107: Jimmy Dore, Part 1 - Ukraine Biolabs and Bogus Fact Checks
So there’s this jagoff comedian making videos in his garage… I mean, this millionaire Hollywood guy running his own media venture, employing writers and producers… who is persecuted… I mean, criticised… for bravely standing up to the establishment and the corporations and American imperialism… I mean, for being a reactionary, and platforming fascists, and doing interviews on fascist TV with America’s most prominent fascist, and spinning conspiracy theories, and engaging in stealth antivaxx during a deadly pandemic that he downplays and about which he spreads misinformation, and smearing people who point out that he’s full of shit, and making covert apologias for Trumpism, and sneakily implying that brutal, murderous, authoritarian, imperialist dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad are actually not that bad… Content Warnings apply, not least for clips of very shit comedy. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Jimmy Dore: Jimmy Dore at RationalWiki https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jimmy_Dore Jimmy Dore at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Dore The Jimmy Dore Show https://www.youtube.com/c/thejimmydoreshow The Dirt: Political Commentator Jimmy Dore Buys Rambling L.A. Compound Jimmy Dore Bought a Charming Los Angeles House – DIRT (1)Jimmy Dore on Twitter: "I interviewed a member of the Boggaloo Boys, I was completely floored when he said he is: -Pro LGBTQ -Pro Black Lives Matter -Anti Police Brutality -Anti Racism -Anti ICE -Anti War WTF?!?! Radicalized Michigan Anarchist Seeks Unity With The Left. https://t.co/nTXQ3gCEg4" / Twitter WSWS: YouTube personality Jimmy Dore Promotes fascist Boogaloo Boy YouTube personality Jimmy Dore promotes fascist Boogaloo Boy - World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) (1)Matthew Dimitri 🐍🧪 on Twitter: "Jimmy Dore despairs that The Daily Beast reported on the OANN reporter who wrote the false report that caused Trump's conspiracy theory tweet is a Russian national who also writes for the Kremlin propaganda outlet, Sputnik: "I don't even know what to say. We are so fucked." https://t.co/YHx5fsxQkE" / Twitter Re Ana Kasperian allegations (1) Matthew Dimitri 🐍🧪 on Twitter: "Jimmy Dore provides evidence that he made inappropriate, humiliating comments about Ana Kasparian at TYT. "I wrote her a card saying sorry... that was inappropriate. You don't have to worry about that happening again. I won't comment on your clothes anymore." https://t.co/rZgMl4sADl" / Twitter Jimmy vids (or vids featuring Jimmy) we clip / talk about: ANOTHER Bogus Fact Check of Jimmy Dore DEBUNKED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g9w7lGD31o&t=3s Yes, Ukraine DOES Have Biolabs – Admits US Government. w/Glenn Greenwald https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV8S8NN7yfU Total Deaths From COVID MUCH LOWER Than Reported https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O7ugdwv3iY One of Jimmy’s many cosy chats with America’s favourite fascist broadcaster Comedian tells Tucker Carlson his take on identity politics - YouTube Videos about Jimmy: Shaun’s video: Jimmy Dore’s Anti-Vaccine Lies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wRDLf54Scs José: The Jimmy Dore Show, What Bad Leftwing Critique Looks Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwsr1PDpb2g&t=445s The Majority Report on Jimmy Dore The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - YouTube The Serfs on Jimmy Dore The Serf Times - YouTube Sophie From Mars: Conspiracy on the Left Conspiracy on the Left | Sophie from Mars - YouTube (Also mentioned: LonerBox: Russell Brand’s Despicable Coverage of Ukraine Russell Brand's Despicable Coverage of Ukraine - YouTube) Regarding Jimmy’s videos: Politifact: No, death totals from COVID-19 in England have not been overstated PolitiFact | No, death totals from COVID-19 in England have not been overstated Regarding Ukraine’s Biolabs: Victoria Nuland’s Senate testimony (exchange with Marco Rubio) Ukraine Has Biological Research Facilities, Concerned Russian Forces May Seek To Gain Control: US - YouTube Glenn Greenwald’s Substack article re Ukraine Biolabs and Fact Checkers https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological?s=r QAnon Anonymous Ep183: Ukraine, Bioweapons & Adrenochrome Stream Episode 183: Ukraine, Bioweapons & Adrenochrome by QAnon Anonymous | Listen online for free on SoundCloud Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald biolabs questions have simple answers. (slate.com) (1) PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 on Twitter: "#USBiolabs has been trending. The account claiming that Putin may have attacked US biolabs in Ukraine, presumably in response to covid conspiracies, is a follower of Q, has called for the execution of police, media, officials, and doctors, and has pushed past racist rhetoric. https://t.co/RbmOKA8MyP" / Twitter PolitiFact | There are no US-run biolabs in Ukraine, contrary to social media posts Fact check: Claim of 'US biolabs' in Ukraine is disinformation (usatoday.com) Ukraine war: Fact-checking Russia's biological weapons claims - BBC News Fact-checking Russian claims of US labs making lethal biological weapons in Ukraine (telegraph.co.uk) PolitiFact | China repeats false claim that U.S has biolabs in Ukraine Fact Check: There Are NO US-Run Bioweapons Laboratories In Ukraine | Lead Stories Fact Check: Russia DID NOT 'Find Over 30 Biological Labs' In Ukraine 'Formed By The Pentagon' | Lead Stories Fact Check: No, There Are No U.S.-Funded Bioweapons Labs in Ukraine (thedispatch.com) Russian media spreading disinformation about US bioweapons as troops mass near Ukraine - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (thebulletin.org) Ukraine, US Biolabs, and an Ongoing Russian Disinformation Campaign | Snopes.com What are Russia’s biological weapons claims and what’s actually happening? | United Nations | The Guardian UN says not aware of biological weapons programme in Ukraine | United Nations News | Al Jazeera WHO says it advised Ukraine to destroy pathogens in health labs | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/03/13/tulsi-gabbard-latest-to-push-russian-backed-conspiracy-about-us-backed-biological-labs-in-ukraine/?sh=c4d1f925522d Russia Is Lying About Evidence of Bioweapons Labs in Ukraine, Russian Biologists Say (theintercept.com) Regarding Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution: Dissent Magazine: A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-letter-to-the-western-left-from-kyiv N+1: Ukraine, Putin, and the West https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/the-intellectual-situation/ukraine-putin-and-the-west/ CrimethInc. : War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine Remembering Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity | openDemocracy Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution Was Not a ‘Coup’ (polygraph.info) Good Socialist Takes on Russia invasion of Ukraine: Marxist-Humanist Initiative Editorial: Ukraine Fights for National Self-Determination Against Russian Imperialism https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/mhi-radio-free-humanity Radio Free Humanity Ep64 Ukraine Fights for National Self-Determination Against Russian Imperialism Episode 64: Ukraine Fights for National Self-Determination Against Russian Imperialism – Marxist-Humanist Initiative (marxisthumanistinitiative.org) Radio Free Humanity Ep64 Rohini Hensman on Ukraine’s Protracted Struggle for National Liberation Episode 65: Rohini Hensman on Ukraine’s Protracted Struggle for National Liberation – Marxist-Humanist Initiative (marxisthumanistinitiative.org) The Wire: Rohini Hensman: Ukraine’s Protracted Struggle for National Liberation (thewire.in) Workers’ Liberty: Unite the Left to defend Ukraine https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2022-03-08/unite-left-defend-ukraine Stop the War? Yes, but with victory for Ukraine! https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2022-03-15/stop-war-yes-victory-ukraine Putin is not a victim of NATO https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2022-03-15/putin-not-victim-nato The Antifada: War is a Defeat for All of Us w/ Alex Gendler https://podbay.fm/p/the-antifada/e/1646218800 Neil Abrams tweet threads on Grayzone conspiracy theorising to excuse Russia for atrocities in Ukraine: (1) Neil Abrams on Twitter: "OK, so @MaxBlumenthal of @TheGrayzoneNews recently published an article claiming that Russia’s bombing of a Mariupol theater was actually a false-flag operation carried out by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. Reader, this is one dishonest article, and I’m about to show you why. Thread:" / Twitter (1) Neil Abrams on Twitter: "Folks, @TheGrayzone’s back with another flagrantly dishonest article claiming that Russian atrocities—this time in Mariupol and Bucha—were false-flags by Ukraine. Their latest journalistic farce further exposes them as purveyors of unvarnished propaganda. Let’s dig in." / Twitter Behind the Bastards on Paul Manafort in Ukraine: https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1533031200 https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1533204000 Misc: BBC accidentally forgets to help the Establishment cover-up America’s coup in Ukraine by publishing transcript of leaked Nuland/Pyatt phone call Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call - BBC News https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin/putin-repeats-long-running-claim-genocide-ukraine/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/mar/11/russia-china-and-tucker-carlson-lack-evidence-ukra/ Tucker Carlson’s history of pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukraine propaganda | Media Matters for America How Russian Disinformation Goes From the Kremlin to QAnon to Fox News (thedailybeast.com) Leaked Kremlin Memo to Russian Media: It Is “Essential” to Feature Tucker Carlson – Mother Jones https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/news/disinformation-about-current-russia-ukraine-conflict-seven-myths-debunked-2022-01-24_en https://theconversation.com/putins-claims-that-ukraine-is-committing-genocide-are-baseless-but-not-unprecedented-177511 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/60477712 https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-russia-falsely-blames-ukraine-for-starting-war/a-60999948 https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/25/2076638/-Ukraine-would-not-be-on-the-brink-of-invasion-were-it-not-for-Paul-Manafort-and-Donald-Trump https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/vladimir-putin-ukraine-attack-antisemitism-denazify Putin’s Assault on Ukraine and the Nonproliferation Regime | Arms Control Association * Orwell, Notes on Nationalism: Notes on Nationalism | The Orwell Foundation “When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realizes that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion – that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware – will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack – all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.”
The conversation on the left revolves almost exclusively around identity.
Which is, in other words, me.
Narcissism is about me.
Yeah.
But you kept talking about economics.
That used to be the central conversation on the left.
Or in America, actually.
Yeah.
Why no more?
Because the establishment has learned how to co-opt identity politics to put the brakes on economic progress and justice.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
All right, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, episode This is a prime episode, but mostly because it is a prime number.
But also, normally, if you hear my name, if you hear my voice first, it's because I have a special guest who's going to come, and Jack will not be joining us.
But instead, I am now going to be the host and Jack is going to explain some internet dipshit to me.
So, there's a little bit of a role reversal here.
I'm really looking forward to this because today we are talking about more.
We're doing another episode about Jimmy Dore.
And every time I try to watch or listen to this fucker, it's not like my eyes unfocus or I can't hear or he's saying something terrible that I can't.
It's just my whole brain and personality starts to unfocus.
I find myself literally becoming less of a person because following this person, following Jimmy Dore, like actually trying to take him remotely seriously, even enough to prep an episode on him, is just like it's nailing jelly to a wall for So, Jack has boldly taken on this task because he finds Jimmy Dore even more infuriating than he finds most of the other people we've covered, and so he has presumably prepped an amazing episode for us.
So, Jack, thanks for joining us.
Hey, thanks.
I like that.
We're really mixing it up.
And so, you know, I often begin with like a literature joke and you began with a maths joke.
It's really characteristic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very, very James Lindsay and some maths.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that's more math than James Lindsay has ever actually done on any of his podcasts.
Complex papers about binomial something or other.
Come on.
He knows a lot about this.
I'm sure he does.
It's when you put the communism and the fascism or the fascism and the communism.
That's what he knows.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we start on James Lindsay, we will never get anywhere.
So we need to talk about a different git.
Talk about someone else who.
Yeah, we need to talk about not friend of the pod.
I don't know how you want to describe him.
Jack, tell me about Jimmy Dore.
Yeah, Jimmy Dore.
Okay, so basically I need to begin by saying this episode is completely superfluous thanks to somebody on YouTube called Sophie from Mars who recently did a stupendous YouTube video.
It's really, it's what gives you hope for the medium.
It's one of the best things I've ever seen on YouTube about left-wing conspiracy theorists and they do, they cover Jimmy Dore, Caleb Maupin, George Galloway, all these fuckers.
And it's a brilliant video.
And actually, quite a few people have done good stuff on Jimmy Dore.
The Serfs have done good stuff about Jimmy Dore, Jose, and very... people know about this.
Sean, fairly recently, did an excellent video about Jimmy Dore, absolutely just decimating this guy's dishonesty on his anti-vax grift.
So this episode is kind of completely superfluous, but I'm going to do it anyway, just out of pure spite, because you're much more serious and conscientious than me.
You feel the need to have a real good, serious reason to do an episode.
I just sometimes just want to kick somebody I hate, you know?
Hey, well, that's that's that's a perfectly fine reason.
And, you know, sometimes the reason we do an episode is, well, we got to get two of these up in a month or else, you know, we're going to people are going to think we don't care about them anymore.
So, yeah, no, I'm sure I've listened to the clips you have prepared for us.
And oh, boy, I'm sure we're going to get into some really some really nice topics.
I would also highly recommend that Sophie from Mars video.
I thought it was it was quite good.
It's excellent, it really is.
And I've recently discovered, I'm getting off track already, but I've recently discovered that Caleb Morpin and his hangers-on have already done, I think Caleb has already done three response videos and a live stream with Peter Coffin and some other dipshit.
I think Max Blumenthal was in that one too, yeah.
Oh, is he really?
Wow.
I believe so.
Yeah.
Well, I've watched some of that and it's just as amazing as you would think it would be, but let's... We could do an entire Caleb Moffin episode and not touch that topic, but why would we?
Anyway, let's not talk about Caleb Maupin right now, let's talk about Jimmy Dore.
There will be Caleb Maupin later on in the episode, but let's crack on with it.
As I say, it's no secret that Jimmy Dore is a piece of shit.
This episode isn't really going to be like debunking him the way Sean did or Jose did.
And it's not really, it's not going to be anything like the kind of analysis that Sophie from Mars did.
I just, I kind of want to get at how he argues and how he operates and some of the just gaping and yet incredibly basic hypocrisies of the guy.
And I'm also, I'm doing this, it's kind of the Russian invasion of Ukraine particularly triggered this because this whole milieu of reactionary leftists or pseudo leftists, they really wind me up for reasons that are probably obvious to everybody, and I think it's really insidious.
And I think it does tie in with our main subject because as people who actually know anything about politics know, fascism always It relies upon a section of, you know, left or pseudo-left useful idiots.
It often has roots in a kind of breakaway section of the reactionary left.
I'm not saying Jimmy Dore is a fascist or a Nazi, but I am saying that there are convergences and dangers here.
To get to the basics, Jimmy Dore, born 1965, Chicago.
His father was a Chicago policeman who owned his own brickworking business on the side.
He dropped out of Illinois State and then graduated from Columbia College with a degree in marketing.
He took up comedy, he's had various shows and podcasts, including Citizen Jimmy on Comedy Central, went to The Young Turks in 2009, co-hosted a show called Aggressive Progressives, Jimmy Dore's show starts on The Young Turks, then a YouTube version starts in 2012, leaves The Young Turks in 2019.
Now here we kind of have to gesture at something that's actually, it requires more than gesturing really, but it's all we're going to do.
In 2021, Anna Kasparian, who's one of the co-hosts of The Young Turks, alleged repeated sexual harassment of her by Jimmy Dore.
Jimmy responded, and we're going to get to how he responds to criticism, in such a way as to just basically admit it and blame her.
Wow.
This was not something I was aware of.
This is, uh, no.
No, this is continue.
Yeah, this is this is a whole thing.
I'm not really going to cover this and I feel bad about covering it because I feel we could do an entire episode just on this.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Sure.
But yes, there will be so many links in the fucking show notes to all this.
All this.
Trust me, Jimmy host.
I mean, I feel like like that's it really.
You know, we're done.
It's over, but we're going to carry on anyway.
Jimmy hosts the Jimmy Dore Show with Steph Zamorano, who is his co-writer and his partner, and this guy Ron Placone, who is a co-writer, and there's some other people involved.
We don't really need to get into that.
In 2020, Jimmy bought a very nice Hollywood mansion.
It's described as a rambling 1930s Hollywood compound.
Apparently it cost him about two million dollars.
So he's doing okay.
His current business model is doing okay for him.
And because we do class politics here, let's just reiterate this.
He is from a cop stroke petty bourgeois family.
He's a college graduate.
Yeah, basically.
And is now a millionaire Hollywood property owner who runs a flourishing private media business.
Yeah, basically.
And he's now a millionaire Hollywood property owner who runs a flourishing private media business.
Let's, you know, I'm just saying, because one of the things about Jimmy is he kind of self defines as one of these things that he says about himself is, I'm just a jag off comedian.
And he likes to say I'm just a pothead.
And you know, I'm just a comedian doing a show from my garage, stuff like this.
He likes to pose as an ordinary guy, a working man.
As I say, he's got a particular class position, like quite quite a few of the more successful YouTubers.
Again, we're going to be getting onto this.
I do like to ask of these people who, you know, look, if you if you come from a certain background and you actually find yourself doing like committed like to leftist activity and, you know, you make a good living at it.
I'm not one to, like, sneeze at that necessarily.
Like, yes, OK, fine.
But I do like to ask the question of some of these people.
Have you ever actually held a job?
And it doesn't sound like Jimmy Dore is a person who's ever really held a job, if you know what I mean.
I don't know.
He might have done.
But if he did, you know, his job is now being a YouTube shithead and it pays very well, clearly.
Fair, fair.
Uh, it's funny to me also just as someone who had an interest in like stand-up comedy and, you know, used to watch a ton of Comedy Central.
I never got into the Young Turks or anything like that, but Jimmy Dore has like given, put like no impression into my brain, like as a comedian or anything, like until he started being like this kind of reactionary dipshit on the internet, I had, I had had no impression of him whatsoever.
It's for maybe like, you know, a clip of his here and there that was being criticized by someone else.
Like, it was like a name I knew, but like, I have no, like, no, no connection to him whatsoever.
And I think that, I think that, like, that's, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I think this is a theme that we're going to develop slightly, which is that, you know, there's a reason that this guy now does Internet politics, if you want to put it that way, rather than comedy as his main career, because he's not very good at it.
He's not very funny.
And another theme, really, I mean, we're not going to go into this in detail, but he does remind me strongly in his way of of another person who was supposedly a comedian and Was on the Young Turks and split away from the Young Turks and has made a career sort of being a really, really bad and stupid reactionary internet politics person.
I'm assuming you're referring to Ina Mohamed's favorite, Dave Rubin, in that case, who very recently, as in the last couple of days, showed up on Michael Shermer's podcast of all places.
Oh, great.
That sounds fun.
You know, that was one where I saw it and just went, Delete!
Don't bother with that one.
That'll be a nope from me, dog.
That'll be a, I have no reason to listen to these people at all.
I will let others go into that and get a breach.
Yeah, the reason that I'm on this guy, and people might remember that we kind of sort of did an episode about Jimmy Dore last year, I think it was, when he interviewed Magnus Panvidia, a Boogaloo boy, which again is going to come back.
And I'm back on it because he's just gotten worse and worse and worse.
And the reason, you know, as I kind of intimated, He's one of these people who's ostensibly on the left, but is actually reactionary.
And he's drifted from a kind of left populism, populist leftism, however you want to put it, into, I think, increasingly unhinged and openly reactionary and incipiently red-brown politics, you know?
And I think it's via the vector of conspiracy theorizing, because he's a long-term conspiracy theorist.
And I would just recommend now the Rational Wiki page on Jimmy Doerr is very good.
There's loads of details there about the various conspiracy balls, he believes, with loads of citations and receipts.
Go and look at that.
You know, we're talking JFK, which, as we recently talked about with Kelly Wilde, you and I used to believe, but then we, you know, grew up.
And Building 7 and fuck knows what else.
It's all there on the Rational Wiki page.
Sure.
Does he does he does he do the holographic planes thing?
That's really the that like the dividing line.
You like the moon landing didn't happen kind of guy.
He's not that far gone, but I think he's going that way, you know?
Sure.
But he bases his he bases his shtick on, as I say, he does this kind of I'm just a Jagoff comedian doing this in my in my garage, you know, and he bases it on a on a sort of The performance of being the, you can't fool me, I'm too savvy, the government can't get one over on me, no flies on me sort of thing.
But he also does this infuriating thing where when he fucks up, because another theme we're going to be developing in this is that he can't be wrong.
Jimmy can never be wrong.
Okay.
Right.
You know, he will occasionally admit he got something wrong, but then there's always an excuse or there's a... My producer gave me that to say.
That was the thing.
I just say what my producer gives me.
That is classic.
That is absolutely classic.
I mean, you know, hero of the working man, you know, he just fires this producer.
There's this boss that just fired, you know, I'll blame you.
You're fired.
Great.
Well done.
That's socialism for you.
But yeah, his grift is reliant upon, you can never fool him.
He's always too savvy to buy what the mainstream media say or the government tell him, you know.
But at the same time, he will he will just make mistakes all over the place.
And when he makes mistakes, he either just smears the person pointing it out or he if it comes to it, he will do this.
Well, I don't know about this.
I'm just I'm just a boomer.
I don't know.
I don't know what bugaloo boys are.
You know, I don't know about any of this.
How could I know?
And it's just very, very annoying.
Yeah, but he's basically a kind of left-wing Fox News grandpa.
But of course, like Dave Rubin, he's got the economic political behaviorism thing going on and the audiences are pushing him towards greater and greater reactionary conspiracy theorizing and you can see that very much with his increasing anti-vax grift and with, as I say, it's the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the reaction of him and, you know, it's emblematic of a lot of people in that sort of reactionary left sphere.
Yeah, we're seeing various themes.
He has different techniques.
A big one is to advocate a conspiracy theory, basically sans any evidence, but using appeals to other facts that apparently make the conspiracy theory seem more credible.
Basically, these people are all still living in the war on terror era, and they can tell you anything.
They can tell you that the government is doing anything they like, or anything the government says is a lie.
And then they can justify it with reference to, oh, well, Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
You know, it's just that over and over and over again.
Well, Judith Miller, therefore, you know, COVID denialism, basically.
Essentially, yeah.
In very much the same way that Caleb Maupin proves that BreadTube is funded by the CIA.
And again, we're going to get to this by telling you all about How the CIA funded, you know, Hannah Arendt and people like that in the 50s and 60s.
Like, well, okay, maybe some of that's true.
Maybe COINTELPRO existed, etc.
That doesn't prove anything about what you're saying now.
It doesn't prove ContraPoints is being paid by the NSA, you know, come on.
But this is the technique that's used.
And another thing Jimmy does is any claim you don't like, you just discount by pointing out that the person making it or the organisation that it's coming from has some form of connection with somebody else that you don't like or that you can insinuate is untrustworthy.
Again, you know, Greyzone does this all the time.
We're going to be getting into this.
And of course, you just ignore any such affiliations with regards to your own sources.
Complete hypocrisy.
One thing I do want to mention, we already mentioned his Ana Kasparian allegations, is that this guy gives off, to me, he gives off misogynist in fucking waves.
It's very Stefan Molyneux for me.
He's got a serious hate boner for Hillary Clinton.
He's repeatedly peddled the, you know, she's got Parkinson's disease.
He said that she tried to kill Julian Assange with a drone.
He's kind of sort of peddled the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.
Rachel Maddow is kind of his personal Satan.
He hates Rachel Maddow.
I mean, not that these are not fairly good targets.
You know, these are awful.
How do you how do you how do you like go after Hillary Clinton and never hit anything real?
There's so many, so many things to criticize and to be listened to.
It's just the dumbest shit.
And it's in service of what is essentially a reactionary agenda.
It seems like criticizing from the left, but it's not because the ultimate agenda of these people is not left-wing.
It's pseudo-progressive.
It's pseudo-left-wing.
I first became very aware of Jimmy Dore because his channel is like a clearinghouse for all the opinions of the people during Russiagate who were, you know, self-proclaimed Russiagate skeptics, you know, and you've got Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Michael Tracy, Matt Taibbi, that entire sort of coterie of people.
And as far as they're concerned now, it's just a fact now that Russiagate was just a hoax, you know.
Mueller report is a damp squib, all this.
Despite the fact that there is acres of evidence, including in the Mueller report, of extensive relationships between the Trump organization and Russian government and Putin and all this stuff, you know, there's loads of it.
I mean, you know, Paul Manafort in Ukraine is an entire series of podcasts by itself, for God's sake.
Oh yeah, for sure.
But Jimmy, you know, despite ostensibly being... This is emblematic.
Jimmy, despite ostensibly being on the left, you know, he's much more likely to talk to you about Hunter Biden's laptop, you know.
Now, Hunter Biden, Burisma, you know, these aren't people we like, but...
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, I mean, if the choice was Jimmy Dore or someone who's doing cocaine off of the strippers ass in Ukraine.
I mean, you know, I know who I'd rather hang out with, but, you know.
Sure.
But this is it all comes from latent and often not so latent sympathy with Trumpism.
That's that's what this is.
I mean, Jimmy said in the run up to 2016 that a Trump presidency would be better for progressives than a Clinton one, which there you go.
Which is just the yeah, just just the most the most brain dead takes.
I mean, is he was he also one of those like, well, Bernie and Trump are both kind of standing on the same anti-establishment wing against Hillary Clinton?
Was he was he was he one of those guys?
Yeah, kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he also fell big time for Tulsi Gabbard.
Well, of course, all these fucking, you know.
She says like one word, like, maybe we shouldn't be in maybe we shouldn't be in Afghanistan.
And then suddenly it's like, you know, Coconut Mommy, I love you.
That's the name the Nazis gave her.
To be clear, that's not like I'm trying to be racist.
That's not my that's not my special name for her.
No.
But yeah, no, like that stuff is always like, she's just principled.
No, she, she, she wants, she doesn't want to invade these countries because of the risk to American service members.
Which, not that I want American service members to die, of course, but that's not really the nub of the argument here.
You know, that's not really, What I call an anti-war, anti-imperialist stance is like, we really need to protect the heroes and the heads of American service members.
Like, maybe the people of Afghanistan have a larger moral frame.
And it's never framed that way with these guys, or at least Tulsi never framed it that way.
It was always like, well, American interests need to be protected, but we don't need to go to war because, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
It's, it's never, it's never the, the actual, like the real issues at the heart of this, you know?
And yeah, I could go on about this for hours, you know, we're circling so many things that we could just like spew on about forever.
Well, this is the thing.
This podcast is already going to be too long and we're going to just we're going to fly past so many things that we could do entire shows about, you know, Tulsi Gabbard.
I mean, of course she doesn't Oppose American involvement in Afghanistan on the grounds of, you know, caring about the Afghan people because a lot of them are Muslims and Arabs, not all of them, but a lot of them, you know, and she's a... She's a Hindu nationalist.
She's a Hindu nationalist.
She's in bed with Modi and the fascist government of India, which is completely secondary from this campist, supposedly anti-imperialist, reactionary left point of view.
It's completely secondary to the fact that she criticizes the American government for regime change wars.
That's all they care about.
So, yeah, I mean, let's be clear, Russiagate was, there was a lot of, you know, liberal cope and hype and nonsense spoken about it, but criticizing the liberal establishment, the Democratic Party, Stephen Colbert, MSNBC, etc., that doesn't, you know, that's no reason to effectively whitewash the Trump organization and its very, very dodgy ties to the right-wing authoritarian regime in Moscow, you know, but that's what this amounts to.
Exactly.
But of course, as far as these people are concerned, Russiagate is a hoax.
Jimmy Dore just says, Russiagate, hoax.
And he will adduce that as evidence of his superior trustworthiness.
He will talk endlessly about how he is smeared and silenced and attacked.
And he will say, yes, but I was right about this, that, and the other.
And the things that he's proving himself right about with You know, Russiagate was a hoax, Assad didn't gas his own people, the Douma gas attack wasn't Assad, etc, etc, etc.
So this is pretty insidious stuff.
From my point of view, this is very insidious stuff.
The pro-Assad Syria denialism is, you know, there's orgy of that stuff in this coterie, you know, and it's all conspiracy theorizing, you know, false flag theories conspiracy theories about the white helmets
the doomer attacks as i say recited from rt russian propaganda um aaron mate max blumenthal and norton gray zone contingent eva bartlett discredited rt stooge conspiracy theorists uh door was using eco watch as a source before they cleaned their act up uh He said Assad gassed his own people as a conspiracy theory, etc, etc, etc.
And again, we don't have to, we don't say that we approve of American imperial attacks upon Syria.
That's not the same as whitewashing Assad.
You know, this is, this is really, this is child, this is child stuff, you know, but it's not obvious to a lot of people.
I want to give a kind of brief capsule description of the channel by just basically just reading some episode titles, and I think our audience will probably be able to pass some of this.
One of the most recent ones I've seen is, Is Obese an Identity?
Rogan and Mar get blowback for talking about obesity.
You can just guess how great that is.
I know, I know, I know.
I have listened to that podcast.
You have?
I haven't listened to it.
No, I could probably recite it to you verbatim.
Yeah, without having listened to it.
Absolutely.
Where's the racism?
Rogan and Ma mock quote-unquote racism of lab leak theory.
Medical ethics professor fired over vaccine now vindicated.
Scandal.
Ivermectin versus Ivermectin.
Which study is right?
Triple question mark.
That presumably is his response to the recent study that basically just completely demolished the idea that Ivermectin can be used as a COVID treatment.
Yeah, I'm sure that's a criticism of the TOGETHER study, which is, you know, just like, you know, the gold standard of evidence.
Ivermectin does nothing for COVID.
It's fine.
Yeah.
How the left lost its mind over Covid and became authoritarians.
That's with Christian Parenti from Greyzone.
He went into overdrive about the Will Smith slapping of Chris Rock thing.
Will Smith mocked alopecia victim on television.
It's I think it's it's kind of worth taking a little side trip on this, because this is another part of Jimmy Dore's thing.
His identity is that he has this very sort of strong comedian identity.
He's not actually very good at being a comedian, but being a comedian is very much part of his identity.
And it comes very much from that kind of Boring, outdated idea, beloved of people that never got past being a student and listening to George Carlin and Bill Hicks records, you know, of the comedian as kind of an outrageous truth teller, you know, so he's big supporting Chris Rock.
He went Big into supporting Dave Chappelle after he was criticized for disgusting transphobic jokes and opposing cheap housing developments.
And he went big time into supporting Joe Rogan during the whole Spotify thing.
He's a big fan of Joe Rogan.
He says he's a lefty.
Again, I think it's pretty well established now that Rogan is, albeit a flailing one, a reactionary.
But this is a big thing with him.
The Squad pushes war and imperialism in Ukraine.
He hates AOC.
Media whitewashes Ukraine Nazis.
Gas sales, the real reason for the Ukraine war.
So it wasn't Putin-Imperialism, eh?
Hunter Biden laptop confirmed real by New York Times.
US-NATO preparing false flag chemical attack in Ukraine.
That was from March the 5th.
The grey zone, Blumenthal, etc., they've been going hell to leather on pushing false flag conspiracy theories about the various horrific Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
Every time they get debunked, they just move the goalposts.
I'll link actually to a couple of quite good Twitter threads from this guy, Neil Abrams, who goes through two of these examples of the Grey Zone attempting to use conspiracy theorizing to whitewash these atrocities.
COVID tests secretly used to sequence your genes.
That's a rare one.
You don't hear that one.
Full-blown dictator, Trudeau freezes protesters' bank accounts in authoritarian crackdown on the truckers.
Again, little stop off here.
Big support for the trucker convoy.
And of course, we quite recently did an episode on Lauren Southern, who referred to Trudeau as a dictator.
I think it's very interesting, that synergy.
And I also think it's interesting, You mentioned, you noticed that the title about, you know, Ukraine Nazis, he's been going big on that one, like Ukraine is just a Nazi country, if you believe Jimmy Dore, because of the Azov Battalion.
They use the existence of the Azov Battalion to, and some of the horrifying propaganda that they produce, like don't you know, we're no great fans of the Azov Battalion, but that was like the immediate thing is like, Oh, and now all you supposed anti-fascist leftists are totally in support of the Nazis in Ukraine because you're just obeying your NATO masters or your CIA masters or whatever.
And it's like, oh my God, can we just not have like the most childish argument in history about Yeah.
And this is the thing when I say like I just feel my personality like running out of my ears when I like try to follow this is that there's just no there there here.
I mean, I'm looking forward to like getting into the clips and like going through all this stuff and kind of having a laugh at this guy.
But like it is just like there's no there's nothing to push against.
It's just this Reactionary, pseudo-populist, you know, garbage.
I mean, it's just, it doesn't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
I mean, Caleb Moffat at least has an ideology, you know, like there's something there.
He's got like a fully worked out, completely batshit history.
Of, like, leftism.
And he has, like, an ideology that you can at least respond to.
Jimmy Dore, from everything that I've seen, is just, like, he's just, he's like Tim Pool without the charisma.
And do you know how bad you have to be to be Tim Pool without the charisma?
Even reading those, like, headlines, like, any one of those could be a Tim Pool headline.
We could do a little, uh, a game.
You know, guess who wrote this?
Guess the thumbnail based on reading it, you know, is it Tim Pool or Jimmy Dore?
I mean, they're producing effectively equivalent content in terms of at least the ideological component at this point.
Yeah, no, I agree.
They're very similar in many respects.
But I think it, I mean, maybe just it isn't pure spite, but I think it is worth going into this a little bit because I do find just the, I find the fact that this guy has quite a large audience and quite a lot of, like he recently, I mean we're going to be talking about this, we're going to be talking about him having Caleb Maupin on for his absolutely ludicrous BreadTube is CIA video that he did recently.
That's, you know, he's got a significantly bigger audience than Caleb Maupin.
He's probably boosted Caleb Maupin's profile by doing that.
Yes, for sure.
This is dangerous, you know.
So why is it that this guy who isn't funny, who doesn't know anything about politics, who has no particular charisma or personality, no real knowledge, no expertise, who blatantly just switches back and forth between, you know, I know all, you can't fool me, I'm too savvy.
And on the other hand, well, I don't know anything.
Don't blame me.
I don't know.
You know, it's so transparent, and yet he's managed to carve out a profile and a niche in an audience.
And despite the blatant hypocrisy, like, as I say, with the Ukraine thing, they go on, you know, there's a problem in Ukraine with the far right.
Ukraine has a very complex and long history, which informs its current predicament with the far right.
We're going to be talking about this a little bit.
The Azov battalion is a real thing.
Etc.
If you believe Jimmy Dore and several other of these people, Ukraine is basically a fascist country, like the police is run by the Nazis and there's Nazis in the government, etc.
And I mean, basic facts, like basic facts about who the minister of this and who the undersecretary of that is in the Ukraine government.
Just wrong.
Just wrong all over the place.
And yet it keeps on coming.
Acres and acres of this stuff.
And the incredible hypocrisy as well.
Look at CNN, look at MSNBC.
They're repeating Nazi propaganda.
They showed the Azov Battalion.
There's a Nazi symbol on this guy.
You know, he's hell for leather supporting the Trucker Convoy.
The Trucker Convoy, organized by, supported by, affiliated with far-right fascists all over the place in Canada.
You look at their rallies, they're holding Far-right banners and wearing far-right symbols.
Apparently that basic hypocrisy doesn't, it just doesn't, it just, it doesn't, you know, affect Jimmy Dore's ability to tell you what you should think about Ukraine.
To imply that the Russian invasion, not quite say, but imply that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is justified because there's Nazis in Ukraine.
It's just infuriating.
It really is.
And he doesn't even have the rhetoric about the brave red army that crushed fascism in the 40s that Caleb Maupin has, right?
That's one of Caleb Maupin's things that he'll bring back over and over again.
The glorious and wonderful Red Army and how they were the true heroes of World War II, etc, etc, etc.
And, you know, looking back at them as, like, the true anti-fascists who were anti-imperialist.
And Dora, again, Dora doesn't even seem to have that.
It's just this, like, a pose.
It's just this, like, aesthetic choice, almost.
Yeah.
Well, one of the funny things about the videos with Caleb and Jimmy is, look, Caleb will go off on these rants about, you know, The science of dialectical materialism and providing a scientific understanding of what fascism is and about how Marxism actually says this, that and the other, you know.
And Jimmy's eyes sort of glaze over and he's sort of standing there going, when is this going to be over?
You know, it's hilarious.
This is the most I've ever identified with Jimmy Dore, by the way.
Yeah, Stalinist is too much praise for Caleb Maupin.
But anyway, a few more of these episode titles because I think they give you a very good pocket picture.
Pfizer releases long list of over a thousand VAX adverse events.
Warning against boosters.
Frequent boosters threaten immune system.
Doctors pressure to lie about Omicron.
Hillary caught spying.
Hillary spied on Trump, says Biden's Justice Department.
Natural immunity vindicate.
Jimmy and Max Blumenthal have both been on this natural immunity kick.
On and on and on this shit goes.
On and on and on.
Why not us?
Masks off at UK airports, but not at... Jimmy, since we, in this country, very ill-advisedly got rid of all our COVID restrictions, our cases are through the roof, and airports and airplane companies are cancelling flights because all their staff are down with COVID.
Maybe that's why.
Who knows?
Yeah, moving on a bit.
We referred to the Sean video, which very effectively deals a blow to Jimmy's basic standards of accuracy and honesty when it comes to the anti-vax grift that he's been on.
Not quite anti-vax, because he doesn't want to get thrown off YouTube or anything like that, but he wants to pander to that audience.
Jimmy Dore's response to Sean is something we're going to track a little bit.
But this is giving you a picture.
There's just so much of this stuff.
You know, I've been left behind by it as I've been researching it.
OK, so let's get to the first clip.
And the first clip is about the Ukrainian bio labs nonsense.
So we had the Russian invasion of Ukraine, obviously, and this entire tendency, this reactionary left pseudo anti-imperialist tendency, they've gone into overdrive trying to Maybe not quite say this, but, you know, heavily imply with everything that they say and do that Putin's done nothing wrong.
So a big thing in that has been the explosion of this conspiracy theory about the bio labs in Ukraine.
Again, it's not the main topic of the episode, but just a little bit of background.
It started basically on Twitter as a conspiracy theory touted by a QAnon influencer.
And from there it spread.
I mean, QAnon just went nuts for this.
Listen to the QAnon Anonymous podcast episode they did about this.
They think the Russian troops are rescuing slave children from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from Ukrainian dungeons.
But it got picked up by Tucker.
Tucker ran with it.
He's done loads of segments about this to the point where apparently the Kremlin said to Russian TV channels, just show clips from Tucker on television all the time.
And Glenn Greenwald has gone with this as well.
And part of this is Glenn's war on fact-checkers.
And this is something that Jimmy has jumped on very readily because Jimmy loves, because he gets fact-checked and debunked so much, he loves to talk about how fact-checks can't be trusted.
So we're going to start with a little bit from a clip from a video that was on, yeah, it's called, Yes, Ukraine Does Have Biolabs Admits US Government.
This was from March the 12th.
Unproven claims of U.S.
funded Ukraine bioweapons lab spread online.
So this is a fact check.
So we've showed you how the fact checkers are almost always wrong because they're funded by people who want you to think they're fact checking but they also have a bias and it's usually corporate.
So here's another fact check.
Factcheck.org.
We've shown you where they get their money.
Social media posts misrepresent U.S.
Ukraine threat reduction program.
Okay.
Russia is targeting U.S.
biological weapon labs in Ukraine invasion.
That's from Plittle Fact.
And that's from the guy who did a bogus fact check on our show about coronavirus.
That's that incel guy I showed you before.
I'm not going to mention his name, but it's the same guy and he's getting this wrong too.
Okay, so I started this video and I got that literally that far in and I'm like, wait, what?
What the fuck is he talking about?
So what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to go back to a previous video called Another Bogus Fact Check of Jimmy Dore Debunked from January the 29th.
And I've edited this clip down a bit to get some of the best bits together.
Cause that's what these guys do, right?
Is they're just kind of constantly responding to like previous fact checks or whatever, and just spewing out like nonsense about, well, and this person was wrong earlier about this thing.
Well, and then, but there's never like a, you know, a laid out, like organized, you know, this is actually what's going on here type, you know, conversation about this.
It's always just like, you know, inclinations and vague insinuations as opposed to anything concrete.
Great.
Absolutely.
The clip you just heard is from a video, which is a clip of an interview between Jimmy and Glenn Greenwald.
Glenn Greenwald is on there to talk to Jimmy about these supposed bioweapons development facilities that are all over Ukraine, which they don't quite say this, but they heavily imply that it justifies Putin's invasion, or at the very least It's one of the things that makes Putin's invasion, you know, you shouldn't condemn it.
Certainly not because, like, you know, the US government condemns it and the liberal media condemns it.
So obviously you should, you shouldn't believe them.
You shouldn't share the same, you should never agree with them morally or politically about anything.
So one of the ways in which you justify that is you find ways to create fake nuance and fake complexity.
So you come up with the whole sort of, oh, Putin is responding to NATO expansionism, Which is bollocks.
Putin is responding to, you know, this America's trying to block a pipeline or something.
It's always a fucking pipeline with these people.
And one of them, the one that's had big success on the right and with these people, so still on the right, is this thing about there being bioweapons facilities all over Ukraine.
Now, as we're going to say, complete crap, but they love it.
But it's very important that the fact that it's Repeatedly fact-checked by PolitiFact and loads of other people that, you know, Snopes, all these things, shown to be crap.
It's very important that that not be allowed to slow down the narrative.
So what they have to do is they have to go into overdrive smearing the fact-checkers.
And Glenn has this entire Substack article which is about Oh, there's people who declare themselves fact checkers all over the media saying that this isn't true.
Well, you can't trust them because, and then you get into acres and acres of Greenwaldian bafflegab and filibustering and etc, etc.
And this is basically what Glenn is doing on Jimmy's show.
But you see, in that clip we just heard, Jimmy Jimmy refers to a fact check of a previous thing that he did.
And he just he writes it off with, well, we showed you where they get their money.
Now, this is this is a thing, right?
If you can show that somebody who said something you don't like got some money or even just has some sort of association with somebody else that you don't like or is suspicious, particularly, you know, looks bad from a left perspective, you can just say, well, that's it.
You don't need to pay any attention to anything they say.
So I'm not wrong after all, despite the fact check.
And so that's why we're going back to this previous video from January the 29th, another bogus fact check of Jimmy Dore, which is about a PolitiFact fact check of a video that Jimmy did recycling the claims of this guy on YouTube who sort of persistently does videos So guess what happened again?
on the narrative about vaccines and COVID, et cetera, et cetera, John Campbell.
And this video is about his claim that Office of National Statistics data from the British government shows that the COVID death rate is much lower than reported.
PolitiFact fact-checked this, debunked it.
Jimmy then responded with a debunk of the debunk.
That's what we're going to listen to now.
So guess what happened again?
This is great.
We got another fake fact check, this time from PolitiFacts.
So you know we get these fake fact checks, and they're not fact checks at all.
This one isn't either!
And so we get to show you.
So here it is.
PolitiFact.
And they're funded by the Poitner Institute.
Total deaths from COVID much lower than reported.
That's in quotes because that's the headline in my video.
You can tell it's wrong because he read it in a silly voice.
That's not only great comedy, but it's very analytical.
No deaths, no death totals from COVID-19 in England have not been overstated.
That's what PolitiFact says.
That's counterfactual.
They have been, and the PolitiFact is bullshit, and I'm gonna prove it to you.
By the way, here's the guy who did the fact check.
That's the guy.
I'm not going to show you his name because he doesn't deserve to be propped up on a bigger platform than he deserves, so I'm not going to mention his name.
But I wanted to show you the picture they have for him up at PolitiFact.
They want to let you know, yes, we hire incels directly from their mother's basements.
And you want to know what his qualifications are?
This guy has less qualifications than me.
Ready?
Here's his qualifications.
He's a contributing writer to PolitiFact.
And he has previously done that same thing.
He's been a content editor at Chicago Tribune and South Florida Sun-Herald.
Sentinel.
Sentinel.
And do you know what the qualifications are to get a job working at the Tribune?
Nothing.
Firstly, I mean, you can tell, again, why this guy does this for a living now instead of comedy, because that's his comedy there.
You know, the guy looks, he's an incel and he lives in his mother's basement.
And this, like, just sort of poking fun at people's appearance as a way of, like, discrediting them?
Totally, like, totally not a Nazi thing, by the way, you know?
It's kind of a perpetually online thing.
I mean, you know, we've done the Baldy McDickface thing.
We've, you know, like, look, you know, you deal with these people, you kind of make fun of it.
But that's just part, that's just a joke as a way of getting to further analysis.
This is like, well, this guy just looks like an incel.
He's just a loser.
And you shouldn't listen to him because yada yada.
Well, Jimmy Dore, not exactly a spring chicken either.
And then you get to, he basically starts just writing fanfic about how you don't need any qualifications to work for PolitiFact.
And while in the same breath telling you essentially that this guy has had quite a long professional career as a journalist working for two reputable news outlets, you know, I've looked at this guy's LinkedIn.
I'm not going to name him either because there's no reason why this poor fucker needs to be dragged into this or any more than he already has.
But I've looked into this guy's LinkedIn.
He has an extensive career as a journalist of good reputation.
There's loads of testimonials on there from people who've worked with him saying he's a great fact checker.
Jimmy makes a virtue of just, by his claims, just being a jag-off comedian and a pothead working out of his garage with no qualifications.
Well, make your mind up, Jimmy.
You know, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Yeah, I mean, you know, but this is the thing that I was kind of talking about a little bit in the Killy Wild interview is, Um, you know, the fact that Jimmy Dore is not within the establishment gives him a higher level of credibility, you see, like because he's not being like fed talking points by the machine, you see.
And on certain issues, I think there's, I mean, look, you know, We understand the systemic issues that come along with, you know, having, working within the liberal media, or working within, you know, getting money from the State Department, even in some rarefied way.
I mean, like, this is a constant source of criticism from the left of legacy media, obviously.
Jimmy Dore isn't doing that.
He's just spewing nonsense.
There's no argumentation here.
You know, there's no connection.
It's just, you know, a smear.
It's just a smear.
There's nothing else here.
Well, like a lot of stuff that he says, and again this is partly why him and why he and people like him are insidious, is that a lot of it on the surface it sounds reasonable enough from a left perspective.
You know, like a lot of things he will, you know, he will talk about the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, he will talk about the The hypocrisy of the liberal media is stuff like, you know, he will talk about genuine problems, genuine crimes of US imperialism, etc.
He will talk about genuine problems with labor relations and bad things done by this company.
So, you know, he will talk, they will talk about stuff that's Reasonable on the surface.
And then when you get underneath it, you get to, you know, an actual content that is at best contentless and at worst actively reactionary.
But the thing I really just wanted to point out that it's just internally contradictory because he doesn't give a shit about whether it makes sense or not.
You know, you can't trust this guy because he has no qualifications.
You can trust me because I have no qualifications.
That's what he's saying, you know.
Yeah.
Whereas, in fact, this guy does have qualifications as a fact checker.
And it's actually a very good article.
It does, in fact, debunk Jimmy's recycling of this guy, John Campbell's very bad YouTube video that distorts the reality about covid cases in Britain and in a very misleading and a very dangerous way.
It will it will not shock you that John Campbell has come up in my research previously.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to be talking a little bit more about him as we go on, so let's carry on with the clip.
Doar shares his interpretation of another YouTube video from a Briton named John Campbell.
How about Dr. John Campbell?
He's a PhD.
So now you know right away this is a political article because they're leaving out facts so they can skew your perception of Dr. John Campbell, and they're not calling him Dr. John Campbell.
I don't even know if they...
Dr. John Campbell, whose bio describes him as a retired nurse teacher and emergency nurse with a Ph.D.
focus on nurse education.
Ah, so you see what's happened here?
Jimmy is reading this for the first time as he's reading it to us.
Again, this is a theme that's going to be going on and on and on.
Also, also very Tim Pool, right?
Very Tim Pool?
Sargon of a cod level.
You literally took the words out of my mouth.
Sorry, I didn't mean to.
No, no, that's absolutely fine.
That's absolutely fine.
He says they're distorting facts by not telling you that John Campbell is Dr. John Campbell.
And then as he reads on, he discovers that they do, in fact, tell you that John Campbell Do you see what they're doing?
John Campbell is a PhD and a nursing trainer.
He is technically entitled to call himself Dr. John Campbell.
He has a PhD.
The fact is, if you're recycling his COVID misinformation and you are without context, even if it's just in the title of the video, calling him Dr. John Campbell this and Dr. John Campbell that, you are giving a misleading impression, which is what the PolitiFact article is clearly trying to address.
Anyway, let's carry on and finish this up.
Do you see what they're doing?
I didn't get a fact wrong at all.
Facts 100% correct. - Mm.
They didn't like the interpretation.
They wanted me to say something else around that fact.
That is literally what you've just criticized them for, Jimmy.
They didn't get the facts wrong about John Campbell's qualifications, you just criticized them for having an interpretation of those qualifications that you don't like.
You literally just...
I mean, and it's such like what all of these like reactionary dickbags do when they, it's like, well, did I get a fact wrong?
You know, did I, did I make a statement which is factually incorrect?
You know, Brett and Heather, Jesse Single, I mean, all the fucking Nazis.
It's always like, well, Didn't I say the accurate thing?
Didn't I caveat properly?
Did I make a technical error?
And it's like, even if that were true, which in many cases it is not when it comes to these guys, you are leaving a clear implication that is factually incorrect.
You are leading your audience down a path to incorrectness by using implication and by using skewed context.
Yes, and that is...
You know, Jimmy Dore has made his living with the English language for like his entire life, you know?
He's literally got a degree in marketing.
You know, like you understand, like this, you can't be this dumb.
This has to be intentional.
But I mean, maybe not.
I don't know.
Like, yeah, well, it's infuriating.
It's just infuriating.
It's both at once.
It's intentional and it's also dumb.
What you just described is exactly what Jimmy is doing in the original video that that PolitiFact fact-check is fact-checking.
That's what they're criticizing.
It's not a question of him getting facts wrong, it's a question of him giving a misleading impression through
you know aesthetics and context and all this stuff that's what they're criticizing that's what they're correcting but of course he can't be wrong because his grift depends upon this you can't fool me I'm Jimmy Dore thing so it has to be addressed so what you do is you smear and one of the you know we've seen you know incel guy mother's basement etc another thing you do you see at the start of the clip he says oh they get their money from the the pointer institute he mispronounces it he says pointner institute because again he's reading it for the first time as we're as we're watching um
The fact that PolitiFact gets money from the Poynter Institute supposedly just immediately makes anything they say suspect, okay?
Facts are apparently just contingent upon the moral status of the, or even just the friends of the person relaying them, right?
So that The Poynter Institute is untrustworthy because they get some money from the Koch Foundation and they get some money from the Washington Post, right?
This is what he says in his video.
Later in the same video, he quotes from an article called How Fact Checkers Mishandled the COVID-19 Origins Debate, which presumably to carry on just casting doubt on fact checkers in general, in the abstract, and also to keep kind of pushing the lab leak theory.
Yeah, this is a pro-lab leak video, I'm sure, yeah.
Absolutely.
And he's reading this article from something called RealClearPolitics.com.
Oh, this is another thing.
He says, he makes a joke, again, brilliant comedy, about how you can tell political fact is being political because they've got politi in the name, right?
Later on, he's quoting from an article From an organization called Real Clear Politics.
It's got Politi in the name.
By his own standards, it's untrustworthy.
You look up Real Clear Politics, it's owned by Real Clear Investors and Crest Media.
The same people publish Conservative Country, a far-right website.
It publishes pro-Trump.
A Facebook page publishes pro-Trump, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, far-right memes, etc.
And it relies upon... Real Clear Politics is aggregated from other sources such as The Washington Post.
The New York Post, Salon, Fox News, The Federalist, The National Review, literally in one video is telling you, you cannot trust this fact check because it gets money because PolitiFact get money from the Poynter Institute who get money from the Washington Post.
Later on in the same video, he's reading from an article from a website that gets stories from the Washington Post.
So this is not me saying this.
I'm not saying you can't trust that article because the same website gets, you know, gets stories from the Washington Post.
This is him saying this.
This is no, I mean, it's it's it's within 30 seconds.
He's just, you know, he's flopping all over the place.
Just depending on I mean, this this is like some James Lindsay level.
You know, James Lindsay is a model of subtlety compared to this.
Yeah, I am.
I am familiar with real clear politics, although maybe like kind of back in the day.
But I always got the sense of them as just kind of an aggregator site, just putting ads on other people's blurbs and shit.
So, you know, certainly not what I would consider a, you know, reputable, you know, You know, at least go and click through to the original article if you're going to quote from Real Clear Politics, right?
You know, go quote from the Washington Post or the New York Post or whatever.
Yeah, no, it's just it's just the sort like the slimiest, like low effort bullshit that just makes Jimmy Dore so infuriating and just so like difficult, right?
Because it's just like it's just surface level.
I mean, I know you put hours and hours of work into this, but, you know, You didn't have to.
It's all right there.
He'll tell you himself.
Well, it's surface level because this is always the same with these guys.
They think their audience are idiots.
They have contempt for their audience.
They don't expect anybody watching to pay enough attention to go into this much detail.
They don't think anybody's going to do this.
They don't think any of the people that they're selling this stuff to is ever going to bother to think about it.
The fact that he openly contradicts himself in the same video.
They think their audience, and a hell of a lot of their audience clearly do do this, are just going to go, you know, okay, whatever.
Which is great, particularly with these people that market themselves as kind of, oh, get the real truth here.
You know, they're all lying to you.
Don't be fooled.
Come to me for the truth.
And on that subject, if we go back to the original video that we started with, the thing about the Ukrainian bio labs.
The one with Glenn Greenwald.
This is basically in response to the Senate testimony of Victoria Nuland.
This caused the bioweapons labs in Ukraine thing to go insane across all these people.
She was testifying to the Senate and Marco Rubio asked her, does Ukraine actually have biological weapons?
And she responded, Ukraine, I'm not quoting, but it's something that you can go and look at it on YouTube.
It's there.
It's not a secret.
Go and look at it.
She responded, Ukraine has biological research facilities, yes.
And all these people just instantly took this as confirmation, somehow, of US-funded, secret, nefarious biological weapons programs bases all over Ukraine.
And thus, maybe not quite saying this, but hint, hint, Putin was right to invade.
Or it's understandable that Putin is invading.
Or, you know, don't support the condemnation of Putin, etc, etc.
It doesn't mean anything like that, obviously.
Go watch the clip.
It's a routine question about something that is public knowledge and has been public knowledge for a very long time.
The Russian propaganda about Ukrainian biological weapons labs is all based on public record information about the fact that there are biological research facilities in Ukraine.
There's these places all over the former Soviet Union.
There used to be Soviet research facilities.
And after the fall of the Soviet Union, In line with international treaties, publicly, you know, it's not a secret.
The United States has been partly funding these labs to, you know, there's no question about the fact that this is partly US soft power, that it's a form of neo-imperialism.
If you have an actual structural analysis, you can accommodate that while also saying, yeah, it's not a nefarious plot to build, you know, secret Toxins that will be carried by birds into Russia and attack only people of Russian blood, you know?
Right.
Well, and these are these are like biological research.
Like I've worked in a biological research.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, like millions of literally millions of people have worked in one of these.
Every industrialized country on the planet and many not industrialized countries.
We have biological research facilities.
Do you know why?
Because they're doing research for medical reasons.
You can't jump from that and jump from US funding.
Also, the NIH and other three-letter agencies in the US fund a lot of grants around the world for research.
And yes, it's a part of U.S.
soft power.
Absolutely.
If that's the argument that Jimmy Dore is making, if that's the argument here, I'm happy to have that conversation.
They're literally just confusing biological research facilities with biological weapons facilities.
That's all this is.
That's all it is.
Yeah.
It's, as I say, it started with a QAnon conspiracy theory and these people have just, you know, from Tim Poole and Russell Brand and Tucker right the way across to Glenn Greenwald, they've run with this.
They've quietened up a bit about it now, but at the time they just went knocking futs with this.
And the thing that really catalyzed it was this Senate testimony from Victoria Newland, Who is the, uh, what is she?
Hang on a second.
I've got it written down the proper title.
Sorry, hang on a second.
Let me get this right.
Who is the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, right?
And she's doing this Senate testimony where she's talking to Marco Rubio and it's a routine exchange about public records stuff.
Yes, there's biological research facilities in Ukraine and they basically Jimmy and Glenn bake this like a fucking Q-drop.
They really do.
They watch this and they hallucinate onto it.
They project onto it this whole psycho drama where Marco Rubio is handing her this question where she's supposed to say no, there's no biological research facilities in Ukraine and for some reason, I mean it's a pretty shit conspiracy if she just blurts it out, For some reason, she just blurts out, yes, actually, there are.
And they project onto Rubio this, like, stunned disbelief.
He's like, what the fuck?
Why did she say that?
And it's like they hallucinate people in the background suddenly doing like this with papers.
What's going on?
Why is she saying that?
You know, and Rubio has to immediately try to get her to backtrack.
And she starts to backtrack, you know, and go and watch the video.
None of that happens.
None of that happens!
I grieve for the soul of Richard Pryor, right?
Because these people never tire of saying to each other, who are you going to believe, the government or your lion eyes?
Who are you going to believe, CNN or your lion eyes?
Russell Brand says it all the time, Jimmy Jordan, all these people, they say it all the time.
I'm asking you, I'm begging you, go and watch this exchange between Marco Rubio and Victoria Newland.
Believe your eyes.
This is nothing.
This is nothing!
But these people have managed to convince themselves that what they're seeing is scandalous confirmation Of, you know, like a conspiracy being blown out in the open.
And it's it's just fucking crazy.
It really is.
And this is this is basically what's happening in this.
And Glenn Greenwald wrote this entire subset about it, where he's also having a go at fact checkers that dare to say this isn't real.
And, you know, in line with his usual method, he just, as I say, gish gallops and baffle gabs and filibusters.
And that's basically what he's doing on this Jimmy Dore video as well.
Yeah, I think we can listen to the clip now.
So, Glenn, Why would you repeat Russian propaganda from Russia just because Victoria Nuland admitted it was real?
It's like we're at that point pretty much like if the Russian government says anything, like for example, there's some pretty substantial and dangerous neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine.
Something that the Western press has been talking about for at least a decade, like concerned about, wording about.
But if you say that now, you'll immediately get accused of spreading Russian propaganda.
Why?
Because the Russian government says it as well.
So it's like the opposite game.
Like whatever the Russian government says you're not allowed to say, you have to affirm the opposite.
Even if what the Russian government is saying is true.
Doesn't mean you think the invasion is justified.
Doesn't mean you don't think the bombardment is immoral or unjustified.
You're just simply acknowledging this fact that exists.
And as long as the Russian government is also asserting this fact, You're automatically a Russian agent by virtue of the fact that you're recognizing it.
You see what's happening here?
You see how slimy it is?
They're casting themselves as martyrs to persecution.
By their telling, the fact that they're just trying to talk seriously about these facts, which Aren't there, as I hope we've just established.
You know, it's so unfair that people are criticizing them.
You know, they counter in terms of, oh, we're being accused of being Russian agents, etc, etc.
You know, maybe the odd chad from the liberal media outlet makes a stupid remark on Twitter about, oh, you're being paid by Putin or something.
That's not what we're actually talking about.
We're talking about people criticizing them for talking rubbish in the context of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
You know, sowing the exact kind of confusion about what's actually happening there that aids Putin that aids this vicious imperialist war.
That's what they're being criticised for.
And they're casting themselves as much, you know, and of course their own assumption, they're saying, they're giving all these pieties about how you have to believe it.
You have to believe this bad thing about Russia because the government says so.
What are they doing but exactly the same kind of reflexive thinking in reverse?
I just think it's amazing that when she admitted that they had the biolabs and then immediately afterwards said, but we're worried about Russia getting a hold of them.
And so, if there isn't some nefarious stuff happening in those labs, why would you care if Russia got a hold- No, no, we're just- They're just working on things that'll help- Jimmy is there basically parroting Glenn's line back to him.
That is something that Glenn has already said in the context of this interview.
It's something he says in his substack.
It's his basic maneuver.
Well, if she says they're worried about the Russians getting hold of these labs, how can they also say these labs are innocuous?
Which, You know, I think you might know this, Daniel, but it is possible for materials that are dangerous to nevertheless be used for things that aren't necessarily biological weapons.
Yeah, actually, there are plenty of things in a biological research facility or in a pharmaceutical research facility that could be purposed for other uses as it happens.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I could probably list you a billion examples if you gave me a little bit of time.
Here's one example.
Anthrax, right?
One of the things that Glenn, again, likes to talk about is, well, I mean, people say, oh, people say, Oh, the United States would never secretly develop biological weapons.
And yet, in 2003 or whatever it was, there was the anthrax terrorist attack, and that came from a US lab.
Anthrax can be used to make vaccines!
Don't, don't, don't give them that little piece of information.
We'll never hear the fucking end of it.
And I mean, you know, if you're trying to, you know, cure diseases, you have samples of those diseases.
If you're, I mean, you know, basically any, you know, pharmaceutical intervention, particularly like a cancer, you know, intervention, chemotherapy, for instance, can be, can be repurposed and used as a chemical or biological weapon.
I mean, the solvents that we'd use, I mean, you know, ethanol is flammable, methanol is flammable, isopropyl alcohol.
I mean, these can be used to make Molotov cocktails or whatever.
I mean, you know, it's endless.
And also, I mean, just to be clear here, there are reasons to not want Russia to get control of these facilities.
It has nothing to do with weaponizing their contents.
Like also, you know, you wouldn't want, you know, Russian military forces to have access to them because it prevents, you know, medical testing of like COVID tests and other types of, you know, because who knows what all of these facilities are and what the, you know, whether they're actually doing kind because who knows what all of these facilities are and what the, you know, whether they're actually doing kind of basic research or whether they're doing, I mean, any
You know, like, you know, I haven't looked deeply into exactly what these facilities are and what they're and how they differentiate between, you know, kind of more routine medical testing or whatever.
But you don't want you want these to remain in service to the people of Ukraine because you value the health of the people in Ukraine.
You know, like it's just I mean, it's again, I keep saying this, but it's just the dumbest possible shit.
It is.
But and yet it goes on and it goes on and it goes on and it goes out to a big audience.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is child logic.
Glenn Greenwald, supposedly this serious journalist, is saying, well, if they're so harmless, why are you worried about the Russians?
That's literally an argument he makes.
And Jimmy Dore is helping him to, you know, Jimmy Dore is helping him to disseminate that.
And at the same time, Glenn Greenwald is bringing his patina of journalistic respectability and he's worked with a whistleblower, et cetera, and lending it to Jimmy Dore.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
No, no, we're just they're just working on things that will help people and cure their health.
We don't want Russia to also be able to help people and cure their health.
That would be horrible.
Is that what they're saying, Glenn?
Like that's what that's what they're doing.
And like like the U.S.
wanting Ukraine to have its own biological research facilities is somehow stopping Russia from from helping its own people.
As if there are not research facilities, medical research facilities in Russia.
Yeah.
That's really the reason they needed access to facilities to make ibuprofen.
That's why Russia really invaded Ukraine.
We just couldn't get ibuprofen.
We all had headaches.
The migraine sufferers of Russia will suffer no longer for lack of acetaminophen.
I mean, it's just The real reason, the meta reason we don't want Russian troops to take possession of Ukrainian biological research facilities is that Russian troops shouldn't be in Ukraine.
They've invaded in an act of naked, unprovoked imperialist aggression that all of this It's studdedly pulling attention away from and trying implicitly, despite Glenn's pieties about, oh, we're not saying the invasion's good.
Despite all that, it is implicitly implying a justification all the way through.
And it's disgusting.
Anyway, let's get through the rest of this clip.
Well, I mean, they've kind of had these shifting defenses because they obviously didn't anticipate she was going to go and blab her mouth about these things and answer it, you know, on the ready.
So the first thing they said was, no, no, no.
She was just referring to this very noble and heroic program.
Instituted by the United States Senate under, you know, those bipartisan centrist heroes, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Lugar of Indiana, those kind of old wise men of Washington who had a program to secure and dismantle old Soviet biological, chemical and nuclear programs in the old Soviet republics.
And they did do some of that.
They like went to Kazakhstan and Other places and they like found anthrax labs and you know, the U.S.
already has its own anthrax.
Again, baking, baking, just hallucinating, projecting onto this conversation.
I think that'll do because he just goes on and on and on.
But that is, that is what we're talking about.
You know, you can say it in that skeptical sneering tone.
That is what we're talking about.
We're talking about an open public domain U.S.
funding arrangement with Ukrainian labs that remain under Ukrainian domestic control For keeping these old Soviet research facilities, keeping them safe and stable so that everybody benefits.
And no doubt the Americans have their own selfish, imperialistic reasons for doing that.
Reality is complicated.
But that is what we're talking about.
And you can say it in this, well, you can believe that, you can believe anything way.
That's not journalism.
That's not skepticism.
That's not fact-checking.
It's certainly not progressive or radical politics.
No, not at all.
And it's not anti-imperialism just to take Russia's side.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, this is the thing.
This is what infuriates me, infuriates me about these people, because they are exactly what they criticize in reverse.
You know, they complain endlessly about MSNBC and CNN and, you know, all these people use it.
Well, you just believe anything the American government tells you.
You're literally doing the same thing in reverse with the Russian government.
And just like Chris Hedges or whoever says, oh, I don't believe everything Biden tells me, you say you don't believe everything Putin tells it tells.
But you're doing the same thing.
You've just relocated, as George Orwell said in Notes on Nationalism way back in the 30s when he was talking about Western Stalinists, very similar people, Caleb Maupin, etc.
They've just relocated their blind loyalty to country and king and God and everything from the embarrassing domestic context where it doesn't look good if you're a journalist or an intellectual or whatever.
to the foreign context.
So you just, you keep the exact same habits of thought, the exact same sort of conformist cringing habits of obedient thought, and you move them from Churchill and the King to Stalin.
They're just, they're doing that.
They are what they behold in reverse.
No, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And another thing I just want to talk about, when we're talking about Ukraine and Victoria Nuland and these people, this isn't the first time they've hallucinated stuff onto Victoria Nuland, right?
And one of the things with all these people, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, and by extension the sort of the hangers-on, you know, the pilot fish on YouTube, Jimmy Dore, Tim Pool, all these people, Russell Brand, all these people, They will all talk about... I don't know about Tim Paul, he might not say this, but certainly Russell Brand and Jimmy Dore say this.
They will all talk about the 2014 Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine as a coup.
It's just a fact for these people.
They will just say it's a coup.
2014 Euromaidan coup in Ukraine.
They'll just say it's a fact.
They have no evidence for that whatsoever.
None that I can see.
It was a genuine, you know, it's complicated.
It got hijacked by elements of the far right, etc, etc.
It was a genuine people's revolt in response to the people, the people of Ukraine, of all sorts of political persuasions.
They weren't, you know, it wasn't an angelic, politically perfect protest or anything like that, but en masse, the people of Ukraine in huge numbers revolted, occupied Kiev, stuck it out, kept going until, you know, out of exasperation with their current, the president at the time, who was a
vote-rigging, authoritarian, police-violence-using, authoritarian, as I say, who was defying both his own pledges and the majority desire for trade relations in a Western direction, with the EU, in favour of pro-Russian policies that the majority of people in Ukraine did not want.
And they revolt, they occupy, they protest, etc., etc.
The guy flees, he gets The parliament, the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, they say, including all the deputies of his own party, say, well, he's gone.
We can't, you know, he's got to go.
They depose him.
This is a coup, apparently, for these people.
And their evidence basically boils down to a leaked phone call between Victoria Newland, who was at that point, At one point, the assistant secretary of state, a phone call between her and the then US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they have a conversation about the situation and talk about who they would like to see as the next president.
That's it.
And the smoking gun is that the guy they would like to see as the next president was in fact the next president, which is no surprise to anybody because he was the leader of the opposition and the second biggest party in the radar at the time.
Right, right.
And even if, like, I mean, look, even if we say, OK, look, the State Department put their thumbs on the scale and so on, you know, that doesn't... I don't doubt they brought influence to bear because they had... Because it's the fucking US State Department, duh!
But it doesn't, it doesn't invalidate the, you know, the political realities on the ground in Ukraine.
Like there's so much about like this whole thing that I just find disgusting because it is just, you know, anytime you view any, like so much of the conversation around this on a whole lot of political spectra is like nothing ever happens without the influence of the U.S.
State Department.
Yeah, these places do not have their own internal politics.
They do not have their own autonomy, that it's ultimately like the CIA is just, you know, puppet masters playing with strings here at all times.
And it's just, again, it's simplistic, it's infuriating.
Look, this stuff is complicated.
I don't understand this stuff.
I, you know, I've been trying to look into, you know, like the history of Ukraine and the And I'm like, this history is lost to me.
I have a very difficult time following it personally, just because it's not my field.
It's not something I've been following for years.
And the people that I trust to know the history, who go into it in detail, it's a complicated history.
And to take all of that and then turn it into State Department propaganda, And our NATO pressure or, you know, the CIA did it or whatever is like, it's just so myopic and it's frankly racist.
I mean, it's just.
Well, I recently watched a Loner Box video.
We recognize Loner Box's videos about Lauren Southern.
And I recently watched his video about Russell Brand.
Very, very good video.
Again, like Sophie from Mars's video.
I strongly recommend it.
And he called it and I thought this was excellent.
He called it American exceptionalism in reverse.
Yep.
I think that's brilliant because that's what it is.
That is that is a very good video for sure.
Yeah.
And it comes of these people.
They pose as left wingers.
They pose as progressives or socialists or whatever.
I don't think Glenn Greenwald does, but he, you know, on some level he poses as, you know, he poses as on the left, whatever, you know, sort of.
Yeah.
But, you know, Jimmy Dore certainly poses being on the left and all these people do to some extent or another, but they have no belief whatsoever in the power of ordinary people to influence events.
They don't believe, they don't have no, you know, and the Euromaidan protests are complex and they're far from, you know, ideologically satisfactory from an orthodox Marxist or anarchist or whatever point of view.
Don't get me wrong.
There's, I'll recommend people to a very good episode of the Antifada, which goes, goes into this stuff.
It's complicated and it's messy, etc.
But it was fundamentally about people en masse protesting very bravely against a murderous police crackdown, authoritarian, vote-rigging, corrupt president who was more or less openly in hock to a foreign power that's, you know, Literally centuries of aggression against Ukraine.
And they protested and they occupied and they revolted.
It was a revolution.
Whether you like how it ended, none of that, you know, it was ordinary people revolting and changing things.
And these people who pose as being on the left, they have no faith in that and they don't like it.
So it's all going to be the CIA.
It's all going to be the U.S.
State Department.
They fundamentally don't believe ordinary people can do anything like this.
It's all got to be powerful people pulling strings.
That's what they think politics is.
And there's this kind of fundamental, and this may be not quite what you were going for, but there's this fundamental thing that the unit of analysis that they use is the unit of the nation state, that the nation state itself has.
Ukraine wants things, and Russia wants things, and the United States wants things.
And I understand why you play that game if you're talking about, like, if you're playing Risk, you know?
If you're doing foreign relations LARPing, you know?
Like, I understand why people speak in those modes, but usually people who have, you know, actual, like, expertise in international relations and who know these things also understand that there are internal divisions that matter, and that there are other modes of analysis, and certainly no one who considers himself a leftist of any sense
Should be viewing the world through this kind of lens because nation states are fundamentally socially constructed pieces of bullshit, you know, and we're supposed to be like supporting working class, the working class and working people and ordinary human beings, as opposed to any of their governments.
You know, and we can judge these governments on a sliding scale of, like, bad to very bad, but ultimately, you know, like, it's just, like, I do feel like these people are just sitting around, they're just, they see themselves, like, you know, Napoleon, you know, like, moving pieces around on a map or something, you know?
Like, they're playing the great game, and, you know, it's just, I mean, it's just, it's so, it's just wrong.
It's just fundamentally wrong.
But it's so compelling because, you know, too, I'm sure a lot of the audience finds it compelling because they have not been exposed to a set of more more genuine left politic that views things through these lenses of the working class.
I mean, you've watched a ton of Jimmy Dore.
Has he said word one about the actual Russian protesters against the against Putin's war?
Has he?
Has he said anything in support of these people who literally, you know, sign themselves up for death penalty for protesting this and who are doing it in astonishing numbers, given that?
I don't want to say that he hasn't, because I don't know, because I haven't watched all his videos, even all his videos about Ukraine and Russia.
But if he has, I haven't seen it.
And he does not, you know, he does not genuinely, generally talk very much about stuff like that.
Like, you know, there's one video on the Amazon warehouse union.
There's one.
Was the one about the Amazon Union being used to just slam AOC?
Was that what his take was?
- Clapping Chris Rock, but there's one on the Amazon union.
- Was the one about the Amazon union being used to just slam AOC, was that what his take was? - Again, I didn't watch it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
- I guarantee you that's the only reason because AOC didn't show up and support them in an overt enough way.
And so, uh, that's, it's a, yeah, no, it's a, yeah, my God.
I literally can just like write these things for them.
They should hire me.
Just hire me.
We can hire us.
We could use it.
Yeah.
I'll take the paycheck.
No, I won't.
I will not take that.
Believe me, I have to look myself in the mirror.
It's fine.
But just on the subject of Russian dissenters, there were a load of Russian scientists who literally took their lives in their hands.
Incredible heroism to publicly call out the bio labs conspiracy theory thing.
To say, no, this is crap.
Our government is lying to you.
You know, in Russia, they're doing this.
People high profile, under their own names.
You get a bullet in the back of your head for that.
Like nothing on the Jimmy Dore that I'm aware of.
No, I mean, Jimmy Dore, like he's going to get canceled on Twitter or whatever.
Yeah.
Like free speech.
Just fuck off.
I mean, fuck off.
But it is this kind of, you know, there's no class analysis, there's no structural analysis, there's no real awareness of the complexity of history.
It's immaterial, it's idealism in the philosophical sense.
It is not a materialist left analysis, and yet it is being presented as one.
It is this very crude sort of canny nose-tapping, you can't fool me, I'm too cynical, You know, crude folk geopolitical realism that is being peddled to people as a left analysis, as a progressive analysis.
And Jimmy Dore is like the populist wedge of this.
And I find that very, very insidious, particularly in the context of implicitly supporting this, this atrocious imperialist aggression from Vladimir Putin.
I just think that, and it's, you know, it doesn't help the cause of actual opposition to US imperialism either.
It vulgarizes it, it degrades it.
Right.
It's bad on so many levels.
Exactly.
I think we have an episode here for an hour and a half.
I think we do, yeah.
I think we can save the... I think we can record later this week and kind of do this as a two-parter.
I think that's probably the best bet.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, I was going to suggest the same thing.
I just want to close with one thing, which is that, you know, we opened with, the cold open was Jimmy during one of his many appearances on Fox with Tucker Carlson.
And I don't really feel the need to comment on that cold open because I think it very much speaks for itself.
But the interesting thing is, you know, given, particularly given Jimmy's insistence that you can just discount stuff based on who's saying it, you know, This source says something I don't like.
Well, this source once met, you know, Joe Scarborough at a party.
Therefore, I don't have to, you know, that sort of crude child reasoning.
The BioLabs conspiracy theory was very effectively, very quickly, very sensibly, very accurately debunked by Jennifer Griffin, the national security correspondent at the Pentagon on Fox News to Sean Hannity.
Oh, my God.
I won't, I won't put the clip here because you don't, you know, if you want to find it, it's on YouTube.
Fox News debunked this crap on the Sean Hannity bit, kind of while Sean Hannity was almost arguing with her and she's, because she is at least tethered on some level to reality.
She just debunks it in about two minutes.
Yeah, well, and this is, this is, uh, this, this is, uh, this just goes how deep the establishment is going.
Me too.
To hide the truth.
You know, that's the that's that's all this is.
You know what?
You trust somebody on Fox News?
Let me go hang out with Tucker Carlson.
He's got the real thing.
He's on Fox Nation now.
It's fine.
The stuff that's too racist to be on Fox News.
But there you go.
Jimmy's grift is to present himself as the, you know, no flies on me.
You can't fool me.
I'm the guy that tells you the truth.
I get slandered and smeared and persecuted for telling you the truth.
And come to me and you'll get the real story, etc.
And this is his level of honesty.
This is his level of internal consistency.
You know, how he himself peddles this crap incredibly lazily, assuming that you won't.
If you're the audience, you know, this guy is insulting you with every word he speaks because he assumes you won't bother to check.
He assumes that you will just believe everything he says.
He assumes that you will just swallow it when he openly contradicts himself, both literally and in terms of his own methods and his own reasoning and his own argumentation inside his own videos.
So I think that's a point worth making.
And yeah, I think, I think, I think we've got a video here.
This is going to be a two-parter.
I don't, I don't really know if Jimmy Dore warrants a two-parter, but fuck it, I've done the research.
Plus we've already, plus we've already done one episode on him, but here he does have, he does have a massive audience.
And I think, I think people are going to enjoy this.
I think, I think people have, I think people really liked the first one and I think people are going to like this even more.
So yeah.
Yeah.
So just a little taster of the next one and the next one we're going to be, we're going to be getting onto
Jimmy's sort of long-term reaction to being basically destroyed by Sean in the famous video where Sean takes him apart over the vaccine ivermectin thing because you know his initial response is quite interesting and then his longer-term response is quite interesting and that's going to be taking in stuff about Max Blumenthal and the grey zone and about how Abigail Thorne of Philosophy Tube is apparently funded by and run by Prince Charles and the royal family.
And about how that somehow proves that Sean and the rest of Breadtube is a CIA op.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this because I have some notes on this for sure.
And that's going to take us into an interview that Jimmy did with Caleb Maupin, who is an interesting chap, as we've already referred to.
Very enlightening intellectual conversation between those two about this one.
And yeah, we're going to be doing that and some other things.
So I'm looking forward to that because I just I hate Jimmy for the most rational reasons.
So, yes.
Thank you for also.
Also, obviously, I'm being paid by the CIA.
Clearly.
Well, I mean, you too.
I'm being paid by my five.
I think that's an interesting dynamic.
Yeah.
What the fuck's going on there?
What's happening now?
No, yeah.
Thanks, Jack, for prepping that for us.
Thanks to everybody for listening.
You can check us out.
We each have a Patreon.
You can check us out on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And until then, we will talk about Jimmy Dore some more in the next episode.
So see you then.
Bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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