I think I'm going to be providing as many details as I can about the campaign against this rally from within left-wing organizations and organizations that presented themselves as anti-war as I can going forward, because I think it's disgusting that they would get in the way.
It's like Ronald Reagan would always talk about The 11th commandment is never attack a fellow Republican.
And I would say that the 11th commandment should be never undermine an anti-war rally if you actually care about stopping nuclear war.
And as Jimmy said, what they're saying is, I'm against nuclear.
I don't want nuclear war, but not with them.
It's like Jimmy conjured up this scenario in his speech about firemen arriving to his house and his house is on fire.
And then he stands in the door and says, excuse me, are you all vaccinated?
And what do you think about social security?
I can't let you in my house to stop the fire unless you agree with me on social security.
And that's what certain organizations and personnel in certain organizations within what I call the professional sectarian left did with this rally.
Now, first, I got to talk to someone who actually was a participant on the phone call that Code Pink staffers had with Medea Benjamin, who basically is the face and spiritual leader of Code Pink.
And I think one of the most heroic anti-war activists of our time.
She was backstage with us at the rally.
She was fully in support of it.
And I can talk about this on background.
I didn't get this from her.
But one Code Pink staffer after another, these kind of millennial professional left types, NGO types, would say that they didn't feel safe at the rally as a Muslim or as a gay person.
So she couldn't participate.
I asked Medea why couldn't you actually just sack them all?
And she doesn't actually have that power.
I mean, what I would have done is I would have gone to the, have them all go to the HR director, have the HR director fire them all and then fire the HR director.
But what do they, but if they don't feel safe, I mean, that's, that's, of course, their, their prerogative.
But they don't have to be aware of that.
But they don't have to go to the rally.
They can just not go.
Well, they kind of like held her hostage because she wanted to continue working with Code Pink and she couldn't do what I would have done.
I would have had a mass purge.
I would have had a mass purge, but she couldn't do that.
She's a board member.
I think she's actually retired from her previous role and she wants to continue working with them.
So they held her hostage because of what's, you know, what we would call woke politics.
And, you know, just being on stage, I watched every speaker.
I was around everybody there.
If anything, there were denunciations of Islamophobia.
And you heard it from my speech.
And, you know, there were no attacks on gay people from the stage.
I mean, I don't know what they're talking about, but it shows that they actually prioritize boutique social issues to stopping war and that they infest these anti-war organizations and basically infiltrated them and are neutralizing them from within.
So that's what took place at Code Pink.
That's really sad.
The Green Party had a very contentious vote.
We saw in past years the Green Party fell after Jill Stein under the leadership of Howie Hawkins, who was a huge supporter of the Ukraine proxy war.
He's a supporter, active, active supporter of regime change in Syria.
I don't know how he got in control of that group.
He's no longer the leader, but they basically have no leadership as far as I can tell.
And Jill Stein was there at the rally, also another important former presidential candidate.
And the Green Party sent some of its membership out, but other members opposed this.
And then you have Answer, the Answer Coalition, which is like a front for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
And I think this group may have played one of the most important roles in attempting to undermine this rally from the left because they have, you know, their people on the board of Veterans for Peace.
They're a close coalition partner with Code Pink.
I know they share funders with Code Pink.
And, you know, Answer is a significant organization in the anti-war movement because they played a role in the major 2003, 2004 Iraq war protests that got hundreds of thousands of people out.
And they didn't bring out, they don't have hundreds of thousands of people.
They have maybe like hundreds and hundreds of people.
They are a Marxist-Leninist organization, and they're really good at getting permits for protests.
That's like their specialty.
So they got the permits for the Iraq war protest.
But it was really like a lot of Democratic organizations that used their massive mailing lists like moveon.org that brought out tons of people because they were organizing against Bush's Republican war.
And so there's this fantasy of this liberal, you know, left socialist coalition that they still seem to entertain.
But the Democrats, especially since the Obama era, have become the pro-war party.
But Answer PSL still has this fantasy of coalitioning with them and then having this endless left-right conflict.
And so they, I don't know if they issued any official statement, but I saw their higher level members attacking the rally.
Some of these people are like obsessed with hating Tulsi Gabbard, like a very unhealthy obsession.
It sounds like the Russian obsession.
I mean, it sounds exactly like culture war profiteering is every bit as good as regular war profiteering.
It sounds like they don't dig peace.
Well, no, I mean, you just look at what they've been doing for the, I've been looking at what they've been doing.
I mean, I worked with them on the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective.
They did a good job out there, maybe, because Venezuela is like a socialist-oriented government.
Their leadership was, you know, denounced Russia's invasion.
And the rallies that they had were pretty small and forgettable, honestly.
Didn't seem like they put a lot of effort into it in the past year.
They did put a lot of effort into opposing reversing Roe.
They were heavily involved in that nationally.
This was during the Ukraine proxy war throughout the summer.
I just saw very little activity from them on Ukraine.
And they had some pretty much smaller rally in New York, like a few weeks ago.
And I think that was going to be the end of their organizing until this rally came around and they were like, well, we're not going to be a part of it.
And we're going to denounce it.
And, you know, this is fascism or whatever they wanted to say.
But now they're having an alternative rally a month, exactly a month later.
It's like, we can't be a part of that because those are the bad kids that we can't play with.
So we're going to have a rally.
And what I heard from people who are going to be involved in that rally is this is a much more energetic effort by Answer PSL to actually bring in coalition partners because they want to show up this rally.
They're actively competing with another anti-war rally after trying to depress turnout for it.
So it shows me two things.
First, that they are threatened by the coalition and the kind of political and cultural momentum that's forming around Rage Against the War Machine because they want to dictate the anti-war movement and control it and also exclude lots of people from it, just like they exclude unvaccinated people from their activist centers.
But they also are being forced to step up their own game by Rage Against the War Machine.
So it clearly shows how Rage Against the War Machine is actually reinvigorating anti-war activity and just forcing the issue with other groups.
So, I mean, go have your alternative rally, but let the record reflect that Answer PSL has actually, at least through many of its members who I've seen on Twitter and elsewhere and on their little radio programs or podcasts have denounced an anti-war rally, attacked it and attempted to undermine it.
And that just really says everything about your priorities.
And they did so because of social issues.
The demands, by the way, on their rally are different from the demands that were on the Rage Against the War rally.
And the contrast was interesting.
Rage Against the War was end the proxy war in Ukraine and NATO expansion for Julian Assange.
That was the basics, right?
Well, also end the CIA, abolish the CIA, which is a real concrete demand.
And it's not something that hasn't been discussed even in Congress during the golden era of intelligence reform, the Church Commission.
It was none other than Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who proposed breaking up the CIA because of its excesses and extremist assassination policies, covert activity, drug dealing, etc.
Moynihan was no leftist, but I'm just saying it's a concrete demand.
And then you look at their demands.
Some of them are pretty good, but one of them is end bigotry.
And I'm like, I oppose bigotry.
We all oppose bigotry.
Didn't they just not go with your rally out of bigotry?
Right.
Well, and no, but well, I'll get into that in a second, but end bigotry.
I mean, that's just an abstract concept.
That's not a concrete demand.
It's like end hate.
It's such a liberal conception.
And there's nothing about ending the CIA.
So a lot of virtue signaling from them.
And then, you know, you had people like Jackie Luckman from the Black Alliance for Peace denounce this rally as so white and call everyone racist.
And I saw her on my friend Jared Ball's radio program.
And she was actually asked, who are you talking about?
Who are you referring to when you call the speakers racist?
And she called them latte leftists, like who've never done anything.
And she spent five minutes refusing to name any names.
And then, you know, she was involved with the answer PSL's, you know, half-hearted tiny rallies and said that those are the rallies that we should be having.
So, I mean, it just, it just really shows you why the anti-war movement has been in such a sad state, why it continues to have problems getting going.
And it's just because of the narcissism of the people who have posed as its leadership and failed to deliver anything since the great anti-war protests against Bush's Republican war.
And just being in this rally, being in the, you know, walk marching with people, going to, there was a reception afterwards.
So I got to meet a lot of the people and have extended conversations with them.
I met someone from Kodiak, Alaska who came from Alaska to the rally.
I met a couple from rural Vermont who drove down to the rally.
I met many people from Ohio, many people from California.
So many people came from out of town because this meant so much to them.
And these are people who are not only opposed to this war, but they are opposed to what I call the tidal wave of corporate media propaganda, the hybrid war being fought on the American people through the media.
And they also saw through the Covidian propaganda that the professional sectarian left opponents of this rally actually tried to reinforce.
You know, Party for Socialism and Liberation's DC chapter actively called for a China-style lockdown in Washington, D.C. for Omicron earlier during the Omicron variant, which would have prevented any protests from ever even taking place because people would have been welded into their homes.
So, you know, there are so many cultural divides there.
And it's so interesting.
People, the people that the people who cohered around this rally are united by something that I think is so much deeper than a political ideology or a political party or a school of thought.
So it was actually kind of a cultural happening.
And I think in that respect, there's a new force emerging in American politics that's being born out of the post-pandemic era.
What was born out of the pandemic and how people responded to it.
And these are the people that really responded when Jimmy Doerr started challenging all the lies around the mandates and the lockdowns.
And these are people who are hardcore gray zone readers.
And these are people who are actually turning out, going offline.
They're not slacktivists, but they're not being, they haven't been fully organized.
And they were able to come out in possibly in the thousands for something that was under attack from all sides, from within and without.
I mean, I didn't even talk about the haters from the neoconservative side who've been attacking this rally or the corporate media.
Yeah, and we're going to get to that later.
But trying to end this on a positive note, this sounds like this is a cherry challenging thing to put together and attacks coming from all different sides.
But I think you've given us a lot to think about here.
And overall, I think we can think about trying to overcome all the sectarian stuff, which accomplishes nothing.
No, I mean, well, it accomplishes weakening the anti-war movement.
Yeah, that's what it's there for.
That thing that weakens organizations, that came through, that tour through comedy, that door through all the entertainment.
Remember stupid Gamergate.
That was a part of the wall no one was watching.
And everybody got implanted in everybody's thing.
That's amazing to me.
Then SJWs could ruin leftists, radical leftists.
Like, that's wild, dude.
Yeah, I mean, it's happening before our eyes.
But yeah, props to Nick Brana from the People's Party, Angela McArdle from the Libertarian Party for putting this together.
And there's no debate on the fact that it has breathed new life into the anti-war movement and forced its internal critics to step up their game.
And I would also note that over 100 local mainstream media affiliates, TV affiliates have covered this rally.
And some of the coverage I saw was kind of fair or straightforward.
So I think the rally actually broke through.
You know, it's hard enough to organize just in and of itself, but then when you have people who are ostensibly on your own side trying to undermine it, it makes it even more difficult.
So the organizers pulled something, pulled off something important here.
You could have got Fred Hampton.
I'm amazed how well it went.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's not talk about Fred Hampton and what he did to cross cultural lines and transcend cultural wedge issues and boutique social issues to actually fight for a serious common cause, challenging the empire from inside the belly of the beast.
Let's not talk about that, Fred Hampton.
I mean, they're just, I mean, in closing, I mean, there just is a rich tradition of people overlooking serious differences.
And I had serious differences with many of the speakers, especially on a lot of domestic issues.
I mean, I probably line up more with the answer PSL rally on a lot of domestic issues.
But the point was to transcend that and maximize our numbers to send a message to the war State.
And there's a rich tradition of this.
I mean, we had, like, even after the Patriot Act, Phyllis Schlackly's Eagle Forum joined together with the NAACP against the Patriot Act.
I was talking to Medea Benjamin.
I think Code Pink has partnered with the Heritage Foundation to oppose the bombing of Syria back in 2013.
I might be getting the chronology wrong, but they've had lots of left-right partnerships at Code Pink.
And Code Pink actually, this is crazy.
Code Pink did a sister rally in San Francisco with Rage Against the War Machine, their local chapter, but their national chapter, because it's infested with professional sectarian leftist NGO types, they refuse to support Code Pink's local chapters rally.
So let them be divided and fight among themselves.
We're going to keep the momentum going forward.
I really feel like this is going to snowball into something much bigger this summer because the war is still going to be going on.
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