Mafia State U.S.A.
For the entire duration of the Trump-Russia crime spree, the people who spoke out hardest – and paid the worst price – have been women. That trend continued this week with the testimony of national security advisor Fiona Hill, who reconfirmed what Gaslit Nation already knew (that Putin had been interested in Trump for ages) and paid the price with death threats.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling essay collection The View from Flyover Country and the upcoming book Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of Agnieszka Holland's film Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump Administration and rising autocracy around the world. And so, as you know, impeachment hearings are finally, at long last, set to start this week. We've already seen a lot of damning transcripts from those who are about to testify in those hearings. In particular, we've seen testimony from National Security Council and Russia expert Fiona Hill, who has confirmed our repeated statement that the KGB and Putin specifically have been eying Trump since he was a businessman in the 1980s. This is a very basic fact that anyone who studied the former Soviet Union would know, but it's been routinely denied by mainstream journalists. Hill is saying this is not a revelation. She is simply doing her job, but you are so unaccustomed to people actually doing their jobs, particularly when they work in the Trump Administration, that it feels revelatory. Fiona Hill is also another example of what we've been seeing again and again: a woman going forward and putting things on the record when men are too cowardly, and then being threatened for her efforts. According to The Guardian, Hill has received death threats. She joins many other federal officials who've come forward in this regard and have been threatened or punished, from Lisa Page, to Marie Jovanovic, to Reality Winner, to Natalie Mayflower Edwards, and more. So Andrea, what are your thoughts on Fiona Hill's testimony?
Andrea Chalupa: Well, I think Fiona Hill herself is a fascinating expert at the center of all this, because she is seen without a doubt as one of the world's leading experts on Putin. She wrote the book on Putin, a book called Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, and she herself is somebody who is widely, widely trusted. And you can see it, including when we had the Helsinki Hell Summit, when Putin and Trump did their joint press conference in the summer of—God, when was that, Sarah? Was that 2018? When was the Helsinki Hell Summit?
Sarah Kendzior: Um, they did a couple, I mean—
Andrea Chalupa: Oh, it was when we launched the show. That's how I remember it.
Sarah Kendzior: It was 2018. It was 2018.
Andrea Chalupa: Yeah, summer 2018. It was when we launched this show, and we were furious, and we were like, "Yep, we've been telling you this for a long time now that Putin has Trump on a leash." Because that's what that press conference looked like. Like, Trump looked like a giant ape at the end of Putin's chain leash, and they came out, and Trump in his posture and everything was very submissive to Putin, and referring to Putin, like the body gestures, all of it, as though Putin was his protector. Putin, the master manipulator, as called out, as described in detail by Fiona Hill in her textbook on Putin, the master manipulator Vladimir Putin had Trump wrapped around his finger. What people have to understand is that Putin is a great storyteller. He hosts these big press conferences for the Russian people, for Russian journalists, where he speaks for hours and hours. He's a very charming communicator. He could really pull you into his reality if you're weak, and Trump is incredibly weak. And Trump, given his terrible record as a businessman, given his bankruptcies and his corruption, and given that no credible institution in the West will lend to him. Putin—Trump! Sorry, Freudian slip. Trump is dependent on Putin's Mafia State, his Russian oligarchs, big and small, for easy, cheap financing, and that's why he's gotten over the years. Even the idiot sons, Eric and Don Junior, have admitted as much. So Fiona Hill at the Helsinki Hell Summit stood out, because as the world was shocked that we got visual confirmation that Putin has Trump on a leash, the CIA itself reportedly gasped when they saw how truly terrible it was. We had a really interesting moment in Helsinki where the White House and the Kremlin sat on either side of the table from each other, and on the White House side was Fiona Hill, and she was pretty much mad-dogging Putin, because she knows how you need to treat Putin. She knows that Putin only understands and only respects strength, and that is what if Fiona Hill herself was showing when she sat across from Putin and his side of the Kremlin, next to a United States President who is, as you've always said, is a Russian mafia asset, is a Putin asset. But Fiona Hill did what she had to do in that moment for our national security. She held strong. Now, that does not make her a Russian hawk. She's not a warmonger. She just understands the psychology, the manipulation of the KGB agent and the Kremlin, and she showed and reminded Putin that she knows who he is, and that was a very strong and admirable intimidation tactic that was necessary in dealing with an ex-KGB agent like Putin. That was actually a rare comforting moment in an otherwise horrifying time for our country where we got confirmation that the Kremlin succeeded in one of the, arguably, the most successful intelligence operations in history. And so Fiona Hill's testimony was very much an extension of that, where she came up and she said what needed to be said, including doing something which a lot of people are reluctant to do, unfortunately, where Fiona Hill came out on the record, said that she's getting death threats. And I'm so glad that she said that, because I know for a fact that a lot of people that are doing this work are getting death threats, and they're too ashamed to come forward because part of that intimidation is the shame you feel of being targeted, where you're living in America, a country that's supposed to be free, a country that's supposed to be a democracy, a country where the government is supposed to protect you as one of its citizens, and instead, the government is allowing the mass-murdering terrorist regime of the Kremlin to intimidate and harass its own citizens, either through direct death threats or through Kremlin-backed media like Sputnik News. It is that the Trump White House with Giuliani and shadow foreign policy in the Kremlin are an extension of each other now. They're playing on the same side; they're allied. And so Fiona Hill coming forward and saying, "I've received death threats" is what she had to do in the psychology of standing up against this terrorism by saying, "You're not going to make me feel ashamed. You're not going to victimize me. I'm going to call you out and stand in my truth," and that's what she did, because she knows that when you have a bully like Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, you have no option but to stand up to them.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we have seen a general reluctance of people to come forward about death threats. You know, we hear whispers. We hear sort of confessions as an aside. We hear people like Michael Cohen under oath saying that he himself threatened people. We see Trump openly threatening people and people often backing down from those threats in a way that's extremely reminiscent of what happens in authoritarian states and what happens in mafia states. And there is an incredible reluctance to believe that this is how the United States government openly functions. There's always been a willingness to believe that this is how it secretly functions, that there's some sort of deep state apparatus going around threatening and intimidating people, and indeed there has been, with things like the FBA and Cointelpro. It's not like that's entirely a myth. And so when it comes to a figure like Fiona Hill, who is an academic, who is a lifelong researcher of the former Soviet Union, who is an institutionalist, it's interesting to me that she remained in this administration for as long as she did. She is a keen observer of this. We've seen a kind of willful denial, among other institutionalists, mostly people who are affiliated with the GOP, where they wanted to deny the severity of what was happening, where they believed in American exceptionalism and thought it couldn't happen here.
I did not get the impression that she was on that page. There are moments of skepticism on certain issues in her testimony; for example, she mildly disparaged the Steele dossier, but I think that that seems to be more rooted in what she saw as Christopher Steele kind of being too unofficial, kind of like being a little bit of a renegade, not doing things in the way that things are normally done. But of course, he was doing that because we're not living in normal times, and he was making an effort to try to warn the United States government of a terrible threat. And again, when BuzzFeed released that dossier, it was viewed with extreme skepticism at the time by some. Almost everything in it has checked out, and the most important elements of it, for example, that Trump was actively groomed from at least 2011 onward for this mission, for this internal infiltration of the United States for the benefit of the Kremlin, that's the most important facet of that beyond the pee tape, or what have you. And that has checked out entirely. And so there's been a lot of talk going into impeachment about the legal minutia surrounding what exactly Trump did in his attempted extortion of Ukraine. People have argued about the language, about there being too much Latin, about how much does this crime really have to do with the previous three billion crimes he's done, which I've always said, "Yes, this is actually one continuous crime rooted in Trump's mafia and Kremlin affiliations." But it's been frustrating to me about this whole conversation is that this is not exactly a matter of law, but of power. We have already reached the point in the U.S. where autocracy has consolidated. I think in an episode we did on Gaslit Nation back in March or April, Andrea, you were like, "It's here." It's not like somebody puts a lei around your neck made of barbed wire and says, "Welcome to authoritarianism." It happens incrementally, and eventually it reaches a point, usually with the hijacking of the judiciary, where the odds are greatly against us. And the entire concept of law and due process and facts and truth is really up for grabs, and that accelerated a lot this year with the appointment of Bill Barr. So I have to say, I am frustrated with the kind of television punditry going on about similarities to, for example, Watergate, which does not nearly match the scope of this crime, and not understanding that this is about abuse of power. It's about open lying. It's about lying as an act of power. It's showing, "I do not have to tell the truth, and you may know what the truth is. You maybe even heard me confess the truth, confess my crimes repeatedly on television but it makes absolutely no difference what you heard, because this is about power and every reaction that the GOP has had." For example, something like ignoring subpoenas has been a test of how much power the Democrats and other federal officials will give away and how much they will let this fledgling mafia state take form. And the answer is they've let them take a lot, and so I'm glad that they're now bringing in people, neutral witnesses, experts on the region, experts on the subject matter, who hopefully will be able to set the country straight in these hearings. But I have to say, a lot of time has passed. That was time that we didn't have to waste, and it's very frustrating that we're at this point that we could have been doing this back in March to much greater effect. And honestly, we maybe could have avoided the Ukraine shakedown situation, which has horrifically affected people in Ukraine on the ground, as you well know.
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Andrea Chalupa: Everything points to Hannah Arendt. Putin and Trump are united in their values of hate and power for power's sake. That's all it is. It's just it's shared, disgusting values at the center of this, and they're both experts at manipulating reality and creating their own reality and confusing other people's reality and roping you into their reality. And so I'm going to read a quote from Hannah Arendt from The Origins of Totalitarianism: "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of a man who can fabricate it." At the center of that is the reality TV show President Donald Trump, at the center of that is Putin, who has engineered a hysterical Russian propaganda mental prison for the Russian people, which they've also expanded abroad through RT and Sputnik, that they used not only to confuse and to manipulate people, to convince them to come over—because RT has had some great coverage on social ills that must be examined in the US, which does win hearts and mind—but then they bombard you with the world as they see it, and then you get roped into their narrative on, for instance, Ukraine being a so-called neo-Nazi regime and so forth, and all this other propaganda that they want you to believe. And on top of that, they use their propaganda empire, as Trump does, as Putin does, with examples of Fox News and Breitbart and Bannon, generally, they use their propaganda machine to harass and intimidate and dehumanize their opponents. So all of this is happening. It's worse than you even know, because there's so many people that are suffering in silence, and we are still in a very precarious situation. You have people that are too afraid to risk their lives, their family's lives, because, quite frankly, not everybody is acclimated to waging this sort of warfare. Not everyone is acclimated to being a target of the propaganda machine, so people do give in. People do think that they can negotiate with the devil, not realizing that if you do, you're giving up your nation's sovereignty. So we have a media and political leaders, public servants who are not ready for this moment in time, and unfortunately are playing catch up. And the big question is, is it gonna be too late for us? And that is something that Sarah and I don't have an answer to, but we are trying to prepare people by bringing it all down to grounding the situation in the hard reality of what the truth is right now, that yes, this is dangerous; yes, this is really happening; and yes, it's worse than you realize. The only people that can get us out of it right now are ourselves, because as we're saying always on this show will always repeat it, because you have to understand, there is comfort. There is hope. There is always hope. Progress cannot be stopped, but progress can be delayed, and so the best protection against what's happening is community. Community is the vaccine against this virus. And you can go to GaslitNationPod.com for a whole list of ways to get involved and build community, because we're telling you the truth. That is the answer to all this. That is what is reliable power today is grassroots power.
But back to Fiona Hill, because she herself went on a really interesting journey. In 2004, she wrote an op ed for The New York Times called "Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him," where she was part of this chorus of voices that led up to the inevitable reset button which happened under Obama's watch where we gave Russia a second chance. And this is very much the mistake of Americans with their rose-colored glasses in misreading Russia and thinking that democracy was inevitable for Russia, not realizing how much Russia's own pride was on the line. The collapse of the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet era was a terror state—the 1990s brought such severe instability and poverty that in order to rebuild, just like you had with the Weimar Republic, you had this charismatic leader in the former Putin coming in and selling everybody nationalism. And you had Putin's core of oligarchs that rose up in that period as holding on to the glory days of Russia's tsarist past, and how that became a manipulative tool in order for them to consolidate and build their power and stay in power, and the natural extension of that was even rehabilitating the image of mass murderer monster Vlad—sorry, Vladimir Stalin [laughter]—Stalin, springing Stalin back with statues and so forth. What the whippersnapper Americans underestimated was Russia's own romanticism of its past, and its own definition of patriotism and how it wanted to build up itself. That's why when Putin went in and seized Crimea, which was an invasion where people were killed and tortured, that actually boosted his ratings in Russia. Russians applauded that, and even Russian opposition figures who don't like Putin and risked their lives in freedom protesting him, even they applauded that. There's another sense of Russian patriotism that the West has not been very good at translating or understanding, or has underestimated, that Putin is very much seized on and manipulated to build his control and manipulation of the Russian people themselves. And Fiona Hill was somebody who wanted to give Putin a chance, and over time that backfired, like it did for so many well-meaning people in the West. And she finally came around—and maybe she went back and forth on this, because we know she had that really interesting op ed from 2004, "Stop Blaming Putin, and Start Helping Him—maybe she went back and forth over this over the years, but she finally came around and became known as a Russian real realist, where she accurately picked up on details, little details that revealed who Putin was, like in a press conference at a meeting with press and visiting Western experts in 2011, she noticed that an aide to Putin gave him notes with giant, giant letters written on it so he could easily read it. And so what she deciphered from that is that Putin is a man who might need glasses but is too proud, and doesn't want to risk showing any frailty that might disrupt the myth of Russian greatness that he's built up for his people, that has helped cement his control in the country. So instead of wearing glasses like he might need to, he instead has his aides write in giant letters notes to him. So Fiona Hill picked up on that little detail, and those little details do matter.
Sarah Kendzior: Do you know—I just have to interrupt that Trump was just revealed to have been doing the exact same thing. There was an article in Slate about how Trump needs glasses. Trump can't read in the sense that he can't make out the words, and they're using the exact same tactics. of like giant font on a teleprompter speech in order to enable him for the same reasons you're talking about, for this projection of strength and this macho posturing. So that's interesting. But anyway, go on.
Andrea Chalupa: Yeah, it's called toxic masculinity, where might makes right. And they basically are banking on this really outdated form of dominance and strength where they're the giant gorilla in the pack that just beats their chest and intimidates all the other male gorillas. Like, they really seem unevolved here. They really seem, like, let's say we had alien lifeforms that were so advanced from far away civilizations and they came to earth, and let's say they saw who we had in charge, they would keep going. They'd be like, "These people are a bunch of idiots. Look who they have running their countries. Let's pass this planet and find the next sign of life out there." Trump and Putin are unevolved. They are unevolved. They're trying to take us back into evolution. They don't believe in moving forward. They do not believe in science and progress. In fact, Putin's strangulation of the Russian people has led to a massive brain drain. Russia has historically been on the frontlines of culture, science and technology, and instead, Putin is scaring off all that potential for the Russian people, and that is at the center of this. As we always say, authoritarianism kills potential. It kills progress, but ultimately progress can't be stopped, and so a lot of really brilliant Russians are doing their work abroad, so other countries are benefiting from the Russian mind. And unfortunately, Russia is going to have to make up for the giant pile of bones that Putin has created for many years to come.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, I agree with all that, but one thing—and I know you know this, but just as a caveat—
Hold on. You disconnected again. I'll wait for you to call me back, and then we'll continue. Every fucking show. I swear to God. Alright.
Andrea Chalupa: I want to finally say that when Sarah and I record this show, we get our calls dropped constantly. So the edited version you hear is basically a very smooth version without all those stops. So she and I speak on the phone regularly, but the only time our calls drop are when we're actually recording, and they tend to drop when we're really hitting a note, if you know what I mean.
Sarah Kendzior: Yep, certain names, certain times.
Andrea Chalupa: Exactly.
Sarah Kendzior: On that note, I want to respond to what you were saying. You're absolutely right, and I agree with you, and I know you already know this, that in terms of Russia having this brain drain, losing its potential in terms of study, of science, of social progress, of things like that—yes, but what they still have is power and money, incredibly consolidated among a very tiny portion of the population. Russia is the country with the greatest income inequality and hoarding of wealth in the entire world, even more than United States. They have weapons and they have lies. They have a vast propaganda apparatus. This is true of Russia, and this is true of the United States. And I think a lot of times because of the anti-intellectualism in particular projected by Trump, but to some degree, Putin, you know, when you see him out bare-chested, like riding a horse and what have you. They're underestimated as strategists, and I think they're very different in this regard. Like, Putin is obviously much more sophisticated. He's a former KGB agent. You can never really be former. He's somebody who does possess geopolitical acumen. Trump is a master of spin. He's a master of PR. And in America, in a country dominated by Hollywood and tabloid culture and legal maneuvers, this is a more valuable skill, I think, than geopolitical acumen. We're in many ways a kind of anti-intellectual country. And I really think you need to have a knowledge of both. You need to have high-brow knowledge and you need to have low-brow knowledge in order to fully understand what's going on here, and I think too many lean to one side.
And on that note, this is why I'm concerned, because as we've been saying on this show all year long, if the House does not have impeachment hearings in time, we will end up with show trials. And so this is coming true right now. Right now, as the Democrats are putting together hearings, at long last, we see William Barr trying to undercut impeachment with a report rumored to contain lies and propaganda, while at the same time, the GOP is putting together its own show trial witness wish list. And on that wish list is your sister, Alexandra Chalupa, the independent researcher who was the first to warn the country that Manafort was working with Russia to attempt to rig the election for Trump, longtime mafia associate. You could go back and listen to our archives—our first three episodes ever back in 2018, but also an episode called “The Alexandra Chalupa Interview” in which she tells her story for the first time. So what's your sister's reaction to being put on this GOP witness list that was created by Devin Nunes and pushed out by all of cable news media over the weekend?
Andrea Chalupa: There's this surreal new normal that my family lives with, right? We talk about Thanksgiving and details over Thanksgiving, who's sleeping in which room when we all come back to my parents’ place, and the typical things every family deals with. And then on top of that, you have this banana republic targeting my sister, and it's absolutely surreal, and it's horrendous, and it's—you cannot normalize this. It is as bad as it sounds. And if you look at Devin Nunes, he's a classic example of what wannabe authoritarian leaders are like. They're not very bright. They're morons, and they just want power for power sake, and they want to intimidate anybody that dares to hold their moral corruption accountable. So the same week or so that when Putin outlawed criticizing him on social media in Russia, Devin Nunes sued people that made fun of him on Twitter, including the cow account. What is that, right?
Sarah Kendzior: [laughter] Right. That's like Adam Parkhomenko's parody account, right?
Andrea Chalupa: Or somebody. I don't know whose it is, but there's like a Devin Nunes cow that makes fun of him, and he sued all these Twitter accounts.
Sarah Kendzior: Very sensitive guy. What a snowflake.
Andrea Chalupa: Snowflake Devin Nunes sued a bunch of people that make fun of him on Twitter, and that just grew those accounts. Those accounts just exploded their audience. So basically, the fight of our lives is about keeping the idiots out of power. That's all it is. That's why it's up to every person that believes in facts, that believes in science, that believes in the power of empathy. You're morally obligated to run for office just to flush the idiots out, no matter where you live or how red your district. You have to get up and do it, because that's the fight we're in right now. It's an existential fight for survival, because the idiots, they make no sense. They absolutely make no sense. The endgame is senseless, and that is what Hannah Arendt points out in the banality of evil. The endgame is senseless. Evil is senseless, and so if you want the world around you to start making sense, then you need to stand up and run for office. If you believe in facts, if you believe in science, if you believe in empathy, it's your moral obligation, no matter where you are or where you live in America or around the world to run for office, large or small, just to flush the idiots out.
Now back to my sister. The only comment I'll make on this in regards to her perspective is what she shared publicly. And that's in this Facebook post that she wrote when the news was announced that the Banana Republicans in the House called her and other patriots who were just doing their jobs and following the law to alert leaders, alert the press, alert the public to the Kremlin's invasion of the highest office in our land through Donald Trump and his family. That's all they did, and they're being punished now for pointing out the crime. So here's what my sister wrote on Facebook: "Excited about this opportunity and hope they realize what they're getting themselves into. On a side note, it is highly unlikely the GOP knows who the real whistleblower is. That would be a major security breach. It's much more likely that they targeted someone they could tie to me after they failed to paint me as the whistleblower the previous weeks. Whether this individual is or is not the whistleblower, in the process of their smear campaign, they revealed he's a CIA operative, which was not public information. Did they violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982? The media should examine this question and the greater impact it has on endangering U.S. national security, since it also reveals how the NSC is structured. Regardless, this is an ongoing attack against the U.S. intelligence community that's been in progress well before the 2016 election and which Trump has carried the torch for. Trump and his Republican cohorts have spent countless time, energy, and resources helping cover up Putin's attack on the U.S. while smearing the men and women who risk their lives to protect our national security. This is what happens when an organized crime syndicate controls the White House and deeply infiltrates Congress. They've betrayed the United States."
Andrea Chalupa: [Pause] So they keep interrupting our call. Somebody—I don't know how, but our calls keep dropping, and what they do is they drop—our calls tend to drop at key moments in our conversations, not just random moments, but in key moments. So one Russian opposition organizer said that went to her calls were tapped, they did it in such a way that they let you know their calls were being tapped. They want you to know that they're harassing you. It's supposed to be intimidation to silence you and to make you shrink, but this has been going on for as long as Sarah and I can remember. So we've been living with it for a very long time.
Sarah Kendzior: And especially as long as we do the show. If we're having some inane conversation on the phone, like about our kids or like a TV show we like, or something like that, this does not happen. It happens when we're trying to work together in two separate cities to get information out to the public through this podcast, and it's like, well, you know, this is all public information anyway. It's not like they're listening in and hearing anything that we're not saying publicly. But yeah, it's disruptive, to say the least.
Andrea Chalupa: People don't understand that there have been entire podcast episodes where you and I don't even hear what the other person says, and we just keep going, and our editor stitches it together.
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, and because we have a mindmeld, this works out very well for us. If we lacked that quality, we'd really be in trouble. On that note, I want to emphasize yet again, as you just did, the prevalence of these threats, which are very widespread. They've been aimed at whistleblowers, at federal officials, at journalists, and we have yet another example this week. It's a little bit ambiguous because the news just came in, but there was yet another suspicious death related to the Kremlin, this time in Turkey, where James Le Mesurier, a former British intelligence official who was working with the White Helmets civilian rescue team in Syria—he was among the people who helped found that group—died by, quote, "falling off his balcony in Istanbul." And so his death, there's not a clear cause yet. It's being viewed as suspicious by those who knew him, in large part because Le Mesurier was continually targeted both by conspiracy theorists and by the Kremlin itself. Last Friday, the Russian foreign ministry wrote on its Twitter account, and I'm quoting here, "The White Helmets co-founder James Le Mesurier is a former agent of Britain's MI-6, who's been spotted all over the world, including in the Balkans and in the Middle East." They then went on to claim that he had a connection to terrorist groups. And we've seen a lot of Russian propagandists online saying that he is affiliated with al-Qaida. And so this is yet another death—again, we don't know for sure if this is a murder. It could have been a suicide, I suppose. It could have been a fall. But this is a pattern. I mean, this is a very common way for Russians to off someone. They've become more and more brazen about it. We saw the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury in the U.K. That was one of those events where I really thought, "Okay, this is so vile. This is so brazen, so open, so shameless, that clearly the UK government and NATO and all of these officials are going to have to react because, of course, that attack, as we've described it before, was on UK soil and an innocent bystander, a random British woman, died as a result of it." So, you know, we're seeing these kind of attacks both on specific individuals who are designated as enemies of the Kremlin and on just spy standards. And nothing is being done. And I certainly don't expect Erdogan in Turkey to do anything beneficial. Erdogan, who currently is threatening to release ISIS members into the EU to destabilize it and is, of course, being welcomed with open arms by Trump on Wednesday, the day that impeachment hearings start. That's going to be an interesting day. But yeah. This brutal culture of continual threats and violence and surveillance and intimidation, which I think is greatly exacerbated by digital technology and by this kind of trollish, "Oh, we're just kidding. Oh, we're just making a little poke at you. You know, why would you consider this a threat? Why would you consider this such a big deal? You sound so ridiculous." Like, that is beating people down, because it's sucking the honesty out of the conversation, and in that honesty is a component of fear. Of course, people are afraid, and that's not a sign of weakness. That's a sign of rationality. You're looking out at the landscape and you're seeing enemies who are attacking you, who are degrading you, who are actually targeting you, but people are so afraid of sounding hysterical or alarmist that they don't issue a cry for help or even talk straight about what's going on. And I don't think that that's a lack of courage, necessarily. Like, if you're frightened, that's not the same thing as not being courageous, because they think courage is going ahead and fighting back anyway and continuing to do your job, even though you're afraid. It's not the absence of fear, it's the perseverance in the face of fear, and we're certainly seeing that in many people, too, and that's very admirable, but I think collectively we need to get out of this denial. This sort of, "Oh, it's gonna be okay," or, "There's no way the United States could turn into a Kremlin proxy mafia state." It has! I mean, it's not as severe, obviously, as it is in other similar states, but that's what's happened, and it's happened in part because of the denial of officials that it could get this bad. That is the road to thing getting this bad, is saying, "Oh, that can't happen here," or, "It can't get that terrible," or, "Checks and balances, blah, blah, blah." And I really hope that over the course of these hearings that are going to open, people are going to be blunt about this and realize that there are lives on the line here, there are lives at stake, and not play this down for the sake of false reassurance to the American people, because the American people deserve better than false reassurance. They deserve to know the truth, even if the truth is terrifying.
Andrea Chalupa: You're absolutely right. We have to deal with the reality of the situation, not worry about any labels that are thrown on us. You and I had labels put on us left and right, and we kept talking. They couldn't shut us up, and fortunately, we've been vindicated. Part of the reality of the situation is that when you have a sister that is being targeted by both the Kremlin and the White House, what we have to do, what Sarah and I do for each other, is we say things like, "Hey Sarah, regular reminder. I would never in a million years commit suicide, so if I end up dead in a hotel room and it looks like suicide, I was murdered," or, "Hey Sarah, just a regular reminder. I'm in great health. I'm doing great right now. In fact, I even have no cavities. Just saw the dentist—clean bill of health there, too, even I love my candy." We're always checking in with each other on this stuff. It's a practical measure for us. To not do so would be irresponsible. For instance, I'm about to travel, and if I end up found with too many sleeping pills and alcohol next to my hotel bed and I'm unresponsive, I was murdered. So that's the stuff we say for each other, just to check in, and you have to do it, because what they do is they target not just the whistleblowers. They target not just the journalists. They target not just the opposition leaders. They also target their families. That is how they get you. That is how they try to silence you, and with my sister being targeted by the Trump regime and the Putin regime, I have to take these precautions. I have to. It's the responsible thing to do for myself and for my friends and my family.
Sarah Kendzior: And I think part of this defense, as you've said before, is community, which we sort of establish in our small way with the show. But it's also telling your own story, and it's doing it in a chronologically proven time, not reactively, not reacting to what the administration does and saying, "Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you, I was threatened at this point in time." It's documenting everything as it happens day by day so that they are not able to construct a false narrative of what actually happened to you. And your sister was doing that throughout 2016. Journalists kept killing her story, as she mentioned, but some told and she was telling it herself on Facebook. And we've been telling it steadily in various ways through social media, through articles, through our podcasts, and that's necessary. And if you are one of those people who is being targeted and threatened, I really suggest that you record all of this. Like, record it in your voice, make it in a video, put out an article, in part because it does serve the public good and I think people will not judge you as harshly as maybe you think. Like maybe you worry about being labeled an alarmist or being labeled a coward; I don't think that's going to happen exactly, because so many people are secretly horrified by the extent of these threats and what's going on. And it's just good for yourself protection. And on that note, same thing here: if I died, it was not natural causes. I'll just put it that way. I can't believe we had to do this sometimes. Like, the surrealness of it.
Andrea Chalupa: Hey, if anything happens, you have to keep Gaslit Nation going. Like grab Olga Lautman, grab Malcolm Nance, and just keep it here.
Sarah Kendzior: That's our deal. I remember we talked about this. We talked about having to put a little murder clause in our contract. I mean, it's just, it's absolutely crazy. And speaking of contracts and threats and slimy people, I think we should talk about the Whistleblower vs. Anonymous, the author of the new crappy book that you shouldn't buy, and basically this duality that America is now struggling with, which is duty versus book deals. We've had a number of people threatening the whistleblower, the whistleblower who still remains anonymous at this point, the whistleblower who Donald Trump, ceaselessly tweets about, has threatened in the past. Last week, Donald Trump Junior was criticized for tweeting an article that listed the potential whistleblowers name. After that, Twitter personality Yashar Ali tweeted out the whistleblower's alleged actual name in a tweet. He then deleted it after criticism. What this shows is, of course, there's no protection for whistleblowers in this administration, and you have an entire media infrastructure existing that endangers the people who dare criticize it. This goes everything from Fox, which is a propaganda appendage of this administration, to people like Yashar Ali, who I don't think it is that, but possibly just wanted the traffic or thought he had a scoop. I don't know exactly what his logic is, but what we all need to remember is this is very serious. You know, Trump threatened to murder the whistleblower last month. Right after the speech where he did that, just hours after, The New York Times immediately gave revealing details on the whistleblower's identity and endangered their life. And so as this is happening—and this is the thing that just is so disgusting—you're seeing this parade of losers from the White House trying to monetize their service for a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government by writing what they claim are tell-all books. And so we've got two offenders right now. We have the anonymous employee, whose book is called A Warning, who wrote in 2018 in The New York Times a year ago anonymously that we will all secretly be saved by the, quote, "steady state"—spoiler: we were not—on one hand. And then on the other hand, we have psychotic warmonger John Bolton, who is coming out with his own book, and has decided to take a two-million-dollar advance to write that book while not testifying to Congress. And so this mystifies me. I mean, I'm mystified why anyone would buy these books. I strongly suggest that you do not. But also, why are they even so interested in book deals? Like, that is very strange to me, especially because they don't tend to really put value in traditional emblems of institutional prestige. They're deconstructing the administrative state. They're building their own right-wing propaganda apparatus, so why do they want to be supported so badly by these publishing industries? Especially because two million dollars, to a normal person, is a shitload of money. To John Bolton that's like chump change. He could make more being a consultant, or like being a consultant for the Russian mafia, like so many other federal officials have done.
There's a pattern to these kind of books. They tend to cover up crime with scandal. We've seen this in journalism, quote-unquote, as well, from people like Michael Wolff or Carl Bernstein, that really kind of worked around the very serious crimes of the administration to emphasize personality disputes, or these books are attempts to whitewash the complicity of the authors. And that's what happened in the books by, for example, James Comey and Jim Mattis. What I'm wondering is whether the publishing industry is functioning as a sort of self-censorship operation, offering monetary incentive to careerists and possibly containing some version of an NDA. I mean, this really varies from publisher to publisher, from authored author, but many publishers, especially with a big book, will prohibit details of the book from being revealed beforehand, and so this becomes a serious problem when you have a book about an immediate national security threat, and it is a great way to shut people up in advance while not actually employing state censorship. So all of this benefits Trump and his backers. We know that Trump has his fans within publishing, and it's pretty clever. It's kind of an extension of the way that he controls the media, not by flat out saying, "No, you can't write that. No, you can't run that on TV," but through incentives, through intimidation, through finding the slimiest people possible, people like Ken Vogel, who we discussed in our last episode, outlets like The New York Times that do this both-sides kind of nonsense, who rely on court intrigue, tales, who won't touch his mafia affiliations, who won't go deep in Russia, who in fact covered for him with Russia by lying about the FBI has knowledge of Trump and Russia back in October 2016, right before the election by pumping out Hillary email intrigue tales. They are working in their own way as propaganda apparati, and in a way that I think most Americans won't identify as easily, because these are American institutions. It's not like RT and Sputnik coming crashing in with their own pre-built operations. This is the hijacking, often voluntary, of American publishing establishments, and it's working fairly well. I just wonder what's in it for the authors, because it's not really money, and their reputation isn't being rehabbed to people for whom it matters, and they often don't sell great. They kind of shoot up the charts and come crashing back down once the next scandal happens, which is like a week later. So, yeah. Do you have thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa: Anybody who has the expertise to warn us not only what's happening now, but what's coming next, those people are being highly lawyered, you could say, at the publishing houses. The lawyers, media companies, and publishing houses are scared of those people and are trying to tone down their books. I know because I talked to people who have books that are being heavily lawyered. Even facts are being taken out because the facts are just too damning. That's what we're up against right now. It's a self-censorship, because you have a litigious White House, a Russian mafia asset in the White House, who uses mafia tactics to intimidate people. I mean, these sort of brass knuckle tactics work. It almost killed Ronan Farrow story at NBC News. He had to jump with it to The New Yorker, and his fame, his prestige as a public figure helped him do that. Imagine if he was just your regular run-of-the-mill journalist with that big story. He might not have the confidence, the network to successfully pivot as he was able to do. That's not a knock on Ronan Farrow. That's a knock on our society. So anybody who's in a position to really point out the big elephant in the room that we finally need to deal with, namely the corruption that's being aided by the Republican Party, that's the biggest elephant of all. They are dealing with a lot of cowards wherever they are in media and publishing, and they have people that are trying to tamper down their stories, kill their stories, and so forth. Sarah and I know of direct stories of this happening, and I want to point out generally media behaving badly. There was a study how in political journalism white men talked to other white men and women get shut out of the conversation, and therefore women are locked out essentially of being prominent political journalists. There are very few of us. And there's no greater example of that than just now, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jon Favreau of Pod Save America saying that I am the former DNC contractor who has been called before the House. Andrea Chalupa.
Sarah Kendzior: [laughter] Oh my God.
Andrea Chalupa: And I'm sort of like, wait a minute, you guys. I want to say to Josh Marshall and John Favreau of Pod Save America: the Kremlin, the Kremlin can tell me and my sister apart, which is why we in America here, our media, and our government has been played so successfully by the Kremlin. If you here in America cannot even tell that my sister and I are two very different people, what is wrong with you? How can we trust you to accurately, successfully, effectively cover one of the greatest crimes in human history? Get it straight. On the heels of the Steele dossier being dropped by BuzzFeed, Putin's Sean Hannity did a segment on how my sister created the Trump Russia scandal and how I helped her. The only solace I took in that was that, "Okay, well, at least the Kremlin is smart enough to know that we're two different people. I wish my own media would catch up."
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, I mean, it's pathetic. It's a sign of their laziness. It's a sign of their incompetence, but their incompetence puts people's lives at risk.
Andrea Chalupa: It's a sign of their arrogance. It's a sign of their arrogance. We've had this show for a year. We have members of Congress that follow this show. We've had outreach from members of Congress. We've had impact with what we've had to say. And yet our colleagues in the political journalism world, we don't register with them. We don't count on their radar, because they're busy talking to each other. If we were two men that launched a successful podcast within a year, there's over half a million podcasts out there. Very few rise to the surface. Gaslit Nation within a year was able to do so, within its first few episodes was able to do so. Our trailer announcing the show went viral. If we were two men who managed this on our own, we would have profiles written about us. Instead, Sarah and I continue to be ignored, even though we're at the center of this and our lives are threatened by this and we're getting harassment and phishing emails and other things as a result of the reporting we're doing. And yet, we're still continually sidelined by our colleagues who are also covering the story.
Sarah Kendzior: Right, and it's only by a certain type of colleague, to be honest. It's by rich white men who live in New York and D.C., because we do have a very large audience. We have a very diverse audience. We have an international audience. You have a movie; I have a bestselling book. We both do media appearances regularly. Like, we're not exactly languishing in obscurity. What I find frustrating about this is like, you know, I certainly do not need the validation of like Pod Save America, or, God help me, Josh Marshall to get through my day. I can live without that. What is frustrating is that the information that we're putting out there is coming months in advance of other publications and that it's because of our expertise, because we both spent our lives studying the former Soviet Union. And of course, in your case, your sister is caught up in this whole mess. And so when we come out in April and May with warnings about Giuliani's activity in Ukraine and about how he is the new Manafort and about everything else that we were like, "Please, Congress, look at this. Please, U.S. media with more resources and money than us. You need to look at this. You need to examine this, or we're going to end up with something like, oh, I don't know, Trump conducting an extortion scheme in July." Maybe if you would actually pay attention to what's going on and listen to people who have experience with this region, despite the fact that we happen to be women, maybe you fucking know a thing or too, instead of just running out your mouth like, "Wow, I can't figure out why in the world Trump is connected to Putin." It's like, holy fucking shit, man. Like, there are books about this. Like there are books, you know, there are books written by me, but there are books written by many other people. There are television shows run by women like Rachel Maddow or Joy Reid that have been documenting this for years. You've got to catch up. You suck at your job. Like, either quit your job or catch up, because lives are on the line. Freedom of speech is one of the few weapons that we have at our disposal that we more or less control. Free speech, free media. Guess what? It's probably not going to last forever, so it's your duty as an American citizen, as a journalist, to try to inform the public. And if your information is marred by your inability to actually consider women as human beings and listen to their expertise, then we're in a lot of trouble, because as we see again, as they pointed out in the beginning of the show, people who are bringing the truth forward are often women. It is Fiona Hill. It's the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. It's whistleblowers like Reality Winner. It's the journalists I just mentioned. And it's a very consistent phenomenon of being marginalized in this discussion. And again, this is not about ego. We've been around long enough that we really don't give a fuck. It's about facts.
Andrea Chalupa: It's about facts. Let me break it down to you like this. So I have a friend who is an executive coach, and she said that her clients primarily come from mediocre white men who are so shocked that they keep getting promoted that they need help managing the extra responsibilities, and women who are doing all the work and never being promoted. That's her client pool.
Sarah Kendzior: And that's how things are. That's how things are in the United State of America.
Andrea Chalupa: That's political journalism. That's journalism. That's government. That's the space we're in.
Sarah Kendzior: And we encourage women to just keep speaking out and keep telling your stories and to, you know, if you can, run your own podcast or your own publication. Like, media is dying. We've seen a gutting of independent journalism. We're losing outlets right and left. The mainstream media is largely co-opted not just by government pressure, but by corporate constraints. We have barriers to entry where you have to be quite wealthy a lot of times to work for a pittance at one of these prestigious publications in the most expensive cities in America. We've got one out of every four journalists living in a very expensive place, while people like Missouri can afford to shoot their mouths off. And so I just encourage, you know, I don't want women to listen to this and feel discouraged, feel like no one's going to listen to them, because that's a really funny thing. Every day I get probably a hundred to a thousand tweets of people saying that, you know, "No one listens to Sarah Kendzior." [laughter] I'm like, well, if no one's listening to me, why are my inventions just an endless stream of people telling me that no one listens to me? And really, the key word in that sentence is "no one," because what they mean by "no one" is wealthy, white men, because everybody else is listening and is, you know, quite aware. It's this very narrow group, a kind of tyranny of the minority within journalism that, you know, part of it is they cannot come to grips with the breakdown of American exceptionalism. They cannot come to grips with the fact that they missed the story. They missed the boat. This all went right over their head while they were busy rambling on about Hillary's emails and how she was destined to win the election and all the other shit they got wrong. They cannot handle that. It's incredibly humiliating, because our very existence is a slap in the face to that establishment. And it's like, well, you know what, tough shit. We're all on the same sinking boat. We're all Americans living under this incredibly corrupt administration. We should all be trying to do our part to get the facts to the people. So yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Andrea Chalupa: And let's end it with Elizabeth Warren. You have Biden potentially crumbling as a frontrunner because he doesn't have what it takes. And it's just a simple fact of Biden not reading the room, not being part of the zeitgeist right now and giving the terrorist organization fueled by blood money—the Republican Party—way too much credit, saying that if only the Republicans can free themselves of Trump, we can have a united country. The Republican Party created Donald Trump. They are complicit. They're all in this together. This was the inevitable. The Trump Frankenstein monster was the inevitability of the Republicans party's ideology of hate, which has been growing in this country for so long, and so Biden's not reading the room. And what you're having is this emergence of Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren has been doing such an incredible job in having this common-sense platform where she has these plans on how she's going to confront the corruption that allowed Donald Trump to come to power. Elizabeth Warren is framing the debate accurately that the 2020 election is going to be about corruption. It's just corruption, plain and simple, and that is what her plans are about, is tackling gross income inequality, tackling the inhumane policies in America, where people are continuing to fall through the cracks as a society where any sort of health problem can make you lose your house and go bankrupt. And yet, you have a cable news bubble that continues to demonize her because they are afraid of losing their own power. What we're hearing on cable news is the familiar sound that all women know, and that is the entitled scream of the mediocre white man, because they know that we are coming for them because they have had power for far too long and they did not use it responsibly. So now nobody, nobody gives up power willingly, especially idiots. So what we need to do is arm ourselves with our grassroots armies, wait for nobody to save us but ourselves and show up, and show up for each other, and do not give in to their gaslighting. Elizabeth Warren has what it takes. She's a well-balanced candidate, and she has solutions to all of the social ills that gave rise of Donald Trump. And she understands. She has called the enemy by name, and the enemy is corruption.
Sarah Kendzior: Absolutely. And you know, on the final note, what they were chastising Warren for this week was being, quote, "angry and antagonistic." Which, quite honestly, I'm glad she's angry. She's angry at injustice. She's angry at the corruption of billionaires who are influencing and breaking our institutions, who have run this nation roughshod. And so yeah, she's antagonistic toward them. To be clear, she's not alone in this. You see this kind of rage from Sanders, you saw it from Beto O'Rourke, you see it sometimes from Kamala Harris, from Julian Castro. You see it from many of the candidates, and it's a good thing. We should be angry right now. That type of anger is a form of compassion. It is the opposite of hate or spite. It is the opposite of apathy, and I think people oppose this, people in the media from high positions of power who have been entrenched in that power despite their lack of merit, because it makes them very uncomfortable. It reminds them that there is an alternative to godlessness and to moral failure, and so I encourage all the candidates to continue speaking out in the way Warren has, and I encourage female journalists and other female activists to keep speaking out despite these sexist caricatures and attacks, and this insistence that we play nice, because quite honestly, there's a difference between nice and good, and I think that what we need to do is do good, is do things that are morally sound, things that are beneficial and helpful to vulnerable people, instead of just valuing this, quote-unquote "civility" above all else, because all civility is is a cloak for corruption.
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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 our listeners to donate to Raices, a Texas-based nonprofit agency that provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. They're helping with the crisis facing migrant families at the Texas border and need your support.
Andrea Chalupa: We also encourage you to donate to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry. Donate to the orangutan project at TheOrangutanProject.org.