Mitch McConnell's Black Hand
In the last Gaslit Nation episode before the election, we discuss the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s blatant desire to have the election decided by courts instead of by the American people, and the role SCOTUS may play in who will be our next president. The dark tactics of court packing, institutional purges, and demoralization are coming to a head this week as the GOP attempts to fulfill its goal of a one-party autocratic state.
Jared Kushner:
The thing we've seen in a lot of the black community––which is mostly Democrat––is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about, but he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful. And what you're seeing throughout the country now...
Dr. King:
Man was on the plane with me some weeks ago, and he came talked to me and he said, "The problem, Dr. King, that I see with what you all are doing is that every time I see you and other Negroes, you are protesting, and you aren't doing anything for yourselves." He went on to tell me that he was very poor at one time and he was able to make it by doing something for himself. "Why don't you teach your people?" He said, "Lift themselves by their own bootstraps." Then he went on to say, "Other groups face disadvantages; the Irish, the Italians, and he went down the line."
Dr. King:
I said to him, that it does not help the Negro, it only deepens his frustration for unfeeling, insensitive people to say to him that other ethnic groups who migrated or were immigrants to this country less than 100 years ago or so have gotten beyond him, and he came here some 344 years ago. I went on to remind him, the Negro came to this country involuntarily in chains, while others came voluntarily. I went on to remind him that no other racial group has been a slave on American soil. I went on to remind him that the other problem that we have faced over the years is that the society placed the stigma on the color of the Negro––on the color of his skin––because he was black. Doors were closed to him that were not closed to other groups. You can say to people that you ought to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
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 journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we've got some updates for you. Sarah and I are going to be celebrating our four year friendship anniversary. Sarah and I met on Halloween. If you've been listening to this show for many years now, you know the backstory. Basically, I launched the hashtag #TrumpSexTape off of the reporting of Christopher Steele's anonymous interview with David Corn and Mother Jones saying that there was all this sex crime kompromat or gross stuff on Trump that the Kremlin had collected. I confirmed that on Twitter saying, "Yep, I've heard that too." And then Sarah-
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, if you die, they're going to ignore that you made Mr. Jones a critically acclaimed movie and your obituary, if it's in the New York Times is going to be like, “Chalupa is best known for launching the hashtag #TrumpSexTape in 2016.” Sorry, sorry, my mind is going backwards. Go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
True, likely. Sad. But also if that New York Times writers one of the subversive ones that actually does real fine journalism, that person would go to write, “and that hashtag led to the friendship between Kendzior Chalupa who launched the greatest podcast in the universe.” So Sarah and I met on that Halloween, which has been a metaphor for our friendship ever since. So, we are going to be celebrating by doing a big party with our friends at Indivisible this Saturday at 4:30 PM Central Time. Anybody can sign up and it's going to be a phone bank. We're going to be calling voters in Pennsylvania, a state that Biden absolutely must win, a state of course, that went to Trump narrowly last time around.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, we're going to be rallying the troops, connecting with you all over Zoom or however they have it set up, and you can join that. We're going to share a link at the very top of the show notes for this episode, and the first 50 to sign up get a free t-shirt from Indivisible. Again, that's this Saturday, Halloween at 4:30 PM, join us for a Halloween Fascism or Treat phone banking.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then the next thing we want to draw attention to is Karlyn Daigle––one of our tenacious production managers––she is showing us how it's done, how to build community, how to build a solidarity movement. This is so exciting. So, everybody needs to go to her website, candyslovesyou.space/candys-vote-lab. Again, this will be in our show notes. What Karlyn Daigle has done is she has put together a space for the LGBTQ community to come together to discuss ideas, for allies to come and join in protecting what is unfortunately going to increasingly become a vulnerable community under this super trashy Supreme Court we now have thanks to Mitch McConnell and his black hand.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm going to read about Candy's because I think that you have to check out this website because if all of us across the nation replicated what Karlyn and her friends have done in Portland, Maine, we stand an extremely good chance of pulling America out of fascism. So, go check out Candy's and please do this for where you live, for whatever community you want to help protect and grow and strengthen, because we're not going to get true equality in America without doing this work on the community level.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Candy's is a queer community space located at 511 Congress Street in Portland, Maine, designed to create space and resources for marginalized groups to achieve outcomes that further benefit our community. This is a space for gathering, learning, conversing, connecting networking, socializing, celebrating, and addressing and rectifying community issues. Portland has a thriving and diverse queer community and a lack of queer space. Candy's is creating and maintaining necessary space, benefits and programming centering marginalized groups. We’re a space designed for queer people and allies by queer people and allies, and maintained by queer people and allies.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our goal is to increase access to queer community and address inequality.” And now, they put together a super smart Vote Lab, which looks at all the public officials where they live, and all the reading guides and all the things you need. This is a super cute site and resource. Please replicate it where you live for the people you care about, about the issues you care about. If we all did this, we're going to get through this together.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then finally, we are going to link to some must read resources from Indivisible and other groups on what to do should there be another coup, should Trump steal yet again, another election. Please read these resources and prepare yourselves for what may lay ahead.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, because we know what's lying ahead, and one of the great frustrations of this moment is that we have been warning you of this moment for four years, or more. Honestly, when you talk about the destruction of our institutions, the collapse of social trust, the vulnerability of this country to autocracy. Since I am brimming with rage, a rage so incandescent that if there is a grid attack-
Andrea Chalupa:
You're a jack-o'-lantern of rage. You're a clear jack-o'-lantern of rage.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah if there’s a grid attack on or around Election Day, I think we will be able to power this country with my rage. I am just going to read a little thing that I wrote for the Globe and Mail––it's now about exactly two years old––right after the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh (whose finances still need to be investigated, by the way) but this is just as relevant now as it was then. This was the precursor to the hell that we endured last night with the installation of Amy COVID Barrett.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm just going to read this: "Autocrats rewrite the law so they are no longer breaking it, and they hire and fire accordingly. This is why I've been warning for years that Donald Trump, whose autocratic consolidation grows stronger every day, was akin to a criminal able to select his own judge or delay his own trial, and now, he has. This is why a purge of the FBI was followed by a sham FBI investigation into Justice Kavanaugh, reminiscent of those of authoritarian states with key witnesses and evidence ignored.
Sarah Kendzior:
“For the president, the confirmation of his judge is a handpicked gift. But for ordinary Americans, he marks the end of truths we deem self-evident. Justice Kavanaugh marks the imposition of a corrosive new reality. The Supreme Court is likely to roll back decades of hard earned rights, particularly voting rights, civil rights and women's rights.
Sarah Kendzior:
“On September 28th, Senator Patrick Leahy effectively pronounced the American democratic system dead. ‘This Judiciary Committee is no longer an independent branch of Congress, and we’re supposed to be, the Senate is supposed to be,’ he said. ‘We're an arm––and a very weak arm––of the Trump White House. A resemblance of independence has just disappeared. It's gone.’" In less than two years, the United States has lost the executive, legislative and judicial branches to corruption. While other checks; the media, the criminal justice system, remain badly damaged. That leaves one check: the people. That is why we fight. That is why we protest. That is why we vote, because we the people are all we have left.”
Sarah Kendzior:
So, Andrea, do you want to start talking about Amy Coney Barrett? I want to just read one of your tweets from last night because you were actually able to watch this shit show. I could not bring myself to do it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Her voice is disgusting. She has so much vocal fry in her voice. I mean...
Sarah Kendzior:
She's a closed caption fascist. All right, you tweeted: "Amy Coney Barrett's speech is meant to gaslight Americans into thinking she's going to keep her personal preferences out of her decisions on the Supreme Court so that her anti-democracy rulings seem in good faith. They are not. She is tied to a far-right religious cult." So, let loose.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right, a far-right religious cult accused of trauma and sexual abuse. So, yeah. Basically, Amy Coney Barrett went up there like a good far-right soldier and acted super normal and gave a very super normal speech. That way, when she and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and John Roberts and the others pass some sweeping crazy far-right verdict––including trying to shut down the vote count in this election––it's going to seem normal and quaint to the rest of America that are just not paying close enough attention.
Andrea Chalupa:
So she struck the right tone. This is why we're always saying tone matters, beware the calm liar. She delivered all this perfectly, so when the horror does come down the line, it's going to be packaged nice and pretty, just like Amy Coney Barrett.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. No, it's... I don't know if you've... Go ahead.
Andrea Chalupa:
I've got a ton more because what's really-
Sarah Kendzior:
Keep going.
Andrea Chalupa:
... what's really striking about the Supreme Court, so I'm going to go down this list. You had also Kavanaugh's sloppy opinion, striking down Wisconsin's right to let ballots received after election day but postmarked by Election Day, those ballots won't be counted now. So, Wisconsin's in the fight of its life right now. We don't know what's going to happen with Wisconsin with all of these votes, these absentee ballots in a pandemic being received after Election Day, they won't be counted. But during the primaries, in Wisconsin, they were counted––and we're talking about 80,000 votes that were counted––because Wisconsinites had more time to send in their ballots as long as they're postmarked by the Election Day.
Andrea Chalupa:
This could cancel out tens and tens and tens of thousands of votes, and keep in mind, Trump barely won Wisconsin-
Sarah Kendzior:
And he only won through voter suppression. He won because so many people were disenfranchised, that that number, which I think was around 200,000 outweighed the 30,000 votes, with which he won by. But go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Basically, Kavanaugh in backing up the Supreme Court's verdict on this, wrote an extraordinarily sloppy opinion. If you follow the source material that he cites in his opinion, it contradicts his arguments. Just to illustrate, Sam Levine of The Guardian US writes on Twitter, "In his Wisconsin concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh cites Vermont as an example of a state that did not change its election rules during the pandemic, but that's not true. Vermont legislature authorized the Secretary of State to automatically mail a ballot to all registered voters."
Andrea Chalupa:
Marshall Cohen of CNN writes on Twitter, "Kavanaugh ruled against the six day extension for Wisconsin to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day. He cited an article from a legal scholar and CNN contributor but in that article, it says that states should extend postmarked deadlines."
Andrea Chalupa:
That's just sloppy, sloppy work to back up what Trump wants to do, which is declare the winner of the election on election night and stop the count of any votes received after. That's what Trump wants. And Kavanaugh, by gaslighting the American people, wrote an easily fact-checked opinion piece and that is just sloppy, shoddy work. And that matters.
Andrea Chalupa:
You have also now from Mother Jones, “Amy Coney Barrett is the least experienced Supreme Court nominee in 30 years. Barrett has spent virtually all of her professional life in academia. Until President Trump nominated her to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, she had never been a judge, never worked in the government as a prosecutor, defense lawyer, Solicitor General or Attorney General, or served as counsel to any legislative body, the usual professional channels that Supreme Court nominees tend to hail from.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“A graduate of Notre Dame Law School, Barrett has almost no experience practicing law whatsoever––a hole in her resume so glaring that during her Seventh Circuit confirmation hearing in 2017, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were dismayed that she couldn't recall more than three cases she'd worked on during her brief two years in private practice. Nominees are asked to provide details on 10.” I'm going to add to this, never mind that Amy Coney Barrett... In addition to all this, Amy Coney Barrett is of course tied to an ultra creepy far-right religious cult known for making wives subservient to husbands, a cult accused of trauma and sexual abuse.
Andrea Chalupa:
Patriarchy is a tool of fascism. Fascism is about blunt force strength, and having that dictator father figure in the home is an extension of the dictator father. Dictatorship controls your emotional life so that you will obey without the state and terror police forcing you to obey. You self-censor, and you pre-surrender. So, patriarchy is an essential part of controlling a person's emotional life, their body and their mind. Then that brings us to, of course, John Roberts, who gutted––his court gutted––the Voting Rights Act and let corporations have the First Amendment right given to human beings in the US constitution, that ruling known as Citizens United flooded our elections with dark money.
Andrea Chalupa:
Both of those two major rulings gave us Trump. Then you have Clarence Thomas, who gives paid speeches and was accused of sexual harassment and is just generally dumb as a rock. All of this combined, basically, we have a trashy Supreme Court now. This is a Panama City Beach spring break, girls and boys gone wild Supreme Court. This is a Florida man and a Florida woman Supreme Court. We must, for the rest of our lives, hound them until we impeach them. We must mainstream this movement and never give up, no matter what the Norah O'Donnells in the media say. None of this is normal. Republicans have grossly cheapened the highest court in the land, and the only––the only––credible response to this is to extend the court, because that's modernizing the court, right?
Andrea Chalupa:
It's just time, we haven't extended the court since the 1860s, around that time. So, extend the damn court to keep up with modern times, and also impeach the three Supreme Court justices that were installed by an illegitimate president. The fact that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election with the Kremlin's help has put us in a constitutional crisis. Therefore, his three Supreme Court picks are illegitimate. And not only that, Kavanaugh lied to Congress and Barrett was pushed through.
Andrea Chalupa:
For all these reasons, we must work tirelessly with all our other efforts––right?––to protect our local communities, to make sure our local state governments go Blue. In addition to that, we unite in coalition building to impeach these three illegitimate court justices.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Sarah Kendzior:
I just want to emphasize that our claim that this is an illegitimate president is not sour grapes, it's not because we dislike––we hate––his policies-
Andrea Chalupa:
It's national security!
Sarah Kendzior:
... it's because... Yes, it's because he violated national security, because he is a Kremlin asset, because he used illegal tactics and illegal aid to get into this position, because he is backed by a mafia syndicate. These are all things that I have documented extensively. You can read my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, with it's 35 pages of tiny little footnotes. You could read Craig Unger's book. You could read David Cay Johnston's book, Malcolm Nance's book. This information is all in the public domain, and that's just how he got there.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are things about this election that have only recently been looked at in depth and we've talked about it on the show. There's the book Rigged by David Shimer who discussed how electronic voting systems in the 2016 election were certainly infiltrated by Russia and Kremlin-aligned actors and votes were, as Harry Reid predicted, quite possibly changed. It's quite possible Trump did not win that election.
Sarah Kendzior:
That is the point that we've been bringing home to you for the last couple of years of this podcast. Sometimes we don't say it quite so bluntly, but that is something that I believe, and I think the refusal to admit that that was even possible––that this could happen even though there are so many warnings that it could happen––is what has allowed him to remain in power.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then the longer this charade went on, the longer this assault on our national security, and this overt display of the failure of our institutions and the failure of them to protect us went on, the harder it became to reverse. But that's the problem. That's why when an autocrat is trying to seize power, you need to get rid of them immediately. You, in fact, need to make sure they don't get in because once they get in––as we're seeing––it is very hard to get them out.
Sarah Kendzior:
But we have just an endless array of appointments of unqualified individuals of criminal individuals, many of these individuals have already left. Some have already been indicted. We also have a litany of crimes that have been committed by this administration. The foremost one right now is what they have done in reaction to the coronavirus, which is an impeachable offense. That's the kind of thing that the Democrats could have been working on as Amy Coney Barrett was trying to get in is move on impeachment hearings related to coronavirus, which has now killed over 225,000 Americans. We have what Jared Kushner did, which is preventing states from getting necessary medical equipment, denying it to doctors, saying outright that they were just going to let people die as a strategy.
Sarah Kendzior:
We see them on TV now, Mark Meadows and others saying, "Yes, this is our plan. We're going to let people die." All of this is criminal. All of this meets the standards of criminal prosecution. Glenn Kirschner, the legal expert, has spoken extensively about that. On top of that, you have abuse of migrants at the border: forced hysterectomies, another subject suddenly dropped from the news that should have been investigated, abuse of the pardon power, obstruction of justice, being named Individual One in a federal probe. These were all crimes that were committed, most of them within the first years of this administration, that the House Democrats refused to pursue, refused to impeach on.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think if they had impeached on all of those and put into the public light the full context of the criminality at play, the stuff that I spell out in my book and that we talk about on the show all the time, I think there would have been a different reaction from the American public. The kind of panic you are seeing now, the kind of dawning that our democracy is in... Yes, it is in its death throes and that this could have been prevented. That is something that people could have grasped a year ago.
Sarah Kendzior:
But because so many officials went on treating this as if it were normal, others went on to treat it as if it were normal as well. They thought if this is really happening, surely Pelosi would do something, surely the Mueller probe would reach a conclusion in which guilty parties were indicted, or at the least interviewed. Instead, we have just seen total and complete abject failure to deem this administration what it is, which is fundamentally illegitimate at every level.
Sarah Kendzior:
So yes, it is absolutely fair to start looking at the appointments that were made during this administration and demanding that they be removed from their position, or at least that they be investigated as to their qualifications and as to how they got in. Those are all completely valid questions to ask when your country is hijacked by transnational crime, when your country is hijacked by mafia money. This is our country. This is our democracy. This is our representative democracy, and they will try to tell you to not expect so much, they'll try to tell you this is idealistic, this is aiming too high. It is not. This is a completely reasonable demand, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. We have been in a constitutional crisis these last four years and the media has normalized it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep.
Andrea Chalupa:
And a lot of our political leaders have normalized it and try to work within a system that is rapidly fraying. So, advice to everybody: play the long game. Play the long game. Do what the Kremlin does, do what the Republicans do, and play the long game. Fight like hell election cycle after election cycle and keep planting seeds that are going to grow, grow, grow over time. What you have to remember is that fascism is the American story. The hope we have is that America is moving away from fascism after being founded in fascism.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, keep this in mind, we had so many––there's so many Native Americans that were slaughtered––that it changed the global climate. There's centuries––centuries––of the Holocaust of slavery. Those aren't footnotes. America has always been a fascist country. All Black and Brown progress has been met with the violence of white rage, always. You have that, like the Great Migration up north was met with bloody race riots.
Andrea Chalupa:
This has been a reliable pattern throughout our history. The first Black American president was, of course, followed by a white supremacist. This is the American story. It's always been this way. So if you're horrified by what is happening right now in America, that means you're finally learning that America's history has always been whitewashed, America's history has always been fascism.
Andrea Chalupa:
That great moment of glory that we had when we defeated the Nazis in World War II, who led that? That great branding that America has, that we liberated Europe, we punched Nazis? Where did that story come from, that great mythology? That actually is rooted in truth. That was led by a Democrat married to a feminist. America has gotten its moments of glory from good people doing the right thing against fascism.
Andrea Chalupa:
The best of us are the ones who punch Nazis, the worst of us have always been the Nazis. You had the American aviator hero, Charles Lindbergh, writing in Reader's Digest in 1939, that we've got to make America white again, okay? We've always, always, always had this massive strain of fascism. Our country was founded in it. If you want to take any solace in this current chapter of America's fascism it’s this: it's that there's more of us than there are them now, and they're terrified. So, the fascists are going inside Hitler's bunker and they're building their armaments, and they're basically trying to block us from smoking them out of their hole. That's what Mitch McConnell and the others are doing. This is a massive power grab, because they know that the final chapter of American fascism will soon be over, and there's nothing they can do about it. There's nothing they can do about it.
Andrea Chalupa:
You simply cannot put the marriage equality genie back in the bottle. You've got all these gay marriages, everybody's enjoying the weddings, you've got gay divorce. [laughs] It's all normal. Gay families, but it's still a war that needs to be protected and fought. You still need to work your hearts out to protect this social progress. You're not going to tell women to get back in the kitchen. You absolutely cannot, especially when you have women leaders saving their countries around the world right now from a once in a century pandemic.
Andrea Chalupa:
So all of these genies of progress are out of the bottle and it's changing the very fiber of our culture and how we see each other and what is possible. They know they cannot stop this. As a result, they're just trying this gross, disgusting, hideous Mitch Mcconnell's rotting black hand power move now. They know their time is up. Ultimately, do take solace in the fact that culturally, as a society, we are confronting and trying to kill off this monster of fascism once and for all. And it's going to be painful, but ultimately, we're going to prevail. So, just take faith in that because even though America was born in fascism, it has, over time gradually been becoming less and less fascist.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is just fascism's last big yelp. I do want to back up all this. There's a report in The Guardian, which we'll link to in the show notes for this episode, on a university study out of Europe on how America's Republican Party for decades has devolved into an autocracy in the style of Orban's Hungary or Erdoğan's Turkey. I'll read from that now.
Andrea Chalupa:
"The Republican Party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties and autocratic societies than its former center right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study. In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonizing and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey. The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
Andrea Chalupa:
“As we keep saying, Donald Trump was born when George W. Bush and Karl Rove stole Florida in 2000. There's no debate over whether George W. Bush or Trump are more corrupt. George W. Bush is Trump in the final debate. The new civil tone blasting out lies and Trump is Trump in the first debate, steamrolling over everything."
Andrea Chalupa:
I found out about this study because so many Gaslit Nation listeners kept tagging us in this news saying Gaslit Nation has been saying this for years. That is true, and I want to tell the future historians listening, if you manage to dig up these archives somewhere in a far off future, there was a time in 2018 when white male pundits who dominated the media landscape liked to talk about all the things process-wise Republicans could do to stop Trump. Gaslit Nation came on the scene and pointed out the Republicans gave us Trump. They're all part of the same crime in taking down our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Since Republicans have been playing the long game to get us here, we have to be committed to playing the long game in building a fair and inclusive democracy that protects lives, not destroys them and sacrifices to the greed monster. Here are three books on the Gaslit Nation Reading Guide, which you can find on our website gaslitnationpod.com. These will show you the long game that our enemies have been playing and how we need to, now , commit ourselves to the long game to undo this.
Andrea Chalupa:
These books are Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean. Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count, by David Daly. Get to it, everyone.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I just want to say one thing regarding your comments on American strains of autocracy and the fact that they are always race based, always ethnically based. That is the history of our country. We were never a full democracy, we were always a democracy for some and an autocracy for others. I've been thinking about our show over the last two years and how we have never, I think, had to convince a Black member of our audience that we were correct, that laws are only as good as the people who uphold them, that the US is vulnerable to autocracy, or that the government will treat citizens as disposable.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think that what is finally happening now is that white Americans are learning, mostly through the coronavirus and the way that the Trump administration has handled it, that they too are disposable. They are learning what it feels like to go to the polls and wonder if your vote is going to count or if it's just going to be thrown out, and then there's nothing you're going to do about it. They are learning what it's like to be beaten up by police in the streets and have no legal recourse and not be treated with sympathy by the media.
Sarah Kendzior:
That has been Black American life for the entirety of this country. Obviously, there has been progress forward; the elimination of slavery, the elimination of Jim Crow laws, all of that progress had to be put into law. It had to actually be codified because nobody could rely on the kindness of a white person's heart, on white people to just do the right thing, to have empathy, to behave the same towards everyone of every background. There had to be a legal rule.
Sarah Kendzior:
What the Supreme Court––this new hard-right, white supremacist court––is going to try to do is decodify all of those protections. They're going to do this to gay and lesbian people, they're going to do this to a variety of ethnic and racial minorities, and it's going to eventually come down into voting rights. We may get our first taste of this, unfortunately, when the election actually happens, because it's very clear at this point that Trump wants the supreme court to decide the election. He does not want the American people to decide the election. You're already seeing Kavanaugh citing Bush v. Gore.
Sarah Kendzior:
We already, as Andrea's noted many times, have three justices on the court that participated in Bush v. Gore. That's terrifying in its own right. But the things that are eating away at me is, we know what the short term goal of this group is: it’s tyranny of the minority. It is a one party, autocratic state ruled by a white supremacist death cult.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've been saying that for a while and people, I think, thought we were exaggerating or overstating things. Welcome to over 220,000 dead Americans, and scientists say about 130,000 of those deaths could have been easily prevented had the federal government not had a policy of “let's let them die off.” That unfortunately is their guiding ethos. They want to make money, they want to consolidate power, and it's easier for them to do that if we're dead.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our existence is inconvenient, and it's particularly inconvenient in the era of climate change, in which there's going to be this battle over resources, over land. So we're really in tumultuous times. It's this big picture existential crisis that's eating away at me, I think, more than this immediate problem, because autocracies can fall. Dictatorships can fall.
Sarah Kendzior:
The other problems––these problems of climate change and bigger threats––are more difficult to remedy, but the first step though is being extremely resolute and vigilant and not backing down in fighting these corrupted institutions, in forcing them out, whether that's through protest or through voting or whatever means you can think of. You need to try absolutely everything. Like Andrea says, you need to think like the Republicans, not in a moral sense, not in terms of what they believe in, not in terms of their death lust, but in terms of the way that they are able to get into everything from the lowest local institutions to the highest court in the land, their ability to strategize and think long terms. That may mean getting rid of the Vichy Democrats in our midst, the people who have held us back. We could have made a lot of progress last year.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't want people to forget that. Yes, obviously, the GOP is our greatest enemy. Yes, obviously, you should vote for Biden, because doing so––and vote Democratic down the ticket––because that will give you leverage to move forward, leverage to be able to protect ourselves and our country. But do not forget who abandoned us in our time of need. Do not forget the betrayal, the refusal to investigate, the refusal to prosecute, the refusal to even name the crimes.
Sarah Kendzior:
Pelosi telling us that we're not worth it, our country's not worth it. “Impeaching is not worth it.” We were always worth it, and people are recognizing how much we're worth because we are losing each other, we are losing each other through death by a pandemic. We are losing each other through the loss of our voting rights, through the loss of our civil rights. And the greatest loss of all, of course, will be if the climate crisis continues at the level that it's going and then you have the loss, quite literally, of our planet.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is getting very bleak, but we need to get people in office who will take responsibility, who will work hard, who will serve the public, and it is possible. Look at other countries. Look at New Zealand, which now looks like a paradise. There are leaders around the world who are capable of having this vision and bringing it forward.
Sarah Kendzior:
I believe there are leaders in this country that are capable of it, and they are held back by people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein and the rest. So, they've got to go. Trump and the GOP have to go but their enablers also have to go. There needs to be a reckoning.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yep, without question. We have this ongoing Save Democracy Challenge where we challenge you to make 1,000 phone calls or send 1,000 texts to voters in swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona. These are states we must win. The only way we can protect ourselves from Keg Stand Kavanaugh is if we win on November 3rd in a landslide. If it's so, so ahead––if we're so ahead in electoral votes––that there's just no way they can challenge it.
Andrea Chalupa:
The way we do that is driving out the vote. Don't get complacent. Don't think, “oh, look at all these people voting.” We don't know whether all these massive early crowds are just people that would have shown up on Election Day normally, so we don't know what this means yet. So, don't take anything for granted. Make 1,000 phone calls, send 1,000 texts, go to gaslitnationpod.com and check out the 2020 Survival Guide where we can adopt a state race in a swing district. Go do that, and then tweet at us. Tweet at us @gaslitnation on Twitter. Tell us what you're doing to save our democracy and ensure a Biden landslide and we'll retweet it. Out of the responses we get, we're going to select three people to come on the show in the new year and we're going to talk about how we're going to play the long game together.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you need a mental health break, if you need some art to help inspire you, I highly recommend the new Aaron Sorkin film written and directed by him called The Trial of the Chicago Seven. This is a film to definitely see now to help with your election anxiety. The Trial of the Chicago Seven is a new historical legal drama. It's written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and streaming now. It's, of course, the story of a group of anti-Vietnam War protesters arrested for inciting riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968. They were put on trial, which they in real life turned into a political theater with a whole list of folk heroes as star witnesses like Arlo Guthrie.
Andrea Chalupa:
They read off the names of the American soldiers killed in the war. They knew Nixon was just trying to set up a show trial and get them arrested, and they were right. So, they turned their show trial into political theater. Let that be a lesson to us in case Trump stays in power and it's show trial time. Turn your show trial to an art festival like they did. The film takes poetic license, of course, so you don't see so much of the protest festival in the court, and Tom Hayden in real life was a lot more radical during the trial than shown in the film.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's still a powerful film and very much worth watching, especially now. In Chicago 1968, the protesters were blamed for starting the riots. We now know the cops started the riots. They did this to discredit the left in the eyes of the country in order to justify suppressing the left and discredit Nixon's political opponents to help Republicans in elections and it worked. Have you seen the 1972 electoral map? The entire United States electoral map of the 1972 election is red for Nixon, with the exception of Massachusetts and Washington D.C.
Andrea Chalupa:
So this brings us to the 2020 election where Trump is again using Nixon's playbook. He's got law and order Trump lawn signs on the homes of his supporters. He's trying to push this “Jobs Not Mobs”. He uses that. He uses that in his campaign ads––”Jobs Not Mobs”––in showing all these blue cities as lawless anarchy and all of it and the fiery riots.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, this is interesting. Just like the cops started the riots in 1968, we have reporting that these far-right fascists are trying to start riots and fueling violence on the ground. From Minnesota's leading newspaper, The Star Tribune: “Texas member of Boogaloo Boys charged with opening fire on Minneapolis Police Precinct during protests over George Floyd. Feds say Texas adherent of far-right group fired on precinct building, conspired with cop killer to ignite Civil War.”
Andrea Chalupa:
From WSLS 10, a local TV news network in Roanoke, Virginia: “Police say Richmond riots instigated by white supremacists disguised as Black Lives Matter.” So again, Trump is relying on Nixon's playbook. He's running TV ads––I've seen one––that say “Jobs Not Mobs”, and the Trump yard signs now say “Trump Law and Order.” Will this work? It could. The election could be close. That's why you’ve got to get out there and make phone calls and send texts even if you've never done it before. Again, we're going to be doing this for Pennsylvania, at 4:30 PM Central this Saturday. So, join us there and make some calls. You're going to be helping save civilization if you do.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and it brings to mind, the Nixon playbook is the Roy Cohn playbook. Roy Cohn, as we've mentioned many times, was the infamous lawyer for Joe McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings then became a lawyer for the five mafia families of New York City. He was also a key advisor of Nixon. A lot of these strategies that Trump has learned, whether how he deals with the media with the combination of threats and bribes and manipulation, with how he deals with judges, following the famous Roy Maxim where it says, “I don't want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is” and then therefore control policy that way.
Sarah Kendzior:
These sorts of tactics, these illusions of mob riots from civil rights protesters and capturing what Nixon would call “the silent majority”, which is not something I think really exists right now. We may have a silent minority of people who are racist and don't publicly want to be racist in the way that Trump fans would. They enjoy being racist.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't think it's quite going to work the same way. Honestly, I think it's an indicator of Trump's mind which is basically frozen around 1988. It's as if everything just shut down his cultural references and his playbook. A lot of it still works, and he obviously has many other people advising him who are more up to date, and he shows the natural affinity for modern propaganda means like social media, reality television, and so forth. But this is an old playbook.
Sarah Kendzior:
But yeah, it's very interesting to see these reports coming out of who actually instigated violence at this protest. The same was true with Minneapolis. I remember at the time in Minneapolis, there were Black owned businesses being burnt down. There were businesses being burnt down in areas that weren't anywhere near the protests.
Sarah Kendzior:
On Twitter, people who actually lived in Minneapolis were saying, :This is not the work of Black protesters and of course Black protesters are enraged and should be enraged. Anyone of conscience should be enraged about this.” But the logistics just didn't match up. I remember witnessing the same thing in Ferguson firsthand, when it was happening in 2014, because I live in St. Louis and I was there for those protests. I would see random white people who we didn't recognize burning shit up, and it was annoying. It was something that the Black community here really wanted them to go, because it was not their place, it was not where they lived, and most of all, they knew that, of course, the St. Louis police are looking for pretexts to arrest Black protesters. They're looking for any means possible. Often they don't even come up with one, they just will randomly arrest and decide what crime you committed after the fact.
Sarah Kendzior:
But they opened the door. A lot of people say, "Oh, God, don't talk about the trope of the outside agitator.” Martin Luther King warned against that. Yes, it can be used as a damaging trope, but at other times, there really are outside agitators. There are people from The Proud Boys, there are people from all these white supremacist groups, there are sometimes people from militia groups. They take advantage of this opportunity and they stage it for cable TV consumption. That's something that didn't exist in 1968 is this 24/7 news cycle in which they can just play the same clips of burning streets or burning buildings all the time to create an image of a protest that's steeped in violence, when the actual protest is more expansive, more sophisticated, and usually not violent and not oriented toward arson, but the news doesn't particularly like that.
Sarah Kendzior:
So yeah, that's the kind of dark arts from the Cohn training that we're seeing playing out by Trump and his backers now.
Andrea Chalupa:
Since it's Halloween, we have to talk about Mitch McConnell's Black Hand.
Sarah Kendzior:
What the fuck is that?
Andrea Chalupa:
Mitch McConnell's apparently rotting from the inside. We normally don't like to mock people for their health, but Mitch McConnell has gone so far to the dark side that it shows. Photos went viral of Mitch's hand having turned black, possibly due to blood thinners to help with limiting the risk of a stroke as some have speculated. We don't know what's going on because McConnell refuses to talk about his health, saying everything's fine, even though Republicans accused Biden of having dementia.
Andrea Chalupa:
Meanwhile, Biden delivered a presidential interview on 60 Minutes and Trump stormed out. His Fox News propagandists, Kayleigh McEnany––whatever Fox News girl––gave Lesley Stahl a giant dictionary-sized book claiming it was Trump's healthcare plan. They probably never imagined Lesley Stahl, a journalist, would actually check. There was no healthcare plan. They literally gave 60 Minutes a prop.
Andrea Chalupa:
Back to Mitch McConnell's black hand––a metaphor of the GOP, the decomposing minority rotting our democracy. The architecture of modern day voter suppression by the Republican party started in earnest in our recent history under George W. Bush. The Guardian did a stunning deep dive into three white men who empower other white people in the Republican Party, and this is a direct quote from one of them, reading from the Guardian, "J. Christian Adams is the President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group known for accusing states of having ineligible voters on their rolls. ‘Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor, you're a racist and so forth.’ Adams told conservative activists earlier this year, according to The Washington Post."
Andrea Chalupa:
Read this piece to know that Republicans have been playing the long game against our democracy. For instance, Mitch McConnell made the time to shove through a totally unqualified supreme court justice and then adjourned the Senate until November 9th with no COVID relief package. Several millions of people have been plunged into poverty and McConnell and the Republicans care more about consolidating power than helping people.
Andrea Chalupa:
If all of this has you down, we're going to link in our show notes to this episode to a great piece by Dahlia Lithwick who writes about courts for Slate and hosts the Podcast, Amicus. She breaks down what's going on in the Supreme Court and gives you a lot of ammunition about why you must not give up. Now is not the time to give up.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just to add to what she writes in this great piece, I just want to share with everyone, in my despair when George W. Bush in 2004 won reelection, I was working as a community organizer to try to stop that from happening. We won our state in Oregon. Oregon was a swing state at that time in 2004. But Bush and Karl Rove just eked through. I was so depressed about that, countless of us were that worked on that campaign. My response was to throw myself into researching and making a career out of this obscure little country that most people didn't give a shit about at the time, and that country was Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
I went to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, I brushed up on my Ukrainian, then I showed up in Ukraine and lived in Kyiv and Western Ukraine in the beautiful medieval city of Lviv for around half a year, and that's when I began writing Mr. Jones in earnest, really focusing on getting that big pipe dream off the ground. I decided to go all in for Ukraine, and that's how I was ready to explain Ukraine to a Western audience in 2013 when the revolution started, and then in 2016 when the Kremlin proxy hijacked our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
In my despair with George W. Bush, we got Digital Maidan (the hashtag of the revolution in Ukraine that I helped launch with a bunch of strangers online), Mr. Jones (a gorgeous film by three time Academy Award nominee, Agnieszka Holland about Stalin's little known genocide famine that killed millions of people, primarily in Ukraine), and we also got Gaslit Nation.
Andrea Chalupa:
Those three extraordinary things that I was a part of, that I helped initiate––Digital Maidan, the hashtag of Ukraine's revolution, Mr. Jones and now Gaslit Nation––those were products of my despair in 2004 When George W. Bush won again. So understand that you need to take your despair and you need to treat it like fertile ground, and you need to build something out of it. Play the long game. Be ready. Don't surrender and don't let yourself be left behind, because I can assure you, there's a lot of people like us toiling away in the dark, turning our despair into fertile ground and building long lasting, beautiful stuff with it. So, be one of those people.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you don't, you're going to feel left behind when all the work we're doing is finally going to come and bloom out into the world and bring in the light. So, take your despair, and mine it for light. Mine it for gold. It's there. It's up to us not to stay in our despair and too long and to come out and find it and bring light and healing to this world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Which brings us to family separations. From the Guardian: “Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump's separation policy. Three years after Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants crossing into the US, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of 545 children separated from them under the Zero Tolerance Policy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In a court filing, the ACLU said that about two thirds of the parents have been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In the rush to carry out Trump's orders, the locations of the parents were not recorded, and three years later, they still cannot be found.” Here's a clip of journalist Jacob Soboroff, the author of Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, explaining what this means.
Jacob Soboroff:
Yeah, and it's unbelievable. I actually talked to an eight year old boy from Honduras who's living in Northern California with his aunt and uncle just last night, expecting this news to be filed in court today. The father is still in Honduras, and he's trying to get brought back to the United States. It's an almost insurmountable legal hurdle based on the terms of this agreement that was made between the ACLU and the federal government, but I just want to reiterate, what these children went through has been now categorized as “government sanctioned child abuse” by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as “torture” by Physicians for Human Rights, and it was perpetrated by the Trump administration political officials, after they were warned by career people in HHS, in DHS, in the Department of Justice, as was reported just a couple of weeks ago, that this policy was going to have the exact consequences that we're talking about right now.
Jacob Soboroff:
The record keeping wasn't there, they wouldn't be able to track these families down, and here we are, as you said, almost three years later, with trauma compounded––if you talk to child health care professionals––probably on a daily basis for these children.
Andrea Chalupa:
We know everyone is gut punched by all this, and again, we're going to keep fighting, we're going to keep planting seeds, we're going to play the long game. We have no choice now. Sarah, did you want to read from your poem?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I guess, to close out the show on a resolute note. I'm not going to say an optimistic note. Here's a poem from the Polish dissident, Czesław Miłosz, that he wrote in 1950 called, You Who Wronged. “You who wronged the simple man bursting into laughter at the crime and kept a pack of fools around you to mix good and evil to blur the line. Though everyone bowed down before you saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, striking gold medals in your honor, glad to have survived another day. Do not feel safe, the poet remembers. You can kill one, but another's born. The words are written down, the deed, the date, and you'd have done better with a winter dawn, a rope and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Wow. Thank you so much. We're going to end this episode with the clip of the viral video that everyone must watch––if you haven't seen it, I've watched it 50 times––of Joe Biden in 2018 greeting a family who lost their father in the Parkland Shooting. The man's name was Chris Hixon. He was the school athletic director and he was killed trying to disarm the gunman and save his students.
Andrea Chalupa:
In this video, you'll hear his son, Cory Hixon, run up to Biden who instinctively hugs Cory and gives him a kiss in the forehead. Then after that you're going to hear a song from a Gaslit Nation listener. The song is called Join Together, and the artist is Emily Grogan, who wrote to us, "I'm a huge fan of you all, you inspired this song." Thank you, Emily. We're a huge fan of the song. We'll link to it at the top of our show notes so you can download it. It's exactly the kind of anthem we need right now. So, here's Biden reminding us how to stay human, followed by Emily Grogan's rallying cry of a song, Join Together.
Joe Biden:
Who are the parents?
Debra Hixon:
I'm Chris Hixon's wife. This is Chris's son.
Joe Biden:
Well, how are you? Thank you for hugging me. Are you okay? You'll be okay. We're going to be okay, we're going to be okay, I promise you.
[Song: Join Together by Emily Grogan]
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, which is 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 listener. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. And also subscribe to us on YouTube.
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...