Gaslit Nation Transcript 11 June 2021 Red State Resistance: The Lindsey Simmons Interview https://www.patreon.com/posts/red-state-52383451 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 am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world. And I am thrilled today to have a fellow Missouri-based guest on our show, Lindsey Simmons, who ran for Missouri's 4th Congressional District. If you know Lindsey from Twitter, she's at Lynz for Congress, L-Y-N-Z-F-O-R Congress—hopefully, you know how to spell congress these days—where she has a very insightful account running down problems not just in Missouri, not just in “red states”, but nationally. We've seen a lot of discussion about how to change our political situation in states like ours but not a lot of folks from those states actually giving their viewpoint on things, which is why we’ve decided to invite Lindsey on. I asked Lindsey for her biography and I loved what she wrote back so I'm just going to read it and hopefully that's cool with you. Sarah Kendzior: She writes, "I no longer have a prepared media biography. I think most of what I'm going to say and why it's relevant is that I was born and raised in rural Missouri but went East for law school in 2012, where I saw a growing divide between how my classmates experienced the world and how my family and neighbors experienced it. These divides manifested in the 2016 election and as the toxicity grew, I felt a pull to try and build a bridge between these two parts of my life. That work largely resulted in my run for office in Missouri's 4th Congressional District, where I outperformed every single other Democrat on the ticket. Now I'm continuing to build bridges and build community through the Mighty Missouri Project." Lindsey is an attorney, a military spouse, a former congressional candidate, and a Gaslit Nation guest. So welcome to our show. Lindsey Simmons: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for continuing to use the platform that you have to raise awareness about the growing fascism and autocracy in my beloved home. Really appreciate it. Sarah Kendzior: Oh, well the feeling is mutual. And speaking of our beloved home, you have repeatedly referred to Missouri as a “failed state”. On what basis do you make that assessment? Lindsey Simmons: I think that if you go back, and anyone who has studied traditional characteristics of what failed states are will recognize that they're generally classified as areas that have limited resources for their citizens. There's a lack of democracy, there's great income inequality, there are all of these metrics by which you can gauge whether a civilization is succeeding or not. And obviously, Missouri is one of 50 states in the United States and so the correlation and parallels are not exact, but in Missouri we meet many of those metrics. Lindsey Simmons: We have a lack of democracy in the state, from the term limits that were implemented in the 1990s by the Republican Party in an attempt to run out all rural Democrats because they believed and were correct that it would be difficult to get additional Democrats elected after those terms were up. You then have a full Republican legislature that went on to gerrymander our state to the point where you now really only have three, maybe four counties in the state that vote Democrat, even though you have, historically, very strong Democratic roots in many of the counties. Lindsey Simmons: My home county, Saline, is a perfect example of this. We have significant wealth inequality in this state. People do not have hospitals. Where I live, we have a hospital in my hometown of Marshall, but if you live 30 miles away, 60 miles away, my hometown might still be the closest hospital that you have. There are people who have to drive more than two hours to get to the nearest hospital. We have food deserts. Even though we are a rural and agriculture-based community out here in rural Missouri, there are still places that lack food and people have to drive more than 10 to 20 miles to reach a grocery store. Lindsey Simmons: We have failing public education systems. I know that many rural school districts—and folks listening to this might also know—that students out here go to school four days a week, and this is a pre-COVID existence. And that's because we couldn't afford to keep schools open five days a week anymore. And I could go on, but those are just some of the ways in which our very existence is not a success. We are a failed state. Sarah Kendzior: What do you make of the fact that... I mean, first of all, I agree with you and I see a lot of the same problems that you're bringing up for rural Missouri here in St. Louis, in urban Missouri. We also are struggling with food deserts, with a lack of healthcare, with schools that are failing, and with apathy from the state legislature toward all of these problems. What do you think of the fact that, as a state, we seem to recognize this, we seem to be united in our disgust, united in our disillusionment, and when it comes to actual ballot initiatives—things like the Clean Missouri elimination of dirty money in politics, raising the minimum wage, medical marijuana, protection of labor unions, so on and so forth—those ballot initiatives tend to pass statewide, including in Republican districts, but we still have Republicans winning the elections. How do you explain that contradiction? Lindsey Simmons: So, two things. First, I really love that you mentioned how similar the existence in rural Missouri is to living in a city in Missouri. There's so often rhetoric and language used to kind of divide those two situations. We have so much in common. We have so much in common. I love talking to folks who live in Kansas City and St. Louis because you realize very quickly that the struggles we're facing are incredibly similar and we would do ourselves a great service to work together rather than pretending that we're facing two totally different experiences. Lindsey Simmons: And I think that goes to show what you're talking about with these ballot initiatives, where folks in the cities and folks in rural areas united to protect labor unions and united to expand healthcare and united to try to clean up the gerrymandering that's happening in this state. And to the question of, why is it that we can vote on progressive ballot initiatives, but then vote for regressive politicians? The answer to me is kind of simple, but it has a lot of problems baked into it, which is that, when people have to think about the issue, it's a little bit more easy to go in a more progressive direction because progressive policies tend to help the most people. And most folks want to help other people and they want to help themselves. When you look at politics and just see an R or a D behind someone's name, that's when the polarization and the cultish following happens, and that is why we continue to elect folks who work against the very measures that we've also voted for. Lindsey Simmons: And I think a really great example of that—merging back into what we just talked about, with Missouri being a failed state—has to do with Clean Missouri, the effort to reform gerrymandering and to get money out of Missouri politics. I don't know if a lot of people know, there used to be no contribution limit in the state of Missouri. You could literally donate as much money as you wanted to. It's one of the reasons that Missouri is (I consider it to be) the capital of dark money in the United States and Clean Missouri worked to reform that. It passed by over 60% of the vote in 2018. So, of course, in 2020, the Republicans decided that they needed to put it back on the ballot and try and get ahold of it and they did it in one of the most disingenuous ways. Lindsey Simmons: And it ended up in court, where the court actually said that the language going onto the ballot was “misleading”, and indeed it was. So they had to rewrite part of it and it passed again with this bad language now, kind of stripping the good work that was done in 2018, but Republicans weren't satisfied with their new victory and, in the legislature in 2021—so just a couple of months ago—they actually introduced bills saying that the language passed by the legislature is exactly what goes on the ballot. They tried to pass a law saying that the courts could no longer change that language because that is what had gotten them into trouble previously. And then they went so far as to try and change the way that judges are even appointed in Missouri Courts.