Chris Hedges: interview with Jimmy Dore

I was pleasantly surprised at how cogent, well-reasoned, and calm Dore’s conversation with Hedges was. I’m used to his show, of which I usually only see 10–15-minute clips—and that only rarely—where he’s joined by a peanut gallery of yuk-yukkers and where he often plays videos in chopped-up snippets, analyzing and taking them apart, but it’s often a bit much.

The 52-minute interview below, though is very, very good. I’ve cited at length below the video.

The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore) | The Chris Hedges Report by The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube)

At 05:58, Dore says

“The people who claim to be putting democracy on the ballot have zero democracy. And, for three election cycles now—for 2016, 2020, and 2024—they have zero democracy in their election process in the primary.”

“Even the speeches were ridiculous. There’s absolutely no class critique happening. It’s all identity politics. It’s all abortion, which by the way they’re giddy that the Supreme Court overturned abortion because now they have something to run on. That’s why they have to call Donald Trump—he’s going to make himself a dictator—they have to say that. Which is completely made up, right? We have a system of checks and balances and if he could do that, why didn’t he do it the first time? And then Donald Trump has to call Kamala Harris and Joe Biden communists, of course. That neither of those things are true—they’re corporate authoritarians—and so but it was especially depressing leaving that convention, cuz I guess I didn’t see it coming. I’d only been to one before and in there I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn’t care…they treated going to the convention like they were going to prom and it was honestly downright depressing.”

“[…] it’s like some kind of bizarre Kabuki theater of all these billionaires and millionaires pretending they’re working-class people.”

At 13:00

“When I saw Bobby Kennedy at that rally for Donald Trump—and it’s not that I believe Donald Trump is going to do what he says or or he’s going to allow Bobby Kenny to do what he says—it’s the crowd, right? So, the crowd was cheering ending the wars and investing that money back home. That was a stadium full of people. I had just come from a stadium full of people cheering on war and cheering on oligarchy and there they were saying that they were going to take on the oligarchy, […] they’re going to end the war, they’re going to make friends with our enemies in China and Russia. They were saying that they were going to take on Agra business. They were going to take on the corrupted FDA and our regulatory agencies and they were going to fight big corporations. And they were being cheered while they were saying that. So, it’s not whether I have put my faith in those politicians, but it’s good to see that there’s a stadium full of people who show up for a Republican that feel that way. So, that’s the only thing that gives me an ounce of hope for this country.”

At 15:45

“I think that there’s a good chance that she might be able to skate. I hope not. I hope that, at some point, she has to do something that is unscripted and then people kind of see through her. But people have been so…they’ve done such an effective job at demonizing Donald Trump and making him seem like he’s a special kind of evil that people are willing to overlook all. They’re going to overlook a rigged primary. They’re willing to overlook her being installed after they couped Joe Biden.”

At 17:00

“Rachel Maddow, who’s the most popular host on MSNBC, is coming out with a documentary about Russia and it’s called From Russia with Love. And it’s just…she just…they just didn’t stop. They just didn’t stop doing their McCarthyism. They just didn’t stop artificially propping up enemies in the service of them. I mean she is a complete and 100% puppet of the military-industrial complexes. And you know she Russiagated, which was debunked from day one on my show, but it was even debunked by the Muller report. There’s no evidence of any of that stuff and it didn’t matter one bit because the establishment isn’t going—you don’t have to pay a price for lying like that. And, in fact, you get rewarded. Now she went from making $7 million a year, now she makes $35 million a year, which, by the way, is $100,000 a day. That’s how much Rachel Maddow makes and that’s the lefty news people. So, I don’t think there’s any hope.”

At 30:00 or so, they said,

“Jimmy: The reason why they hate Donald Trump is because he’s such a political novice. And they can’t control him. Every once in a while, he will tell a big truth the president’s not supposed to tell. And the biggest one he told was when he was asked point-blank, ‘why are you leaving troops in Syria?’ and he said ‘For the oil. The oil is secured. It’s our oil. We’re taking the oil.‘ And you can’t say that. So now the whole world saw the president give away that the point of our foreign policy for the last 50 or 60 years is to invade smaller, weaker countries and steal their natural resources. He’s supposed to say this is because Assad’s oppressing his people and we’re trying to secure liberty for them. That’s what he’s supposed to say and didn’t. He just gave the game away.

“Jimmy: He said the same thing about Venezuela recently at a campaign rally. He said ‘Venezuela was ready to fall. We could have had all that oil. we could have had all that oil.’ And he just says it […] As Aaron Maté says, ‘he puts an ugly face on imperialism.’ And that makes it tougher for them to do their imperialism. […] It’s so much easier for the military-industrial complex to have a guy like Barack Obama or a black woman like Kamala Harris. This is why I said, at least when a Republican’s president and he does wars, sometimes the Democrats will go and protest him, right? […] Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George Bush and nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. They gave him a Peace Prize, right? And Kamala Harris is set to do the exact same thing. So, in that regard, it’s worse if Kamala Harris becomes president because the left goes to sleep when a Democrat is President, especially if it’s a president of color.

“Chris: Glenn Ford, who we lost a couple years ago—he used to edit the Black Agenda Report—he said the Democrats aren’t the lesser evil; they’re the more effective evil.

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