Tom Cotton’s Dream Come True in Belarus
After a two-week break, Gaslit Nation is back! This week we continue our documentation of the ongoing shitshow we call 2020, starting with the dismantling of the US Postal Service by newly appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy. And then we discuss Tom Cotton's dream come true in Belarus.
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Speaker 1:
I never saw it before. That's something absolutely unprecedented in the country. I must say that I couldn't even imagine that Belarusians can protest so broadly. They happened to, not just in Minsk, but in more than 30 cities I think, hundreds of thousands of people took part. There were many clashes, several people died. Lukashenko introduced army on this and special security forces. The Alpha Group of KGB was shooting journalists yesterday. We are looking for our colleague's reporters. There is no information since last night about them. One reporter, my colleague, Natalia Lubneuskaya from Nasha Niva was wounded with a bullet. She's in hospital, but her condition is stable. So it's not just about protesters. No. They're shooting everyone who is on the streets. It also could mean that authorities are going to introduce something like a martial law or a state of emergency.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, the writer and producer of a bestselling film, Mr. Jones, which is available now so go check it out.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump Administration and rising autocracy around the world. We are back after a two-week break. During those two weeks, it feels like the world is echoing everything that we have been saying about autocracy since 2016. Of course, the thing we wish they had really listened to was the part where we warned everyone there is a limited window of time to protect our institutions before they collapsed. That window has now closed. Or, to be more precise, our complicit and complacent officials have closed it. That window was the Overton window. An American democracy has been defenestrated. All that's left now are the people, but as we always say on Gaslit Nation, "Never underestimate the power of the people."
Sarah Kendzior:
So how do we fight a rapidly consolidating autocracy? We're going to discuss that today in terms of elections, in terms of protests and in terms of retaining our own strength during this historically traumatic time, but let's start out with the attacks on the US Postal Service. There is a Postal Service purge. Back in March, we warned you that the Trump administration was going to use the pandemic as a pretext to implement fascist measures in the US. What's amazing about the times we live in now is that they did not even bother with that pretext. They simply let the virus spread while doing nothing to stop it and began implementing fascist measures entirely outside the parameters of the Coronavirus response. Americans are now left with the worst of both worlds: a pandemic that shows no sign of abating and a vicious autocratic government attacking our rights while we struggle to survive. The Trump crime cult has endless funds and resources to pay for military troops to attack us, but somehow, that money vanishes when it's time to fund the most critical infrastructure during the time of COVID-19.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Post Office. To review: On June 16th, Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a GOP mega-donor, as the postmaster general. DeJoy is the first postmaster general with no experience in the US Postal Service in the history of this country. DeJoy arrives in the tradition of other Trump administration appointees who were installed to destroy the very departments which they were tasked to lead. Betsy DeVos in public education, Ben Carson in public housing and so on. This is in keeping with Steve Bannon's famous claim that Trump was placed in power to "deconstruct the administrative state." It's also in keeping with the war on the Post Office that the GOP has been waging for decades as they manipulated its budget to try to force it out of existence, much like they seek to do with social security and other public goods. This would be bad enough in a normal GOP administration, but we are living through the worst public health crisis in modern history and a rising fascist regime.
Sarah Kendzior:
On August 7th, DeJoy purged 23 senior Postal Service officials. This move came after months of some regions facing a severe slow down, or even shut down, in mail. There are areas of Philadelphia and Baltimore that have allegedly not gotten mail for weeks. This impacts many of the most vulnerable Americans who get medication, food and other necessities through the mail as well as small businesses and anyone attempting to pay their bills. The attacks on the Postal Service affect everybody but the ultra rich. The attack on the US Postal Service in 2020 also impacts voting. Now, we've been talking for a very long time–basically, from the moment that Trump was inaugurated–about 2020, likely, being rigged.
Sarah Kendzior:
As we’ve said before, there are four main threats here. There is domestic voter suppression as a result of the partial repeal of the VRA in 2013. We saw that play out already in 2016 with disenfranchised voters–primarily, voters who aren't white, in states over the entire country, but especially the Upper Midwest. We have foreign interference, which this show has described in great detail–primarily from Russia but with the help of other nations. We have hackable machines which they are finally admitting were tampered with in terms of not just accessing databases but probably changing vote tallies. In 2016, this is a claim we have long made in our pursuit for an audit and they have long said this is impossible. It was not impossible. And we have the threat of Trump simply refusing to concede even if he has obviously lost the election. That threat was always there; it is only now, about less than 100 days before the election, that people are acknowledging it as severe.
Sarah Kendzior:
On top of this, we have the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to a broad recommendation that we vote by mail for the sake of public safety. In March, when voting by mail was proposed, the GOP responded immediately by threatening to defund the Postal Service. They are now making good on that threat. Let's note that the US Postal Service is one of the most popular institutions in the US. It has a 91% approval rating. Trump and his cohort are not trying to win an election; they are trying to steal the election. So, Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I think we're all in suspense of whether or not we're going to have a free and fair election in this country in November. As we've been saying on this show for a while now, we're not waiting for authoritarianism to get here. It's already here. This is what it looks like. We still do have a window of opportunity to resist it, to fight it. As our recent guest on this show–the great historian, Timothy Snyder, an expert in the 1930s, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Stalin and their mass murder and how they influenced each other–Tim Snyder came on our show and one of the things that he pointed out was that all of our actions that we have been taking from the marches, from supporting all these waves of candidates for office, bringing in these new fresh voices. All of these actions we've been taking, the phone calls, the texts, the postcards, all of this get out the vote, it works. It creates speed bumps for the authoritarians. We can slow them down this way.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I think that's important to point out because things are as bad as they seem. If the Trump Crime Family does get away with stealing another presidential election like they did in 2016 and they have four more years of this, the authoritarianism is going to get worse. It's going to get entrenched. You're going to see Ivanka Trump as the first woman president. She's going to just skate right in, because it's game over for us on a federal level. What you might then see is, possibly, emergency referendums in states like California that say, "We don't want to be part of this anymore. Our federal government has fallen and we want to be our own state because we have such a huge economy. We're advanced and progressive, ahead of the national agenda under Mitch McConnell and Ivanka and the Trump Crime Family. We don't want this." You'd see, I think, over time, a dismantling of the United States as we know it, which of course would be Putin's dream.
Andrea Chalupa:
So the stakes are extraordinarily high. I do want to comment on some of the things that Democrats are doing to combat this, which I think are worth noting because all of this–as Sarah and I always say to each other in our own private conversations on the show, of course–is the importance of keeping a record of who did what, a record for history. Because the way dictators work is, they gaslight you and they try to say that none of this ever happened. It's always important to take notes, leave notes, keep a journal. This was the same advice they had during the rise of Hitler. They said, "Keep a journal." Anne Frank, of course, was not the only one keeping a journal. That was actually a movement where they were recommending to people, "Keep a journal of what's happening. What life is like.” You are a witness. You are bearing witness to history. That alone is extremely powerful.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think we do have to take note of what the opposition is doing. I watched, last night, a really interesting interview with Tom Perez, the civil rights attorney, the head of the DNC, with Ali Velshi on MSNBC. He cited as a success their lawsuit to make sure this Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin–a Democrat–was able to run and how the Democrats are building this coalition, an ecosystem, he kept calling it, to push back against what we're watching in plain sight, which is the Trump White House literally trying to steal the election by destroying the USPS and all of it. Which, of course, hurts rural America, which depends on the Postal Service, and Tom Perez pointed out last night that people also get their medicine in the mail. Once again, Trump is putting peoples’ lives at risk just so he can stay in power. I think that's going to be really important to pay attention to, is the ecosystem of lawsuits and the coalition that they're building to be aggressive and fight this.
Andrea Chalupa:
Another really interesting strategy that just came out in Politico, which shows a lot of learning from 2016–I'll read from this piece now in Politico and explain why this is significant. This just came out: "Congressional Democrats stung by the Obama administration's soft-pedaled approach to Russian election interference in 2016, have a plan to prevent a repeat under President Donald Trump: Make as much noise as possible, early and often. For weeks, top Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate have been blaring warnings and demanding briefings and public disclosures from the intelligence community, shrugging off Republican charges that they're politicizing intelligence. And Democrats can now point to evidence that their pressure campaign might be working. On Friday, the Trump administration's counterintelligence chief publicly confirmed that Russia is attempting to harm Joe Biden's candidacy in 2020. The official, William Evanina, even singled out a pro-Russian Ukrainian, Andrii Derkach, as a key participant in the Kremlin's new effort."
Andrea Chalupa:
And according to Politico, Andrii Derkach is Ukrainian lawmaker who met with Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in Kyiv last December to discuss investigating the Biden family. Now, that may not seem like much, but considering the impact that idiots in the media had in 2016 to help the Trump Crime Family steal the election–and I'm talking mainly, of course, about the New York Times, which was running breathless coverage on the front page about Hilary's non-scandal email scandal, right? And of course, downplaying in a shocking way Trump's very real ties to the Kremlin. All of this matters because you have idiots in the media. You have these psychopathically ambitious people in the media like Ken Vogel who, last spring, came out with this "bombshell” of a story, trying to say that Biden was interfering in Ukraine's politics by pressuring Ukraine to fire their prosecutor general and his son had some connection there to Burisma.
Andrea Chalupa:
Vogel was even on cable news talking almost to Giuliani and that whole camp themselves saying they need to stop being spoken about the story and maybe let the reporters handle it, almost like Vogel was trying to protect his piece of meat, this juicy story that he could get a lot of mileage out of at the New York Times where he works. This is called, in journalism, “Winning the Day”, where you come out with a report that's so juicy that everybody is talking about it on Twitter. It's called, Winning the Day. What happens when you resort to the crack cocaine of Winning the Day journalism is that you're just pushing out articles for the sake of attention. It's like the crack cocaine of media. You're not stopping to think about the real world impact that your reporting is having and next thing you know, Donald Trump is president. You go, "How did this happen?" Because you are winning the day with Hilary's email stories that were just putting blood in the water, feeding crack to the hamster wheel of the media cycle.
Andrea Chalupa:
What the Democrats are doing by pushing the intelligence community to come out with what they know, what they're doing is very, very important because they did not do this in 2016. The Democrats in Congress are forcing the intelligence community to tell the American public who Andrii Derkach is before some idiot, like Ken Vogel, can write some breathless piece saying, "Here's this Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, saying that Biden did this and this and this." Because that, for a minute, would win the day for Ken Vogel. He would post that shit on Twitter with a big *boom* BREAKING and all of us would be like, "What's this? What's the latest?." He can't do that now to that extent. I think the Democrats are employing a very smart strategy by trying to neuter the Ken Vogels in the media, which they should've done in 2016.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Sarah Kendzior:
I agree with that facet and I certainly hope they keep up the pressure of having the intelligence community reveal everything they know about threats to election integrity. As we noted from our very first episode of Gaslit Nation, that's what Harry Reid tried to do in 2016 when he had spoken with the intelligence community and had said, "Our election is under grave threat from Russia and it includes the intent to falsify vote tallies." That is what he wrote in an open letter. Then he wrote that in August 2016 to James Comey who did nothing. Then he wrote it again in October of 2016 because Comey was still doing nothing, except now he had opened up a fatuous investigation into Hilary Clinton, which yielded no result and meanwhile, failed to inform the public about threats to the election before they went to the polls. The public has the right to know. No government branch has jurisdiction over the truth. For us to make an informed decision, before we go and cast our ballot, we need to know what forces are at play in the manipulation of the integrity of that vote.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is good that they're pushing back against these access journalists, these court stenographers, these propagandists pretending to be reporters, like Vogel. That part is good. The part I'm less convinced of in terms of it being a bulwark against encroaching autocracy is the court system. The sort of strategy you described Tom Perez laying out on MSNBC of all these lawsuits, it's like, yes, lawsuits are a potent force. Lawsuits can be a good idea. No one knows this better than the Trump goon squad with its coterie of criminal lawyers starting with Roy Cohn, going through Michael Cohen, culminating with Bill Barr. They understand the law. They understand how to abuse the law. They understand how to protect themselves from the law by rewriting the law. That puts the Democrats and anyone of conscience, it puts them on the defense.
Sarah Kendzior:
In that sense, I think a barrage of lawsuits is a good strategy, but they have not employed that strategy over the last few years. We've seen a reversal since the Democratic House came in. They started out with a list of 81 people and organizations, including major players–people like Jared Kushner or the Trump organization–that they wanted to have hearings for. They had the Michael Cohen hearing. The next hearing scheduled was supposed to be Felix Sater; that was canceled, and then it stopped. Then people stopped honoring subpoenas. They stopped showing up. They stopped having investigations as a result of that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Recently on Twitter, one of the most discouraging things I've seen is Representative Ted Lieu basically encouraging everybody to go out and vote early.–if you're voting by mail, vote early. If you're going to vote in person on election day, get out there early–because he knows the election is going to be rigged, or at least that they're going to attempt to rig it, and these are mechanisms to use to work around it. I think that's practical advice, but then people were like, "Oh my God, you are a representative. You're a congressman and you're telling us that this is just game, set, match. That they've won. That there are no checks and balances. That there's no accountability." To everybody who tweeted at him, he kept saying the same thing: "What do you expect us to do? What do you recommend we do?" And it’s like, you know, it's not the job of the everyday citizen to devise a legal or political mechanism of Congress. That is why we have representative government.
Sarah Kendzior:
Normally, if a person in office was behaving like that on Twitter, I would've gone off. I've gone off at some of them before, but because it was Ted Lieu, I bit my tongue because Ted Lieu is one of the very few people who has been trying to use the mechanisms available to Congress in order to beat back autocracy. In June, he called–I think I have it right here–he released a statement along with other representatives. It says, "House Dems propose strengthening Congress' contempt power to break administration stonewalls." I'm just going to read the very beginning of this. It says, "We've seen unprecedented and illegal obstruction by the Trump administration to congress.", Ted Lieu said.
Sarah Kendzior:
"House Democrats increasingly frustrated by the Trump administration for defying subpoenas are proposing legislation that would ratchet up their power to punish executive branch officials who reject their requests. Representative Ted Lieu and five other members of the House Judiciary Committee unveiled a rule change Monday to formalize and expand Congress' power of inherent contempt, its authority to unilaterally punish anyone who defies a subpoena or testimony or documents. Though Congress has long had inherent contempt power, it has been in disuse since before World War II. This power, upheld by courts, has included the ability to levy fines and even jail witnesses who refuse to cooperate with congressional demands, but such extreme measures have fallen out of favor over the years as Congress has relied instead, primarily, on litigation to enforce its subpoenas and officials across government have acknowledged the unappetizing prospect of using force to impose its will."
Sarah Kendzior:
He is absolutely right that we need to use inherent contempt. We need to use force. We need to use the power of the purse. And he has been saying this for a very, very long time. He was calling for impeachment for a long time. He was calling for hearings. And what is holding him back, I believe, is the House leadership. It's Nancy Pelosi and the heads of some of these other committees who, basically, are abetting Trump and its regime of brutal lawlessness by refusing to utilize the full powers of the House. What I'm taking from his tweets is that he is deeply frustrated. I wish he would call out why he can't pursue the action necessary to keep this administration in check and keep it from hurting the republic. I wish he would name names about who is not allowing him to use that power. I doubt he will, because before an election, they don't want to have Democrats versus democrats and whatnot, but man, it's bad.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's not just that. He's been calling for an investigation of Kushner. He's been calling for a bill that would prevent Trump from unilaterally launching nukes. He's trying to do his job. I like very few people in this Congress, but I, generally speaking, have appreciated his efforts. It's just a shame that they're not using the full powers at their disposal.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. Nancy Pelosi is Tom Hagen in the Godfather.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmhmm.
Andrea Chalupa:
She's not a wartime consigliere. Michael asks Tom to step aside when the families go to war, for a reason. That's Pelosi. She should've stepped aside and let someone like Barbara Lee go to town on all these people. The Democrats, under Trump, had the opportunity to turn C-SPAN into Netflix. People would've been binge watching C-SPAN with all these juicy scandals being investigated into Ivanka, into Jared Kushner, and yet, they acted like those two were above the law. That you couldn't touch them because they are Trump's children. There's a reason why Trump put his children in power, so he could use them as a shield. "Oh, don't touch my children. Children are off limits."
Andrea Chalupa:
Because all of these public officials, they have children. They don't want to mess with each other's children, but the difference is that Jared and Ivanka are de facto president of the United States. They missed an opportunity to really do Netflix and binge watching for C-SPAN for the American public. They did give us a bit of that, but not enough. They could've really milk that further, but I do want to point out that we have, still, one million days left before the election. A lot can happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
One million?Ddid you mean to say? Is that in Trump years or ...
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, I did. Yes, in Trump years, it's a billion, but yeah. A lot can still happen. A lot can still happen. You have the Kremlin proxies working very hard in Ukraine to try to dig up some dirt on Biden. What guys like Vogel count on for attention in the media is the American public not fully being versed in Ukraine and how it works. For instance, that big Vogel "bombshell" of Biden from last year where he thought he caught Biden trying to meddle in Ukraine's affairs by pressuring the firing of a prosecutor general. Well, let me tell you something: Ukraine's former president lost reelection in a landslide because he didn't fight corruption effectively, including not firing that deeply corrupt prosecutor general. Everybody that cared about fighting corruption in Ukraine and democracy for Ukraine wanted that guy gone.
Andrea Chalupa:
Biden was one of countless voices and a chorus demanding accountability and real substantial anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine. The former president was just too slow and dragging his feet, being an oligarch himself and Ukrainian voters made him pay the price for it. There was a sweeping spanking at the polls. So, Biden was absolutely correct. There was no story there. But again, Winning the Day "journalists" like Vogel depend on us not knowing those details here in America when it comes to Ukraine. So they're going to try to take full advantage of that and I think we all have to be vigilant of that and not allow these crack cocaine bombshells to have any oxygen because that's what Republicans are cooking up. They're going to be working on some October surprise. If that all fails, then you have William Barr that can create some legal mechanism to justify stealing the election. That's what authoritarians do. We're already at that point in our country where they're doing that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Agree, agree, agree. Speaking of authoritarianism, should we move on to Belarus, the American future?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. We're Tom Cotton's fantasy of sending in the troops against peaceful protestors. That's playing out in real-time.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Exactly. You know that it's bad when Americans look at the images of Belarus and then they're like, "Oh, it looks like Portland, Oregon." That's the point that we've come to. So, there was a "election" in Belarus. It was rigged by long-time dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for 26 years. In the 1990s, Belarus was called, The Last Dictatorship in Europe, but times have changed and they have changed for the worse. In 2020, autocratic regimes like Russia and Azerbaijan have consolidated while new European dictatorships like Hungary and Turkey have arisen. Lukashenko's election officials are claiming that he won a sixth term in office with 80% of the vote and they are claiming the opposition challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, got 10%. In reality, Lukashenko may have gotten as little as 20% of the vote and the election itself was harmed by brutal acts of voter intimidation.
Sarah Kendzior:
Following the announcement of the results, mass protests broke out in Belarus, centered largely in the capital city of Minsk, and state forces beat, kidnapped and arrested the protesters. They then cut the internet so that the abuses could not be recorded or disseminated worldwide or within Belarus. The demonstrators were largely people under 30 who have no memory of any other president than Lukashenko, and are now coping with a pandemic on top of the political repression and economic devastation that they have long endured. As of Tuesday morning, at least one protestor has been killed and Tikhanovskaya has been forced to flee to nearby Lithuania. So, Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, this is different. From I've been reading–and I've been following Belarus for some time–I think this is a turning point for the country. I don't think we've seen the end of this yet. They're employing a Hong Kong strategy. Of course, the movement of Hong Kong is still going despite crack downs by authorities and even a pandemic. I want to read from an article I wrote in 2013, an interview I did for Big Think with a Ukrainian human rights activist who is a founder of the feminist movement, FEMEN. FEMEN, they're known for naked women that flash mob appearances by Putin and other autocrats and literally put their bodies on the line to push back against white male patriarchy and oppression in the name of religion. I did an interview with one of the founders shortly following their time protesting Lukashenko in Belarus. So I'm going to share an excerpt from that interview so people can get some insight into what these peaceful protestors are up against. The story is very disturbing. I should note that Belarus’ own security arm is still called The KGB.
Andrea Chalupa:
"Inna Shevchenko, a 22-year-old leader of the Ukrainian organization, FEMEN, survived 24 hours of torture by the KGB in Belarus. On December 19, 2011, KGB agents kidnapped Shevchenko and two other FEMEN members in Minsk for protesting the country's president, Alexander Lukashenko, known as Europe's last dictator. The six agents drove the women blindfolded into a snow covered forest, stripped them naked, doused them in oil and threatened to burn them alive if they didn't complete humiliating drills. The agents chopped off the women's hair with knives, threatened rape and videotaped them, presumably for Lukashenko. One agent allegedly said for the camera, 'Look at those bitches that were traveling all over the world protesting. Look at them now.' Lukashenko did not have the women killed, likely, to avoid the media backlash Putin experienced over Pussy Riot who are imprisoned. Shevchenko and two compatriots, Oksana Shachko and Alexandra Nemchinova, were abandoned in the forest, naked and soaking wet without money or identification. They ran for hours and eventually came across a small village of loggers, all men. One had a cell phone that Shevchenko used to call FEMEN founder, Anna Hutsol, in Ukraine for help. Shevchenko credits FEMEN's fame for keeping them alive."
Andrea Chalupa:
So that's what Belarus is like. It's repression. It's disgusting. People are still protesting. Just to show the inspiring unity that's happening there today and a lot of comparisons our people are making to Ukraine's own revolution of dignity, Euromaidan: On Monday, Marichka Marczyk, a Ukrainian singer and musician from Ukraine who let her own band of merry artists in Ukraine's Revolution of Euromaidan, she wrote this, which I think is really interesting insight into what's happening there in the streets and the larger struggle. Marichka wrote, "Zero info from our friends, actresses of Belarus free theatre. They were taken by police yesterday and nobody heard from them yet. Police stations are out of space and placed protesters in garages and closed factories. Protests to be continued. People standing in a chain to block roads. One of the official calls for protesters is, 'If you are scared, sing a song. It will raise your morale and demoralize the enemy.'" She ends it with, "Zyvie Belarus." Long Live Belarus.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then, we have this interesting insight from Nikolai Khalezin, a co-founding artistic director of the Belarus Free Theatre: "The evening of August 9th was a turning point in the modern history of Belarus. The reason for this is not the use of overwhelming force against demonstrators who were trying to peacefully defend their right to free elections. Nor is it the fact that some members of the security forces and election commissions refused to carry out criminal orders. It was historic because the protesters have a new vision for the nation. This was not a protest in support of any specific politicians or political parties. This was a movement demanding fundamental reform in every sphere of the country's life. In this sense, the protest movement is closer to the Hong Kong model than the traditional Eastern European protest model, where political leaders have typically led the masses."
Andrea Chalupa:
"The protests currently taking place in Belarus are driven by small, localized groups with a strong emphasis on creativity and non-violent resistance. The authorities have great difficulty dealing with this approach, as their past experience has focused on detaining political leaders. This has led to the current situation, with mass arrests but no sign of an end to the protests. It is also worth dwelling on who is protesting. Many are young Belarusians, and a significant percentage are IT professionals or entrepreneurs, leading to smart and innovative approaches to protesting and dynamic responses to a rapidly changing situation. The lack of clear leadership makes it very difficult to predict the outcome of the current confrontation, but it is already obvious that the situation in Belarus will never return to the status quo of two or three months ago. We can say with some degree of confidence that the transition of power has already begun in the country, but it remains unclear how long this generational shift will actually take."
Andrea Chalupa:
So that's a lesson for all of us here at home. This is why we have this Gaslit Nation Action Guide. That's leadership taken from activists on the ground, not only in our country but countries around, the world who are risking their life in freedom. This is how it's done. That's why we say also in the Gaslit Nation Action Guide, art matters. Make art, be creative. Be creative. Ukraine's revolution was an art festival. You have people out there, artists, especially who are out there on the frontlines. In Portland, the Wall of Moms was very creative and that was a growing movement. All of this, Hong Kong, Belarus, the protests growing against Putin in Russia, all of us are united against a shared enemy, and our enemies are all united in their shared corruption. We just have to keep fighting and know that come November, we have to do what it takes to get them out.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Absolutely. I keep thinking about this because every day, we're seeing these unprecedented mass uprisings–as you mentioned, Hong Kong, Belarus, but also Russia, Israel, Lebanon before the terrible explosion in Beirut–this is happening worldwide. There are commonalities to all of this. Of course you see, increasingly autocratic, brutally repressive Right Wing governments. Some of these governments were long in play like Belarus, which has really no other system, officially. Others have lurched in this direction like Israel and the US over the last decade, decade and a half. Then the protesters tend to be people who have grown up in the shadow of the global tragedies of the last 40 years of extreme income inequality in every nation; of 9/11 and the "war on terror" and all of the American wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that have destabilized so many regions; of the 2008 global financial collapse, which destroyed the prospect of financial stability and opportunities for most young people and took the savings away from older people; from opportunity hoarding by elites of all of these countries in which jobs are reserved for the nepotistic offspring of the wealthiest citizens.
Sarah Kendzior:
Education is bought. Credentials are purchased. It is very hard, I think, to succeed on merit. Then there are also incursions on sovereignty. You see this with Hong Kong trying to take back its own culture from China. You see this, of course, with the Uyghurs in China who are now suffering in internment camps as all of their cultural history is destroyed. It's amazing to me to look at Belarus and to look at the United States because Belarus has long been kind of the most loyal, continual satellite state of the former soviet republics. Most of the former soviet republics very enthusiastically departed the Russian's sphere of influence. You see this most in the Baltics, with Estonia, with Lithuania, or in Central Asia–they created their own forms of nationalism, they got rid of Russian language, they nationalized the alphabet in the tradition of the 1920s and 30s, the Korenizatsiya period. These are still dictatorships, but they were now nationalist dictatorships instead of soviet dictatorships. I'm thinking here of places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, but then you had Belarus, which seemed pretty content to be in Russia's orbit or at least Lukashenko and those surrounding him seemed content to be. They were a proxy state.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then you look at the United States–the great opponent of Russia throughout the cold war period, the great super power against whom no one was supposed to be able to succeed–turning into a Russian proxy state, turning into a mafia state, controlled by a transnational crime syndicate consisting of oligarchs, plutocrats and mafiosos from around the world, but primarily from Russia and from the United States. To think of the US and Belarus as being in similar positions, having similar protests, having elections within a four-month period that are designed to be rigged that will likely be greeted with intense state violence, that will likely require citizens to take to the streets in order to take their country back... the US has really fallen. All credit to the Belarusians who are rising up because it's very scary.
Sarah Kendzior:
The United States has this long history of romanticizing decent when it happens in foreign countries, and of looking at things like the Velvet Revolution in 1989 as the model of how revolutions happen. It's just this beautiful flowering of poetry and then the dictator sees the power of the people and they step down and a great leader comes in and it's all good. When this happens in the United States, when it's black people rising up, then suddenly it's dangerous and threatening. But Americans are learning the hard way exactly how scary protest is. I think Americans who aren't white already knew this lesson very, very well, but white Americans–the folks that we now see protesting in Portland with their leaf blowers, with the Wall of Moms–they are seeing now that the government sees them as disposable and will attack them with violence. I think some of that recognition, some of the willingness to come out in protest, is because they see their own disposability in the eyes of this crime cult. They see it through coronavirus and the refusal of the Trump administration to pass basic public health initiatives to keep hundreds of thousands of people from potentially dying.
Sarah Kendzior:
We already have 160,000 people dead and so many more suffering or dealing with long-term complications of illness, all of which was preventable, and they chose death. This is an administration that will choose death. They will not choose you. They will choose death, and I think that that has been driven home in the most horrific way possible.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's an interesting time, clearly, for Belarus. One of the most important things that the West could do–the EU, Canada, the United States, whoever is left at home in the White House, whichever adults are left in the room–they have to go strong against Lukashenko. They absolutely have to pass sanctions against him. They have to be united. They have to have strong statements. During Ukraine's revolution, the Ukrainian protesters were saying, "Enough with the statements. Pass sanctions. Help us in more substantial ways". But this is the time to really push back against him. The reason why many in the West are electing to do this is because they fear that by doing this, they'll push Belarus closer against Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
The benefit that we have now is that Lukashenko wants to maintain his autonomy from Russia. Putin is trying to absorb his country. Russia, doing what it does best, trolled Belarus on his stolen election, congratulating him and saying that they look forward to working together as a united nation, essentially. That was what the statement was. It was very troll-ey. One of the ways Putin tried to rig things for himself so he could stay in power and die in power, like a typical dictator, was form a new nation. Form a new nation that included Russia and Belarus. They would become one nation. Lukashenko was like "No, thank you. I would like to remain a dictator of my own little pond over here."
Andrea Chalupa:
We can push back against the dictator of Belarus and the West should do it with strength and conviction and use all of the peaceful levers of power that they have, including sanctions against him and his family and his riot police, the heads of these riot police. They have to shut them down, because he's not going to go running to Putin, because as soon as he goes running to Putin, he's lost his country. He's lost his country. If Putin is all he has left as a lifeline, what do you think is going to happen? Russia is going to absorb Belarus. They're going to become that one nation because, under Putinism, it's hyper imperialistic. And as soon as they're done doing that, they no longer need Lukashenko. He could die from a heart attack, die in his sleep. He's old enough where they could arrange that, and they'll put in their own little proxy to be the governor of Belarus and over time just become another part of Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
So now is the time to strike definitively against Lukashenko and use all of your peaceful levers at your disposal, including sanctions against him and his family.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I agree, although I just look at what's happening now and at these institutions, which were supposed to support these sorts of protest or at least support the integrity of democracy in different countries, stand for it. The UN, the EU, NATO, they have been so dramatically weakened in the last four years, primarily because of what's happened in the US with the Trump administration aligning itself with dictators around the world, and in the UK with Brexit and their alignment of those leaders with dictators. It feels like these kinds of institutional barriers have diminished when we have the so-called paragons of western democracy actually part of an access of autocrats. So I don't even know what to do there. I always look at the Republicans and what they're doing now, where they're passing autocratic initiatives flagrantly in the United States. They're trying to keep people from voting. They're labeling Antifa as a terrorist group and then broadly proclaiming that anybody protesting or just, you know, stating their opposition to fascism is therefore a terrorist. Now, it's becoming illegal to be against fascism in America.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are all these things going on, but then when it comes to China, they're suddenly very much like, "Oh, yeah. We need democracy. We support the Hong Kong protesters." My own senator, Josh Hawley, is one of the main people doing this. I look at this and I don't believe the sincerity of it for a minute because I'm like, if you recognize this on a fundamental moral level as wrong–what the Chinese are doing to these different groups, to the Uyghurs, to the citizens of Hong Kong–why can you not see it in the United States and furthermore, why are you emulating these kind of autocratic repressive measures? It's because they are hypocrites. They are opportunists. This is mostly about money. And they don't care. But that's what makes me skeptical that the normal process of sanctioning a nation will be carried out by this Congress, because we've already seen it with Russia where they'll pass a sanction that’s supposed to punish people that stole the 2016 election and then they just don't enforce them.
Sarah Kendzior:
You get people like Oleg Deripaska building aluminum plants in Kentucky with Mitch McConnell. You get them just saying, "Yeah, sanction, whatever. We're going to keep going." It's the whole order of it, the whole mechanism of bulwarks against this corruption seems to have crumbled.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. If the Trump Crime Family and their enablers really posed a genuine threat to China, the Chinese regime would not be granting trademarks to Ivanka. Trump asked China to investigate Biden. All of that is just a ruse to juice up their ratings and throw raw meat at their base. They're all in bed together. All right. So, next in the authoritarian weather report, what do we have?
Sarah Kendzior:
We have corona. I feel like this is one of these things...we were gone for a two-week period, a little pause in the show for various reasons. During that time, we have seen the virus spread. It's also becoming this crisis point because people are trying to debate, "What do we do about the opening of schools?" And I'll just say, I'm in this position wondering what the hell is going to go on with my children's school, which starts in two weeks. They are public school students here. It looks like they're going virtual. We've had to look at all of these programs. I'm just sort of trying to process this as a parent. Parents everywhere are trying to figure this out. There are all these concerns about things like lunches for free lunch kids. We're in a Title One district. It is such a mess.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is so incredibly dangerous because they kept claiming–the Trump administration kept falsely claiming–that children can't get this. Last I read, there were tens of thousands of children who contracted the virus in the last week or so since schools have reopened. Children, generally, don't get severely ill from it, but they do pass it on older relatives that are vulnerable, so this just seems like a disaster. Then on top of this, we have mass evictions. We have the worst economy since the great depression. We have the collapse of small businesses, the collapse of art and entertainment and sports. And another thing that I feel like needs to be paid much more attention to in the road up to November is that the borders of the US are now sealed for, basically, the first time in history. We cannot get out. Trump went on and on about the wall, but the wall was constructed by other countries who do not want our diseased population to go within its borders.
Sarah Kendzior:
So a US passport, for the first time in history, is essentially useless. This is just like, oh my God, such a perfect storm of disaster heading up to this election where we're likely to see violence on the streets. We're likely to have seen a lot of people who maybe would've wanted to cross that Canadian border or that Mexican border. Canada and Mexico are not having it. It's a crisis point. I have a letter to read, a historical document to read, that I've been just looking at as I, as a parent, try to process this time, try to say something reassuring to the kids in my life, to my own kids, to my niece and nephew, because it's one thing for me to be mouthing off on Gaslit Nation and be very gloomy and direct. When you talk to kids, you don't want to snuff out that fire of optimism. You want to sort of give them a framework to process things and I’ll read that at the end of the show, but do you have thoughts on this, on this giant existential crisis shitstorm that we're living through?
Andrea Chalupa:
Sure. No, go ahead and read it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Okay. So I've been reading this to myself and read it to my kids, who didn't pay that much attention. Maybe your kids will. This is a letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to his children in 1971. In particular, it was to his 17-year-old daughter on how to deal with existential crises. He writes, "You're learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable social structure, that the older you get, people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons, and what have you got? A space wanderer named Nan. And that's okay. I'm a space wanderer named Kurt and Jane’s a space wanderer named Jane, and so on."
Sarah Kendzior:
"When things go well for days on end, it is a hilarious accident. You're dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well, I feel as though I've lost the years since Slaughterhouse Five was published, but that's malarkey. Those years weren't lost; they simply weren't the way I'd planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not. I look back on my own life and I wouldn't change anything." That's it.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's great. And there is a lot that we have to count as victories. Chuck Todd got demoted. I like to take credit for that. Women, often enough, we don't give ourselves enough credit.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Chuck Todd industrial Complex is getting dismantled.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly right. Gaslit Nation, only our third episode, we came out with the Chuck Todd Industrial Complex and the rest was history. So you're welcome, Chuck Todd. You and your flapping lips and our branding campaign got you demoted. I totally take credit for that, all right? We also have the fabulous Letitia James, the attorney general of New York State, which is a reminder that local politics can make all the difference. She is demanding that the blood money terrorist organization, the NRA–which was working with the Kremlin to dismantle our democracy–she wants it to cease to exist. A judge ruled that E. Jean Carroll can proceed with her rape-related case against Trump. And Jerry Falwell, Jr. has stepped down from Liberty University because he is disgusting. These are all highlights noted by the great Rebecca Solnit on her Facebook. Thank you for that.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, there is a lot to be grateful for. We are steamrolling them. We are creating a Wall of Moms and dads and children that do not want to live in this world, and they want another world and another world is possible. If you want to build that, please do not be on the sidelines binge watching the rapid decline of your democracy like it's some Netflix series because it's absolutely not. This is real life and countless lives are at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. So go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide. We have many ways that you can get involved right now, to use all the power you have now. If you do not do this now, you will deeply regret it later when things just escalate and get unimaginably worse. Please, roll up your sleeves and get to work. We are all being asked to do that right now. There are so many ways you can do that on the Gaslit Nation Action guide.
Andrea Chalupa:
The most important thing for all of us is, make a plan and figure out how you are going to vote in November. Get ready, if you have to, to protect yourselves. Get your snacks, get your masks, get your folding chair, get whatever you need if you have to wait in line for hours because that's what the Republicans depend on. They depend on stealing elections as an election strategy, so all of us have to fight like hell now while we still have time left.
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. If you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the orangutan project at the orangutanproject.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 at 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 Visonberg, Nick Farr, Demian Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based form, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon...