The Chris Hedges Report: Betrayal of the Liberal Class

“Like a Stepford Wives convention” — Comedian Jimmy Dore looks back on the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

ScheerPost

In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges wrote “The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it.” 

There has been no time in American politics where this phenomenon has been more clear than today. In this episode of “The Chris Hedges Report,” host Chris Hedges talks to comedian Jimmy Dore about his reporting at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. The pair find the event illustrative of the past few decades of liberalism in American society, namely that its entire concept is not “reality based.” 

The values the liberal class arguably once cherished have been completely abandoned by today’s neoliberal Democratic Party, and its contradictions ring loud and clear in everything involving Kamala Harris’ campaign to the media’s coverage of it. While on the one hand, the Democratic Party rhetorically clings to its past as the party of progressivism and inclusion, Kamala Harris boasted at the DNC about wanting to make the U.S. military the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Not many people capture the hypocrisy and demise of the liberal class as well as comedian and host of The Jimmy Dore Show, Jimmy Dore. While Dore felt the 2016 DNC was an event filled with hope and revolutionary energy after the emergence of Bernie Sanders, he described this year in more unfortunate terms: “I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn’t care. They treated going to the convention like they were going to prom. And it was, honestly, it was downright depressing.”

Once a believer in the “Bernie or Bust” movement, Dore has become more radicalized since the fall of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. While he’s not sure any solution is possible, he believes revolution is the only answer: 

“ And so it’s going to take a real revolution and it’s going to have to look something like what happened up in Canada during Covid with the truckers and something that Christian Smalls did on Staten Island. [He] was a black guy who organized a bunch of Trump voters against the establishment [and] Amazon. And so it’s going to have to come from the ground up like that. We’re going to have to shut down capitalism to…have even a chance to take over our government and bring it back to the people.”

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones

Intro: Max Jones

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript: Diego Ramos

Chris Hedges: Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out.  The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’ slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power. 

Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. 

All the while, they pay little-to-no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class. And when they see one of their political puppets faltering, as Joe Biden was, they step in to cut off the funds and stage a party coup.

The media plays its anointed role in this farce as courtiers to the powerful, amplifying their fictitious narratives and lies. There are only a handful who call them out. Joining me to discuss our political burlesque is Jimmy Dore, the political commentator, podcaster and host of “The Jimmy Dore Show” on YouTube.

Well, you just came back from the DNC, which must have been exciting, seeing our democracy in action. You were also at the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philly, as was I. But those were very two different conventions, and I think juxtaposing those two conventions shows you how steep our democratic or political dissent has become. But talk about what you saw, I know you were outside the hall doing a lot of reporting.

Jimmy Dore: I was outside and inside, just like in 2016 and so in 2016 there was real hope. I felt good about it. Half the primary voters in the 2016 election for the Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders, which meant they voted to overthrow the establishment of the Democratic Party and get the corporate control out of the party. And they wanted to return it to the people and workers make it, turn the Democratic Party… 

Well Bernie used to start every speech with saying, “sounds like you’re ready for a revolution, right?” And he stopped saying that in 2020, but back then we were and it felt like we were going to have a revolution. And so inside and outside the hall, it felt great. People were, there was a lot of friction. People were talking about policy differences. People were talking about big things, and it gave me hope, and even though Bernie eventually bent the knee, it felt like there was a movement of people and that we would eventually take over that party. That’s what it felt like. It felt like the momentum was on our side, and that we’re going to get this party back to being a party of the workers and away from the corporations, which is what Bill Clinton ushered in. 

And it didn’t happen. It just, you know, Bernie just never made them pay a price for cheating him. He never demanded anything for his support for Hillary Clinton. He never demanded they do anything. And he did the same thing in 2020; he never demanded anything for the support of his following. And so just like Barack Obama, they disbanded immediately after the… He never asked them to get in the street. He never asked them to do anything. He never asked anything of his following that he had. He had real power, just like AOC has, you know, 12 million Twitter followers. She never asked them to do anything. 

And so in 2020 there wasn’t a convention and this last one, it was depressing, right? So I showed up outside. The Palestinian protests weren’t as big as they should have been, and a lot of people said that they felt it was because we have a Black woman as the nominee now, which kind of got rid of some of the enthusiasm for those protests. 

And then, on the inside, it was nothing like 2016 it was like, as I described it, as being at a Stepford Wives convention. There was no talk about policy. Nobody cared that there was a rigged primary. Nobody cared that Kamala Harris didn’t receive one vote. They didn’t even feel like they had to do anything about it. I had delegates repeat back to me, well, there was a process, and we followed the process. 

Yeah, but that’s not democracy. That’s the donor class installing Kamala Harris, because let’s remember, she was the first choice of the donor class in 2020 and she was the first one who got knighted on Martha’s Vineyard by the donor class. And then she couldn’t get a vote, and so she had to drop out before the Iowa primary but they got her. They enforced her as the vice president of Joe Biden, because he’s a complete puppet of the donor class. And now they got to install her after they did a coup on Joe Biden, and the people who claim to be putting democracy on the ballot have zero democracy. 

“That’s not democracy. That’s the donor class installing Kamala Harris.”

And for three election cycles now, for 2016, 2020 and 2024, they have zero democracy in their election process, in the primary. So that’s the joke there. And then you watch, even the speeches were ridiculous. They have no class, there’s absolutely no class critique happening. It’s all identity politics. It’s all abortion, which, by the way, they’re giddy that the Supreme Court overturned abortion because now they have something to run on. Otherwise, that’s why they have to call Donald Trump, he’s going to make himself a dictator. They have to say that which is completely made up, right? We have a system of checks and balances. And if he could do that, why didn’t he do it the first time? And then Donald Trump has to call Kamala Harris and Joe Biden communists. Of course, many of those things are true. They are corporate authoritarians but it was especially depressing leaving that convention because I guess I didn’t see it coming. I’d only been to one before, and in there, I was just surrounded by zombie, brain dead, brainwashed delegates who didn’t care. They treated going to the convention like they were going to prom. And it was, honestly, it was downright depressing.

Chris Hedges: Well, you had this strange phenomena of the 1 percent. The Obamas, how many mansions does Barack Obama have? I think three, he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. [J.B.] Pritzker bragging that he’s a real billionaire, unlike Donald Trump. But you had the 1 percent using the rhetoric of class.

Jimmy Dore: Oh, no doubt about it. Was it you who said it, that I quote, or maybe it was Thomas Frank, is that they know the words, they repeat the words, but they don’t ever put it into action, right? 

So we’re left with Michelle Obama standing on stage saying that “my parents were always suspect of people who took more than they needed.” Meanwhile, like you said, they have three giant mansions. They have 48 acres on Martha’s Vineyard. They have another mansion in Chicago and now they have one in Maui, where they had to get… It’s against the law to build a sea wall, but they got a cut out because he’s President Obama, so he put a sea wall in front of his house. And you can’t do that, because it creates beach erosion down the street, it’s bad for the environment, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s Barack Obama. 

And how many air conditioners do you think he has in those houses after he made his trip to Africa and told people that “you all can’t have air conditioners because the planet’s going to overheat.” And then he goes back. So it’s just a joke. I mean, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama came into the White House without millions of dollars, and they left with millions of dollars, $80 million and now they’re worth, like, $180 million and Michelle Obama charges $750,000 a speech. That’s the last time I checked. 

So, yeah, you were left with stuff like that, and you’re left with Oprah on stage talking about racism, sexism and income inequality and saying how she’s been a victim of it. Now, that might have been true at some point in her life, but my entire adult life, she’s been a very powerful, high-paid celebrity, given her own television shows, and now she’s a billionaire who owns more acreage in Maui than there are acres of Central Park in New York. 

So, yeah, it’s like some kind of bizarre Kabuki theater of all these billionaires and millionaires pretending they’re working class people, and what they really are is just tools of the military industrial complex and the establishment, and they have no class critique whatsoever, and they don’t really care about workers. And so, I mean, I think we’re at the end of the republic. I read your book, and that was a while ago now, and it’s only way worse. So, yeah, it’s honestly depressing. 

“It’s like some kind of bizarre Kabuki theater of all these billionaires and millionaires pretending they’re working class people, and what they really are is just tools of the military industrial complex and the establishment.”  

Think about this, Chris, we’re left with… Donald Trump is easily to the left of Kamala Harris. It’s crazy. All he has to do is say, I want to end the Ukraine war, and he’s to the left of Kamala Harris. I mean, Kamala Harris is to the right of George Bush in a lot of ways, most ways. And it’s a sad thing. But I will say this, when I saw Bobby Kennedy at that rally for Donald Trump and it’s not that I believe Donald Trump is going to do what he says or he’s gonna allow Bobby Kennedy to do what he says. It’s the crowd, right? So the crowd was cheering ending the wars and investing that money back home. 

That was a stadium full of people. I had just come from a stadium full of people cheering on war and cheering on oligarchy. And there they were saying that they were going to take on the oligarchy. They’re going to end the war. They’re going to make friends with our enemies in China and Russia. They were saying that they were going to take on agribusiness, they’re going to take on the corrupted FDA and our regulatory agencies, and they were going to fight big corporations. And they were being cheered while they were saying that. 

So it’s not whether I, you know, have put my faith in those politicians, but it’s good to see that there’s a stadium full of people who show up for a Republican that feels that way. So that’s the only thing that gives me an ounce of hope for this country, is that if we could somehow come together. 

But I think that because of the Telecommunications Act, the media is so consolidated that they’ll never let us come together. And the politics of division is very powerful, which is what identity politics is, and it’s why I think a lot of these things are being pushed. It comes not from the bottom up, but from the top down, from Blackwater, Vanguard, because they can wrap, you know ESG and those things, they can wrap themselves in a patina of virtue while they rape the planet, which is exactly what’s happening, and which is why the Ukraine war and the Russian war is still going on. 

Places like Vanguard and BlackRock thought they could Balkanize it, which they are doing to Ukraine. They’re already splitting it up and giving it to Blackrock but they thought they could do that to Russia. They thought they could break it up and give it to these, you know, Vanguards and BlackRocks. 

Of course, Russia proved to be way stronger, and we did the one thing we’re not supposed to do, which was warned against by everyone from [Noam] Chomsky to [Henry] Kissinger, is you don’t want to push Russia closer to China, which is exactly what the Joe Biden neocon administration did. And so that’s bad for the United States. And now there’s new power centers like BRICS sprouting up, and there’s going to be new… You know, how much longer do you think the United States dollar is going to be the reserve currency of the world? We don’t know, but it’s certainly being damaged. The petrodollar did not get renewed, [AFP Fact Check could not find any evidence of an expiration date on the petrodollar deal] and two weeks after that, CBS was doing reports on how Saudi Arabia was involved in 9/11. It’s remarkable, it’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen recently. But anyway, I know that’s a long answer. I’ll stop talking.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about how they’re going to run Kamala Harris. They’re clearly taking everything from the Obama playbook, which is identity politics and race. It worked for Obama. Obama also was opaque in terms of his policy issues. He admitted as much in his memoir, I didn’t read it, I just read the excerpts of it. But I’m not sure that it’s going to work with Kamala. What do you think?

Jimmy Dore: Well, she’s not as talented as Barack Obama as a politician at all. She’s actually not very talented at all as a politician, which is why she had to drop out, even though she was “The Anointed One” of the donor class in 2020. I’m bad at predicting things, but if she ever has to, you know, speak unscripted, that’s always a loser for her. And so that’s why they haven’t had her, you know, do an interview. That’s why they haven’t had her even talk to a constituent unscripted and because I think as soon as she does, her numbers are going to go down. But from what I saw at the Democratic Convention, it doesn’t look like the Democrats or the media is going to force her to do an unscripted interview. They’re not going to force her to answer any questions. And so they’re just going to try and ride this propaganda wave, which is… You know, the media is definitely in the tank just like the intelligence community is definitely in the tank for the Democratic Party right now. And so I think there’s a good chance they could just push her along to the finish line. 

Please Donate Today to CN’s Fall Fund Drive 

Again, I’m not great at predicting things, but that exactly seems like their plan. Their plan is to throw out these platitudes, how now she’s going to give people, you know, a free house, and she’s going to give people $25,000 down payments. And then she just copied Trump’s tip proposal on not taxing tip wages, even though, just a year ago, she was bragging and the media was writing articles about how she was right to cast the deciding vote on making the IRS go after tipped wages, right? People were saying, some of those tipped workers make $100,000 a year, and we should go after them. I mean, those are the kind of articles I was reading. 

And so, yeah, I think that there’s a good chance that she might be able to skate. I hope not. I hope that at some point she has to do something that is unscripted, and then people kind of see through her, but people have been so… You know, they’ve done such an effective job at demonizing Donald Trump and making him seem like he’s a special kind of evil that people are willing to overlook a rigged primary. They’re willing to overlook her being installed after they coup’d Joe Biden, I love how they say, you know, Joe Biden, he so graciously stepped out. He didn’t step out. He got forced out. They threatened to 25th Amendment him, right? And so…

Chris Hedges: Well they cut off all this funding. All the billionaire class pulled the plug.

Jimmy Dore: That’s exactly right, and that’s how you know that’s who controls the party, and that’s who controls our government, right? So I don’t really have… I think it’s very possible she could do this and become president, because the media is going to let her.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the media. I mean, one of the things that has stunned me is the way many commentators in the media have defended her strategy of not talking to the media. But you know, you and I both, this is a kind of whipping boy for both of us, but just let’s talk about the abject failure of the media to even abide by the most basic journalistic ethics and standards.

Jimmy Dore: I just saw that Rachel Maddow, who’s the most popular host on MSNBC, is coming out with a documentary about Russia, and it’s called for “Russia with Lev.” And they just didn’t stop, they just didn’t stop doing their McCarthyism. They just didn’t stop artificially propping up enemies in service of them. I mean, she is a complete and 100 percent puppet of the military industrial complex. And she Russiagated, which was debunked from day one on my show, but it was even debunked by the Mueller report. There’s no evidence of any of that stuff. 

And it didn’t matter one bit, because the establishment isn’t going to… you don’t have to pay a price for lying like that. And in fact, you get rewarded. She went from making $7 million a year, now she makes $35 million a year, which, by the way, is $100,000 a day. That’s how much Rachel Maddow makes, and that’s the lefty news people. So, I mean, I don’t think there’s any hope. If you look at the Huffington Post, it’s like a cartoon. It’s like, those headlines are… I look at it, my wife and I look at it, we just kind of, I can’t, like, I have to blink a couple times. Like, that’s their headline? And it’s complete control by the billionaire class. And that’s what’s wrong with with the media. 

They answer to the donor class. They answer to their advertisers. They answer to Big Pharma, military industrial complex, Boeing, people like that, and Wall Street, and so that’s why they’ve come down so hard on you, and they’ve come down on independent news, right? 

Because they can’t have a counter narrative because if you can’t control, if the establishment can’t control the narrative, then they lose control. And if they can’t control the narrative, then they have to start disappearing people, which they’ll do. It’s just a little harder, right? 

And so they’d rather just do censorship and control, which the media is all for, right? I mean, you look at what they did to Matt Taibbi when he exposed the control and censorship and the collusion of government intelligence communities and social media. Look what they did to him, right? They sent the tax man to his house the day he was supposed to testify, and then they did character assassination on him, and he was just doing good reporting. And things that Democrats are supposed to be upset about, right? 

The collusion of the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the White House and private corporations, that’s called fascism, especially to censor. And censorship, which now half the country’s for, at least the Democratic Party, is for censorship, and they look at it as a virtuous thing, because they’ve been told it’s 1933 and they’re fighting Hitler and it’s not. It’s 2024 and they’re fighting a real estate game show host. And so they’re on board for that. So, you know, the media is just as censorious. They’ve tried to discredit me, I’m sure they’ve tried to discredit you, and they try to discredit anybody who’s telling the truth about it. I mean, look what they did to Russell Brand, that was amazing. There wasn’t one criminal charge against him. Nobody even would use their name to accuse him of anything, and they got him immediately demonetized on YouTube, and he’s… 

“They’ve been told it’s 1933 and they’re fighting Hitler and it’s not. It’s 2024 and they’re fighting a real estate game show host.”

Anyway, so the point is, I think the media is 100 percent as corrupt as our political parties, and that’s why things like the Ukraine war happened. I mean, even a guy like Jon Stewart, who has a lot of talent, and every once in a while does some great work, right? Like when he interviewed Larry Summers, that was a fantastic interview. But then he’ll never tell you the truth about Covid. He’ll never tell you the truth about vaccines. He’ll never tell you the truth about the Ukraine war, because if he did, he’d have to pay a price for it. 

He told the truth on Stephen Colbert’s show about where the origin of the Covid virus came from. He said it came from a lab, right, which even the F.B.I. agrees to now. So he was made to pay a price for that, he didn’t know it was coming. But it came, and he was ostracized from polite liberal society. And he did a video about how it threw him, right. So then he had to make up for that.

And what did Jon Stewart end up doing? Well, he had to interview Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and give them a tongue bath, two of the biggest blood soaked war criminals in my lifetime, without any pushback. And then he had to go hang a medal on a literal Nazi at Disney World, and he had to lie to you about Covid, and he had to lie to you about Ukraine, and he’s gladly doing it, and there’s no media there to keep him accountable. So there’s no hope, I don’t think. And so I’ve somehow managed to not get canceled on YouTube yet. I’m on Rumble but Rumble just has a [inaudible] thumbprint in the media world. It’s nowhere near the delivery service that YouTube is but that’s the only hope we have now, is independent media. 

And you know, I would have never guessed it 10 years ago, but Tucker Carlson is showing that you can buck the system. He didn’t get fired from Fox News for lying, right? When he was lying about the Iraq War, MSNBC gave him his own show. It’s when he started to tell the truth. He told the truth about Syria, he started to tell the truth about Ukraine. He started to tell the truth about the control of both parties. And then when he brought on Bobby Kennedy to tell you the truth about Covid and vaccines, that was the final straw, they had to get rid of him. So the only hope is independent news. And so there’s a guy like Tucker, who’s kind of blazing a trail and showing that it can be done. Glenn Greenwald’s over at Rumble, you’re doing your show. I’m making my small contribution. There’s The Grayzone, they’re doing great work. And you know they’re doing great work because they just got kicked off YouTube for a whole week during the convention. So that’s the only thing I think we can do. That’s the only way the media can push back. It’s never coming from the establishment. If you’re welcome on establishment media, you’re doing something wrong.

Chris Hedges: I want to do a subtext on the censorship, which has been really pushed primarily by the Democratic Party, as Taibbi points out. But the subtext is that by using algorithms to block or limit access to independent media, they are attempting to funnel viewers and readers back towards the legacy or mainstream media because their own credibility has been eviscerated. And my old employer, The New York Times, after, you know, we can go all the way back to weapons of mass destruction, but two years of Russiagate and then deciding that the reason Donald Trump was elected is because America was racist, not that 30 million Americans had lost their jobs in mass layoffs orchestrated by a Democratic administration since 1996. “The Caliphate,” I don’t know if you follow that podcast, a completely fictitious account and I come out of the Middle East, so it was transparent to me when I heard it. Muslims crucifying non believers on crosses, I’m not making that up. The false story about sexual abuse and rape by Hamas and Palestinians on October 7th, I’m not denying that there weren’t atrocities, but that was never substantiated, and they hired some Israeli woman who had worked for Air Force intelligence and never been a reporter… I mean, that’s one of the depressing… I worked for The New York Times for 15 years, and it’s always been an elitist publication, it’s never been good on Israel. I don’t want to pretend that it was, but there were certain standards that have now completely—and I think you just pointed this out—they’re just gone. They’re not there anymore.

Jimmy Dore: Yeah, when they, when they allowed those two people who weren’t journalists, but literally, I think one of them came from the IDF, to write a front-page story about the atrocities Hamas had allegedly committed on October 7. That should have been the official end of their newspaper. But of course, when you try to debunk that, you get demonetized, and you even get censored, right? 

So we’re living in the world that I grew up thinking the Soviet Union was, or what China was. We’re living in a completely authoritarian time, as far as it comes, from censorship, and you’re not allowed to say things and you’re there’s a social… I mean, I’m an outcast in Hollywood. I was an outcast in Hollywood because I wouldn’t stop telling the truth about Hillary Clinton in 2016 up until… After the primary is over, you’re supposed to shut up as a Democrat. And I wouldn’t. And I kept saying, come get my vote. And you have to make Hillary Clinton come get your vote. And because I wouldn’t stop criticizing her, I had everybody from the executive producer of Modern Family to my comedian friends pilloring me because I’m helping Trump get elected. 

I’m like, no Hillary Clinton’s helping Trump get elected because she won’t try to come get my vote. And that’s exactly what happened. And so, I mean, I’ve been… then I went on to debunk Russiagate, which then I was slandered as everything. And then I told the truth about the gas attacks in Syria, which wasn’t hard. None of these things are hard to debunk, if I can do it right? I did it, and it was not hard at all. Same thing with the Ukraine war, same thing with Covid. And if I can debunk these things, it’s not hard. So, yeah, that’s how bad it’s gotten, right? It’s like, that’s for me, I never lived in the former Soviet Union, I never lived in China, but that’s the way I grew up, thinking it would be. It’s the world I’m living in now, where you’re encouraged to snitch on each other. Tim Walz did that during Covid, encouraging people to snitch on each other. And there’s the professional managerial class, which its job is there to keep people like me in line. And if I don’t stay in line and go along with the establishment narrative, then I will be ostracized. Well, I am ostracized.

Chris Hedges: It’s not the debunking that’s hard, it’s the cost. Yes, so you’re right, it’s not that hard to see. So for instance, on the eve of the call to invade Iraq, which I publicly opposed, there was no disagreement among any of us who covered the Middle East, that invading Iraq was a disaster in the making. Just the other reporters were smarter than I was in keeping their mouths shut. And these people are ultimately careerists. They have no real moral core. And you talked earlier about all the people who were wrong and they’re still in positions of power. Well, yes, they were wrong, but in another way, they weren’t wrong. They served those centers of power, and they continue to serve those centers of power, and it doesn’t matter whether what they say is wrong or right, and that’s why figures like Thomas Friedman and all the others who were wrong about Iraq and Ukraine are still with us. 

But the cost, I mean, there used to be a place — I come out of the media, you’re a comic— but, I mean, there used to be a place for… I was mainstream at one point. Glenn Greenwald was a mainstream journalist. Matt Taibbi was at Rolling Stone, but essentially a mainstream journalist. Now, the walls have narrowed, the room, you know, it’s become so constricted. And I think it’s, as you pointed out earlier, the reason is that they don’t… it’s not just that we challenge the narrative it’s that they don’t have any answer anymore. They don’t have any credible answer to the kind of critiques that you make or that I make, or Matt makes, or Glenn makes. And so therefore they have to shut us down, because it’s become completely transparent.

Jimmy Dore: You would hope it would be more transparent to [inaudible] more people, but I’m surrounded by Democrats. I live in Hollywood. My in-laws, everybody, all my friends, they’re all Democrats, and no one seems to care. Really, no one seems to care. In fact, they’re always like, oh, Jimmy, why do you gotta be the wet blanket? Why do you gotta do that? Let’s just all try to get our next job. And it’s crazy. But what’s interesting is, you know, Black Lives Matter, so, it was so easy for the establishment and the professional managerial class to wrap themselves in supporting Black Lives Matter. But then the Palestinian-Gaza-Israel genocide started happening, and Black Lives Matter, then supported the Palestinians. And so now the people where I’m at in Hollywood, are like I thought we were supposed to do what the Black Lives Matter… but we have to be with Israel because it… And it’s funny kind of to watch that group. So now what they’ve decided to do is just don’t talk about it.

Chris Hedges: Well, it’s where we live. Jimmy, your circle is Hollywood, and mine is Princeton, New Jersey. These are the people who profit from the system. They are the managerial class. They are the 1 percent. I think much of the country actually does see it. I teach in the prison system, certainly all of my students and their families, most of whom don’t vote, because it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s Biden or Trump. We still run the largest carceral system in the world. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re a Palestinian, if it’s Biden or Trump. And you touched on, I think correctly, this yearning, which is real, the sense of betrayal, which is real, that is fueling Trump, Trump’s candidacy. And of course, you’re right, Trump is everything you said he is, but he is speaking, in his own kind of distorted, disingenuous way, to real issues. And I think one of the things that I found so chilling about the DNC is that it wasn’t a reality based event. You know, we always talk about Trump and magical thinking, but the Democratic party wins the prize for magical thinking. They won’t even accept, not only will they not accept responsibility for what they did, they won’t even acknowledge the reality that is literally outside their door.

Jimmy Dore: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It was not a reality-based event, that’s a perfect way to put it. You know, I’m the only sliver of hope that you can… I try to find a sliver of hope, otherwise I’ll just be depressed all day. And, you know, my sliver of hope is that Donald Trump always wants credit for deals like his big thing and he didn’t start a war. He did ramp up the drone war. And he did assassinate [Iranian General] Soleimani and he did move the [U.S.] embassy to Jerusalem.

He did a lot of those types of things, but he didn’t start a war. And I’ve asked a lot of people, why do you think that is? Why do you think he resisted bombing in Syria, and then when he did, he just bombed like a place that was inconsequential and why he put the pause on the arms to Ukraine, and people, it’s because my theory, again, this is my sliver of hope, is that he wants to be seen as the guy who solved problems and he got the deal done, and he’s all about deals. 

And I think he has a distaste for calling up Gold Star families and telling them that their kid is dead. I think, as I’ve heard him described, that he’s, you know, he’s New York real estate evil, he’s not deep state neocon evil. And so I think he does have a distaste for that. And I think that just like he had the over-the-top rhetoric with Kim Jong Un, if you remember, and then he was able to do a deal. It reminds me, like when I was a kid, I remember them saying, you know, because Nixon had spent his whole career being a red-baiting maniac, that he was the only one who could go to China.

I remember them all saying that, well, only Nixon could, because if anybody else went and created friendly relations, he would immediately be labeled a red and a lefty and a puppet. So hopefully that’s Trump’s strategy, is that he’s like he did with Kim Jong Un, is that he speaks so over the top, creating space for him to create a deal. I found an audio recording of Donald Trump when he first approached the Israel/Palestine issue, he thought the problem was going to be with the Palestinians not wanting a deal. And he found out that it was the Palestinians who did want a deal, and it was Bibi. 

In fact, on the recording, I think I’m quoting verbatim, he said, after about three minutes of talking, “I said, Bibi, you don’t want a deal, do you? And he said, uh uh uh.” So Trump kind of figured that out, and they did push the Abraham Accords, so that was, I think, his attempt to get a deal. And so maybe he has this over-the-top_rhetoric so he can enforce some kind of a deal.

Maybe he’s got that rhetoric because he wanted to get the $100 million from [Sheldon] Adelson’s widow, which he got, and so maybe that creates space, right? And so he didn’t have the space with Russia because he didn’t talk tough against Russia, right? Because there was no reason for him to. But I mean, I hope I’m being clear on what I’m saying. I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m saying that’s the only sliver of hope we have, because Kamala Harris is 100 percent in bed with the deep state and the military industrial complex and Wall Street and the billionaire class and the WEF [World Economic Forum] and the people who actually run things right, because she doesn’t, just like Joe Biden isn’t running things, she’s not running things. She’s being told what to do. So the deep state is… They’ve been trying to get rid of Trump since he started, right? That’s what Russiagate was about. That was collusion of the F.B.I., C.I.A. and the Hillary Clinton campaign and the media to discredit him, get rid of him. That’s what January 6 was. There were, you know, how many cops were in the crowd? How many were dressed as MAGA supporters inside the Capitol before the riot even started? The F.B.I. won’t tell you. So that was another psyop, right? 

I’m convinced a lot of those Black Lives Matter riots were inspired by the F.B.I. to create chaos. Chaos always favors the establishment. They wanted to get rid of Donald Trump and then the C.I.A. lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, and there were 50 of them on a letter and so… But they’re not doing that for Trump. So at some point, he is somehow a thorn in the side of the deep state and the military industrial complex. 

And like I said, I think it’s because he has the stupid idea that the president is supposed to control the military and the intelligence community, and they are letting him know he is not in control, that there is a group of people who are in control. It is the deep state. It is not the president, and if you don’t serve them, just like Chuck Schumer said to Rachel Maddow, right on camera, is that if you don’t do what the deep state wants, they have six ways to Sunday to mess with you. And that means — what Chuck Schumer revealed when he said that to Rachel Maddow — was that the president doesn’t control the C.I.A., that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. and the NSA doesn’t work for the president, and if they don’t work for the president, the question then is, exactly, who do they work for? 

“He has the stupid idea that the president is supposed to control the military and the intelligence community, and they are letting him know he is not in control.”

Well, Rachel Maddow is never going to ask that follow up question. She’s never even going to point that out, but that’s the obvious takeaway from that conversation that she had with Chuck Schumer, who, at the time, was the leading Democrat in the country. So that’s the only sliver of hope, is that they’re trying to kill him. So somebody’s trying to kill him. And that’s my… I know that sounds like a weird way to bring you hope, but that’s it.

Chris Hedges: I think that’s a fascinating truth, and it’s clear that the leaks on Russiagate were coming from the intelligence community, and then all the former intelligence… Clapper and all these figures could not be on MSNBC or any other network fast enough to accuse Trump of being a Russian asset, and it’s anecdotal, so I don’t want to pretend that it’s fact, but I did speak to somebody who is close to Trump, and told me that Trump’s greatest fear is that the C.I.A. will take him out. And I think that there is a great deal of truth to this antagonism. I don’t share your sliver of hope with Trump. I’m just completely bleak. But that is a fascinating dynamic, because, of course, the C.I.A. is like the military, it’s uncontrollable. There’s a historian, Arnold Toynbee, who writes about the death, he chronicles the death of empires, and he said the common characteristic is that they have a military industrial intelligence complex that goes rogue, that can no longer be controlled. And that’s certainly where we are. We perpetuate war, disastrous war. 

I mean, I just was reading about, a review of [H.R.] McMasters new book where he trashes Trump. This was in The New York Times, and they talked about his distinguished career as if Iraq wasn’t a debacle, as if Afghanistan wasn’t a complete catastrophe, as if Libya was… I mean, so these people are responsible for, I would argue, what’s happened in the last two decades in the Middle East is probably even more damaging to the empire than Vietnam. It’s probably the worst strategic decision in American history, this is worth another show, and yet no one is held accountable. And in some ways we, you know, and I’m not a Trump supporter, but remember that Trump called out the Iraq war as a disaster, I mean, on the debate stage in front of Jeb Bush. He said what no one else was willing to say by at least among the political class of either party.

Jimmy Dore: Yeah, not only that, he gave the game away about how, you know, he said, I used to be a donor. I used to come in and give them money, and they did what I said. And so I think that’s maybe another problem for the donor class and him. But he is also such a political novice that he will say a truth so like, if you listen to CNN, they’ll tell you the reason why the establishment and they all hate Donald Trump is because he went to Washington, D.C., and he started lying. If you think that the establishment hates a politician because he went to Washington, D.C., and started lying, I’ve got a vaccine I’d like to sell you. 

The reason why they hate Donald Trump is because he’s such a political novice and they can’t control him, that he, every once in a while, will tell a big truth the president’s not supposed to tell. And the biggest one he told was when he was asked point blank, “why are you leaving troops in Syria?” And he said, “for the oil, the oil’s secured. It’s our oil, we’re taking the oil.” And you can’t say that. So now the whole world saw the president say, give away the point of our foreign policy for the last 50 or 60 years is to invade smaller, weaker countries and steal their natural resources. He’s supposed to say this is because Assad is oppressing his people and we’re trying to keep the secure liberty for them. That’s what he’s supposed to say. And he did it. He just gave the game away. He said the same thing about Venezuela recently at a campaign rally, he said, “you know, Venezuela was ready to fall. We could have had all that oil. We could have had all that oil,” and he just says it. 

And so those are the things that he, as Aaron Mate says, that he puts an ugly face on imperialism, and that makes it tougher for them to do their imperialism, especially since they’ve demonized them as a white supremacist and a racist, it makes it much harder for them. It’s so much easier for the military industrial complex to have a guy like Barack Obama or a Black woman like Kamala Harris. This is why I said it’ll be, you know, at least when a Republican’s a president and he does wars, sometimes, the Democrats will go and protest him, right? But what if it’s Barack Obama? He dropped more bombs than George Bush, nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. They gave him a peace prize, right? And Kamala Harris is set to do the exact same thing. So in that regard, it’s worse if Kamala Harris becomes president, because the left goes to sleep when a Democrat is president, especially if it’s a president of color.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, Glen Ford, who we lost a couple years ago, used to edit the Black Agenda Report, said the Democrats aren’t the lesser evil, they’re the more effective evil.

Jimmy Dore: Well, look at Bill Clinton. He was able to do things that George Bush the first wasn’t allowed to do. He couldn’t pass NAFTA and then Bill Clinton comes in, gives the Blue Dog Democrats cover. They cut the legs out from underneath organized labor ever since, for a generation, at least. And then he goes on to gut welfare, expand the police state, explode the prison population, deregulate Wall Street, which crashed the economy within 10 years. And who did that hurt most? The Black and brown people. And then, of course, he had a private deal, as Thomas Frank taught us, to end Social Security and privatize it. But thank God for Monica Lewinsky, that didn’t happen.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Gaza. I mean, I, as you know, spent seven years in the Middle East and a lot of that time in Gaza. It’s a personal issue for me. I certainly could never support in any way, including the marginal act of voting anyone who… But, I mean, we now have reached a point where we are supposed to back a party that openly carries out mass murder of innocence. And I just want, I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, that I was in Sarajevo during the war. That was 300-to-400 shells a day, that was four-to-five dead a day, that was about two dozen wounded a day. That is nothing compared to Gaza. We’re talking about, often hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We have not seen this kind of destruction, this kind of saturation bombing, since, probably, Vietnam and that was in a much larger area. Gaza is only 20 miles long and five miles wide, but let’s talk about Gaza.

Jimmy Dore: Well, I can’t believe the things people say to me about Gaza. They’ll say this, “Well, Jimmy, I know you support the LGBTQ community. You know, who doesn’t? Hamas. Hamas doesn’t support gay people. So what do you say to that?” And I say, “Oh, I didn’t know that they don’t support gay people. I guess we should slaughter their children.” 

That seems to be the answer for these people. “They hate gay people, so it makes the slaughter of innocent women and children okay somehow.” Then they say, well, I’ve had people on my show say, “well, having Israel as an ally is like having our own aircraft carrier in the Middle East.” And I’m like, “unfortunately, that aircraft carrier has a concentration camp right in the middle of it. I don’t know if you saw that part. And Israel is not our ally. Israel, they’re our biggest thorn in our side. They’re our biggest… They’re the ones causing World War III.” 

If you go back and look at everything Bibi Netanyahu has wanted us to do, which we’ve done, the last on our list is a war with Iran. It’s made everything more unstable. It’s made us all more insecure. It’s drained the Treasury. It’s done nothing but create strife and hatred and more war. So the arguments that people make, just on their face, they’re just ridiculous. But I’ve seen gay people say that, “Jimmy, you know Hamas doesn’t support gay people, how could you support them?” I don’t have to like Hamas to support them not being slaughtered, right? And by the way, the people, what they don’t also say is that most of the people alive right now in Gaza, in Palestine, didn’t vote for Hamas. Most of them are under 18 years old, they didn’t vote. And when they had to vote at the first time, almost half the people didn’t vote for them then. 

So this idea that because they vote… That’s like saying, well, we voted for George Bush, and so now Iran and all those countries and Iraq should be able to bomb us because we one time voted for George Bush, who did a war in Iraq. So that’s just a crazy, fallacious, stupid argument, but it is heartening to see that now, finally, the majority of people in the United States are against what we’re doing in Israel. 

But again, public opinion doesn’t have any effect on what the ruling class does. It didn’t affect Dick Cheney and George Bush when he was told by Leslie Stahl, you know, most Americans are against the Iraq War, and he said, “so what?” 

So they don’t care. So it’s going to take a real revolution, and it’s going to have to look like something that happened up in Canada during Covid with the truckers, and something that Christian Smalls did on Staten Island, was a Black guy who organized a bunch of Trump voters against the establishment, the Amazon. And so it’s going to have to come from the ground up like that. We’re going to have to shut down capitalism to have even a chance to take over our government and bring it back to the people. I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but it does not seem at all possible. People are so willing to go… it’s like we’re living in the middle of Orwell and the Brave New World, and people are taking Soma, at the same time they’re rewriting history. And now nobody knows anything, and nobody cares. I hate to be such a doom-and-gloom guy, but there’s very… That’s why I have to hold on to those slivers of hopes, like I said before, about Trump, we’ll see.

Chris Hedges: Well being gay is morally neutral. I mean, Ernst Röhm was the head of the Nazi brown shirts, and he was a homosexual. I mean, the argument doesn’t make any sense, but that’s all right. I mean, I want to close by asking you, you’re a comic and I’m a journalist. Both of us have been pushed to the margins. A good journalist, I mean, I was trained as a newspaper reporter, so I was trained to manipulate facts. And let’s be clear, you select the facts that you want to include, you don’t include. If you’re an honest journalist, you will select the facts to try and tell the truth, that gets you in trouble. If you’re a good careerist, like most of the journalists of The New York Times, you will select the facts, it’s factually true, but you select the facts to buttress and support the dominant narrative. And I’m wondering, I’m thinking of Norm Macdonald, who I like, of course, George Carlin, yourself. Is that true for a good comic as well?

Jimmy Dore: I think it’s true for a good comic. Those are the comics that I was always drawn to, people who poke holes in the status quo, in the establishment narrative. Those are the people who I always enjoyed. But that all kind of went away because of Trump. A lot of that went away. I mean, look at the late night talk shows, it’s just one big propaganda machine spitting out propaganda of the establishment. And the Democratic Party is the favored party of the establishment right now. And so, you know, I mean, even, and it got even worse during Covid. You know, I would see comedian after comedian go on stage and tell and shame people for trying to get informed about an experimental medical treatment they were being forced to take, or they couldn’t go to work. 

If you’re a comedian, you’re not supposed to shame people for trying to get informed. You’re supposed to shame people for following rules without question. And if you’re not questioning the authority, then you should go just sell cars, because that’s what you’re good for. And so I was a lone voice, and a lot of time in that, especially in Hollywood, and I understand the same thing went on in New York from my co-host, Kurt Metzger, that there was just conformity. And people who I look up to, people who consider themselves truth tellers and rebels, would tell people to don’t do your own research. 

You know, before Covid, doing your own research just meant you were reading. And so that’s now, somehow they got comedians to shame people for reading like I woke up in the middle of a Bill Hicks bit. Looks like we got ourselves a reader. What you reading for? So it became, it broke my heart. I was always proud to be a comedian, Chris. I was always proud to be part of the comedy brotherhood, because you tell a comedian to do something they’re going to do the exact opposite, at least that’s what Tommy Smothers said in the documentary on comedy I saw, and I always felt the same way. Comedians always don’t do what they’re told. They always question authority. You can’t control them but they just became the biggest enforcers of the narrative, especially during Covid, Ukraine, Trump. It is a disaster what is happening to comedy. And, you know, thank God for Joe Rogan’s club in Austin. I was just there. It is a beacon of free thought. And what my biggest accomplishment is when I could get to go up and tell people that the Ukraine war is a lie and get them to laugh about it, right? And I get them to make fun of Russiagate, and people who don’t know me, don’t know I’m coming, not my own audience, people who pay to see me. 

But when I go up in Hollywood and people don’t know I’m coming, and I can get them to laugh at how ridiculous Gaza and how horrible that is, I feel like that’s a big win, because, you know, laughter is involuntary, and you can’t deny it. So when I point out a ridiculous contradiction and I do it comedically and people involuntarily laugh, I feel like that’s a big win, and that can crack people’s brain open and get them to think a little bit. It certainly worked for me when I was younger. But no, we don’t have many, you know, you see, like I said, Jon Stewart, you know, he just goes along. He went along with the law fear of Trump, and he doesn’t care. He won’t tell the truth about Covid. He won’t tell the truth about… none of the late night people will tell the truth about Ukraine. It is kind of heartbreaking. But then, on the other side, there’s a big lane for me. So I guess I should be… There’s that kind of bittersweetness to it. But yeah, that’s my report back from comedy land.

Chris Hedges: Well, you do a great job.

Jimmy Dore: I appreciate that.

Chris Hedges: That was the comic Jimmy Dore. I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], Thomas [Hedges] and [Diego Ramos], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

This interview is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Please Donate Today to CN’s Fall Fund Drive