What if I told you Jimmy Dore was Sean Hannity’s clone?
There’s been a steady drumbeat of Fox News and right-wing media talking points linked to Jimmy Dore and the Dumdumleft, who are part of the same pro-trump suppression apparatus made to rig arguments in Trump’s favor, and cry smear merchant at conflicting information.
The nexus between Fox News, GOP conspiracies, the far-right, and the reactionary left has kicked into high-gear over the last 3 months, correlated directly by the official announcement of the probe into Donald Trump purportedly conditioning aid in Ukraine to dig up dirt on political opponent Joe Biden.
Jimmy Dore has adopted the most sensationalist, far-right conspiracies incubated on the web, name-dropping CrowdStrike, to defend Trump asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” to a data server that does not exist.
Trump confidant Roger Stone, and even kook Glenn Beck, promoted this particular theory to discredit CrowdStrike’s investigation. Trump believes an elusive DNC server in Ukraine harbors evidence the 2016 DNC hack was fake news manufactured by the DNC to take the wind out of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
This theory is frequently voiced by Trump, then harnessed as an opening for conservative media to spew crackpot theories about the election. The theory depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of the workings of digital crime, and if one were to hand over a digital copy of the server, the server and any potential evidence would be destroyed in the process.
That doesn’t stop Jimmy from constantly reminding his viewers: “Comey never inspected the DNC server. Your intelligence agencies are lying liars who are lying about this.”
How can you argue with ‘lying liars?’
Moreover, Trump and his henchmen believe investigating a virtual crime is like investigating a murder. Daily Beast reports, The Russians didn’t leave DNA evidence on the server racks and fingerprints on the keyboards. All the evidence of their comings and goings was on the computer hard drives, and in memory, and in the ephemeral network transmissions to and from the GRU’s command-and-control servers.
There was also this, reported via The Daily Beast:
“We were in close contact and worked cooperatively with the FBI. Any suggestion that they were denied access to what they wanted for their investigation is completely incorrect.”
— DNC’s Adrienne Watson
In early October, Jimmy appeared on Hill TV, to claim Trump’s Ukraine phone call was not a scandal and no-one cares, echoing Tucker Carlson’s comment that the Ukraine scandal ‘doesn’t seem very shocking,’ and attacked the media for covering it.
In the same program, he asserted Joe Biden’s son needs to be investigated (despite the fact that investigation did happen, and turned up nothing), that Trump purposefully asked China to investigate Biden as 3-d chess and claimed Mitch McConnel will block a trial from happening.
Dore also seized upon The Hill’s botched reporting on Joe Biden’s “corruption” in Ukraine, to promote a both sides do it-type spin.
Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate embraced the erroneous Fox News theory of ‘Spygate,’ peddled by professional hacks Dan Bongino and Sean Hannity. The theory asserts the Whistleblower ‘never saw the transcript’ and ‘the Hillary Clinton Campaign got a FISA warrant to spy on Trump.’
The Horowitz report busted the right-wing media “Spygate” conspiracy.
In late September, Aaron Mate appeared on Jimmy’s show to say we should investigate the origins of the Russian collusion story, which is a trope weaponized by Sean Hannity to distract from Trump’s corruption.
In the same broadcast, Jimmy Dore charged that, the impeachment inquiry is bound to backfire on the democrats, which is a common talking point distributed at this place called Fox “News.”
He seems to repeat this one a lot. Either knowingly, or unknowingly, regurgitating a Fox News personality: Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Media Matters reported, Sanders said “democrats are being incredibly stupid right now” because “impeachment is going to fail” and “help get the President re-elected.”
Dore made the argument the media reports on Russiagate/Ukraine-gate to drive up TV ratings and ensure Donald Trump wins again. White supremacist Ann Coulter agrees.
Kyle Kulinski seems to believe it doesn’t matter Trump used his public profile to dig up dirt on political opponent, because Trump’s a norm-violator, on the contrary, he seems really peeved that Joe Biden’s son was on an energy board.
Twitter user Obama freed the gays observed: “And is also repeating Trump’s argument that the Ukrainian prosecutor Biden got fired was investigating Hunter Biden, which, as I recall, is the opposite of what happened.”
Twitter user Peoples Historian commented: “He’s also saying he doesn’t “have a problem” with about 5 criminal actions taken by Trump from the original “ask,” to the conspiracy to defraud the US to the obstruction, the campaign finance violations, to the abuses of power. Then, there’s breaking the oath of office.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity and Ukraine Conspiracy Architect Rudy Giuliani’s jockeyed for the release of classified materials for a long time now, asserting the President has authority to do it. Jimmy Dore has tagged along for the ride, defending Trump on faulty grounds, ‘Trump has to declassify the FISA court hearing stuff, so that they can look at it,” and accused “the FBI of lying to the FISA court on the regular.”
Jimmy’s justification for Trump’s unprecedented release of classified materials is informed by the ludicrous conspiracy that we need to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation. According to the Wall Street Journal’s September 17 article: “[This] is a move that could eventually allow the public unprecedented access to a probe that he has repeatedly railed against.”
Sounds problematic, right? Let’s rewind back to late March, when Glenn Greenwald, and the anti-anti Trump crowd were timid about calling for the full Mueller report to be released.
Kid Showbusiness highlighted ‘they got the headline they wanted that confirmed their business model. Calling for the full report to be released might jeopardize that.’
There is a long pattern of the reactionary left adamantly advocating against accountability for the Trump regime, which is strange considering the Dumdumleft billed themselves on vigilant skepticism to intelligence agencies and ‘the deep state.’
After Mueller’s report was released, Jimmy Dore really leaned into the Fox News alternate Universe. On the Sep 26, 2019 edition of The Jimmy Dore Show, for example the eponymous host declared: “The Steele-dossier is funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. […] They hired a company, called Fusion GPS, to go dig up dirt on Donald Trump, that’s called opposition research.”
This mirrored what Sean Hannity said on the January 23, 2018 edition of Fox News’ Hannity.
On the same edition of The Jimmy Dore Show, the eponymous host lied: “They used that bullshit Steele-dossier to get the FISA warrant on the Trump administration, so they can spy on them! Opposition research paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign to get a FISA warrant, which is highly unethical to do that.”
Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-hosts Pete Hegseth, Steve, Doocy, and Ainsley Earhardt coincidentally concluded the same thing: The FBI was spying on the Trump campaign.
Perhaps, the most egregious example of Jimmy Dore’s terrible editorial judgement was the Seth Rich conspiracy. His credible source for the preposterous claim that Seth Rich leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks — a Fox New legal commentator, Rod Wheeler.
Wheeler might as well have danced on Seth Rich’s grave, when he purported to be on the family’s payroll. The Rich family quickly swatted that down. Wheeler, then backtracked, lying to CNN that he hadn’t actually obtained information linking Rich to WikiLeaks — throwing Fox5 under the bus by saying they told him to.
The Post’s Dave Weigel reported, much to Jimmy Dore’s rage:
The Rich conspiracy thrived not just because fringe conservatives liked the idea of a break in the “Clinton body count” theory, but that the idea that someone would murder a leaker to cover up a conspiracy against Bernie Sanders would justify so much angst. Briefly, before Wheeler recanted his story, the Young Turks network’s “Jimmy Dore Show” chewed over the revelation that Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks.
The Seth Rich conspiracy crashed through the guardrails of fact-checking with ease, amplified by the nature of the Information Era, Twitter, Fox News, Russian news, and some people on the Left.
On the bright side, the theory was eventually outed as a Russian disinformation campaign.
According to self-appointed Dumdumologist ‘Kid Showbusiness,’ Jimmy Dore deceived his audience, pretending he never promoted the story.
Eventually, Jimmy did apologize for his contribution, though it was at a time when he knew the fewest amount of people were watching.