cover of episode SHOCKING! CNN Actually DEFENDS Joe Rogan & Bernie Sanders!

SHOCKING! CNN Actually DEFENDS Joe Rogan & Bernie Sanders!

2024/11/13
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The discussion revolves around whether Democrats should have accepted Joe Rogan's influence and how Bernie Sanders' appearance on his podcast was received.
  • Bernie Sanders faced backlash for appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast.
  • Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump, raising questions about his impact on the election.
  • Democrats are criticized for shunning alternative media.

Shownotes Transcript

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Medium speeds and jumps to medium and hits them head on. It's the Jimmy Dore Show. Welcome to Jimmy Dore Show, everybody. Keaton Weiss here with Russell Dabler filling in for Jimmy this week while he is on tour. Go to JimmyDore.com for tickets to catch him in a town near you. We're talking a lot today, a lot today about...

Bernie Sanders, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, same names coming up in a lot of these stories. Well, the news is the news, folks. We don't control it. We just report it. We don't make the news. That's right. That's right. We just report it. We don't make it. The gas stove, Dana Bash, asked Bernie Sanders about the vilification of

of attending Joe Rogan by the Democrats. So one of the narratives after this election is that Donald Trump's pitch to the Manosphere, going on the Joe Rogan podcast and the Theo Vaughn podcast, the real pitch to alternative media, is one of the things that really padded his landslide victory. Now, Bernie Sanders tried going on the Joe Rogan podcast back when he ran for president. He went on for about an hour, didn't go three hours the way Trump did.

But he got a lot of pushback from party leaders, including surrogates like AOC, who were reportedly not happy with his decision to go on the show. And so now there is a bit of second guessing. Hey, should we have been so hard on Bernie for going on Joe Rogan now that this seemed to work pretty well for Donald Trump? So here's this interaction here on CNN. Exactly.

An example, perhaps, of this kind of dynamic that we're hearing about: Joe Rogan, very popular podcaster, he endorsed Donald Trump in the final days of the election. Four years ago, you went on his podcast. You got a lot of blowback for doing that and for touting that he endorsed you. So is this the kind of example of Democrats perhaps shunning or vilifying people who don't totally agree with them?

Yeah, I think that's fair enough. Look, you can have an argument with Rogan, agree with him, disagree with him, but what's the problem going on in those shows? It's hard for me to understand that. So I think we've got to get, and clearly you have an alternative media out there, a lot of podcasts that have millions and millions of viewers.

Get on the show. Disagree with you here. I agree with you there. I don't see a problem in doing that. And you're right. I got vilified by some of the Democratic establishment because I went on Rogan's show. Now a lot of other people are doing just that. Not just by the Democratic establishment, by AOC. AOC was reportedly very unhappy with his...

to go on the show and the decision to tout the endorsement. That's what really got him in trouble. Joe Rogan came out and said he was going to vote for Bernie Sanders, and the campaign made a big thing of it, as they were right to have, and that got a lot of pushback. So now... AOC came into my office. I was very surprised to see her wearing a strap-on. I was even more surprised to see it was in the shape of Nancy Pelosi. Yeah.

And she pegged me over my desk. That's true.

That's true. Made me apologize. She said she would come back the next day and do it again if I didn't apologize. If I didn't apologize. So I had no choice. So here's Dana Bash talking about that interaction. I guess this was the next morning or something. She's got a different wardrobe. So this was on a different block. But here she is. I wanted to ask him about Joe Rogan is because in the days since the election, you've heard a lot of Democrats saying we need to find our own Joe Rogan.

And Joe Rogan was their Joe Rogan. There you have it. Joe Rogan was basically a Bernie supporter. He was. He was. That's funny. That's too late.

Five years later, five years later, he endorses Donald Trump. That's so funny. That's so funny how now Hitler's going to be president again. Absolutely. Bernie has been completely neutered and has no political power and can't get 25 people to show up to his appearances. And I wanted to sort of illuminate this, shine a light on this with my interview with Senator Sanders was funny.

That, to me, is such a prime example of where Democrats have kind of lost those people. Now, the point I was making with him is that there are a lot of things that Joe Rogan says and believes that a lot of Democrats just totally shun. He's said not great things about Democrats.

some social issues that Democrats don't agree with. Like he doesn't believe in intersex cage fighting, I guess. Is that what they're talking about? I guess so. I guess they're obsessed with that. And once again, I will say to our many anti-communist, anti-Marxist friends, while we have this freeze frame of Dana Bash, listen, part of the program is her working in the soybean fields. Yeah.

OK, that's part of the program. You grab Dana Bash, you drag her out of her luxury high rise and you send her out into the fields. He doesn't support vaccines. And so that is part of the reason why when Bernie Sanders went on the show. He took a medicine that a doctor told him to take. That's another big no-no.

He took a medicine. I won't say what it is. I don't know what the rules are over there. But he took a medicine that his doctor told him. No, but they got to clip it for YouTube. So they took a medicine that the doctor told him to take. That's a big no-no. That's a big no-no. Flintstones vitamins. Yeah, Flintstones vitamins. That's right. That's right. And so that was the other sin. Oh, he got vilified. But him getting vilified...

by a lot of people on the left is case in point of the intolerance among a lot of people in the Democratic Party who claim that their whole mission is to be tolerant.

One, isn't that kind of a central piece of the conversation Democrats are having now about why this happened? It is. It is. It is. And that's precisely why. Now, Bernie's Bernie. This is blowing my mind. I haven't actually seen it. Bernie, but I agree with you. You know, his whole thing is we we we our policies are not geared toward the working people. We went back and forth on that because.

President Biden's policies were geared toward the working people in a lot of ways. No, they weren't. Unless you were a railroad working person. They never were. This is what is revealed by this election is that 2020 was the fluke, not 2016. 2016 was actually the leading indicator. That was the canary in the coal mine. It was 2020. That was the fluke. No, Biden didn't run on fluke.

working class issues biden ran on the guy who if you will voted for him you might be able to go in the supermarket without a mask on your face anymore like that was basically his pitch

is, hey, this guy's an incompetent manager. You got a cloth on your face. You want to take it off? You're going to have to take it off on our terms. I can get you to a place where you can take it off. You get the thing in the thing here. You get one of these right here, and then you take the cloth off the face. That was it. I mean, that's basically how he drove up his votes. There was no working class agenda under Joe Biden. And these people sit here, and they talk about how Bernie was able to communicate to Joe Rogan, and they had the Democrats on their side, as if they played no part

In sabotaging that movement. In destroying that movement. In making sure they could never get off the ground. That's what I'm saying. Five years ago, they were exactly the people who gatekept Bernie talking to Joe Rogan. Well, Joe Rogan has said a lot of things that have really upset a lot of communities that are core to the Democratic Party. That's the song they were singing then. Now, they always...

are willing to concede these points once they will have no political impact whatsoever. Right. That's when they'll concede. It's too late to do anything about it. That's when they started asking questions about the Iraq war, once it was too late to do anything about it. Too late. Right. That's when they started beating up on Israel a little bit after Gaza was already flattened. Yep. Right? Yeah. No, it's just always when there's nothing that can be done. So this tweet went kind of viral. This is kind of what she's talking about here. Oh, this fucking moron. Yeah.

8.2 million views. People saying Harris should have done Joe Rogan are missing the point. That wouldn't have helped her. Liberals need to build their own Joe Rogan. Somebody who can speak to the people he speaks to without being a guy who wants to kiss ass to billionaires.

like Elon Musk. So, friend of show Jimmy Dore tweets out, "Liberals have their own Joe Rogan." Joe Rogan, he's a classic liberal. The Democrats aren't. They are now neocon warmongering fascists who are anti-worker and crush union strikes, fund genocides, tear gas college students, censors of free speech, and are anti-First Amendment authoritarians

anti-bodily autonomy, and anti-women. The Democrats have Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Howard Stern, The View, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, Pod Save America, etc., etc., etc.,

Of course, they won't get the message or do any introspection of what is wrong with them or why people making under $50,000 don't vote for them anymore. They think they just need a smooth talker who can dress up neoconservative policies and trick workers into voting against their own interests. Instead, these people are the most ridiculously out-of-touch elites I've seen in my lifetime. And, well, that's true. And even as Dana Bash says, hey, you know what? Maybe, maybe...

the party was too hard on bernie for going on joe rogan again just completely goes over their head that they were amongst the loudest people shouting him down for doing that of course this is just a mess of their own making and the the question really does have to be asked like

Looking back, do they actually have regrets about treating the Bernie movement the way they did? Because that was really the off ramp to this. And they would have gotten off pretty cheap. He wouldn't have been able to do the kind of transformational things that he wanted to do. They'd have been able to block most of that shit. You're talking about paid leave would have gotten through. And then they would have kept all the people like us inside the party. Yeah.

Instead of agitating from outside. But I'm saying if they had just let him win, look, would we have all been so red pilled by that election? If they just let Bernie, no, we'd probably all still be Democrats. We'd all be like one day guys, one day we'd all still be singing that song. If they had just let Bernie win.

I mean, even if you're not coming at this from the perspective of, OK, we need to really invest in the Democratic Party long term. Right. And I'm not saying that these media people aren't Democrats. A vast, vast, vast majority of them are. Even if you're just looking at this from a lesser of two evils perspective, even if you have, you know, severe Trump derangement syndrome and you really do fear for the future of the republic now over these next four years, you could have avoided all that pretty cheap.

Right. I mean, you would have had to give up one or two social programs. You would have to enact one or two social programs that you probably don't want to because it probably takes the boot a little too far off working people's necks for your liking. But now, given where you are now, that's got to look like a pretty good bargain in retrospect. And that's what I'm saying. You wouldn't have had all these people leave the Democratic Party.

If you had just done that, your whole political project would be intact now. Of course. Of course. You would have had things basically done.

The way they were with one or two more social programs that you probably didn't want, but okay. Would you rather that, or would you rather be staring down now? Trump term too. Well, and when you look at how they play these things at all, it always reminds me of when they talk about, uh, you know, hunters or tribes that use every part of the animal. That's what the media is like. You know, they use, they use every part of the animal, you know, first they suppress, uh,

any kind of progressive movement and they profit and benefit from that. And then when everything they've told people is proven to be wrong, then they use that to show themselves to be fair and impartial and objective by critiquing what their own side, what is clearly their own side, critiquing the establishment when it doesn't matter at all.

when it doesn't matter at all they they they are completely opportunistic and parasitic they take advantage of every turn in the news cycle to spin the myth

Of their own validity as news gathering organizations rather than propagandists. That's the purpose of that segment to show that, no, no, we're not in anyone's pocket. Look, look, we support Bernie. Yeah, look at us pushing back on the Joe Rogan narrative now that it doesn't matter at all.

Well, this is the question is, do they revert back to old ways or do they see something like... Oh, they just go back to old ways? We've seen this before. They always do this. But now the question is...

Do they reexamine that bargain? Do they see this as the only way out, the only way to salvage any part of the system that they love so dearly? Because if you look back at the initial bargain, that's really what the Bernie thing was. And that's what we said it was. We basically were saying, look, this is basically the last chance to save this country the easy way. Right. If you don't do it the easy way, it's going to be a lot harder down the road. And so...

Now, option A is off the table. Do they reexamine that as perhaps the only way forward? I mean, you do have people coming out now and saying, as they have said in the past, that's true. But they have not been staring down this in the past. They blamed the first Trump victory on Russia. They said Hillary won the popular vote. It was a fluke. It was 80,000 votes spread across three states and, you know, blah, blah, blah. He caught us by surprise and the Russians helped and all this.

This is different. This is you lost in a landslide. He now has a mandate. You are now looking at a very, very strong possibility that this becomes a new cultural wave, that this becomes another Reagan era where you got Trump for four and J.D. Vance for eight. Right. So at that point.

When you don't think you can wiggle out of this by, you know, putting together enough votes in the Philadelphia suburbs or whatever the fuck your plan was this time. At that point, you do have to reexamine these questions. Yeah, exactly. At that point, you do have to reexamine these questions, I think. Yes, but it's really existential for them because as we were touching on a little bit with Lee, the whole thing is just a grift.

It's just a grift. It's just a way to stuff money into the pockets of the elite classes, and they're no good kids who move into politics, and through the family contacts they have, they get their jobs in these lobbying firms and these consulting firms and these political offices. It's a big fucking business for them.

There's no, there's no reason. It's like saying, well, you know, if you're, if you're an arms dealer and you can't sell any more arms, you're going to start a, a, a NGO for peace. Why would you do that? You're not, you're, you're, you're, you're lost, right? At that point you lost. What's their incentive to become something other than what they are when the whole thing is just a big grift.

It would have to be taken down from the outside. They're not going to reform. They have no motivation to. As long as they can keep people like George Soros writing the big checks, they can keep losing. They can keep getting rich losing. Like why reform? Well, because you have to be able to win a certain percentage of the time in order to be bribable, right? I mean people aren't going to bribe an unbribable party.

They'll have their blue states. They'll just be completely... Big money is in these national campaigns. I don't think they're going to be a viable national party for much longer. Well, maybe. Well, that could be. Yeah, they could collapse as a national party. But will they reform?

I mean, reforming, they might as well collapse because it's not its purpose is not politics. Its purpose is enrichment of its members. Oh, sure. Sure. Hey, you know, here's another great way you can help support the show is you become a premium member. We give you a couple of hours of premium bonus content every week.

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Welcome to the Jimmy Dore Show, everybody. Keaton Weiss here with Russell Dabula filling in for Jimmy this week. There we are. So after Trump's landslide victory, Bernie Sanders thought, hey, now's the time to rub it in a little bit. See, now that he's out of shill mode on November 6th, now he can start telling the truth about the Democrats again for a few months. And then as the midterms approach, he'll start shilling for them. It comes in cycles, you know.

To everything, there is a season, right? Bernie Sanders says it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working class people, would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. Nancy Pelosi.

did not take kindly to that so uh she claps back at that here's some audio of her response to bernie and i have a great deal of respect for him for what he stands for but i don't respect him saying that the democratic party has abandoned the working-class families that's where we are for example

For example, under President Biden, you see the rescue package, money in the pockets of people, shots in the arm, children in school safely, working people back to work. What's his name? What did Trump do when he was president? One bill that gave a tax cut to the richest people in America. In fact- But why did voters who earned less than 100,000K go

go for Trump in such large numbers. Well, there are cultural issues involved in elections as well. Guns, God and gays. That's the way they say it. That's how they see you, man. That's how they see you. Doing the exact thing that

most Democrats who have had the balls to appear on camera these last few days have said we shouldn't really do anymore. We should probably cut the guns, gods, and gays shit that's really not helpful. No, she goes right there. And what the interviewer referenced there is what, in my opinion, is the most stunning takeaway of this whole campaign season, which is that the Democrats actually won the rich vote this time outright. Uh,

won it outright. That's never been true. Even as the working class has trended redder since Trump came onto the scene, it was still the case that Trump and the Republicans won the rich vote. That's not the case here. The only class demographic that Democrats won was the upper income earners of over $100,000 per year. Middle income earners, 50 to 100K, overwhelmingly to Donald Trump. And voters under 50K,

Very, very close, but still Trump over Biden amongst voters under $50,000. Among $50,000. I mean, that is just incredible. That is an incredible statistic. Now, here's Bernie Sanders getting a chance to clap back against Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi here, they ask him about her remarks. They play another piece of sound from her and ask him to respond to that. So here's this. As you know, your statement was met with some sharp reaction as well. This is what Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had to say. Take a look. I'll get your reaction on the other side.

Bernie Sanders has not won. Let me, with all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don't respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class families. He has not won. Senator, how do you respond to Nancy Pelosi? Well, Nancy's a friend of mine, and we've worked together. Of course. There you go. There you go. There it is.

uh in the senate stop saying they're your friends what are you saying to your friends for i guess they are his friends nancy has some secret papers about my wife's very shady dealings at a certain university you might have heard of and she has threatened to release them to the press um if i do not call her my friend in all uh appearances so she is my friend that's how friends treat each other friends are there to blackmail you that's two years

We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour.

In America today, we have not brought in the Senate. We have not brought to the floor the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to join unions. We're not talking about defined benefit pension plans so that our elderly can retire with security. We're not talking about lifting the cap on Social Security.

so that we can extend the solvency of Social Security and raise benefits. Bottom line, if you're an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no, and that is what has got to change.

All right. So he lays that out pretty simply. Should have said that a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks ago may have been nice. A couple of months ago may have been nice. A couple of years ago. Yeah. You know, it's too bad we didn't have somebody who was in a great position to run as an independent and take down this whole farce. Of course. Of course. That is a pity, isn't it?

Alaska voted overwhelmingly for Trump. They also voted overwhelmingly to raise the minimum wage. Missouri voted for a minimum wage increase as well as paid sick leave. Nebraska voted, I believe, 74% for paid sick leave. These progressive economic policies won in deep red states. Oddly enough, ironically, you know where they lost? California.

California. And this speaks to something. California, I can't believe that. California voted against getting rid of prison slave labor. Yep. Now, if Louisiana voted against that, the first people to jump up and point a finger would be people in California. Yep, exactly. Exactly. And this speaks to that charge that Pelosi makes there, which is that Bernie Sanders has not won. He has not won.

Well, actually, he has won. He's won Senate races in a state like Vermont. Now, look, I know Vermont has this reputation of being this Libby, hippie, world state. It's actually not that. I live pretty close to the Vermont border. I used to work three weeks out of the year in Vermont. You have Burlington, which is a liberal college town, sure.

a vast majority of that state is not Burlington. The vast majority of that state is actually very rural. It's very family-oriented. It's a very hearth and home, down-home kind of a state with a real family values culture. And Bernie, just in time, won at 63-32 over the Republican challenger, winning in all these rural areas. I mean...

Vermont, there is no such thing as a big city in Vermont. Those three are the largest. Burlington, Montpelier, which is the capital, and Rutland. I've been to all three. Like I said, I used to work in Vermont a few weeks out of the year. I know the state fairly well. It is mostly, like I said, a rural family-oriented state. A lot of gun ownership in that state. A lot of churchgoers in that state. And look at this. Vermont's

elected a Republican governor 73 to 21. So you say, well, it's this liberal bastion, bunch of woke blue haired hippies. No, no, no. Republican governor 73 to 21. The same state that elects a Republican governor by a three to one margin elects a Democratic socialist senator by a two to one margin. What does that demonstrate? That demonstrates the crossover appeal, the very broad appeal of

of an economic populist program. This is the map of results in the governor's race. Notice even Burlington is red. Even Burlington voted for the Republican governor. Look at that. You have these rural areas in the state, deep red for the governor and deep whatever that is, uh, golden brown mustard for Bernie Sanders. Uh,

That shows you what the Democrats could have had if they wanted it. This was the map in 2020 that went viral. This is a map of the United States that shows clusters of small donors powering each of the primary campaigns. So obviously you got Klobuchar in Minnesota. You got Beto in Texas. You got Pete Buttigieg in Indiana. And look at that, Joe Biden in the great state of Delaware. Other than that, it's plaster blue for Bernie Sanders.

All over. So the idea that that program is not viable is nonsense. And you can't even say, well, it's only viable amongst a Democratic primary electorate because like I show you here, the state of Vermont, not the woke hippie state everybody thinks it is. They voted 73% for Republican governor, 63% for a Democratic socialist senator. This is what the Democrats want.

could have had, they deliberately destroyed any opportunity to have that kind of appeal nationwide. Look at all that blue. Look at all those great plain states. Look at all those heartland states. Look at all those southern states. They all want a minimum wage that you can live on or at least come close to live on. These are not controversial issues.

positions to ordinary people the democrats do not advocate for them anywhere kamala harris didn't even mention the minimum wage you got the minimum wage winning in missouri kamala harris doesn't mean not a word not a word well how can they after the after the senate parliamentarian debacle yeah where they hide behind the parliamentarian that george bush fired

yeah when he was thwarted by the parliamentarian this this person has no power you can just get rid of them and put in somebody who will do what you want and then you talk to the libs about it well no no it's it's a parliamentarian it's the procedures it's a procedure you can't go around procedures they're just the dumbest people on earth now also if you look at this this is something i got into a little bit the other night when i went on a shama stream on election night hey

There was a great article written about this a while back about the fact that the whole consultant class theory of what the American electorate looks like is completely ass backwards. This whole idea that we live in a country that's full of people saying, don't raise wages and don't give me health care. It's total bullshit. They want you to think that.

because then they get to have it both ways. They get to say on the one hand, look at these ignorant people voting against their own interests.

And then they don't have to go against the interests of their donors. They don't have to do things their donors don't want. They can blame the savages. They can blame these ignorant people who vote GOP, who vote against their interests. But as we see here, no, if you give them the opportunity to vote for those policies in isolation, they will actually vote for those policies. So what is it about the Democratic Party they want? And that's where you have to look at a lot of the cultural stuff. At best,

The country is libertarian. Live and let live. Leave people alone. As soon as you start leaning on them and telling them,

how the how they have to behave how they have to think what their theory of gender and race has to be and if you don't conform to that there are going to be severe social and professional consequences you'll lose them and bernie until 2020 we talked about this he didn't play that he really didn't in 2020 he started that's when he started opening his speeches we're against homophobia we're against sexism we're against race the first

campaign he talked very little of that rhetoric it is as we'll see when we do the segment with Lee and Trump's closing pitch that is a loser for most of the country you're seeing a lot of people Joe Rogan said it we covered Justine Bateman did this tweet storm that went viral a lot of people are saying

I can breathe now. I'm so glad these people have been crushed so I don't have to worry that if I make a joke somebody doesn't like, it's going to be the end of my career. Well, also, if you look at the difference in emphasis on issues between the sort of, I would argue, more centrist, more neoliberal Democrats who lean more on the woke signaling and a politician like Bernie,

who now, unburdened by the need to compete in the national Democratic primary, doesn't really talk the kind of shit that you were talking about. He was sort of forced to talk about in 2020 because they tried to run him out of the party in 2016 when he didn't bend the knee in that way, right? If you look at a state like New York...

The neoliberal politicians in New York who run on culture issues, basically, they can't win in rural areas. New York, if you look at a map of New York State. New York is mostly red. It's beet red, except for New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo. There's a college town here or there, Ithaca, New Paltz that goes blue. But other than that, it's basically a sea of red with a few blue cities that are very high population. Right. But.

the centrist Democrats who lean hard into the branding of cosmopolitanism cannot win in the rural areas. Those rural areas go red. Not in a million years.

In Vermont, the rural areas go socialist. Why? Because he talks about the minimum goddamn wage. Right. It's that simple. It's that simple. So the idea, well, well, he hasn't won anything. He couldn't have won. And that that that really doesn't make sense that we've abandoned workers. And that's why we lost. That is such obvious nonsense. All you have to do is look at these two maps here.

Same people, same exact electorate, 75% for a Republican governor, 63% for a Democratic socialist senator. If that doesn't tell you that the Bernie program has the kind of mass appeal that you are in desperate need of now and can never get back, in my opinion, that says it right there. That's it. That's Corinthians 2. That's the whole ballgame. In the boys' bathroom, none of us are free. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

A little thing happened last Tuesday, last Tuesday night. A little thing. By a little thing, I mean a big, big thing. A little bit. A little bit. Big. Big news. A big Trump win. And, well, the circular firing squad has been set up. Eric Abinate tweets out Nancy Pelosi throws Kamala and Biden under the bus by chiding Biden for not stepping down soon enough. You don't say. And endorsing Kamala Harris emotionally.

Immediately. So Nancy Pelosi has been pretty combative about this whole thing. She has not been as conciliatory as you might think an elder stateswoman such as herself might be. So here's an interview with the New York Times where she kind of throws blame around in several different directions. How many people in this country wake up in the morning and say, fuck, she's still alive? Yeah. All right. Let's take a look.

You think it's important to discuss a little bit about what you think could have been done differently. And a lot of the discussion has centered around how much President Biden's delay in deciding to leave the race following the debate in June hurt the VP's campaign. You know, you were very involved in encouraging him to leave. And there's reporting that you were concerned about him being the candidate well before the debate in June.

And polls were showing that the American people were very concerned about President Biden's age and his ability to lead into another term. Do you wish you'd gotten involved earlier than you did? No, I, well, the president made his own decision to step aside and to endorse Kamala Harris. He made a patriotic, selfless decision. Ha ha!

to uh and for which we are all very great she's the last hold out for that one a patriotic selfless decision a patriotic selfless decision look where you're at look where you're at the uh hey man that that's the script that's the party line it went out to all the operatives that's what you say when you're asked about this and she is nothing if not a pro

A Patriot. Yeah, well, she has learned that throughout her years. Just going to say what she, yeah, well, we can see where it's gotten everybody. That's right. But she's going to stick to that method. Those are the talking points. You have talking points, and we all sing from the same hymnal.

We did all that we needed to do to win the House as well as the White House. It's up to the candidate for president to make his or her own decision about timing, policy. Do you think the timing hobbled Kamala Harris? Because she had 100 days to get a campaign off the ground, to mobilize people, to get her message across, to get her self-known. I mean, this was...

an incredibly truncated campaign, and many people think that maybe she was set up to fail just by the timeline alone. Oh, I don't think she was set up to fail. But let me just say this: We're only a couple of days since the election. There'll be many reviews of timing and the who, what, when, and why, and where. That's like when the Israelis shoot a journalist.

Yeah, exactly. We'll do an investigation later. You say that, but it's actually – it is a very similar motivating mentality. Sure. We'll talk about it later. We'll talk about it later. After everyone's forgotten about it. When everybody's forgotten about it. When we can make up our own bullshit story of how things actually went down. Now let's just what? Lick our wounds, take the time to heal. We'll put this off. We'll talk about this later. There will be plenty of time for this, just not at a time when most people are asking the question. Right.

We want to answer these questions at a future time when people have other things on their mind. And I feel, look, a lot of times when we have guests on who are Marxists like Shama, we'll get some pushback from certain portions of the audience. I don't think they understand the core to the communist program is throwing Nancy Pelosi out into the bean fields to work.

Right. Yes. I think they need to lead with that. I think they need, because that's, you know, they go through all this theory. Just say, under our program, Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi will be dragged out of their houses and forced to work in the fields. Start there. Start there. And now they're listening.

That's a unifying message. That's what you call a populist message. It is a unifying message. A unifying populist message. Well, I tried to get Dennis Kucinich on board with that. Yeah. Oh, well. I wonder how he did. And books will be written about it. The fact is she did a great job with the time constraint that she had. Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.

Kamala, I think, still would have won, but she may have been stronger having taken her case to the public sooner. Okay, first of all, first of all, first of all, you insisted that there would be no Democratic primary. You insisted Biden would be the nominee. After he became the nominee, you said, well, we had a primary, even though you did not allow for an open primary. And you are correct in the sense that if

If Biden had stepped down, there would have been an open primary. But you said Biden won the primary. That's what you were out there saying. He won the primary. So now you're going to say, well, if he had gotten out sooner, we would have had a more open primary, in which case what? You would not have rigged that in favor of Kamala Harris. Like this is where the thing is, like this is where the whole you could take this disaster of an election all the way back.

to Barack Obama elevating Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who would be the two next nominees, Joe Biden to vice president, obviously Hillary Clinton to secretary of state. You can go all the way back there because that is what set in motion this chain of events. Yeah, that was what set in motion a chain of events that led you to here. They tried passing the ball to Hillary. Didn't happen. They passed the ball to Biden.

It happened because of fluke circumstances, shall we say. Biden refuses to step down, but because he picked Kamala Harris, because he promised a woman VP, and because the establishment always wanted Kamala, he picks Kamala. And then you set yourself up for a worst case scenario where Biden melts down a few months before the vote, and he has to give the ball to Kamala, who can't finish the game.

And now you're going to come here a few days after and do this revisionism about, well, yeah, I suppose if Biden had stepped down, we could have had an open primary, in which case it may not have been Kamala. A, you made sure there was no primary. B, we know for a fact that if Biden had stepped down,

everybody would have endorsed Kamala. You know how we know that? Because Biden stepped down and everybody endorsed Kamala. So like the idea that you could have done one or two things differently and had a different outcome is nonsense. This was a burial that was really forecasted over a decade ago. In 2008, they made this bid. Well, they really, if you want to go into the Hillary Obama thing, they decided that

Around 2014, they're not going to have primaries. They're not really going to have primaries. They're going to decide who the nominee is going to be well ahead of time. They're going to pretend to have a primary and whoever they want by hook or by crook, they're going to push forward. The problem with that is.

Is when you are a member of an elite class that's completely out of touch with the American public, your idea of who that person should be is going to be completely batshit insane.

The idea that Hillary was a safe bet was insane. Of course. It was insane. The idea that you're going to get, and to give a complete picture, they didn't want Biden. They wanted Kamala in 2020. They settled for Biden because they were terrified of Bernie. And by that time, Kamala, because of her own repulsiveness, had to drop out before Iowa.

So instead they backdoored her into the vice president. We'll get what we want in the end anyway. That's the pattern. We'll tell the peasants what's good for them. Problem is they get to vote and wherever people have the opportunity.

to express what they really think of these people there is an outpouring of contempt that is that is why people like Nancy Pelosi and our whole political party are obsessed with censorship they're obsessed with imposing their ideas through control of the schools

because they know they can't sell it through democratic processes. That's the irony of how much they go on about how much they love democracy. Nobody hates democracy more than the elite liberal class. Sure thing. All right, she goes on. She's not done yet. You've talked about your interest in having had an open primary. Yeah. And...

as you know, it would have. I'm sorry. I hate to do this again. At what point did she express interest in an open primary? You mean now? You mean two seconds ago after the election? When did she never express any interest in an open primary? All right. If you can't be right in advance, you can be right in advance in hindsight. Yeah, exactly. Yes. About your interest in having had an open primary. Yeah. And as you know, it

It would have uncovered her weaknesses or strengths. It would have tested her electability. That's what the primary system is intended to do. And it would have also perhaps resulted in a nominee that wasn't so tied to an unpopular president. Well, let me it's interesting that you say those. By the way, all of that, what she just described, happened in 2019, except the unpopular president part, because she wasn't an incumbent at that time, meaning the vice president.

Kamala did go through a test in 2019 to see how electable she was, and she couldn't even make it to state one. And you insisted on, according to Caleb Maupin, his excellent book about Kamala Harris, he says on the original speaker's lineup for the DNC, there was a slot for Kamala Harris and there was a slot for VP.

So somebody or somebody's leaned on Joe Biden.

And made, we know what a nasty vindictive bastard Joe Biden is. There's no way that he would have picked the, that little girl is me person for his VP on general principles. They forced her on him. Why? Why? That is the elite arrogance of these people. The voters didn't want her. Well, you know what? You're going to get her anyway. Yep.

I don't think that any review of the election should be predicated on weaknesses but strengths of Kamala Harris. Well, that's a great idea. She gave people hope. It's a great attitude. She caused a great deal of excitement in all of this. It's about winning. You don't have to tell me that. But the fact is we're set up for what comes next. Should there have been an open primary, though? Well, see, we thought that there would be. You know, the anticipation was...

that if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But

We don't know that. That didn't happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. OK, so at the end of the day, she does throw Biden under the bus at the end. That was a very roundabout way of saying, yeah, he screwed us. And you know what? He did screw you. But you really can't.

lay the blame on one person for this. And the reason I say you can't lay the blame on one person for this is because you could trace these bad decisions back to 2008, where you elevated Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. And that timeline of events led you to a situation where you had this man actually trying to convince the country that he was fit to serve

as the world's most powerful man for four more years. This is Joe Biden today on the Delaware beach. Look at this. Look at this. Like a turtle walking through the sand. Look at this. Most powerful country on earth. That was today. That was today. Now, the design flaw in this campaign is very simple. It's all predicated on the idea that this man

spent the better part of his first term convincing people, insisting that he was fit for a second term. And because of the Democrats' obsession with identity politics, he felt he had to pick a woman. Because of the establishment's obsession with Kamala Harris, they told him it has to be this woman.

And that set you up for a nightmare. Sports fans, if you watched game one of the World Series this year, Yankees brought in a lousy pitcher. Last out of the game, he gave up a grand slam. Yeah, that was a bad decision. That decision was set up three innings earlier where they took their ace pitcher out of the game before they had to. It's a similar situation here. You could trace this all the way back to Obama deciding for no reason he just had to elevate the

These two relics of a bygone era, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. That's what got you here. And Nancy Pelosi knows that. She's a pro. She's been in this business a very, very long time. She understands that. So, yeah, you could throw Biden under the bus for these decisions he made late in the game. This was a reckoning decades in the making. They deserve every ounce of pain they are feeling right now.

Yeah, well Obama elevated them to protect his legacy and we have a story about that a little later if you remember after 2016

There was a perception that the left had momentum, that Keith Ellison was going to become the DNC chair, that these lower level candidates like AOC, what came to be known as the squad, were going to gradually build a bench. And that would be a repudiation of everything that Barack Obama stood for. That is how profoundly narcissistic and how

intrinsically antagonistic he was to the left politics that he claimed to believe in. It's just political reality. If they came in and proved that that's not political reality, that would have repudiated his entire term in office and the entire philosophy of politics that he foisted on people, very much like Bill Clinton's politics, aim low,

very little is possible. It's the nature of the system. If Sanders and a new wave of progressives had come in and completely upended that system, it would have cast a certain light on his presidency, which now in the end, he's getting what I feel he has coming. He's far more, he's going to end up far more despised than he might have if he had just let things play out.

Yes. And, you know, one of our friends and contributors, Tusker, made this point on the election night stream. If the ruling class had just let Bernie win.

They could let him win. What would he have done? He'd have probably passed the paid sick leave or whatever. There's too much pharma influence, too much health insurance influence to get Medicare for all through. I have a public option. We would have done something like that. They would have given a little bit up, but they would have gotten to keep most of what they wanted relatively on the rails. Instead, they got this.

Instead, you got Trump term one with a four-year intermission of just absolute chaos and hell. And now you have Trump term two. Like, wouldn't it have been easier to just let the guy give people some fucking paid family leave? Like, wouldn't that have been the easy way out? No. No, because it goes back to what you said earlier. The arrogance of these people is just unmatched. They feel, no, we don't have to give anything up. We don't have to give a thing.

No, it's the horrible combination of greed and a belief in their own moral superiority. So you've got the combination that they constantly lust for more and don't want to give up any of what they have, combined with an unshakable belief in their right to dictate morality to the peasants. Yep, absolutely. ♪

This is Russell Dobular here with Keaton Weiss and our guest Lee Fong, who has been dropping a lot of tweets, kind of designed to shoot at every bottle on every tree stump of every ideology. So we actually covered this on election night. Completely agree with Elon that Democrats have widely censored, but if the last year has shown us anything...

The Republicans will more than happily censor anything critical of Israel and smear anyone who speaks out as an anti-Semite or a terrorist. Now, you got a little pushback on this. And I just want to point out some developments since you tweeted this. There was much rejoicing that Trump, seemingly under pressure from his base, announced that he wouldn't appoint Mike Pompeo to his cabinet. And yet he did appoint...

Zionist maniac, Russophobic, very pro-Ukraine war supporter, Elise Stefanik.

Now let's remember, she was also a leading figure

in the persecution of the college deans.

uh who refuse to stop protests on their campuses or to define them as de facto anti-semitism so what does this say about the real commitment to freedom of speech i i i have no doubt you're going to be able to gender people any way you want under under a trump regime but what does this mean for pro-palestine protests are they going to support that kind of speech

I think this is a question where the answer is still up in the air. There are very powerful neoconservative voices still in the orbit of Trump world. Stefanik being appointed or will be appointed to the UN is a great example of this. These folks do not care about free speech. They will host a

congressional hearing about the need for free speech. And actually, Stefani is a good example of this. If you look back, she's on this congressional committee that deals with higher education. If you look back six months before October 7th of last year, she's hosting these hearings about the crisis of free speech on college campuses. You can't speak your mind on college campuses. We need more free speech on college campuses. The moment after October 7th,

She's bringing in these university presidents, berating them by exaggerating and inventing claims that there were chants around killing Jewish students and demands for a second Holocaust.

and demanding censorship, demanding that there'd be a crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy and these student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine would be kicked off campus or disciplined in some way. Complete reversal once there's an emergency. Of course, many supporters of

free speech are fair weather supporters on both the left and right. It's easy to support it when you're looking at censors at the other side of the aisle. It's harder to support it when it's your own team doing it. That being said, there are still a lot of interesting figures in Trump world that even if they, you know, I think there's a principled support of free speech. They kind of realize the

the basic fundamental value. Some of these folks from the kind of San Francisco podcast VC world that do have an ear in the Trump world, Vivek Ramaswamy, also I think very principled on free speech. He's still in the orbit. Tulsi Gabbard, David Sachs. That's what kind of makes the Trump world very interesting because there is a very active push and pull. Someone who's

influential on one day could be pushed out the next. We'll see what the future holds. But on issues around Israel, yeah, I'm not holding my breath. The major Republican super PAC donors to the Trump campaign were people who are very hawkish on Israel. Miriam Adelson, excuse me, Paul Singer,

several others that are just very pro-israel so you know i think it's tbd but uh likely to be a very centrist pro-israel uh administration and i mean this israel issue seems to be one where like values

seem to go out the window there seems to be an israel exception for so many of these people i mean if you look at a guy like rfk jr you know he made uh you know a very central pillar to his campaign when he ran as a democrat and then as an independent prior to dropping out was free speech and yet when bill ackman's you know tweeting out how these university you know uh

have to go. RFK, he's retweeting Bill Ackman. It just goes out the window. This seems to be the one issue that across the board, even people who you look to as being very principled in other areas seem to have an exception. And so...

Look, I mean, Stefanik, she's UN ambassador. She's not going to be in a position to censor speech, but it is reflective of a certain value set. He's throwing a bone to Miriam. Right, exactly, exactly. And that's not going to be the first one. That's not going to be the only one, right? I mean, that's the way you kind of have to look at that, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, I think...

I mean, here's the kind of rub. I mean, there's a lot of focus on X and on Twitter as a platform, but it looks like TikTok and Facebook have been censoring pro-Palestinian speech at a much higher degree. That's on the basic kind of evidence that we see. And I did a story earlier this year. There's a former Israeli intelligence-backed NGO called CyberWell that works with all the other kind of anti-Palestinians

anti-disinformation, anti-hate speech NGOs that work kind of in the back end to enact these content moderation and censorship demands on those big platforms. The big question is, you know, as I think as the Trump administration gets in, they're going to try to clean house

at the State Department, at the DHS and other agencies that have brought in these NGOs and kind of given them, if not government financial backing, kind of the credibility backing to pressure these platforms.

There's gonna be a very new dynamic, I think, with Elon Musk and others who are a little bit more opposed to these dynamics. And it's a big question of whether the pro-Israel groups can shoehorn themselves in to continue centering because there's government censorship, there's private sector censorship, but then there's also kind of this mix where these NGOs and governments collaborate. - Well, that was the Twitter files, right?

Hey, become a premium member. Go to JimmyDoreComedy.com. Sign up. It's the most affordable premium program in the business. All the voices performed today are by the one and only, the inimitable Mike McRae. He can be found at MikeMcRae.com. That's it for this week. You be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me. I freak out.

Do not freak out.