For Pacifica Radio, November 17th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I do about six or eight or 10 of these a week.
So if you want to check out the full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, they're all available for you for free at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all introducing Jimmy Dore, standup comedian and political activist and host of the Jimmy Dore show.
This huge show on YouTube just in the past year, year and a half or two, there's a force in leftist politics now and in this election.
And I'm very happy to meet you and very happy to have you on the show.
Welcome, Jimmy.
How are you?
I'm doing fantastic.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, you know, it's the fact that my show has any prominence in any kind of political influence.
It just goes to show you the desert that the corporate media is.
Well, that's true.
But you're being modest.
The reality is your show is great because you have principle and you know what you're talking about.
And of course, you're funny and engaging in all the great things about your show.
So you've certainly earned it.
What you say negatively about the rest of the media, of course, is certainly true as well.
But listen, we're big fans of your show at antiwar.com.
We try to run you on the blog from time to time.
And you've been great, of course, on the Russiagate hoax.
And well, let me can I just ask you a question first, because I'll forget.
Sure.
If I why do you think people who consider themselves to be on the left pushing something such as Russiagate, how is that negatively affect the antiwar movement?
Oh, well, of course, it's terrible, right?
It's as effective as a psyop on the leftist mind, I guess, or the liberal mind in America as the Obama presidency was.
Hey, if the guy you love is the one waging the wars and probably just butt in your lip for the next eight years.
And that worked real well.
But then to have the entire set of accusations against the Republican president and complete hate figure Donald Trump be associated with his lack of patriotism and lack of loyalty to the foreign policy agenda of his predecessors, so to speak, and his underlings in the executive branch is a whole other level.
And so I'm sure you saw the polls.
In fact, I think I saw you cover the polls that said that liberals believe in the CIA far more than conservatives do now.
And, of course, conservative skepticism only extends to the CIA's persecution of their political hero in this circumstance on that side.
But as far as how bad it's been for liberalism, it's terrible.
But that's why I like you and other principled leftists so much who are not partisans, but instead are principled and put the worst things first and keep them there and refuse to be cowed by things that I guess should seem like an easy way to get a political enemy, but in fact aren't true and are damaging to especially our relationship with Russia, which is the most important thing in the whole world.
So is that a long enough answer?
So, no, that was the only thing I would maybe add to that is that.
When it first started happening, I tried to tell people on the left who were doing it or what this is going to eventually do is is going to come back to to bite us in the ass when we oppose a war.
And that's how it's always been.
Well, look exactly what happened.
There's one candidate running who's in the military currently serving in the illegal wars that these people engineered, who tells the truth about them and is speaks a moment of peace on national television.
And she's immediately slimed by a former first lady, secretary of state and nominee of the party as a Russian asset.
So now because you push this along on the left now, anybody who challenges and then she didn't want to went along and said it was Jill Stein, too.
So anybody who not only challenges war, but even challenges the two party corporate duopoly that has had the stranglehold on this country, even if now that you're also a Russian, so you can't even be an environmentalist, you can't even think outside the two part.
Anybody who strays, it's going to be used now as a as a as a billy club to keep you in line.
And that's exactly how it's being used.
And who is it used against?
The left, of course.
And and and what people don't realize what Russiagate really is, is attacking Trump from the right.
And so when you say, oh, he didn't he didn't bomb Syria enough or he used Nerf bombs, as I've heard people say, what you're actually doing is saying he should bomb more, which as a lefty, you're supposed to be intrinsically against that stuff and always suspicious of that.
And of course, why?
Because who gets killed?
People.
That's why people get killed.
So and especially at KPFK, which the whole point of KPFK Pacifica is anti-war, it was founded as anti-war.
And to hear people on the left attacking Trump from the right and wanting him to be more bellicose and saber rattling is shows you how deleterious and destructive Russiagate can be to the left and which is why they should stop it.
They should have stopped it and they should continue to stop it if they haven't.
Yeah, well, I'm sure with you on that.
And it's funny because my strategy is always attack the right from the right, but in a different way.
Right.
And characterizing the warmongering as the opposite of conservative, it's wasteful and destructive and and horrible in so many ways.
But you're right that the liberals are attacking him from the right in all the worst ways.
But that also brings up a great tactic that I think that leftists like you can use against liberals to try to keep them honest is you can invoke somebody like Rand Paul and insist that they have to stay to the left of Rand Paul, don't they?
If Rand Paul wants to get out of Syrian Afghanistan, don't tell me you're to the right of him.
I mean, you can't really give credit to anything about Trump because all he does is talk a good game.
He never actually withdraws troops from anywhere, but we know Rand Paul wants to.
And it seems like that would be a good cudgel to use against the liberals is no matter how far left Rand moves on foreign policy, we have to stay to the left of him.
And wouldn't that be great if we could actually end the wars and try to get them to dispute that?
Let them try.
Well, that's that's that is a good tactic that they believe me they will ignore it.
But let me just say this, Rand Paul, for his foreign policy stance, has already been smeared as directly working for Vladimir Putin by who?
John McCain.
Where?
On the floor of the Senate.
That's right.
Can I ask you this about, you know, Andrew Yang, why isn't he running in the Republican Party?
I actually don't know anything about him at all, honestly.
Tell me.
Because he seems to me like one of these libertarian guys.
Right.
He's because he's not for Medicare for all.
He's not for a minimum wage.
So he's more really a kind of a he's appealing because of his libertarianism.
And I'm like, well, why wouldn't you just run against Trump and take him out?
Does he have a foreign policy that's even worth discussing?
So that's the thing.
I don't think he does.
Right.
So that's so why is he even in the race at all?
Because that's the most important thing.
So let me ask you about Tulsi Gabbard here.
This is actually sort of my ulterior motive for getting you on the show, Jimmy, is that I kind of want to have her on the show and win an argument with her.
But then I think I won't if it's on a show.
I really want to convince her.
I'm not trying to rack up a win here.
But OK, so what's the deal is this?
I think she's great, but she ain't great enough.
So let's well, very simply look at the war in Syria where Obama and John Brennan had us on Al-Qaeda's side.
Right.
So she says, let's stop backing terrorists because she was, as you said, she was in Iraq war, too.
So she can tell who's on whose side here.
And she can tell that Al-Nusra ain't no moderate rebels.
And you can't get her to get on that bandwagon.
Right.
So that's great.
That is just great.
But that's great in the face of an absolutely insane policy to back our actual enemies.
But then when it comes to the war against Al-Qaeda, as she has said repeatedly, she's a hawk.
And she says that essentially wherever there's a Sunni with a rifle anywhere, then we have to fight the war against terrorists forever, which she also is against regime change wars, this bait and switch and overthrowing whole countries in the name of fighting terrorism.
That's also great.
But, you know, the drone wars and special operations wars against alleged Al-Qaeda targets, she talks like she wants to fight a war like that for eight years.
And as she says, because as long as they believe in Wahhabism, they are incorrigible terrorist enemies of ours.
And that's just all wrong.
And the fact is that the reason that the terrorists are attacking us was because Hillary Clinton's husband was bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia all through the 1990s.
And that's what turned Ronald Reagan's and Saudi Arabia's mercenaries against the United States.
It was radical politics, not radical Islam.
And it was America's government's actions that did it.
And so, in other words, as Ron Paul said, we just marched in.
We can just come home.
She doesn't have to be a hawk against terrorists, but a dove on backing them.
She could be a dove on both.
And I think that's part of what's holding her back is a lot of good peacenik people would like to support her, but they hear some of these expansive war on terrorism arguments that she makes and are really hesitant, you know.
But my thing is that if I could get you on the same page with me and she'll listen to you and that you can really tell her, hey, it was Hillary Clinton's husband that drove bin Laden to knock down the towers.
That's the fact.
And she could use that, too, obviously.
There's certainly what, you know, can't dispute what you're saying.
And certainly that's I mean, so.
And the most important part of that, she listens to you.
And so, you know, there's no point.
I don't want to take her on.
I want you to, like, teach her and fix her.
So better.
Well, I'm sure there's I could learn more from her than she'll ever learn from me, for one.
But two, there is Wahhabism is so let's put it this way.
Wahhabism is a problem.
But the problem is that, you know, it's been encouraged by the CIA.
So, I mean, if you go back, though, it's still too broad.
There are lots of Wahhabis who aren't militant humans in any way.
Right.
It's a belief that we're talking about a very small group of people with radical politics.
I'm not saying they're not religious nuts.
They are.
But that's not the war that religious nuttery makes them attack innocent people.
And the further away, the better.
Right.
It's America had combat forces in Saudi Arabia that they were using to bomb and blockade Iraq for a decade leading up to the September 11th attack.
That's the deal.
Right.
Right.
So well, wasn't also.
So tell me this.
You probably I'm sure you know more than I do, too.
So but what I from what I understand was that Osama bin Laden was particularly upset that Saudi Arabia called in the infidels, which is the United States, to come straighten out stuff in the Middle East.
And he was like, why don't we straighten out stuff in the Middle East?
Right.
Starting with Iraq War one.
And then but especially it was the permanent stationing of the troops there.
But yeah, absolutely.
That's right.
And so that's when bin Laden had the break.
Right.
From Saudi Arabia.
But but that's also why 15 of the 18 or whatever is that I think that's the number of the hijackers from Saudi Arabia.
And so this is a real important point, too.
Right.
Why, again, do these people attack us?
Because our government was too close to their government.
They weren't from Iran, Iraq and Syria.
They were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
And they hated us because we were preventing them from overthrowing their government.
But that means that in the regional war, when we fight on Saudi's side, we fight on al Qaeda's side, just like we see in Yemen today and Syria the day before yesterday.
So, yeah, I think that's what well, you know, honestly, I don't want to speak for for Tulsi's foreign policy, but I could just talk to I just can just speak for myself.
So I'm not speaking for her.
Sure.
But, you know, she is consistent in a sense that she's calling out Saudi Arabia also in our she's had the same question you have right now, which underlies all this.
Hey, why are we why are we friends with Saudi Arabia?
And which actually is is, in fact, an exporter of extreme terrorism.
A lot of people say that's the Wahhabi sect.
Right.
So that's what Dylan Rattigan would say.
That's what Tulsi Gabbard would say.
So and it's been proven WikiLeaks has revealed that they in fact are not they are funded by Saudi Arabia government.
They used to also say they used to always say, well, that's just a one off prince that has his own oil money, that he's funding them, the terrorists.
But no, WikiLeaks reveal, in fact, it was the Saudi Arabian government that is funding the terrorists.
Right.
And so why do they do that?
Well, they're useful.
Right.
So because how?
Well, if you want to overthrow Assad, all you got to do is you got to get some terrorists to go in there and overthrow him and say it's for all these other reasons.
And the CIA will help you.
So there is that.
Right.
And so and they and as far as 9-11 goes, she's right now calling.
She's the only person with enough courage to stand with the victims of 9-11, the victims' families and call for the release of all the documents around 9-11, including the ones about Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, she's in my sense that she's consistent.
Right.
She's not schizophrenic, as the United States foreign policy is when we say we're friends with Saudi Arabia, but we're against ISIS.
It's like, you know, we're against Al-Qaeda and we're but we're friends with Saudi Arabia.
You can't that's you know, that's like saying, oh, I'm for I'm for the Navy, but I'm against the Marines.
You know, it's like, so I agree with that.
I mean, as I'm saying, she's essentially on the three big chunks.
She's good on two thirds.
Right.
She doesn't want to fight wars for Al-Qaeda and she doesn't want to overthrow governments that even could benefit Al-Qaeda.
But she does want to fight Al-Qaeda forever.
And that is still a hole big enough for Bush to drive another couple of regime changes through, you know.
Yeah.
So I'm you know, she also introduced a bill called Stop Funding Terrorists Now bill.
Right.
Which, of course, didn't pass.
And no one, of course, it got no press and no one because they would have to ask the question, well, why do you have to bring up a bill like that?
Well, because we're funding terrorists, which would blow people's mind, which is what I tell people.
Of course, they have to silence someone like Tulsi Gabbard and smear her as a Russian asset, because if she gets any actual press coverage, people will find out what their government is actually doing in places like Syria and they would be just as upset as she is.
Right.
And they can't.
She's the consensus in D.C. is we got to back Al-Qaeda.
She's against it.
They call her the traitor.
Yeah, that's that's exactly 100 percent correct.
Yep.
You know, she sits on the Foreign Relations Committee.
She sits on the Armed Services Committee.
She's currently an active soldier serving in the military as a medic and they still slime them.
So all that, you know, it's you know, when when Trump was going after that Goldstar family during the election and people were all clutching their pearls, oh, my God, he's insulting a Goldstar family.
But here they are, a live veteran who actually is a woman of color serving as the first Hindu in Congress.
And they can't smear her enough as a commie, as a red band.
It's unbelievable.
So there it just goes to show you that the Democrats keep trying.
That's why this impeachment will fail, because what it is is a morality play.
We're better people than Trump and they're not.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, so now here's the thing, too, is I was saying I should have recorded it, but I got bets going with my boss at antiwar.com about all this stuff that even though she's, you know, being attacked now, as long as she hangs in there, a lot of the rest of these Cory Bookers are all going to flake out.
And at the end of the day, you know, she's obviously by no means going to be coronated by the Democratic Party establishment.
But if she plays it right, it could come down to her versus Warren at the end or her versus Biden or her versus the last Hillary or whoever is the last establishment candidate in the race.
As long as she hangs in there and actually then in those in that context has a real chance to argue about this stuff, I think she could do really great.
She has so many reasons to be a very strong candidate to to the American people, if not to the Democratic Party establishment and the TV media and all of that.
You know, and Tulsi is a vegan, which, you know, that's right there.
That's a much better person than I am.
That might be the margin of victory right there.
The vegans let that out there.
So she also and I know this isn't the focus of your work, but I just think that, you know, as far as her being a bonafide lefty, she's Medicare for all.
She's got a much clearer foreign policy stance.
She doesn't take any corporate money.
I mean, that's a to me, that's a that's a plus candidate.
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Hey, let me ask a little bit about Bernie Sanders here, because I think even he understood after 2016 that if only he had gone after Hillary on foreign policy, he could have had the nomination.
And then I think it's pretty obvious would have had a lot easier time with Trump in the fall.
He'd be the president right now.
But so what is he doing to change anything?
Yeah, I mean, he's he speaks more.
Don't you?
He does speak clearly on Yemen.
He's been great in the Senate on Yemen.
But I got to admit to you, I don't know much about his campaign so far.
So is he really running on that stuff?
Well, no.
I mean, you know, he's he's that's always been his his weakness.
Right.
He's that's that's been his weakness.
Right.
So he's better than everyone else.
But that's because everyone else is horrible.
Right.
So he's not better to me.
That's why I'm you know me.
I'm like you.
I'm an antiwar guy.
So I'm more attracted to Tulsi in that way.
And I think she's and I think her voice, you know, in the primary, I'm supporting her because I think her voice needs to be heard because she does speak so clearly on foreign policy.
And so whether or not, you know, she will get the nomination, I think it's important for her to pull Bernie to the left on that.
Yeah.
And so that's why that's why, you know, that among other reasons is why I'm I think it's important for Tulsi to be in the race, be on the debate stage, get get neutral press coverage, which never happens except for places like here.
And so anyway, so, yeah, that's Bernie's.
But, you know, Bernie, what his problem is for him in foreign policy is that for whatever reason, Bernie will repeat the CIA precepts for invasion and then say we shouldn't invade.
For like for instance, he'll say, oh, Maduro in Venezuela is a brutal dictator and the people are suffering and he's got torture and all that stuff.
But we should leave it up to the people.
Well, if you all that stuff is garbage, that's all CIA talking points because they need to they need to set up a pretext of, hey, it would be immoral of us not to help those people.
And so if you say if you agree with the pretext that this guy's a dictator, their people are starving while he's eating steak, he's oppressing them and jailing them and torture them and then you don't do something, well, now you're immoral.
So it makes the case much harder to oppose an interventionist war if you repeat the CIA talking points.
And that's what Bernie does.
So Bernie will will accept the framing.
Oh, Assad is a dictator who gasses his own people.
And then so if you accept that now, if you don't want to go help those people from being gassed, you're the bad guy.
And so you lose the argument right away.
And so that's what he does.
Tulsi doesn't do that.
Yeah.
And so that's what I've noticed.
She doesn't do that.
She says, hey, we need to stay the hell out of Venezuela.
She doesn't go, hey, this guy's a brutal dictator.
Hey, we need to stay out of there.
Our history of intervening in South America is horrible.
And so they're done.
So you don't have to get into that debate about if he's a good guy, is he a bad guy?
It that doesn't matter.
What the point is, every time we intervene, it makes everything worse.
Yeah.
And so she's you know, she doesn't want to be the policeman of the world, which we shouldn't.
The only reason we claim we're the policeman of the world is because where we want to go, police people has natural resources that we want to steal and give to an American corporation.
Yep.
Well, we're just talking about Bolivia earlier today, too, and all the lithium supplies they have there and got to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese and so forth.
Same as always.
But hey, let me ask you about Elizabeth.
I know that you guys just go after Elizabeth Warren all day and night on your show.
But I'm trying to remember if you've if I've seen your coverage of her foreign policy specifically is I know that she has said in the past, hey, I want out Afghanistan and Syria.
You know, I think Maddow tried to to make her attack Trump for his proposed withdrawal from Syria a year ago.
And she said, no, I'm sorry.
I'm going to have to go ahead and go with him on this one.
So I don't know.
Is there anything interesting there?
Yeah, she wants to green the military.
That's her big push.
She wants to make it environmentally friendly.
So when we drop bombs on brown people to steal their natural resources, we do it in a carbon neutral way, I guess.
That's good.
Less depleted uranium, a little more tungsten.
Yeah.
So, you know, she voted for those bloated military budget.
She voted to give.
You know, that's the whole thing.
Hey, is Trump is Trump a Russian stooge?
Well, yeah, he is.
Well, let's give him 80 billion dollars to go do his Russian stoogery.
That does.
Those two things are contradictory.
And so it's one or the other.
Well, we all know it's the other.
And that's I just wanted to bring up Chile.
What's and that's another negative effect of Russiagate.
The State Department is putting out press releases saying that after 30 years of neoliberalism in Chile, the people have revolted and they're in the streets by the and they're in the streets by the millions.
And of course, you know, they have the right to decide what kind of government they want.
They don't like the one that's in power that has in the system that they've had for the last 30 years.
I think I'm sure everyone would agree that they get to decide what kind of system they have.
And while the State Department has said that it's being caused by Russia influence.
So so once you validate that, the State Department is going to use that everywhere and anywhere for neoliberalism, for CIA coups and toppling governments.
And they'll just go.
So now they've got that implanted in everyone's lizard brain.
Russia, Russia, Russia.
And, you know, that was made possible by the useful idiots on the left who pushed Russiagate.
Yeah.
And they have done that in Germany and in France and over Brexit.
And they just came out with a new thing last week saying that the conservatives only won in England because the Russians intervened and bankrolled them.
And I guess it was the source.
Christopher Steele says.
Yeah, Brexit couldn't be actually a reflection of the ruling class turning its back on its workers.
It couldn't it couldn't actually be 40 years of banker run economies coming back to everybody in the step for the upper 10 percent.
It couldn't be the fact that the people in the United States, which has been proven we live in an oligarchy and not a democracy.
It couldn't be that.
No, it's probably I'm going to say racism and Russia.
You know, got to be anything but responsibility on the part of those complaining that they lost their power.
Aha.
Well said.
That's a great way to say it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen.
So I don't know if any of the others are worthy of mention at all.
Klobuchar and whoever else is in the race to any of them have anything particularly bad on foreign policy that we should be aware of other than just the usual.
Amy Klobuchar is fake lefty comedian Bill.
Bill.
Bill Maher's favorite.
That's the one he endorsed.
Amy Klobuchar.
No surprise there.
Geez.
Is that amazing?
What what passes for a lefty and a comedian and a corporate new comedy show?
Yeah.
And it's been that way for 25 years with him, too.
You know?
Yeah.
No kidding.
You know, people ask me, what's your show like?
I say, well, my show is like what The Daily Show would be if it wasn't hosted by a millionaire and produced by a giant corporation.
Yeah, that's what it is.
And it's nothing like the Bill Maher show, no matter what variable you switch out.
That's good.
Yeah.
But anyway, there's no I don't think there's anybody else worth talking with.
Joe Biden, of course, is a continuation of the Bush doctrine.
You know, if you vote for Joe Biden, you're voting for a guy who voted for the, you know, Iraq, did Libya, wanted to do, you know, Syria, the whole deal.
He's he's horrible.
Twenty four in Ukraine.
Yeah, that's right.
So and people, you know, we got in bed with Nazis over Russiagate, right, because we wanted to, you know, it was pre-Russiagate, but it was because we were afraid of Russia and we wanted Ukraine to be to to sign an economic deal that was more favorable to the European Union in the West than it was to Russia.
And so we would literally get in bed with Nazis to make that happen.
No, I'm sorry.
I have to correct you there.
We learned in the impeachment hearings this week that those Ukrainian militias, the Azov battalion and so forth, are equivalent to America's Minutemen who fought a revolution against Great Britain.
And these are the guys who and they made it explicit, didn't they, that this is why we're getting rid of our president is because this is our foreign policy and he's trying to change it and we won't stand for it.
Right.
So, you know, this and also one of the saddest things about Russiagate is that the left has somehow exalted the intelligence community, which has always been the enemy of the left and will continue to be.
And so, you know, the FBI infiltrates peace organizations and dismantles them and smears them and slimes them and keeps them out of power.
That's what the FBI does.
They're not your friend because you hate you happen to both hate Donald Trump at the moment.
Yeah, very well said.
And listen, I got to tell you, I'm a big fan of your show and I'm so glad that you do it.
And I really appreciate your time on my show.
Thank you.
Well, I appreciate you having me on.
Thanks for letting me talk to your audience.
Aren't you guys?
That is Jimmy Dore and he is the host of The Jimmy Dore Show.
You can find out all about what he's doing at JimmyDoreComedy.com.
All right, you guys, and that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Wharton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and I'm the author of the book, For the Future.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I'm here for Antiwar Radio every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
