I may write a separate piece on the phenomenon of Jimmy Dore, a materialist analysis of his brand of YouTube “populist” politics which has yielded him a 2 million dollar mansion in LA’s Studio City, his second LA house, with neighbors like Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney and firmly places him in the 1% of the US elite class, as he continues to larp as some downtrodden beleaguered “pothead comedian making a show out of my garage”. Dore is not an isolated phenomenon who got to where he is, with millions in his bank account and assets of over 5 million at a minimum, based solely on his comedic genius and rhetorical brilliance. No, he’s the product of a particular moment in American society, the coming together of structural factors at the material level, like the establishment of the online media space with the growing prominence of YouTube, and at what Marxists call the superstructural level, meaning the particular nature of the political field that Dore situated himself in post 2016. Take away Bernie, and Dore is still a failing loser comedian doing shows to 6 people (same with Dave Rubin if you take away Trump: the two phenomena are rooted in the same underlying structural factors).
Brihanna Joy Gray has also fed on the lucrative anti-vax trough. She had a guy on who was called out for his sexism, bullying in a detailed Twitter thread by Deepti Gurdasani. She ignored it and had him on again. The anti-vax demographic is passionate and well-to-do. A rich seam, grifters of all hues cannot look past.
Pretty much a perfect summary of Dore. It pains me to see people on the Left defending him. I also agree that Briahna Joy Gray being a good choice. She’s one of the extremely few left media figures who’d leant disappoint. Likely due to her actually being involved in actual politics herself.
A reader got in touch with me with some goods points that I replied to which I think others may find worthwhile as well, so here it is:
Thank you for the very kind words. I agree with you that one key element in understanding Dore is the intentional ambiguity inherent in the "populist" brand of political output, which extends from the media space to political actors like those you mention. There's a slippage from "right-wing populist", which is already a strange category, to just "populist", which functions similarly to "anti-establishment". Trump is the perfect embodiment of how these labels are assigned to a person based purely off vague, off-hand rhetoric, a few sentences taken here and there and glued together. Ignore the totality of his rhetoric and political practice, what he actually pushed for and implement while President, just keep going back to these snippets.
For Dore though there is a secondary aspect as well, namely the fact that he is an actor in the online media space. I said I might end up writing a separate piece on that, but that really is crucial in understanding how a vile depraved grifter cretin like him can be made. The online media space is governed by certain rules, unwritten yet known by everyone operating within it. If you do X, the result will be Y, and they know it, they have to know it in order to successfully position themselves in that space, like Dore has done. And what he did around 2017/2018 is realize that the "populist left" brand had a ceiling, and it wasn't enough in terms of the cash he was getting to buy that third mansion in Florence. So he re-positioned himself. He began putting out content solely critiquing anyone on the broad left, with a particular focus on AOC because she became the new hate figure of deranged right-wingers, and he did the Dave Rubin move, except instead of branding himself as classical liberal who by accident just happens to agree with every right-wing position and boosts them while only shitting on the broad left, Dore stayed with the equally lucrative "populist" brand, wherein the "left" part kept being eroded by him. Don't do that segment on cops, let's say climate change is a hoax but frame it as a WEF project like my MAGA crank audience wants to hear, let's say trans people are weird and creepy, play into all the deranged culture war stuff from the right.
And that's how he ended up where he is today, shouting like a drunken lunatic cunt to Cornel West because he cares too much about trans people and says white supremacy. That's prime content for the audience he has cultivated. They love that shit. I want my Jimmy yelling at these gross radical blacks. Please do it more daddy, please humiliate them more on my show as you suck off Ron DeZionist and Trump and RFK Jr constantly.
Jimmy Dore might very well be one of the most depraved scumbag humans alive, which incidentally is why everyone close to him hates him viscerally. Look at the litany of people who were close friends and co-workers with him who now call him out for the grifter scumbag he is. They all know it.
And I agree with you about Cornel. He is not perfect, as I said in the piece you can critique him from the left, with a coherent principled point. That's fine. I have done it and will do it whenever it's necessary. But in terms of the context of candidates running for higher office, there is zero doubt that he is the most moral, principled actual left populist person who has ever done so, maybe with the exception of Eugene Debs and those figures back then. I have been reading his work for over two decades now, and he is deeply familiar with the socialist and Marxist tradition, has done very good work in the latter, like his excellent " The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought", and has generally taken up the right positions on various issues and, crucially, been part of social movements from Occupy to BLM and union organizing.
But RFK Jr., a decrepit scion of American political royalty who has been a Clintonite his entire adult life until he began this populist rebrand larp backed by right-wing Zionist billionaire cash, he's the guy you suck off as the real anti-establishment hero? The guy who extols the virtues of the free market, is a proud neoliberal, whines about how the government is corrupt so we have to reduce its size, a Blairite-Reagan-Clinton clone who was told to pretend to be against the Ukraine proxy war so he could launder himself as a radical, even though he never said a word about it as the events that lead to it were happening and in fact proudly backed those events as a Clintonite neo-con, he is your hero?
Jimmy Dore is a depraved cunt who has cultivated a cult of cranks and MAGA freaks as his core audience to great personal monetary benefit, and he will keep doing it because of that very reason. Marx's materialist principle that social being determines consciousness is proven correct yet again.
Brihanna Joy Gray has also fed on the lucrative anti-vax trough. She had a guy on who was called out for his sexism, bullying in a detailed Twitter thread by Deepti Gurdasani. She ignored it and had him on again. The anti-vax demographic is passionate and well-to-do. A rich seam, grifters of all hues cannot look past.
Pretty much a perfect summary of Dore. It pains me to see people on the Left defending him. I also agree that Briahna Joy Gray being a good choice. She’s one of the extremely few left media figures who’d leant disappoint. Likely due to her actually being involved in actual politics herself.
A reader got in touch with me with some goods points that I replied to which I think others may find worthwhile as well, so here it is:
Thank you for the very kind words. I agree with you that one key element in understanding Dore is the intentional ambiguity inherent in the "populist" brand of political output, which extends from the media space to political actors like those you mention. There's a slippage from "right-wing populist", which is already a strange category, to just "populist", which functions similarly to "anti-establishment". Trump is the perfect embodiment of how these labels are assigned to a person based purely off vague, off-hand rhetoric, a few sentences taken here and there and glued together. Ignore the totality of his rhetoric and political practice, what he actually pushed for and implement while President, just keep going back to these snippets.
For Dore though there is a secondary aspect as well, namely the fact that he is an actor in the online media space. I said I might end up writing a separate piece on that, but that really is crucial in understanding how a vile depraved grifter cretin like him can be made. The online media space is governed by certain rules, unwritten yet known by everyone operating within it. If you do X, the result will be Y, and they know it, they have to know it in order to successfully position themselves in that space, like Dore has done. And what he did around 2017/2018 is realize that the "populist left" brand had a ceiling, and it wasn't enough in terms of the cash he was getting to buy that third mansion in Florence. So he re-positioned himself. He began putting out content solely critiquing anyone on the broad left, with a particular focus on AOC because she became the new hate figure of deranged right-wingers, and he did the Dave Rubin move, except instead of branding himself as classical liberal who by accident just happens to agree with every right-wing position and boosts them while only shitting on the broad left, Dore stayed with the equally lucrative "populist" brand, wherein the "left" part kept being eroded by him. Don't do that segment on cops, let's say climate change is a hoax but frame it as a WEF project like my MAGA crank audience wants to hear, let's say trans people are weird and creepy, play into all the deranged culture war stuff from the right.
And that's how he ended up where he is today, shouting like a drunken lunatic cunt to Cornel West because he cares too much about trans people and says white supremacy. That's prime content for the audience he has cultivated. They love that shit. I want my Jimmy yelling at these gross radical blacks. Please do it more daddy, please humiliate them more on my show as you suck off Ron DeZionist and Trump and RFK Jr constantly.
Jimmy Dore might very well be one of the most depraved scumbag humans alive, which incidentally is why everyone close to him hates him viscerally. Look at the litany of people who were close friends and co-workers with him who now call him out for the grifter scumbag he is. They all know it.
And I agree with you about Cornel. He is not perfect, as I said in the piece you can critique him from the left, with a coherent principled point. That's fine. I have done it and will do it whenever it's necessary. But in terms of the context of candidates running for higher office, there is zero doubt that he is the most moral, principled actual left populist person who has ever done so, maybe with the exception of Eugene Debs and those figures back then. I have been reading his work for over two decades now, and he is deeply familiar with the socialist and Marxist tradition, has done very good work in the latter, like his excellent " The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought", and has generally taken up the right positions on various issues and, crucially, been part of social movements from Occupy to BLM and union organizing.
But RFK Jr., a decrepit scion of American political royalty who has been a Clintonite his entire adult life until he began this populist rebrand larp backed by right-wing Zionist billionaire cash, he's the guy you suck off as the real anti-establishment hero? The guy who extols the virtues of the free market, is a proud neoliberal, whines about how the government is corrupt so we have to reduce its size, a Blairite-Reagan-Clinton clone who was told to pretend to be against the Ukraine proxy war so he could launder himself as a radical, even though he never said a word about it as the events that lead to it were happening and in fact proudly backed those events as a Clintonite neo-con, he is your hero?
Jimmy Dore is a depraved cunt who has cultivated a cult of cranks and MAGA freaks as his core audience to great personal monetary benefit, and he will keep doing it because of that very reason. Marx's materialist principle that social being determines consciousness is proven correct yet again.