Al a Gory

9 February 2025

by Not Sure

Our story begins many years ago. We are confined to a few random high points here and there, as recounting the tale in full would turn this into Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Alas, there are no heroes in this epic.

Al Gore Jr. was the vice-president under William Jefferson Clinton. His now-estranged wife, Tipper, got her own cameo as the ‘outraged Christian mother’, fighting the music industry single-handedly, with only a handful of Parental Advisory labels and some righteous indignation. A minor actress, she took over where George H.W. Bush’s vice-president left off. Dan Quayle is perhaps mostly remembered for attacking the sitcom Murphy Brown, decrying its promotion of single motherhood. The fact that their moral campaigns had merit is neither here nor there. They were playing roles.

Al Gore Jr.’s father is little remembered today, but Al Gore Sr. was a U.S. Congressman from 1939 to 1953 and a U.S. Senator from 1953 to 1971. That’s a lifetime of perks and privileges. He was a good buddy to Armand Hammer who ran Occidental Petroleum for years. Armand Hammer was known as ‘Lenin’s chosen capitalist’ and that Soviet leader kept him in style. This tradition continued when Leonid Brezhnev gave Hammer a luxurious Moscow apartment. Like I said, a few random high points, but it’s interesting that Muammar Qaddafi made Hammer a major beneficiary of Libya’s oil wealth.

Armand Hammer’s father was one of the founders of the American Communist Labor Party, so it wasn’t completely far-fetched when J. Edgar Hoover accused Hammer of being a courier for the Comintern. Al Gore Sr. defended Armand Hammer on the Senate floor, Hammer escaped the grasp of Hoover, and Hammer continued to keep Gore in his pocket. A worthy pet.

Al Gore Sr. had a son and called him Junior. This Senator’s son did end up serving in Vietnam…as a journalist…for five months.

Besides petroleum, Armand Hammer was into zinc-mining. Please see this New York Times article from 2000, “THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE VICE PRESIDENT; Gore Family's Ties to Oil Company Magnate Reap Big Rewards, and a Few Problems”. But for for an amazing story, worthy of at least one book in a Homerian epic poem, please read “How the Gores, father and son, helped their patron Occidental Petroleum”. This January 10, 2000 article from the Center for Public Integrity describes how Al Gore Jr. helped orchestrate the sale of the Elk Hills oil field in California. This deal transferred publicly owned land which the US Navy had held as emergency reserves since 1912 to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1997, in what has been described as the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history.

Many exposés were written in the lead-up to the 2000 election, but Al Gore was popular, and his campaign promises included expanding gay rights, paying off the debt, increased investment in biotechnology and information technology, and tackling the cancer problem. His race for the US presidency against George W. Bush was tight and he lost the electoral college vote by five electoral votes, making him one of only a handful of candidates who would win the popular vote but lose the election.

Gore has a particularly close relationship with his daughter Karenna who served as the Youth Outreach Chair in his 2000 campaign. From 1997 until 2011, Karenna was married to Andrew Schiff, a primary care physician in Washington, D.C, and the grandson of Jacob Schiff, a banker at Kuhn, Loeb and Co., who financed the Japanese military efforts against Czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. He was the foremost Jewish leader from 1880-1920 in what was called “the Schiff era”, tackling all the major Jewish issues and problems of that period including the plight of Russian Jews and the rise of Zionism.

After the 2000 presidential race, both Al and Karenna would reinvent themselves. Al became an environmentalist, with an earnest slide show about global warming. His reputation was sealed by An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Billed as a documentary, this is a work of pure fiction, with melted ice caps and homeless polar bears. This won an Academy Award in 2007, the same year that Gore was given the Nobel Peace Prize. Karenna is the founder and director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. According to Wikipedia, “In 2014, she organized "Religions for the Earth," a conference held in conjunction with the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit. Religions for the Earth brought together more than 200 religious and spiritual leaders to redefine the climate crisis "as an urgent moral imperative.”

Al Gore currently sits around #40 on the Most Popular Public Figures list. Not as popular as Martin Luther King, Jr., Queen Elizabeth II, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jimmy Carter, Ivanka Trump, Anthony Fauci, and Pope Benedict the XVI, but more popular than John Kerry, King Charles III, Bill Gates, Justin Trudeau, and even his little mini-me, Greta Thunberg.

Generation Investment Management was founded in 2004 by Al Gore and David Blood, an ex-partner at Goldman Sachs. The idea was ‘sustainable investment’ and ‘capitalism with a conscience’. Blood and Gore.

In late January, Al Gore was at Davos for the 2025 meeting of the World Economic Forum, presenting his emotionally over-the-top, energetic slide show to his cultishly adoring audience. He looked fit and sharp, and I wondered how old he was, still pushing his platform with such enthusiasm. He will be 77 next month. This reminded me of something Alan Watt said in today’s Redux.

“Really, there are very few people in charge of this whole world scenario. There are maybe thousands upon thousands of workers for them, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs; but, really, there are only a few people at the top. There's no doubt whatsoever that it's also intergenerational, you cannot get away from that fact, that inter-generational planning, by a few families is carried on; and the son takes over from the father, with a religious fervor and that's the key to it: it's more than just some one-generational fanatical crazy idea that someone's got. This is intergenerational; you can't pass on that kind of fanaticism unless it's a religion, of a sort. That's where you see it, that's where you see people who never retire, because they still have that ‘fire’, as they call it, at the top.”

Understand who Al Gore Jr. really is. Let his lifetime of lies sink in. We are told that the word ‘hypocrisy’ entered the English language c. 1200 as the sin of pretending to virtue or goodness. The practice of feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. If I get ‘round to writing a proper allegory or epic poem, I will give the character that Al Gore Jr. plays a more appropriate name: Hypokritēs