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Gaslit Nation Transcript 03 February 2021 Fight for the Vulnerable: The Eliza Orlins Interview https://www.patreon.com/posts/fight-for-eliza-47050906 Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kenzior, the author of the best-selling books The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight. Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones. Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States, and rising autocracy around the world. Andrea Chalupa: Our coverage of the impeachment trial begins next week. That's a historic second impeachment trial for historic failure Donald Trump. We'll also highlight which of the jurors—meaning the Republican senators— are most vulnerable in 2022, where the electoral map looks good for Democrats again. So be sure to tune into that next week. And this week, we're bringing you a special interview. New York City is incredibly important on the front lines against authoritarianism, as we saw during the Trump years. Andrea Chalupa: The NYPD's union endorsed Trump, and the NYPD is currently being sued by State Attorney General Tish James for use of excessive force against protestors. And the grassroots engine here in New York has been providing a lot of extraordinary moral leadership, most famously, of course, is AOC, who gave us a heart-wrenching, deeply personal and vulnerable account of the January 6 violent attempted coup. Please go watch that. You can check it out on her Instagram. She saved it there. It's a gutting oral history of one of the worst terrorist attacks ever against America. In it, she shares how she was terrified and was preparing herself mentally to die. Andrea Chalupa: Again, as the impeachment trial gets underway, never forget: this was a violent attempted coup by Donald Trump and his family and many people—including Republican lawmakers who are still in Congress—that incited this insurrection against our democracy. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. They were planning on getting away with it. We're not going to be so lucky next time if we don't do the necessary work to take back our democracy by expanding the vote, protecting the vote, undoing gerrymandering and all the other corruption and cheating the Republicans do in order to try to get minority tyranny in America. Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, absolutely. It was heartbreaking and it was difficult to watch the video that AOC put out last night, but it was incredibly courageous of her to do so, and incredibly necessary, because what we're still dealing with here is information warfare and the construction of a narrative. And you see, especially on the Republican side, this farcical and insulting and cruel, honestly, desire to move on, to make nice, to unify, which is basically just their euphemisms for dodging accountability. And so it is critical that no matter what the Democrats do next week as impeachment starts, what the Republicans do, that we all remember exactly what happened on January 6. We remember, as AOC reminded us, that we knew that this was coming, that we knew the violence was there. Andrea and I, even on January 5, announced we're doing a post-insurrection Gaslit Nation special. Andrea Chalupa: We had a special plan, okay? Sarah Kendzior: A plan! And we described like- Andrea Chalupa: It was obvious. Sarah Kendzior: Tune in tomorrow as we discuss the terror, violence, lies ... We described what was going to happen and people were like, “wow, how'd you know?”, and I'm like, they told us! Donald Trump told us. The insurrectionists told us. They posted their names, they posted their locations, they live-tweeted the whole thing. There were other signs from Trump supporters and people who oppose him, saying “yes, January 6 is going to be a very violent day. There's going to be an attack on the Capitol.” We didn't know, of course, the details. We didn't know people would die. We didn't necessarily know that they would make it inside, but we feared that they would. So there's this difficult balance where we were trying not to, one, give publicity to people who want to overthrow the government—to violent actors—and build them up. We always have to walk that fine line. And two, we didn't want to completely scare the crap out of everybody. Sarah Kendzior: But it was there. It was there and we even talked about it in December. We did an episode and we were like, “please be careful on January 6”. So don't let them lie to you and say there was no idea that they knew this was going to happen. Everyone knew it was going to happen because the people who encouraged it—like Donald Trump, Josh Hawley—and the people who helped plan it, which include Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, GOP congressmen, they all knew. They are traitors. They are violent, and they are fine with the potential murder of their colleagues in Congress, of people like AOC. You cannot let that go. So if anyone tries to make you let that go, to gaslight you, to make you forget, to play down both the trauma on a personal level and the attack on a political level that happened to our country, its representatives and its citizens that week, do not ever, ever let them. And so we'll be covering that next week. Sarah Kendzior: It's very likely that we're going to do at least one extra episode as the hearings go on. That will be Patreon only, so if you haven't already joined us on Patreon, please do so. You can get access to all of our previous episodes, including our post-January 6 insurrection episode, which I'm glad we did because you need to record these things as you go on. You need to capture that immediate reaction so that we never forget what we knew and when we knew it. That documentation is extremely important in terms of accountability. Andrea Chalupa: And it's absolutely clear when you're listening to AOC's Instagram live recounting of this horrific terrorist attack that the Capitol Police leadership were in on it, that this was deliberate and the massive conspiracy included a very wide network of actors. There need to be investigations. There need to be firings, and the seditionists in Congress—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, that QAnon mascot from Georgia—they all need to be removed from Congress. They have absolutely no business representing the United States of America at this fragile moment. They need to go. They are a danger to our country. They are a danger to their colleagues in the Congress. Sarah Kendzior: Yeah. And I don't want to hear anything about “oh, but what about their constituents?” because guess what? They're threatening my representative. My representative is Cori Bush. I am her constituent. What are you saying about the constituents of the threatened representatives when you place the people who are committing sedition—who are encouraging violence—and their constituents above us. Of course everyone has the right to representation. They don't have the right to representation by traitors and criminals who want to, one, overthrow our government, and two, cheer on or help the assassination of their colleagues. When you do that, you've got to go. And then you get a new representative who won't do those things. It will probably be a representative that disagrees with my representative on all sorts of stuff and that's politics and that's freedom of speech and that's how things should work. But there is a hard line to be drawn here. So don't fall for that argument either. Andrea Chalupa: QAnon, Republican, neo-confederate, Nazi, whatever you want to call them, they are at war with us, and those in power have to act accordingly to protect our democracy and hold these traitors accountable. Now, moving on to this week's big interview, 2021 is a big year for New York City. After all the hard work we put into stopping Trump's attempted dictatorship in 2020, New York City voters now have to fight for the soul of our city in 2021. This year, there are primaries for district attorneys and the big mayor's race. No rest for the weary, as they say. Andrea Chalupa: If you need to change your party affiliation in order to vote in the upcoming primaries in June, you must do so by February 14 by filling out a voter registration form and mailing it or hand-delivering it to your local elections office. So if you live in Brooklyn, it would be the Brooklyn elections office. The mail is slowed down and there's a pandemic. Both of those crises have been created by the Kremlin asset Donald Trump, so it's best to hand-deliver your registration if you can do so safely. Andrea Chalupa: So this week, in celebration of all that is good in New York City at this historic and challenging moment in America's history, we have an interview with New York City public defender Eliza Orlins, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. This interview was recorded in October of 2020, so you'll hear some dated conversation which provide important reminders of where we are and what's at stake today.