What I Learned From the Bernie Sanders/Naomi Klein Podcast Was NOT What They Intended Me to Learn

Let's pay attention to what they do not say, and think about why they do not say it

By listening to this podcast of Naomi Klein with Bernie Sanders I learned what their “pitch” is and this is an interesting thing to know because it sheds light on what are the strengths and weaknesses in the understanding of the world held by people who admire these individuals (“progressives”).

The pitch (my stream of consciousness recollection of it)

“Because the words ‘working class’ and ‘ruling class’ are censored in the mass media, and Israel is committing genocide in the name of making Jews safe, and yes we need to end fossil fuel carbon emissions to save the planet but also end poor people and non-white people suffering the most from pollution and no clean drinking water, and economic inequality is extreme today, and pro-Trump people have real working class grievances that Steve Bannon appeals to, and today’s youth aren’t just single issue—they are connecting all the issues and know the system is the problem, and of course it was wrong for Russia to invade Ukraine but the U.S. should be pursuing peace, and Tucker Carlson talks about how the rich are screwing the working class but offers no better alternative, and we should give aid to Israel but only conditionally, and Trump is a fascist, and it’s wonderful how many progressives are in Congress now, AND THEREFORE WE MUST RE-ELECT BIDEN!”

What this pitch tells me

This pitch tells me that there are lots of people (that the likes of Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein aim to lead, or as I would put it, mis-lead) who want to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor and with none of the horrible things the rich do. The pitch tells me this because it is clearly designed to portray Sanders and Klein as leaders with this aim; it is designed this way because Sanders and Klein know that this is what LOTS of people actually want.

What this pitch also tells me about people who follow the leadership of Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein, is this: they do not know—and Sanders and Klein do not want them to know—that:

1. About 86% of pro-Trump MAGA people would LOVE an egalitarian revolution to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. (I found this out by talking to them, as I report in this article and as I discuss further here.) If good people who self-identify as “progressives” knew this about ordinary people who are not “progressives,” then they would also begin to see that the “woke” nonsense they identify with is pushed by the ruling class’s liberal media (NPR, etc.) for the purpose of preventing unity of ALL the have-nots, as I discuss in some detail here.

2. Israel may say that its violence against Palestinians is for the purpose of making Jews safe, but it is not. It’s actual purpose is to enable the billionaires who rule Israel to make Palestinians a bogeymen enemy they pretend to protect Israeli Jews from and thereby control, severely economically oppress, and get rich off of working class Israeli Jews. (I prove this here, and also prove here that the Israeli government for decades has funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power in order to make the bogeyman enemy maximally frightening)

3. Even most (not the rich ones!) passionately pro-Israel Jews can be won to oppose the entire Israeli/Zionist violent ethnic cleansing project (not just the current genocide in Gaza) by telling them the facts in point #2. Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionism organization that Naomi Klein proudly says in the podcast that she is a member of, expels anybody who talks about the facts in point #2 (they expelled me for that reason, as I report here.)

4. Electoral politics is NOT the way to remove the rich from power to get real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. The ruling billionaire plutocracy (that rules no matter whether Trump or Biden sits in the Oval Office) was never elected and thus cannot be un-elected. (Read about this here.)

5. Mass action against U.S. support for Israel, not voting for a warmonger like Biden, is what can force the U.S. to stop supporting Israel; furthermore the reason truly MASSIVE action against U.S. support for Israel can be built is because of the facts in point #2, which Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein never even hint at. (Read more about this here.)

6. There is no persuasive evidence that C02 from burning fossil fuel is causing catastrophic global warming. (Read here how there is in fact no “97% consensus” of climate scientists supporting the alarmism about C02, and read here WHY the rulers of the world want us to believe that burning fossil fuel is catastrophic, and if you like seeing actual data about this go here.)

7. Russia’s stated aims for its special military operation in Ukraine, and the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, are entirely morally just, despite the fact that the Russian government is anti-egalitarian; just as, during the United States Civil War, the aims and actions of the Union army to free the slaves and remove the slave-owners from power were entirely morally just, despite the anti-egalitarian nature of Lincoln and the government he led. (Read about this here.)

8. The people whom “progressives” demonized, who opposed mandatory Covid-19 vaccination and who said the Covid-19 vaccine did not prevent infection and did not prevent people from becoming contagious and who said the massive lockdowns were unjustified (because testing and quarantining of infectious people was the just and effective alternative) and the lockdowns were particularly oppressive of working class people and small business owners, were right.

9. Winning important reforms happens when the movement for those reforms grows more and more explicitly revolutionary, not when the movement aims to elect a “good” politician. This is evident from how Americans won Social Security and the right to form labor unions and unemployment compensation; it was not by relying on FDR (as I discuss here). And this is how Americans abolished Jim Crow; it was not by relying on LBJ (as I discuss here.)

10. It is indeed possible to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor (read how here), instead of settling for “taxing the rich” as Bernie Sanders advocates, which amounts to merely making them pay a fee for the right to treat the have-nots like dirt.

These are vital truths that people need to know in order to win what most people actually want, and yet these truths never escape from the mouths of Sanders and Klein who pretend to be our leaders and tell us that the main thing is to re-elect Joe Biden because, you know, Trump.

• Biden, the man who provides Israel the bombs and diplomatic vetoes at the UN so it can continue genocidal violence.

• Biden, the man who is escalating war—an unjust war!—against nuclear armed Russia by allowing Ukraine to use U.S. supplied and managed weapons against land deep inside Russia (note that neither Russia nor the U.S. ever attacked the other nation’s land, not even via a proxy nation, during the Cold War, but Biden is breaking this old agreement even though Russia has a well-known policy of responding to an existential threat with nuclear weapons.)

• Biden, the man who seized Scott Ritter’s passport for no justifiable reason—in outright violation of several Constitutional amendments in the Bill of Rights—because Ritter has been outspoken in telling the truth about why Biden’s war against Russia in Ukraine is a war in defense of—literally!—outright swastika-wearing Nazis whose aim is violent ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking people and the placement of NATO nuclear weapons aimed at Russia right on Russia’s border.

Nonetheless, there is some good news. Though it takes time, the trend is plain to see: more and more people are sorting the good ideas from the bad, and judging leaders accordingly.