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Jan. 26, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
42:44
Live with Jimmy Dore! Viva Frei Live!
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Time Text
I think he recognizes that sometimes he's just caught up in that cycle of outrage.
That cycle of outrage, there's no room to step back and to sort of reset.
It's just constant outrage, constantly under attack, and then there's these words that get thrown around that sort of lose their meaning, like globalists, you know, and shills, and this sort of, like, attitude that there's this cabal of evil that is trying to take over the world, and at one point...
They're talking about Alex Jones right now.
This is actually from a podcast with Jimmy Dore.
And Joe Rogan, 2018.
Alex had this idea that they were going to try to kill off most people.
And you remember that?
I heard about it.
There was this idea that they wanted to euthanize, or it was genocide.
They wanted to break it down to, what is the word where they talk about doing that?
I think they're talking about eugenics, I think, but I also think they're talking about those stones in the mountain there, the north, what are they called?
The guidestones.
I think he's talking about the Guidestones.
To talk about reducing the population.
There's like some sort of a conspiracy theorist term of reduction of population to a sustainable number of super evil geniuses that could live forever.
And they wanted to get it down to like, you know, 500 million people worldwide that can live for a million years or some crazy shit.
What a difference five years make.
Now, everybody, I don't adhere to the philosophy that, or the theory.
That whatever's going on is deliberate population control.
But it's certainly much less preposterous or outlandish than it might have been five years ago.
And at the end of the day, like I say, whether or not it's deliberate genocidal population control disguised as whatever versus just...
Absolutely idiotic policy that is going to have something of a lasting impact on global population for a generation.
The only difference there, ladies and gentlemen, is one of intent, not one of outcome.
Because I made the joke a little while ago.
If the theory were that you wanted to reduce global population, you wanted to decimate a generation, render people potentially issues with reproductivity, and you wanted to do it in a way that you'd not get caught...
What would you be doing differently?
So I was watching these podcasts.
It's amazing.
You go back five years, the world was different.
What was outlandish then, not so outlandish now, even if you don't agree with it.
And I've watched hours and hours of Jimmy Dore over the last days, and it's fantastic.
I know him.
Better than I think he knows that I know him.
Now, Jimmy Dore is in the back right now, so I'm not going to go on longer than I have to with the intro.
For a second, I was a little nervous.
He wasn't going to come, but he came.
He's here.
Standard disclaimers, you know the whole thing.
No legal advice, medical advice, election fortification advice.
I've starred a few super chats.
I'm going to look at the Rumble rants.
We're going to try to get to some questions.
We're going to go exclusive to Rumble.
I don't know, 15 minutes in after we delve into Jimmy's...
Childhood, because it's interesting.
And that's it.
So, without further ado, I see Jimmy in the background.
Jimmy, get ready.
Coming in.
Three, two, one.
Coming in hot.
Jimmy, sir.
Okay.
How you doing?
Good to be here.
It is so bizarre to me.
I've been watching you for the last three days.
You don't know it.
I've been cyber-stalking, and I'm joking, but I've been watching interviews, going back, and I've been listening to you for a while, and it's fantastic to finally meet you.
Likewise, I appreciate it.
I wonder, I'm curious to see what you found over the last three days watching me.
I got, well, there's a number of things.
The podcasts with Joe Rogan, Wikipedia, Stuff on the Young Turks.
Oh, we're going to get into it.
We're going to get into the bottom line.
You have Jimmy Dirtbag Left Door on your screen.
I don't know what separates left and right anymore.
And we're going to get into this in a bit.
Because I don't think there's much that you say that I disagree with.
I don't think there's much that this side of the aisle says that you disagree with, save and accept for certain policies, universal health care.
We'll get there.
But, Jimmy, okay, for those who don't know who you are, 30,000-foot overview before I go further into your childhood than I think you might want me to.
Who are you, for those who may not know?
So I've been a stand-up comedian.
Had a couple of Comedy Central specials.
Did a lot of late-night television.
Had a public radio television show.
Had a special called Citizen Jimmy in 2008 that was chosen Best of the Year that led to me getting a national radio show, which then led me to be on The Young Turks, which then led me to start my own show.
And so now I've become who I am, which is a populist lefty who...
Won't participate in the two-party corporate duopoly, and I'm not going to pretend that voting for Joe Biden was going to make one bit of a difference.
In fact, I make the argument that Thomas Frank made in his book, Listen Liberal, that oftentimes a Democrat is the greater evil.
And so, you know, who else made that at the Black Agenda report?
Glenn Ford said that, that Obama was the greater evil.
So it was Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton did stuff that hurt the workers and unions that George Bush I could never do, like NAFTA.
George Bush I tried to pass NAFTA.
He couldn't do it because the Blue Dog Democrats wouldn't cross the unions.
Well, then Bill Clinton became president, and he gave cover to those Blue Dog Democrats to cut the legs out underneath unions for a generation, which they did.
So that's the 30,000 view.
That's where I come from.
I still do stand-up comedy.
I have a new special coming out very soon, and I think it's going to be called COVID Lies Are Funny.
And lately, so what got me on the outs with the Democratic Party and people who used to be my friends in Hollywood was that after the Democrats cheated Bernie in 2016, which is not a conspiracy theory, it was admitted to by everybody, including Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile.
She found the contract that Hillary Clinton had with the DNC saying that she would be controlling the DNC during the primary, which is unethical and illegal and all that stuff.
So anyway, and Bernie Sanders didn't make them pay a price for that at all.
They screwed Bernie over.
And he allowed them to still have superdelegates, take all the corporate money they want, all that stuff, and nothing ever changed.
And so then they did it again.
And so I've been done with the Democrats, and I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because I said that things just get worse every four years.
They're always going to find a monster that's worse than them, or they can prop them up.
And it turns out Trump didn't govern any really different than any of the unit party because Barack Obama was not a departure from George Bush.
He took us from two wars to seven.
5.1 million families out of their homes while he made sure the bankers got their bonuses.
He deported twice as many Hispanics as Donald Trump.
He built the cages.
They put those immigrant kids in.
He dropped more bombs than George W. Bush.
And he gave us a right-wing health care plan, which is a giveaway to health insurance and big pharma, instead of what he promised, which was a public option, and Medicare for all.
He didn't codify Roe v.
Wade, which is what he said he would do on day one.
He would give abortion rights to women.
He didn't do it.
That's not that important to me.
Why?
Because they have nothing else to run on, because fundamentally the Democrats and Republicans are the same.
Barack Obama even said so in an interview with Venezuelan television in 2012.
He said, if you look at my policies, they would be considered moderate Republican if this was 1984.
And so there is no left in America, and that's what people don't realize.
They think AOC and Bernie, they're left.
No, what they're there to do is to make sure they funnel the progressive revolution.
And that's exactly what they've been doing.
And they've been voting along with war.
They're war pigs.
Bernie Sanders is a big war pig.
I don't think you can be a lefty and vote to send $100 billion to a bunch of Nazis in Ukraine fighting a proxy war over liquefied natural gas.
And this is an economic fight.
We all knew it.
In fact, Angela Merkel just admitted that the only reason that they did the Minsk agreement, which was in 2015, that was the peace agreement between the Russian speaking in the eastern part of Ukraine and the Ukraine government.
The reason why they did that was to buy time so Ukraine could build up their military.
So when they did provoke Russia to, in So we're using the Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
And people in America have been so propagandized, they look at people in Ukraine who are literal Nazis and they're told that they're freedom fighters and they don't know anything better because they've been so propagandized.
But what's even worse is they don't know that they don't know anything.
Jimmy, they just need to go back and see videos from 2016 about the Nazi problem in the Ukraine.
Okay, but hold up.
That was a mouthful, which I'm undoubtedly going to clip because it's fantastic.
And we're going to get into all of that before we even get there now.
Jimmy, how old are you, if I may ask?
I turned 40 17 years ago.
So you're 57 years old.
A young old man or an old young man.
From Wikipedia, it says you're seventh of 11 kids.
No, that's not correct.
I have 12 siblings and I was number 11. I have one younger sister who was adopted.
I was the last natural-born child of my mother.
We were born Irish Catholic.
It's a long story, but we had 10 kids, and then my mom adopted two more.
One, a boy older than me, and a girl younger than me.
Okay, I had no idea.
May I ask, what would possess anybody to adopt two additional children after having had 10?
I don't know.
My theory was that my mother didn't know what to do with herself if she wasn't taking care of a baby.
She wanted a baby.
Right?
And I think she felt like she missed having a baby because when she had babies, she had to take care of all these other kids.
And so she went to Catholic Charities, which has foster kids, and she asked for a baby.
And they said, "We don't have a baby, but we have this third grade kid." Would you want to take this third grade kid?
And she took him.
And I said, why did you do that?
And she said, because I wanted to get in good with them.
So then they'll give me a baby.
And I thought that was crazy.
And sure enough, like, I don't know, eight months later, they gave her a baby.
And so then I got to have a little sister, which was great.
I always appreciated having a little sister.
So that's the only thing I can think of.
I won't get too far into this, but what's it like?
Ten kids, I presume by the time you're the young kid, the older ones have already moved out of the house, so there's not ten people living under one roof.
What's it like for a third grade kid to come into somebody else's house and be the new kid, but be someone else's kid?
Boy, I don't know.
You have to ask my brother, Eddie.
I don't know.
He adapted.
I really, I can't tell you that.
Okay, now, one story, I was listening to Joe and the story, which it's, you make it funny, but it's not funny at all.
First of all, I always thought, I didn't know you came from an Irish Catholic family.
And then when I read that, I got to the part of the Joe Rogan podcast where you're describing water skiing with a priest.
And making jokes about having been...
Groped or touched inappropriately by an adult.
If you can tell the story, I don't want to steal the thunder, but you come from a religious family, and the problems with the church are the problems that we know of, and you experience them not as thoroughly as others, but you had your own brush with being fondled by religious people.
So there was this priest, Father Hallahan.
And it was at Our Lady of the Snow's Paris on the southwest side of Chicago.
And when I got into eighth grade, he became our new pastor.
So he was from another church and he came and he was the new boss.
And he had a house on a lake up in about 40 minutes north of Chicago on a lake.
And he had a house with a boat.
And so he would take like five kids, five boys.
On the weekend, on a Saturday, drive us up there.
And then he is under the guise of we're going to go out on his boat.
He's going to teach us how to ski and stuff.
And so he had the day.
It was so funny.
So he had the day rigged.
He had it set up that you would have to do some work and then you could do play.
Like you had to do some yard work or you had to clean something.
And then you could go do play and then you had to do some more work and then you could do more play.
And the reason why he had it set up like that was because each time he had changed the activity, you had to change your clothes.
And so everybody had to go into a room and we would all change our clothes together at the same time.
And then he would find a reason to come in the room.
And then he would always start wrestling with someone.
And he's not that kind of a guy.
He was like a real soy boy.
I don't know if that's the term.
Whatever that means.
He's not that kind of a guy.
And we knew what he was doing.
And we knew who he was.
The boys did.
We used to call him Happy Hands Holohan.
And we knew he was a toucher, as they say.
So this guy was a molester.
But we wanted to go on his boat.
And so we knew it was your duty to stay away from him.
We know he's a pedophile.
And so it's up to you to stay away from him.
Let him touch you.
But he got a couple of them.
I remember he got this guy, Danny Dominick.
And I remember I broke his gumball machine trying to get away from him.
He would try to teach you how to ski.
I don't know if you've ever learned how to water ski.
The way they teach you how to water ski is just like riding a bike.
They put you in fucking water skis and then they pull it and you try to get up.
So he was going to teach you how to...
He took you in the shallow water and then he would put his arms...
His hands cupped underneath your balls from front and back.
And then he would go, okay, when the boat takes away, you're going to get pulled up.
And we all saw what he was doing.
I didn't let him do that to me.
He started doing it with Danny Dominick.
And then he's like, do that.
And we're watching.
And Danny looks at it and goes, help me.
And we all just started laughing.
Because that's how kids react.
That's how an eighth grade kid reacts to somebody getting molested right in front of them.
They start laughing.
It was funny.
It was funny to us at the time.
Then I faked a stomach ache.
I don't know if I faked it.
I think I actually did get a stomach ache.
It's hard to remember.
It was a long time ago.
I didn't get fully molested.
He tried several times, but I didn't get fully molested.
People are saying in the chat, my dad would have shot him.
It could be funny at the time and maybe even humorous in retrospect, but at some point in your life, does this not become a traumatizing event?
And did everybody around you, your parents, did they know what was going on at the time?
Or is it like a...
So no, we got in trouble for talking about it.
Like if we, you know, we called him Happy Hands Holohan.
We called him Happy Hands because he would always grab you.
But he would see you.
And like our parents didn't go, huh?
I wonder why they call him happy hands, hollow hands.
They just go, don't call him that.
That's disrespectful.
I mean, that's the way it was back then.
That's why the Catholic Church was able to get away with that for so long.
And, you know, that's this.
But that didn't scar me.
What scarred me?
What scarred me?
What scarred?
What scarred me was when I made my, if you're a Catholic, you make your, they call it confirmation.
And if you're Jewish, I think it's kind of like their bar mitzvah.
I'm not sure.
I'm not familiar with it.
It's a reaffirmation of the baptism that occurred when you were a baby type thing?
Yeah, so you get baptized when you're a baby, which is supposed to mean that if you die, you won't go to hell.
You've now been cleansed of your original sin or whatever.
But then you've got to fucking do that again with this confirmation thing.
The confirmation thing, I was told, is when you accept the Holy Spirit into your heart.
It's kind of hokey-spoke-y.
So the bishop comes to the church, right?
So that's a big deal.
The bishop's going to come to your church.
And in Chicago, the bishop's a big deal.
Especially when I was a kid in the 70s, I knew who the bishop was because he was on TV all the time.
It was before the internet.
So there's only three stations.
And the bishop was always, it was the cardinal, Cardinal Cody.
He was always on the TV.
And so, oh, the cardinal's coming.
He's going to come like, oh, I was excited.
And my dad.
He's a guy who was what they call him, lectors.
He's a reader at church.
So he's a layperson.
One of the readings from the Bible, he would read every week.
So for my confirmation, he was the reader guy.
So he said, hey, before the thing, come backstage and you can meet the cardinal.
So I was like, all right.
So we go back there.
And I was an altar boy, so I was familiar with being backstage.
And the door opens.
I'm excited.
I'm going to meet the Cardinal.
And it's another guy.
It wasn't the Cardinal at all.
It was just some jamoke I had never seen before.
And my dad immediately kneels down and takes his hand and kisses the ring.
And I was just like, what in the fuck is going on?
That's just a guy.
And so I was just, and my dad was like, do you want it?
And I'm like, no.
I couldn't even give a shit.
And I certainly didn't fucking kneel down in front of him like my dad did.
It really, really bothered me.
And so afterwards, I asked my dad, why did you do that?
Why did you kneel down and kiss that guy's ring?
And he said, well, he's the bishop.
I go, that's not the bishop.
And he said, oh, well, the bishop's really busy, Jimmy.
He can't be everywhere.
You know, it's like Santa Claus, so he has helpers.
So I was like, oh, the bishop has a helper?
So he's like the bishop, but he's not the bishop.
And my dad said, yeah, like that.
He has all the powers of the bishop.
And I go, so why did you kneel down in front of him and kiss his ring?
And he said, I wasn't kissing his ring.
I was kissing the, there's a holy jewel.
And that's special and sacred.
And I was kissing that.
And I go, really?
He just happens to wear it on his ring finger, on a ring that you kissed?
And that...
Scarred me.
How old were you?
However old you are in 7th grade, I was in 7th grade.
13, 14. I like that, over 13. That scarred me.
In Jungian terms, that helped build my father complex.
Is what scarred you about it seeing your father be subservient to another human?
Yes.
To be betrayed.
I was taught in Catholic school that there's Pharisees and they're just men.
And they're the ones who wanted people to bow down to them.
And they're the ones who persecuted Jesus.
They were the religious people, the Pharisees.
And here comes these fucking guys dressed just like the Pharisees in my religious textbooks.
They're drawn to look like they're still dressing like that from 2,000 fucking years ago.
And my dad kneels down in front of him.
And I don't even know who this guy is.
And it's just a person.
And I just knew it instinctively.
So maybe in a good way.
The silver lining was it just solidified, like, this is bullshit to me, that this is about hierarchy and dogma, and this isn't about spirituality, and it isn't.
The Catholic, you know, I think most denominations, whether it be, you know, I still go to church, though, because my mother-in-law likes to go to church, so I go with her.
And so we go to all different kinds of churches, and I haven't been to a church yet that gets the meaning of the Bible.
It's all very surface level.
They have no idea what it's actually about.
They have no idea about how to go inward.
God is always external.
God is not external.
God is inward.
As Carl Jung says, those who look outward dream, those who look inward awake.
Okay.
We're not going to spend the whole time on your childhood, but other than the occasional molestation from a high priest and your dad being subservient to the very same institution that was doing this at the same time.
Normal childhood?
How do you go from that into stand-up comedy?
So I don't know.
People would always say, hey, what's it like growing up in a big family?
And I didn't know what to say because I don't have anything.
You don't know what you are until you go experience something else that you could compare it to.
So they say, like, you don't know your hometown until you leave it.
So I didn't really know what it was like growing up in my family until I wasn't.
And it was...
You know, fucking chaotic all the time with no boundaries whatsoever.
That was the big thing.
You didn't have any boundaries.
You got all those people living in one house, so you don't have those kind of boundaries.
So you had to figure and learn.
And so I was constantly crossing other people's boundaries in life when I went into the world, you know, and when I went away to college and stuff like that.
And I had to realize, oh, that was a big thing for me to figure out where my boundaries were and where other people's were.
So that was the one thing I had to...
But I became a stand-up comedian because when I got out of college, I got a degree in marketing communications.
And I was supposed to go into advertising and I was going to write advertising copy.
And I just started doing stand-up comedy that summer instead.
I went up on an open mic because I had seen people on television that I was fucking sure I was funnier than.
And I'm like, well, if they could be on TV, I bet I could do it in a club.
And I was right.
And so I immediately started getting work right away.
They started paying me.
A couple months after I started doing open mics, I started getting paid.
And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?
I was getting paid as much to do that as I was to do brickwork.
And I was just like, this is amazing.
Sometimes I would go...
For the first time I went out of town to do comedy in Milwaukee, I had so much fun, I forgot to get paid.
It's fantastic.
And anybody who has never experienced the expression, you know, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life, won't appreciate that.
But what was the nature early on?
What's the nature of the comedy?
Observational?
Was it political or was it apolitical?
No, it was, you know, I just talked about whatever.
I just tried to get a laugh.
You know, when you first start, it's just...
It's just trying to figure out how do I get a laugh on stage.
It's such a different thing to getting a laugh in real life or offstage.
And I started to talk about my family a little bit more, but then after the Iraq War, so about 10 or 11 years in, the Iraq War happened, and that kind of changed everything for me.
Iraq War No. 1 or Iraq War No.
2?
Number 2. To be a good stand-up comic, you have to be able to read people, read a room.
Do you acquire that skill or was it a skill that you knew that you had already and you honed it through stand-up?
I think when I quote-unquote read a room, it's like I can sense the mood of the crowd.
What I'm going to need to make this joke go over.
Am I going to be able to present this joke?
How do I present this?
How do I create the conditions in this room that will help my joke succeed?
And that's what I do.
So sometimes you've got to be quieter and softer.
When the crowd's a little rowdy, you be quieter.
When the crowd's a little quiet, you be a little more rowdy.
So, you know, it's a dance, right?
It's different every time and every night and every time you get up.
It's different.
It is like dancing.
And some people are good at dancing and they have a rhythm.
You know, Jerry Seinfeld said that good stand-up comedians could have been...
He said, I think most good stand-up comedians could have been a drummer.
And I know Bill Burr is a big drummer.
Actually, really good.
So I agree with that.
It's about rhythm.
And I've always had rhythm and I can always dance and stuff like that.
So that's what I think when I hear Read the Room.
It's just about sensing their energy and knowing how to flow with it.
Not to change who you are, but to create the conditions that will give your jokes the best opportunity to succeed.
Alright, now I think we're going to end this on YouTube.
We're going to stay here.
I'm going to click one button because we're going to go over exclusively to Rumble.
I didn't put the link.
That's the one thing.
Everybody in the chat, I asked if I had forgotten something to do and it was to put the link to Rumble because we're going there now.
I flagged some of the comments.
Because there's some questions, some super chats, and they're good because we're going to get into all of this.
So ending on YouTube now, come on over to Rumble where we're going to carry this on because now we're going to get into the politics of this.
I don't know where you acquired the wealth of information you did, but the marriage between politics and comedy is what makes you fascinating.
So everybody, go to Rumble.
We're ending on YouTube in 3, 2, 1, now.
Okay, so you say the second Iraq war changed you, and Jimmy, not to say that you're cynical, not to say that I think we've all gotten a dose of the red pill.
Some of us have gotten a heavy dose, and some of us have gotten it rectally, so to speak.
First of all, how do you qualify yourself politically speaking?
The internet says you were a Reagan Democrat, or your family was.
I don't even know what that means.
How were you brought up?
So my father was what they call a Reagan Democrat.
So he was a guy who voted Democrat his whole life.
And then when Reagan came along, he voted for him.
Actually, my dad voted for an independent the first time in 1980.
But he did then go ahead and vote for him in 1984.
So they called those people people who were traditional blue-collar people who always voted Democrat, who Reagan appealed to.
So they called them Reagan Democrats.
But I was, you know, Bill Clinton woke me.
I got woken up by Bill Clinton.
I'm like, he's no friend of the working man.
I could tell when he did NAFTA and then he deregulated Wall Street, which crashed our economy within 10 years, just like they said it would.
And of course, all his friends got rich and everybody else got poor.
So I knew that he was no friend of the working man.
And then I saw that they were both warmongers, both parties because of the Iraq war, the second one.
And then Barack Obama had big hopes for him.
But of course, if someone like him is allowed to become president, it's only because the establishment is okay with that.
And then it was revealed by WikiLeaks that his entire cabinet was chosen by an email from Citigroup.
He got more money from Wall Street than his Republican opponent, John McCain.
So those are the things that woke me up.
And so again, I'm very unpopular with the Democratic Party because I criticize and I expose them for being not what they say they are.
They are exactly...
You know, this last election they were running around on every TV show and even Bill Maher said it on his show.
He said, well, I'm going to vote for the one party that's still going to protect democracy.
That's what he said.
As if we live in a fucking democracy.
We haven't lived in a democracy for at least 40 years.
Our democracy was taken.
It's been proven by a Princeton study that it doesn't matter what the bottom 80% of wage earners in America, what they want is never, never reflected back in legislation.
But if you're in the upper 10% of wealthy, exact proportion.
If 50% of the upper 10% want something, 50% of the time it becomes legislation.
So it's very responsive to the upper 10%.
And zero to the rest of it.
So we, in fact, live in a de facto oligarchy.
And those same people are the ones who fund the corporate news and the politicians.
So we do live in an oligarchy.
We don't live in a democracy.
And that's why I'm not going to participate in those same party that they said was the party that was defending democracy.
And somehow the Republicans were fascists like Donald Trump.
They immediately after getting elected.
They committed fascism.
They instituted fascism by breaking the railroad workers' strike.
And that was a really important strike.
The guys don't get sick leave, and they were going on strike.
They rejected this offer because they wanted sick leave, and they're not giving it.
And those are the workers that keep, they are the glue that keep our capitalist system running, the fucking railroad.
Without that, our whole economy crashes, which is the rationale that Joe Biden and the Democrats used to squash that strike.
They said it would hurt our economy too much.
Well, that's exactly...
That's exactly what gives them power.
And so what is fascism, as Mussolini taught us, is when business joins with government to screw the worker and the citizen, and that's exactly what they did.
So the Democrats, after campaigning to save democracy, committed fascism against workers and took away their right to organize.
That's the fucking definition of fascism.
And then they imposed a contract on them or they couldn't work.
That's not democracy.
That's not freedom.
That is the exact thing they said they were running against.
Again, my friends don't know any better in Hollywood.
My ex-comedy friends in Hollywood, they have no idea what's going on.
And they don't know that they don't know what's going on.
When do you start getting unpopular with Democrats?
Yeah, it's from Bernie Sanders, right?
So it was right then at Bernie.
When I went back, Bernie Sanders, that was the death thing.
How dare you?
I'm sexist.
I'm all that stuff.
I'm misogynist.
And then I was helping Trump.
Then I became a Trump.
Then I got on board with Tulsi Gabbard.
And that was even worse than Bernie Sanders.
She's a Russian asset, Jimmy.
That was even worse.
And I was a big supporter of Tulsi because she didn't take corporate money and she spoke the truth about Syria, which nobody in the Democratic Party was willing to do, tell the truth about Syria.
And it turns out we were proven right, even though Wikipedia says I'm a conspiracy theorist about the gas attacks in Syria.
We debunked this conspiracy about the gas attacks.
But again, it exposes the establishment's conspiracy, so then they say you're a conspiracy.
So whenever you have a narrative that goes against the establishment, they immediately call you a conspiracy theorist, which is why my Wikipedia page looks the way it is, even though I've been proven correct on everything they said is a conspiracy in there, including Seth Rich.
Seth Rich was one of them.
The Syria false flag was another one.
But let's back it up actually just a little bit because, you know, getting on the outs with the Democrats as of 2016, it's, you know, the joke is anyone right of Mao is now a far-right extremist.
But, like, Iraq war number two, 9-11, you're not unpopular with the left until, let's just say, 2015, give or take.
But there's a decade, some of which where you're with the Young Turks, where you're not yet on the outs.
Are you...
Criticizing the left, or are you just sort of getting the feel for the fact that we've always been lied to, whether or not it's Bush or Clinton.
We've always been getting lied to, and you're sort of getting black-pilled type.
Is that the evolution?
And what happened?
I want to get into the Young Turks for a bit.
The evolution was Barack Obama, right?
So when I saw Barack Obama and...
When I saw even after he got re-elected in 2012 and he just became more of a corporatist and more of a liar, instead of like, oh, everybody was like, oh, no, those first four years, he's playing it safe so he can get re-elected.
That's what they would say, right?
The apologists.
And then, of course, he got re-elected overwhelmingly and he just went ahead and instituted his opponent's policies anyway.
Like, it didn't matter who we voted.
That's when I was like, oh.
It doesn't fucking matter.
They all do the same thing.
And of course they all did the same thing.
And that's why I got behind Bernie, because he would start every speech by saying, it sounds like you're ready for a revolution, which he doesn't fucking say anymore.
And he stopped saying.
And then they screwed him.
And then I saw, oh, he's actually a useful idiot for them on purpose.
And then the whole thing's a scam.
The whole fucking thing.
And so the only thing, the only way out of this is through what happened on Staten Island with Christian Smalls and Amazon.
So Christian Smalls got fired from Amazon when COVID started, and then he went out there and he organized those workers along class lines, not political lines.
You know, people on the left, they love to say, we've got to organize along class lines because it sounds good.
It makes them feel like they're anti-authority, but they don't realize what it means, and they don't mean that.
When they say organize along class lines, They don't mean it, because what that means is organizing with Trump voters, people in the same class as you, and they don't want anything to do with those people, but Christian Smalls outsmarted them all, and he did organize with Trump, because he's on Staten Island.
If you know anything about the demographics of New York, that's mostly Trump voters, and Staten Island, white working class, Trump voters, and he organized those people in a union against the man, and that's what has that.
That's real organizing.
Boogaloo Boy on my show because it turns out Boogaloo Boys were developed as an antidote to the Proud Boys.
Boogaloo Boys were anti-racist.
They were anti-imperialism.
They were against the wars.
They were against the cops.
And they were actually defending the Black Lives Matter protesters.
So I brought one of those people on my show and everybody pretended like I brought a Nazi on my show.
And they had to distort what happened on my show.
Oh, Jimmy brought a Boogaloo Boy on.
He's a far-right Nazi.
And I'm like, no, I'm telling you, this is called class.
Organizing.
This is what that means.
This is called class solidarity.
We have common interests.
We all want to end the wars.
We all want to have healthcare that doesn't bankrupt us.
And we all want to take the power away from cops to have qualified immunity so they can fucking do whatever they want and not be held accountable.
We all have those goals.
And then we disagree on guns.
I'll fucking disagree on guns.
I don't care if I disagree with you on guns.
I agree with you on this other shit.
We can work together on this other shit.
And you're not my enemy.
You're my neighbor.
The Boogaloo Boys.
We're going to get back to that in a second as well.
Now, you spent 10 years at the Young Turks, affiliated with the Young Turks.
Now, they're, as far as politics go, described as progressive.
I mean, where I have trouble understanding, do they call themselves progressive?
Yes.
Okay.
What does it mean to be progressive in this world?
What does it mean to be Democrat?
And what was it like at that institution?
And has it changed?
Did it change from day one to year 10?
Because when I look at that, I don't know how it exists.
I don't know how they're not zero viewership and just regarded as batshit crazy, but they might be.
Did they start off that way or did they get that way?
And if they did get that way, what turned them that way?
Well, they were the only place where you could hear anti-establishment news from the...
Populous left.
They were the only place that you could hear that stuff.
And, you know, even at the time, I was always way more left than them.
Like, they were for the Syrian war the first time that they were bombing in the early 2010s.
And we had those arguments.
And they were for the Afghan war.
Because when Obama took over, he's like, give him a chance for a couple of years to do the...
And it's like they weren't actual anti-imperialist war.
And so they've been for...
It turns out they've been for every fucking war.
It says this.
They were on board with Bernie Sanders, but it was very, you know, tepid support of him, and they wanted him to drop out of the race way earlier, and they couldn't wait to get behind Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
And so that was our break right there.
That's when they were done fighting.
So they talk about their fighters, and they want to go to war with the establishment.
But what they really wanted to do was get in bed with the establishment, which is exactly what they did.
They took $24 million from DNC donors and Hillary Clinton's friends and right-wingers, and so they could become corporate media.
So they could get their TV show on YouTube TV, which is an app that's carried all the...
And so they did that.
And so they immediately started defending...
So things did change.
And I was told by an executive at the Young Turks when they took that money that, Jimmy, we know we have to move to the center, which is what they said.
And so they then, when Trump became elected, everything changed.
They just became regular Democrat shitlibs.
They abandoned all independents.
And they would...
They would promise their vote to the Democrats.
And my whole thing is you can't promise your vote to the Democrats until they deliver on something to you and stop doing that.
Same thing with Hillary Clinton when she was running against Trump.
I was like, if a pollster calls you, tell them you're not voting for Hillary Clinton, even if you plan on voting for her.
So she fucking changes her subpositions.
Anyway, so she went to the right.
Beat Bernie Sanders in the—or cheated them in the primary.
Hillary Clinton then didn't take a progressive and make them her vice president.
She took an anti-woman, anti-worker, anti-abortionist, anti-choice, conservative, and made him her vice president.
Tim Kaine was a slap in the face to progressives, feminists, everybody.
But everybody's mad at Jimmy Dore.
Somehow I have more power than Hillary Clinton in the top of the Democratic Party.
I forget what the question was.
When the Young Turks went off the deep end.
Has Cenk and Anna Kasparian always been as bad as they are today?
And I'm saying this.
It's not like rage bait.
It's beyond rage bait.
I watched that show or the clips.
Were they always like that?
I didn't think so.
I didn't think so.
They've certainly gotten a lot worse.
I never saw them.
I saw them get issues wrong when I was there.
But it wasn't until Trump when I saw them just actively lying.
Like they really started to lie.
Like they started lying about Julian Assange when they knew they were lying about Julian Assange.
And they still have that video up where they lied about Julian Assange and Paul Manafort having a fake meeting at Julian Assange at the embassy.
That never happened.
And they reported it like it did.
And as the same day I was debunking it in their very studio on my show, they were repeating that same bullshit CIA talking points that slandered Julian Assange in favor of the Democratic Party and the CIA establishment narrative.
So I knew they were lying.
And then they lied about forced to vote, which I don't have to go into it.
It was just...
It was this pressure campaign that I spearheaded around what we just saw with the right wing did for their vote for Speaker McCarthy.
So whenever the House shifts hands from Republicans to Democrats, you have to elect a speaker.
And then because it's such a narrow margin of victory, a handful of progressives had power to use to leverage their vote to get things, just like the right wing did.
They got a lot of stuff.
I don't know if you noticed.
They got a lot of stuff.
They held out for a week, and they won.
And we won.
And the Democrats, the House, the squad, Nancy Pelosi, I mean, AOC and Bauman and all those people to do that, same thing.
And they then pretended like...
It was crazy.
This will never work.
They're not going to do it.
They kept changing their story.
And Cenk Uygur was running around lying, saying that if they did what I was asking them to do, that Kevin McCarthy would become Speaker, which is obviously a lie.
He couldn't even become fucking Speaker when the Republicans took over.
It was such a lie.
But that was a lie that was propagated by people like Cenk Uygur and people like David Sirota and people like all those types.
And so...
So they went from just being wrong about stuff like the Iraq War, Afghanistan War, Libyan War.
Not the Iraq War, but the Syrian War and Afghanistan, Libya.
But then they went to being outright liars.
And they just lied about Aaron Maté and the people at the Gray Zone.
Now, Aaron Maté won an award, the Independent Journalist Award, because he did a meticulous debunking of Russiagate.
And because it was always a CIA op.
It was always invented by the Democratic Party in the deep state.
It wasn't that hard to debunk it.
And so we did it.
And then the Young Turks start lying about him, saying that Aaron Mate is taking money from the Russian government.
And he's taking money from the Syrian government.
We're all correct.
So now the guy who's...
So Aaron Mate is doing what the Young Turks should be doing, which is exposing the lies of the government and the war machine.
But instead of doing that, they're now smearing the guy who's exposing the lies of the war machine.
It's become the exact opposite of the whole point of the Young Turks.
So I'm with you.
I don't understand how any...
So I think the people who watch that show now are just teenagers who don't have cable so they don't tune into CNN and MSNBC and now they just watch the Young Turks.
This is the question.
It's broader than just the Young Turks, Cenk and Anna in particular, but what drives journalists...
To become this way.
There are no mainstream journalists who are covering, let alone defending Julian Assange.
Is it just money?
Is it just money that they get paid that much and they won't get it unless they toe the line?
You know what?
I have lots of different theories for different people, but I think it's a little bit of everything.
I think a lot of it, like Cenk Uygur's greatest asset is his ego.
He has an ego that made him think that he should do this.
He should have a worldwide news show that's...
He did some damage against it.
He was big enough to think he should do that.
But it's also his ego is his Achilles heel because it's that ego that won't let him admit his mistake.
It won't let him see that the reason he was so triggered by Trump instead of the system that provided us Trump, which is what I was upset at, was because he's just like Trump in his shadow, as Carl Jung has taught us.
And that's why he's so triggered.
And the people who spent all their time focused on Trump instead of the system that gave us Trump, which is bipartisan, those are the people who are...
People are most like Trump and deny that they are.
I have to put that in their unconscious.
Who am I talking about?
People like Keith Olbermann.
People like Cenk Uygur.
Those are the type, the most obnoxious lying pieces of shit.
They have to have a whipping boy and they project that onto Donald Trump.
All the things that they are.
So that's why I wasn't triggered by Trump like other people.
I'm more triggered by a system that made working people desperate enough to take a chance on a guy like Donald Trump.
I'm going to get into how you get your knowledge and how you retain your knowledge.
But one thing that people are asking here, and it's the segue.
I had Alex Jones on last night.
I wanted to bring it up, but it didn't come up.
But it's Young Turks, Alex Jones, and segue into everything.
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