Is JD Vance A Real Populist Or Captured By Donors?
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Medium speeds and jumps to medium and hits them head on. It's the Jimmy Tore Show. There's an article written by the one and only Whitney Webb at Unlimited Hangout. It says the man behind Trump's vice president pick, it's worse than you think. Because here's what I was thinking about J.D. Vance. This is the Teamsters president. This is what he had to say about J.D. Vance. First of all, he's got great initials.

But here he is on the Teamster president talking about J.D. Vance and how workers support him. J.D. Vance, the short time that we've worked together, I mean, he's been great on Teamster issues. He is supporting, co-sponsoring an airline manufacturer bill that addresses outsourcing of critical airline maintenance to China. He's also supported...

paid sick leave for our railroad workers. If you remember that situation a couple of years ago, when they weren't getting sick time, he stepped right up. He's also been very vocal and supportive of holding employers accountable who try and skirt their obligation under an independent contractor model known as DSP. So he's been right there on all our issues. We've publicly stated it. And look, at this day and age, there's nothing better than having...

That's what the Teamster president said about J.D. Vance. Here's what Glenn Greenwald said in a speech on YouTube. If you want to understand J.D. Vance's thinking, I really encourage you to go watch this. It is a well thought through speech intended to express his ideology about the Republican establishment, the Democratic establishment. But here is one passage that I found very telling and very interesting. Senator Mitch McConnell was elected literally the year that I was born. And Mitch McConnell is extremely confident about nearly every single foreign policy view that he holds, despite the fact that he's been a senator since I was born and nearly every foreign policy position he's held has actually been wrong.

Okay. So whatever your views, if I can impart something really, really important to you or anybody else who's listening on social media or otherwise, it's that we have to be open to new arguments. When people say something that challenges our preconceived notions, if your response is to sort of think about it, that's good. Whatever you ultimately, whatever conclusion you ultimately come to. If your response is to kind of seize up and immediately repeat the slogans that we've all heard for the last four years, you are part of the problem. And we have to, we have to beat back the problem for what to fix what's going on in the country. So let me sort of articulate two, and this is not to be a full scale or full scale.

So that was interesting that he's against Mitch McConnell. Here's one more thing about the Ukraine war and J.D. Vance. Here at Fox News in October of 2023.

reported this, Republican senators introduced a standalone bill to aid Israel without more funding to Ukraine. Quote, Republican lawmakers opposed combining Ukraine and Israel aid. Republican senators, Russia Marshall, Ted Cruz, J.D. Vance, and Mike Lee introduced a standalone bill to funnel aid to Israel without tying it to Ukraine aid on Thursday. The bill called the Supplemental Appropriations Act is an alternative to President Biden's $106 billion emergency supplemental bill he requested from Congress last week. That was the bill that we covered. Now, obviously, J.D. Vance is a supporter of financing Israel's military and its wars.

I would say you probably can't survive in Republican politics without taking that view. Certainly, Trump has that view. Joe Biden has that view. Kamala Harris has that view. And I've made my views of that very, very clear. That's obviously a place where I vehemently disagree with J.D. Vance, to put it mildly. But given the alternatives that Trump had to choose from in the Republican Party, he could have obviously gone with some hardcore Trump follower like Matt Gaetz or Margaret Taylor Greene or Carrie Lake. And I think there, from a political perspective, that would not have been wise because that really would not have expanded the appeal of the Republican Party. J.D. Vance not only will for obvious reasons, but also...

There is a genuine record of him defending the kind of anti-establishment populist politics that got Donald Trump elected in 2016.

We'll see throughout the campaign exactly how he articulates that. He's obviously going to be constrained by what Trump supports. And then obviously, in a lot of ways, this vice presidential pick is even more important than usual, given that Trump's age makes it highly unlikely that he could go beyond four years. And beyond that, he would be term limited. But there's also a chance, given Trump's age, that he wouldn't make it through the four years. And symbolically, certainly, this is Trump taking this movement that more or less he has single-handedly brought into the mainstream. It was bubbling in Republican politics for a long time, but he was able to articulate and sell it.

And he's essentially naming his successor. That's the significance of J.D. Vance being so much younger from that next or even two generations removed from Trump. And so I do think J.D. Vance's selection is more important than the usual vice presidential selection. And I think deconstructing his actual ideology is reflected in his actions and votes and bills, not just in his rhetoric, is more important than ever. So back to Whitney Webb. She says the man behind Trump's VP pickets would pick it's worse than you.

I think while J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in the new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy, and reigning in the surveillance state. Now, I read this article, and I'm just going to read you a little bit of it. It is a pretty jarring article, to say the least.

And it certainly damped out my enthusiasm for the J.D. After the recent revelation that Donald Trump has selected J.D. Vance as his vice president, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to billionaire Peter Thiel.

Vance has been one of the several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Andrew Palmer's Lucky. Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School.

Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel's investment firm, Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution's Rise of the Rest seed fund, whose major investors included Amazon's Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of Walmart, who boast longstanding deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm, Narya,

capital in 2020 which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who we know is a CIA buddy buddy and was very much involved in the lockdown okay so it gets worse gets worse

Both Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door, and overtly globalist Bilderberg Conference. Newsweek once called Schmidt and Thiel the two most influential figures at Bilderberg. Thiel has donated heavily to Vance's political career, giving $15 million to Vance's successful Senate bid in 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate.

Thiel also joined Vance, a former never-Trumper, on a visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president's blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia like David Sachs, who donated a million to Vance.

and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sachs, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump's selection of Vance as vice president as they ran a secret lobbying campaign for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson. After leaving PayPal,

Thiel would follow a similar path in creating another company, Palantir. Now we've talked about Palantir here on this show. We showed you how they're doing what the CIA can't do legally, so they do it privately and they are bragging about being able to surveil, stop social right-wing movements, things like that.

Palantir is the engine. Oh, by the way, the head of, we showed him just most recently at our live show, Al Karp, the head of Palantir, said that it was really important to stop these student protests about Gaza because if they win the intellectual battle over it, we'll never be able to send U.S. military out anywhere again. And so that was who this is. So Palantir,

The old founded Palantir, Palantir's, that guy, Alex Carp, is the engine on which the surveillance state runs. And soon after Vance was announced as Trump's vice president, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, as well as Palantir itself, were backing a Trump-Vance super PAC called America PAC. So there they are.

Okay, so now let me bring in the author of that article to fill in the rest of the gaps. Whitney Webb, she's been a professional writer, researcher, and journalist since 2016. From 2017 to 2020, she was a staff writer and senior investigator reporter for Mint Press News. She's a contributing editor for Unlimited Hangout and author of the book One Nation Under Blackmail about the connection between the U.S. Intelligence Service's organized crime and Jeffrey Epstein. Welcome back to the show, Whitney Webb.

Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So...

Tell me, what's so bad about J.D. Vance's connection with Peter Thiel? And do you think that the money that Peter Thiel is giving to, it sounds like a stupid question as I'm saying it. Do you think that the money that Peter Thiel has given to J.D. Vance is going to manifest in more surveillance state activity from J.D. Vance and Donald Trump?

Yes, I absolutely do. Not just because in general politicians, when they're in office, in contrast to what they say on the campaign trail, when they're in office, they do what their donors tell them to do.

So I think that's what we're likely to see in a second Trump administration, particularly with J.D. Vance as the vice president. Keep in mind, Trump, sorry, Peter Thiel was a major donor to Trump during his first campaign cycle, played an outsized role in his transition team as a result, and had major influence over people that were put in Trump's cabinet, particularly in the Pentagon, which led to an explosion of contracts between the U.S. military and

and Palantir during Trump's first term, as well as other, you know, defense startups and military and intelligence contractors that are funded by Peter Thiel.

which include Clearview AI, which is a facial recognition company, and Anderle, which was created by Palmer Luckey and Trey Stevens. Trey Stevens being a big part of Thiel's Founders Fund, and Palmer Luckey having been a Thiel fellow that sold his VR company Oculus Rift to Facebook while Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook. And as far as J.D. Vance is concerned,

JD Vance not only really owes his political career to Peter Thiel, he also owes his previous venture capital career to Peter Thiel because it started at a Thiel-linked firm called Mithril Capital. And then, you know, after he went and joined the venture capital firm of a former or the AOL co-founder Steve Case, the Rise of the Rest Fund I mentioned earlier, and his current VC firm, Narya Capital, he co-founded with another person that he worked with at Mithril Capital.

And was largely funded by Peter Thiel, and Peter Thiel was the main bankroller of his initial Senate campaign, and subsequently was the person that brought him back into Trump's good graces after his, you know, a lot of the quotes that have resurfaced recently about him being a never-Trumper and comparing Trump to Hitler and whatnot. So...

A lot of, you know, essentially the person that did more than anything else to get J.D. Vance as vice president is Peter Thiel. So so you think that J.D. Vance went from being a never Trump or calling Trump Hitler to being his vice president, to being praising Trump and being his vice president because of Peter Thiel?

Yeah, Peter Thiel personally accompanied Vance to Mar-a-Lago and brokered that, I don't know, I don't know exactly what you'd call it, sort of a smoothing over of what had previously been a rocky relationship. So I think absolutely Peter Thiel has been the guiding hand of J.D. Vance's entire career. And considering that Peter Thiel, when he was a donor last time, had an outside influence on Trump's policies, at least early on,

And military policies were likely to see him be even more influential in a second term, not just because of J.D. Vance, but now after J.D. Vance was announced, you have Palantir itself and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, giving heavily to the Trump campaign now that Vance has been selected as a pick. So these Thiel-founded companies are very

or field-funded or founded companies, since Vance was announced, have essentially signaled that they're all in on the Trump-Vance campaign. And this also includes Palmer Luckey as well, of the defense contractor, Anduril, which is making...

from a lot of unmanned drones and other you know defense weapons it's building our virtual border wall on the u.s mexico border that trump supports instead of a physical barrier that he used to campaign on and they're also hugely involved in the ukrainian conflict so any sort of possibility of of a second trump administration winding down uh american aid to ukraine i think with theel in the equation

becomes questionable right away because Anduril, Clearview and Palantir itself intimately involved with the Ukrainian military as it relates to the conflict with Russia. So anything that would see their contracts or their bottom line as it relates to their involvement in that conflict, I think it's unlikely that it would whittle down significantly if Thiel has the influence that is to be expected in a second Trump term. So do you think that has already... So that's depressing.

Thanks. But that's the Uniparty. Both sides love war, you know, and they love surveillance. So do you think that so you so Palantir, which is still founded, is making big money off Ukraine? Yeah, they're majorly involved. They're also hugely involved in Israel's war on Gaza.

Right. Supercharging the use of AI to murder innocent people. A lot of these field-connected defense contractors claim that they're making war more efficient and sort of reducing the bloated military industrial complex. But if their idea of efficiency is AI targeting, I mean, you can see as has been demonstrated quite clearly in Gaza that precise AI targeting still results in the mass murder of entire families. Yes.

Do you think that, so it was surprising to me because Donald Trump seemed like he couldn't wait to become president again so he could end the Ukraine war, right? That like he knew he had like an ace up his sleeve and he knew how to do it. And the way you do it is you just threaten to, you just tell Ukraine to accept the terms of a peace agreement. And then you try to work out the best, most favorable peace agreement for Ukraine. And then you move on with your life.

Well, it's possible, but look at what the Ukraine conflict started not long after the Afghanistan war ended. The national security state in the US, maybe it will shut down one conflict, but it'll start another one soon after. That's why you have CIA involvement with the beginnings of the Ukraine conflict, because they had run out of their way to launder weapons and all sorts of money.

In Afghanistan, so they started Ukraine. So, you know, if Trump is going to end the Ukraine conflict, he'd probably, I don't know, start a war with Iran, which is oddly enough something that J.D. Vance, as soon as he was named nominee, despite his Quincy Institute speech where he claimed to be against going to war with Iran, was like, let's punch Iran hard.

And he takes a lot of money from AIPAC. And if you're familiar with them, they've been lobbying us along with the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence for war with Iran for a very, very, very long time. And as what's going on in Gaza and Israel threatens to expand into a broader regional war, some of the companies that stand to benefit most from that are connected to Peter Thiel. So.

My question was going to be, do you think that, well, of course, you know, when Joe Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, it was Trump who actually negotiated that peace deal. And then Joe Biden decided to pull out and leave all our equipment behind.

And the reason why he did that is obvious to someone like me and people who watch this show, because then that means that they have to buy all new equipment from the same people who manufactured that first set of equipment that we're leaving there. Eighty five billion dollars worth of stuff is what Trump said in his speech anyway.

And so people started to pat Joe Biden on the back. Other YouTubers started to call themselves Biden bros, like demented morons. And, you know, it's such a childlike thing to say over a surface. They can't look below the surface of what Joe Biden's pullout of Afghanistan was. And I said, well, wait, wait.

He's being allowed to pull out of Afghanistan by the military industrial complex in Wall Street, which is who he serves. And what's he going to do with the money we've been spending on Afghanistan? I want to wait till he has an announcement to say he's going to invest it back in America. And of course, he didn't. They had another war waiting, which is what we've talked about on this show. They had the Ukraine war, which they've been ramping up from since at least 2014, if not a decade before that. Right.

So that's why they allowed Joe Biden to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan and start this new war, which Joe Biden had just committed to another 10 years. So that would be 12 years, at least, of Ukraine war. So I was crossing my fingers that Donald Trump would end this Ukraine war, and he's more of a dealmaker where he tries to find deals. But then he went...

And he's credited with making sure this last round of funding went to Ukraine. So do you think that comes from J.D. Vance's influence and Peter Thiel's influence and the money that they gave to the campaign?

It's certainly possible, but there's any other number of reasons. Trump has many donors. Peter Thiel is just one of them. But with J.D. Vance, he's becoming increasingly influential and he was very influential again during the first campaign. But it's important to keep in mind that like some of, you know, a lot of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign are

are very wealthy Zionists and neoconservatives who try and conflate U.S. foreign policy goals with Israeli regional policy goals. And there has, in Trump's first term, you know, he, one of his biggest donor actually was Sheldon Adelson, who had tried to promote the idea of preemptively nuking Iran. And it was under Trump that Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general, was murdered

during a diplomatic mission that could have easily spiraled into a regional war, but it didn't. And they attempted to coup Venezuela, for example. In the Trump administration, John Bolton was his national security advisor. I think it's likely this time around, it's very possible he'll make similar cabinet choices. For example, there's calls right now for Trump to install Eric Prince as head of the Pentagon in his second term.

And Eric Prince has been going around on podcast appearance after podcast appearance. There have been tweets that have gotten tens of thousands of likes calling for him to be in charge of the Secret Service, if not in charge of the entire military. And this is very unsettling because he was a CIA asset during the Iraq war.

His CIA handler was a man named Alvin Krohngard, who's one of the major suspects in 9-11 insider trading and a former CIA deputy director. And of course, during Blackwater, while Blackwater was a contractor,

Sure, they weren't, you know, Raytheon or whatever, but they killed untold number of innocent civilians and just wreaked havoc and engaged in extreme bad behavior that had extremely dire consequences for the countries where they were operating and operated essentially as the CIA death squad in the Middle East.

So the idea that this is the person that should leave, leave the Pentagon because he wants to privatize our wars. Yes. Back to when the Ukraine conflict started, he was trying to privatize the Ukrainian war before that wanted to privatize the Afghanistan war. So the answer to our imperial wars isn't to privatize them. It should be to end them. So, you know, but if you privatize them, it's going to be very lucrative for all these defense contractors. Right.

And the ones that are seeking to come up and dominate the defense contracting space are these firms like Anduril and Clearview AI and a lot of these other Thiel-connected defense contractors. But of course, there's obviously more in the mix than just them. But I think...

We should consider that. You know, there's more than meets the eye here. And once these people are in office, things change a lot compared to their campaign rhetoric. I mean, I would encourage people to go back and look at Trump's campaign rhetoric when he was campaigning for the first time in 2015 for the 2016 election and what he actually did when he was in office, because a lot of people have forgotten that.

Well, he said he was going to drain the swamp. And the joke that I did at that time was he drained the swamp. And what did he find at the bottom? His cabinet. Yeah, more or less, that's what happened. He wants to put in Jamie Dimon, potentially his treasury secretary. I know, I know. How is that populism? How are people acting like this is a populist ticket? I mean, maybe J.D. Vance has cloaked himself in rhetoric.

And, you know, other things to to be the person that sort of gives this populist anti-establishment wash to Trump. But we have to remember what happened last time and follow the money, because historically in American politics, that's what you have to do to know how things are actually going to turn out. And I would encourage people to be very vigilant about it. But as I noted in my article, one of the main reasons to be concerned about Peter Thiel is that the company he's made Palantir is at the heart.

Of the surveillance state and including on the war of domestic terror and some of his companies brag about targeting Trump supporters expressly. Clearview AI brags about helping law enforcement send people that were present at the Capitol in January 6th to prison. It's in their sales pitch.

This is a company deeply tied to Peter Thiel. And I think people should, you know, think, you know, look at the evidence and look at, you know, again, follow the money. That's how you figure out how things actually work. So what did Trump. So this is an irony is that one of Trump and Dave Vance's biggest donors is has a video out. I think it's on YouTube even that brags about using their money.

their software their their programs to identify january 6 protesters and put him in jail it seems so crazy and then uh they're all buddied up with this guy and then well so just to get back really quickly so eric prince uh

His big idea for Gaza was to flood it with ocean water. Imagine if he's in charge of the Pentagon. He wanted to flood all of Gaza. Flood it. That would flood the tunnels. Kill everybody. He would just make the whole place like a Noah's Ark flood.

And that was his big idea. And he was upset that the Pentagon wouldn't let him do it.

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So we have a guest with us, Craig Pasta is the co-host of the Convo Couch, an independent talk show discussing and analyzing the daily news cycle and featuring up-and-coming grassroots personalities. He also has a new show called Pasta to Go, where he dives into the world of food and culture around the globe. Please welcome back to the show our pal Craig Pasta Giardula. Hey, Craig, how are you? Doing good, Jimmy. How about yourself? Good. Where are you right now?

I'm actually just flew in the Florida last night. I'm attending a event this weekend with Kim Iverson, and then I'm off to Nicaragua and then to Venezuela to observe that election. So now the reason why we have Craig on for this story, because this story is about election integrity. So they tried to they passed this new bill in the Senate. I mean, no, in the House. It's called the Save Act. Our speaker, Mike Johnson, he says the Save Act.

will safeguard our elections by ensuring only American citizens vote in federal elections. And I just say, why is Mike Johnson such a complete racist and a homophobe and an anti-Semite? And I know I have the rest of the list somewhere, but he's all those things. If you're asking for... So here's what he says it'll do. He says this act will require state election officials to ask about citizenship before providing voter registration forms.

Boy, that seems very racist. Requires an individual to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections.

It allows state officials to accept a wide variety of documents that will make it easy for citizens to register to vote in federal elections. Also, it provides states with access to federal agency databases so they can remove non-citizens from voter rolls and confirm citizenship for individuals lacking proof of citizenship. Wow.

How dare you demand someone tell you where they are from when they're entering the country? That's what I say. The last thing you want to do now is come up with a reason for them not to become soldiers. Am I right? Here's a little bit more. He goes, direct the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether to conduct removal proceedings if a non-citizen has been identified as having registered to vote in federal elections.

require DHS to notify a state chief election official whenever an individual has been naturalized to ensure our newest citizens are able to exercise their right to vote. Wow. And then give them a credit card and free medical. That's the guy you're going to vote for, right? So, by the way, Elon Musk says those who oppose this are in all caps traitors.

And then he says, what's the penalty for traitors again? I think he's, I don't think that's good. I think he's, that's stochastic violence. So, Craig, the reason why I have you on is because you're an election integrity specialist and you found out that most other countries ask you to, well, aren't people in fact think it's crazy that they don't demand an ID? Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, when I was in Nicaragua, there was one of our tour guides was asked me several times. They really don't let you vote in the United States without an I.D.

because in Nicaragua, you had to have an ID to vote. And I kept telling him, yeah, you don't need ID to vote in Los Angeles. You can vote without ID. And he said, why don't they just make it easier to get an ID? If that's the complaint from the Democrats saying that a lot of people can't get access to get an ID. He was just dumbfounded. And whether I was in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, you need ID.

Nicaragua, you need an ID to vote, and that's just plain and simple. And those people in Central or Latin and South America, I don't know where Latin America is. I know where Central is up, but I know... But according to Dan Quayle, he was glad he paid attention in Latin class. And he also was...

When he goes to the Arctic, he hopes he can speak articulately. Anyway, that's an old Rich, what you call his joke? I'm blanking on his last name. So they think it's crazy that we don't have, and I also think, now this is going to sound maybe crazy to some people, I think it's a bit racist to not demand voter ID because people say, well, I'm going to show you what people say in a minute. But you're assuming black people are so feeble

That they can't get an ID. First of all, you can't rent a car without an ID. You can't rent a hotel room without an ID. You can't ride on an airline flight. You can't make an airline without an ID.

There's almost nothing you can do. You can't get a credit card without an ID. You can't buy cigarettes or alcohol without an ID. There's nothing you can't do. You have to have an ID for that. Except vote! Except vote. And to say that black people...

are somehow so feeble that they can't get an ID. I used to be, I used to, I flipped on this until I talked to you, Craig. I used to be, yeah, because they say it'll disenfranchise certain amounts of black people. And then you're like, yeah, but that's, and then I'm like, yeah, it is crazy. Here's what people said about this.

So this guy says, if you did what you said you were going to do, we'd have closed the borders and have less of a need for the SAVE Act. 5,000 illegal aliens crossed the border today. So far, you lack a spine. But here's the even more interesting point.

Paul S. Sapula says the Senate is never going to prove this. You failed, Speaker Johnson. Your only leverage was funding and you gave Joe Biden a blank check. Shame on you. You're part of the problem. So he's he's saying.

The House and the Speaker of the House has the power of the purse, and that's what you could have used as leverage to make sure the Senate passed this, and he didn't. So he knew that the Senate wasn't going to pass it, and guess what? The Democrats just blocked the SAVE Act. Yeah. So is there any legitimate reason, Craig, for them to be against the SAVE Act?

I don't know if there's any legitimate reason to be against it other than to fundraise and continue to call your opposition racist. They're allowed to stick to the script that way.

So I don't know why they would necessarily, you know, vote against it. But I do want to make one important point here, Jimmy. And I have a lot of points written down to talk about when it comes to the SAVE Act. It won't fix the problem, you know, because immigrants really don't vote in mass and national and national elections. They just don't. They hide in the shadows. You know, they there's they don't commit as much crime as American citizens. That's just the cold, hard fact.

Right. But what this is really doing, Jimmy, and I think people need to when they look into this, it's not so much about stopping immigrants from

from voting. It's stopping the establishment from exploiting an immigrant's ballot that's automatically given to them, right? So in Nevada, for instance, when you go to obtain a driver's license or re-register for your driver's license, you're automatically registered to vote. And not only are you automatically registered to vote, you get a mail-in ballot a month before the election.

And in Nevada, they have vote centers, ballot harvesting and drop boxes. So it's not so much, you know, that they're going to stop immigrants from voting. They're going to stop the mechanism in which immigrants are exploited for their ballots because you don't need voters to fraudulently swing an election. You just need ballots. And in today's age with drop boxes and a ballot harvesting legal in 27 states,

it's easy to swing an election when you have mass mail out balloting and in states like Nevada and California and in New York,

You know, we lived in California for many years. You know, they they allow undocumented workers to get a license. They want them to do that. So therefore, if they automatically register them, they get a ballot. It's where does that ballot end up and whose hands and then who has the ability to use it? So it's it's stopping the mechanism of exploiting the ballots of immigrants that come across the border. Tell people what ballot harvesting is, please.

Ballot harvesting means that you or I or anybody else can hand in someone's ballot. In other words, I can take as many ballots as I want and put them in a drop box. I can grab my aunt Betsy's ballot, my uncle's ballot, my mother's ballot, my neighbor's ballot.

Any ballots, right? So if there's loose ballots floating around, the way that you fraudulently swing an election is you get as many ballots out there as possible with no chain of custody. We have no chain of custody and a ton of ballots floating out everywhere because there's shotguns all over the place.

So when if I can take in 25 different ballots and I bought a bunch of ballots from somebody who went around and collected a bunch of ballots that were in the trash or, you know, when they try to return to sender and all those things, then I can sway an election because I have all these ballots. And if I can generate illegal immigrants, ballots or undocumented workers, then I can sway in a whole election because there's so many ballots out there.

I did see that you saw the videos of the people doing the ballot harvest. I saw, well, with Tim Canova's election, we saw them. There's no chain of custody. People are showing up with ballot boxes full of ballots in their trunk, putting it into a U-Haul box.

So, you know, before 2020, the Democrats used to scream about the lack of integrity in our voting system and our election systems. They don't do it anymore. Right. But so I just want to show you here's a here's a I just got to jump to this part. Here's a black representative. And here's what he has to say about the this the save act speaker.

I rise today in support of HRA 281, the SAVE Act. For years, Democrats have called Republicans conspiracy theorists for stating Democrats want illegal aliens to vote in our elections. Yet President Biden and every single Democrat in Washington want this bill to fail. If Biden and Democrats want to clear up this conspiracy theory, Mr. President, when this bill passes, make sure you sign it into law.

And on another note, I've been black for my entire life. Really? I'd like to bring up the most racist thing I've ever heard is the insinuation by Democrats that black and brown Americans are too stupid to get an ideal vote, just like everybody else. I call this the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Figuring out how to vote in this country is a very low bar. And we can all figure it out regardless of your race, religion, color, or creed. And we should all want free and fair elections. With me today, I'm not going to pull mine out this time, but I have six forms of government issue ID. How did I acquire that?

Personal responsibility in this country. I've also heard a lot about Jim Crow here today. I'm here to tell you Jim Crow is over and I know it because my parents grew up in it. And I think it's actually insulting to those that actually experienced the ills of Jim Crow. Having an idea to vote in our national election should be a requirement, which is why I stand before you today urging my colleagues on the left to support this bill.

If you want secure elections, if you want your vote to count, vote for the save act. So this isn't as so that's a black guy saying that it's actually racist and insulting to say that black people could because that's what they always say. And I want to show you some video of the people saying that. Let's watch this. This bill is essentially a poll tax.

Because I am not aware of a single proof of citizenship document that does not cost an individual money to get it. Unless we are requiring every state to provide one for free, and then it's on unfunded mandate. Hey, why don't you just have people show their vaccine passport? You gave those to people for free? Why not that? Somehow, I had to have a vaccine passport to buy a burrito. Ha!

I'd have a vaccine passport to go have lunch. But to have an ID to vote is somehow a bridge too far for these motherfuckers.

Hey, Jimmy. Yeah. But by the way, one of the most interesting things that I found out in the seven Latin American countries I went to to observe elections, the grassroots wants IDs. In fact, they want more identifications for the individuals because they understand and they're way more educated on their elections than we are the citizens. They understand the easiest way for the ruling class to steal an election is to create more votes. If you

don't have ID laws, then you can create more ballots and more votes that way. It's less trackable. There's ways to steal an election if, in fact, IDs aren't brought about. So when you go to these other countries, it's the poor grassroots that are actually demanding

That you have ID in Colombia. They wanted like the verification, like the electronical thumbprint verification. They wanted that there because they understand if you don't have these voter ID laws and you don't present an ID, the ruling class can then create votes and steal an election. That's the crazy part about what we're talking about.

Here's some more from that same session of Congress. Hypotheticals. It is under attack right now, right here with this very bill. Republicans want to throw up barriers because when people vote, they lose. Let me be clear. They don't want you to vote. They don't want to hear black voices, brown voices, LGBTQIA voices, young voices. Our fundamental access to our democracy is being politicized. And this xenophobic attack that we're debating today

So you're telling me gay people also can't get IDs? Not gay people, young people. Every young person I know has a driver's license. Every young person I know has to get an ID when they go to college. Every person, so it's not just black people. So black people somehow can't figure it out. This is unbelievably insulting. Yeah, yeah. If she says comedians, I'd be like, fuck you, I know how to get an ID.

Here we go. They will make it harder for Americans to vote. My Republican colleagues will claim that requiring IDs is a small ask, but nearly 30 million people lack a valid driver's license. And about 15 to 18 million adults don't have access to documents proving their birth or citizenship. So how did they get their vaccine passports? That's my question. How were you able to verify them when they got their vaccine? Somehow you did it. You were for that. I know she was for that. You know she was for that. Yeah.

How are you able to verify them for their vaccines? So what do you say to that when she says 30 million Americans lack a driver's license? Are those 30 million people who just... Is she counting children who aren't older? That's what I think she's doing. I think she's counting children and people who live in New York City who don't want to get a driver's license because they don't drive. She must be counting... And then she says 15 million Americans who lack the documentation...

to get a how do they know that how do they you know reminds me of an old joke uh you know four four out of four out of five people who suffer from diabetes don't know it well really if they don't know how do you and if you know why don't you tell them so how does this how do they how do they know that 15 million america 15 million america first of all that's

That's about as many people as they let in undocumented on a monthly basis in the United States. I'm exaggerating, but how do you think they know that? That 15 million Americans don't... They don't have... So they don't have a birth certificate? Is that what she's saying? I mean...

It's just an exploitation of poor people, which he's just trying to use. I mean, this is a tactic they've been using for quite some time, Jimmy, because a lot of Democratic voters, unfortunately, they think with their feelings and not their brains, and they don't do the homework there. And if you want to fix this problem, the two things that they talk about, number one, they can't get an ID. Make it easier for them to get an ID. I keep screaming this.

Because that's what it should be. And like you said, they made it easy for everybody to get a vaccine passport. Well, make it easy for everybody to get an ID. And if it's a financial thing, hey, it's a poll tax. Why don't you give us a working economy where we don't have to worry about the finances to go get an ID if you really want to fix this problem? But they love to call you a xenophobe. They love to call it. Here we go. Watch this.

Republicans is for them to lay the groundwork to undermine the outcome of the presidential election, just as they did four years ago, just as they will again and again until they realize either the futility of this exercise or the republic crumbles. I pray for the former. He's going to say if you if you demand a voter I.D., the republic will crumble. Did you hear that's what he said? Yeah. So it's the exact opposite.

Right. So according to you, an election expert, election integrity expert, it's the exact opposite. That if you don't have some kind of controls on who gets ballots and a chain of custody, that that's how you rig elections.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, go ahead. Good. Sorry. I was going to say, like every election that I see and what we need over here has to be transparent, a strict chain of custody, and it needs to be publicly verifiable. And with the systems that are in play in the United States, it just doesn't happen that way. And this is why I think, Jimmy, that, you know, when we have selections instead of elections.

the people's will is never brought to the forefront. It's always what the donors want because they can simply control who gets in and who gets out. And here's the leader of the Democrats in the House, Hakeem Jeffries. Only citizens can vote for the United States Senate. Only citizens can vote for the presidency of the United States. So this extreme mega-Republican voter suppression bill is not designed to solve any problem on behalf of the American people.

It is designed to jam people up and prevent Americans from voting. The extreme mega Republican voter suppression. So what do you say? What do you say to him saying that it's going to jam people up?

Yeah, well, I think he should look over the overall system of our elections and try to figure out why people got to stay at the voting spots for six to eight hours like they did in UCLA. Yeah, that's just. Yes. That's how you jam people up. You make them stand in line for hours and hours to vote. That's how. And they don't care about that, do they? They didn't care what had happened when it looked like Bernie Sanders was going to win.

So in 2004, I think it was, it was James Baker and Jimmy Carter had a bipartisan convention and they came out of that convention as Republicans and Democrats saying the area that's most ripe for fraud is the mail-in process. Well, they didn't.

put this mail-in process on steroids for the 2020 election. And they found an easy way to do what they needed to do. Right. I don't want to, well, I can say we're not on YouTube, right. They found a way to, to, uh, fraudulently steal the election. In my personal opinion, from looking at it, uh,

and they don't want to get that mechanism removed away from them because if they can control that mail-in process, and this is what this is about. When you look at the safe act, it's about removing the mechanism in which ballots are just generated at a mass amount. If that's removed from them, I think they're just fearful that they'll lose a lot of elections where they have this in place because a lot of these States like Nevada, these laws were made an emergency faction during the COVID. Well,

they made them permanent in some of these laws. It's not just mailing ballots. It's mass mail-in ballots. So it's like everybody on the voters list in Nevada gets a mail-in ballot. So literally there was millions of ballots out there floating, never turned in. You know, they're just out there for anybody who wants to commit fraud and especially the establishment to grab a hold of and then make, you know, push an election the way they want. So if they remove this mechanism from them, they're not going to have their way.

it's, I, I think it's, it, it, you know, when, again, it was talking with you when you told me how people in Latin America, wherever that is, um, they don't speak Latin. I'll tell you that. Uh,

when they were outraged that you didn't have to have a ID, I was like, ah, something's up. And then I saw a guy do a video where he went into black neighborhoods around the United States and he asked them, is it hard for you to get an ID? And they looked at him like he had two heads, like, what are you talking about? Black people, is it tough for black people? He goes, no, I got an ID. Everybody's got a, how can you do anything? You can't do anything without an ID. And that's when I was like, that seems, that does seem crazy.

And I guess I would challenge the veracity of her numbers, her 30 million, 15 million number. I'd like to challenge that. Invite her on the show.

I do say, Jimmy, that the good thing about this is this is going to educate the public on how elections are run. Remember, Article 1 directs the states to control the elections. Federal law is only guaranteed voting rights, not procedures. And the good thing is of this particular bill, it's getting people's wheels turning and learning the system how it works.

The bad thing is it's not going to fix the problem. You know, my friend in Nevada, Ellen Swenson, she's an election integrity activist. She did some numbers in 2022 and she saw that there were 40,000 illegitimate votes that were cast. Why? Because people who live in Vegas, they move on, they die, they don't live there, but they're still on the voter list. So they were mailing out ballots to people who weren't even living there, who weren't even alive.

And literally a lot of your seats in that particular election in 2022, the Secretary of State won. That was decided by 12,000 votes. So you can just imagine how you can really mess up an election or sway an election when you have mass mail-in ballots. And with ballot harvesting, you or I can take as many ballots as you want and put them in that drop box. Okay. All right. Well, Craig Pasta Jardul, I appreciate your...

Your insight and expertise on this. And I hope it wakes people up to, you know, what the real problem is. And I didn't know that. I didn't know that they I didn't know that all the stuff that they just gave out ballots to mail mail and ballots does seem problematic. I got it. Do you think they'll ever get rid of them?

Well, if they went back to the old rules of mail-in ballots, the old rules, Jimmy, were that every election, if you wanted a mail-in ballot because you couldn't make it to the polls because of an injury or age or sickness, whatever it is, every election you had to re-register for that ballot.

Now it's different. In Arizona, in Maricopa County, if you voted in the last 10 years, you're on that list of ballots being sent out to you. So they don't clean these lists up at all. And I think in the case of Carrie Lake's election, about 1.8 million ballots were mailed out a month early. Only like 8%.

800,000 were turned in. So once again, you got a million ballots just floating out there. So it's not just mail-in ballots. It's also the way they create these lists to distribute the ballots. There's no chain of custody when they're mailed in, but there's also no chain of custody from the printing company when they're mailed to you. So there's so many different problems. When you go to Nicaragua,

The chain of custody starts at the door. The ballots are there. They're counted in front of the people. So it's almost impossible to cheat and steal that election because it's done in front of the purview of the citizens. With mail-in ballots and mass mail-in ballots in particular, that thing is just obliterated. And I want to show you, here's a list of all the countries that

Full or partially democratic countries that require ID to register to vote or cast a ballot on election day in all districts. For Iceland, oh, you know those racists. Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, the Nazis over in Germany, Austria, United Kingdom, Malta, Spain, Mauritius,

Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Cape Verde. Where is Cape Verde? Sounds like you want to go there for a vacation, right? And eat things that are green. It's in Africa. It must be a nice part of Africa to be called Cape Verde. South Korea, Costa Rica. Look at all. So anyway, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Mexico.

uh montenegro ukraine freaking ukraine okay mali fiji they have the they have the water not as nice as you think it is a lot of problems with the fiji water anyway so there it is kyrgyzstan okay uh oh united states no haiti does but not here united states no

Okay. All right. Craig Pasta Jardula, thank you for joining us. Good to see you. Thank you for having me on, Jimmy. I'll see you in Chicago. See you in Chicago, pal. Hi, everybody. We have a special guest with us today. He is a leftist social critic.

what does that mean anymore i don't know what that means anymore i don't know what he's he's against the war so he's probably a right winger that's what i think uh he's he's against he's against censorship so you know he's maga uh i don't i don't know um anyway he is a citizen journalist and a commentator it's nick cruz who's also a host and co-founder of the revolutionary blackout network welcome back to the show nick cruz

What's popping, Jimmy? They're so crazy now. What do they even mean to be on the left anymore? We have leftist children for the CIA, FBI, NATO. You got NATO leftists. You got the squad that's now part of K-Hive, Jimmy. They are now enthusiastically endorsing the cop, Kamala Harris. So,

I like to view myself as what it means to truly be on the left. If you took the original definition when it spawned from the French Revolution, someone who was advocating for social change, for the betterment of the working class. You can't call yourself on the left if you support the military-industrial complex and you believe that they actually work in good faith. That's essentially the social Democrat wing, and I'm a fierce critic of them. And it's very confusing to me.

The left-right divide. A lot of people stuck in 2015. It's way different now. Now, when you say the Social Democrats, do you mean the DSA?

The DSA, you have CPUSA, you have people who claim they are communists. You have people who claim they are socialists who then make an argument why we should vote for genocide Joe Biden. And I don't associate with those people. If you're not on the streets organizing, if you're not doing mutual aid, you're just a fan of said ideology. You have CPUSA that endorsed Joe Biden, and now they said to endorse Kamala Harris.

And I don't associate myself with those leftists. The United States left, in terms of the global stage, is considered a joke. I talk to global international journalists all the time on RBN. They laugh at the idea of a U.S. left. And that's why we're trying to build an RBN. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Being a leftist is being gaslighted to death in the United States. Get this.

being upset that you don't worship war criminals. But that's what we try. That's what we try to do. We try to advocate for a real left that's critical of all wars, a true anti-war, anti-genocide, anti-ruling class coalition. And that's not what you advocate for, which is the social democrats, the Bernie Sanders, who believe in the devil's bargain that they should sell out the global working class and support war so they can get crumbs. That's not a leftist in no sense of the imagination. So I...

I heard someone explain it like this, the big difference between the left in the United States and the left, say, in France.

is that in France the left is connected to workers, blue collar workers, right? In the United States the left is represented by the professional managerial class and what they worry about is how many people of color do we have on the board instead of hey how do we get a living wage for everybody? How do we get healthcare for everybody? So they're more concerned about identity politics

in the United States than they are about actual material helping out of the working class and raising their economic standards, right? Would that make sense?

Yeah. And things are so messed up in the United States, Jimmy, because like, how do you even get started? For example, the Tories in the UK, they're considered a right wing party, right? They support universal health care. I know. So what do we even talk about in terms of the United States? Because what is considered left is so far removed. AOC, Bernie, they don't even talk about medical for all no more. I completely go ahead and even talk about the public option, which Joe Biden ran on.

Yeah. Yeah. And there are a lot of people, especially a lot of pretend socialists in the United States. They believe what it means to be a socialist is advocating liberal social policy. They think they're socialists because they advocate for trans people, because they advocate for whatever rights they talk about. That has nothing to do with what it means to be a socialist. I've rejected all forms

liberalism from, I'm a very socially liberal by the way, but that has nothing to do with politics. The culture war generally have nothing to do in politics. Just to understand how confused, to highlight how confused a lot of people on the left are, do you guys know that there's a lot of communists and socialists in the global south who are extremely religious Christians who are against abortion, for example? So the Bernie left, they would cancel the same

black evangelical voting base that support Lula, for example. Lula is very socially conservative because he has a large base of poor black evangelical socialists who advocate for the needs and benefit of the working class, but they're not for abortion, man.

Then they have anti-gay thoughts and the left in the United States will cancel them. And to be clear, I'm very socially liberal, but I don't I don't consider that. I don't consider that part of that's a culture issue. And socialists and left should be worried about working class issues, connecting people to challenge the ruling class. That's not our battle to be battling among the culture wars. That's why I truly believe.

That's a great point that you never hear anybody else make but you, is that the people in the global south consider themselves socialists and for real, and they would be canceled by the liberal class in the United States because they don't adhere to their policies on abortion or the LGBTQIA+.

So that's a really interesting point that people, yeah, they would cancel and they would call them MAGA because they don't play along with the identity politics. And by the way, we all got a good lesson during COVID that the people who used to say my body, my choice never really meant that. What they really meant was they were pro-abortion. They're not for a woman's right to choose because they're not for a woman's right to choose. Exactly.

not to take an experimental medical therapy called a mandated vaccine. They're not, they were for the mandates. They were for Joe Biden who mandated those vaccines. He had to be stopped by the Supreme court. And so they're not, so I'm actually for bodily autonomy and my body, my choice. And they would say that makes me a right winger. So if you're for my body, my choice, you're a right winger. If you're anti-censorship, free speech, you're right winger. And if you're anti-war Ukraine war, you're right. So all these things, uh,

that classic lefty positions, they've now managed to make people think they are right wing positions, which is why all my asshole friends from Hollywood and comedy call me a right winger because I don't go along with the Democratic Party, which is an anti-worker pro-war party.

pro-Wall Street Party. They don't even have any idea that the Democratic Party isn't a left-wing party. As you point out, if Joe Biden was a politician in the UK even, he would be considered an extreme right-winger because he's against universal health care. That would put him all the way on the outskirts of on the right. Anyway, well, that was... I didn't realize that...

That introduction would lead to such an interesting conversation about what it means to be left and right, but that certainly was interesting. Hey, become a premium member. Go to JimmyDoreComedy.com. Sign up. It's the most affordable premium program in the business.

Don't freak out. Don't freak out. All the voices performed today are by the one and only, the inimitable Mike McRae. He can be found at MikeMcRae.com. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. That's it for this week. You be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me. Don't freak out. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't freak out. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out.

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