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March 20, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
31:39
Jimmy Dore with Natali Morris: Being Attacked for Telling the Truth
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My guest today is Jimmy Dore, host of The Jimmy Dore Show, someone I've just wanted to meet for a really long time to talk about what it's like to...
Report on stories in a way that we are sort of not supposed to, to go against the grain.
You, like Redacted, get a lot of flack for saying things that are against the government narrative.
And so I'm so excited to meet you for the first time and hear your story.
And also just, I know maybe it's not useful for our audience, but talk about what it's like to be on the receiving end of so much ire.
From government propaganda.
So, first of all, it's really nice to meet you.
Thanks for coming on Redacted.
Well, it's nice to meet you, too.
Thanks for having me on.
And, you know, the ire, I'm from, you know, I'm Irish, so I guess I should be used to the ire, but at first it bothered me.
Like, you know, I mean, I started my show in the late 2015, and I was surprised when I would catch a lot of flack for certain things.
I was just, you know, I was a comedian doing a show.
And but I it happened right away when I wouldn't give my vote to Hillary Clinton because, you know, I was a Democrat my whole life and I was a Bernie supporter in 2016.
And I kept telling people, you know, make make Hillary Clinton come get your vote.
And she wouldn't.
She didn't care.
And she was like, you owed your vote to the politician.
And if you didn't vote for the politician Democrat, you let them down.
I was like, that's not how politics works.
And politics is supposed to, if you don't have enough votes to win, you have to go get them.
And I kept telling people on my show, and then my radio show too, I had a radio show at the time in Los Angeles, and I would tell people to, you know, if a pollster calls you, tell them you're not voting for Hillary, so she has to come get your vote,
and she does something to actually campaign for you.
And so that was the beginning.
People coming at me, people I've known all my life, stuff like that.
You know, they had built Trump up to be Hitler.
So that was that.
And so it doesn't the thing like that.
I'm kind of happy when I get a mainstream news media come after me, like Newsweek or the Washington Post or New York Magazine, stuff like that.
I've had all that happen to me.
But it's when people I've known all my life just start to slander me on social media without a phone call or a conversation.
That still stings.
Yeah.
I get more silence than anything else.
People don't come to me, but I was a mainstream media journalist for NBC and CBS, and I think people get confused.
That I am no longer parodying that narrative.
Like, where'd you go?
What happened to you?
Or, I don't know if you know, but Clayton was a Fox News anchor, so I think people think that I've been radicalized by my husband.
And that bothers me a lot, because they think that I can't think for myself I must have just been.
Indoctrinated.
Whereas the truth is, when we started Redacted, I thought, well, I'm going to show you some stuff.
I thought that I was going to be a liberal voice against these narratives, and I couldn't back it up.
I went seeking book after book after book, and I'm like, none of this is true.
Everything they're selling us is a smokescreen for lies, and I just couldn't do it.
So I don't know.
I didn't...
I don't mean to align myself with the American right, which I guess is what the perception is.
It's just a refutation of the American left.
So it's good to hear that you might not be bothered by that eventually.
Can I just say that I consider myself a lefty.
I still do.
But not a liberal.
The liberal class has become...
Right-wing, from what I was always told was right-wing, right?
But they're not.
Like, the right-wingers I know, I was always told right-wing was pro-war, right-wing was authoritarian, right-wing was censorship, right-wing was against bodily autonomy.
But now that's flipped, right?
Especially during COVID.
That's like, I've stayed the same.
I'm pro-free speech, anti-censorship, I'm anti-war, I'm...
For bodily autonomy.
So if you're against the Ukraine war, or if you're against mandated medical treatments, and if you're for freedom of speech, that is all called right-wing today.
So I'm often called a right-wing grifter, even though I've kept my values.
My values stay the same, plus I'm pro-single-payer medicine.
I'm also...
Pro-union and pro-worker in that way.
So I still consider myself on the left, but the liberal class has become very illiberal.
There's nothing less liberal than being for censorship and against free speech and against bodily autonomy, which you notice a lot of liberals stopped during COVID.
They stopped saying they were for bodily autonomy or pro-choice, and they started to say they were pro-abortion.
Which sounds funny to me, in a bad way, that you would be pro-abortion.
I've met some people who claim they actually are pro-abortion.
To me, that's a weird thing.
That's like saying you're pro-amputation.
It's like, yeah, if you have to do an amputation to save your life, you do it.
But it's kind of a dark day.
It's not a celebration.
But the people who celebrate abortion are just beyond me.
I don't understand it.
So I've stayed left.
And the liberals have...
Lost their minds.
They've become very illiberal.
So let's put it that way.
Because the left-right labels don't really work today anymore.
And so I've stayed consistent.
And people haven't noticed that the Democratic Party, Democrats, have become the opposite of what they're supposed to be.
They're pro-war.
They're pro-Ukraine war.
They were really...
Anyway, so I have already said it, but that's...
That's how I look at it, and so I've stayed consistent, and they've moved to the illiberal side.
Right.
Now, a lot of times I will watch your show after we do ours because I want to make sure that I'm not influenced, you know, by other voices.
And then I'm surprised that we have a lot of similar takes on it.
But you use comedy.
I'm more of a poindexter.
I have to just see everything in books and original source material or else I don't feel the confidence.
And so I'm so curious about the angle of using comedy to handle these things because I feel...
Like, when I watch your show, I need it.
I need the levity or else I just get too dark.
I get too depressed.
So is there any time sometimes when you're like, it would just be safer to tell poop jokes rather than do this?
Well, it always is safer to do those kind of jokes, but they don't interest me enough, right?
And so I like doing, you know, I wouldn't say my show is a, you know, Daily show, comedy show like that, but definitely we inject a lot of humor in our show.
And, you know, I have two really funny writers who write jokes for the segments we do, and if it fits, I'll do them, right?
So I have Kurt Metzger, Rick Overton write for my show, and, you know, I just got done taping my comedy special, my latest comedy special at the Joe Rogan's Mothership in Austin.
And so, I mean, it's...
I'll take a lot of comedy from the show and put it in my act.
It's got to be something that interests me.
We have to talk about it every night on stage.
I'll get bored.
A lot of people say what you just said to me.
They appreciate that we bring humor to serious topics.
It's where I come from.
I've been a comedian for 30 years.
Right.
I think that...
It's very validating to see that people I respect might have a similar take on a story.
And it was probably around the height of the pandemic, 2021, 2020, that we started to notice that we had an overlap of viewers.
And to me, that felt exciting because I really resonated with the things that you were saying.
And if people were interested in hearing both shows, then I felt like, OK, then we're in good company because what we do and the sort of personal nature of the attacks is hard.
It's hard to do.
Yesterday, we did a piece on the Jewish lawyer, David Goldberger, who defended the
Nazis'rights in Skokie, Illinois, and Holocaust survivors as well.
Yeah, there were at least two Holocaust survivors that said that if you start banning speech, you open a dangerous door, and Jews should know that better than anyone.
But now, so I guess...
You know, something we share in common is we were called anti-vaxxers, but we weren't that.
You and me and our respective...
Then we were called Russian apologists or Putin apologists.
On Wikipedia, someone said that Clayton was married to, I don't know, Sergey Lavrov or something stupid like that.
Like they keep punking us as if we are Russian agents.
And then now, because we refuse to stand down about this broad definition of anti-Semitism, which now the ADL has defined as in this survey, which is crazy because we're
talking about speech.
They say that 83 percent of Jewish college students have witnessed anti-Semitism, but how they define it is seeing graffiti or hearing problematic comments about Israel.
That's certainly not anti-Semitism as somebody who actually lost members in the Holocaust, hearing something.
Most Holocaust victims had never even been to Israel, so they wouldn't have had any personal connection to saying something about a government.
And so I see this being used to take.
Well, yeah,
I mean...
Because there was, you know, it's like when they stopped, they used hate speech.
So it's just a different version of hate speech laws, right?
And people who want to ban hate speech are people who hate speech.
So you can just take trans and you can substitute anti-Semite.
And it's the same thing.
So it's hate against Semites, hate against trans.
It's the same.
You can't...
It's exactly what you said.
You open up a dark door to a dark place when you start banning people's hate.
And that's what that is.
And so, yeah, again, I'm against hate speech laws, just like it doesn't make sense to me.
Why am I not allowed to hate stuff?
And so they're trying to...
That's just another form of control.
And they're trying to control the narrative.
I mean, that's why they banned...
So TikTok's banning.
They'll just tell you right out by Antony Blinken.
And I have a video I play in my show of Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney talking about, yeah, the people were being pro-Palestinian on TikTok.
That's why we had to get rid of it.
It was a real problem.
And so, you know, they just did a new...
Gallup poll that showed that I think something like a third of Jewish teenagers sympathize with Palestinians now.
So most of the Jews that I know in this space, you know, they don't support Israel's position right now.
So they're also, I guess, they're self-hating anti-Semites.
If there's a rise in anti-Semitism, right, which it's mostly just because of what you said, they redefined what anti-Semitism is to criticisms of Israel or Israel's policy.
But if there's a rise of anti-Semitism while the state of Israel is doing a ethnic cleansing and bombing, indiscriminate bombing.
Of women and children, when they bomb a building, you know, most of the people inside are kids from 0 to 10 years old, and those are the most people being killed by those bombs.
Don't be surprised that there's a rise in anti-Semitism, right?
It's like, it didn't come out of nowhere.
It's like, hey, we don't...
So if there's a rise of anti-Semitism, it may be while you're committing a genocide or ethnic cleansing, if you want to parse words, maybe take a look in the mirror of why you think this is a rise.
But it's mostly because of the way they're reporting it.
Any criticism of Israel is considered anti-Semitism.
And again, I'll go back to the, why can't I get to hate stuff?
Why can't I?
Hate the state of Israel or hate what they're doing or hate ethnic cleansing or hate a politician.
Why can't I hate those things?
Right.
But you and I know that there are shifting rules of engagement, especially on YouTube.
And so YouTube has started to turn its censorship head towards anything that's critical of Israel.
And so, you know, we're having to sidestep.
And so how do you play this game?
Because we're constantly trying to figure out how to say what we feel like we need to say without being punished because we want to still be on the platform.
Well, I learned how to tiptoe around the COVID rules pretty well.
But the new anti-Semitism stuff, I'm still negotiating it.
You know, they have a...
They haven't censored us outright, but they will demonetize videos, which is another form of getting you to self-censor, because we all have crews, we all have people we have to pay and bills that we have to meet, and it's certainly an incentive or a disincentive for you to cover Israel in a critical way.
So I haven't figured out how to tiptoe around that yet, but I have figured out how to tiptoe around COVID pretty well.
Yeah, I guess it's just something we have to collectively learn while doing it because we got punished for reading the Pfizer vaccine trials, clinical trials, and then we got punished for talking about the composition of the Ukrainian army with a word that I won't say right now because,
again, it's, you know...
Ryan Smith's schmatsy with Yahtzee.
So it's like, what do we have to continue?
You know, what's next?
And sometimes I feel like this is just the job.
That whatever is against the most popular government narrative is what we are going to have to be creative about talking about.
Do you feel that?
Like, we're never going to be done.
Yes.
You know, it's not as in one way, it's not half as bad as what they have to put up with in Europe.
Right.
So they have those that censorship act.
I forget the exact name of it, but it's it's horrible.
It's called the Digital Services Act.
That's it.
Yeah, that's it.
So they have it much worse than we do.
And in a lot of ways, the United States is the last bastion of of free speech.
We're the only place left in the world.
That's which just makes it all the more tragic if the Trump administration clamps down.
And starts policing speech for anti-Israel hate, which is what that is.
So that would be a horrible thing.
And so I encourage MAGA supporters to...
To not put up with it and have to remind them that it's the speech you hate that needs the protection.
It's not the speech we all agree on.
No one needs protection for that.
You need protection because one day the speech that you want will be called hate speech, right?
And just like it was called hate speech to talk about, you know, gender reaffirming care for children or, you know, drag queen story hours in libraries for children.
Or trans issues.
That was all called hate.
You can't deadname someone.
You can't.
So that was all.
I mean, a lot of people were censored all over the place because of that.
And so now you have to be cognizant of that when you want to have a Palestinian protester silenced and censored.
You have to show.
That you don't want that.
You have to put up with that speech that you find distasteful and even disgusting because then it won't be granted to you.
You have to be consistent.
And now, I mean, as soon as, you know, the Ben Shapiros of the world, right?
Like, I used to like what he had to say about, you know, you don't have a right to your feelings.
To have a safe space on a college campus.
You're supposed to be confronted with lots of ideas that make you uncomfortable.
And then as soon as October 7th happened, all those people who said that stuff flipped.
And they became just as censorious as the liberal class, the Democrats.
It was just a different issue.
So it was like, I'm for free speech up until it bothers me.
And that's not how free speech works.
So it's a real precarious time right now because there isn't free speech in Europe at all.
I don't know if you saw that 60 Minutes piece that a lot of people were talking about a few weeks ago, but it was chilling.
They're breaking into people's houses as if they were drug lords or something at 4 or 5 o 'clock in the morning and breaking into their house because they put a meme up on social media.
No kidding.
And there have thousands and thousands of cases that they're prosecuting.
And they do it with a smile because in their mind, they're protecting their country from right wing extremism.
When, of course, the government are the people who are engaging in what they would consider right wing extremism.
They're censoring people wholesale.
They're putting people in jail and fining them for speech, which is thought crimes.
And at the same time, they're canceling elections now in Romania and saying that we might have to do that in Germany.
And then they're banning opposition leaders from running for office, which they just did with Georgescu.
And at the same time, they're literally funding Nazis in Ukraine.
Right. So they.
They are that thing.
And so that's how it always happens, right?
There used to be a saying, when fascism comes to America, it's going to be carrying a flag in a Bible.
And that's exactly what's happening.
They're doing it.
As if it's a good thing.
It's a good Christian thing to do to censor people's hate and hate speech, which, again, we know one man's hate is another man's love or free speech.
And so there's no way around this.
And so I use my platform, because I do have a lot of MAGA that watch my show, to try to educate them and inform them and make them raise their consciousness about you have to put up with this kind of speech that you hate.
Yeah.
The tribalism doesn't serve us.
And sometimes I think, like, what am I?
What group?
And I don't want any one tribe that will not think critically because our show was really launched on the anti-war platform, anti-authoritarianism under COVID.
And so a lot of MAGA...
I had seen that for themselves because they are capable of free thinking.
But, you know, for whatever reason, the loyalists to Trump maybe can't see.
That this is very dangerous.
And in my opinion, maybe more so because Israel is a lot more powerful than Ukraine.
They have a lot more global influence, a lot more money, a lot more military strength.
And it feels scarier.
And I was scared all the time.
I have three kids to speak out about Ukraine.
And so this does feel dangerous.
And so what do you think?
Is it going to happen?
Because I think that I guess what I'm asking, I want to ask this in a diplomatic way.
Do you have any faith that things are different because we're not under the Democrats because that was so scary?
Or do you think that it's just it's a uniparty?
Well, I definitely think Donald Trump is an outlier from the Republican Party.
You know, in 2016, he ran against the Republican Party like Bernie did.
And they had a lot of the same critiques.
You know, I mean, Donald Trump's critique was that these people are all bought.
I used to buy them.
And I would give them money and they would do what I want.
And Bernie Sanders was saying the same thing.
So a lot of people who couldn't vote for Bernie ended up voting for Donald Trump.
So and then, of course, the establishment in the end, you know, there's the never Trumpers inside the Republican Party and the log cabin republic, whatever they call themselves.
And so I think that Donald, you know, the establishment did Russiagate.
Right.
And that wasn't left.
That was both the establishment in both parties.
And that was to kind of discredit Donald Trump.
And then to try to make it illegal for him to run.
January 6th was an establishment hit job.
We've covered extensively on my show.
And, you know, the 92 felony indictments, that's the same things they're doing to Georgescu right now in Romania.
And, of course, the two assassination attempts.
So there are factions in the deep state and in the establishment that are allergic to Donald Trump.
Which is kind of weird because Donald Trump was an establishment darling his whole life, my whole life anyway.
And they gave him his own network television show for 10 years.
They gave him Emmy nominations.
He was invited to guest host Saturday Night Live.
He was on the cover of every...
Oprah wanted to run for office with him.
She even said that.
So it was so...
So he obviously posed his...
He ran on an anti-interventionist program and he wanted a platform.
And so that's what they couldn't take.
And as Tucker Carlson says, they're afraid he's going to do one less war than Kamala Harris.
And that's enough for them to do all that stuff to him.
So at some point, even though it sounds...
I mean, he's surrounding himself with former Democrats, like Elon Musk, I'm sure, voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
Tulsi Gabbard certainly did.
RFK Jr. certainly did.
I mean, he ran as a Democrat and came on my show and defended the Democratic Party as being better than the Republican Party when his campaign started.
So he's got to surround himself with a weird bunch of outsiders to the Republican Party.
So, yeah, I think, is there hope?
There's a little.
I don't have faith, but I have hope.
And we'll see how this all plays out.
There's a lot of people right now.
It's Kash Patel, for instance, another outsider.
He's going to remake.
He's going to clear the corruption out of the FBI.
I have some people come on, like Christian Parenti, and say this is a good thing.
You don't go to war with the army you want.
You go to war with the army you have.
That's what the Trump administration is.
That's what they're doing with the USAID and the NED and the FBI.
Some people say...
Who are critical that, oh, they're just going to replace those people with their own goons who are loyal to Trump and nothing's really going to change.
And I have people who I respect, you know, like even Chris Hedges came on my show and he said that Trump's implementing the 2025 agenda.
And I was like, well, if he was actually doing that, if his agenda was more imperialism.
And the 2025 agenda, why would Dick Cheney endorse Kamala Harris?
Why would all the neocons and all the CIA people and the 51 people who said Hunter's laptop was Russian, why would they all do that?
If they knew Trump was going to do the thing that everybody claimed they wants was the 2025 agenda, it's the neocons want.
So that doesn't hold water with me.
So I think on some level he's a threat to...
Right.
But covering the Biden administration, something that you did really beautifully was you would take what Biden was saying and you were able to say, he's leading us towards this.
This is why this was scary.
And it was usually a straight line between authoritarian policy and authoritarian reality.
Whereas Donald Trump...
He plays us in a lot of ways.
For instance, the fact that he shared Jeffrey Sachs' video about Netanyahu being an SOB and then is doing exactly what Netanyahu wants in terms of aid and cracking down on antisemitism really confuses me and I feel like there may be something.
Here that we don't see.
A game at play.
And that's how I sort of leave the door open.
So I can't take his word to the bank from his tweets.
And I know that the algorithm on X is riling me up.
You know, so, like, the algorithm should have long since lost the privilege to rile me up.
But I still allow it.
So I guess that's...
A personal journey.
But, you know, is there something that maybe we need to step back and say, maybe I don't, like, I'll give you a little bit of wiggle room, but this doesn't make sense.
But maybe there's a bigger agenda at play.
Have you seen it that way or do you not?
Well, I mean, that's the hope, right, that I have, right?
So maybe he's, you know, he did.
Stop the bombing of Gaza.
Right.
So that did happen because of him.
The ceasefire did happen because of him.
And so when he speaks in an over the top ways about, you know, what he's going to do to Hamas if they don't release the prisoners, it won't be good.
You know, hell like you've never experienced stuff like that.
When he said, I'm like, well, you know, hopefully that's just him trying to position.
Well, that's what I said during the campaign is like that.
Hopefully his rhetoric is so over the top pro-Israel that that provides him space to go in and force a deal.
Right.
So he can't be seen as pro-Hamas in any way as so he can go in and enforce a deal.
And, you know, kind of like, you know, Nixon being able to go to China, he's the guy who could, he's got to be so over the top.
So that's my hope.
I don't, again, I don't have, but we'll wait and see how this all plays out.
His idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza and get, it just, you know, but they've had a, they've had, you know, I just played on my show yesterday, Gaddafi.
Predicted what they're doing in Syria.
He said they're going to break up Syria into five.
They want to balkanize it into five different sections.
And he said they want to do the same thing to Egypt in three different sections.
And he's right.
I mean, they have Turkey.
They have the United States.
They have Israel.
They have Al-Qaeda.
They call it HTS.
So they all have their own sliver of Syria now.
And so they've balkanized it successfully.
And they say that the Kurds are...
That's the United States.
And it's the oil part.
And we're still stealing 80% of Syria's oil right now to this day.
And Trump admitted it when they asked him in his first term, why are you leaving troops in Syria?
And he said, for the oil.
And so I'm like, well, at least he's being honest about it up front.
But they don't want him to say that, right?
They want him to say for liberty and freedom.
But now, I mean, so Donald Trump protected Idlib.
I mean, I don't want to get too off topic, but right now, al-Qaeda is in charge of Syria, and I don't hear any outrage about it from the Trump administration.
And that's something that the United States and Israel and Turkey and Qatar made happen.
Yeah.
And I believe Russia has a presence in Syria as well.
Right, but they're fighting against the Islamic terrorists.
They're fighting against ISIS.
Everybody predicted it from Tulsi Gabbard to people like me was that if you get rid of Assad, what are you going to replace him with?
You know what you're going to replace him with?
Fundamentalist Islamic terrorists and Al-Qaeda.
And that's exactly what's running.
And right now they're doing...
A slaughter of Alawites and Christians, and this is all predicted.
Yes.
Yeah.
There's a great book, I don't know if you've read it, called Washington's Long War on Syria, about how this started with Bashar al-Assad's father years and years ago.
Not necessarily the Obama administration, although the Obama administration told us copious lies about Syria, and people just bought it.
So, yeah.
Well, we could continue to get into the weeds, but I didn't mean to take your time like this.
Like I said, mostly I wanted to know you and hear what it was like from your side because we respect you a lot on this show.
We've played your clips often, and we just really appreciate that there's another voice like that.
And I think in a time like this, you shouldn't need it because you have to be brave, but I feel like I do.
I need you.
So you need to stay on the air, and I need the...
Comedic relief sometimes.
I need, you know, especially when you do this work just in a studio with a camera, you don't have co-workers.
So you don't know it, but you've been my co-worker for many years.
Oh, that's very sweet.
I appreciate the compliment.
And right back at you, I played your clips on the show and I watch your show often and it is a comfort.
And it's nice to see that people can come from different backgrounds politically and agree on a lot of things.
And that's the only thing that scares the oligarchy and the establishment is people on the left-right, the populist left and the populist right coming together.
That's the only thing that scares them, which is why they try so hard to divide us.
And that's the point of identity politics, which is why I pushed back on that since I started my show.
Well, amazing.
I cheer you on every single day.
So watch The Jimmy Dore Show on whichever platform you'd like.
I know you're on X, you're on YouTube, Rumble, all of the places.
Yeah, all of the places.
Thank you so much for your time.
I hope we meet in person sometime.
Yes, likewise.
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