I have more reservations about their perspective and reporting than the critical-minded view I try to take of all punditry and reporting. It's hard to know how much is ideology and how much is marketing sometimes. That group - Jimmy Dore most particularly - is currently defining itself as a distinct brand from other left-leaning alternative media like TYT/The Young Turks, Sam Seder's Majority Report, and Nomiki Konst. I would include Jacobin's podcasts in that latter group. Ana Kasparian of TYT also co-hosts a Saturday Jacobin podcast, for instance. I would put RJ Escrow and his Zero Hour podcast more in the latter category.
I don't mean to imply that there is some sharp programmatic list of issues that clearly differentiate them. There is some cross-pollination. David Dayen, who appears fairly regularly on The Majority Report has also recently appeared on Katie Halper's show. RJ Escrow recently conducted an interview on his show with Matt Taibbi, specifically challenging Taibbi's, uh, eccentric commentary of Herbert Marcuse's work, on which I've also commented here. (Matt Taibbi rants against Herbert Marcuse 02/26/2021)
Both groups generally take an "anti-imperialist" position, which I certainly do too. If "anti-imperialist" was good enough for Mark Twain and William James, it's good enough for me.
The Primo Radical podcast above podcasts include a reference to one of the issues that has brought some justified criticism on the Dore-Halper group (for want of a better label), which is the position they have taken on the conflict in Syria, including what looks to be the un critical embrace of at least some Syria propaganda narratives, like their denigration of the White Helmets group and their, at best, overly confident dismissal of charges that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its opponents, specifically in this case at the city of Duma. (I haven't dug very deeply into the details of that particular issue. But what I have seen on it makes it seem pretty clear that the charge is true.)
AFter 38:00 in this video, Khalek and the host get into a more ideological7factional discussion about the difference between those two groups.
In the case of Syria, I do think the intervention on which President Obama and Secretary of STate Hillary Clinton was a seriously bad idea. The fact that the Syrian government is a dictatorship with bad policies does not mean that the US needs to get directly militarily involved. And mainstream reporting on the groups that the US was directly assisting in that civil war situation also raise serious questions of how sensible their choice of local allies was. "Blowback" is a real thing. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone today can say with a straight face, for instance, that backing the jihadist mujahedeen rebels against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan had unqualified beneficial results for the US. It was that conflict that spawned not just Al Qaida but the "jihadist" brand of Muslin extremism. Israel's support for the early formation of Hamas as a way to weaken the more moderate Palestine Liberation Organization has certainly had elements of blowback, although the results are not unwelcome to hardline rightwing Israelis like Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have some friends who are Kurdish refugees from Syria, and I've talked to them some about their perspectives. But they've mainly talked to me about their personal experiences and the events in the Kurdish areas. And I know from that and from the general news that Kurds in northern Syria have had to deal with hostilities from the Syrian government, the Islamic State, and Tayyip Erdoğan's government in Turkey. Reducing genuinely complicated situations like that to a good-guys-vs-bad-guys framing that the US inevitably uses when intervening in a foreign military conflict can be a highly misleading thing.
One topic that comes up here is that fact that some people on the left, like the late and far-too-soon-departed Michael Brooks of The Majority Report, criticized the Trump-Pence Administration for withdrawing its troops from the area controlled and temporarily government by a left Kurdish group, the YPG. That was a classic case where a pragmatic recognition that we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time when it comes to foreign policy. On the one hand, there was no way the Trump-Pence was going to provide direct military backing over any long term for a left Kurdish government there. On the other hand, the withdrawal was done as part of a Trump deal with Erdoğan that allowed US NATO ally Turkey to invade Syria and carry out an actual ethnic cleansing operation in some of the Syrian Kurds to resettle non-Kurdish Syrian refugees there. It was a thoroughly ugly business which, among other things, should have led the EU to revise its own Turkish policy and get serious about a refugee policy.
I commented on this and criticized the Trump-Pence policy in real time, including The Syria troop-withdrawal muddle and why it shows it's a mistake to consider the Trump-Pence foreign policy non-interventionist 01/12/2019. I'll further note that, as Bibla Wahab noted NPR at the time, "[The Syria Kurds] only ask that the U.S. military sticks around because that [American] flag is powerful enough to deter a Turkish invasion. And Mr. Trump's decision was to remove that American flag and failing at protecting the Kurdish friends and deterring the Turkish invading army." (A Look At The History Of The U.S. Alliance With The Kurds All Things Considered 10/010/2019) Again, a very complicated situation. But Trump made a dirty deal with Erdoğan that made the US complicit in a Turkish ethnic cleansing operation.
The Primo Radical podcast also shows Noam Chomsky, who has been carrying on a fundamental, anti-imperialist criticism of American foreign policy since the 1960s, criticizing Trump's action in that case. And in the discussion that follows, Rania Khalek does show some appreciation of the maddening complexity of that particular situation. But she also casually dismisses the Turkish Kurdish group the PKK as "a cult," which is misleading at best. Given human rights abuses the Turkish government has committed in the name of fighting the PKK, such characterizations deserve careful scrutiny. Her discussion of the far more complex issue of creating a Kurdish state is also really lightweight.
I'll note that the Vienna weekly Falter has provided some good analysis of Erdoğan's ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds, e.g., Nina Brnada, Erdogan, der Krieg, die Kurden und wir Falter 42/2019, which also discusses how the EU's refugee deal with Turkey influenced Turkey's action in this situation, and Raimund Löw, Die Schlacht um Idlib und das Ende des Syrienkrieges Falter 09/2020.
Rania Khalek is too relentlessly melodramatic for my taste. And, honestly, a bit of a Meghan McCain tone. And she does get some things right in her commentaries. But her foreign policy commentary in this videa is definitely a mixed bag. The host frames the TYT-Sam Seder group as described here as a "pro-empire left," a frivolous description as opposed to the true "anti-imperialist left," and claims the difference between the two as an "existential, philosophical" one.
On the media competition side of things, it's always good to keep in mind that, from Whittaker Chambers to David Horowitz to Dave Rubin, there is a long-standing market for "converts" taking the position that they used to be left and have now come to realize that the left is horrible and the Alt-Right has the real answers to all important political questions. Dave Rubin, formerly of TYT and now with The Blaze, has taken that track, which typically involves an "independent-thinker" stage. Glenn Greenwald has always had a quirky libertarian position. But he and Jimmy Dore are currently embracing a kind of left-right "populism" that seems to be heavily tilting toward the positions we hear from Tucker Carlson on his White Power Hour show on FOX News.
One of the people identified with this group whose trajectory I find particularly disappointing is Max Blumenthal, who didn't a really substantial book on the American Christian Right, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (2009). But his commentary for years now has come off to me as a dogmatic, uncritical version of "fundamental opposition" to US foreign policy. Nomiki Konst and Benjamin Dixon discuss this phenomenon in The Fracturing Of The Left + The So-Called Leftists Close To Aligning With The Far Right 036/04/2021.
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