I've stumbled on a wonderful 50 minute video which carefully deconstructs a very popular (900,000 viewers) "leftist" named Jimmy Dore. If you don't have time for the full 50 minutes I'd still recommend watching the first 11, or even 5. This is not the Jimmy Dore show, but a deconstruction of it, showing how Jimmy Dore lies.
(As a leftist myself, I would call Jimmy Dore an ultra-leftist. Ultra-leftists attack both major political parties "from the left" and insist on not voting for either one. This is a useless strategy. The better strategy is to vote for the one which is better, even slightly better, and save time and effort for other kinds of politics, including in-good-faith primary challenges as Bernie did--ultimately endorsing the winning party candidate, demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of public education. More often than not, refusing to vote for the "lesser-evil" as ultra-leftists call it, leads to far greater evil than expected. I had this experience personally in 1980 and 2000, and I learned my lesson. Noam Chomsky correctly calls the "lesser-evil" the "greater-good" and I agree with what Chomsky says in general and on this topic in particular.)
Jimmy Dore is now filling the ultra-leftist role on Youtube, where in the past 2 years he has become a star. Because I follow most of the left, I've seen lots of people falling for his schtick and occasionally tried to argue back (though, I've also stopped following a lot of people who constantly follow him, and after seeing 2 minutes of him, I have never watched any more Jimmy Dore but I still read what people are saying about him--because he is so popular. I find him to disgusting to bear.)
Dore didn't start out being an anti-vaxxer. As the video below shows, he was initially critical of how only elites were getting the first vaccines, and how people in poor countries weren't, etc. That take was largely correct.
But sometime in the middle of this year, Dore pivoted to disseminating and even originating anti-vaxx content. The video below shows how this is done. Of course, Jimmy Dore doesn't say he is anti-vaxx. He says he has taken the vaccine, but wants people knowing the full story. He has "concerns." That's what they all say. As the video shows, Dore very selectively quotes from articles, leaving out the author's key sentences and ideas, and rearranging bits to make an anti-vaxx story. And sometimes, in one case, adds in words that weren't even in the article in order to give it his slant.
If his goal were merely to inform, why would he do this?
Clearly it's not actually to inform people. Then why? Well if you look at his viewership counts, once he started pushing anti-vax stories his viewer counts went way up. And...he's got a mortgage to pay off. A big mortgage because he lives in LA.
No comments:
Post a Comment