Jimmy Dore argues the U.S. government's excesses, from mass incarceration to surveillance, stem from the Democratic Leadership Council's corporatist shift under Bill Clinton, which enabled NAFTA and Wall Street deregulation. He accuses Nancy Pelosi of theatrical opposition while secretly collaborating with Trump on military funding for a border wall, and labels Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as feckless "company men" who failed to challenge the establishment or demand Universal Basic Income during the pandemic. Dore contends both parties serve Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, noting the latter spends over $131 billion annually on foreign wars while domestic crises like homelessness remain unsolved, ultimately suggesting true change requires directly threatening economic disruption rather than polite protest. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Part of the Problem00:06:43
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
Hello, hello, hello, everybody.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm so excited for this episode because I have on the show a guest I've wanted to talk to for quite some time because I'm a huge fan of him and his show.
Of course, it is Jimmy Doar, the host of the Jimmy Door Show.
Thank you for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, absolutely, man.
You know, as I told you when I was on your show the other day, I'm a huge fan of the Jimmy Doer show.
And I think the reason I love the show, well, number one, you're hilarious, which makes it entertaining to consume.
That helps.
Number two, you've been right.
You're right about pretty much all the most important stuff, which, you know, to me is like the wars, calling out the neoliberal and the neoconservative Democrat and Republican establishment, and that they're basically the same freaking thing and they're wrong about everything.
And then, you know what I think I also love about your show is you have this attitude that's, I think, very similar to me, where you're like, listen, I'm an idiot comedian, and I'm better than the entire corporate press.
That's the statement.
So that really is kind of the premise of my show.
And it's funny when people try to, in the corporate media or their sympathizers, will come at me and attack me.
They'll say, you know, you're dumb or you don't know how things work.
And, you know, and I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point is that even someone like me can see how fucked up this is and what needs to be done and that you're lying.
I know, but I watch MSNBC and CNN and they tell me about Syria and a gas attack.
I know they're lying.
When they tell me about Venezuela and Maduro, I know they're lying.
When they say he set on fire the aid, I know they're lying.
When they say we're arming moderate rebels, which is like being a little pregnant, I know they're lying, right?
So, and they won't, it's amazing to me.
It's like my friends in comedy say to me, because the show has taken off and I went from just being a regular headliner in comedy clubs to now filling theaters, which nobody's doing shows now, but right before this.
And so all my friends are like, Jimmy, what are you doing?
And I'm like, it's really easy.
They fucking just lie about shit straight up.
So, and then I get to come in and fill that void.
Like, for instance, Russagate.
It's all bullshit.
And my friends would be like, what are you talking about?
How could Russagate be bullshit?
And so then I would start making predictions, you know, and I would say, well, I'm going to tell you what's never going to happen.
You're never going to see evidence of a Russian hack into the DNC server.
Because I already know I had Bill Binney on my show, who's the top codebreaker ever for the NSA.
And he said that if that happened, the NSA would have evidence of it because they have a copy of everything that ever happens on the internet.
And if that happened, they would reveal it to the country just like Kennedy revealed the missiles in Cuba during the crisis.
The intelligence, he said, see what they're doing.
So here they would go, look, and the fact that they haven't done it and the fact that it hasn't leaked means it doesn't exist.
Means that that's not what happened.
So I would predict to my friends that they'll never have evidence, that'll never happen.
Also, no one will be ever indicted.
And I could tell them what was going to be in the Mueller report.
And when it happened, they were like, you were fucked.
So they thought I was nuts up until the Mueller.
And then they were like, you're right.
And I was like, I was fucking right all along.
This is a sideshow because they don't actually oppose Donald Trump.
That's the big secret.
So when Nancy Pelosi stands up at the end of the State of the Union and she rips up Donald Trump's speech, well, first he doesn't shake her hand and then he doesn't pick, then she rips up his speech.
Now, why would they do that so publicly?
Why would they feel a need to do that?
It's because they're actually working together behind the scenes to pass the legislative agenda of our oligarchs.
And so just like wrestling, they're being paid by the same people.
They serve the same guy.
And so they have to act.
It's theater.
They have to act like they're, and people love it.
People, the blue check Hollywood loves Nancy Pelosi ripping that up.
And they have, they're so stupid and vapid, they have no idea.
She had just gotten done passing his entire legislative agenda, including letting him divert money from the military for the border wall.
Yeah, like everything.
Everything he wanted.
So that's the point.
And you don't have to be smart to know that.
You know that.
I know that.
We're comics.
And so the thing is, I don't, I'm not trying to get a job in the news.
I'm not trying to get a job outside anywhere.
Right.
So I get to tell the truth.
I'm not trying to get a job with Bernie Sanders.
All right.
There's a lot of people who do news like that too.
They're trying to get jobs inside of political campaigns or they're trying to get jobs at MSNBC or they already have a contract and they have a YouTube show.
So I don't have that.
So I already, what I tell people is I'd already got my validation in life through stand-up comedy.
Every comedian I ever respected and wanted to like, wanted to respect me, did validated me.
Thank God, right?
Thank God it happened.
Right.
So I've had my favorite comedian, Brian Regan, Pat Noswell, Bill Burr, write really nice things about me on my book.
So I got that.
So that got stamped.
All that shit my dad didn't do for me, I got it done for my peers.
All right.
So now I don't need, I'm not trying to get in their club and I don't need their validation at all.
In fact, I like that they don't like me and that they look down their nose at me because I'm fucking outdoing them.
I'm out journalism, journalisming, the fucking morons who went to, by the way, if you went to Columbia Journalism School, that's a guarantee you're a shitty journalist.
And you are repeating CIA talking points every fucking day of your life.
So that's like, if you see, I went to Columbia School Journal, that's a tip off.
That guy's a tool.
Columbia Journalism School Scams00:09:35
Yeah.
Because that place is nothing but a CIA.
It's infiltrated by the, it's not infiltrated.
It's run by the CIA.
Yeah.
So people don't that's no, no, no, it's it's you're absolutely right.
And it's really something.
I mean, it's, it's just, it's kind of a comment on the world we live in, but where you could go, somebody like, and I think for you, um, and for me to some degree too, but the uh, the Mueller report was a real vindication.
Because if you had been listening to the Jimmy Doer show for the previous year, to the Mueller report coming out, and had been listening to the Rachel Maddow show for the last year before that report came out, you would, you would think, you know, you'd maybe there'd be some part of you that'd be like, and I, and I get where some people feel, they'd be like, well, but I mean, Rachel Maddow's a serious journalist who's got a big television show.
And I mean, she couldn't be wrong about everything, could she?
But look at it.
And in hindsight, it was so freaking obvious from the very beginning.
I mean, let's let if you just think it through, the claim was, like, you know, they say like outrageous claims require, you know, strong evidence.
The claim was that Donald Trump was an asset for Vladimir Putin, that the sitting president of the United States was doing the bidding of a hostile foreign power.
And you're like, wow, that's quite a claim.
That'd be the biggest scandal in American history if it was true.
So what evidence do you have?
Well, the evidence is the CIA says so.
You're like, okay, what else do you got there?
And they're like, well, also, the FBI says so.
Right.
Okay.
But I'm going to need a little bit.
Like, what is the actual now?
If you, now, and again, this is what you don't have to be like a genius to figure this out.
If you looked at the reporting that Aaron Matei was doing, I know you have him on your show quite a bit.
You looked at his reporting and then you looked at Rachel Maddow's reporting.
Couldn't anyone, like in IQ over 80, anyone could look at that and go, wait, one of these guys is doing real reporting and the other one is just spinning, you know, like theoretical conspiracies.
Well, it was worse than that.
It was straight up McCarthyism.
It was straight up an evidence-free red baiting McCarthyism campaign led by the Democratic Party and the media.
And it was just straight, it was, and it was, it's crazy to watch what's happening, you know, this kind of political realignment, right?
So the Democrats used to be the victim of McCarthyism.
Now they're the ones doing it.
And they used to be the ones of the workers fighting against Wall Street.
Now they're the party of Wall Street and war.
And then Trump actually is, if you're watching what's happening, Trump easily outlefts the Democrats, right?
So right now what's going to happen is we're going to have unemployment higher than the Great Depression.
So, but at this, but at the Great Depression, there wasn't a fucking epidemic pandemic, right?
But there is one now, which means our hospitals are going to be overflowing.
And when people lose their jobs, they're going to lose their health insurance.
So now there's going to have to be a solution, a universal solution.
And this is my prediction.
I'd love to hear what you think of it.
I think that Trump is going to have to implement some type of Medicare for all.
Either it be temporary, but once you, you know what I know, once it goes in, they're never taking it away.
But because no one's going to have a job or half the country won't have a job, which means half the country won't have health insurance.
It's $30,000 to treat one episode of coronavirus.
So there's going to have to be right now.
They're talking about expanding Medicaid, but there's going to have to be a UBI because no one's going to have a job.
And you can't have a works program because people can't go out and work because they're going to be fucking sick.
That's the difference between this and the Depression.
So what FDR did was he gave everybody a job.
He didn't do what they're doing now, which is supply side, give money to the richest thousand motherfuckers in the country.
What FDR did was he gave money to workers and he gave everyone jobs and he put money in the people's pockets, which is called demand side economics, Keynesian economics, which then creates a demand for shit.
And then capital shows up and fulfills that demand.
That's what not there.
They're doing that.
Not this time.
They're fucking giving it to the richest motherfuckers.
But now nobody's going to have rent.
Everybody had their one last rent payment.
And so now they're scrambling again.
They're going to go, well, fuck, we have to give people money for rent and their mortgage and their car payment and their credit card bill and their health insurance bill.
But again, so this is going to, I think the coronavirus is going to get done what politicians couldn't do.
But you watch, Trump is going to be able to outleft the Democrats.
He will propose some kind of universal medical thing and the Democrats will fight him on it.
That's going to be the irony.
And they're going to call it Trump care.
And the fucking Democrats aren't going to be able to live it down for decades.
Well, I think you might be right about that.
I'm not sure.
I hadn't even really thought about Trump ushering in some type of universal health care.
I would just say that it's actually, it's far worse than supply-side economics, what we're doing right now, because the supply side, supply-side economics would be like, oh, well, we're going to lower tax rates for these wealthy corporations because then they'll produce more, they'll create more jobs, the kind of that idea.
But they're just giving them handouts.
I mean, they're just looting the American taxpayer and giving out handouts.
It's cronyism at its absolute worst.
It makes what Barack Obama did, which was horrible, look like child's play.
Yes.
Because the way it was explained to me by Dylan Radigan is: imagine what if the house is on fire and instead of sending a fire truck, you send a bunch of criminals to rob the house while it's on fire and you still didn't put out the fucking fire.
Yeah.
So this is what we used to do to other countries.
Well, we do to other countries, not used to.
This is what we do to other countries, right?
So we use the power of our corporate military to go destroy someone else's government and then we loot their country.
So, but we've done it to ourselves now.
The coronavirus has come.
The war is on.
So we've used our corporations to take over our government and then loot our fucking country in the middle of a pandemic, which is the house on fire.
And they still haven't put out the fire because nobody's going to have health care and nobody's going to have a job.
So there's no money to, so they're putting a trillion dollars a day into the banks.
They've already guaranteed that they'll do that.
And so they took $4 trillion.
You can't even imagine how much money that is.
And they gave it to the richest thousand people in the country.
That's basically what they did.
So now, as all the businesses close, every comedy club closes, every hot dog stand, every burger stand, every independent restaurant, every independent anything.
Now they're all going to close.
And the only people that have money are the richest thousand people in the fucking country.
So now everything's going to be really cheap.
They're going to come and buy fucking everything.
And everything's going to be a chain.
I'm going to be all restaurants will be cheesecake factories, everything.
And that is what is about to happen.
And inequality, which has been growing, which is greater now than during the Gilded Age, is going to be cemented for a generation.
And people don't realize that that is just what fucking happened.
So what has to happen now is feckless leaders like Bernie Sanders and bullshit leaders like Ocasio-Cortez have to finally fucking do something and make sure that we get Medicare for all out of this and a UBI, because if they don't, we've gotten nothing.
Right.
Right.
Well, which is, you know, it seems to me that what the average American gets out of this is worse than nothing.
I mean, what they get out of this, what is it?
You know, it was something like, you know, the $60,000 in debt for each family that this is going to cost so far.
And that's only what's happened so far.
So you end up, you know, they end up kind of, you know, stealing the wealth from the American people.
And then maybe they'll get some crumbs back to them to kind of justify it.
So that's to me how that to me is how I see the checks that are going out or the electronic deposits that are going out to people.
So it's, in other words, they can justify this huge bill of corporate giveouts with, okay, here's some crumbs for you.
And then it's all in the same bill.
So they go, well, look, we did it for the crumbs for you.
And I don't mean to downplay, I don't mean to downplay how much, you know, like money.
No, you can't.
It doesn't help that 1,200.
They fucked people.
So as Thomas Massey said, that $1,200 payment was the cheese and the trap.
And what happens when the mouse takes that cheese?
He gets his head fucking smashed in.
And that's what is about to happen to the U.S. public.
You don't think I said to Dylan Radigan, I said, well, at least they're not kicking people out of their houses this time.
And he goes, oh, they're going to do it as soon as they fucking can.
Because remember what they did last time.
Last time, they gave trillions of dollars to the banks.
And then the bank also wanted your fucking house.
So they made the banks hold.
They never missed a bonus.
And then they took your house when it was at the fucking lowest price possible.
And then they re and then a couple of months later, they reinflated all the prices and the bank sold it again.
So they got paid twice and you got kicked out of your fucking house.
And that shit is going to happen again at a much faster scale because renters are going to be now being kicked out.
And that, so they have to come up with solutions.
And the only solution right now that I can see on the horizon is you got to give a universal health care to everybody and you got to give people money in their pockets.
And they can't go out and work because they're going to get everybody sick.
Bill Clinton and NAFTA Pushback00:14:58
That's at least until there's a vaccine.
And that's going to be until, let's be honest, the fall of 2021.
Yeah, no, you might be right about that.
And the big, the big fear is that the virus mutates and comes back stronger next winter.
And that is a that's a real possibility.
I mean, a lot of people are going to get this thing.
A lot of people are going to build up immunities to it.
And what viruses do when you build up immunities to them is they mutate, you know, they evolve.
And we're just all hoping this doesn't evolve to be something worse because even if a vaccine was developed, you know, like with the flu, you have to get it every year because the flu keeps evolving and keeps coming back as some new strand.
And so there's a lot of fear of that stuff.
And I don't think, listen, I think, and I think you've been, you know, fair in the way you've covered this over the last few years, but it wouldn't be a crazy move for Trump to outleft the Democratic Party.
On many issues, Trump was to the left of the Democratic Party.
Trump was never a right-winger.
Trump's a populist kind of guy, you know?
So he kind of says, he says what he thinks will be kind of like, well, let me say, he doesn't exactly govern as a populist.
He governs as a corporatist, but he ran as a populist.
And he, and he's always kind of been fine with the idea of big government action for this reason or that reason.
And in fact, it seemed like he was really proud of this is Donald Trump's mentality.
He was just proud of how big the number was when he passed the bill.
He goes, oh, 2 trillion.
I mean, that's like the biggest bill ever.
Am I right?
And then to watch, it was really something for me, you know, as a libertarian, to watch Mitch McConnell and like all these Republicans just like so proud, like, yeah, we got the biggest bill through.
I thought you guys, you know, under Barack Obama, we're all railing about, you know, deficits and debt and big government.
And it's funny because, again, this is, we talked about this a little bit when I was on your show, but so much of the problem in America is that, you know, like you'll have Sean Hannity and he'll be like the far left, Nancy Pelosi.
And it's like, dude, the far left hates Nancy Pelosi's guts.
They despise Nancy Pelosi.
But in Sean Hannity's mind, that's the far left.
So, and then, of course, the, you know, it's like what they used to say, like, um, uh, about Paul Ryan, that he was like some dangerous libertarian.
He's reading Ayn Rand books and he just doesn't believe in government.
You're like, Paul Ryan is presiding over the largest spending in American history.
He's not against government.
He just wants it going to his corporate buddies.
So it's all, everything is so, is so perverted and twisted around.
And people don't, you know, it's like, I think, and I know you've experienced this a lot, where people get very, very tribal.
And that's how most people interact with politics.
Like throughout the country, most people are either see themselves on like team red or team blue and they like this guy because he's kind of their team.
And just like you, you experienced when you were calling out.
And obviously, from a perspective like you're, you're like, I think Donald Trump's terrible, but there's no evidence that he is in bed with Vladimir Putin.
So that, and, and I know a lot of people on the left gave you a lot of shit for this.
Um, and I, and I've seen recently because you've been critical of Bernie Sanders, that a lot of people are giving you uh shit about that again.
Yeah.
So, well, you know, I have the beauty of being older than some of those people.
And I can, I remember, uh, you know, I'm old enough to remember when being when Bill Clinton took over the Democratic Party and he got in bed with the Koch brothers and he started a thing called the Democratic Leadership Council, which people don't even know what that is.
What happened was Ronald Reagan had just kicked the Democrats' ass so hard that it scared the fuck out of them.
And so when Bill Clinton took over the party, he came along and he thought the problem with the Democratic Party was that they were too far to the left and that they needed to move to the right.
And so shit that George Bush I could not get done, for instance, NAFTA.
They tried to pass it under George Bush I, couldn't get it passed because the Democrats would take shit from it from their constituency if they passed it.
Well, Bill Clinton comes along and he fucking gives them cover to vote for this.
He's like, no, no, no, this is going to be great.
Me and El Gore.
And behind the scenes, they're in bed with the Koch brothers, getting money from them to start their Democratic Leadership Council, which what it really did was it stripped all the fucking real liberalism out of the Democrats, right?
And they became corporatists.
And so that's when he passed NAFTA.
That's when he exploded the prison population, ended welfare as we knew it, and deregulated Wall Street.
And that, which would end, which would crash the economy within 10 years.
And of course, they would blame it on people who, poor people who bought houses they couldn't afford.
That's what they, and I was like, I knew it had to be somebody with no money and no power.
And another thing that people don't know about Bill Clinton is he had a secret deal to privatize Social Security.
Now, look what would have happened to our Social Security if we would have left it.
So anyway, he had a secret deal with Newt Gingrich.
This is a fact.
And what happened was before they had a chance to announce it, Monica Lewinsky's blowjob happened.
So her blowjob actually saved Social Security.
So I'm old enough to remember exactly how we got here.
So a lot of people are like, well, how you got to vote for Hillary over Trump.
I'm like, no, that's why you got Trump, you fucking morons.
And that's how they're playing you, just like they played the stimulus bill.
Oh, well, they put the corporate bailout with your $1,200 piece of cheese.
So we had to, people are hurting.
We had to, that's what Bernie Sanders and AOC says.
We had to vote for it.
Our hands were tied.
Well, no, you didn't.
And I know that a senator can put a hold on a bill for two weeks.
And so what you should have done, Bernie, was put a hold on it and say, untie my hands, or I'm not fucking letting a hold off this bill.
Untie my hands.
I'm going to take the gun away from my head and put it right fucking back at you.
And in the meantime, I'm going to tell everybody what you guys are doing.
And if anybody could do that, it would be Bernie Sanders because he has a huge following behind him.
People will listen to him.
Like Bernie Sanders, if he were to say that, he could go, Bernie Sanders could so easily go, do you really believe that I don't want government aid to help people and the rest of these people do?
Does that ring true to any of you?
Bernie Sanders wants, you know what I mean?
Like he'd say, he's been saying, you know, I want the checks to be bigger that go out to people, but he could stand up and say, we cannot loot the American people.
I thought you hate the big banks, Bernie.
I thought that was your thing.
So let's stop looting the American people while the Federal Reserve pumps in a trillion dollars a day to the big banks.
And it's always really bugged me about Bernie Sanders that he rails against Wall Street all day long, but the Federal Reserve never really seems to come up.
He'll mention it once or twice here or there, but it's kind of like if you were like, if you were railing against like local chase branches, but you never mentioned J.P. Morgan.
Like it's like, you know, this is the center of the whole thing.
So like put some focus on that.
I liked your point that you made about how Bill Clinton, you know, it got through NAFTA, whereas George H.W. Bush couldn't.
There's something about that dynamic.
It certainly, at least there would have been a lot more pushback for a Republican to get some of these trade deals passed.
And in the same way that Obama was able to start, you know, five new wars with virtually no pushback in the country.
This is great what you're saying.
So this is what I, so this is what people don't realize.
They go, well, you got to vote for Hillary because she's a lesser of two evils.
They don't realize is that Bill Clinton against George Bush, Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils.
George Bush was because he couldn't get fucking NAFTA done.
He couldn't have fucking exploded the prison population.
He couldn't have decimated welfare or deregulated Wall Street because there would have been natural pushback by the Democratic Party.
But that was Bill Clinton starting to shift the parties.
That was him starting to take the Democrats away from being a worker blue collar party into a Wall Street military industrial complex party.
And that was the shift right there.
So that shit got done that could not have gotten done.
Same thing with Barack Obama.
If George Bush was still president, do you think he could have made the banks bigger?
Do you think he could have, they would have let George Bush take us from two wars to seven?
No, Barack Obama could do that.
That's why Barack Obama got more money from Wall Street than fucking John McCain did.
At the very least, at the very least, there would have been intense pushback and we would have been talking about it.
So if Bush, if Bush had just, after the failed war in Afghanistan, after the failed war in Iraq, had decided, you know what, we're going to go have regime change wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, there would have at least been a movement against it.
Now, maybe he would have gotten it through anyway, but there would at least, it would at least be discussed.
And then, of course, on the other side of it, right, you look, but what did Obama get a lot of pushback for?
Well, it was for big government.
It was for his record high spending.
And now look at Donald Trump.
He's outspent Obama in every year, and you don't hear a peep out of that.
Because in the same way that only Nixon could go to China, like that type of deal, which actually was one of the good, one of the few good things that Richard Nixon did, better to talk to people than fight wars with them.
But in the same way, Republicans don't get big pushback for being big government Republicans because who's going to push back on them for that?
Republicans are all like, well, that's my team.
And Democrats don't get as much pushback for fighting these wars because it's like, well, who's going to push back against them?
The Republicans?
The Republicans would push back at Obama for not fighting the war harder.
Do you remember like when John McCain would criticize Obama for not, all right, there should have been more bombs in Syria?
That was the big problem.
You know, it's just like you said before, the professional wrestling, the kind of made-up theater of it.
But I wonder from your perspective, I wanted to ask you about this.
And we get back to the stimulus stuff in a second.
But let me just point about it.
That's not hyperbole that it's professional wrestling.
That it really is.
They all work for the same guy.
So every, you know, who's won every election in my lifetime?
Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
Yeah.
Now, my good friend and brilliant historian, Tom Woods, he says his line is, no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Which I think is just such a great line.
Like it's like, no matter who you're like, I'm pretty sure we didn't vote for John McCain, but we're getting all of John McCain's policies somehow, no matter who it is.
No, and you're right.
I mean, look, the establishment wanted in 2016, the race to be between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
And now, can you tell me one substantive difference between the two of them?
I mean, they may say, rhetorically, there might be some differences.
Like, they may say different things.
Hillary Clinton might say, you know, oh, no bankers too big to jail.
And then privately, she's like, look, this is just what I say in public.
Don't freak out about it.
But in terms of actually how they govern, there's literally like almost nothing that's different between the two of them.
So that's, it's all, but they'll pretend like they're mortal enemies.
You know, they'll pretend like, oh, there's, there's this wide chasm between them.
But what do you, you know, one of the things I like, I'm old enough to remember that when George W. Bush was fighting the war in Iraq, when that was a disaster, it seemed to me like there was a fairly sizable anti-war left movement in this country.
Like people were really sick of the wars.
And to me, and I'm curious what your take on this is, but I thought that the worst part about Barack Obama's legacy was that he shattered the anti-war left.
And it seems like it never really came back, even in the Trump years.
I mean, there's good principled people like you.
I don't, you know, there's like the people who do really great work out there, and I admire all of them.
But it seems like Barack Obama, it was like he was team blue.
He was the first black president ever.
He was charismatic as shit.
And it was just something about this combination.
It just, it was so hard for left-wing people, friends of mine, left-wing people who are friends of mine to call him a war criminal.
It was just like, oh, then I have to give up everything about my identity if I call Barack Obama a war criminal.
Whereas calling George W. Bush a war criminal, well, that's easy, obviously.
Bush family, oil money, all this shit.
But it just seemed like nobody, not again, I shouldn't say nobody, but so many people were just silenced by the Obama administration.
So yes, there's no doubt.
That's why I said it would be better for Trump to be president, maybe, instead of Hillary Clinton, because then we'd take a good look at what fucking Barack Obama has been doing for the last eight years, right?
Because now we could oppose it because Barack Obama put the left to sleep.
You know, people got upset when Trump banned Muslims at the airport.
And what I would say, well, why do you think the Muslims are at the airport?
Because Barack Obama bombed the shit out of them for eight straight fucking years.
And now they're all refugees.
And now they're at the airport.
What did Barack Obama have to do?
Bomb Muslims at an airport for you guys to give a shit?
I remember tweeting when the Iraqi guy was being held at the airport and there were these protests about it.
And I just tweeted out because there was some Iraqi guy being held at the airport and I said, this is the worst thing our government has done to an Iraqi in my lifetime.
Like half the people not even getting it.
And I was like, do you realize we've been bombing Iraq for 20 plus years?
We've killed the million number comes from George W. Bush's war.
That doesn't count Bill Clinton's wars, Bill Clinton's sanctions, George H.W. Bush's wars.
You know how many Iraqis Americans have killed?
And you're now, by the way, not saying it's not bad that they're holding this one guy at the airport, but the level of outrage compared to when we're slaughtering Iraqi children seems a little bit off.
Well, they also immediately there was like pictures of immigrants in cages, right?
And you're like, oh my God, the cages.
And then you find out Barack Obama built those cages.
You're like, oh, my God, I thought Barack Obama delivers Christmas gifts.
Yeah, he's Santa Claus.
Turns out Santa Claus is an asshole.
And I've tried to tell, trying to tell that to people in the era of Trump is one of the hardest fucking things I've ever done.
You're like, oh, my God, Trump is gassing immigrants at the border.
Barack Obama gassed immigrants at the border, motherfucker.
And I guess they should be honored.
They were gassed by the lesser of two evils.
So why do you think we have these fucking immigrants coming here from these countries?
It's because of our fucking war, our war policy, our drug war policy, our economic fucking policy.
You know, NAFTA turned a bunch of fucking Mexicans into paupers too, who were doing non-factory farming.
And that's why they all have to fucking come here because factories, factory farming, put them out of business, right?
And so that's about to happen to everybody who has an independent business right now.
They're going to come and put you out of fucking business because they got $4.2 trillion and nobody else has any money right now.
Obama Administration Cronyism00:14:51
And that's, and by the way, Bernie Sanders voted for it and Ocasio-Cortez voted for it.
And you know what they didn't do?
They got up and they yelled at the Republicans.
Guess what they didn't do, Dave?
They didn't yell at their leadership who negotiated that shitty bill because they always been the need of the party because they're fucking company men and they're fucking sheepdogging you.
Anybody who's a revolutionary, they're sheepdogging you inside to the Democratic Party, the corporate war party.
And for a progressive, that road, as Shama Sawan says, the road for progressives inside the Democratic Party leads to a fucking graveyard.
It's shame on Bernie Sanders and AOC and anybody else who pretends to be a revolutionary or be against the establishment because they're doing the opposite.
And they did nothing for you on this fucking bailout bill.
Absolutely fucking nothing because they won't call out their own Democratic leaderships, which makes them hacks and cowards.
You know, and the funny thing is that Bernie Sanders, it's like he's just, and this is the thing, this is why Trump was successful in my estimation.
This is why Trump was successful and why Bernie Sanders won't be in terms of winning the presidential race or even winning his nomination is that Donald Trump's fucking fucking demented death rattle.
That's how yeah, well, listen, he is the problem really at the end of the day with Bernie Sanders is that he's just, he's a bitch.
Like he pussies out at when it really matters every single time.
He doesn't have the balls to just go there and say what you obviously think.
Like what you ought, like, look, Donald Trump, Donald Trump didn't say, oh, I have to blame Obama for everything, but I won't say anything bad about George W. Bush.
Donald Trump looked at Jeb Bush and said, your brother lied us into war.
And even, and this was at South Carolina in the Republican primary.
He even got the Republican primary base in South Carolina to look at each other and go, you know, he's right.
You know, George W. Bush really did lie.
These were the same people who cheered that war on.
And he was so assertive and so confrontational that he got them to go, hey, you know what?
I lost my brother in this war and I cheerleaded for it.
But you know what?
This guy's right.
We did.
And he, so, I mean, by the way, that's like the, he didn't say he got the information wrong.
He said he lied us into war.
The claim there is this guy's a war criminal, which he certainly was.
Democrats wouldn't even say that.
That's right.
And so that's, and that's, you're exactly right.
That's why Bernie Sanders is not going to even beat a demented walking death rattle because he's, he, A, doesn't know what it takes to grab power.
B, is unwilling to do what it takes to grab power.
And three, doesn't know how to use the power he already has.
Yes.
For instance, right now, for instance, right now, he said Lloyd Blake finds he bragged that Lloyd Blake finds I'm dangerous to Wall Street.
And he's right.
I am dangerous to Wall Street.
Well, right now, Bernie Sanders could prove that.
If you're really dangerous to Wall Street, what he should be doing right now is leveraging the power he has, which the people are his followers.
And he said, hey, guess what, Wall Street?
Until we have Medicare for all and a UBI, my followers aren't paying their credit card bills this month.
They're not paying their rent.
They're not paying their mortgage.
And they're not paying their student loans.
None of them.
And that's, and guess what?
That kind of shit is catchy when nobody has a fucking job.
Right.
And so that's the leverage he should be using right now.
Guess what, Dave?
He will never, ever do that.
Why?
Because Bernie Sanders is a feckless leader who bends his knee to the establishment whenever they say.
That's why he voted for this 96 to nothing.
And people go, well, Jimmy, he's just one senator.
What could he do?
The media would have slaughtered him.
They would say he's standing in the way.
And I go, I think that's his campaign slogan.
Vote for me.
I'll do the right thing.
Unless the media doesn't want me to.
Yeah.
So, by the way, then that means that's basically the same thing as saying, then we'll never get anything important out of him.
Because if he's not willing to stand up and say, well, oh, the media is going to slaughter him.
By the way, the media has already been calling him and his supporters Nazis.
I mean, like, what more?
What more are they really going to do than they already would?
But look, Bernie Sanders, you can almost, it's like he'll never criticize really directly Joe Biden.
And the thing that, like, he won't criticize Obama, but at the same time, everything he's saying, you're like, well, if that's true, then Obama was a huge failure.
If you're saying that he'll say things, which, by the way, he's correct, he'll say things about like the recovery.
And I forget the exact numbers, but he'll be like, did you know that like 90% of the new wealth created went to the top 5% of people in the country, which is 100% true.
Obama's recovery is all bullshit.
Why don't you say that, Bernie?
Why is that?
It's because Barack Obama was a tool of Citigroup.
His entire cabinet was chosen by Citigroup, which fucking Julian Assange revealed, which is why they're trying to kill him.
And Bernie doesn't even have the guts to stand up for Julian Assange and he wants to be my leader.
Well, that's why he can't even beat a fucking demented walking death rattle because Bernie Sanders doesn't have what it takes to grab power, nor does he have the courage to use the power he has, which is why he has one of the biggest failed campaigns in the history of fucking politics.
But in case anybody doesn't know exactly what you just referenced there, the WikiLeaks revealed an email from Citigroup telling Barack Obama who his cabinet should be.
This email was after he had won the election, but before he had taken office.
So it was president-elect Barack Obama at the time.
And they told him what each one of his cabinet positions should be.
You're going to keep George W. Bush's defense secretary, Gates.
You're going to put Geithner in the Treasury.
Everything that.
And Barack Obama picked it to a T.
He got his marching orders from Citigroup and picked his cabinet exactly.
But yet, right, like Bernie Sanders won't bring that up.
He won't mention that.
You know, look, dude, if you're saying like, if you're railing against how our health care system is so horrible, and, well, it's like, well, you know, Barack Obama's signature achievement was his health care bill.
But then he'll still go around and say, like, well, Barack Obama did a lot of good.
He did a great job.
And we just want to build on that.
Yeah.
So Bernie Sanders failed.
He had four years.
He could have made the case how we got here.
And he should have started that.
And he didn't.
And he's because that takes, again, more political courage, which he doesn't have.
And so, you know, he'll talk in broad strokes, but he won't say Barack Obama screwed you.
And the reason why they're allowed to do this right now is because Barack Obama didn't lay down a template for how to handle a crisis like this.
He should have said mortgage freeze, eviction freeze, all that shit.
And we're going to write down your mortgages.
So when people had inflated, I don't know if you remember, but people's houses were fucking so inflated.
So what they're supposed to come do and the banks are supposed to take a haircut and we'll write it down and everybody.
And they didn't do anything.
Barack Obama did nothing.
That's why there was Occupy Wall Street, which Barack Obama did nothing for.
In fact, what he did do was let union cops crack the heads of those peaceful protesters from crack coast to coast from at the behest of fucking Wall Street.
And then he let the union get taken away from the teachers in Wisconsin and wouldn't even fucking mention it.
Not only would he not put on a soft shoe and go stand in the picket line, which is what he promised, he wouldn't even acknowledge them.
So that's the kind of cocksuckery that happened during the Obama administration.
He opened the Arctic to drilling twice whenever fucking Shell Oil asked.
The guy was the fucking corporate tool.
No matter who we vote for, we get John McCain.
He was John McCain.
And Bernie Sanders would not, he did not have the political courage to make that case.
He wouldn't even start that conversation.
So consequently, he starts his campaign by saying, because all people wanted in the Democratic Party, the people who show up to vote in primaries, was somebody who was a decent guy who can beat Trump.
And what was Bernie Sanders saying every time he opened his mouth?
Joe's a decent guy and he can beat Trump and he's my friend.
Trump did not do that when he ran in the Republican Party.
He was like, these motherfuckers are all bought.
And you know how I know?
I used to give them money and they would do whatever I said.
Bernie Sanders wouldn't even say Joe Biden was corrupt.
When somebody wrote an article, one of his fucking, his own surrogates wrote an article, Zephyr's Teach Out in New York, wrote an article describing Joe Biden's unbelievable corruption.
Bernie Sanders disavowed her and said he's not corrupt.
Well, you just lost it.
You're campaigning for Joe Biden.
So that's what I mean.
Bernie Sanders is a feckless leader.
He ran a cowardly campaign and he forfeited.
He wasn't willing to do what it takes to get stuff done.
He's still not willing to do it today.
He's willing to let people starve and die right now during this pandemic before he'll threaten Wall Street to say, I'm going to do direct action with my fucking people.
If you don't reconvene Congress or have a promise to do so within the week, we're going to have a rolling strike of all the grocery store workers or all my people aren't going to pay their fucking credit card bill or their student loan or whatever the fuck it is.
What they got.
And then they go around and they send me emails, Dave.
It makes me sick telling me all the shit they got for us and the stimulus.
What they got, as Thomas Massey says, was the cheese and the trap or what I like to say is they gave the richest thousand motherfuckers all the money in the world to build a giant prison and Bernie Sanders just got you a water fountain inside that prison.
Yeah, that's a good, I like that.
That's a good way to put it.
And I've, you know, I think you're absolutely right.
And I've seen this out of Bernie Sanders a lot.
I mean, I even thought, not that it's as big a deal as the stuff you're talking about, but I thought when he pulled his endorsement from Jank Uger, I thought that was such a, such a bitch move.
I mean, like, listen, by the way, I'm, I'm not the hugest fan of Jank.
I've been critical of some of his coverage.
And I know you guys were.
Sure.
But say what you will, Jank was, you know, they gave Bernie Sanders a lot of love over the years.
And for him to then pull his endorsement over such bullshit accusations of like, what, like 25 years ago, he said some borderline sexist things that he's already apologized for.
It was so weak.
It would have taken nothing for Bernie Sanders to just, if someone was like, you know, tried to throw that in his face, like, well, you support a guy who said something sexist in the 90s, he could literally just be like, listen, everyone said something.
He apologized for it.
You know, I don't know.
He believes in a lot of the same things I do.
I'm going to support him.
But right away, as soon as there's a threat, he backs off.
Even like in the thing like where he goes, you know, when they were saying in the debates, they make up this narrative, which I've never seen any actual evidence to back up is true, but like the Bernie bros are sexist.
They're these horrible, evil people.
Like, I mean, Twitter is filled with people saying shitty things.
I don't know that it's any more of a problem for Bernie supporters than others, but they say, and then he calls out his own people right away.
He goes, yes, I think you should all stop and it's terrible and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, what do you, you're going after your own people?
By the way.
Do you know what that's called?
That's the strategy of a loser.
Yes.
Hillary Clinton literally said that half of Donald Trump's supporters, I mean, 63 million people voted for Donald Trump.
So she said half of them are irredeemable deplorables.
So are those people now not allowed to say something back to Hillary Clinton?
You're going to tell somebody that they're, you know, and then the same thing.
And she said Bernie Sanders is, you know, like horrible and no one likes him and his fans have all his followers have all been duped and all that.
So what, you think they're not going to say anything back to you?
You think when Chris Matthews goes on and calls you guys a bunch of brown shirts, what are they supposed to tweet?
Hey, Mr. Matthews, I respectfully disagree with you.
No, they're going to be like, fuck you.
Like, you know, and how Bernie couldn't just stand up for people who have been loyal to him.
Dave, did you see him just get his fucking ears boxed in by Whoopee Goldberg?
It was humiliating.
She asked him a four-year-old question.
Why didn't you work hard enough for Hillary Clinton?
And he didn't have a fucking answer that slam-dunked her ass.
An idiot like Whoopi Goldberg.
He didn't have an answer four years fucking later.
Do you understand that this is not the guy who really wants to grab power?
Do you understand that?
That is not a guy who wants to grab power.
And by the way, Bernie Sanders would not come on my show for four fucking years, wouldn't even acknowledge our show.
And why?
Because they're afraid to get, he'll go on and be asked all the bullshit questions by Jake Tapper, but he won't be asked a real question from his left.
Yeah, that's the thing.
He doesn't want to be, he doesn't want to be attacked from the left.
And right now, I'm the only one coming out saying the things I'm saying about Bernie Sanders in his campaign.
The rest of them will follow as soon as he endorses Joe Biden, but they're not doing it yet because for some reason, the progressive media sees themselves as a fan club instead of fucking what they're supposed to be is people who put pressure on their representatives, which is what we're supposed to do.
So as Chris Hedges says, I think I'm going to buck up this quote, but at the best of times, our political leaders are ineffective.
And at the worst, they're venal.
And it's up to us to make them fear us.
And right now, Bernie Sanders, AOC, the squad, Bonro Conner, none of them fear us.
They don't fear us.
And so I'm calling them out as much as I can.
That was bullshit what they did.
They lied.
Bernie Sanders did not get you the unemployment in that fucking, by the way, that unemployment was again, the cheese in the trap.
There was all kinds of shit they could have done.
They didn't do it.
And they won't call out their own leadership, which shows you they're corrupt.
Yeah.
You know, I was in a similar, a kind of similar situation years ago, back in like around 2012, 2013, and then going on with, although my show was much smaller then than it is now.
It wasn't nearly the size of your audience.
So I didn't take as much heat for it.
But I was a big Ron Paul supporter.
And then Rand Paul started running.
And a lot of people, a lot of like real anti-war libertarians were really hopeful.
Like, oh, now we have another guy in there who will kind of fight for what we believe in.
And really, the truth is there's only been, in my lifetime, there's only ever been two campaigns where the, the, for president, where the person put the issue of war as the number one issue and was against war.
Like, you know, John McCain might have put it as the number one issue, but he was for all of them.
Like, like, it was Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard.
Those are the only two people, the only two people who ever said the number one issue is war and peace.
And we need to not be an empire that fights all these crazy wars and kills all these people.
And then Rand Paul came along, and I was very critical of him because he was endorsing Mitt Romney.
He was bashing Obama when he wanted to make the Iran deal.
And I was like, this guy is just selling everything out right now.
The Iran deal was one of the few good things that Obama did.
Bernie Sanders Real Plan00:14:21
I'll give him that.
He did a lot of bad things, but opening up relations with Cuba, the Iran deal, I was real supportive of those two things.
But so I was real critical of Rand Paul, and I would get a lot of people who are like, dude, what are you doing?
This is like the best chance we have.
So why are you criticizing him?
And I see people who are like really loyal to Bernie Sanders giving you that kind of reaction.
And I think what they don't realize is that it's not that, oh, we can't criticize him because this is the best chance we have.
If he's going down this road, there is no chance.
Then it means that there's no chance of anything good coming of this.
And now, so what are you going to, he's just going to end up being the guy who, you know, do what he did with Clinton, endorse her, go around giving her speeches.
He'll write another book.
He'll make another couple million bucks.
Honestly, Dave, it's in a sense, he's lucky of this coronavirus because how painful would have been to his young supporters to watch him go around work his ass off giving 37 speeches for Joe Biden.
That would have crushed them.
And so now they don't have to see that like they did with Hillary Clinton because that was crushing.
You know, I don't know if you remember, I recovered it.
So I covered his speeches in Iowa before the primary when he was fucking overflowing gymnasiums, overflowing theaters, overflowing halls.
And then I covered him after he couldn't fill 100 seats when he was stumping for Hillary Clinton.
Nobody else covered that part.
That was kind of funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And do you remember?
Go ahead.
Do you, because I remember this literally just popped in my head as you were saying that, but there was all this talk in the corporate press about how the Republicans might have a contested convention and it might be like warfare at the Republican convention.
And obviously, Hillary Clinton has unified the Democrats, but Donald Trump hasn't.
And Donald Trump, you went to the convention, they were crazy for Donald Trump.
The one person who got booed at the convention was Ted Cruz when he wouldn't flat out endorse Donald Trump.
That was now at the Democratic National Convention.
Do you remember night one where the Bernie people were booing every time Hillary Clinton's name got mentioned?
She was getting booed to the point that Sarah Silverman was like, you Bernier bus people are being crazy.
And then you know who saved the day?
Who saved the day was Michelle Obama came out and gave this beautiful speech.
And it really was, by the way, a beautiful speech.
I mean, I hate the Obamas as much as anybody.
I think Barack Obama should be tried for war crimes and locked in jail.
But that speech that Michelle gave was beautiful.
She ended on the thing about how slaves built the White House and every morning she would watch her two black daughters playing in the front yard.
It was really just a beautiful, and it kind of almost silenced like all the Bernie bros were like, all right, that is, that is a pretty nice thought.
And it kind of, it saved Hillary Clinton from, but yep, the Bernie people were furious and rightfully so.
People don't, I was there at that convention and what people don't realize what was happening was that they were upset.
It was revealed the week before, but was it a week prior that WikiLeaks had then revealed that they were rigging the election that the fact that Huntai and Soho, the DNC was being run.
They're supposed to be neutral actors.
Not only were they not neutral, not only were they favoring Hillary Clinton, not only were they doing things against Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton was running the entire DNC operation, meaning press releases, the what to do with debate, the whole feel.
And they were lying all the time saying they were neutral.
So that was so bad that Debbie Washington Schultz, who was the CNC chair, had to step down right before the convention.
She tried to give a speech at the convention and just in front of her own delegation of Floridians, and they booed her.
She couldn't give it.
She had to walk off stage.
So people will forget that's what happening.
So now, and they start turning the Bernie people start to protest because they know it was rigged.
Right.
Bernie starts sending emails to his own delegates telling them to stop.
Don't do this.
Be well-behaved.
Don't be rude.
Don't chant.
Don't do anything.
What he didn't tell his delegates was that he wasn't writing those emails, that Robbie Mook, who worked for Hillary Clinton, was writing those emails and he had given them access to his emails because he had signed a non-aggression pact in May of 2016, which he never told anybody.
And still today, nobody fucking really knows about this.
That's news.
And so he was betraying his own delegates back then and not telling them that.
So that's the kind of leader he is.
So, and people don't want to see it.
And that's, I mean, he's better.
He's better than most.
But just like Chris Hedges says, we have to make them fear us because he certainly doesn't when he pulls shit like that.
And then he never held them accountable, the DNC, for cheating.
They didn't just cheat him.
They cheated his followers and his movement.
And they cheated the party and they cheated the country because Bernie could have beat Trump because he was a real outsider, just like Trump.
He would have been.
He had a better chance.
Much better chance.
better chance than hillary clinton did for sure because so many of the the problems that or so many of the the areas that donald trump would hit hillary clinton over and over on he couldn't have done that with bernie sanders and bernie sanders would have had bernie sanders had an answer so if donald trump said something like well all these trade deals are terrible bernie sanders can say i opposed every one of them like right there you you he loses that attack and and things like that so you know and he was And he was against the Iraq war,
right?
So he wins that one too.
Yeah.
So you're right.
And Trump actually promised everybody health care.
So Bernie would win on that because he had a real plan.
Trump didn't have a plan.
He was just saying it.
But Hillary wouldn't even say it, right?
Donald Trump would.
And then Donald Trump would say, I'm going to get you jobs.
Hillary wouldn't even fucking say it.
She wouldn't even say, I'll give you a $15 minimum wage.
So Trump said, right, he outlefted her in rhetoric.
He's not certainly governing that way.
But it was easy to outleft her because she's there.
So again, the Democratic Party is so corrupt, they're so calcified that they can easily be outlefted by a guy, a fucking game show host with no political experience.
That's how desperate people were after eight years of Barack Obama.
And Bernie Sanders could never make that case to the people.
That's why we got Trump.
So consequently, he had less of an impact this time around because now there's all the buddy aping his policies, but nobody's really telling you why.
And neither would Bernie.
He wouldn't even tell everybody that the people on stage with him are the problem and they're corrupt.
He wouldn't even say that.
He wouldn't even say, Joe, you were in that White House for eight fucking years.
You gave us this shitty healthcare plan that everybody fucking hates.
It's your fault because when you had complete control of government and a filibuster proof Senate, you gave us fucking John McCain's plan anyway.
You gave us Romney care.
This is your fault.
And the reason why you don't understand that Medicare for all actually costs less than the current plan we have is because you're paid to not understand how math works.
He will never say any of that, which means he forfeited the race.
He was a feckless leader and they ran a cowardly campaign and they never intended to win.
And that's the thing that people, his followers have to come to terms with.
I'm the only one saying this right now, but you watch in a few months, everyone will come around when Trump actually signs Medicare for all.
Well, it does seem like with the with the Russiagate thing, with a lot of these things, after a little bit of time, when you look back on it and the emotion is kind of removed, the truth becomes a little bit more obvious.
And it's harder to kind of pull the wool over people's eyes in hindsight than it is when it's actually happening.
The other thing I got to say about Bernie, and this really disappointed me, which is what, you know, I did, I sent money to Tulsi Gabbard twice.
And I know you were supporting her early in the race.
Of course, she got out and endorsed Joe Biden, and I'll never forgive her.
I support her for that.
I support her all the way through.
And even though she said all the way through, I'm going to support the eventual nominee.
For some reason, I'm such an idiot.
I never thought she was going to endorse it.
Because I didn't think it was going to be Joe Biden.
Nobody did, I think, but I didn't see it coming.
And it just was a gut punch to me.
And you just can't square that circle.
You can't be the anti-war person and then vote for the biggest warmonger in the race or support him.
You can't square that circle.
You have to oppose that.
You have to oppose war if you really oppose war.
Because if you support Joe Biden, you're signing a lot of people's death warrants and you're just continuing to be a part of the problem.
She said it early in her campaign.
What's the difference if we elect someone like that if they're both just big at warm on?
She used to say that and then she goes ahead and does it.
Now, I understand why for political expediency, someone has to do that.
And I appreciate that she actually brought into everyone's consciousness what even a fucking regime change war is, right?
And so at least people know what it is now.
Now, maybe some more people know that what we're doing is that we're actually bombing poor brown countries that are rich with natural resources at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Israel and the bankings and the military industrial complex.
No, I agree.
And I think I still have, I'm somewhat grateful to her for at least running a campaign that was kind of designed on fucking reminding the left that you are supposed to be anti-war.
God damn it.
Like, what are you here for if you don't oppose mass murder abroad for profit?
I mean, come on, man.
Like, what is the point?
You can see why they lost to Trump, right?
Yeah, well, of course, yeah, no, absolutely.
And, but, you know, so Tulsi, you know, the thing that that sucks about her getting out and endorsing Biden and, you know, is that now there seems like Bernie Sanders said early in the campaign, I remember very early in the campaign, they asked him if there was one thing he would want to change from 2016.
And he said that he didn't talk about foreign policy enough and he was going to do it more this year.
But the same thing this year, it just doesn't seem to be a priority to him.
It just really doesn't.
And I wish there would be one, you know, like Ron Paulian type person in Congress or something who would just say this as just like a compromise position almost between the right and the left.
And I'll tell you, talking to you, it reminds me of when Ralph Nader and Ron Paul made that kind of like, like they would go on speaking tours together and they would say, and they would outline these issues that they both really care about, like ending the wars, transparency at the Federal Reserve.
The debt was one of the issues too.
Ralph Nader was like, this debt is a real problem.
Now, he may have had a different solution from Ron Paul.
He may have wanted to tax rich people, whereas Ron Paul wanted to cut spending, but they both acknowledged that we can't just leave our grandchildren like these debts that can never be repaid.
And right now, if you're saying that we need to already have spent $6 trillion with trillions more probably coming up, well, then doesn't somebody need to stand up and say, okay, fine.
Well, at the very least, then, guys, we can't be an empire anymore.
If we have to spend this type of money at home, we cannot afford a trillion dollars a year for these mass murder campaigns that get us nothing, that get us nothing except destroyed nations and a bunch of our bravest young men sitting around with one leg contemplating suicide.
That has to be at the forefront of this.
End the freaking wars already.
And so, you know, it's like, I remember I watched a movie about the Beatles and it was somebody said, you know, we all just thought back then if everybody in the 60s, if we all just thought if our parents would all just smoke a joint, everything would be, they would understand and everything would be okay.
And I just feel like if everybody in this country understood the massive fucking we're getting from the military industrial complex and our political leaders via that, like we understand it.
I think we could, there was shit would happen, but people have no idea the massive fuck.
So since Trump became president, you know, when Bernie ran in 2016, wanted to give everybody free college, that's $65, $70, maybe $80 billion tops a year.
You can end homelessness for $20 billion a year.
So you could give everybody free college and homelessness every year for less than $100 billion.
They have given Trump since he became president, the people who say he's working for Putin and is a traitor to our country.
The Democrats and Republicans have given him an extra $131 billion every year, not once, but every year into perpetuity to spend on bombing fucking other countries.
And they gave it to him without any oversight because they used the AUMF, which he could just say there's a terrorist there and they go and invest.
So we could have free college right now.
We could have ended homelessness.
They just, there isn't any political will to do that.
That's how corrupt people have no idea how we're at the end of an empire right now.
And this fucking stimulus bill was maybe the final nail in the, there's maybe one more nail to go.
And I don't know what it is, but we are close to having an ended a failed empire.
You know how many bases we, military bases, they admit to.
They admit to over 800.
There's probably over 1,000 because lots of them are secret.
You know how many bases Russia has around the world too?
Yeah.
Well, it's like Yeah, and we have them right up against the up to their borders.
I mean, we have we've gone all the way NATO's gone all the way east.
They're all the way Russia hasn't made an aggression, you know, since the Soviet Union.
And even then we had them pretty much locked down.
And it's just, you know, it really is like to watch, as you said earlier, at the beginning of our conversation, the kind of role reversals that happened where, you know, the McCarthyites became, you know, basically went to the Democrats and the Democrats became, and it was really something for me, again, as somebody who's been following politics, you know, like going through the George W. Bush years into the Barack Obama years into now to watch everybody at MSNBC seamlessly become Cold Warriors.
I mean, they all basically, and it's, and they're, and they're even dumber than the actual Cold Warriors because there's not even a communist country over there anymore.
It's not even, you don't even have the Soviet Union.
You're Cold Warriors against.
They're shitty crony capitalists like fucking we are over here because we fucking exported it to them.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
Cold Warriors Against Capitalists00:01:13
That's exactly right.
They gave up on communism and embraced fascism like us a long time ago.
So it's not even like that's, you know, like that's even the issue.
You're fucking sitting here railing against a country with the GDP the size of Italy and freaking out about them.
I mean, it's like it's really, it's just bonkers to watch.
And it's been crazy to watch, you know, the Rachel Maddows and Joy Reids of the world all go down this path.
I mean, I remember, you know, Rachel Maddow writing a book about never-ending war and shit like that.
But then she's, you know, all of a sudden, the big bucks start rolling in and she's, she's criticizing Donald Trump for not for not bombing more people.
And it's just the whole thing has been crazy to watch.
And I know I know it'll it'll continue to be crazy.
I think we'll wrap up there.
I've, you know, dude, like I said, I've been a huge fan of yours for a long time and I always felt like we would have great conversations.
And both on your show and now on my show, I really enjoyed talking to you.
So hopefully we'll do it again soon.
Likewise, man, it was a pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
Everybody, go check out the Jimmy Dore show.
And he puts a whole bunch of free content out on YouTube.
And then he has more content for his supporting listeners.