Gaslit Nation Transcript 11 November 2020 “Klown Kar Koup”
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris: All the women who have worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century, 100 years ago with the 19th Amendment, 55 years ago with the Voting Rights Act, and now in 2020, with a new generation of women in our country who cast their ballots, and continued the fight for their fundamental right to vote and be heard.
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris: Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination, and the strength of their vision to see what can be unburdened by what has been. And I stand on their shoulders. And what a testament it is to Joe's character that he had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exists in our country and select a woman as his vice president.
Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris: But while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities. To the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourselves in a way that others may not, simply because they've never seen it before. But know that we will applaud you every step of the way.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a filmmaker and journalist and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa: We are all about Georgia in our opening segment. First, we want to congratulate everyone who did the Gaslit Nation Save Democracy Challenge and made 1,000 calls and/or sent 1,000 texts and wrote letters. Congratulations, you really did it. You helped save democracy. We're going to announce three winners selected from the submissions we received to join us on the show in the new year. Thank you so much to everyone.
Andrea Chalupa: We have a new contest. It's called Save Humanity from Mitch McConnell. We need you now to make 1,000 phone calls for Reverend Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Their opponents are clownishly evil, demanding the Georgia Secretary of State resign because their elections went into runoffs. Between now and the election day in Georgia–January 5th, 2021–we need to each commit to make 1,000 calls. We're going to select three additional winners, and since we are so all hands on deck for Georgia, the Georgia folks, meaning all of you who are making calls and sending those letters and texts, whoever does that and tweets us about it to @gaslitnation on Twitter, from the three we select, you'll each get a signed copy of Sarah's book, Hiding in Plain Sight and assigned movie poster of my film Mr. Jones. It will be signed just by me, and that is enough, okay? You don't need all these other signatures of all the glorious cast of the film, I am enough, damn it.
Andrea Chalupa: You'll come on the show and scream in delight after Democrats take control of the Senate, sidelining Palpatine Mitch McConnell. If Democrats win both races in Georgia, then Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the tie breaking vote in the Senate. So, donate to both races, give as much as you can. Understand the massive war chest we created for Democrats, we needed that to keep those Republicans busy and on defense.
Andrea Chalupa: To get us grounded in the big number one battle ahead, meet Jon Ossoff if you haven't already. All of us should know him by now. He's been helping lay a lot of important progressive groundwork in Georgia. Jon Ossoff is a Georgia native, a media executive, investigative journalist and small business owner. Jon and his wife Alicia, an OB GYN physician, both grew up in Atlanta.
Andrea Chalupa: Since 2013, Jon has served as a CEO of Insight TWI, and now a 30 year old media production company that investigates corruption, organized crime and war crimes for international news organizations. According to Business Insider, Ossoff's opponent, David Perdue, "bought stock in a company that produces protective medical equipment the same day senators received a classified briefing on the coronavirus." Here's a clip of Jon Ossoff destroying David Perdue, who later refused to debate him again.
Jon Ossoff: Perhaps Senator Perdue would have been able to respond appropriately to the COVID-19 pandemic if you hadn't been fending off multiple federal investigations for insider trading. It's not just that you're a crook, Senator, it's that you're attacking the health of the people that you represent. You did say COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio, and you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions. Four times.
Jon Ossoff: The legislation that you tout, the Protect Act: it includes loopholes that specifically allow insurance companies to deny policies to Georgians with pre-existing conditions. Can you look now in the camera and tell the people of this state why you voted four times to allow insurance companies to deny us health coverage because we may suffer from diabetes, or heart disease or asthma, or have cancer in remission? Why, senator?
Andrea Chalupa: Now, meet Reverend Warnock. According to his campaign bio, Reverend Raphael Warnock grew up in Kayton Homes public housing in Savannah. The family was short on money but long on faith, love and humor. Raphael and his 11 brothers and sisters were taught the meaning of hard work. Reverend Warnock's father was a veteran, a small businessman and a preacher. He spent the week hauling old cars to a local steel yard and on Sundays he preached at a local church.
Andrea Chalupa: Reverend Warnock's mother grew up in Waycross, where she spent summers picking tobacco and cotton and still lives in Savannah today. She worked hard to raise Raphael and his siblings to know that they could do anything they put their mind to. Here's a clip of Reverend Warnock delivering the eulogy for 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, who was murdered by a police officer in Atlanta earlier this year.
Reverend Warnock: We have not worshiped in this sanctuary since March, but we had to come here today, because there's another virus in the land and it's killing people. There's COVID-19, and then there's what I call COVID-1619, and they are both deadly. And we have to fight both with the same determination and focus. COVID-1619 in this land, we've been trying to beat back this virus of racism since 1619, when 20 slaves arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. Mass incarceration is its latest mutation, but it is an old virus that kills people.
Reverend Warnock: You don't have to be shot down by a police officer for racism to kill you. If you don't have access to health care, that'll kill you also.
Andrea Chalupa: There's a lot of groups we can support on the ground in Georgia to protect and expand voting rights and to make sure every vote is counted in January. We'll link to a great list of those groups helping Georgia in the top of our show notes of this episode.
Andrea Chalupa: Now, Stacey Abrams showed up for our country, so now we all have to show up for Georgia. From Ben Wikler, the Chair of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, he wrote on Twitter, "There's a lot of totally correct talk about how Stacey Abrams was pivotal to winning Georgia. Folks, Stacey and her team were pivotal to flipping Wisconsin too and every other battleground. They worked with us to build massive, supercharged voter protection teams starting early. Stacey Abrams, we all have to keep in mind is not an overnight success, she worked for a decade to build an infrastructure on the ground to turn Georgia blue, and she had to work against a lack of interest and a lack of belief from the Democratic Party itself, which didn't give her the resources she needed in 2018 to counter the voter suppression in Georgia when she ran for governor, the voter suppression that ultimately stole that election from her." That's according to a report in Politico.
Andrea Chalupa: I'm going to read from this now, because everybody needs to take a moment and understand that Stacey Abrams is a very classic example of two important things that the progressive movement must keep in mind. Number one... Oh, and the Democratic Party establishment, all of us in the resistance fighting against actual Republican fascism need to keep these two things in mind. Number one, play the long game. Fight like hell to plant seeds and fight like hell to make those seeds grow, and know that every failure is just fertilizer. You keep going. You keep marching.
Andrea Chalupa: Number two, stop trying to win over white moderate voters. Expand your voting base by showing voters of color that the system does work for them, and that good things do happen when they vote and they get involved, okay? That's what she did here. So, I'm going to read from this now in Politico.
Andrea Chalupa: "As Joe Biden opened a narrow lead in Georgia on Thursday, Democrats across the country couldn't believe it was happening. But Stacey Abrams and a network of activists had been planning for the moment for nearly a decade. The people leading the effort to flip the state, a group composed of Black female elected officials, voting rights advocates and community organizers understood why Democrats had often fallen short in the south the past decade. Topping the list of reasons, the region's long running conservative bent, voter suppression tactics by the Right and the failure of Democrats to mount a sustained voter outreach program.
Andrea Chalupa: “But something changed in 2018, Abrams' razor thin loss in Georgia's gubernatorial election made it clear to her and other liberals in the state that demographic shifts in the suburbs had reached a tipping point. Their argument to the National Party was simple: Democrats could win more races by expanding their coalition to include disengaged voters of color, as opposed to continuing to focus on persuading undecided, moderate, often white voters.
Andrea Chalupa: “Abrams had come close with this strategy. Her campaign and its allies registered more than 200,000 new voters in the run up to the 2018 election. When Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project–two organizations founded by Abrams–tried again this year, they quadrupled their gains, registering more than 800,000 new voters. This vast new coalition of first-time voters–many young, and of color–put Joe Biden over the top in this state by more than 10,000 votes as of early Sunday.
Andrea Chalupa: “The expected win in Georgia would bring his Electoral College total to over 300,000 votes. Abrams' strategy of expanding an existing coalition has not only proven successful in Georgia, but potentially offered a blueprint for how Democrats can win elections in other red states drifting left. It's a defining storyline of the 2020 election, and in all likelihood, many cycles to come.” The Stacey Abrams movement wasn't a Stacey Abrams movement. This wasn't about her and building her name, it was a democracy movement. She focused on strengthening democracy, fighting voter suppression, demanding accountability, because she took voter suppression to court in Georgia and securing the vote. That's what she did, and though her race for governor was stolen from her, she turned Georgia blue. It took a decade, but she turned Georgia blue.
Andrea Chalupa: Imagine where we can be a decade from now if we keep organizing and showing up for each other and demanding accountability like Stacey Abrams has been doing for the past decade.
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Sarah Kendzior: Yep, amen. I don't like to make heroes out of public servants, or any of that kind of personality cult shit, but Stacey Abrams is a tremendously admirable figure and she's the linchpin on which this election turned, and a role model, and somebody who understands strategy, and somebody whose words should be heeded. As we said in the previous episode, she's written books, she offers guidance–go get them–because we would not have our now tenuous win of Joe Biden without her work and without the broader organizational infrastructure and activist community that she inspired.
Sarah Kendzior: So, to review the tumultuous week which has just been an insane series of emotional ups and downs for Andrea and for me and I'm sure for you as well, we had a nice little reprieve over the weekend (two days) where I think a lot of people felt like a weight had been lifted, that they could envision a future... We had a, and we have–I should emphasize–we have a solid intractable win. Biden won the popular vote by a large amount. Biden won the electoral college by a very significant amount. He won it enough in the states that are being challenged that it's very difficult to claim voter fraud at the level that the GOP is trying to do, where they're going to have to argue that tens of thousands of votes were fraudulent, whereas in reality, we've had millions and millions of votes over the years and I think there's only been 32 cases of documented voter fraud. We'll get to that later in the show.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm going to just briefly bask in that weekend glow again, where we got to watch Biden and Vice President to be, Kamala Harris, make their speeches to the nation. I watched this speech with my two children. The oldest is 13 and my youngest is 9, meaning that they were 9 and 5 when Trump came into office. I realized that this was the first time my children have ever watched a live speech from a president that was not full of lies, racist insults, or incitement of violence against fellow Americans. They haven't had this experience. Sarah Kendzior: My oldest remembers Obama, somewhat, but my youngest, he was born into the world of Trump. As I've raised them, I've had to tell them over and over, this is unprecedented. What is happening obviously builds on the flaws and atrocities and weaknesses of America that were already in place, that allowed Trump to come into power, because Trump was never a fluke, he was a culmination. They know that. They know that from learning US history. They know that from the places around America I would take them to show that this history of Jim Crow, of attacks on ethnic minorities, of demagoguery, it never went away. But it was such a profound relief to see this speech and know that I didn't have to cover their ears, or I didn't have to issue a factual correction every couple of seconds, and that they wouldn't leave disgusted and afraid and worried about their friends who aren't white and worried about whether we're going to have a country. They could just sit there and they could just enjoy this speech by a man who wants to serve America, by a man who we never need to question where his loyalty lies, who values our sovereignty, values our national security, needs to be pushed in a more progressive direction on some things but seems willing to be pushed in that way, and certainly needs to be pushed towards accountability and that's something that we're going to be relentless about.
Sarah Kendzior: It was a good moment, and I want people to remember that night, the night that followed a day of celebrations that so many people who have lived in occupied countries or who have lived in countries that were at war and witnessed that war ending, they were comparing what they saw in America to those experiences, to the relief of tyranny collapsing and that iron grip of a dictator letting go. The problem, of course, is it hasn't let go. We still have 71 days until Biden's inauguration, and we're going through a coup. There's an attempted coup happening and we're going to talk all about that.
Sarah Kendzior: But that energy you felt over the weekend–that sense of possibility returning–hold on to that. Don't let that go because you're going to need that strength and that vision of the future to propel you forward for the next two months, because we have said from the very first episode of Gaslit Nation that this time period between November 2020 and January 2021 is going to be one of the worst time periods of American history, full of violence on the ground, protracted court battles, authoritarian maneuvers. And we didn't even know about the pandemic.
Sarah Kendzior: So, brace yourself. I'm going to get into Bill Barr and his attempted coup and the firings of various officials that seem to signal something very ominous in a minute. But I know, Andrea, you had stuff to say about this as well.
Andrea Chalupa: Yeah, I completely agree with you. Let's just keep soaking in that we did something that was very difficult to do, and it was not easy, and we're going to run through some of that now. I want to say, I could not get enough of the dancing in the streets videos. Every time I watched one, 50 more would appear. There are just endless streams of these dancing in the streets.
Andrea Chalupa: I want to also point out, Philadelphia, that was just amazing. Philadelphia, thank you so much. Thank you to Gritty. It takes orange to defeat orange. So that was really, really gratifying to celebrate with everyone across the country.
Andrea Chalupa: And I want to say, talking about white supremacy and how that is Trump and that is the Republican Party and that is the Electoral College and that is all of these white male pundits on Twitter mocking the rest of us for wanting fairness and equality. I just want to just stay grounded. Today, Philly is dancing in the streets. But keep in mind, Philadelphia, which saved the day in Pennsylvania, I'm going to read now from Vox the reality of white supremacy, and ask yourself as you hear this, keep in mind right now that the number one domestic terrorism threat in America is white supremacy. It's white supremacy terrorism. Listen to this and keep that in mind.
Andrea Chalupa: From Vox, "On the evening of May 13th, 1985, long standing tensions between MOVE, a Black liberation group and the Philadelphia Police Department erupted horrifically. That night, the City of Philadelphia dropped a satchel bomb–a demolition device typically used in combat laced with Tovex and C-4 explosives–on the MOVE organization who were living in a West Philadelphia row home known to be occupied by men, women and children. It went up in unextinguished flames. 11 people were killed, including five children and the founder of the organization. 61 homes were destroyed and more than 250 citizens were left homeless."
Andrea Chalupa: If you want to know what Sarah and I will go back to doing once Trump is no longer in office, we're going to go back to doing what we did before, which is researching and writing about authoritarianism. The only difference is that, from our experience writing about this stuff in post-Soviet states, we see it here in America's own history and even in its recent history, where white supremacy, scapegoating others, this idea of natural God-given superiority of one group of people over others, that is a well used tool of authoritarianism and how it works. We have it here.
Andrea Chalupa: That is why you have a university in Europe doing a big old research report saying how, for the last 20 years or so, the Republican Party has been acting like any authoritarian party you'd see in Turkey or Orbán's Hungary, where they're fanning the flames of violence and oppression towards the opposition. We still have our work cut out for us. Understand that we need to pull out from the root and confront, and un-gaslight all of the factors, all of the social diseases, that got us Trump in the first place. They're still alive and well, and they're going to be coming back at us with a backlash in 2022 and 2024 and beyond.
Andrea Chalupa: Yes, celebrate, take a breath. But let's roll up our sleeves and stay in the fight because people's lives are literally on the line. Civilization remains literally on the line. We're going to be going over that in this episode and all future episodes. But I want to just remind everybody, this is what it took to finally win an election with historic levels of voter suppression, just blatant in your face voter suppression across the board, where they were throwing everything they could at it. Andrea Chalupa: That's what we saw. Imagine what we didn't see. Imagine what was going on behind the scenes. That includes, of course, election hacking. We know very well how vulnerable our systems are. So, this is a very difficult election to analyze because of the massive voter suppression. We don't know what the hell went on with the hacking yet. We may never know. Hopefully, we find out. Hopefully, that's all exposed, but we can't write that off as not having played a role this time around, considering it did in 2016 and who knows how in other elections.
Andrea Chalupa: Then also you have the pandemic. How many people just could not make phone calls or even bother to vote because they're grappling with the loss of their job, the loss of their house, the loss of a loved one? This is a very difficult election to read and to try to figure out where do we go from here because of all of these destabilizing factors. But just know that we didn't just defeat Trump in 2020, we have been fighting him, fighting him ruthlessly as needed, all four years.
Andrea Chalupa: Look at all the damage he has done. He would have done so much more if it weren't for us slowing him down, getting in his face every chance we could and slowing him down. I'm going to make a summary now. This is not an exhaustive summary because there's obviously going to be stuff that's left out because there's just so much that's gone on in the last four years. So, forgive me if I left some essential groups out and feel free to send us a message about that, because we want to make sure that for next time we include them. But here's just from off the top of my head, this is a summary of all that we did.
Andrea Chalupa: Around 3:00 AM on November 9th, 2016, it started with a phone call. Sarah–someone I hardly knew on Twitter–slams into my DMs and asks for my number and then calls me. She said, "This doesn't look right." We stayed on the phone while my sister wrote a memo to send up as high as it could go to the Clinton campaign, to the Democrats, to Republicans. My sister, of course, was the contractor working on ethnic outreach for the DNC in the 2016 election. She did something she normally would not do: she put her memo on Facebook, where it went viral. It essentially reads like a summary of what would become the Mueller report, explaining Putin operative Paul Manafort's dirty tricks and urging for a vote audit.
Andrea Chalupa: Sarah, myself and countless others demanded a vote audit, amplifying the warnings and research of our nation's leading computer scientists who tried to warn us our elections could be hacked. That led to the recounts. That led to Jennifer Cohn continuing the fight as a tenacious election security advocate. Then millions of people across the country and around the world joined together for the Women's March, which pundits would later snark at. And many of those women went on to build The Big Blue Wave in 2018, many of them running and winning office for the first time.
Andrea Chalupa: We had marches. We had so many marches; Tax March, the March for Science, the March for Truth, which I started with complete strangers on Twitter who had never organized a march before. But the other marches like Women's March and the Tax March mentored us and we figured it out. We had Indivisible turning the Republicans' rabid playbook on itself as chapters of Indivisible organizers sprung up across the country, fighting for new laws, new candidates. We had people rushing the airports of major cities protesting the Muslim ban, along with teams of volunteer lawyers giving up sleep to help the new arrivals who suddenly found themselves impacted by an unconstitutional ban on a religion.
Andrea Chalupa: When we learned that they were separating families, a Black woman–an immigrant–climbed the Statue of Liberty in protest. Lots of new groups were built, old ones fortified with new talent. A revolution is a great way to find talent, and we had a lot of it as people kept showing up for each other. A climate emergency was declared as kids led the way. The best adults in the room gave us The Green New Deal. We demanded impeachment and called out those who were supposed to be on our side for dragging their feet on fighting corruption. Handmaids kept appearing and marching. Authoritarian experts amplified each other. We built independent media. Gaslit Nation was born.
Andrea Chalupa: We had to vote in such large numbers that the election couldn't be stolen, and we did. We had an exhausting, sleepless four years, and we transformed ourselves and our country in the process. If anyone ever shrugs off the Trump threat and gives credit to our institutions and our Republic, our system of checks and balances, it was the people who sacrificed, who fought, who organized, who led from the bottom up, that saved us. Never forget what we've told you on the show since the very beginning: grassroots power is the only reliable power we have left. Our institutions did not save us, we saved each other.
Sarah Kendzior: Yes, extremely well said and extremely important to remember, not just for the sake of history but for how we're going to handle the challenge that we're facing right now as they attempt to take that power away, because they're keenly aware of the power of the grassroots, of the power of the people. That's why they hate democracy. That's why they're against democracy, because democracy literally translates into the power of the people.
Sarah Kendzior: They're going to do everything humanly possible to try to retract to this victory, and then later (and we're just going to insist that Joe Biden gets in) they're going to do everything possible to come back and do it again, which is why accountability is so, so critical.
Sarah Kendzior: Before you went into that history which I'm very glad you wrote, I'm really glad you also brought up the history of Philadelphia and its white supremacist bombings and these atrocities that are often forgotten against minorities that are fighting for their rights. Because there's this thing happening now as the Republicans try to carry out their coup, where I see white male pundits on Twitter, in papers, do this thing where it's like, “imagine you were covering this in another country”, and they've done this throughout the whole Trump administration. And it is the most lazy and deceptive narrative tactic. It's a way of denying our own weaknesses, denying what's right in front of us, denying that this is happening in another country. But it's also denying the selective autocracy of the United States, which has always been a part of our history.
Sarah Kendzior: It is ignoring the very distinctly American flaws that aspiring autocrats like Trump exploit along with their foreign backers. If you don't understand autocracy in an American context, if you just expect it to follow the same playbook as Hitler, or Stalin, or the famous fascists that you can name, you are never going to be able to defeat them. It's just an utter failure of imagination, an utter failure to see reality.
Sarah Kendzior: As Timothy Snyder said on our show, in order to see what is in front of you, you need to know history, because history expands your imagination and it allows you to envision what is possible and then how to prevent it, how to break the future. That is what we need to do.
Sarah Kendzior: I hope people move away from that tactic and look at what's staring us right in the face, because also, within that is the nature of this grassroots movement that formed, which is powered by young people. It's powered by people who aren't white. It's a very diverse coalition. It is powered, often, by the most marginalized and oppressed people; that was also true with who actually delivered the votes in these critical states. So, we should never forget that. We should never forget who the Trump administration wants to hurt the most, because it is those vulnerable groups that they've always targeted the most that will be most hurt if they are actually able to carry out their coup.
Sarah Kendzior: So, I'm now going to discuss Bill Barr. For the last few weeks-
Andrea Chalupa: Speaking of Bill Barr, who protested NAACP fundraiser when he was younger–white supremacist Bill Barr–I want to just add, we saw the celebrations that were... Someone described New York City as a victory in Europe Day of World War II, the way people were dancing, like we had overthrown a dictator because we had. I want to just point out, on the news, I watched a mixed race family being interviewed in a park in Atlanta, Georgia where people were celebrating. Both the mom, who's Black and the dad who's white had tears in their eyes talking about how hard it was to parent with Trump and power.
Andrea Chalupa: That came up again and again, how relieved people felt for the safety of their children, for their own physical safety, because the violence was just becoming more emboldened. Genocides begin with propaganda, and Trump is a propaganda machine. It starts with people emboldened to discriminate, to bully others, and the temperature turns up as the government passes more and more discriminatory laws and rolls back protections. We will not survive four more years of Trump, not this Trump or any Trump.
Andrea Chalupa: So I want to make clear to everybody listening in other countries, this fuse of genocide exists everywhere, waiting for a leader to come along and light that fuse. No country is immune. You have laws, norms, a culture of accountability to keep the fuse out of reach. But in America, with Rupert Murdoch and the consolidation of far-right media–Rupert Murdoch, who is the son of eugenicist–the fuse has been lit for a while, and now we have a proud white supremacist refusing to leave the White House, and 70 million Americans voted for him. He's openly murdering hundreds of thousands with his greed and corruption and 70 million people voted for him. He let Putin–mass murderer Putin–put a bounty on the heads of US troops in Afghanistan leading to their deaths and 70 million people voted for him.
Andrea Chalupa: Donald Trump is a mass murderer, and 70 million people voted for him and they repeat his propaganda back to you, calling his list of crimes fake news. We have to do everything we can now to be self-reliant and organize to get this fuse of genocide extinguished and out of reach through accountability and norms and just building a culture of tolerance and fairness for everyone. And fuck Facebook, by the way. Dismantle Facebook.
Sarah Kendzior: [laughs] Yes, fuck Facebook is always an excellent way to conclude every paragraph.
Andrea Chalupa: Now go on with the coup weather report.
Sarah Kendzior: Back to the coup! Yeah, so everything Andrea said. We have been in this danger the entire time. This is one of the reasons that when we saw off ramps from this situation, we pleaded with our representatives, we demanded that they take them and those representatives and officials didn't. Mueller refused to indict or even interview key players in this crime cult, Nancy Pelosi had to be dragged to impeach. She kept the impeachment short and narrow in scope, didn't go into any of Trump's crimes, didn't go into his links with the transnational crime syndicate even though some of those testifying were either alluding to it or even mentioning it.
Sarah Kendzior: Then after that, wouldn't use the tools of the House at her disposal (inherent contempt). And most of all, would not impeach Bill Barr. It was absolutely critical that the House impeach Bill Barr. Does that mean that Bill Barr would have been removed? No, because Bill Barr is the architect of a coup and he knows how to protect himself. But what it would have done was create a framework for the American public to understand what's going on and to understand the severity of the danger that they are in with Bill Barr as attorney general.
Sarah Kendzior: What they got when he was first nominated was this whitewashed version of him from Ben Wittes and Asha Rangappa, I think her last name is, all of these "legal experts" who were like, "Oh, he's great. He's an institutionalist, everything will be fine." They sold that image hard. Those little propagandists went to work on his behalf, and now we are left with him attempting to bring about a coup, and that is not unexpected, as we explained many times, this is what Bill Barr does. He is the GOP cover up guy. He is the guy who helped cover up Iran-Contra. He's a longtime friend of Robert Mueller, which should have made you question Robert Mueller's character instead of assuming that somehow Barr was a better person than he is.
Sarah Kendzior: Even hardcore conservatives–even people like William Sapphire–wrote op-eds warning Americans about Barr and the fact that he is a threat. In 1992, Sapphire wrote an op-ed about this. This is a guy who's been around for a long time, and if you dig deeper, you find even more unsavory activity. You find connections to elicit Russian money. You find a major connection to the Jeffrey Epstein child trafficking blackmail network. It was his father, Donald Barr, who hired Epstein, brought him into the world of New York high society and finance, in which he, after that, hooked up with Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, and began their operation which ensnared leaders around the world and abused countless victims. And they have never been brought to justice either.
Sarah Kendzior: So, the Barr family was key to that. That story begins and ends with Bill Barr, with Jeffrey Epstein "Dying in prison, committing suicide in prison," under Barr's watch. This is a deeply dangerous individual. He auditioned for the Trump administration with a letter saying that he planned to prosecute Trump's enemies, whether or not they had committed a crime, and make sure that Trump was never charged with any kind of offense. This was very much out there.
Sarah Kendzior: Over the last month, he has gone very quiet and everybody was wondering, what is he doing? What's going on? Over the weekend–when we were so jubilant because Biden had definitively won the Electoral College, he was making his speech, it seemed like things were going the right direction–Barr was basically mapping out a legal strategy and meeting with police and other organizations across the country. I'm not 100% sure where this is going but it's not going anywhere good. They are trying to mount a legal defense on fraudulent grounds to overturn this election.
Sarah Kendzior: I'll just read a brief summary from the Washington Post today: "Attorney General, William Barr, on Monday gave federal prosecutors approval to pursue allegations of ‘vote tabulation irregularities’ in certain cases before votes are certified and indicated he'd already done so ‘in specific instances’, a reversal of long standing Justice Department policy that quickly drew internal and external criticism for fueling unfounded claims of massive election fraud pushed by Trump and other conservatives.
Sarah Kendzior: “Richard Pilger, head of the Justice Department's Elections Crime Branch stepped down from his position in protest over Barr's directive, though he remains at the agency, according to people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically volatile situation. The people said Barr had first broached a similar idea some weeks ago and that political leadership in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, of which the election crimes branch is a part, pushed back. ‘Those officials were blindsided when Barr's memo was released on Monday.’, the People said.”
Sarah Kendzior: None of this should surprise you, the fact that Trump refuses to concede, the fact that he's trying to monetize his refusal to concede (constantly demanding money from his supporters), the fact that he is trying to cause as much destruction whether he stays in or doesn't. The next two months are about that. The process itself is its own goal. It's not just about the outcome. The process is destruction, theft, violence between Americans. If he manages to stay in power, all the better. Sarah Kendzior: There are some debates about this, like, how do we talk about the coup? You, of course, do not want to legitimize the coup. And Biden should just go on and carry on as if he is president-elect. He should be giving speeches to the public about the issues that we are concerned about, like the coronavirus, and we've had the good news that there may be a real vaccine and that we may get it next year. Think about that for a second: who do you want giving you this vaccine? What administration do you want to be responsible for this vaccine?
Sarah Kendzior: I think just the presence of Biden giving a speech about getting the vaccine for Americans and helping us get our lives back would just be a tremendous thing. There are so many things Biden can discuss that just the contrast between him and Trump will give such inspiration and encouragement and ability to look forward. So, he just needs to keep doing what he's doing. He needs to pick out his cabinet. He needs to make sure that it is not dominated by sleazy Republicans or Republicans of any kind. This is not the time to make nice. As we’ve said many times, you cannot have a Kumbaya moment with a mafia syndicate, and that is what the Republican Party has become.
Sarah Kendzior: But anyway, Biden is the president-elect, he should act like the president-elect. We should act like Biden is the president-elect. But we also need to be very aware and talk in plain terms that this is an attempted coup. This is the Republicans, backed by a transnational crime syndicate, trying to create a one-party autocratic state. This has been their goal the entire time and it was completely predictable that they would take it to this level.
Sarah Kendzior: And there are going to be side effects from this. For example, Trump is trying to get all of his supporters riled up, out in the streets, fighting people who voted for Biden, doing the kind of AstroTurf protests that we saw in the early months of coronavirus where they were going into city halls with weapons. We should expect violence. We should expect countries that have refused to acknowledge Biden's win–like Russia–to perhaps intervene. And I have worries there. I have enormous worries about our national security due to a series of firings or resignations of people who were key guardians of that national security.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm going to get into that. But first, did you have anything you wanted to say about this, because I've been talking about Barr for a long time here?
Andrea Chalupa: It's been a coup for four years. It was a coup in 2016. It's a coup now. So, everybody with their hair on fire over a coup, that's how Sarah and I have been living since October 2016 when we were really trying to warn everyone that Putin was attacking our democracy through his Russian mafia proxy, Donald Trump. I guess, emotionally, nothing's really changed for me, because it's always been a coup. I guess I have more relief during these terrifying couple months.
Andrea Chalupa: I do think that the more they try to coup it out, the more they're establishing their brand as dictators for those who needed to hear it in the back, I suppose, who had trouble getting it. I do think that the stupidity of media hot takes trying to compare Trump trying to create this new birther movement by saying this election was stolen for him. If you read Jason Stanley's great book, How Fascism Works–a very simple guide on how fascism works–there's a chapter called Victimhood. The fascist needs to always be the victim. That's what Trump is doing now and he's going to keep doing this until the day he dies, and his little Trumpettes–his children and his brainwashed cult–they're all going to keep doing this.
Andrea Chalupa: Do not let any idiot in the media try to compare this to Russiagate, the very real and necessary yet emaciated investigation into the Russian attack on our democracy and all of the complicit Republican traders that made it happen.
Andrea Chalupa: Russiagate was valid, and it did not go far enough, and that's why Gaslit Nation exists. That's why we started our first three episodes of this show with looking at 2016 like a crime scene and going through all the forensics of how Trump stealing the election with Putin's help in 2016 was another 9/11.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, this is a criminal operation, and there's been a refusal to look at it that way. People are finally coming around to calling this authoritarianism or fascism, but it was always kleptocracy at heart and it was always linked to organized crime. There is never regard for law. There was always an overt attempt to rewrite it so those breaking the law were no longer breaking it, and there was always a deep need for grassroots, very hard, very broad pushback against it.
Sarah Kendzior: Thankfully, the American people have not let us down. As we're describing these dire, scary conditions, I want everyone to just remember that you did it. You voted, you got him in, we've slowed them down. Remember all of those things. I was thinking about all the parties–these spontaneous street celebrations that happen over the weekend–those are as effective as protests in communicating the disgust and the rejection of Trump and his administration. That is the people expressing their will in a way that is rarely covered in the media, where they would always try to seek out the downtrodden Trump supporter and make them into victims to accompany Trump's own sense of victimhood, his own sense of martyrhood.
Sarah Kendzior: We saw America... America was finally seeing, I think, with clear eyes this weekend, and of course, there is a substantial amount of the population that voted for Trump that's going to fight on behalf of Trump. Many of them are armed, and it's going to get very ugly, but continue to show your dissent and continue to celebrate your victories as things go on. It's just absolutely critically important that we have some kind of transparent, objective metric of what people in this country want and who we want to represent us, because they are going to try to rewrite reality in front of our eyes. It's going to be just like Inauguration Day back in 2017 when Trump said he had the biggest crowds in US history, and there was hardly anybody there.
Sarah Kendzior: They're going to do this all the time. Hopefully, the media will not continue to fall for these same tricks. They were actually better than I thought they would be during the week in terms of not calling the election early for Trump, showing some caution, but their memories are so short, and they do not understand coups, and they do not understand how a democracy becomes an autocracy. They simply won't learn, they won't read, they won't listen. They are a problem, and I am worried that they are going to “both sides” the coup. I hope that they are not so incredibly reckless and destructive that they would do that. But they “both sides” climate change. They “both sides” all sorts of situations that don't have two sides, so I could easily see them doing this.
Sarah Kendzior: Anyway, onto possible world annihilation. I'm getting into these firings, because this is the other thing that's happening this week that's freaking me out along with Bill Barr. Trump has made a number of bureaucratic changes. This is a strange thing for any lame duck president to do. The most significant among this is that the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, either resigned or was fired. There's some debate as to what happened. As for himself, he said he was not willing to be Trump's yes man.
Sarah Kendzior: I have to say, Esper is not a great guy. So, if you're thinking like, well, what wouldn't he do? That's a disturbing question. He's been replaced by Christopher Miller. I don't know too much about that. We've had long periods throughout Trump's tenure where we did not have a Secretary of Defense at all. We have only had acting Secretaries of Defense after Mattis stepped down in December of 2018. That is so there is no oversight, there is no accountability, so they can carry out all sorts of deals and make all sorts of plans involving the trading and selling of weapons, things like the assassination of Soleimani–which was an enormously controversial thing to do in January–in Iran, without any transparency as to why these actions are being taken, who we are engaged with, who we are aligning with. Trump, of course, aligns with other autocrats and is surrounded by bloodthirsty warmongers, including Mike Pompeo, who seems to be gearing up for war in Iran. He is tweeting very aggressively about it. He's writing cryptic little things like, “America is and shall remain the greatest nation in all of human history.” Why are you supporting a Kremlin asset as the president?
Sarah Kendzior: Anyway, then he says, "We welcome the day when the Iranian people get their wish, and you know what that is. That is all." You know, you're the Secretary of State. Don't tweet that shit at Iran. This is a guy who builds policy based on the rapture, which is a terrible idea, and you can't expect too much of this. But my God, the stakes are so high right now. The tension is so high. Pompeo is planning to go to Israel to meet with Netanyahu, who, of course, is imperiled himself. There have been, I think, 20 weeks of protests from the Israeli people against their indicted president who they desperately want to remove.
Sarah Kendzior: So, Netanyahu is in a vulnerable position, Trump is in a vulnerable position, and they seem to be interested in war with Iran, which has been a long-held desire of many of Trump's backers. So, there's that. Then today, on Tuesday, we have Pentagon top police official, James Anderson, resigning after clashing with the White House. I don't know the details of this yet, but not good. We also had the Deputy USAID Chief, the top climate scientist, and the Energy Regulation Chair all fired within the last couple of weeks. We have the top lawyer from the DOJ handling elections, that person has resigned. We're also getting these stories from anonymous staffers saying that they are afraid. They're afraid for our country. They're afraid of what Trump's going to do over the next 71 days, and they're afraid to speak out.
Sarah Kendzior: So, please, if you are listening to the show and you're in this government, you need to speak out. You need to speak out to protect the American people, to do your job, to prepare us. This is such a tumultuous and frightening period.
Sarah Kendzior: The fact that our agencies are gutte...we have a gutted FBI, gutted intelligence community–or at least one that's tremendously ineffective–gutted State Department, gutted DoD, and they've been packed with lackeys just the courts have been packed with lackeys, which is, of course, a big part of the plan of the coup is to try to get these fraudulent allegations of electoral fraud to the Supreme Court where they can rule for Trump.
Sarah Kendzior: But anyway, what I'm saying is our institutions are in tatters and that means a lot can go on, especially in the chaos of this moment. I'm worried about war in Iran. I'm hoping that I'm wrong about that. I'm worried about arm sales. We're starting to get some confirmation that I was right to be worried about that. I'm worried that this government does what they always do, which is treat all of our assets and resources like their own personal property, and then sell them to pay off their personal debt.
Sarah Kendzior: We know that Trump has a tremendous amount of debt, Kushner has a tremendous amount of debt, and we also know that they have mafia connections. This is where it gets very frightening. If they're doing things like selling off our weaponry, who are they selling it to? We know that Trump is connected to Semion Mogilevich's Russian mafia transnational crime network, the most deadly and powerful crime network in the world. And he has dealt in arms trading. Trump actually has a very long history of dealing with arms traders. One of the people that was in his circle close to him in the 1980s was Adnan Khashoggi, the uncle of the murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Jamal Khashoggi, who criticized Trump and who may have known quite a bit about what kind of things Trump was engaged in, in this time.
Sarah Kendzior: This is the mafia. As Andrea said early on, whoever runs against Trump in 2020 will be running against the Russian mafia. What Trump represents is a marriage between the Russian mafia of the West and the Russian mafia of the east. Really by “Russian”, it's somewhat misleading because the Kremlin is the key government node within this network–it provides a lot of the fuel and the power–but this is international. These are people; oligarchs, plutocrats, mafiosos, from all over the world with a vested interest in destroying the United States, stripping it down, selling it off for parts.
Sarah Kendzior: Trump doesn't care if this happens. Trump doesn't care if America collapses, he only cares if he personally collapses. Then finally, my last big concern here is what Leah McElrath on Twitter, who has studied psychology, is an expert in these sorts of things, has called annihilatory rage, where Trump, as a narcissistic sociopath, is not going to be able to handle losing this election and is going to lash out in all sorts of violent and frightening ways.
Sarah Kendzior: One thing that has just terrified me from the moment he took office, is that Trump has had a 40-year fascination with nuclear weapons and with using them. And he is a fatalist. He believes that the world is going to end in nuclear war. He has said this for decades. He's also said, if we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?
Sarah Kendzior: For Trump, it's like... You know how most old people have some sort of bucket list wish, like, I want to go skydiving or I want to travel to Europe? I am worried that Trump's bucket list is like, “I want to be the guy who launches a nuke. I want to be the president who does that. I want to be the person who pushes that button.” Let me remind you that Trump has unilateral power over launching nukes. A lot of people are in denial about this. I don't know why because this is just a basic fact of how the chain of command works, how nuclear protocol works, but he can launch a nuclear weapon. Congress can't do anything about it. The DoD can't do anything about it. I guess maybe people could just refuse to follow orders.
Sarah Kendzior: This strikes me as unlikely. This is one of the many reasons he should have been removed long ago. If Biden does... Well, let's just not even do IF. WHEN Biden gets into office, they need to pass Ted Lieu's bill, which prevents the president–any president–from having unilateral control over nuclear weapons. This absolutely cannot be a decision that one person makes, especially when that person is of unsound mind and is full of venomous rage. Those are some of the things that I'm worried about for the next 70 days. Do you have any thoughts on that, Andrea?
Andrea Chalupa: Yes, I have thoughts. I actually am hopeful for the Democratic Party, because I do believe that when the dust settles, the progressives in this debate will have a lot to stand on, as we went earlier pointing out. Stacey Abrams, her book, by the way, is called Lead From The Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change. That is basically the marching orders for the Democratic Party and the grassroots movement, is lead from the outside. Don't give in to the system that just wants to oppress you.
Andrea Chalupa: Imagine all of these fascist Republicans as Black people. Imagine that. They would be in prison by now. They would be marched out of there by the military. That's what we're talking about when we say white supremacy and how it works.
Andrea Chalupa: I want to start off by paying tribute to Morning Joe and the other white men–Joe Scarborough and his clique–that act like they're steaming themselves in the sauna and listening to themselves talk. That's what Morning Joe sounds like. All the jubilation over Biden's win. Morning Joe was patting itself on the back over the containment of the socialist left. That's how they're acting, saying that our system of checks and balances has held because Democrats are stuck with Mitch McConnell's senate that's going to block our nation's progress and congratulating themselves on being rich, powerful white men. Andrea Chalupa: Then they bring on... On Monday, they bring on a renowned historian and journalist, Thomas Ricks, who wrote the book Churchill and Orwell, a must read book on how those two men rose to meet the great battle of good and evil in their time. That book, Churchill and Orwell, you’ve got to read it. It helped me a lot during this dark time. Thomas Ricks was on Morning Joe Monday to talk about his book, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country.
Andrea Chalupa: The Morning Joe click was all starry eyed, talking about how the wisdom of the founding fathers and how we're meant to have this gridlock in Washington and all of it has such wisdom and design. Yet, Thomas Ricks basically served them some wisdom himself when he pointed out that the founding fathers today would be shocked by the greed and corruption destroying our democracy. We're going to play a clip of that now, what he told the Morning Joe sauna crowd.
Thomas Ricks: I'd like to see more talks about the public good and especially less talk about individual property and individual property rights. The Supreme Court seems to me to have been defined downward by conservatives as the court of American property. That you have a voice, you have money, you can spend how you want. You can influence elections. I actually think the thing that would shock the founders most after how slavery moved the country apart and the Civil War, I think the thing that would shock them most is the role that campaign finance plays in our elections. They would regard our campaign system as utterly corrupt.
Thomas Ricks: And I think a lot of them–not all of them–would say that Americans now live in an oligarchy. It's an oligarchy that still has Democratic trappings, but they had seen those things in the ancient world. An oligarchy is basically rule by the wealthy. I think that's what we have in this country these days.
Andrea Chalupa: He's absolutely right, and here are some facts to back them up on income inequality in America courtesy of Pew Research: The highest earning 20% of families made more than half of all US income in 2018. Income inequality in the US is the highest of all the G7 nations. The US is closer to Eastern European countries in levels of income inequality, like post-Soviet states. The US Black and white income gap has held steady since 1970 when redlining, the discriminatory practice of banks and other financial institutions refusing to lend money to Black people, when that was rampant.
Andrea Chalupa: If you want to throw around the world socialism, and blast progressives and be glad that they're being ganged up on and contained politically, you're exhibiting a Marie Antoinette moment of “let them eat cake”. From the Washington Post, "Income inequality today, maybe higher today than in any other era." And guess what? “In the age of automation, with automation and AI taking away American jobs, with protected incentives for businesses to ship jobs overseas, the job loss and the shrinking middle class is only going to become a greater crisis. Meanwhile, the rich have taken a simple income tax system and, over the decades, added all these loopholes to the point of avoiding paying taxes on their wealth. Simply put, the rich are growing richer, and the poor are growing poorer, and the poor, and those fighting tirelessly to stand up for them are being mocked by pundits on cable TV.”
Andrea Chalupa: Now, here's AOC, one of these champions for the poor, one of these champions who's spelling out this crisis to everybody like the adult in the room. Here is her summing up the election results and pushing back against attacks by our own party, that progressives cost these seats.
Jake Tapper: You told The New York Times that you almost didn't even run for reelection, in part because of treatment from your own party. You said, "It's the incoming, it's the stress, it's the violence, it's the lack of support from your own party, it's your own party thinking you're the enemy." Do you really think other Democrats see you as the enemy? Do you think Joe Biden sees you that way?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I don't believe President Biden sees me that way, and I believe that that's actually one of the reasons why he won election. There's a marked difference between 2020 and 2016 in how the Democratic Party was able to unify–to Joe Biden's credit–before the election and get everyone on the same page to make sure that we vote Donald Trump out of office.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: That being said, there are, at least in the House caucus, very deep divisions within the party, and I believe that we need to really come together and not allow Republican narratives to tear us apart. As you mentioned, we have a slimmer Democratic majority. It's going to be more important than ever for us to work together and not fight each other.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And so, when we kind of come out swinging–not 48 hours after Tuesday, when we don't even have solid data yet–pointing fingers and telling each other what to do, it deepens the division in the party and it's irresponsible. It's irresponsible to pour gasoline on these already very delicate tensions in the party. So we can help. It's not saying that every member has to campaign as a progressive in a traditional progressive way, but it's to say that we have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into or exploited.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: And I believe that we can take some of these seats. I think Katie Porter is an amazing example. Michael Levin. There are swing seats. Every single swing seat member that co sponsored Medicare For All won their reelection. The conversation is a little bit deeper than that, than just saying, “anything progressive is toxic in a losing message.”
Andrea Chalupa: Kyle Griffin of NBC News on Twitter writes, "Voters in at least six states have overwhelmingly approved police reform measures and voters in nearly a dozen cities and counties in California, Texas, Oregon and Ohio, approved creating overhauling or strengthening police oversight boards." So, understand that a lot of progressive measures were passed across the country, and people are just not blinking an eye because a lot of those grassroots-led progressive movements are now normalized and mainstream because that's what you get when you lead from the outside.
Andrea Chalupa: Then you have Earther–Gizmodo's section on the climate crisis–writing, "The Green New Deal didn't sink Democrats. Co-sponsors of The Green New Deal and close partisan voting index seats went four for four. Basically, the people who actually backed progressive policies came through the election largely unscathed and in many cases, fared better than their more conservative Democratic counterparts in swing districts. And lest we forget, Kamala Harris, one of the senate co-sponsors of The Green New Deal, is now vice president elect."
Andrea Chalupa: Where do the Democrats go from here? It's very simple, you need to lead and create the conversation. We're in a time of mass extinctions. The climate crisis is creating a refugee crisis that will lead to conflicts that more Trumps and many Trumps will try to exploit with panic. Countless people will be displaced by a warming Earth, by rising sea levels.
Andrea Chalupa: From the New York Times, "Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by the year 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and eastern China will result in death even for the fittest of humans. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the US border over the course of the next 30 years."
Andrea Chalupa: According to a World Bank report, climate change could force over 140 million to migrate within countries by 2050. That's just 30 years away, and the US is held hostage by a climate change denying fascist party and the Democrats are wringing their hands over being too bold in a time of crisis. Democrats are out there now telling people to trust the science, because of the coronavirus. Now is the time to build on that and urge them to also trust the science on climate change and all the compounding crises of climate change.
Andrea Chalupa: Trump has sucked out all the oxygen in the room for four years. There's a lot we need to do as a country to be dealing with now. For instance, to add to all this, we have China determined to win the artificial intelligence space race. China, which is currently carrying out a genocide against a Muslim minority. China is a genocidal regime. Genocides are won by powers that are technologically superior. Are we going to let China win the AI space race? That would be disastrous for the whole planet. With the advancements of AI and automation, we have jobs that are going to be decimated. We need a universal basic income. Anybody who scoffs at that has not been following the rapid developments in automation and in AI and how different industries will look–even white collar industries–15 years from now.
Andrea Chalupa: Bold vision is required. Imagine if Democrats took on the oil industry during the time of George W. Bush, capitalizing on people's anger towards his war for oil. Look at oil now. It's dying. Exxon just got dropped from the Dow. From CBS, "Exxon's market value has sunk to $175 billion. The company has been plagued in part by claims that it deliberately concealed the damage that the oil it has long extracted and refined into gasoline was doing to the planet."
Andrea Chalupa: All these years, Democrats could have embraced the climate science with full force, going after polluting giants, forcing them to pay. Instead, what did we get? Wasted time as Democrats let Republicans set the narrative. The bubble of the Clinton '90s came to a screeching halt with this horrific Clinton impeachment scandal that was deliberately gross. The Starr Report was graphic and meant to cause ultimate humiliation. As a kid growing up watching this, it was deeply disturbing. There was immense backlash, Americans hated Republicans for the hypocrisy of the Clinton impeachment. Instead of capitalizing on that, Al Gore distanced himself from Clinton and embraced super proper conservative Democrat, Joe Lieberman, as his running mate.
Andrea Chalupa: Joe Lieberman, who is an honorary Republican who endorsed Susan Collins in 2020. Al Gore even dipped his wife on stage at the Democratic Convention and implanted a big kiss in her lips to prove just how much he's not Bill Clinton. Gore and his wife are now divorced. The Clintons, for what it's worth, are still married. Then you had Howard Dean ignite people in 2004 in the Democratic primary for the presidential election against war criminal, Bush. Howard Dean was like a Bernie before Bernie and yet Dems rallied around last place finisher John Kerry, the flip flop king who didn't know what to think or feel until he heard it from a highly paid consultant.
Andrea Chalupa: Howard Dean bounces back in 2008, leading the 50 State Strategy for Obama, which gets Obama elected. Then honorary Republican Rahm Emanuel doesn't let Howard Dean into the new administration and Obama lets the DNC and Democratic Party atrophy as Karl Rove turns state governments red and the Republicans build a ferocious ground game, while Debbie Wasserman Schultz overstays her welcome as the head of the DNC.
Andrea Chalupa: Again and again, Democratic leadership have let Republicans set the narrative and jumped through the hoops Republicans held up like little show poodles. Meanwhile, the big changes have come from outside the system, like the Indivisible guide moveon.org, the Stacey Abrams Movement, all built by people outside the system because official Democratic Party leadership eats its own and lets Republicans dominate discourse in our country. You can set the narrative by saying, “hey, we're in a time of crisis, and we have to do something about it”, just like you have to say that right now about the pandemic. Nearly half of the country, as we saw with the 70 million who voted for Trump, don't care about the pandemic, don't trust the science, yet Democrats ran on a science platform.
Andrea Chalupa: Do that now for winning the AI space race and providing a basic income for those who are going to lose their jobs from automation in the next 15 years. Do that now for climate change by embracing a totally non-controversial and common sense Green New Deal. It's insane that we're stuck with the same thinking of Al Gore's Democratic Party, of John Kerry's Democratic Party, Rahm Emanuel's Democratic Party, and it's the outsiders who refuse to wait and refuse to ask for permission and are building what needs to be built. Andrea Chalupa: Science was on trial this election and it was still close. It will still stay close because half of the country are the idiots that would have put Galileo on trial. Half of our country thinks people's intelligence is determined by their skin color. The Republican Party is an authoritarian party, and authoritarianism depends on fostering anti-intellectualism. That is true. That is a chapter in Jason Stanley's brilliant book, How Fascism Works. Read it.
Andrea Chalupa: So the last thing the Democrats can afford to do is dumb themselves down. That is forfeiting your leadership. But that's what they've been doing for two decades with rare exceptions.
Sarah Kendzior: Yes, absolutely, and we're at a point now where there's no room for debate because there is a ticking clock above us. It is literally an existential threat. Everything you said about climate change applies to that, and all of these broader issues that we're fighting–of corruption, of rising autocracy, of digital surveillance–they all play into this.
Sarah Kendzior: We're at a crossing in the road where we can either go head on into dystopia or we can just confront what's going to be a very difficult, very arduous time, but that might really bring us to a better future. That is what you should look at when you look at what people are blowing off as, you know, “Dems in disarray” or “inter-party disputes”. When Democrats, the centrist ones; Pelosi, this Abigail Spanberger, when they are attacking the Squad, when they're attacking progressives, it is not just a petty personality dispute, they are trying to block the policies that are needed to literally save the planet.
Sarah Kendzior: Policies like The Green New Deal that Dianne Feinstein laughed at terrified children for trying to get her to embrace. Policies that they should have gotten on board with a very long time ago. We’ve said many times that the GOP is an apocalyptic death cult, and some people thought that was overstated until coronavirus showed up and we saw them flat out saying, grandma should die for the economy, or just simply seeming to exalt the deaths of over 200,000 Americans.
Sarah Kendzior: There's a sadistic component to this that's actually quite overwhelming for people like Trump, like Kushner, like Miller. They enjoy seeing people suffer. But what goes hand in hand with that is apathy that is just as cruel in its own way. That is what Pelosi has been about for her entire tenure as the House Speaker under the Trump administration. It's standing by and enabling and letting this Republican apocalyptic death cult get away with incredible criminality, with cruelty, with threats of violence, with targeting of public officials, but also not doing anything about these broader existential problems that are intrinsically connected to the ability to bring accountability to this Republican Party.
Sarah Kendzior: In other words, you need to get these people out, or we're going to die. You need to actually enforce accountability, or the policies that are necessary to save the planet are not going to be passed, and then they're just going to build on themselves. Sarah Kendzior: What we've seen over the last few years is just a prelude of everything that's to come. So I think that these attacks on Ocasio-Cortez and on other progressives within the party are not just destructive to the Democratic Party, they're broadly destructive in a way that maybe the Democratic "leadership" doesn't understand. Because everything that the "Squad" is putting forward are common sense, necessary policies based on science, based on logic, based on what's good for the economy and what helps human beings survive. So I hope people get past this sort of cat fight mentality that they're trying to frame this as and look at the real cruelty behind these attacks on Ocasio-Cortez and others, because they're not just attacking her, they're attacking what she and so many others are trying to build, what the grassroots movements that allowed Joe Biden to get into office are trying to build.
Sarah Kendzior: And what we're trying to build is a future for our children. That is what so many Americans are very worried about right now, including me. When we look at our kids, there's a pit in our stomachs and a sort of I don’t know just a heartbreak of thinking of what they'll have to go through if we don't fix … … these problems now, and if they know that we knew that it was coming down the road, and we didn't do absolutely everything we could to stop it.
Sarah Kendzior: I don't know how people live with that kind of guilt and that kind of shame. But if you don't feel it already, you're going to. The time to get on board and fix these problems is right now.
Andrea Chalupa: Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior: We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, or just supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the frontlines in the US, China and other hard hit parts of the world.
Andrea Chalupa: We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org, and if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior, and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon, it keeps us going, and subscribe to us on YouTube. We are everywhere, world domination 2021.
Sarah Kendzior: Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa: Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior: Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa: Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon...