Walter Duranty: "Resistance Journalist"
Gaslit Nation is back trying to save the 2020 election! This week we discuss Trump and the GOP’s attempt to illicitly influence the election, using old tactics from 2016 along with a new assault on the vote-by-mail policies that are being recommended due to the coronavirus pandemic. We go on to examine the media debate between Ben Smith of the New York Times and investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, whose book Catch and Kill describes how the brutal Israeli private intelligence agency group Black Cube tried to kill the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story.
{begin film trailer for Mr. Jones}
Paul:
Hello?
Mr. Jones:
Paul, I need your help arranging an interview with Stalin.
Paul:
Go to Walter Duranty at The New York Times.
Mr. Jones:
Listen, I really need to talk to you, I found something big. You can break this story wide open.
Mr. Duranty:
Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones:
Mr. Duranty.
Mr. Duranty:
Why are you really here?
Mr. Jones:
I need your help.
Speaker 5:
This is Ada Brooks. She's my star.
Speaker 6:
What do you want?
Speaker 5:
The story no one is talking about.
Speaker 6:
Ukraine.
Speaker 5:
Stalin's called.
Speaker 7:
You will retract your statements to the press immediately.
Speaker 8:
Or they will shoot our engineers?
Speaker 7:
You actually thought you could interview Stalin and make some kind of difference, didn't you?
Speaker 6:
I guess the agenda now–
Speaker 9:
I don't have an agenda unless you call truth an agenda.
{end film trailer for Mr. Jones}
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, which is-
Sarah Kendzior:
And this... Sorry.
Andrea Chalupa:
You hold on a second. Mr. Jones is available now for rent. Okay, you could rent it now. Just go to my Twitter, and you'll see all these links and where you can rent it right now in the US. And then it's coming to the US and Canada on June 19th. And everyone can buy it and watch it. It's going to be great. All right. Go ahead, Sarah.
Sarah Kendzior:
Okay. And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration, and rising autocracy around the world, and the global pandemic, but we'll get to that later. For now, we're going to start with an old Gaslit Nation topic that unfortunately never goes away, which is the topic of illicit election interference. Right now, Trump is yet again, creating an election rigging narrative very similar to the one that his team devised in 2016.
Sarah Kendzior:
In that narrative where he continually claimed that the election could be rigged, that ended up prompting the Democrats, in 2016, to respond that elections in America could never be rigged. Meaning that when the Republicans, with help from abroad, did rig the election, the Democrats were backed into a corner and could not discuss the illicit activity after the election without seeming disingenuous and defensive. Now, the situation has become even more complicated because of coronavirus.
Sarah Kendzior:
The current battle is about vote-by-mail, and it's an extension of the battle over handmarked paper ballots versus machine voting that we've seen going on for years, and you can listen to a very early Gaslit Nation episode from 2018. I think our fourth episode was on election integrity and hacked ballots. So go check that out. This is a long-term problem. And the election of this in any US election was always in jeopardy for a variety of reasons. You have domestic voter suppression resulting from the partial repeal of the VRA in 2013. You have foreign interference, primarily from Russia, but not exclusively.
Sarah Kendzior:
You have the fact that voting machines are insecure. For that, you can consult the Twitter account and the articles of Jenny Cohn, who goes into great detail about how these machines could be hacked. And you even have warnings from people like Harry Reid back in 2016, who warned that Russia intended to "Falsify official election results." And James Comey, who was the person he warned about this, utterly ignored it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so now we have the GOP, yet again, doing everything possible to prevent what, for them, would be a worst case scenario, which is a high turnout election done exclusively with paper ballots. And their tactics for this include vowing to shut down the US Postal Service by July using the coronavirus as a pretext, filling top Postal Service positions with Trump lackeys.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then conspiratorial tirades about voting by mail, such as these tweets from Trump that came this morning. This is Tuesday morning and I'm about to read where he says: "There is no way, zero, that mail in ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged, and even illegally printed out and fraudulently signed. The governor of California is sending ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are, how they got there, will get one." Well, good.
Sarah Kendzior:
"That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people many of whom have never even thought of voting before how and for whom to vote. This will be a rigged election." No way. I mean, first of all, a lot of what he's complaining about is just very good. Like, yes, you should be able to access a ballot. Yes, it should be easy for you to vote. Yes, you should be able to vote for who you want.
Sarah Kendzior:
And these basic rights, which Trump does not ever refer to his rights–he recently called this “an honor” and generally speaking, the GOP has viewed it as a privilege and it's one that they only want Republican voters to have. That's the hallmarks of a democracy. But they do not want a democracy. They want a one party mafia state, they want an autocracy with Donald Trump at the helm. And so adding to this, unfortunately, the danger is not just talk. The GOP is suing Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, over his vote-by-mail executive order, where he's saying that residents of California must vote by mail.
Sarah Kendzior:
Trump is also threatening to deny federal funding in general to Michigan and to Nevada if they choose to vote by mail. The Las Vegas Sun says President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to hold up federal funds for two election battleground states that are trying to make it easier and safer to vote during the coronavirus pandemic. The President's tweets targeting Nevada and Michigan marked an escalation in his campaign against voting by mail.
Sarah Kendzior:
So in summary, this is an assault on democracy. It's a continuation of a long attack on voting rights made all the more dangerous by the genuine danger of the pandemic and the willingness of the GOP to exploit it for their ultimate goal, which as I said, a one party mafia state. So, Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, if you wanted the US to break apart into different republics where the United States no longer is the United States but more like a European Union, the easiest way is for the far right to keep stealing presidential elections, keep stealing the Electoral College. So, twice in our lifetime, Sarah, we had Republicans win the Electoral College and lose the popular vote, which baffles the rest of the world and explains why we are a far right nation. We're held hostage by a far right minority.
Andrea Chalupa:
We are a country that can produce incredible universities and intellectuals. We do have intellectuals here in the United States [laughs], and innovation and world leading solutions for the climate catastrophe and so forth. And the explanation of why there are two Americas is because–why we have two Americas is simply because of the Electoral College, a monument to slavery from the American Revolution period, a devil's compromise with states that were afraid of going back to tyranny under a central power like a mad king, King George, and they wanted their independence and a way to broker that with the slave states, especially, that wanted their independence and feared the drumbeat of the abolitionist movement coming for them and so forth, was to have the Electoral College.
Andrea Chalupa:
We've been paying for that devil's compromise for a very long time now. So with Paul Manafort freed from prison and back at home, you have to wonder how much he is participating, if at all, because we know that he broke laws when he was under house arrest previously, and you have to wonder how much he's weighing in on these things. And using his dark arts to help the Trump Crime Family steal another presidential election.
Andrea Chalupa:
We want to remind everyone, Paul Manafort, days before the election in 2016, broke his silence randomly with the tweet predicting that Trump was going to win battleground states, even though that defied all the polling at the time. Everyone was like, "What's this guy talking about?" And that turned out to be an ominous sign that this election of 2016 was ultimately stolen as we saw.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then they fought that and they stole it on a variety of fronts, from dark money from Russian sources flooding the GOP, from militarized propaganda, from Cambridge Analytica, from the sweeping bot campaign with the Russian bots and every available social media channel in the US dividing Americans against each other, and so forth. And that's just a quick summary of some of the tactics they relied on to do everything they could to put the Trump Crime Family over the edge.
Andrea Chalupa:
Plus, there was election hacking in all 50 states. And we don't even know the full extent of that because they have been very reticent in sharing with us what they know. And a whistleblower from the– a contractor at the NSA who dared to share documents, proof of Russia's widespread hacking of our election system–she's now in prison. That's Reality Winner, of course. So she's in prison while Manafort is resting at home during this pandemic.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I point this all out to remind us that if you wanted to achieve Putin's ultimate dream of breaking apart the US–and again, the Kremlin has been extraordinarily friendly with secessionist movements in the US, including CalExit, of course. And so has the far right. And if you wanted to destroy the US from within and finally see us all break apart, then Donald Trump would steal the Electoral College again, and the GOP would gladly help him because they rely on voter disenfranchisement and all its many ways to steal elections. They rely on that as an election strategy. They've come out and said that. We've caught them saying that.
Andrea Chalupa:
And it's so obvious, seeing all these long lines, especially. This happened with George W. Bush in 2004 in Ohio, with long lines, magically, in democratic voting districts and so forth, and machines breaking down in those districts conveniently. So, it's not inevitable that Joe Biden is going to win the presidential election and we all have to remind ourselves of that every single day, and remind our friends of that every single day, that Joe Biden winning the presidential election in 2020, and being our next president and being sworn in in January 2021, that is absolutely not inevitable.
Andrea Chalupa:
Donald Trump and the GOP–the far right pirates that hijacked the White House in 2016–they could do it again in 2020. They know how, and we're seeing all the familiar signs of that playing out now. Donald Trump continues to do what he got impeached for in front of our eyes–these quid pro quos, he's doing it with the states. He's helping the states that voted for him. It's all happening before our eyes.
Andrea Chalupa:
Again, if you wanted to destroy the US from within, you’d drive Americans so crazy with this Electoral College determining this, yet again, a corrupt president as the winner. And what's going to happen is you're going to see secessionist movements. You're going to see referendums, eventually. There's just so much of this that Americans can take. Why should a state like California be stuck under moocher, Mitch McConnell, and all the money Kentucky takes from the federal government? Money that comes from taxpayers in California and New York.
Andrea Chalupa:
The most recent study we have on this shows that blue states are highly taxed, and they go to the “welfare queen”, red states, that aren't as taxed as much. I use the term “welfare queen” because that was a racist image that was created by the GOP to hold up African-Americans, specifically an African-American woman, as being the recipient of welfare programs in America. Where in reality, it's far right states like Mitch McConnell's Kentucky, it's Wall Street socialism–Wall Street getting bailed out–it's all these massive corporations that are first at the trough in the pandemic bailout bills that have come out of Congress.
Andrea Chalupa:
It is the 1% that is the actual welfare queen in our society, and it's the African-American communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, that are the ones that are holding everyone else up on their backs. Those are the communities that are being taxed and left behind. So we have to remind everyone that a lot of this pandemic is obviously bringing a lot to the surface that we need to address. And this election, of course, is adding to that as well.
Andrea Chalupa:
What could ultimately happen is if the Trump Crime Family steals this presidential election simply by stealing the Electoral College–Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida–which could very well happen. If you look at GOP-led voting restrictions and racist voting laws and so forth in those states, it could happen again. And what are we left with? You're going to see, then, dark money from far right sources, from foreign sources like Russia, feeding these secessionist movements on the Left and Right, and you're going to see useful idiots on the Left and Right calling for referendums in California and New York, and that is going to continue and take off should the Trump Crime Family steal another election.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just to highlight how perfect of a marriage Putin's Kremlin and Mitch McConnell's GOP are: the Republican Party is organized crime. Their ultimate product that they brought us is Donald Trump. That was the end game of their decades of corruption, their decades of allowing dark money to flood our politics, their decades of trying to restrict the way we vote, and steal the vote. And Putin, of course, just joined forces. They have the same goal in mind–corruption, and making money–despite the costs, despite whose lives are destroyed in the process.
Andrea Chalupa:
So let me just underline that point by reading from this piece that came out a couple years ago in the LA Times, from Conor Friedersdorf, of how precarious our situation is, that it's not just about Donald Trump stealing this election in 2020 like he did in 2016, it's also about the potential demise, the dissolution, of the United States as we know it: "Imagine if President Trump announced that he wanted to oust California from the United States. If it weren't for us after all, Trump would have won the popular vote he so lusts after by 1.4 million. Blue America would lose its biggest source of electoral votes in all future elections, the Senate would have two fewer Democrats, the House of Representatives would lose 38 Democrats and just 14 Republicans. The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, among the most liberal in the nation, would be changed irrevocably, and the US as a whole would suddenly be a lot less ethnically diverse than it is today. For those reasons, Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan–"
Andrea Chalupa:
Again, this came out I think in 2017, "Republicans with White House ambitions, opponents of legalizing marijuana, advocates of criminalizing abortion, and various white nationalist groups might all conclude for different reasons that they would benefit politically from a separation, even as liberals and progressives across America would correctly see it as a catastrophe. So it makes sense that the leader of the Yes California Independence campaign, Marcus Ruiz Evans, was, contrary to popular assumptions, a registered Republican when he formed the separatist group two years ago, according to the San Jose Mercury News. He briefly hosted conservative talk radio shows in Fresno and would not tell the newspaper if he voted for Trump."
Andrea Chalupa:
And, of course, you also had a CalExit activist moving to Russia. So we're not just looking at a crisis of Trump staying in power for another four years, either by stealing the election or refusing to leave the White House, which is possible. I know Congress has control over whether the election moves forward or not. But we're looking at a long-term plan, in our lifetimes, of the US breaking apart. And one thing I learned from being in London during Brexit is that the US and UK are indeed in a special relationship.
Andrea Chalupa:
And what that special relationship is, is that we both have these influential movements of idiots, idiots flooding the ballot box in anger and voting against their own interests and taking that pain out on themselves, election cycle after election cycle. That's the US-UK special relationship. It's that we have these very rich, far right idiots at the top leading the poor idiots like Pied Piper to the ballot box, again and again, and voting against their own interests and just furthering their own pain and further dividing their countries against each other.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so the long-term, again, is the US breaking apart. And that's the ultimate danger here because who the hell wants to live on the border of Kentucky, the Republic of Kentucky, which would probably have an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a lack of environmental regulations? Ask Ukraine how it likes living on the border of Russia. And that is why the US breaking apart into separate state-nations, Republics, is not the answer.
Andrea Chalupa:
Because the federal government, as flawed as our Republic is–these red states, if left of their own demise, without the federal government bringing in regulations, thanks to Congress, it could be a lot worse. It could be a lot more dangerous for the blue state neighbors being on the border with some of these rogue states if we were to be separate nations. It's not the answer.
Sarah Kendzior:
I live in a "red state" and one thing that I've been emphasizing from the time that I started writing about the US is that there's no such thing, really, as a “red state” or a “blue state”, there is a purple state. And, of course, there's governments that are dominated primarily by Republicans–as they are in Missouri–or primarily by Democrats, as they are in California. And that governance makes a tremendous amount of difference into how people live their lives and what kinds of rights and freedoms that they have.
Sarah Kendzior:
But it doesn't necessarily reflect the culture on the ground because of things like gerrymandering, because of voter suppression. But also one thing that people tend to miss when they think of a red state like when you think of Kentucky, they miss Louisville, they miss diverse cities, they miss cities that are primarily African-American or heavily African-American, which is true of every red state in the south. And it's true of every swing state in the Midwest, and certainly true of where I live in St. Louis.
Sarah Kendzior:
These designations are so much more nuanced and complex, that the idea of the United States being broken up into parts, being compartmentalised and sold off–which I completely agree with you is the goal. They basically want to create a breakup of the US similar to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and then just hijack the resources. But I think about where I live in St. Louis, which has always been a place of terrible compromises–the Missouri Compromise comes to mind–and a place where people have tried to make sense of American identity.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm in a "blue city" of St. Louis, with purple suburbs in a state that has a red government but that is made up of a bunch of different communities. The other big cities of–Kansas City is also a "blue city"–but more to the point, my metro area extends over the Mississippi River well into Illinois. Illinois, the blue state. And what I'm seeing now, because of the combination of Trump and our terrible Missouri legislature dominated by the GOP, are people who feel now worried about living in Missouri in the future happening over the river to live in Metro St. Louis but in Illinois, under Illinois laws.
Sarah Kendzior:
And almost everyone I know who's doing this is either somebody who is disabled and worried about their health care, or they’re somebody who is black, and they're worried about our racist state government. And this parallels so much what people in the 19th century would do when they lived in St. Louis, when they lived in Missouri, the slave state, and they would try to get over to Illinois, the Free State.
Sarah Kendzior:
You may know a novel called Huckleberry Finn, which is about this. The fact that we are still living in that version of America with these state laws that don't reflect the desires of people on the ground, and these designations that don't reflect the complexity of the situation, is horrifying. But it's just a steady continuation of history. Our flaws were never mended. Our crimes were never remedied. People were never truly held accountable for the original sin of slavery in the United States. And our politics, as Andrea already noted with the Electoral College, proceed directly from that.
Sarah Kendzior:
But I would encourage people to not fall for the “red state, blue state” designation. That was really something invented by cable TV during the 2000 election when they didn't know who was going to win, and both parties have seized on it to try to form a cohesive identity for the reason of fundraising and objectifying different political parties, and hardening them into forms of identity associated with race, with religion, with all sorts of things. In reality, it's not black and white, it's gray. It's not red and blue, it's purple. And we are one country. We are one America, and it breaks my heart to think that maybe in my lifetime, we won't be.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm happy living where I am. I'm not leaving Missouri, but I'd be crushed if we didn't have California, if we didn't have Alaska, which is another place that the Russians have had eyes on. And yeah, if we didn't have Kentucky. I think a lot of the "red states", including mine, get a very bad, unfair rap, in terms of what we've been through in the last 20 years living under these governments that we didn't necessarily vote for because we haven't had free and fair elections here. We keep trying to clean things up.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, in Missouri, there's literally an initiative that a huge majority of state voters voted for called Clean Missouri to get rid of gerrymandering, to get rid of dark money, and now our Republican legislature is destroying it. So whatever we do, when we try to clean up our own messes, it gets destroyed by powers with a lot more money than we have because we are poor states. And that's the other difference is that we don't have the resources. We've lost our media. We don't have the kind of business conglomerates you see on the coast.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I do wonder what the pandemic is going to do because people are now fleeing these cities. They're fleeing New York or San Francisco or other places that have very high population density and where you're much more likely to catch the virus. And I don't know what that will mean for how the population of the United States is allocated, whether people will now go to where I live and see that as, like, the paradise. I mean, after the Lake of the Ozarks last week and Redhead Bar and Grill, I don't think so, so much. But you never know. But I think changes are in store.
Sarah Kendzior:
However, just to wrap this up, that's a long-term thing that may happen as a result of the pandemic. The immediate problem is the election and it's election integrity, and it's the hardening of these categories and the exploitation of them by bad actors, whether Republicans or Russians, who want to see America broken apart and will use the election itself as a means to that end. And so, yes, we need to push for voting by mail, we need to push for transparency and integrity in our elections, and for the preservation of our union. We cannot take that–that very essential thing that I think most of us grew up not thinking it would be shattered in our lifetime–we can't take that for granted anymore.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. So there's two great biographies by Ron Chernow: “Alexander Hamilton”, which famously inspire the musical Hamilton and “Grant”, on Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general for the North, for the union, and both by Ron Chernow. What he did was he brought us into the lives of these two great forces of personality, Hamilton and Grant, and their greatest contributions were to unite these very different factions under a strong federal government. That takes a force of personality.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you read the Hamilton biography, it's stunning what Hamilton did, nearly killing himself, working himself to death, to bring all of these different states, with their very different cultures, mindsets, and on top of that, you had all of these Revolutionary War veterans that were poor and suffering and still injured, deeply wounded, psychologically, physically, that were threatening to form mobs to kill the baby in the cradle before this new country had a chance to even be born.
Andrea Chalupa:
And just the lengths he went to to unite. Hamilton gets a great deal of credit for why America even exists in the first place as an America rather than a Europe. And then, of course, Grant did that famously with winning the Civil War. It takes personality. It takes strength of character to keep this country together. And what we have in the White House is the exact opposite of a Hamilton or a Grant. We have a traitor within our midst who just wants to enrich himself, and just wants to vindictively rub our faces in his crimes and gets off on getting away with it.
Andrea Chalupa:
And he has children around him who are benefiting from that power–Ivanka and Jared and Don Jr.–and they're going to continue on his dynasty because the Trump family brand is how they've made their money. That's how they've lived above accountability. That's how they've escaped investigations and so forth in the past. That's how they came to power. They whitewashed their crimes through reality television, and we've seen all that. They painted themselves as respectable people. All that sheen blinded the media in 2016.
Andrea Chalupa:
White supremacy is so core to their values and how they're allowed to get away with their crimes and scrutiny. And so it's a very scary time if the Trump Crime Family remains in power. So the solution to what we're saying is very simple. Get rid of the Electoral College. Get rid of the Electoral College. That's it. There is a growing movement that's legally based that's trying very hard to finally get rid of the Electoral College, which gave us the two most corrupt presidents in our history and in world history, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Godspeed to those movements.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm wondering since we're talking about media complicity and misrepresentation, should we talk about the Ronan Farrow situation? The New York Times?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes.
Sarah Kendzior:
Okay. So you may have seen–it feels like a year ago, but about a week ago, Ben Smith, formerly of BuzzFeed, wrote a hit piece on journalist, Ronan Farrow, for the New York Times. And before I get into that hit piece, I'm going to give a little bit of background about one of the stories that I think has been dropped from the news the last few years that I see as a major factor in this political situation that we're in now, which is Black Cube and similar mercenary outlets.
Sarah Kendzior:
So Black Cube is a brutal Israeli intelligence agency that has been hired by everybody from rapist Harvey Weinstein, to Cambridge Analytica–the data mining company that rigs elections here and elsewhere–to members of the Russian mafia, and to Republicans who sought to sabotage the Obama administration's Iran deal and harassed people and threatened people in that administration. The tactics that Black Cube uses include blackmail, threats of violence, stalking, impersonating journalists in order to get close to targets, planting propaganda, tapping phones, and other means of surveillance and control.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is a group that is working intimately with either people in governments or with those hovering at the edges of various administrations and campaigns and doing the dirty work for them. Black Cube used to be something that Congress actually cared about. At one point, there were members of Congress seeking to hold hearings and investigations about Black Cube. Foremost, among those who was investigating Black Cube was Elijah Cummings, the representative who died abruptly in 2019.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I'm just going to read the opening paragraphs of the letter he wrote on May 24th, 2018, just to give an idea of what he was doing. He's writing to the representatives from Black Cube: "We are writing to request documents relating to reports that Black Cube conducted a ‘Dirty ops campaign’ against former Obama administration officials, Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, at the behest of associates of President Donald Trump. If these reports are accurate, they raise grave questions about how and why a foreign entity was engaged to attempt to secretly influence the foreign policy of the United States. On May 5th, 2018, The Guardian reported that your firm was engaged to ‘Orchestrate a dirty ops campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.’ A source with knowledge of your engagement reportedly stated ‘The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.’ We have now obtained documents that appear to confirm that your firm attempted to obtain information about Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl through their family members on multiple occasions."
Sarah Kendzior:
This is in particular true of Colin Kahl's wife, who they targeted directly. And so I think it's worth looking at the full letter from Elijah Cummings, looking at that case, and looking how it was dropped. And so there's one person who did not drop the Black Cube story and that is Ronan Farrow. So in 2019, Ronan Farrow wrote a firsthand account of how he was stalked and threatened by Black Cube agents to the point that he feared for his life. His experiences were captured in his book, Catch and Kill, which is the story of Harvey Weinstein's decades of rape and assault and how they were covered up by the mainstream media, particularly by NBC.
Sarah Kendzior:
As Farrow investigated the Weinstein case and the cover up, more and more women came forward. And he learned that a number of media personalities, notably Matt Lauer, had also been accused of rape or sexual assault by multiple women over a long period of time. So, given the extent of incredible criminality at play, why would the New York Times, and specifically media analyst Ben Smith, write a hit piece on Ronan Farrow? Why would he be a target? And so to briefly give some examples from Smith's op ed: On May 17th, Smith argued that Farrow “delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic with unmistakable heroes and villains but often emits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic."
Sarah Kendzior:
He then added, "His work though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump, that if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives. That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault."
Sarah Kendzior:
So, I'm reading this, and there's not really a lot of solid critiques in this op ed about Farrow's reporting. He raises a few nitpicky questions that... I've read the book and I kept thinking like, "Did he read the book? Did he actually see a lot of these questions are answered within?" But the main thing I was thinking when I read that passage is, guess who else was under assault? Ronan Farrow. And guess who was not mentioned at all in any capacity by Ben Smith, in the New York Times? Black Cube.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so the emission itself, of Black Cube, is startling. But first I just want to discuss what the hell "resistance journalism" means. Whatever it is, it's not political. Most of the people that Farrow has outed over his career have been Democratic officials like Eric Schneiderman, or big donors to the Democratic Party like Harvey Weinstein. So this is not a partisan thing. This is not really an anti-Trump thing. What Smith seems to be arguing is that any kind of journalism, which is not sycophantic access journalism, is thereby "resistance journalism".
Sarah Kendzior:
He's arguing that journalism should not challenge power. The old adage of “journalism should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” does not seem to apply to the New York Times. They hold a mentality very similar to that of Black Cube itself. That media does not exist as a means to relay truth to the public; it exists as a weapon. So, I'm now going to read a passage from Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill, in which he illuminates a conflict of interest between the New York Times, Black Cube, and his own reporting.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is from pages 314 to 315. He writes, "Black Cube promised ‘a dedicated team’ of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA in any other necessary country, including a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, and ‘avatar operators’, specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as ‘operations experts’ with extensive experience in social engineering. The agency agreed to hire an investigative journalist as per the client request, who would be required to conduct 10 interviews a month for four months and be paid $40,000. The agency would ‘promptly report to the client the results of such interviews by the journalist’."
Sarah Kendzior:
This is from a document that Farrow got about Black Cube. "Black Cube also promised to provide ‘a full time agent by the name of Anna’ herein. After the agent, who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the client's instructions and who will be available full time to assist the client and his attorneys for the next four months.’ The invoices attached were eye popping, fees that might have totaled up to $1.3 million. The contracts were signed by Dr. Avi Yanus, the Black Cube director, and by Boies Schiller.
Sarah Kendzior:
This was an astonishment. Boies' law firm represented the New York Times, but here was the esteemed lawyer’s signature in genteel blue inked cursive on a contract to kill the papers reporting and obtain McGowan's book.” That's Rose McGowan, the actress and victim of Harvey Weinstein. And so that information, that very pertinent fact that Black Cube and The Times share a lawyer, that was also left out of Ben Smith's article. So I mean, I just was left reading this like, "What exactly… what are you even doing?"
Sarah Kendzior:
I think some of this is a broadside against "resistance journalism", formerly known as journalism, you know, when you investigate those in power, investigate wrongdoings, try to bring the truth to light and so forth. But there also seems something more nefarious here in terms of the omission of these direct connections between Black Cube and The Times and the complete omission of Black Cube from the article itself, which parallels a refusal to cover Black Cube and its history of interfering with foreign policy, with elections and so forth, at all. Do you have thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, my gosh. I mean, this whole Ben Smith, nitpicking, wannabe takedown of Ronan Farrow and the New York Times… First of all, in terms of what he had issue with in his long investigation into Ronan Farrow, it came out as that Abbott and Costello skit, Who's On First? It was that confusing. It was so in the weeds. And thank you to the New Yorker editor, Ronan Farrow's editor at the New Yorker that painstakingly went into those weeds and fact checked every one of them and had a. ironclad response going down the list.
Andrea Chalupa:
But, in terms of for the general public, the general public that should be serviced by the noble profession of journalism. The general public doesn't care about journalists going after journalists in this fashion. This is very much an inside baseball takedown by a journalist for other journalists. This is like a clubhouse conversation. And that's also what makes it so privileged and abysmal during a time when so many are hurting, especially the most vulnerable communities who we're seeing have the highest death toll, the greatest dangers in this once-in-a-century pandemic, communities of color, and immigrant communities.
Andrea Chalupa:
And here you have Ben Smith, basically acting out that scene in American Psycho, where they sit around comparing the texture and font of their business cards. This is how this played out. And the reason why it got so much airtime is because, again, this was by a journalist written for journalists. And it was just like a country club magazine. And one thing that I really urgently signaled, was that media reporting, the facts, the objective facts, that is all fine and well, we need media reporting.
Andrea Chalupa:
Media columns, on the other hand, where there's score settling–this column felt like it was born among media types, like Ben Smith and other fancy, highly respectable media people over drinks somewhere, in some bar. This feels very much like it was a conversation among fancy media people, and they took themselves very seriously, and they said, "Yes, that is exactly what the world needs. A Ronan Farrow takedown." And they took it seriously because they had no one around them to check them and they went forward with it.
Andrea Chalupa:
And it sucked the oxygen out of the room when it came out because Twitter is filled with media people, all talking about and chatting about it because it's so inside the clubhouse. And the reality is that investigative journalism is absolutely messy because you're chasing down stories that may never bear any fruit. Investigative journalism is incredibly expensive and time consuming. And that is also what makes it expensive. Plus, in many cases, you need to travel and plus you need resources, to have documents, which could cost money to unlock–it's just a very time consuming, resource-heavy pursuit.
Andrea Chalupa:
And that is why in the decades of shrinking newsrooms, this epidemic of shrinking newsrooms, especially the loss of local news. Local news being at the forefront of fighting corruption. In this massive epidemic of the loss of newsroom jobs, investigative journalism is often the first to go because it is so time consuming, and there's no guarantee of payout. You could chase down sources that then suddenly dry up on you, or there's nothing there, or it's just too dangerous, or you get intimidated as we saw with Black Cube.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ronan Farrow is very, very privileged, but he used his privilege wisely in this case. So with NBC News shutting down his investigation, Ronan Farrow had the name, Ronan Farrow had the clout to jump to the New Yorker. When a Ronan Farrow phone call comes in, editors of The New Yorker would take that call, they might definitely not take a call from me or Sarah, but they would take a call or email from Ronan Farrow. So he used his clout wisely to jump to the New Yorker and that allowed his massive investigation to see the light of day. And he also had celebrity protection.
Andrea Chalupa:
Black Cube was going after him. Black Cube went after a lot of celebrities. That intimidation certainly worked. We know that because Ronan Farrow documented it. At the same time, Ronan Farrow was able to rise above it because he had that power of celebrity. He was able to use his power for a platform to speak the truth. And plus, he was a newcomer to this industry. He had worked previously, he had a degree from Yale Law School. He worked at the State Department. He was fairly new to investigative journalism and it was that not coming up in that world certainly gave him a fresher perspective where he was able to really go for the jugular here, not caring who he took down in the process.
Andrea Chalupa:
So that freshness certainly worked in his favor. And I think over the years, as Ronan Farrow, this golden boy, was rising, we see now the jealousy, the career jealousy. We see now how many talks over beers happened during that time over these journalists, poking fun at Ronan Farrow. It all expressed itself in this confusing Abbott and Costello Who's On First?, nitpicking, in the weeds attempted takedown of Ronan Farrow, which got completely ridiculed across the board by so many people across Twitter–namely, many people who are not in media who are like, "What the hell are you guys talking about? The house is on fire and you're making fun of someone that attempted to pick up a hose and put it out."
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. And he actually had the bravery to do that. Like the book is very interesting. I'd read it before but I was mostly kind of skimming it through to learn about different areas that were of interest to me, in my own work. This time, I just really sat down and read it very closely, line by line, to try if I could see, what is Ben Smith even getting at? And there are so many disturbing details in there. There are so many kind of mini stories that aren't fully resolved, I think through no fault of Farrow. I think just because they're supporting details through broader argument.
Sarah Kendzior:
For example, early in the book, he is describing how he interviewed Gwen Stefani. He says, "I asked Gwen Stefani if she vaccinated her kids and how she felt about the anti-vaxxers. She said she supported vaccines and advised people to talk to their doctors. Mike Wallace at {inaudible} but back at Rockefeller Plaza assembling the spot and edit, I got a call from an MSNBC producer working on the concert ‘Stefanie's people reviewed the transcript and they liked some edits.’ She said. ‘Who sent them a transcript?’ ‘I don't know.’ In my inbox was a redline transcript with Stefanie’s soundbites rearranged and trimmed to make it sound like she was ambivalent to negative on the vaccine front. I told the producer I wouldn't air it."
Sarah Kendzior:
And so then after that Ronan Farrow gets in a dispute with his employers at MSNBC because he refused to doctor a conversation to make it not just reflect the opposite of what Gwen Stefani said, but not make it be a very harmful propaganda position. And this, of course, stood out to me because we're in the midst of a pandemic. We're in a time where there is contradictory health information, as well as conspiracies flying all around this country, where media has been gutted. It was already gutted going into the pandemic. There have been about 30,000 journalists that have since lost their jobs or been furloughed. It's very easy for disinformation to get out, particularly on things like vaccines, where you already have this history of conspiracy. And to hear that that's what NBC was doing.
Sarah Kendzior:
That they were fabricating things to appease the anti-vaxxer movement. I'm like, "Wow." That in itself is a story. And it's not one that he completes telling because it's not the main focus of his book. And the whole book is filled with things like that. It is filled with the corruption of media. It is filled with anecdotes about these interrelated corporate entities, law firms, and legacy outlets, and mercenary intelligence apparati, and political campaigns, and Hollywood elites, and so on and so forth.
Sarah Kendzior:
As George Carlin said, "It's one big club and you're not in it." And I think that some of the antipathy toward Ronan Farrow is that he could have been in that club, he could have just kept his mouth shut, he could have kissed people's ass. And he didn't. He extracted himself from the situation, and he told the truth. I don't want to get too much into this, but that's what he did when he was protecting his sister against Woody Allen and outing Woody Allen as a predator.
Sarah Kendzior:
And he's straightforward in the book about how, to some degree, this is personal for him but he also brings evidence. He brings documentation. It's just bizarre. Of all the people to target in this way, it's like one of the very few from this kind of privileged class who's really doing a good job and putting his life on the line. I mean, that comes through very clearly in the book. And it's always weird to me when someone has a dramatic story to tell like Ronan Farrow, that involves his life being in peril, that involves being threatened and stalked and harmed and losing his job and all these genuinely bad things.
Sarah Kendzior:
And people get jealous. They get jealous that this kind of attention is being showered on you. And honestly, I've seen this much more with women. It's almost the same reaction that when women come forward, and they speak out against sexual assault, and you see people saying, "Oh, well, you just want the attention. You just want your name to be in the media." It's like, "My God. No. I've already been through a trauma. Now I have to relive that trauma on a national stage, with a bunch of people who don't believe me, who are determined to assassinate my character, and who are still threatening me."
Sarah Kendzior:
I kept wondering about that. Is Black Cube still threatening Ronan Farrow? Are other people threatening him? Threatening the New Yorker? And so on. Because I've definitely seen a drop off, as I said, in coverage of things like Black Cube in similar mercenary outlets. So yeah, that's just something to consider.
Andrea Chalupa:
This reads like NBC fighting back. Because Ben Smith's attempted takedown of Ronan Farrow was followed by Matt Lauer coming out with his own column on the heels of this one, trying to say, "Yeah!”–So Matt Lauer tried to pile on and the public was just not having it. And Gwen Stefani, who you mentioned just now in this example, Gwen Stefanie works at NBC. She's a star of the NBC show, The Voice, or she was. I don't follow that stuff. I did back in the day. So it's like this very much reads like NBC fighting back against the serious double black eyes that Ronan Farrow gave them with his reporting.
Andrea Chalupa:
And on top of that, you have, in Ben Smith's own piece, a disclosure that he provides, where he writes, "Disclosure. I don't cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column because I retained stock options in the company, which I left in February. I've agreed to divest those options by the end of the year." Now, according to NBC News, this is me now pointing this out. According to NBC News, NBC Universal, which owns NBC News, has a $400 million investment in BuzzFeed. Ben Smith and BuzzFeed, it's like when you're talking about BuzzFeed, you're talking about Ben Smith. They're so linked.
Andrea Chalupa:
And here he is at the New York Times now, their media columnist, including writing an article essentially praising the New York Times and how successful it is. He did that column. So, again, media columnists should not come from the world of media. The only people qualified to critique the media are those who are most vulnerable among us because they're the ones in the positions of power and authority to remind the media, the sole job of journalism is a public service, it's to speak truth to power. It is to hold power accountable.
Andrea Chalupa:
Only the most vulnerable in society should be media columnists. A reporter, or anybody from media, being a media columnist is just masturbation. That's all it is. At the end of the day.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. And we should note that the New York Times got rid of their public editor. Their last public editor was Liz Spayd, who had come out and criticized quite heavily how the New York Times covered Trump and Russia in 2016. After that was reprimanded, then they eliminated the position entirely saying that the public would be responsible for critiquing the New York Times.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now, we all know you know what happens when anybody tries to do that on Twitter, including other journalists, as well as readers. There is a mob pile-on by writers and editors of the New York Times which people attribute to fragile ego but there have been enough internal conversations leaked from the New York Times, published online, that show that... I'm not sure every person working there is a willing participant in this kind of mob mentality. Because there are good journalists there and they're really just trapped in this corporate culture.
Sarah Kendzior:
But it's amazing to me the way they see a power differential, where if somebody is critiquing, for example, Maggie Haberman’s sycophantic, court intrigue-type columns about the wonders of Ivanka and Jared, that rando on Twitter will get pummeled by a shitload of New York Times employees, like, among the most privileged media employees in America. They will descend en masse and say basically that you have no right to a critique. Meanwhile, you've got Roger Stone wishing Maggie Haberman's child a happy birthday on Twitter.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I just look at all this and I'm like, "Something's deeply awry here." If Roger Stone knew when my kids were born and was sending them birthday greetings, I'd be re-evaluating what I'm doing with my life. And if I were working for a publication like that, that's sharing a lawyer with Black Cube, that's slandering the reporters that are actually doing the hard work, I would wonder about the nature of that company, about its financial interest, its political interest.
Sarah Kendzior:
Because this is not an isolated incident. We've discussed the New York Times, its Nazi puff pieces, its lies about Trump and Russia and the FBI and so on and so forth. We've been discussing this for years. It’s highbrow Breitbart. It's rather exceptional in this way. Every publication makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. We've criticized other places, but there's very few that are so continual in this pattern of subversion and of trying to cover up the truth instead of cover it, as the New York Times. And it's shameful.
Sarah Kendzior:
I wish that folks would just focus on those who are doing a good job. People like Ronan Farrow, his sometimes partner at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, is an excellent writer obviously, about dark money, but on other issues as well. Lift those voices up and let the legacy publications that don't live up to their own reputation just drown in their own cesspool that they've devised. I mean, that's the inevitable outcome.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. And you're going to inevitably make mistakes. You're going to inevitably get some things wrong. You acknowledge it, you correct it, you move on. And that's what Ronan Farrow did in the very messy, time consuming, intense process of investigative journalism. All journalists know that. Basically, Ben Smith, he couldn't survive his own scrutiny here, by any means. And his own reporters have been attacked the way Ronan Farrow has.
Andrea Chalupa:
I was shocked at Jason Leopold for holding up this article. When Jason Leopold had some stupid CNN reporter calling him out for his struggles with drug addiction in the past and trying to strike it as credibility. So, journalists do this to journalists. It's a highly competitive industry. It's a highly social industry. It very much depends on who you know. And therefore editors at big platforms with respectable names, they wield a lot of power. A lot of people want to take them out for drinks. They get a lot of really fashionable invitations.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so you have a lot of stupid social tensions there and a lot of score settling and competition. I hate being in conversation with New York journalists and hearing them nitpick each other. It just sounds extraordinarily shallow and tone deaf compared to what's happening across America right now. And the fact that journalists are a dying breed. I know personally, far too many extraordinarily talented journalists and editors who are stuck working in big corporations, in advertising, in copywriting, in PR, because there simply aren't any jobs.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the fact that those that remain in positions of power, at places like the New York Times, that aren't sensitive to that, aren't using their power more responsibly, it's just so infuriating. I can't even begin to tell you. And the only thing bringing me any comfort in this is the fact that I've studied cases like this up close in the many years I spent researching my film, Mr. Jones, which looks at character assassination by a powerful editor, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, Walter Duranty.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I saw where journalists in the early 1930s fell, which side of history they fell on. And I'm telling you, history will be the final judge. Journalists today, they have to check their privilege. They have to force themselves to be conscious that they live a very comfortable life and not to be cloistered in that life to the point where history will judge them, rightly, in a way that will be very harsh if they lose sight of what matters right now. To really illustrate this, I want to... This whole Ben Smith attempted takedown of Ronan Farrow, it so strikes me as clever guerilla marketing for my film.
Andrea Chalupa:
Because here you have young Gareth Jones, a total outsider of this cushy, cloistered world of journalism. He didn't care. He came in and he was slaying dragons. Just like Ronan Farrow was this outsider coming in slaying dragons and just taking people down with very little thought for his life and his career. Then you have some very privileged, powerful Name at the New York Times, Walter Duranty, trying to take down Gareth Jones like Ben Smith tried to take down Ronan Farrow.
Andrea Chalupa:
They were hit pieces written against Gareth Jones, the star of my film. And so I was watching all this play out and I was like, "Wow. This is really clever guerilla marketing for my film, Mr. Jones." Which is available now for rental and coming June 19th [laughs]. But really, that's what I was thinking. And if you think about his stupidity, Ben Smith’s stupidity, of calling out "resistance journalism", Walter Duranty, the villain of my film played beautifully by Peter Sarsgaard, he was the ultimate resistance journalist. He was in the pocket of the Kremlin and feeding the readers of the New York Times all this propaganda about how great Stalin was, how Stalin was trudging along, and building the great Soviet utopia.
Andrea Chalupa:
And, of course, there were some reports of famine but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. So you had this resistance journalism staunchly on the side of the Soviets and believing in their great socialist experiment, believing in Stalin, feeding these lies, feeding the Soviet propaganda to the readers of the New York Times. Walter Duranty IS a resistance journalist. So Ben Smith should take a crack at writing about actual resistance journalism, and leave investigative journalism alone.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I mean, I think it just depends on, what are we resisting here? And if what you're resisting is white collar crime, organized crime, mercenary groups, authoritarian regimes, state corruption, corporate corruption, etc, etc, then today you get branded "resistance journalism" for doing the baseline set of expectations for you as a journalist extensively investigating powerful and relevant figures.
Sarah Kendzior:
But yeah, I see the kind of characterization. You can take it either way. If Duranty is seen as somebody resisting the United States and it's extensively democratic system by supporting the Soviets and totalitarian communist dictators, then, yeah, that is its own form of resistance. I mean, that's why it's just such an absurd turn of phrase because it's never defined. It's meant to be weaponized. It's no surprise to me that another Walter Duranty of our times, Glenn Greenwald, went on to write a long harangue about the evils of resistance journalism in which he put a number of effective voices hung out to dry Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel from Twitter, among them.
Sarah Kendzior:
She formerly, I think, worked for the umbrella organization that Greenwald works for at The Intercept and she's very good at analyzing legal cases regarding civil liberties and things like that. But she was not a Russiagate denialist like Greenwald. So that's her cardinal sin. And so, they use this all the time. I mean, this is an old play. They've been doing this at you and I, Andrea, for ages. We get cover stories called “the new paranoia” for daring to suggest, in 2017, that Trump was an aspiring autocrat, that Trump had been dealing with Russia, that his interests did not put the American people first and foremost. That's literally–
Sarah Kendzior:
Those were the things that, I believe that was the New Republic, that they got upset about us saying, they thought that those were such outlandish claims to make whereas they were very obvious claims to make and they were based on our decades of experience in studying autocracies, which is what both Andrea and I did before we began studying the US and studying how the United States under Trump was engaged in this axis of autocrats. It's very bizarre. It's an interesting phenomenon to see the media weaponizing itself against the other members of the media, who are trying to hold the powerful to account.
Sarah Kendzior:
Especially when those powerful people have absolutely no redeeming characteristics. They are hyper capitalists. They are oligarchs. They are mafiosos. They are white supremacists. There isn't anything good that they're offering to the world except access, money, and power. So if you are a defender of these individuals, if you're going out of your way to help people, whether it's Jared Kushner, or Trump, or Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer, or all of the–I should have added sexual predators into that list of categories I just said.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then what exactly are you working for? What's it worth to you? What part of you are you sacrificing in order to protect these individuals? And what effect does that work have on society, whether it's your refusal to cover these topics, to cover these crimes, and to cover these criminals or to slander those reporters that are doing so. I wish that they would think long and hard about that.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to add, Sarah and I started this podcast knowing full well the attacks against us and this information against us would continue because that's all we're pretty much used to at this point. And we did it anyway, knowing that the truth would protect us. If we just stick to what we know, if we just stand in our truth, the truth will protect us. And that's just a simple fact that we cling to in the work that we do.
Andrea Chalupa:
We very much work towards the judgment of history. We want to be remembered on the right side of history. I wish more journalists thought that way. We would have a much healthier environment. We wouldn't have these stories polluting the information space. And just to really bring that home to the journalists out there, I want to play a clip from a BBC documentary, where a man in his golden years, a British man, is being confronted by an interviewer for this documentary about the hit pieces that he wrote as a young journalist, discrediting and spreading lies and propaganda against George Orwell's comrades in the Spanish Civil War.
Andrea Chalupa:
A group of communists that were also staunchly anti-Stalin, staunchly anti-dictatorship, but they were smeared widely in the western press, including by the New York Times, as fascists. And that was the collective madness of the day. That was the gaslighting that drove Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia, which fact checked and confronted that gaslighting. And even later when Orwell was sitting with Hemingway in Paris talking about how he was nearly arrested in Spain, where he saw his friends kidnapped and killed in Spain.
Andrea Chalupa:
Orwell, all those years later sitting with–on the verge of the end of World War Two. We're talking about, like, 1945. All those years later, Hemingway hands him a pistol in Paris to protect himself should anybody want to kill Orwell all these years later because he was "on the side of the fascists". He was fighting alongside people in Spain that were anti-fascist, anti-dictatorship, but they were so widely smeared by the respectable press as being fascist that their lives were in danger. Orwell lived with that terror so many years after he had been in Spain.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's how deeply this gaslighting goes for people on the front lines fighting for the truth. And so for the journalists out there who are careerists, who care about being fashionable and being respectable and all of that at this great sacrifice of the truth itself, heed this warning: do not live your life where a tenacious filmmaker or a journalist could come and confront you about the stuff that you're writing right now. So we're going to play this clip of a man being confronted about the hit pieces he wrote smearing the anti-fascists as fascists that were all fought alongside in Spain.
Speaker 11:
You see what I'm getting at here if that shook... The May event in Barcelona shook Orwell's faith in communism very seriously. I mean, it was the most important political thing that happened to him. It doesn't seem to have had quite that effect on you. Would you say that was the case? It hasn't really broken your faith.
Speaker 12:
Yes. Mind you. I didn't really have all the information that Orwell had at the time anyway. I mean, this business about the Russians wanting to have a pact with Britain and France at that time. I mean, this never rather impinged upon my probably very innocent political outlook. All a bit deep for me at that time, I think.
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 listeners. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going.
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 Visenberg, Nick Farr, Damian 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.