WTF is happening with Jimmy Dore?
The socialist YouTube host has moved from a reasonable and passionate critic of progressive politicians to a vaccine-smearing, toxic force that does Left-wing politics no good.
Again, I have to swallow my pride and tell you all that I was wrong, this time about Jimmy Dore. That is not to say that I was wrong when I wrote about his incident with The Young Turks (I was 80% right), but it is to say that I valued the perspective of a well-known Left-wing commentator when I shouldn’t have.
It is not unreasonable to have, in the past, watched and enjoyed Jimmy Dore. He has done a number of good segments, especially his dismantling of Bari Weiss when she went on Joe Rogan and attempted to smear Tulsi Gabbard (I was wrong about her as well - might discuss at some other time). Weiss’s attacks on Gabbard, though, were completely unfounded and Dore dismantled her in a glorious fashion. That is one of a number of segments that he has done that were well worth watching.
He was also right about something that not many Leftie’s were at any point, that being Russiagate. He told us from the start that it was not possible for it to be true, and he was one of just a handful of Left-wingers telling us that. It was pretty much him, Glenn Greenwald, The Grayzone, Katie Halper & Matt Taibbi, Noam Chomsky and Kyle Kulinski. Some progressives, such as Krystal Ball, have come round to realize that it wasn’t true, and credit to her for coming to that realization and being upfront about it.
Most, including shitlibs such as Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann who are supposedly critics of the establishment, swallowed their lies hook, line and sinker, and Dore exposed that.
Dore can also be credited with organizing efforts such #forcethevote and the 50 different cities march for medicare-for-all.
I acknowledge all that freely, and am not going to, as Cenk Uygur of TYT tried to do, smear him as a right-winger who grifts for that audience. I believe that Jimmy believes every word he says, he just is way too toxic and some of his views are somewhat worrying.
Let’s start with the latter.
One of the views that he has that I disagree with is that any government that identifies as socialist or communist is not worth criticizing, and that any problems in that country are because of US sanctions and/or military action.
This is partly accurate. Just about every socialist country in the world is the scene of a campaign from the capitalistic behemoth that is the United States of America. However, not every single problem is because of the American influence.
The obvious example for this is Venezuela, the country that conservatives love to bring up as a consequence of socialist policies. Now, a lot of the problems in that country is because of American sanctions that have devastated most of the nation. However, Dore seems to think that all the problems in that country are because of the US, rather than just some. He made a claim that made it seem like this is what he believes in a video about Bill Maher’s bitching about Americans wanting more from their government. Maher pointed out the crazily high inflation rate in Venezuela, to which Dore responded “Boy, it does suck to live in Venezuela. I wonder why their inflation rate is (2000+%)? I wonder if there’s some capitalistic behemoth that has been trying to fuck over that socialist country because they actually take care of their people and lift them out of poverty? And as we all know, the mission of the United States military is to make sure that no socialist government ever is successful in South or Central America … (Venezuela) is having such problems because the capitalists who run our government have been fucking over that country economically, ever since they became socialist.” Jimmy is partly right here. The United States is fucking over Venezuela. But that is not the only reason that Venezuela is in such dire straights at this moment. Another main reason is because Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro put the entire nations economy in the hands of the oil market, meaning that the country would be fine as long as the price of oil didn’t drop. Unfortunately for them, the price of oil nearly halved in the early 2010s, partly leading to the catastrophic inflation that we see there. This is evidence of Jimmy glossing over the failures of socialist governments.
Another example of this is his complete ignorance of the genocide of the the Uyghur population in China. The internal Chinese documents leaked, the video footage of detention camps, including some of the reporting coming out of said camps and the 48% birth rate decrease in Xinjiang - an area of China which is heavily populated by Uyghur Muslims. There is no doubt that this is happening.
Again, there is also no doubt that the United States can complain about human rights given all the things that the nation has done, specifically in the Middle East and South America, a point Jimmy seems to agree with. However, in that same video as quoted above, in which Bill Maher brings up the Uyghur genocide, Jimmy scoffs at that as if it is not true.
He has also said in a March video on the topic “I think that people got the message that the Uyghur people in the United States, the Uyghur Congress, they’re all funded by people in the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex. I know that. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in China but I know that. And I know that if someone uses the Uyghurs as reason to start another Cold War, and care more about the Uyghurs than they do about the people in their own country, then they are full of shit.”
Now, on this last point, Jimmy is dead right. But to claim that there is a Uyghur Congress is simply not true. This is a group of people who have nothing and you are asking me to believe that they control the Congress of the most powerful nation in the world. No. I’m not sure that the Military Industrial Complex’s buying of Congress (they want more war always) outweighs that of the big corporations who will not want war with China, given that that would mean they would actually, God forbid, have to hire people who aren’t slaves to do their work in some cases. There doesn’t seem to be strong support for war with China even in the most pro-war building in the country.
What Dore is doing here is merely ignoring literal ethnic cleansing because it doesn’t suit his socialist ideology. I’m not knocking the socialist ideology, and am totally willing to separate the socialist economic policy from this egregious act, but do not see reason to act like the egregious act is not happening at all.
A second issue, that is perhaps more relevant to your everyday American, is concerning the COVID vaccine and policy concerning the pandemic generally.
Now, before we discuss what Jimmy believes, I need to tell you what I believe. I fully believe in the vaccine and consider it to work, but do not support mandates such as that of Joe Biden, where he forces workers at companies with over 100 employees to get vaccinated or get weekly tests. I simply can’t justify supporting forcing people to put a medical treatment in their body, irrespective of how it works and the safety benefits for society.
I am also opposed to lockdowns, simply because I don’t understand how we can be comfortable allowing the government to lock us all in our houses for however long they feel like (I’ll delve further into covid policy in a future piece discussing the new Omicron variant soon).
Jimmy takes all this way, way too far, as Youtuber Shaun pointed out in an excellent video.
Before we get into his more recent comments, it is important to note that he hasn’t always thought the way he does now. On December 21 2020, he released a video in which he angrily talked about vaccines being made available for elites but not for nurses.
In April this year, Dore released a video in which he complained about Bill Gates denying vaccines to poor countries.
Dore also tweeted last year about Pelosi talking about making the vaccines ‘affordable’ rather than free, talking about how we could inoculate all our citizens but because we aren’t willing to do anything bordering on socialism a lot of people are going to have to die.
These are all legitimate and entirely accurate criticisms of the powerful. Nothing that Jimmy did here is problematic in any way. His position at this point seems to be that vaccines are a good thing that we need to spread widely if we are to end the pandemic.
His views first seemed to change around late April to early May this year after he got his second dose of the Moderna vaccine. He complained regularly of flu symptoms and joint pain, among other symptoms, after the vaccine, in videos on his channel, on Joe Rogan’s podcast and on twitter.
I am not going to claim that he is lying. It seems unlikely that he is. However, this incident does seem to have led to a change in his vaccine philosophy, as since then he has spent most of his time talking about the problems with the vaccine.
One of these things that he mentioned was exceptionally problematic. In a piece entitled OUTBREAK: 80% Vaccinated Singapore Has More Infections Than Ever, he read an article in Future, titled Highly-vaccinated, but more cases than ever: Singapore shows the world what ‘endemic’ COVID might look like. Jimmy often does this, where he reads articles from mainstream newsletters to prove his point. This is perfectly fine in most circumstances, but not in this one.
He reads from one excerpt, which goes as below in the original article.
Please not that the only reason that I snipped these separately is because there are ads on the original article that I didn’t want to include here. All of the writing in beginning of the article is here.
Anyways, there is the article in its original form that Jimmy read out. As you can clearly see, it is making the argument that, because of the high vaccination rate in the country, death rates among those who have tested positive are low, so it gives us reason to believe that we can live with covid endemic, without hospitals being overrun. This is a reasonable idea, and one that seems to make sense.
However, Jimmy took this in the complete opposite direction, manipulating the article to make it sound like the vaccine doesn’t work.
He first read the first sentence of the second paragraph, that says that “On Monday, Singapore recorded 1647 cases of COVID-19, bringing its 7-day daily average to 1545 cases, higher than any other previous wave of the pandemic.” He did not read the first paragraph, that pointed out how low serious cases and deaths were because of the vaccine, and he also ignored the second part of the paragraph that pointed this out as well.
After that, he skipped to the last paragraph here, in which he emphasises that more than half of the new COVID cases in Singapore are among the vaccinated population, and again discusses how the disease is becoming an endemic disease in the city-state. Again, though, he did not read about how deaths are remaining low and if they continue to do that, Singapore can “set an example for other countries, especially those that have maintained zero tolerance for COVID-19, can emerge from the pandemic.” He is ignoring the positive effects of the vaccine because that doesn’t suit his narrative.
Then, he moves back up to the third paragraph, which discusses how much of the Singapore population is vaccinated. He does this again to make it seem like the high case numbers are related to the rate of vaccination, and show the failure of the vaccine, whereas in reality the low numbers of hospitalization and deaths actually show the vaccine to be working.
Now, that selective editing is bad enough. Things get much, much worse. He actually changes the text of the article to suit his argument.
In the original text, the article goes as following.
But what Jimmy claims that the article says is a bit different because someone at the Jimmy Dore show changed it to fit their narrative. Here is what Jimmy claims that the article said.
There is some clear editing going on here. The changes that Jimmy made were made clear by Shaun in his video.
Jimmy here changed the meaning of the article to its polar opposite so that it would suit his narrative. The lie could not be more clear.
Now, Jimmy claims that he did not know of the changes made, and that they were done by a producer who has since been fired. That may be true, that may not be. Very few people know for certain. But either way, this is not a good look for the Jimmy Dore show and the host in particular, given that either he edits these articles to suit him, which is wrong, or he doesn’t so much as glance over the sources he uses to inform his hundreds of thousands of regular viewers. He leaves himself open for this by not holding himself to a the standard he attempts to hold others, such as Ryan Grim of The Intercept. He cannot go after Ryan for his journalistic failures, which he does regularly, when he himself doesn’t read over his own resources. It is simply hypocritical.
This video is not the only one in which he goes after the vaccine. A great deal of his recent videos have been encouraging hesitancy of the vaccine.
Throughout the last few months, he has been casting doubts about the efficacy of the vaccine, as we see here with some of his releases through November.
A great number of those pieces are exceptionally sceptical of the vaccine, cast doubts over its efficacy, exaggerate side effects and encourage people to be hesitant to take the vaccine that works.
Again, Jimmy tells us that what he wants is to vaccinate the elderly and then let others up to their own means. However, his rhetoric makes it seem as though he is actively encouraging people not to get the vaccine, and that is how it comes across to his audience.
Again, I don’t think he is grifting here. I firmly believe
The final thing that we need to mention quickly is his toxicity for progressives generally.
I am not talking about when he goes after shitlibs such as Bill Maher here. I’m talking about when he constantly goes after someone who never did anything to him who he agrees with on 95% of issues, that being someone such as Kyle Kulinski.
Look, Kyle was not right in his summation of the Dore vs TYT argument, and his communication to Jimmy about the cancellation of the interview that they had scheduled on the Krystal Kyle & Friends podcast was embarrassing. But that does not merit months on end of going after someone who considered you a friend until not that long ago.
It has been disgraceful. In a video criticizing Bernie Sanders interview with Kyle’s co-host, Krystal Ball, Jimmy spent about half the video going after his good friend. I happened to partly agree with Jimmy on this, but it does not merit the name-calling and picking holes in that he served us with.
To give you a bit of context, Bernie Sanders’ team reached out to Ball and asked if they could do an interview but only with her, either on KKF or on her show, Breaking Points. Kyle said that he was happy to step aside, prompting Jimmy to ruthlessly go after him, calling him a ‘cuck’ among other things. This was stupid and petty and not worthy of a good friend.
In the months since, Jimmy has repeatedly gone after Kyle with little, one-off jabs here and there, and has liked multiple tweets criticizing the commentator, mostly for reasons nothing to do with his politics, mostly personal problems.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider ruthlessly going after personal problems you have with your close friend for months on end to a massive audience befitting of this friendship. This might just be me though.
This looks at a bigger problem with Dore’s toxicity. Anyone who disagrees with him on matters such as the effectiveness of a 3rd party, as Kyle does, makes that individual unworthy of Jimmy. This arrogance cannot build coalitions. How can someone win an election, as Jimmy claims he would if he ran, when they can’t go 5 minutes without complaining about personal beef with someone who agrees with you 95% of the time.
I have told you all time after time that the way you win an election is by looking at the policies you believe in that are most popular and running on how you would deliver that and your opponents wouldn’t. That way you bring in 70% of the voting ase into being interested in your campaign.
Jimmy can’t do this. He instead constantly argues and smears those who he agrees with the vast majority of the time. This is why he is toxic for the Left.
I hope you can all see the problem with Doreism and how his work is damaging for progressives now. And, if Jimmy ever sees this, please don’t take what I’m saying out of context or change the words or allow one of your producers to do this. I would be grateful.