Gaslit Nation Episode 01 Andrea Chalupa Sarah Kendzior Theme Music My name’s Andrea Chalupa. I’m a writer and a filmmaker. I’m Sarah Kendzior. I’m a writer and the author of the book The View From Flyover Country. ​ ​ This is Gaslit Nation, with Dame Magazine. [Theme music] Andrea Chalupa: Here we are. Why are we going to have a conversation looking back on 2016 and Russia and Trump and how we got here? What’s the point now? Sarah Kendzior: Well, I think we’re among many who are doing that. ‘Cause 2016 was a lie. If they say journalism is the first draft of history, we had then propaganda as the first draft of history and we have to unravel that propaganda - both in real time and look back now. Andrea Chalupa: [Is] what you mean on propaganda the Harvard study on how mainstream media like the New York Times, namely the New York Times, amplified right wing propaganda. Sarah Kendzior: There’s a lot we can do, we will do in an entirely different podcast, on what defines propaganda, but we have a unique situation in that we had a candidate, who was a demagogue, who lied constantly, who was given an unprecedented amount of airtime Andrea Chalupa: -- a free reality show on CNN. Sarah Kendzior: Yeah! We had a reality show candidate, who’s been embedded with corruption, and when you have that, you have to strip away multiple layers of that lie. And you also have to look at how did that lie affect people. How did it change expectations of behavior? How did it challenge the very notion of truth? And so, what I want to get to here – Andrea Chalupa: So 2016 was a gaslighting election. Sarah Kendzior: [Laughs] Yes, of course. This entire event of Trump entering our orbit has been a perpetual gaslighting. Andrea Chalupa: Starting with Obama’s birth certificate. Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, I mean Andrea Chalupa: For many years, several years Sarah Kendzior: We could go back, before that even I think with Trump ‘cause his whole career has been based on his persona and lying and tricking people to get what he wants. Yeah, in terms of his political rise, I would start it there. But with Trump, you know we’ve always had demagogues in American politics, you’ve always had corruption – especially within the Republican Party in the Bush years. And you’ve had this rising conservative movement in recent years, best embodied by the Tea Party. But with Trump I felt like we had something different, everything I’ve mentioned has been a distinctly American phenomenon, a distinctly American flaw. But Trump is new, he’s an anti-American President: he’s against his own country. He’s the first president about which we had to ask, to which country does your fundamental loyalty lie? And so that’s a new situation. And so Andrea, when did you first become aware that Trump was part of a greater and unprecedented threat to American democracy and sovereignty? Andrea Chalupa: Well first I want to say I’m grateful we’re having this conversation. I’ve always wanted to record somewhere, the conversation of the two of us, going back and recording for history’s sake, what 2016 was like for each of us. I think it was an incredibly lonely-- Sarah Kendzior: Yes. Andrea Chalupa: --terrifying year. I lived and still live this way to an extent, thinking my sister could be killed. You know, for the work she was doing. And researching – Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, why don’t you explain who your sister is and what her job was at the time and what her expertise is. Andrea Chalupa: Yeah, I will certainly, I also want to get into why it’s so important to look back and have some time – right now we know it’s mainstream that Trump serves the interests of Putin. That’s widely known. Our allies openly talk – whoever’s left among our allies if we can still call them our allies – openly talk about it. Mainstream news talks about it. It’s just known that Trump is actively working against America’s interests and for Putin. If you said that in 2016 at any time, you were called crazy, and other things [laughs] and largely dismissed. Or you were Hillary Clinton, just trying to become President. And you were dismissed. But I think it’s so important to preserve a record of the fact that so many credible people would interview people like Paul Manafort as though he were just another political operative running a campaign. And not the head of a torture lobby, who helped commit some of the largest atrocities, human rights atrocities in many countries in the developing world. And another thing I really appreciate this conversation, I just worked on a feature film. Not a documentary, but a feature film with actors, and a brilliant director. And the film begins in March 1933. And so a really large challenge of the screenplay was trying to ground the audience in the fact that in March 1933, the world did not necessarily see Adolf Hitler as Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not yet the Hitler we’ve come to know him as. There are a lot of articles in the mainstream press at the time: “Give Hitler A Chance”! [Laughs] Sarah Kendzior: “Hitler will pivot!” Andrea Chalupa: Exactly. And then – Sarah Kendzior: “Hitler’s becoming more Presidential every day.” Andrea Chalupa: “That was such a Presidential speech by Hitler. He read off that teleprompter beautifully.” Of course, Stalin was Uncle Joe and was going to save mankind. So here you had the two greatest monsters in all of world history, at a time when nobody saw them coming, and nobody saw them for what they were. That was the major challenge of the screenplay, and trying to ground people in a place and time, when they were going to be hit by two massive asteroids at the same time. Eerily, it was a time like we’re living today, where I did not see that coming when I first started working on that script. Back to the conversation, of Sarah Kendzior: When did you realize there’s something more to him than just your average, American, racist demagogue? [Laughter] Andrea Chalupa: Obviously it comes down to March 2016, when Paul Manafort was announced as the campaign chairman. And anybody who followed Ukraine, like my sister and I had for many years; that was like Darth Vader coming over. That felt like the bigger, badder sequel of Ukraine’s revolution: Putin’s revenge. That’s what it was like, it was really scary. Just how my sister and I came into the Paul Manafort story. So in 2015, going into the 2016 election, my sister’s working on ethnic outreach for the DNC. So she’s mobilizing ethnic groups to go get out the vote. So she’s working with Indian Americans, Irish Americans, Ukrainian Americans, Russian Americans, so forth. And it was through events in DC with civic leaders and journalists visiting from Ukraine that she’s hearing Manafort’s very politically active in Kyiv. And so she starts digging into Manafort, she sees he has a long history with Donald Trump, who’s running for President. And so she starts to suspect through her research there’s a Russia connection with the Trump Campaign. And he was just a bad, bad guy. He helped elect Viktor Yanukovych, who’s very much a Trumpian candidate. So he had succeeded with this Trumpian candidate already in Ukraine. And what ended up happening to Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych: an estimated 100 billion dollars disappeared from the Ukrainian budget. And that money went to enriching what they called in Ukraine, “The Family.” Viktor Yanukovych, his kids and their inner circle. Sound familiar? [Laughter] So we have our own ‘The Family” under Trump. This was devastating having him here for a lot of reasons for us, because we watched very closely protesters being beaten and killed, fighting for democracy protesting on the streets of Kyiv. Turning the square, in Maidan, in central Kyiv into a fiery battle zone. We know people who were there, watching people gunned down by snipers. By government snipers working under Viktor Yanukovych. Immediately, when Ukrainians were able to successfully overthrow Yanukovych, he fled to Russia. A week after, very very quick – shortly after, Putin invades Crimea. And then, shortly after that, he invades Eastern Ukraine. And Russia’s continuing to invade Ukraine, the war is ongoing, and by the official conservative count, 10,000 people have been killed so far in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And Crimea is suffering from human rights abuses under Russian occupation. And this is all resulting from work done by Manafort, who helped get these forces into power that were serving Putin’s interests in Ukraine. But most Americans, especially American voters, did not know back then, did not care, what did Ukraine possibly have to do with the 2016 Presidential Election in the US, right? Sarah Kendzior: Right. Andrea Chalupa: December 04, 2013, I tweeted: “Paul J. Manafort is a political consultant who advised Bush 1 and 2, Reagan and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.” That tweet was shared only twice. What I found was the violence escalating in Ukraine’s revolution, protesters being beaten by riot police – I was struggling to get a basic explainer piece on Ukraine, the revolution placed in the mainstream press. One editor said to me, you know, “We’ve done enough Ukraine coverage.” A few weeks later, Kyiv was on fire.