108: Jimmy Dore, Part 2 - Transphobia, Misogyny, Boogaloo
Jack continues to tell an increasingly (and understandably) resentful Daniel all about insidious YouTube ‘comedian’ and political commentator Jimmy Dore, detailing his ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive’ version of reactionary politics via accounts of his slimy transphobic coverage of the Lia Thomas story (leading to a bizarre open challenge to all trans man basketball players), his frothingly misogynistic coverage of Taylor Lorenz’ interview about the harassment she faces, and his insane conversation with deeply silly and unpleasant Stalinist Caleb Maupin, in which they free associate (based on a ridiculous Grayzone article) about ‘Breadtube’ being run by the CIA. Along the way, it becomes very clear to see that their version of socialism is the national kind. Also features a discussion about Libs of Tik Tok. Content Warnings. 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 Videos: Trans Swimmer Destroying Competition and Setting Records, May 20th 22 Trans Swimmer Destroying Competition And Setting Records - YouTube Snowflake Journo Taylor Lorenz cries “victim” to silence critics - April 3rd Snowflake Journo Taylor Lorenz Cries “Victim” To Silence Critics - YouTube Left-Wing YouTubers Co-opted By Security State, Mar 30 Left-Wing YouTubers Co-opted By Security State - YouTube Rod Webber's raw footage from Jimmy Dore interview Jimmy Dore - Raw footage from interview - YouTube On Lia Thomas: Members of Penn swim team say Lia Thomas shouldn’t compete - Sports Illustrated Why I'm Proud to Support Trans Athletes like Lia Thomas | Opinion (newsweek.com) Lia Thomas interview: The story of the Penn swimmer at the heart of the transgender athlete debate - Sports Illustrated Trans swimmer Lia Thomas bows out of college sports amid continued hate (pinknews.co.uk) Emily Kreps at Broad & Liberty You searched for emily kreps - Broad + Liberty (broadandliberty.com) RT article on Thomas feat. Kreps and Forstater Transgender swimmer breaks record as women ‘race for second’ — RT Sport News Outkick.com Outkick covers Taylor Lorenz You searched for lorenz – OutKick Details about Outkick from Media Bias / Fact Check OutKick Bias Rating - Media Bias/Fact Check (mediabiasfactcheck.com) Taylor Lorenz, harassment, etc WaPo report by Lorenz on Libs of TikTok Libs of TikTok has become central to right wing politics - The Washington Post Lorenz at Daily Beast on Instagram influencers hiding Pamela Geller connection The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller (thedailybeast.com) Rolling Stone covers Lorenz / Libs of Tik Tok / Conservative backlash Conservatives Enraged Taylor Lorenz Wrote About Libs Of TikTok - Rolling Stone Original MSNBC report Journalists Face Online Harassment - YouTube Grayzone / Maupin / CIA conspiracy theory Original Grayzone article about Abigail Thorn etc Leaked files expose Syria psyops veteran astroturfing BreadTube star to counter Covid restriction critics - The Grayzone Fred Hampton and the Young Patriots The Panthers and the Patriots (jacobinmag.com) And finally... Bellingcat: Pro-Assad Lobby Group Rewards Bloggers On Both The Left And The Right, Sep 19 Pro-Assad Lobby Group Rewards Bloggers On Both The Left And The Right - bellingcat
Jack here, popping in at the start to tell you that owing to technical snafus that we had while recording this episode — entirely my fault, I should stress — my side of the conversation sounded like, I believe the technical phrase is, stir-fried ass.
Now, I've done a lot of monkeying with it in Audacity, and it still doesn't sound great, but it's as good as it's ever going to sound.
So I present it to you, and I ask for your forbearance.
Normal service will be resumed next time.
Most importantly, we won't be talking about Jimmy Dore anymore, which will be nice.
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 episode 108 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I normally tell my friend Jack Graham about terrible people on the internet.
And instead, we are now in our two part episode in which Jack is doing the same to me.
People noticed in the last episode that I was a little bit under the weather.
I am still a little bit under the weather, unfortunately, but we are we are going to press on because we are going to continue to talk about Jimmy Dore.
For some reason.
Yeah.
It's pretty much entirely because I just did too much research.
So we ended up with so much material and it seemed like a shame to waste it.
Of course, if you believe the Jimmy fans stopped by the IDSG Twitter, it's because he lives rent-free in my head or something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
That's what they all say.
You know, the fanboys, they just, you know.
You didn't do your research, obviously.
I love the one who tried to explain that we hadn't done the Biolabs research, which, I admit, I didn't do a whole lot of Biolabs research, but then didn't actually explain the Biolabs thing, you know?
Like, if you're going to come in and say you didn't do your research, at least provide a link, you know?
Like, that's all you have to do, really.
Well, Jimmy and Glenn didn't really... I mean, they didn't provide any evidence.
They just provide hints and insinuations and, you know, well, the government said it, you can't believe that.
I mean, that's all they got, so...
Yeah.
You don't need to refute it.
Yeah.
Well, uh, I suspect that that's a theme that's going to come back, uh, in this recording.
So, uh, looking forward to it.
Oh, so, so many.
There's going to be so many themes in this one.
The first thing I need to do is confess a mistake.
Uh, in the first one, I said that, um, Jimmy had only done one video about the Amazon union when in fact, by the time I said that he had done another one in which, as you correctly predicted, he bashed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Because of course he did.
Yeah.
I forgot about the force the vote thing until I recorded and I'm like, Oh, right.
He's had, he's had a little hate boner for her for a long time, you know, because he insisted that the squad should just force a vote on Medicare for all from a point of complete weakness as a way of like demonstrating their strength.
And like, yeah, no, it was it was completely asinine.
One of the many asinine things Jimmy has done and said that we're not really going to get to talk about.
I am kind of glad, in a way, that this ended up being a two-parter, because the last one was generally well-received, but I did get some pushback about just asserting that Jimmy is a reactionary.
And yeah, if you weren't convinced last time, this one will do it, I'm hoping.
There's, again, one of the sagas of stupid, of the dumb dumb left, as Sam Seder calls them, specifically with reference to Jimmy, is something called Lava Jato, with reference to Brazil.
I just can't find the time to talk about this, but I will link to the Michael Brooks video.
I don't want a Lava Jato t-shirt, but...
I stopped by Jimmy's channel to see if he'd done anything about Taylor Lorenz and Libs of TikTok, because I was brushing up on Libs of TikTok for doing a Twitter space with our friend Ina, and at the time he hadn't.
I don't know if he has done anything about Libs of TikTok now, because I haven't been back.
I checked it this afternoon and nothing jumped out at me about it.
Now he may have done something, you know, somewhere, but it certainly wasn't like in the thumbnails anywhere.
But he has done a couple of Taylor Lorenz videos.
Which, you know, I saw the first one when I was doing the initial research, and I just sort of thought, wow, that'll just be like, you know, lib mainstream media baiting.
I don't need to look at that.
That won't be anything particular.
I went and had a look at it.
It's something particular.
We're going to get to that.
First, I want to talk a little bit about a video that Jimmy did about the swimmer Leah Thomas.
Oh, yeah.
I can't wait for this.
It's going to be great.
I think that one of the organising principles of today's growing sinister far-right movements, the synthesis of alt-right energies and traditional Republican bigotry with all these other currents like the IDW feeding in, is transphobia.
You know, it's the sharp edge of a very nasty wedge.
I think you know where you are with somebody when you see their attitude on this.
I think this is one of those indicators.
This tells you who somebody is when you look at their attitude on this.
So we're going to look at a video that Jimmy did on the Leah Thomas story.
And it's inflected with his trademark version of leftism, which is, you know, just harping on and on about the hypocrisy and wackiness of liberalism.
And it translates very well.
It turns very well into laughing at wokeism.
So I suppose, do you know anything about Leah Thomas, the Leah Thomas story?
I do.
I tracked it pretty closely for, you know, while it was kind of up in the news.
Leah Thomas is a swimmer, a transgender female swimmer at, I forget exactly which school it was, but she is at one of the... Penn University of Pennsylvania.
Penn University, yeah, UPenn, excuse me.
Had formerly raced with the male team in her, I think, freshman and sophomore years, and then sort of COVID hits.
She starts taking hormones, has reached every single medical, every test that she's ever taken in terms of testosterone levels and her She's met every requirement for her medical transition in terms of the rules that the schools and the various swimming associations have met.
She has always met every single criteria, but has trained and is doing quite well.
there were a couple of kind of viral videos in which she won, you know, she won her matches by, you know, what's looked like absurd, you know, lengths, right.
You know, by several, several laps ahead of like some of the other swimmers or several, you know, like seconds ahead where these things are normally, you know, measured in like quarters of a second, eighths of a second, you know, by, by, you know, fractions of a second, she was way, way ahead.
And then that becomes the sort of like viral thing of, well, she's not just, she's, She's not just a good swimmer, she's cheating, because she's actually a man, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this becomes this huge thing among the reactionary right, and becomes a weapon by which to tackle every trans person doing any kind of sport, and she becomes this kind of focal object.
And just to be clear, anyone who looked into this with any depth of decency, Knows that Leah Thomas's times while she is a very good swimmer.
She is not in the like if you look at like the last 10 years in which there was a like swim meet in her event.
She's like 7th out of 10 in terms of the people who won those events.
She is ahead of many of the other swimmers in the pool currently, but she is not like proto naturally, you know, advanced as a swimmer.
You know, but this is sort of the narrative that this gets taken with.
And Leah Thomas has endured enormous amounts of abuse from, you know, other swimmers who are with her, from coaches, from right wing media, from all of these various sources.
Leah Thomas has endured an enormous amount of abuse.
And I mean, honestly, my heart goes out to her.
You know, I mean, it's disgusting.
It's disgusting.
So, I'm sure you're going to tell me that Jimmy Dore was completely on her side as a marginalized person, just trying to go about her business, and that he was in defense of her against the right-wing shitstorm.
I'm sure that's what you're about to tell me.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it's not quite that simple or that encouraging.
Thank you for that summary, by the way.
I can skip over loads of my script now.
It's great.
She finished 8th in her last race.
You know, 100 yard freestyle.
She ended her collegiate swimming career with an 8th place finish.
Which, you know, not to take anything away from her, she's done fabulously well.
She's brilliant.
But she doesn't always win.
That's a point that I think we should make in this context.
She doesn't always win because of the breadth of her shoulders or her centre of gravity or any of this other bullshit that, as you say, went viral and the right-wing media leapt upon, which I think is a point worth making because we're going to talk about Jimmy essentially leaping on the same bandwagon.
I couldn't imagine that that was what was going to happen.
No, I knew it.
Exactly how this is going to go.
She's been at the center of huge amounts of harassment and cruel press attention, and at one point it was touching to whether she'd be able to continue competing because the NCAA, which is some sort of swimming... The National College Athletics Association, I believe.
There you go.
There you go.
Thank God you did your research.
They changed their rules about the hoops that trans athletes have to jump through in order to meet eligibility standards in championship events, and it was about how much testosterone they're allowed to have and so on, and they seem to be sort of changing the rules under her feet and so on, so she's faced loads of stuff like that.
It's worth saying she's also had loads of support from fellow swimmers.
Loads of vocal support from fellow swimmers.
So, there's a video from March the 10th that Jimmy did about this subject, and kind of the first thing I want to say about this is that this video is with a guy that he often does videos with, a guy called Kurt Metzger.
Oh god.
Okay.
We're not going to dwell on this, but I just think you should know who Metzger is.
He's a comedy writer, comedian.
He used to work for Amy Schumer, and she basically fired him and distanced herself from him after he went on Facebook and made rape apologist comments about a comedian who'd been accused of sexual crimes by a woman.
He went on Facebook and he kind of did this.
Oh, well, you know, a woman has accused him, so that's it.
He's guilty.
Until proven innocent, his career's over.
All that sort of stuff.
The implicit basis of their coverage of this is kind of... I mean, I'm sorry to put it this way.
This is not me talking.
This is me summarising the implicit view that's underlying this video.
It's about the craziness and the unfairness of letting a man compete against women.
That's just implicit, you know, and the silliness of Libs and The Woke in thinking that that's fine.
The actual story here is a story about institutionalised and spontaneous harassment and discrimination in the context of a vast wave of transphobia and homophobia.
Jimmy doesn't seem bothered by any of that.
That's not his concern.
He's concerned about other things.
Now, I was going to play a clip here where Jimmy sort of gives himself an alibi, where he says, oh, you know, I've changed my views on trans people, and I don't think trans people should suffer harassment, and he says, I'm an ally.
But then he goes on to indulge in basically the cancellation moral panic, by another name, and imply that people who, you know, you just say something people don't like and you get cancelled by the trans lobby.
He doesn't quite say that, but it's, again, it's implicit.
And he says, you know, like Glenn Greenwald, who has kind of engaged in the, hmm, there's so many trans people now, what's going on, hmm, thing.
You just say something people don't like and suddenly you're cancelled.
And Jimmy has the absolute temerity to say, well, I don't think that way, which I think as we saw last time, he absolutely does.
Yes, very much so.
We'll skip over that clip and we'll go instead to a clip of Jimmy and Kurt gearing up to talk about Leah's results in one of the matches.
The statements of support come after weeks of criticism and transphobic remarks directed at Thomas who set records in three events at a meet last month.
Now Bill Maher has talked about this word transphobic.
Now the word phobic means you're afraid.
I don't think people are afraid.
It's a mental disorder is what it is.
It's a phobia.
This is what I don't get because you're not supposed to call people crazy.
Right.
But you can take a mental illness and then use it as like an insult.
Yeah.
Like you have a phobia.
That's a mental condition.
And they keep putting it on.
If someone says something they don't like, they call it phobic.
I know many trans people, none of whom talk like this or say anything.
It's like a very specific small group of like activists that get like funding or something.
It's not like actual people even.
I remember this when they were talking about this like homophobia like 30 fucking years ago.
This is ancient!
We've been around this.
We've done this before is all I'm saying.
Yeah, once or twice.
The phobia riff.
Ancient reactionary derail.
And again, the cancel culture thing.
Just say something that people don't like.
And Kurt has trans friends.
Kurt has trans friends.
And they don't talk about transphobia.
It's not a thing for them.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
I'm actually perfectly happy to not call it transphobia.
I mean, I'm perfectly just call it anti-trans bigotry, personally.
Yeah.
Because I think that describes it more accurately.
But, you know, I'm not the person who gets to make that determination.
But, you know, I'm perfectly happy if someone says, don't call me a transphobe, then I'm perfectly fine.
You're an anti-trans bigot.
Obviously, you know, it's one or the other, really.
Ah, but by that clip you've misunderstood, and what you're doing is you're victimising and anathematising somebody who's just suffering from a mental illness.
Yeah.
That seems to be the message of that clip, you know, a tiny... I mean, what is the message?
A tiny minority of radical activists who are fanatical and won't permit dissent, and who are getting funding from somewhere, and aren't like normal trans people, They're targeting people who suffer from a kind of mental illness, a phobia, and it leads to them saying stuff these well-funded extremists don't like, and they just get cancelled for it.
Well, what does that sound like?
Yeah, well, my favorite of these, like, dodges is like, I have nothing against trans people, I have something against the trans rights activists.
Yeah, this is my point.
This is my point.
It's bog standard fucking TERFism, isn't it?
No, it is.
It is.
It's completely, it's the same fucking language.
It's just, you know, They put a few mealy-mouthed words around it, and they're trying to do it in this sort of stand-up comedy kind of way.
It's trying to be like, you're just applying a mental illness to me.
It's not funny, but it's supposed to sound like stand-up comedy, I think is kind of what we're going for in that clip.
It has the rhythm of that, even though there are no jokes.
And that's the that's the thing that just that just I think really get like gets under my skin with some of this is the degree to which like it sounds like they're trying to be this kind of like morning radio shock doc show, but they don't do anything to even deserve that level of sophistication.
Yeah, I agree.
But it is sort of bog-standard, pig-ignorant, reactionary stuff.
Yeah, there's nothing original there.
You could find that in a thousand places on the internet.
Almost every show we've covered on this podcast has done something to that effect, or worse.
But the specific mode in which this version of it is being sold is through a superficial left gloss.
You know, Jimmy says, well, I don't have a problem with trans people, and I'm an ally, and he says repeatedly in this video, It's not up... I have my opinion, but it's not up to me.
It's up to women to decide, and so on.
Again, bog-standard TERF stuff.
I'm just defending women.
And the other mode in which it's sold is via this sensibility that comes entirely from, as you say, the stand-up comedy mode.
The stand-up comedy approach.
The stand-up comedy aesthetic.
To go to the next bit, where we finally get to them watching a clip of a swim meet, where Leah Thomas wins.
So watch this.
She's gonna hit the wall.
Nobody says anything.
And now it's 2nd and 3rd are real close.
And that's when people applauded.
So the 2nd and 3rd place came in really close.
And so people are making a big deal out of that.
That nobody in the audience applauded until... What's that?
Yeah, all the people are sitting here believing their own eyes and not what we're telling them.
What's their problem?
Are they right-wing?
So now again, I have an opinion on this, but it's not my opinion that matters, so I'm not even really going to give it.
What matters again, it's up to the women.
If other women want to compete against trans women, then that's up to them.
And if they don't, that's up to them too.
It's not up to me.
I'll compete against the trans.
Man, any day.
Yeah, me too!
Any day.
I got no trouble going up against trans men.
I'll go one-on-one in basketball with a trans man any day.
Well, I've got news for you, Jimmy.
You'll get your ass kicked.
I think Jimmy Dore has no conception of just how much these athletes train.
Even a, like, moderate, you know?
Even a moderately successful professional athlete would wipe the floor with any of us.
I am not a sports guy, believe me, but this is something where I've seen videos online of some third-tier backbench professional basketball player who is well-known for being the worst in the league.
Some dipshit challenges him to a one-on-one, and he just gets owned completely.
You know, there's no question to me.
Jimmy Dore can pick his best sport, I promise you.
Any moderately talented trans woman athlete would wipe the floors.
Modern trans man athlete.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
And I hope that happens.
I really do.
Like, paging trans man basketball players.
Although, you know, don't waste your time just for my amusement, in all seriousness.
Although I would find it very, very amusing.
There's so much I want to say about this.
The clip that he's looking at, I mean, firstly, it's interesting that he points out, you know, first, second, and third are really close together.
Kind of refutes your entire point about, because they go on and on and on about Leah's times, you know, they kind of just state Leah's really good times and then sit back like, there you go.
But the clip that they're talking about, he's recycling this clip and this talking point from a tweet by somebody called Emily Kreps.
I looked around a bit for her, and she's got some articles at something called Broad and Liberty, which seems to be a kind of centre-right political website for free thinkers in Philly or something.
And the articles, well, they have interesting titles.
There's one called Don't Take Sports Away From Women, and Women's Equality Racing for Second, so I think those titles speak for themselves.
She's also quoted on RT, which again shouldn't surprise us, alongside Maya Forstater.
And RT quote a tweet from Emily Krebs.
200 free today at Ivy League Championships.
Thomas has fastest time in the country.
17th fastest in history for WOMEN'S all caps swimming.
My heart breaks for the destruction of women's sports.
The governing sports bodies have let women down.
We need hashtag fair play laws hashtag save women's sports.
So Jimmy's just straightforwardly stealing this talking point, and this clip actually, from this woman who's clearly transphobic reactionary.
And he's baking again, like we talked about last time, you know, baking the Q-drop when it comes to the Victoria Newland Senate testimony.
He's playing Zapruder footage analysis with some college swimming video.
And then you hear the cheering after the first three get through, not when the first one gets through.
And I mean, okay, if you're going to interpret it to that level, I mean, it's just impossible.
Any clip like this, you can just read any number of ways.
It's just, I mean, it's just silly.
Yeah.
This whole genre of analysis, I put that in very heavy air quotes, is just sort of fundamentally broken.
This is what you do when you have to fill, you know, five hours a week or ten hours a week or however much content he produces.
Yeah.
But again, the underlying viewpoint here is that, you know, Kurt does this thing like, oh, people are believing their own eyes.
So what his theory is that the crowd are withholding their applause because They think Leah doesn't pass?
I mean, under the sniggering, this is so distasteful, as well as being incredibly stupid.
Right, well, my favourite bit of that is when he says, I have my opinion, but I'm not going to give it.
It's not my place to say.
It's not my place to give my opinion.
It's like, what the fuck are you doing?
What are you here for?
You are giving your opinion right now.
You were giving your opinion by your frame.
Like, the fact that you didn't say she shouldn't be swimming has nothing to do with it.
Has nothing to do with anything here.
It's just, it's completely absurd.
Yeah, but he's giving himself an alibi.
But the implicit position is biological essentialism and male superiority, which he basically admits at the end when he does that, oh, I'll compete against any trans man thing.
It's also worth noting, I mean, just that we don't have to go here.
I mean, whenever we get into this too deeply, it just becomes like, so what?
Trans women are allowed to compete, but not allowed to win sort of thing, you know?
But Lena Thomas, after she started her transition, and she's been very open about this, and her times are matters of record.
She slowed down considerably from before she was taking these hormone treatments.
It took her a long time to get back into shape, to be that level of swimmer again.
There have been very clear biological differences between what Leah Thomas was doing pre- and post-transition.
Again, an honest assessment of this, even if you disagree with her being allowed to swim, which I think is not tenable, but even if you disagree with it, What astonishes me about this is just the complete lack of, like, curiosity and the complete lack of, like, any willingness to, like, analyze at all.
It's just, we're going to watch this video and we're just, like, there's just no, there's nothing deeper than that with this, you know?
And that's what, and that's what kind of gets to me about Jimmy Dore is that this is all he has.
This is all he has.
There is nothing deeper at all.
And yet he claims to be this bold truth teller or whatever, you know?
Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's silly.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
His shtick, as I outlined last time, is to constantly do this, you know, I'm the guy who's too savvy to believe anything that the government tells me.
And increasingly, you know, I'm too savvy to believe anything that the wokes tell me via his pose of constantly being cynical and disbelieving about the liberal media, which You know, to be clear, you and I are not slavish adherents to the worldview of the capitalist liberal media, but Jimmy's thing is, you know, it's pushing him towards this thing which we see demonstrated here, which is increasingly to sort of mock wokeism.
He doesn't quite use this language yet, but of course he pals around with Tucker Carlson and That's where it's going.
And again, as you say, the complete lack of curiosity and the complete lack of knowledge, coupled with the assumption that he knows, that he has some kind of superior insight into this.
Like, as I say, they're obsessed with Lear's performance and they're asking rhetorical questions about, well, was she setting records before she transitioned?
And are there any trans men setting records?
And it comes from a position of total ignorance.
And then we get to some stuff about, apparently John McEnroe once said that any male player could beat the Williams sisters, and apparently then they did get beaten by some guy in a friendly match who's well down the list of players or whatever.
And they make a huge amount of that.
And Jimmy is very concerned.
I'm just foreshadowing here.
Jimmy is very concerned about all the criticism that John McEnroe got.
You know, to hear him tell it, John McEnroe's career as a commentator and a tennis writer and so on was nearly destroyed by all this criticism that he got for saying something.
I just want to sort of put a pin in that.
You know, we might want to remember that.
Yeah, I'm sure he will have similar amounts of empathy for other people undergoing waves of harassment for things that they said on the internet.
Yeah, I'm certain that's true.
And now, a segue.
So, one of the other things that happens in this video, about the Leo Thomas video, is Jimmy reads from a website called Outkick.com.
Now, you remember from last time, Jimmy thinks that If a source is associated in any way with anybody or anything that's dubious, that just completely invalidates it.
Um, Outkick.com is owned by Fox Corp.
It's anti-mask, it's anti-mandate, it's founded by Clay Travis, who, with a guy called Buck Sexton, took over Rush Limbaugh's radio slot.
With a three-hour weekday conservative talk show.
Clay has worked for Fox Sports.
He's supported Trump, downplayed COVID, spread misinformation about COVID, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, of course, Jimmy's been on Fox.
He's talked to Tucker, so... Yeah.
This sounds like Jimmy Dore's bread and butter, really.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know of any of that that Jimmy Dore would disagree with, except maybe the Rush Limbaugh stuff, because that just gets a little too aggressive.
But yeah, sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
But this is a segue, so I now have to link it up with something, and Outkick have been covering the Taylor Lorenz libs of TikTok article.
In common with just about every other reactionary media outlet, they've been going crazy about this.
As I've said to you off-air, search Google or Bing or whatever for Taylor Lorenz libs of TikTok, and you get The Federalist, Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, ReelClipPolitics, who made an appearance last time.
Acres and acres of right-wing coverage on this.
The headlines outkick are things like, Taylor Lorenz hit piece pushes libs of TikTok close to 1 million followers.
Woke hack of the day, Taylor Lorenz.
Taylor Lorenz exposes herself while trying to expose libs of TikTok.
So Libs of TikTok and Taylor Lorenz.
Your thoughts, Daniel?
Sure.
Well, I mean, I guess it's worth kind of like at least like elucidating the basic, you know, background here, which is Libs of TikTok is a brand really at this point, but I believe started on TikTok and then, you know, sort of moved into Twitter and Instagram and a sort of a collection of, it's one of these like liberal cringe, you know, compilation outfits, right?
These things are kind of a dime a dozen, but Libs of TikTok was, A, anonymous, and B, got really big really quickly.
And, in fact, was retweeted by some fairly major figures, including some politicians, did a couple of appearances on Fox News and other various kind of right-wing sources, and was known for- Joe Rogan boosted Libs of TikTok?
Joe Rogan boosted Libs of TikTok, yes.
Returning character Glenn Greenwald.
Yeah, and was known among other things for, you know, like kind of posting, you know, like videos of like teachers talking about being gay or being trans and how not being able to share that with their students was harmful or hurtful or whatever.
And ended up getting, my understanding was that some teachers were actually fired based on, you know, having... Yeah.
Um, the spotlight shown on them by Libs of TikTok, you know, a really despicable behavior.
Um, yeah, we, we have instances of Libs of TikTok directly communicating with Christine Puchor, who is, um, I think the press secretary of Ron DeSantis in Florida, telling, telling her which district a particular teacher is in so that that teacher can then be harassed by DeSantis's, uh, regime in Florida.
I follow Christine, Christine Fichonnelle, and wow, that is, that is a ride.
Let's just put it that way.
Yeah, boy, I can't wait till Ron DeSantis runs for president in 2024 if she's sticking around, which surely she will.
She's really got that, you know, blood in the water kind of attitude towards this stuff.
Yeah.
Retweeted by James Lindsay, I believe, has retweeted James Lindsay.
I mean, the same sort of thing.
I mean, it's all part of this ecosystem, right?
It's all part of the same anti-cringe, sort of like all the groomer bill stuff.
Don't say gay bill.
This kind of stuff.
It all kind of comes from the same place.
Well, and so because this woman had been on Fox News a couple of times and was interacting with legislators and had enormous cultural cachet, there was interest in who she was exactly.
And Taylor Lorenz found out I think partly through the research of someone named Travis Brown, who is an independent activist who seeks out the identities of people who are in similar places.
He has a background in data science and published basically just a little informational piece mostly about what Lives with TikTok was to readers of the Washington Post.
Nothing that struck me as incredibly hard-hitting journalism, But among other things, revealed this woman's name and her profession.
Really, she's a real estate agent.
What a surprising social position for somebody with these views.
One step away from being a landlord.
I sell to landlords, you know?
Exactly.
But, among other things, the Washington Post linked to her business address, not her personal address.
This is something that gets fudged over many times.
It's like they doxed her because they revealed her home address.
No, they revealed her business address.
And Lorenz also went and sought out, because she couldn't get comment from the woman, she sought out asking friends and neighbors and some family members.
And apparently her mom posted photos of Taylor Lorenz standing on her front porch, knocking on the door, as any real journalist would go and knock on doors.
And this is harassment.
This is harassment, of course.
Yeah.
Whereas, of course, toxic teachers who have green hair and talk about the fact that they're trans or gay, and try to introduce their students to the vital information that I wish somebody had introduced me to when I was very young, that, you know, sex and sexuality and gender are different things, and so on and so forth.
That's beyond the pale.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
For sure.
But yeah, it's a hate and harassment account, anti-LGBT hate and harassment account that boasts about its integration into the right-wing politics, both nationally and federally.
So this is public interest.
The interesting thing is that we're not really going to talk about that.
That's just kind of background to the fact that Jimmy Dore hasn't talked about this story, apparently, but he kind of talked about it before he talked about it, or before everybody else was talking about it.
Right.
See, Taylor Redd is used to research and work in the same vein that we're working in, I believe for the New York Times.
She was an independent reporter.
She actually attended the Unite the Right rally.
She had some tweets around that day.
She was well known for working in this beat.
After a couple of years, she moved on into studying Instagram influencers and TikTok influencers.
some really good, you know, what appears to be really good research and really good reporting on some of the kind of financial networks around that.
And this genre of media, which is becoming increasingly lucrative, and some of the kind of dark money and some of the stuff that's kind of going on in the way that some of these very young, you know, kind of social media stars are being influenced and fleeced and, you know, all sorts of things.
Like there is like really good reporting being done there.
And she is attacked by some of the people in this space for exposing some of their dirty little secrets as well.
And so she suffers from an enormous amount of like online hate because she pokes her spotlight into places that other people don't want them to look.
They don't want her to look.
So yeah, so of course, she's on Jimmy's shit list.
And as I say, say the interesting thing to me about this is that jimmy kind of did the um attack taylor lorenz for doing journalism thing before this massive explosion of that re the lips of tiktok story because as i say he did he did a story about taylor lorenz which is called snowflake journo taylor lorenz cries quote victim unquote to silence critics on april the 3rd this year um
and this is in response to taylor lorenz and another journalist who went on i believe it was cnn jack from the future butting in to say no it wasn't cnn it was msnbc which i will continue to get wrong until daniel corrects me in a minute who was interviewed for a cnn report in
In which they talked about the fact that they suffer huge amounts of harassment online just for being journalists, and Taylor Lorenz broke down during the interview and started to cry in response to... Now, the thing is, this isn't really about Taylor Lorenz.
We don't have to uncritically support her, or pretend she's perfect, or pretend that she doesn't enjoy a certain amount of privilege, or that she doesn't work for the media systems that we have problems with, etc.
That's not what this is about.
What this is about is the fact that she undoubtedly does suffer harassment for the crime of doing her job, and Jimmy responded to that with a video which is... This actually shocked me, this video.
I've edited this down.
This is a 50-minute video.
He basically spends 50 minutes Ranting and raving at Taylor Lorenz and other women for having the temerity to not want to be harassed and insulted and threatened for doing journalism.
But I've edited it down to a tiny amount to just give you a sort of sense of this.
As I say, I've done some editing and I've done a little bit of rearrangement to make some things clear.
You should go and watch the original to check that I'm being honest.
You should always do that.
But if you watch any one of these, go and watch this one, or at least a bit of this one, because the level of fury and bile and rage and contempt that he displays in this video...
It actually did kind of shock me a bit.
His eyes are staring with fury.
He's hopping up and down in his chair.
He's so angry.
So we're going to play some clips from this.
You might hear some sounds from Michael Tracy, who is the guy that he's talking to in this video.
Michael Tracy says some awful things in this video too including implying that AOC is lying about being afraid during January the 6th and lying about being a victim of abuse herself and so on but I'm not leaving any of that in because he's awful but he's just a Bloviating, self-pitying, ludicrous, pompous, bore-like.
I re-watched this video recently, this afternoon I re-watched this, and these two really feed off of each other's bile.
It's really disgusting to watch.
Yeah, yeah.
But amidst the disturbing misogyny on display, there is kind of an amusing interplay where Michael Tracy... Jimmy Dore keeps on talking over him.
Michael Tracy tries to find a gap in the monologue from Jimmy where he can start... And Jimmy just talks over him, and Michael Tracy kind of has to do this laugh.
Oh, Jimmy's off again.
Again, I had a clip which I'm not going to play, but...
There is a bit where they're looking at the CNN report and they, in common with most of the right-wing commentators on this, say that she's acting when she starts to cry.
And they imply that she's claiming that it's worse, that she gets harassed because she's a woman and she wants special privileges, whereas obviously what's being said is that she gets more harassment because she's a woman.
Jimmy calls her a cry-bully.
Which he will indulge in exactly that later in the video.
To hear Jimmy tell it, she's just the most awful person in the world.
There's nobody worse.
And this is, again, this is exactly what the entire right-wing media sphere is saying about Taylor Lorenz now in response to the Libs of TikTok story.
Well, it's what they were saying then, to be clear.
Jimmy Dore wasn't going out on a limb for this.
No, no, he's reciting.
He's reciting talking points from then.
And what's interesting is I delayed this recording in part for a few days because I wanted to go and watch the more recent video because surely that was about You know, that was right after the Taylor Ren's lives were touched.
I thought, sure, he was going to.
And it said he just recycles bits.
He recycles some of the same talking points, some of the same screenshots, the same tweets, the same video.
He just recites the same thing that he'd already done in this video.
Like he's plagiarizing himself, plagiarizing from other right-wing media sources.
I mean, it's just, it's absurd.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, and I would like to just, I don't know exactly what you've got in these clips.
So I just want to kind of highlight this now before I forget to say something, but Taylor Lorenz, like her family.
I mean, if you do the work that I do and you do the work that we do here, you get harassment and you get harassment from some of the most terrible people, like in the English speaking world.
It just, it happens.
All right.
I get, I have literally been targeted by a Satan-worshipping neo-Nazi cult, right?
And I get a fraction of what people who are in more marginalized identities have from this.
I could not describe some of the things that I know, that I have seen happen to people that I know, and that I am in some vague connection with, because it would either be identifying, or it would just be traumatic, or it would just create more of a shitstorm on them, or whatever.
But trust me, there is a very big difference between even ordinary harassment and what young women, particularly young attractive women like Taylor Lorenz or conventionally attractive women, you know, not to objectify Taylor Lorenz in any way, you know, not trying to do that.
But there is a big difference between what Jimmy Dore gets because he makes a big part about comparing You know, his haters, the people who call him a Russian stooge with Taylor Lorenz's harassment.
And I guarantee you, I have not seen Taylor Lorenz's DMs, but I don't want to.
I don't want to.
It's a very, very different level of thing that happens.
And that's just, if you're not willing to admit that as like a baseline reality, you're just not living in the real world, frankly.
And I just want to highlight that now, because that's a lot of what Jimmy Dore does here, and I suspect it's going to be in these clips.
But I just want to highlight that now.
You suspect rightly!
Well, continue then and we can kind of get into the details as it comes forward.
Okay, yeah, so this clip begins with what's happening is Jimmy and Michael are watching the CNN report.
So the first voice you hear is actually Chuck Todd.
One in three women under the age of 35 have experienced a type of essentially sexual harassment online.
Uh, which is also known as not harassment.
If you could consider mean tweets to be sexual harassment, or any kind of actual harassment, then I'm the biggest victim of that in the world.
This is the most insulting shit to women in the fucking world.
But of course that's all they've got now is identity politics and victimization and victimhood and it's a big competition to see who can be a bigger victim and I'll tell you who's on the lowest rung of that is a white male.
I'll never be considered a victim no matter what fucking happens to me but she is just because she has a vagina.
So yeah it's like you did know what was in the clip.
This is Sargon of Akkad level discourse, by the way.
They were doing this 15 years ago.
We've been doing this forever.
Feminism infantilizes women.
That is as old as feminism.
shits yeah no it's like you know feminism infantilizes women that is as old as feminism that is just right yeah and and just just jimmy door i don't think has ever been told to drown in his rapist semen for instance hmm which should we not tj the the Amazing Atheist said out loud to someone on a video at some point.
Because he was so outraged by the use of the word survivor to describe people who've made it through.
Exactly, exactly.
And not to dwell on those kinds of details, but Everyone who experiences this kind of harassment has to deal with it on some level and has to understand every threat comes with a level of, well, is this real?
Is this a joke?
What's the actual reality behind it?
And 99.9% of it is, it's just some dipshit talking on Twitter or whatever.
But you never know.
You never know.
And when you get like a million of them a day and they are like lurid rape fantasies and, you know, photos of, of, of weapons or, you know, whatever.
I mean, Molly Conger had people like actively like, like putting photos of her dogs with like cartoon, like heads being chopped off and cartoon blood and everything.
And then would like tweet at her with these images, you know?
Yeah.
That has never happened to me.
That has never happened to me.
No.
They talk endlessly about Taylor Lorenz having power and privilege, and part of it is that she has a platform.
She does have a platform.
Yeah, sure.
She has 300,000 Twitter followers.
She writes for The Washington Post.
Yes, she has a platform.
Agreed.
Jimmy goes on like that, and he reads this.
Glenn Greenwald has a serious hate boner for Taylor Lorenz.
I don't know what the problem is, but he's really got a problem.
He hates her.
And Jimmy reads out this Glenn Greenwald tweet about her being, you know, the very definition of liberal privilege and so on.
What they don't seem to get is that the platform means that their words can go further, but that means they reach more people who are infuriated and threatened and who are going to come back at her with God knows what response.
So, I mean, I don't doubt for a moment that she is inundated with disgusting insults and threats constantly, because that's just being a woman on the internet, let alone being a woman with a platform, let alone being a woman part of whose job is to actively challenge people on the right.
And in these incredibly toxic online spaces.
She's almost at the epicenter of how terrible this job can be, basically.
And you hear at the end of that clip Jimmy talking about her, again, pardon me, talking about her vagina.
He does that several times during this 50-minute video.
He's very fixated on that word with reference.
You know, this is mild compared to what Taylor Lorenz has to put up with all the time, and women journalists have to put up with all the time.
And I just want to make the point, you know, as you said, It's all there.
This is A Voice for Men, Return of Kings, Gamergate, Identity Politics, The Victim Olympics, The White Male is the Most Oppressed.
It's that.
This is just classic reactionary misogyny.
And I'm flogging a dead... I know I'm flogging a dead horse, but I want people to get that this guy is a reactionary.
He's on the right.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I agree.
No, like, yeah.
Okay.
It's about to get conspiratorial.
He's now talking about a different journalist, the other journalist who was interviewed as part of the CNN report.
It's actually MSNBC, by the way.
Stop trying to silence dissent, because that's what this person's doing, trying to silent dissent.
So you can go Get another job.
That's what you should do.
Or stop reading social media.
Or maybe stop reading social media.
Guess what I do?
I don't read my mentions anymore on Twitter.
Problem solved.
So this woman is literally saying that she can't do journalism because people will criticize her for it.
Well, guess what?
You're not a journalist then.
You're a coddled little idiot who shouldn't be in journalism.
So you're going to do an article calling people white supremacists, and you're surprised that people pushed back.
It's like, why do people get to say anything?
When I write an article and I publish it in a widely read publication that is funded by the biggest corporations in the world, and then I get to ruin people's lives and smear them, they actually say stuff back!
You notice just the assumption is that when the person reporting on white supremacists running for office is actually the MSNBC reporter in the report who is a woman of color and she shows one of the tweets that she shows on screen is a tweet that's aimed at her which talks about her I can't remember if it's, you know, saying that she should be hanged or she should hang herself.
That's what we're talking about here.
But the assumption underlying that is just, it seems to just be automatically assumed that she's smearing these people when she reports on people that she herself says are white supremacists.
That is just assumed to be a smear.
Absolutely, yeah.
And the other reporter there that Jimmy's referring to there, their name is Kate Sossin, or Sossin, I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it, but I believe it's Kate Sossin, just to give them credit for being a part of this.
And what I find fascinating in all of this dialogue is the collapse, the sort of flattening of criticism and harassment, right?
Yeah.
Any that whatever Taylor Lorenz and Kate Sauson are going through and whatever is happening to these people in terms of their reporting, that's just criticism.
That people are criticizing you and we're not allowed to criticize you because, oh, you're so special and you have a vagina and you're such a dainty little flower and you're just a cry bully, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When That's not what's happening here at all.
That's just not what's happening.
There are cesspools online that will dig up photos of her family, and then find their cousins, and find their family members, and send harassing messages to them, or post photos online of addresses.
This is an organized hate mob, right?
Based purely on accurate reporting.
Now, if I was going to criticize Taylor Renz, I think sometimes she does a tweet before she checks occasionally, and has had to issue retractions for her Twitter.
I think that is a really legitimate criticism that I would personally say she could do a little better at.
But she does issue retractions where need be, she deletes tweets where need be, and her actual reporting for the Washington Post and the New York Times... You mean she doesn't blame her producer for handing it to her?
She just read it out, you know?
These are very well fact-checked works.
These are responsible pieces of journalism.
She's not going on a YouTube show and pointing at Jimmy Dore's tweets and going, Beth, that guy has a small dick, but he's just a racist.
Yeah, that's the equivalent of what Jimmy Dore is doing here.
Yeah.
And this collapsing, this flattening of harassment versus criticism is absolutely essential to what Jimmy Dore is doing here, because he's pretending that there is not actual harassment or that that harassment is no more than being called a Russian shell or whatever.
I think if Taylor Lorenz was only being called a Russian shell or a NATO shell or whatever, I think she would Get down on our knees in gratitude and tears for that being the all the worst thing that she had to hear on a given day.
She probably would laugh that off as just part of life, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
She might, she might decide to make a YouTube show where she complains endlessly about being caught in a show.
And that's the other thing is like, you know, I deal with my criticism.
I just don't look at my Twitter.
I just go on.
I just go on with my life.
I don't look at it.
And yet you're sitting here and building your whole content brand around complaining that you get criticized.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, in the other video we played a part of, you whinged about how John McEnroe, you know, a rich guy, was terribly treated for saying something about, well, Surely, if he wants to be a public figure, if he wants to be a sports commentator, if he wants to write books, and people are going to send him mean tweets and... Welcome to life!
Just get used to it.
Just buckle up.
Or, you know, he could just not do that job that he wants to do.
Like, these women should just not, or these journalists should just not do their job.
They should not be journalists.
They should not have social media.
Which, of course, isn't a big part of having a media job these days.
Just don't be online.
Just don't be on Twitter.
That's the solution.
Problem solved.
Most media organizations actually require that their reporters actually maintain an active social media presence these days.
It is actually part of their contract.
I want to get at sort of the underlying politics of this.
So there's a bit on the end of this clip that I think is interesting.
Do those people who they're featuring in this thing look like they came from a blue-collar neighborhood and they had to scrap to get into school or college?
No!
These are people of privilege.
So what's the underlying message here?
It's that we're talking about Elites who are targeting working people, working stiffs like you, underdogs, and they're just smearing them as Nazis!
And then they're complaining when their innocent victims answer back.
I don't know, does this sound familiar to you?
No, this doesn't sound familiar to me at all.
Not in the slightest.
Just put a cap on this one.
This is more control by the establishment.
This is more control to Silicon Valley, which is in bed with the politicians, right?
With the Democratic Party.
This is her article, Taylor Wren's article, going after someone's family.
So the headline is, the Instagram star's hiding their famous Muslim-hating mom.
She's going after their family.
That thing she just was crying about?
So there's Jimmy proving Taylor Lorenz's hypocrisy by pointing out that she did a story Where she talked about the fact that some social media influencers, who surely should just, you know, they should just take criticism, shouldn't they?
You know, all the criticism that comes their way.
If they want to be online, that's just life.
You know, some very influential social media influencers with lucrative media careers were hiding the fact that their mum is Pamela Geller!
Pamela Geller, who is pretty much the face of anti-Islam hate in some way.
Very active in the, if you remember, the WTC mosque issue.
Yeah, the Ground Zero mosque, yeah.
You're on Zara Moss, yes.
Just incredibly active, going back, again, 15 years now, talking about these issues in the most horrendously racist ways.
is like the queen of Islamophobia.
And she is the mother of these two TikTok, Instagram influencer types who are young women who are going about their business.
And Tala Lorenz finds out that there's this connection and writes a story about this connection.
These are all people who have voluntarily made themselves public figures, right?
This is not going after someone's old mom.
Pamela Geller is not like seething about Islam from the privacy of her home.
You know what I mean?
This is not like, well, she's a racist, but she's quietly racist.
This is a very public racist, you know, very, very public persona.
And merely all she did was she wrote a story about this connection.
And honestly, if my mother was a very public, you know, racist, I would make sure to put that front and center of my public persona.
I would make sure to highlight that so as to distance myself from it because it's something with which I would not agree.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
That's the responsible thing to do.
Or at least if asked about it, you answer the question honestly and say how you feel about it.
That is responsible.
That's just the way you should behave.
Instead, the response was, how dare you come after my family?
See, in your hypothetical there, you're kind of assuming a scenario where the social media influencer in question doesn't agree with their mother about everything.
Which, I don't know.
I don't know how these influencers feel about it.
I mean, at least one of them has made racist remarks online in the past and then disavowed them and apologised for it, but yeah.
I think it's an interesting story at the very least.
Well, and none of this is out of bounds.
You know what I mean?
I think that's the thing that Jimmy Dore is trying to indicate, that this is beyond the pale for Taylor Lorenz to ask these questions and then to complain that people come after her family, her private family.
Right?
Yeah.
It's not like if Jimmy Dore... I mean, one of the things that they bring up all the time is that Taylor Lorenz went to Swiss boarding school for her high school years.
Yes, that is indeed a marker of wealth and privilege.
There's no question about that, okay?
If Taylor Renz's dad or mom or whatever was some like oil baron or something of that nature and Taylor Renz was writing about the oil industry, this would be like a relevant thing.
This would be like a relevant point of view that if Jimmy Dore were to do the research, he'd come out and say, well, what is Taylor Renz's dad doing?
And you'll point out these profanities and then Taylor Renz would Answer it or not.
I mean, that's up to her.
I mean, I'm just spitballing here.
I'm just, I'm not suggesting this is true.
I'm just saying, let's imagine this is the case.
That would be legitimate criticism from Jimmy Dore.
That would be Jimmy Dore doing more journalism than he has ever been indicated that he has ever done in his fucking life would be to do a few simple Google searches and determining who Taylor and her parents are.
But you know, that would at least be something.
He doesn't have anything here.
It's just whining about her and it's just smearing her.
With complete nonsense that isn't even true, right?
To pretend that what she's doing by talking about Pamela Geller is the same thing that was done to her and her family, these are not the same thing in the slightest.
No.
And I just, personally, I think it's revealing that Jimmy reserves this level of ire, firstly for a young woman reporter, and secondly, a young woman reporter whose beat is kind of right-wing media figures.
I just think that's kind of interesting.
So, yeah, we're getting there.
But this is kind of the big one.
Although, again, I have cut this right the way down.
We're going to talk now about a video that Jimmy put up on March the 30th, which is called YouTube and the CIA.
Left-wing YouTubers co-opted by security state.
Which has a... A hint.
Just a saupon of Caleb Maupin here, I guess, you know?
Just a tag, yeah.
A hint of a future episode.
Yeah.
Firstly, I just want to stop off on the picture that they used for this video, because it's hilarious.
It has this, you know, CIA YouTubers, and it's got pictures of Hbomberguy, Lindsay Edison, ContraPoints.
It's just...
I mean, I know the CIA has been a little bit eccentric at times, but the idea that the CIA is paying Hbomberguy to make Dark Souls videos... Well, that's how they get you, Jack.
But yeah, this is a video that Jimmy did with Caleb Maupin.
Now, Caleb Maupin, this may be a topic that we'll return to.
You need a basic grounding.
I imagine most of our listeners know who Caleb Maupin is, but I believe, as somebody said, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
So who is Caleb Maupin?
Caleb Maupin is a reactionary conservative anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who larps as a communist.
Passing straight on from that, The best way to see this video is that it's a kind of snapshot in the process of Jimmy transitioning from that guy we talked about earlier that's sort of the pig-ignorant stand-up comedy guy, whose politics amount to a kind of vague lefty libertarianism, to potentially a Nazbol.
That's what it looks like to me.
I can't wait.
It's another part of the process that he starts after Sean does his video about Jimmy's coverage of Covid and vaccines and so on.
Because in the immediate aftermath of that, as we've noted, Jimmy blames his producer and fires him and so on, and then kind of Kind of admits fault and then kind of takes it back.
And then he does a video with Max Blumenthal of the Grey Zone, where they talk about a absolutely batshit, ridiculous, insane, ludicrous Grey Zone article, which claims that BreadTube, you know, that sort of loose association of left-of-centre YouTubers, is kind of a CIA op.
Um, including Sean and, uh, various other people.
And it quotes Caleb Maupin in the article.
And it's all based upon... It's based upon an absolute nothingburger of a story.
Basically, they have what they claim is a leaked memo or something, which...
...shows that Abigail Thorne of the Philosophy Tube channel... What it boils down to is, Abigail Thorne got some money from a think tank that was charged with combating vaccine hesitancy in the UK population.
And they gave her some money towards this video, which came ultimately from the government.
And that is kind of their proof that the government is running Breadtube, you know.
Right.
And it's absolute nonsense.
Childish errors.
Like, one of the institutions involved is the Royal Institution, so based upon that, Max Blumenthal seems to think that Abigail Thorne is being directly sort of run by Prince Charles, which... That's just lame!
Like, if anything, Prince Charles, I would say, is likely to be vaccine-hesitant rather than pro.
Because he's a bit of a woo-woo merchant, I'm afraid, our Prince Charles.
Yeah.
Yeah, it doesn't work like that.
He's the patron of a charity, basically.
But yeah, it's an absolute... Well, and the most, like, anodyne thing imaginable that, you know, that Abigail Thorne maybe got a grant, or there was some conversation about her producing some content to combat vaccine hesitancy, therefore, Therefore, everyone who ever criticized Jimmy Dore, who's on the left of center on YouTube, is part of a CIA plot.
That's the thing.
That wouldn't even establish that Abigail Thorne herself was part of the CIA plot.
You know, like it doesn't even, it doesn't even connect that far.
It's just, it's like this one like thing that they can't think of.
It's like the smoking gun evidence.
And this is the thing that proves that everyone who's against me is actually just run by the CIA.
And it's, it's complete, it's complete.
I mean, one of the talking points, sorry, I know this thing very well.
I've watched so many of these videos.
One of the things is like, well, Sean has such high production values.
He couldn't possibly produce that on his own without CIA help.
And it's like, Sean produces videos which are thumbnails of him talking over a slideshow.
There's nothing wrong with his videos.
They're fantastic.
I love Sean's videos.
They are very well produced.
They are one of the best YouTube videos.
They are brilliant.
Yeah, they are brilliant.
But this is not like...
High production value!
Even ContraPoint's videos are not actually huge budget extravaganzas, but Sean's production values are the research that he does.
Right.
The research that he does and the ability to condense information and that sort of thing.
He makes enough money to be able to have time to do the research.
That's Sean's secret superpower, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, nobody would look at Sean's videos and go, well, that's clearly, that's like MCU level quality in terms of its production value.
Yeah, no, it's absurd.
Yeah.
No, I mean, ridiculous article.
It proves one thing.
Well, it doesn't even prove this, actually.
If that document that they acquired is genuine, then it proves something that wasn't even In dispute, or denied.
It proves something that Abigail Thorne herself said in her own video, which is that she got grants.
That's it.
That is literally it.
But, of course, you know, it's called the Royal Institution.
So, there you go.
The royal family in the British security state, and therefore by extension, you know, the American national security state, are running Breadtube as an op, you know.
This is as a cutout to use one of Max Blumenthal's favorite phrases.
He loves to call things cutouts because it really makes him sound like he knows what he's talking about.
That man just wants to live in a John le Carr novel or something.
Yeah, this is free associative drivel.
Like, we get from that Nothingburger of a report via, you know, it becomes like this, certainly in the Caleb and Jimmy video, it becomes, it's just about Twitter beefs and YouTube grudges.
It's just, you know, Caleb hates Vaush and Destiny because he lost debates to them, so they must be being run by the CIA.
And he's going back and forth with Jimmy, and Jimmy's saying, well, what about Hasan Piker, you know?
It's just everybody he hates.
He's just saying, Caleb, can you say that this guy I hate, who I've got a grudge against, is also CIA, please?
And the serious point here is that they talk about BreadTube, they talk about it exactly the same way the right talk about Antifa.
They talk about it like it's an organisation with nefarious funding sources.
It's a mirror image of how paranoid conservatives talk about Antifa.
But yeah, this video we're talking about.
They start off with repeating loads of campus lines on Ukraine.
CF last episode.
They bake some Biden remarks to mean that the US is planning a regime change war, because of course their whole shtick is based upon pretending that the The War on Terror, Bush 2 phase of US imperialism never ended because that particular type of US imperialism, regime change wars and occupations, that is the specific mode of imperialism that you can sway reactionaries towards opposing on the grounds of isolationism and too much expense in American lives, etc.
So they just pretend that it still works like that.
And then they get on to... Jimmy just bullshits, you know, he's like, oh I've noticed that they're all shills for the Democratic Party.
Yeah, I mean, ContraPoints never stops talking about, you know, how you should just vote for the Democratic Party.
Hbomberguy, Sean, etc.
They never stop talking about how great Kamala Harris is, you know.
Caleb goes through his sort of standard, the standard conspiracy theory argument handbook, which is, you know, you prove that something happened by proving that it's plausible by mentioning things like it happened in the past.
So, you know, we know that the CIA is running Breadtube because in the 50s and 60s the CIA funded the Animal Farm cartoon movie and they gave some money to Jackson Pollock and said, yeah, sure, it doesn't prove anything about what's happening today.
But it's the standard baffle gap for conspiracy theorists.
Then Caleb starts whinging about cancel culture because he's a conservative.
He starts whinging about the left complaining about Trump because Trump said naughty words.
That's obviously the only problem with him.
They're pitting the red and blue states against each other because Caleb's real concern is National division, interestingly enough.
Then we get to, well, I'm just going to play you a little bit of Jimmy talking, and I think this is quite revealing, but see what you think.
So they did come back.
So that's the biggest thing that they seem to want to shut down, is if beating the establishment and the intelligence community, If somebody from the left and the right figure out that they have common enemies that they can work together against, that's what they have to demonize like they did to me when I interviewed that Boogaloo boy.
Which, by the way, people still don't realize it, Boogaloo boy 100% different than Proud Boys.
Boogaloo Boys are the antidote to Proud Boys.
Boogaloo Boys are anti-imperialism, anti-cop, anti-Trump, anti-racist, and pro-LGBTQ and pro-Black Lives Matter.
That's what Boogaloo Boys are.
But the Breadtube people wanted to manipulate that and distort that into Boogaloo Boys are right-wing racists just like Trump and Proud Boys and Nazis.
That's what they wanted people to think and it's the exact opposite.
And that's why I trended on Twitter for three days straight one time was because they have all their bots and everything coming out to try to create a false narrative that Jimmy Dore's working with Nazis instead of Jimmy Dore is reaching out to working-class libertarians who share a lot of the same goals of people on the progressive left and we share a common enemy.
Daniel, your thoughts?
I think there are two things that I can tell you that Jimmy Dore knows nothing about, and those are Boogaloo Boys and Proud Boys.
He's wrong in virtually every detail, of course.
He's fractally wrong.
Every part of it is wrong.
A, these two groups are not necessarily in cahoots with one another.
They do have their differences, to be clear.
I can explain that probably about as well as anybody here.
It's fine.
We spend a whole podcast talking about this.
Issues, you know.
That doesn't mean that they don't share common enemies, Jimmy Dore.
And those common enemies... And who might they be?
That you also share.
That you, Jimmy Dore, also share those enemies.
You are attacking the same people that they attack.
And so, it strikes me that maybe you should be thinking about that.
More.
Slightly.
Somewhat.
That's sort of my initial, you know, like, before you get into any of the, like, larger details here, before you even do any kind of level of basic analysis, you know, it is, it is just, it is just Jimmy Dore.
Also, is Jimmy Dore, like, digging back this thing from, like, two years ago and going, like, see, I was right all along.
Like, that's literally what he's doing there.
It's so patently, it's patently absurd, you know?
Like, As I said last time, Jimmy can't be wrong.
It's part of Jimmy's shtick.
He can't be wrong.
You go to him for the truth, and he's too savvy to fall for any... There you go.
And he's still... And of course, the left and the right uniting against a common enemy, the establishment.
And that just... That might as well have three parentheses around it, right?
That's the establishment.
You're certainly given who he's talking to.
He's talking to Caleb Maupin.
Or the cathedral in kind of more NRX terms or whatever.
It's all the same sort of idea, is that there are those of us, and look, there is something to this.
This is why this stuff is so insidious, right?
There is something to this idea that like, look, we all have to have solidarity with one another as workers.
We have to have solidarity and work together to move forward towards common goals of defeating the capitalist class.
And yeah, I completely agree with that.
And there are people in labor unions who don't agree with certain things that I agree with and who don't hold to certain kinds of ideas about the reality of trans people, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think those people should be defended as workers.
But that only goes so far as they also are willing to hold solidarity with those trans people when they are oppressed as workers and as people in our society.
That's what solidarity means.
That's what Coming together against the common enemy, that's what this means, right?
Not you get to hang out with fucking boogaloo boys preaching race war under the guise of civil war because one of them was maybe a little bit queer and had some good talking points.
It's just such this fundamentally fascist viewpoint, ultimately.
It is, yeah.
It is fundamentally a fascist viewpoint, because who are his enemies here?
Who is he attacking?
It is the people actually trying to build that solidarity from below, from below Jimmy Dore.
And look, Taylor Lorenz is not, as far as I know, a radical socialist coming to break the chains of the working class or anything.
Very much not, no.
Very much not, you know, and AOC, not that I mean, I have, you know, perhaps embarrassingly played some clips of AOC that I thought were inspiring in as far as they go.
And I think the AOC, if we're going to have electoral politics, I think she's fine.
She's, you know.
Jimmy Dore doesn't hate her because she gives good speeches, or because Jimmy Dore hates her because she doesn't do what Jimmy Dore wants, and because she's actually a politician who's better at this than Jimmy Dore is, you know?
And because she's a young woman who gets attention, who, you know?
And yeah, it's absurd.
I keep saying absurd, but it is.
It's just absurd.
It is.
He's falling for the fascist trick, whether it's through ignorance, Cynicism, or fundamental sympathy, or some combination of the three, or just the fact that the three are basically the same thing viewed from different angles.
He's falling for the fascist trick.
The fascists always do this.
They always do the, we should unify, we should struggle against common enemy.
They always do the left rhetoric stuff.
And some people fall for it, or go for it.
And that's precisely what he's doing.
You know, the Taylor Lorenz thing.
We've talked a lot about her tonight.
It's, as I say, it's not really about her.
It's about the fact that Jimmy reacted the way he did to her.
Firstly, because she's a young woman who dares to have opinions.
And secondly, because of who she's covering.
She's covering libs of TikTok.
She's covering Pamela Geller and Pamela Geller's daughters, etc.
He has a fundamental antipathy, like Glenn Greenwald.
Like all these people, like Michael Tracy, they have a fundamental antipathy to anything that's written, and certainly Caleb Maupin, that's actually about real working-class solidarity against things like fascism.
In this same video, Jimmy goes on to repeat the lie that Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers worked with the Klan, which is a grotesque mischaracterization of the Rainbow Coalition and the Young Patriots and so on.
And he says that that's why Fred Hampton was, I mean, Fred Hampton was assassinated.
We know that.
But it's because, you know, according to Jimmy, it's not because he fought uncompromisingly for black liberation.
It's because he tried to unify with the Klan, or did unify with the Klan, which is grotesque.
And then he goes into this thing where he's caricaturing the argument by saying, well, if you're trying to organise a union, you don't weed out the people you disagree with about guns or whatever.
That's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about whether or not you collaborate with fascists, people who are fundamentally opposed to working class solidarity, working class liberation, because they're fascists.
But he's fallen for it.
He's completely fallen for this bullshit.
As I say, whether it's just through sheer ignorance, or whether it's through a fundamental sympathy.
Yeah.
It is a terrible tendency among parts of the so-called left that is susceptible to this, because It's a lot easier, frankly.
It's a lot easier to fall in with this rhetoric and believe, well, all we have to do is support these people and not the cringy, wokest Democrat types.
It is much easier than to actually accept people for who they are and accept a real working class solidarity and build from below.
Well, certainly if you actually are a conservative and a reactionary, it's easier to do that than to go left to actually unifying solidarity with, you know, trans people and so on and so forth.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, the thesis here is like, what they want fundamentally is some kind of reformist government of national unity with a kind of New Deal type state socialism.
I mean, Caleb in FDR is a whole thing.
You know, and they want reforms, and they want public works, but with them in charge as kind of socialist leaders, but nationally.
Yeah, the best kind of socialism, the national kind of socialism.
Look, I'm all for public works projects and repairing our infrastructure and high-speed rail.
I'm all for all that.
FDR would be a lot better than Joe Biden right now.
Look, don't disagree, but that's not socialism.
And if it comes with the same, you know, curtailing of human rights, and it comes with the same keeping the African-Americans and gay people out of the conversation and oppressing them further, as happened under FDR, setting aside the internment camps and, you know, all the other things that happened in that era.
It's not worth it.
It's not it's not worth it, you know, but that's that's that's the world that Jimmy Dore seems to want is, you know, look, People just need to learn to sit down and shut up, and your issues don't matter, because we're going to get better works out of it.
They complain about being called red-brown and strasserites and stuff like that, but this is why people say that.
And it's not like he wasn't told, because after he platformed the Boogaloo Boy Magnus Pan Video, which, as we've seen, he's still defending that decision, He was called out on it by the leftist documentarian and actor and musician Rod Webber and Webber went on his show and Jimmy didn't release this video because he didn't like the way it went but eventually I think Webber leaked it or leaked parts of it because Webber was canny enough to make his own recording of the interview.
And Weber explains to him, you know, at one point he tells him, you know, if I were you, I'd be giving Tim Poole and Tucker Carlson much more shit.
And Jimmy reacts very, very badly to that.
He gets very angry.
And he's very hostile to the idea of rejecting associations with somebody who says they're pro-Black Lives Matter and says they're pro-LGBT on the grounds that they're Boogaloo Boys.
And he's gearing up to accuse Webber of being intolerant of dissent and all this usual stuff.
But Webber explains to him, you know, he wouldn't platform a Boogaloo Boy, at least not without heavy pushback.
Do your research.
Challenge them on stuff like being very pro-Kyle Rittenhouse.
And Jimmy gets very defensive and he gets very angry and then he sort of switches back and forth between saying, well, I didn't know that.
You know, how would I even know to Google that, he says ludicrously at one point.
But Weber goes, he explains to him about red-brown alliances and why they're not actually organizing from below and stuff like that.
And Jimmy seems, at least in parts of this interview, to take it on board.
That to me is quite damning.
Yeah, because it's not that Jimmy doesn't know.
It's not that Jimmy hasn't heard these arguments.
Clearly not.
Or at least he has no excuse for not knowing.
I mean, he never did.
He never did, but he certainly doesn't now.
Yeah, for sure.
One thing I wanted to point out was, you know, remember in the last episode where he's talking about the fact checker at PolitiFact who he refers to as the incel guy?
He actually says in that, I'm not going to say his name because effectively he says I don't want to platform him.
So you understand that it's not depriving somebody of free speech to choose to not boost their profile.
It's a choice you make about who to boost and legitimize and platform.
So for Jimmy, you know, liberal mainstream fact-check journalists who challenge him are verboten, but far-right accelerationists and nazbols are not.
Well, there you go.
There's Jimmy's politics.
There's Jimmy's politics.
I stand with Tucker Carlson and libs of TikTok against the liberal elites.
So I think we're done.
I'll link to an interesting Bellingcat article, actually, about people who've been receiving money from the Syrian government.
But of course, Bellingcat is one of these... Oh, they're just feds.
They're just feds, yeah.
Because apparently they've received some money from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a US intelligence service cutout, according to Max Blumenthal.
Actually, that's another reason why they know that the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2014 were a US coup.
It's because somebody from the NED made a speech there during the protests.
But yeah, Jimmy, according to this article, he received a couple of thousand dollars from, you can trace it back to the Syrian government, the Assad Syrian government, via All sorts of interesting people, including the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, who are kind of a fascist party, whose logo is a stylized swastika.
So yeah, I'll include that link.
The interesting thing is that if Jimmy takes any notice of this, it'll be very easy for him to discredit you and me.
Because as we said in the last episode, you've worked in a biological lab.
Yeah, I've worked in a bio lab.
Yeah, you've worked in a biolab.
I've had family members who worked for the British Ministry of Defence, including a family member who actually worked at Porton Down.
And we have been friendly with Robert Evans.
Our first sort of bump in listenership came when Robert Evans kindly shouted us out on Behind the Bastards.
And Robert Evans writes for Bellingcat.
So there you go.
There's a direct link between us and Bellingcat, and therefore the US government and the British government.
So there's the association right there.
So you can just ignore everything we've just said, because clearly we're being paid.
My own father served in the Air Force, Jack.
I mean, that's just...
Yeah.
During Vietnam, he was clearly helping to destabilize the region.
Yes, well, you see, Daniel, there was Operation... whatever it was called, you know.
This is how you prove things.
Operation Condor.
That's it.
It's all, I'm just, I'm just downstream of Operation Condor.
All the work that I've done, it's all, it was all set up to get to where we could really take down Jimmy Dore too, because that's the most important thing.
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think we're done with Jimmy Dore.
Thank Christ.
I think we are done with Jimmy Dore.
Yes.
Until and less than until he does something.
He does something more terrible down the line.
I think we are done with Jimmy Dore.
It's a nice feeling.
Thank you, Jack, for prepping this.
Maybe you'll get to prep another couple.
No.
And I mentioned at the beginning, I've been coughing all through this recording, so hopefully none of that shows up in the finished product.
But, you know, still getting over this, still getting over this mystery illness.
But we're going to We're going to make it happen, and we will get you another episode shortly.
So check out the Patreons, check out the Twitters, etc, etc.
And until then, bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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