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March 10, 2023 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:02:35
20230310_TJDS_20230310_Podcast_-_3923_11.16_AM
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If you want to see my stand-up special, become a member at jimmydark.com.
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Hey, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Jimmy's President Joe Biden.
Oh, Mr. President, how's it?
How you doing, pal?
Jimmy, I'm doing great.
I'm having a great day.
I'm riding the wave of last night's State of the Union address.
Well, Mr. President, that was over a month ago.
Well, it seems like yesterday.
Literally, in the way that my mind now processes time.
Also, appears a great mystery may soon be solved.
And what is that?
Who blew up the Nord 2 pipeline?
Ah, what a mystery.
Such a mystery that is.
Who could have done that, Mr. President?
Well, that's just what we're trying to get to the bottom of, Jimmy.
As I said, reporters, I have vowed to spend the rest of my life looking for the Nord 2's killers.
I see.
Now you had previously asserted that Russia was responsible for blowing up its own pipeline.
Was that based on any evidence?
No.
Well, then why did you say that?
Because it's morally true.
Russia is bad, and they must be seen as bad.
Therefore, anything bad that happens is because they did it.
Do you really expect the American people to fall for this?
Are you kidding?
It works every time.
But now, this New York Times report just came out saying that a pro-Ukraine group was responsible for the bombing.
This would seem to exonerate Russia at least if you're putting any stock in it, are you?
Well, I'm not abandoning my Russia assertion, but this theory could work too.
Both could work.
Russia and pro-Ukrainian forces both did this together?
No, but this new theory is so vague that it could work to our advantage.
It wasn't Ukraine itself who did it.
They denied that very quickly, which was smart on their part.
But a pro-Ukraine group or individuals, meaning they may never be caught or honed in on.
Are we really supposed to believe a small group of individuals managed to orchestrate a deep-sea detonation so powerful that it took out 150 meters of pipeline through a remote detonation?
Well, why the hell not?
I saw an episode of the 8-Team once where they basically did exactly that.
I wrote that episode myself, as a matter of fact.
No, you didn't.
Okay.
Well, the point is, I guess we'll never know for sure who blew up that dang pipeline.
Just not the Ukrainian government.
That's what matters.
Yeah, I guess we'll never know who did it.
It's not like we have somebody on tape talking about how they will ensure that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will never be completed.
Yeah, that'd be a hell of a smoke and gun.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah, well, luckily, we do have that.
Oh, yeah, let me guess.
The A-Team with special guest RP Zedora?
No, Mr. President.
You!
Oh, come on, man.
I say all sorts of shit.
You literally said that at a press conference, you said that you would not allow the Nord Stream pipeline to happen.
Also, according to one journalist, sources have said that you yourself ordered the destruction of that pipeline and it was carried out by joint U.S. and Norwegian forces.
Jamie, that's ludicrous.
They couldn't even find Norway on a map, let alone entrust their military with the crucial role in a mission that has highly important strategic benefit to U.S. foreign policy.
Okay, I probably shouldn't have said that.
Yeah.
The point is, Jagov, that only you would believe something you read on Substack.
What's wrong with Substack?
It sounds silly.
It sounds like Slea Stack.
You're dumb.
And in this case, it's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hirsch.
Oh, give me a break.
God old muckraker, what a joke.
Muckraker, the man who first reported on the My Light Massacre and Abu Ghraib.
God damn it, I supported both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war, and I wish they were still going on right now.
So, yes, he's a muckraker because bringing those things to light makes America look bad, and that is bad.
Like Russia.
Why is this so hard for you?
You're dumb.
Why am I dumb?
You read an article on Substack.
If your fingers aren't a little smudged after reading a news article, you didn't really read anything at all.
All fake, probably.
Just me as you're dumber.
I like the New York Times version better.
Their pipeline story has dignity and grace because real journalists wrote it.
That a rogue group of unknown pro-Ukrainians took out a pipeline at the bottom of the ocean?
All the news is fit to print jackass.
Democracy dies in darkness.
I'll take fucking parade magazines reporting over Substack.
America had nothing to do with blowing up that pipeline.
That wouldn't benefit us one little bit.
And it makes perfect sense that Russia blew up their own pipeline if you've been deprived of oxygen for a dangerously long amount of time.
So get your head out of your ass.
Stop being dumb and getting even dumber by reading not thenewyorktimes.com or whatever.
And take this Joe Biden ordered the pipeline blown up, crap, and stick it back up your ass where it came from.
I ordered the pipeline blown up.
Whoa, what?
I said you're dumb.
Goodbye.
Establishment media sets of artists fighting.
So good luck with bullshit they can't afford.
Watch and see as a jack dog comedian who speeds and jumps the medium and hits him head on.
It's the chimney tore show.
He's a locomotive engineer who has worked in freight and passenger service since 1998.
He started with Conrail as a brakeman in 1996, was promoted to conductor in 97 and became a locomotive engineer the following year.
He has run trains in nine states over the rails of all of the Class 1 railroads.
He served as secretary of the Railroad Workers United beginning in 2008, and he is now the organization's general secretary, please welcome Ron Kemenikow.
Did I say your name correctly?
It's Kemenco, Jimmy, but everybody gets it wrong.
Okay, well, let me just.
So, I'm glad you're here because here's a recent story from NPR.
Here's the most thorough explanation yet of the train derailment.
So, what happened was the operators of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals near East Palestine, Ohio earlier this month tried to stop the train after a wheelbarrow overheated to a dangerous degree.
But by the time an alarm rang to alert the crew of the danger, the bearing was already so compromised that it failed as the train was still coming to a stop.
Officials said a preliminary report released by the NTSB Thursday stopped short of declaring a conclusive cause of the derailment, but the report, along with additional details shared by officials together, offered the most detail.
Okay, to prevent so in response to this, now the railroad workers want them to do something.
So we, three weeks after the lives of East Palestine, Ohio residents were upended by a fiery wreck involving blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
In a statement, Railroad Workers United pointed to the NTSB's newly published preliminary report on February 3rd crash and subsequent burnoff of vinyl chloride and other carcinogenic chemicals, which suggests that an overheated wheel bearing likely caused the derailment.
The Inter-Union Alliance of Rail Workers cited the NTSB chair Jennifer Homody, who said Thursday at a press conference that there was 100%, this was 100% preventable.
So that big environmental catastrophe that is poisoning all the people in East Palestine, Ohio was 100% preventable.
This was not an accident.
Every single event that we investigate is preventable.
That's what the chair of the NT National Transportation Safety Board said.
RWU, Railroad Workers United, which has previously highlighted how industry-led deregulation and Wall Street-backed policies, such as precision scheduled railroading, have made the U.S. railroad more dangerous.
The Class 1 freight rail carriers, including Norfolk Southern, have prioritized profits over safety, cutting maintenance, equipment inspections, and personnel in all crafts while increasing the average train size to three miles or more.
In the words of RWU co-chair Gabe Christensen, rail workers experience firsthand every day the dangers inherent in this style of railroading.
It has impacted their safety, health, state of mind, and lives on and off the job.
Limits on train lengths and weights are necessary to prevent catastrophic derailments.
Jason Dorick, general secretary of RWU, echoed the message, saying, Every day we go to work, we have serious concerns about preventing accidents like the one that occurred in Ohio.
As locomotive engineers, conductors, or signal maintenance cars, blah, blah, blah, blah, we experience the reality that our jobs are becoming increasingly dangerous due to insufficient staffing, inadequate maintenance, and a lack of oversight and inspection.
We recognize that limits on train lengths and weights are necessary to prevent catastrophic derailments.
One week ago, RW made the case for nationalization, arguing nationalizing the railroads, meaning that it would no longer be privately owned.
Arguing that the United States can no longer afford private ownership of the railroads.
The general welfare demands that they be brought under public ownership.
Specifically, the RWU called on regulators and lawmakers to do ensure sufficient staffing to do the job properly, efficiently, and safely, with all trains operating with a minimum of two-person crew.
They operate with less than that.
Anyway, if they could get a half a person to run a train, I guess they would.
Cap, they want to cap train length and wait at a reasonable level to mitigate the increased likelihood of breakdowns, train separations, and derailments.
Implement adequate and proper maintenance and inspections of locomotives and rail cars, tracks and signals, wayside detectors, and other infrastructure, and standardize ample training and time off without harassment of draconian attendance policies.
Of these measures, only a proposed rule to require two-person crews, described by RWU as loophole-ridden, was included in the blueprint the United States Department of Transportation unveiled Tuesday to hold rail companies accountable and protect the well-being of workers and fence line communities.
The Department of Transportation also encouraged rail carriers to voluntarily provide sick leave.
Norfolk Southern, facing intense scrutiny and backlash amid the ongoing East Palestine disaster, agreed Wednesday to provide up to a week of paid sick leave per year to roughly 3,000 track maintenance workers.
But because the Biden administration and Congress recently imposed a contract without paid sick leave on rail workers who are threatening to strike, the vast majority still lack the basic life-saving benefit, as do millions of private sector workers in other industries who are also waiting legislation to address the issue.
The RW treasurer Hugh Sawyer reiterated the call on Friday.
We demand that the railroad be run safely, efficiently.
So let me bring in Ron.
Ron, what?
So that seems to me to be amazing that of all the, even in this disaster that happened in East Palestine, and it seems like on a weekly basis, there's another train derailment or disaster happening somewhere in the United States.
The only thing you could get was them to agree to two people running a three-mile-long train, two people.
So now they have less than two people sometimes.
Let me just, you could take it anywhere you want, Ron.
Okay, yeah, first of all, there's a misunderstanding.
The Class 1 railroads have never run trains with less than two.
Okay.
They have wanted to, and they first floated the idea in 2004, but it has to be bargained with the unions.
And so we have actually been able to hold them off for almost a generation.
Like I say, November 1st in 2004, they first proposed this idea.
But very few rail operations, excluding captive railroads, mining railroads, and some short lines, have actually been able in the U.S. and Canada to run with a single employee.
So we really, we have held them off.
But if they get their way, one of the things that they have been pushing for, and they feel very confident and cocky they're going to get it, although the last few months have maybe put things in our favor.
They would love to see all of these mainline freight trains, including the one that derailed at East Palestine, run with a single employee.
I didn't even know that was an option.
I didn't know it either.
Oh my God.
I thought there was at least a couple of guys running every train, or at least one guy in the caboose.
They don't even have cabooses anymore.
Have you noticed they got rid of, have they gotten rid of cabooses, Ron?
Or am I just imagining that?
Yeah, oh, yeah.
Cabooses went away back in the 1980s, along with the full four or five person crew.
So the caboose came off.
The brakeman and the conductor ended up on the head end.
So you had a three-person crew.
And then basically in the early 90s, the Last time that we almost had a, well, we did have a national railroad strike.
That was the end of the third pin.
And we generally now have a conductor and engineer on through freight over-the-road freight, just two employees in the capital locomotive.
So what is the RWU plan on doing?
What can you do to...
And so what can you do now?
Well, I wouldn't say that the government was ever on the side of the railroad workers.
You know, we hear a lot of talk all the time, like take our country back, you know, this nostalgia to go back to the good old days when we played fair and workers had all these rights.
And it really just doesn't exist.
It's part of the mythology or the fantasy, I think, of many cultures, including ours.
And so, yeah, the railroad industry has largely been, you know, deregulated.
Both political parties are complicit.
The ICC is gone, replaced by the Surface Transportation Board.
And the Federal Railroad Administration, one could argue, has been captured, quote unquote, by the rail industry.
For example, in the previous administration under Donald Trump, we had Ron Battori, where Ron Battori had been a CEO of railroads his entire life.
So it's an obvious example of the Fox guarding the hen house.
So this is what we're up against, a very, very powerful industry that has extreme wealth to bestow upon different politicians of both political parties.
And a lot of that is coming out, Jimmy.
And it's pretty exciting to actually see the numbers and see the figures in a bunch of articles that have come out as recently as the last few days about the intensity of their lobbying efforts to get the government to not regulate them, to get safety rules and regulations either not adopted or the existing ones modified or done away with altogether.
So this is what we're up against.
So this is just straight up corruption.
This is what we, the system that we have in the United States of legal bribery where corporations and railroad tycoons can give money to the people who write the rules and set the laws in Congress.
And then, of course, that's not democracy.
That's called corruption.
And so that's what we're living in right now.
That's why something like East Palestine can happen.
And instead of Joe Biden going to East Palestine, he goes to Kiev and gives them $10 billion.
They're going to fix their railroads.
They've got to fix their railroads in Ukraine.
Fix their pensions.
And get their pensions and clean water.
So there's a call to nationalize the railroad.
Has that got the support of the rank and file?
And who came up with the idea?
Well, Railroad Workers United has debated this question for well over a decade.
Public ownership in this country has a black eye, even though there's lots and lots of things in this country that actually are publicly owned, like our transportation system, the highways, the waterways, the airports, the seaports, all of this is publicly held.
And if you notice, there's not a whole lot of movement amongst Democrats or Republicans to privatize the highways.
But the way I'm fond of putting it is this.
Imagine if Schneider Trucking owned Highway 80.
And imagine if J.B. Hunt owned Highway 70.
And imagine if UPS owned Interstate 25.
This is what we have on the railroad.
Union Pacific owns the infrastructure.
They own the mainline.
So across Middle America, through Nebraska, Wyoming, and well, here where I live at Nevada, it's all Union Pacific.
It used to be Western Pacific, Southern Pacific, and so forth, Rio Grande, but it's all Union Pacific.
And it's got one competitor, and that's BNSF.
And BNSF doesn't necessarily serve the same customers or come through the same territory.
And so, in effect, the railroad system is a monopoly.
And the agreement was originally, the U.S. government was going to give all of these millions of acres to the rail industry to develop the country.
And in return, they would be a common carrier and carry freight and passengers of anybody who's interested in shipping.
Here's what's happened in recent years, and it's been escalated by precision scheduled railroading.
There's this thing called the operating ratio, and the railroads are fixated.
There's what's called the fetish of the operating ratio, and they want an operating ratio down as low as 0.5.
And that means for every dollar they take in, they want 50 cents profit.
And if they can't get that 40 or 45 or 50 cents profit, they do not want your freight.
Thank you.
And so I got a statistic here that I think is fascinating.
In 2006, the rail industry reached its peak of carloads shipped.
32.1 million carloads were shipped on the railroad in 2006.
You'll never believe it, but that is the most ever shipped.
So in the last 16 years, we're moving less freight.
So in 2022, the rail industry shipped 25.4 million carloads, which by my math is 79% of what they shipped almost a generation ago.
So for every five cars that they moved in 2006, they're only moving four carloads now.
They're making a mess of it.
They're not doing a very good job.
They don't have enough rested crews to move their trains.
Last year it was almost a national meltdown.
And so if you look at this and say, what in the hell are we doing as a society, as an economy, allowing a private industry, a cabal of four major rail carriers, basically they got the country by the balls.
They got the industry of this country up against the wall and the American people are paying the price while record profits every quarter are turned in and it's based upon what do they do with those profits?
Do they double track the railroad?
Do they electrify?
Do they extend sidings, increase the ability of the trains to get from point A to point B in a hurry, good customer service, reliability?
Hell no.
All they have done is taken their profits and bought back stock, pumping their stock up to records unheard of in the rail industry in 150 years.
This is the rail industry we have in this country.
I would postulate it is a basket case.
It's not operating in the interest of the country, and therefore it should be operated in the public interest like our rest of our transportation infrastructure.
And so, you know, the way that to get something like this implemented would be you would have to protest and you would have to shut down the railroad.
So the way you get things done in a country where the government is run by capitalists is you have to stop capitalism in order for them to bend to your will, like the truckers did in Canada, in a sense.
Do you see a willingness of workers to do something like that?
Well, I was on a Zoom call, including the president of the United Electrical Workers Union, Carl Rosen.
And what Carl said is what I believe.
Is this going to happen tomorrow or overnight?
We don't know.
But we're building a movement.
We're building a movement of working people, not just in rail, but perhaps the energy sector as well, and many other sectors of the economy that for years have run amok and run roughshod over the American people.
So we aim to change that consciousness.
How many of my brothers and sisters on the railroad right now would agree with nationalization, public ownership?
I'm not sure.
But as Railroad Workers United propels this campaign forward, and more and more people learn, for example, about the history of nationalization in this country.
And if I might, I just want to read a few statistics, and this is out of our resolution we adopted back in October.
So the rail industry was actually once publicly owned just for a few years during World War I. It was so popular that the railroad workers' ranks at that time voted in a national plebiscite.
We had a lot more railroaders at that time.
But in December of 1918, the combined total of railroad workers from all the crafts and all the unions voted 306,720 in favor of nationalization of the railroad, with just 1,466 wanting them to go back to public ownership.
This is at the end of World War I. The AFL convention at that time in 1920 voted 29,000 and something to 8,000 in favor, once again, of keeping the railroads under public ownership.
And so there was this thing called the Plum Plan.
And Plum was a representative.
He was a lawyer.
And his idea was: instead of having these private Wall Street and today's hedge funds, for example, owning and running the railroad in the interest of private capital, let's have them run with a tripartite board of directors, which had a third of the board appointed by the feds to be in the interest of the American people.
A third were railroad managers.
And interestingly, a third were actually representatives of workers themselves through the trade unions.
And so this would be really as American as apple pie.
It's self-ownership.
It's self-initiated.
It's workers taking control and a personal interest in their own industry.
So I highly recommend people study up on the old Plum Plan.
It's a faded piece of history from 100 years ago, but it provides us, I believe, with a model that we could work from today to ride a much more efficient and safe, modernized railroad system that actually functions not in the interest of Wall Street hedge funds, but in the interest of workers, trackside communities like East Palestine, of course, shippers, passengers, and the environment.
And so in the near future, what is RW, the Railroad Workers United, what do you plan on doing politically?
Do you have any?
I knew there was talk about a new party, a third party.
Because you vote, if you supported the Democrats, and then the Democrats crushed your union using fascist tactics, they got in bed with the tycoons of the railroad, and they crushed the workers.
And so you can't go Democrat again, and you know you can't go Republican.
So what do you do?
Let me just, let me just, before I throw it to you, Shama Suwan, I don't know if you're familiar with her.
She's the Seattle.
So if you are, she's the Seattle City Council, and she's going to start trying to start a nationwide workers' movement.
So go ahead.
What do you do politically?
Yeah, yeah, I'm in touch with her, and it's the workers' strike back.
And we hope to cooperate in coalition with them to bring all these issues forward.
It's the age-old question, Jimmy.
I mean, we have been screwed by Tweedly D and Tweedly Dome, Democrat and Republican, for well over 100 years.
And like I pointed out on the show when I was there back in, I think it was October or November, Democrat and Republican administration alike have broken our strikes, have ordered us back to work, and have played the game of, yeah, we're going to regulate and rein in the rail industry, but in fact, the rail industry actually emerges victorious in so many cases.
The great socialist and the great labor leader Eugene B. Debs once said, I would rather live in a society where the government owns the railroads than a society where the railroads own the government.
And we have seen this time and time and time again.
So I was at the Labor Party founding convention in Cleveland in 1995, 96, I forget which year, I think it was 96.
And one of the unions that was actually party to the founding of the Labor Party, and it was somewhat stillborn, doesn't really function to the best of my knowledge these days.
But it was a great idea.
And the idea was that unions and working people would front our own political party.
And the slogan was: the bosses have two parties, we need one too.
And so the track workers union, the BMWE at the time, was one of four or five unions, including the mine workers, who have had their strikes broken by the great Democrat Jimmy Carter, for example.
The United Electrical Workers Union, which has always been a very, very outspoken, progressive left-wing union, and I think the California nurses.
But interestingly, we actually did have a rail union participate at that time in the founding of a third party.
Whether rail labor will actually take part in the founding of a new party remains to be seen.
Now, for Railroad Workers United's part, for whatever it's worth, our little organization did talk with people from the People's Party a few years ago.
And while we are not a member of the People's Party, or nor do we support or endorse any political party at this point in our history, we did promulgate a resolution that says railroad workers need to investigate the options that are before us to start a new political party.
And we support the movement for a People's Party to investigate what those prospects are.
And we would support the movement of just about any third-party movement that is based in working people, railroad workers in particular, because our faith in the two-party system after decades and decades of being screwed by it is close to zero.
Well, I wish you well on this.
You know, the railroad is the glue that holds capitalism together in this country.
And of course, capitalism Eats itself.
And of course, they're turned into a monopoly.
And of course, they're not taking care of the infrastructure.
So, again, people don't realize how corrupt our government is.
It's 100% corrupt, which is why this railroad system can be like this.
We don't have super, we don't have bullet trains like the rest of the world.
They're advanced world.
We have anything like that.
And what we do is we have a crumbling infrastructure and where they're putting one and two people on three mile-long railroad cars.
And the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.
They all work for the same people.
Ron, Kamenikov, I really hope you could get something done with the Railroad Workers United.
I hope you can start a workers' party.
I hope you can join with Shama Sawant.
I hope that we really need workers to join together and shut things down in America to get things done.
And that's the only thing that they care about.
And we all know that.
And you know that that railroad strike was going to work.
And that's why they had to come in and crush it.
That's why Joe Biden and the Democrats had to crush your strike before it happened because it was going to work.
And so, with that knowledge, doesn't it make you all want to do it anyway?
Well, I can't speak for everybody, of course, Jimmy, but there was a huge, huge pent-up anger and frustration that has been building for at least two decades now.
Draconian attendance policies, massive furloughs, layoffs, job consolidations, all of us going to work knowing we don't have the proper tools to do the job, lack of maintenance, lack of inspection.
I know signal maintainers and car inspectors that are just furious and very demoralized with the inability to do the job as they were trained to do it and as they understand that the law says they are to do it, to say nothing of government or carrier rail carrier policy and procedure.
But there's all this pressure from the top to, once again, the cult of the operating ratio to cut corners, don't inspect, don't maintain.
We don't have enough staff to do the job properly, get the train out, get it over the road.
And so, obviously, by the strike votes that were taken back in the fall and just the outrage, you know, that so many railroad workers wanted to finally collectively exercise their muscle and their strength and their solidarity and make an expression to the carriers and to the government.
Unfortunately, we didn't even get a day on the picket line.
But maybe next time we will.
But this is something I think that most railroad workers are itching for a fight because we know we can win and we know that we deserve better.
And so, you know, we're not counted out yet.
We'll see what happens, of course, in the next round of bargaining.
Well, I hope you do strike.
I hope you strike anyway, and because it would set a tone for the entire country, if not the entire Western world.
You would win the strike.
You would get whatever you wanted.
And I just wish you would do it.
I wish you would, this would be on the agenda number one for the RWU is to strike anyway and just to get just basic safety measures taken care of.
I wish you would do it.
And the government, you would break them.
You would win.
There's no doubt about it.
You would win.
And so I would encourage someone to be more militant at the railroad union.
And I would hope you do it.
Ron, I really appreciate you coming on.
I'm sorry we don't have more time today.
We got to run to get to our next guest.
And you're welcome back anytime.
All right, Jimmy, I'll take you up on that.
We got a lot to talk about.
Yes, we do.
Okay.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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Max Blumenthal from the Gray Zone is with us.
Hi, Max.
How are you?
Hey, Jimmy, how are you doing?
So I saw the Tucker Carlson segment he did on Monday.
And I want to just go over it with you.
You were there, right?
You were there on January 6th, Max?
I was.
I was the Jewish QAnon alternative shaman.
So there's a lot of video that has been released that released to Tucker Carlson.
He is the number one news show in America.
So why wouldn't you?
So McCarthy, the speaker, the Republican speaker, now has gotten control of that stuff.
Instead of the Democrats and Republicans establishment, now they gave over having access to those tapes of what happened on January 6th.
Now they gave them to Tucker Carlson.
And here he makes his case that the January 6th committee is a bunch of liars who concocted a narrative.
If there's one takeaway from the corpus of footage that we spent three weeks looking at, it's that the January 6th Committee lied.
Its members are liars.
And as a result of those lies, Course of Liberties in this country were eroded.
People went to prison.
They're in prison as of right now, unjustly.
So those lies had consequences.
So that's a big statement.
That's the number one newsman in America, or he's the host of the number one news show in America.
And I saw an article that said more Democrats watch Tucker Carlson in the demo than watch Rachel Maddow.
So it's a very popular news show with Americans.
And he just said everybody on the January 6th, one thing we know for sure is that they're all liars.
That's the number one news show turning the narrative completely 180.
And so here he is.
He makes his case.
His general point is that we've been lied to and only shown a sliver.
And here's his case.
These are the pictures you've seen of January 6th.
They're familiar because they've been playing on a loop on every media outlet in America for the last two years.
There's a reason for that.
But it turns out there's quite a bit of video you haven't seen.
And that video tells a very different story about what happened on January 6th.
More than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from in and around the Capitol have been withheld from the public.
And once you see the video, you'll understand why.
Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection.
In fact, it demolishes that claim.
And that's exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.
By controlling the images you were allowed to view from January 6th, they controlled how the public understood that day.
They could lie about what happened, and you would never know the difference.
Those lies had a purpose.
They created a pretext for a federal crackdown on opponents of the Uniparty in Washington.
Our office wants to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible.
The first thing you notice.
And I just want, this is probably going to seem outrageous to some people.
But if Bernie Sanders became president, this is the exact kind of shit they would have done to him.
They would have rushed again for four straight years, and then they would have made his followers look like violent insurrectionists, and they have to be shunned from polite society because they're the only people standing up against the Uniparty.
That's what would have happened to Bernie Sanders.
He wasn't even president.
They said his followers hate women.
They said his followers hate women.
They said he hate women.
They said he was a Russian.
He was getting propped up by the Russians.
Max, you want to say something?
Remember the chair throwing incident in Nevada?
They made them out to be violent at a bullshit caucus in Nevada.
They said that they were throwing chairs.
And then senators from the Democratic Party were flipping them off.
And they said they were doing that because they were being violent, which was all made up.
They just made it up, just like this January 6th stuff is largely made up.
Not all of it.
There were some violence happening there.
But watch what Tucker has to say.
Viewing the full video record of January 6th is just how many people entered the Capitol building that day.
Hundreds and hundreds of people, possibly thousands over the course of about two hours.
The crowd was enormous.
Wow.
A small percentage of them were hooligans.
They committed vandalism.
You've seen their pictures again and again.
But the overwhelming majority weren't.
They were peaceful.
They were orderly and meek.
These were not insurrectionists.
They were sightseers.
Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you've heard about January 6th.
Protesters queue up in neat little lines.
They give each other tours outside the speaker's office.
They take cheerful selfies and they smile.
They're not destroying the Capitol.
They obviously revere the Capitol.
They're there because they believe the election was stolen from them.
They believe in the system.
So now you're not allowed to believe that.
And we're not allowed to say that on YouTube.
We're not saying that, that the 2020 election was in any way anything but above board and perfect.
But the 2016 election, you could say it was stolen and anytime, any nefarious thing you want to say about it, it's okay because Donald Trump won.
So you can say that all day long.
In fact, they've been saying, they still say it, that it was a coup by the Russian government.
That's what they say about 2016.
Can I say that George W. Bush stole it from Gore now that we like George W. Bush?
I'm not sure if you can say that either, Nob.
But anyway, so just so you know, those people, they were bad because they thought that the election was stolen from them.
Now, when the Democrats, for the four years previous to them, thought the election was stolen from them, they were good.
That's good.
These people are bad for thinking the same thing.
Okay, here we go.
Here's the man you've heard referred to as the QAnon shaman outside the Senate chamber.
These are not rioters.
These are people who wandered over from a political rally.
We will not let them silence your voices.
After the rally, they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, where organizers had secured a federal permit to hold a legal rally on the grounds of the Capitol.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Once at the Capitol building, things began to get chaotic.
Capitol police officers fired tear gas into the crowd.
A few at the front of the herd broke windows.
Someone opened the doors and many hundreds of others just walked in.
Of course, they did make it the story.
And at the center of it, the single most famous person arrested that day was a Navy veteran from Arizona called Jacob Chansley, often referred to as the QAnon shaman.
The so-called QAnon shaman.
QAnon shaman, someone named Q Shaman.
Jacob Chansley became the face of January 6th, a dangerous conspiracy theorist dressed in outlandish costume who led the violent insurrection to overthrow American democracy.
For these crimes, Chansley was sentenced to nearly four years in prison, far more time than many violent criminals now receive.
What did Jacob Chansley do to receive this punishment?
To this day, there is dispute over how Chansley got into the Capitol building.
But according to our review of the internal surveillance video, it is very clear what happened once he got inside.
Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape.
The tapes show that Capitol Police never stopped Jacob Chansley.
They helped him.
They acted as his tour guides.
Here's video of Chansley in the Senate chamber.
Capitol Police officers take him to multiple entrances and even try to open locked doors for him.
We counted at least nine officers who were within touching distance of unarmed Jacob Chansley.
Not one of them even tried to slow him down.
Chansley understood that Capitol Police were his allies.
Video shows him giving thanks for them in a prayer on the floor of the Senate.
Can they open the door for them?
Thank you Heavenly Father for paying the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us in this building to walk.
Contrast the reality of what Jacob Chansley did in the Capitol building on January 6th, the indisputable facts recorded on video, some of which has never before been seen, with the depiction of Jacob Chansley that you've seen in the media for more than two years.
He's a terrorist, they said.
He should be killed.
Shoot him.
Shoot him.
Like, if it, you first into the United States, hey, if he was dressed like bin Laden, would you have shot him?
Shoot him.
Shoot him.
It makes you wonder who are the violent extremists here, not Jacob Chansley.
And the video proves that.
But you would never have known from the media coverage.
The people sitting in the chairs need to be sitting in a jail cell.
Chansley is in a jail cell.
He's been there for months.
If he was in fact committing such a grave crime, why didn't the officers who were standing right next to him place him under arrest?
Until now, no one could even prove that even happened, but it did.
So let me bring in Max.
So that story seemed very concocted.
I've heard other things about that guy, that he was some kind of a religious peacenick.
And again, let's remember, nobody had a gun.
He thanked the cops right in there for letting them in, which we saw.
We've seen videos of cops pulling back the gates, letting them in.
And I'm going to show you more video coming up of cops talking about how they were abandoned by their superiors and they didn't give them any backup.
And it all seems to be intentional.
And so as if they wanted this to happen.
So obviously they wanted this to happen.
This is my, I'm speaking.
And I'm going to show you video where the FBI won't tell you how many FBI undercover people they had in that crowd.
So this was instigated by them.
And that's what these videos are revealing, and that the story that they chose to tell the January 6th committee is a lie.
Now, let me throw it over to you, Max.
What do you have to say about this?
Well, Jacob Chansley says that he is a practitioner of Ahimsa, which is an ancient Indian practice of nonviolence, and that he is religiously opposed to harming another person physically.
And it's unclear, therefore, what he did to get more than three years in prison, except being one of the most visible, visibly recognizable people to participate in what's known as the Capitol Riot, the January 6th protest.
I saw him there, as he said, I was a witness to the events.
I just went down as a reporter, and I just saw him walking around like he was at Burning Man.
He was just being merry and taking photos with everyone.
I didn't see him commit any acts of violence or vandalism.
And as you can see, he was ushered around the building by Capitol police.
He's since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in prison.
This didn't factor into the extreme sentence he got.
And I really recommend that everyone read Chris Hedge's piece, which is up at Sheerpost called Lynching the Deplorables.
And it's about how the 9-11 model that was applied to Muslims and Muslim Americans, including many Muslim American civil society leaders who were arrested and raided after 9-11 under orders from John Ashcroft, is now in many ways being applied to these kind of right-wing Americans and Americans affiliated with the pro-Trump and January 6th movement.
And the treatment of them in DC jail and in prison is horrendous.
I mean, we're talking about solitary confinement.
Many of them during the COVID lockdowns were kept in their cells for 23 hours a day.
One had his face literally broken in a beating by a prison guard.
And the sentencing is a lot of it is based on the propaganda we've seen from the January 6th Committee where they poison all the jury pools in D.C. I mean, if you know how the D.C. jury pools work, it's like liberals and people who work for the CIA or CIA contractors are disproportionately represented there.
And they think of these people as terrorists because of the perception.
So I think it is important to present a more full perspective on what happened because what I saw take place there was much more complex than the version that the January 6th Committee, which didn't even have a real Republican counterpoint or counterpoint at all, critical counterpoint, has presented.
Well, they did have Liz Cheney.
Yeah, exactly, who just got a job at University of Virginia through like Larry Sabato, who's a Democratic pundit hack.
So and Tucker's going to talk about this, how this reveals the Uniparty, this January 6th commission, this January 6th narrative that has been cooked up by the establishment.
And just like we had that, that I'm blanking on the guy's name who was the economic professor who had the Scottish accent we brought on.
Mark Blythe.
Mark Blythe.
Thank you.
And he coined the term global Trumpism, right?
I think that was the term.
And he said, you know, Trump isn't a local event and that Brexit was the same thing.
It represented the same thing as Trump's election here in the United States, was regular people using the ballot box to express their disdain for the establishment.
It wasn't that they necessarily even wanted Brexit.
It wasn't even necessarily that they wanted Trump, but they wanted to stick their thumb in the eye of the establishment in some way, and they did.
And so this January 6th PSYOP that was largely manufactured, and I'm going to get to it, by the intelligence community, like they do all this stuff, was there to make MAGA and Trump and his followers unacceptable in polite society.
Like they were going to be, and again, they would have did this to Bernie Sanders and his followers.
They started to do it, but Bernie Sanders never grabbed power because he was afraid of just this thing.
And so now here, Tucker's going to make his case of how they lied, even more so.
Boy, that was amazing with that guy.
So that guy's sitting in prison for at least three years.
I heard it was four.
I didn't know what he even asked.
What did he do?
And so if the cops are opening the door, Tucker makes the point.
He goes, hey, if a cop opens the door to a liquor store and then you go in and you steal the cash and then they let you back out, isn't the cop complicit in that crime?
How are those cops not complicit in this crime with this?
Whatever what crime did he commit?
I don't know how they he had a horrible lawyer.
Maybe he made bad decisions because he's bipolar and that's why he got such a bad problem.
He pled guilty to something he probably shouldn't have.
But Max, what do you say?
Well, there's one guy who was sentenced to over seven years and he didn't even enter the Capitol building, a guy Wesley Reffitt.
And one of the charges he faced was obstruction of justice because he allegedly threatened his teenage sons against reporting him to law enforcement because he was afraid of going to jail.
So a thousand people have been arrested and taken in in this case and many of them did not enter the building.
So now Tucker's going to let you know.
This is his big idea here.
He's going to lay down his case of how they lied.
Take away from the corpus of footage that we spent three weeks looking at.
It's that the January 6th committee lied.
Its members are liars.
And as a result of those lies, core civil liberties in this country were eroded.
People went to prison.
They're in prison as of right now, unjustly.
So those lies had consequences.
So you have to ask yourself, whatever happened to the members of the January 6th Committee, these liars who hurt people and the country.
Well, let's see.
Adam Schiff is running for Senate.
Adam Kinzinger got a job at CNN.
Liz Cheney somehow wound up a professor at the University of Virginia, the August University of Virginia.
They're all still there.
Benny Thompson.
Ooh, listen to his wisdom, but they're liars.
And above all, this video proves it.
Here's another installment.
One of the enduring mysteries of January 6th is the role that intelligence and law enforcement agencies played in the events of that day.
We know there were some number of undercover federal agents in the crowd at the Capitol.
Officials have since admitted that under oath.
But what exactly were they doing there?
The January 6th Committee worked hard to hide the answer to that question.
We do know from contemporaneous videos that a mysterious figure called Ray Epps encouraged the crowd to go into the Capitol.
For some reason, Epps has never been indicted for that.
There's no question he did it.
He needed to go into the Capitol under public pressure.
So now that guy was a Fed.
So that guy's what they call an undercover Fed.
And he was there to instigate that riot.
And he did.
And they've caught, we've showed you this guy many times.
Now, the heads of the FBI were asked about this guy, and they said, we can't answer any questions.
They said that to senators.
So I just want to let you know about that guy.
Okay.
January 6th Committee finally interviewed Ray Epps.
Epps told the committee that he never entered the Capitol and therefore never committed a crime.
His text messages showed that at 2.12 p.m., he boasted to his nephew that he had, quote, orchestrated the protests at the Capitol.
He admitted he helped get people there.
Yet, curiously, congressional Democrats consider Ray Epps an ally, not an insurrectionist.
Tonight we can tell you that at the very least, Ray Epps lied in his sworn testimony to the January 6th Committee.
Epps testified that when he sent the text messages to his nephew, he had already left the Capitol grounds to return to his hotel room.
That lies not true.
The surveillance footage we found shows that, in fact, Ray Epps remained at the Capitol for at least another half an hour.
You're seeing that on your screen now.
What was Epps doing there?
We can't say, but we do know that he lied to investigators.
The January 6th Committee likely knew this too.
Democrats had access to the same tape, yet they defended Ray Epps.
No honest investigation would do that.
But the point of the January 6th committee was never to investigate anything.
The point was to stage a made-for-TV show trial.
Now, I've been making this point here at that show that this is just a show trial and that I've been saying the same thing on stage.
And that's exactly what this is.
This is a concocted show trial.
And here we go.
Opening moments, the tone of the hearings was almost comically overheated and polemical.
There was not a tragedy in American history that Democrats didn't Liken to the protests of January 6th.
I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching.
How staged and fraudulent is the work of the January 6th committee?
Democrats hired a Good Morning America producer called James Goldston to dramatize the footage they released.
They hired a television producer to make the video more dramatic.
They're putting on a show in audio to make the pictures more sensational, as in a docu drama.
The networks carried it all live as if it were real.
But Donald Trump was far from the only target.
The enemy is within the House of Representatives.
Within hours of January 6th, Democrats alleged a conspiracy.
They claimed their Republican colleagues had helped to plan the breach of the Capitol building.
There was never any evidence this was true, none at all.
Yet it was widely repeated.
Our colleagues are continuing to engage with white nationalist extremist groups, the most violent attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812.
At one point, the January 6th Committee publicly accused Republican Congressman Barry Laudermilk of Georgia of leading a reconnaissance mission through the Capitol building the day before.
They were looking for some member of Congress that was involved in all this.
The surveillance state that we reviewed shows this story is a lie.
And the Democrats on the committee knew it was a lie when they told it.
The so-called reconnaissance mission Democrats alleged was nothing more than Congressman Laudermill giving a guided tour to his constituents from Georgia, none of whom were, quote, insurrectionists.
Laudermilk didn't even take the group inside the Capitol building.
They walked through a congressional office building down the street.
The FBI is totally clear to them.
The committee knew this before they actually made their accusations against me.
It wanted to create the story that would fit where they wanted the evidence to lead.
Despite the video evidence they possessed proving it wasn't true, the committee included the lie in its final report.
Protesters, it says dramatically, quote, took a tour of the Capitol with Representative Barry Laudermilk, during which he took pictures of hallways and staircases.
If you read the final report, it was a manifesto against Donald Trump.
That's all it was.
When the committee wasn't accusing Republican officeholders of planning riots on January 6th, it was accusing them of running away from those riots like cowards.
In the case of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, the committee and their allies accused him of both.
Josh Hawley is a to prove that Josh Hawley was a coward.
The committee released a video of him looping out of the building on the afternoon of January 6th with a police escort.
The tape became a staple on social media.
Democrats laughed with derision.
Later that day, Senator Hawley fled after those protesters.
He helped to rile up, storm the Capitol.
See for yourself.
But in fact, But they didn't show the whole video.
Here's the part they didn't show.
The surveillance footage we reviewed shows that famous clip was a sham edited deceptively by the January 6th committee.
The clip was propaganda, not evidence.
The actual videotape shows that Hawley was one of many lawmakers being ushered out of the building by Capitol Hill police officers.
And in fact, Hawley was at the back of the pack.
The coward tape was a lie, one of many from the January 6th Committee.
So what if many, what if many is for certain?
Thomas Massey serves in the Congress.
So that's a big, it's a bigger deal than I think people are realizing because they've tried to marginalize Tucker Carlson so much, and yet he's still the number one news show in America.
And for him to be doing this, it's got to be panicking the people in power.
And the big question is, all Tucker Carlson had to do was look at the videotape and he could see immediately, his staff could see immediately they were lying.
They concocted a narrative and they lied all these different ways.
And there's more ways to show you, way more ways.
They lied that a cop got killed.
The cop didn't get killed.
They lied and said he did.
We're going to show you that.
But the question is, to me, Max, why are they lying?
And of course, the obvious answer would be because they're concocting a story and this was their chance to get rid of Donald Trump and his followers forever.
And that's what this was.
And they wanted to concoct this.
And this isn't something.
Go ahead.
Let me just throw it to you there.
Yeah, it's a lot like Russia Gate, except there is a certain reality there.
There was a riot.
I call it a low IQ riot that lasted for several hours.
And then the crowd was pretty much dispersed once the police arrived on January 6th.
So that was real.
Russia Gate was fake.
But Russia Gate had a dual-pronged purpose that converged inside the Beltway Unit Party.
The purpose was, one, a partisan purpose.
You know, Clintonite dead enders wanted to delegitimize Trump's presidency.
And then you had the convergence or the confluence with the national security anti-Russia fanatics, the spooks like John Brennan.
So here you have the same thing.
The FBI wants to expand its powers massively.
And the Capitol police want to justify their bureaucratic priorities.
They've been able to expand to two field offices thousands of miles away from D.C. since January 6th.
Their budget has ballooned.
And then you have, you know, the January 6th committee.
That was just a partisan show to try to destroy what's left of Donald Trump and possibly, you know, they had their criminal referral.
They want to prosecute him so he can never run for president again.
That's why they're doing this.
That's why is Tucker doing this?
Maybe there's a partisan motivation there.
Obviously, it's Fox News.
Tucker's, you know, the leading voice of MAGA.
But, you know, there are also civil liberties issues in play that run counter to those of the FBI.
So if you look at the way I've been watching, I watched the two nights so far of Tucker's coverage, and I've been watching MSNBC's coverage and some of CNN's, and it's all uniform.
They start out every hour by denouncing Tucker for claiming that January 6th was a mostly peaceful event, a kind of like Woodstock type festival.
And they completely, they render his critique into a cartoon of what it's not.
And, you know, if you actually watch it, Tucker is showing riot footage.
He's acknowledging that there was violence there.
But what he's doing is poking holes in the January 6th investigation with all this footage.
And one of the most interesting interviews he conducted was with Representative Thomas Massey, the libertarian from Kentucky, who said, as a member of Congress, my security is not threatened by releasing all of this footage after the proper vetting and letting the public see it all to make up their minds.
And that would, you know, what would be wrong with that if it is such a heinous event?
And I do think in many ways it was disgraceful what took place and stupid.
And it was also a security state trap.
But let's see it all and let's find out potentially who the federal infiltrators actually were.
I think there's a cover-up taking place there.
That's why there was so little interest in Ray Epps.
We also have to ask why Ray Epps wasn't the only person who took someone actually took a bullhorn and stood up in front of their followers and said, break through the barricades and disregard the police.
And that was the Grepers leader, the Nazi cat boy, Nick Fuentes.
The guy who's advising Kanye's Ye's presidential run.
And then he went and had lunch at a Japanese steakhouse, as Anya Parrampil reported at the gray zone.
I think she's the only reporter who noticed this.
Nick Fuentes was never arrested.
Just like Ray at Ray Epps was kind of left alone when these were key instigators.
It's really unusual.
Yeah, and like, why don't we constantly see that video?
And the video's out there.
They trash him too, and they don't show that.
Yeah, and so many.
You know that story that Chris Hedges told on my show.
And I think, I think it was in Henry Kissinger's book or something about when the anti-war protesters were outside the White House and they had lined up school buses inside the fence.
And Henry Kissinger looks out the window and he says to Henry Kissinger, what are those buses there for?
He said, oh, because that they're there in case they break through the fence, you know.
And he was like, oh, I'm afraid.
And he said something like, well, I'm afraid they'll come for me.
And if they get through the fence, they'll come for me.
And Chris Hedges says, that's exactly where we want them.
So how do you reconcile what that story and Chris Hedges saying that with what you just said about January 6th, the protesters?
Well, the current incarnation of the U.S. left would never do something to make people in power feel threatened.
Although we are seeing in Atlanta some interesting events that I think tie into January 6th.
Okay, you had all of these January 6th defendants accused of seditious conspiracy, in other words, conspiracy to overthrow the government, including the Proud Boys and Stuart Rhodes from the Oath Keepers.
The New York Times itself has acknowledged that there is no evidence in 50,000 text messages and emails involving the Oath Keepers to build a case that they were actually trying to overthrow the U.S. government and violently install Donald Trump.
But all these sedition charges appear to be sticking.
The government is inventing and expanding these World War I era laws to apply to common rioters.
And we're seeing the same thing in Atlanta with protesters against Cop City, this gigantic police complex that's taking out an old growth forest.
You know, what's known as Antifa has been protesting it along with lots of activists there.
And a lot of those protesters, several of them, are being accused of terrorism.
They're facing literal terrorism charges for their role.
So the way that the federal government from Merrick Garland, but particularly Merrick Garland, but from Merrick Garland down to, you know, federal prosecutors is behaving is outlandish in the way that they're applying these charges.
And so it can apply to the left, and it's happening before our eyes.
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