Thank you for your service, Jimmy Dore

A tribute to #ForceTheVote and for practicing journalism on the Covid pandemic

About a year ago, a self-described pothead comedian in his basement made a modest proposal to progressive Democrats who had been elected to Congress thanks to the groundswell of support for Bernie Sanders’ campaigns.

It was simple, basic parliamentary math. The Democrats controlled 222 seats in the House of Representatives, so it took 218 votes to have a simple majority, which also happens to be the number it takes to elect the Speaker of the House. Dore urged progressive Democrats in Congress, specifically the Squad, to refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker unless she publicly promised a floor vote on Medicare for All.

Why M4A? Because all of them said they were for it, and we were in the middle of a pandemic. What better time? It would only take 5 abstentions to block Pelosi from another term as Speaker, since no Republican would vote for her, and if they did block Pelosi then the Democratic caucus would have to pick somebody else, presumably some other Democrat. Then the lies and gaslighting from Democrats, including the Squad, started.

Some said that refusing to vote for Pelosi would result in a Republican becoming Speaker. That’s just a flat-out lie, as a Republican would also have to get 218 votes and could not do so without Democratic support, which would certainly have been educational if it had happened.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said to check the number of co-sponsors for M4A. Well, AOC, to co-sponsor a thing is not the same as actually going on the record to vote for a thing. She also said they didn’t have the votes to pass it, therefore they shouldn’t bring it up for a vote.

WTF. Dore never anticipated that M4A would actually pass the House, much less the Senate, but a floor vote would make public those Democrats who voted against it, which could easily galvanize yet more public pressure to pass it the next time. Hell, it took the British Parliament 30 tries to pass their National Health Service, but they eventually did it. All sorts of good things were voted down in Congress before they finally passed under public pressure. That’s just history.

There were also all sorts of attacks on Dore’s character and statements his idea was a bad one because he said something or other at some time to offend someone. Again, WTF. What’s that got to do with anything? Force the Vote was a good, simple strategy, modeled on things like the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus which caused the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to retire from Congress because they drove him batshit crazy by holding up all sorts of legislation his corporate masters wanted him to pass.

I never liked or agreed with those folks on most things, but it was an effective parliamentary strategy. I also thought the whole point in electing progressive Democrats to Congress was to throw a monkey wrench into the corporatist Democrat agenda in order to force them to give some concessions to progressives.

What happened? Not a single progressive Democrat refused to vote for the contemptible oligarch from San Francisco. Not one. They all bowed down to power in order to advance their own careers and, in the case of those like AOC, their celebrity status with liberals. Dore predicted that they wouldn’t get a single progressive priority through Congress. Here we are in 2022, and events have proven him correct.

That is now another historical fact. Nonetheless, Dore managed to put some pressure on Democrats and got some publicity, and proved to me and at least thousands of others on the left that all Democrats at the federal level are corrupted by the system, by the Democratic Party, and by their own ambitions. He proved them to be frauds and liars, and not worth voting for, much less sending them my or your hard-earned money.

In short, the Party may have changed them, but they certainly failed to change the Party, and they never will.

The second service Dore has provided Americans is accurate coverage of the Covid pandemic, at least as much as he could do at different times. He never succumbed to the mass hysteria promoted by the entire liberal media establishment since the lockdowns and restrictions started in March 2020. He took the vaccines himself and encouraged others to do so, but was always opposed to mandates because he’s a consistent civil libertarian.

He explored proposed treatments for Covid and reported on what other countries were trying. This included Ivermectin, which liberals only opposed because Trump said nice things about it at one time, not for any scientific reasons. It turns out that African countries, denied the vaccine formula by the American oligarchy, used it as a preventative with some success. He never, not once, urged people to avoid vaccination in favor of taking Ivermectin, though he did report on those who did. He also exposed the total fabrications of liberal news sources which claimed people died after taking it.

Dore showed us reports from the US and around the world that showed masks weren’t terribly effective at containing Covid, about the virus being airborne so all the handwashing and cleaning didn’t do a damned thing to prevent infection, and shared reports from medical authorities, like the CDC and WHO, that vaccinated people could still contract and spread the virus, but always talked about how they reduced symptoms.

He reported on his horrible experience with one of the vaccine boosters, and on reports from around the world that questioned the desirability of those same boosters. He showed us how much profit Big Pharma has made off of the pandemic. He showed us reports of how children very rarely developed any symptoms from Covid, and exposed the lie that school closures protect children and teachers from infection while disrupting tens of millions of households.

Dore shared reports from the World Health Organization, the British Health Service, and other medical organizations that Covid was becoming more infectious and less symptomatic, and castigated the American media for reporting only on the raw number of infections in the scariest way possible but not on the decreasing symptoms of the new variants as they came along.

Dore reported on how the corporations who control American health care have closed hundreds of hospitals for “economic reasons” in recent years, and have treated their own employees so badly that many of them quit, which is what really caused the hospital bed and staffing shortages the corporate media loves to fearmonger about, not unvaccinated people who get sick.

Perhaps most importantly to me, Jimmy Dore consistently challenged the McCarthyite scare tactics employed by the federal government, the corporate media, and most Democratic state governments, which clearly were designed to promote the mass hysteria over what turned out to be just another kind of common cold that surrounds us to this day, because people who have had the shit scared out of them are easier to control.

This included demonstrating how statistics have been deliberately skewed to be presented in the scariest way possible. My favorite one is how anyone who dies and tested positive for Covid is said to have died of Covid, when it was actually cancer or diabetes or old age or even gunshot wounds that were the real cause of death.

Jimmy Dore has been the only American media source I have seen who has reported on mass protests against Covid restrictions in other countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium. He’s demonstrated again and again how many of the Covid mandates are really authoritarian means to control how people live their daily lives, because the capitalist oligarchies in many countries, including the USA, are using fear of Covid to attempt to crush political and labor movements opposed to the interests of capitalists.

What’s this done for Jimmy Dore? Well, his viewership has certainly gone up, but he has been smeared and vilified by nearly the entire media establishment and by I don’t know how many mainly Democratic partisans in social media, most of whom haven’t even watched any of his videos for themselves. If they want, they can smear me now, but fair warning! I’m older than Jimmy and, if anything, give even less of a fuck than he does.

And it’s done one more thing. If you ever come to Cleveland, Jimmy, my wife and I will most definitely see your show. If you want, we’ll even turn you on to some of the best Italian food in these United States. For real. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for reading. Good night, and good luck.