So Many Cults, So Little Time
America 2020 is a land of cults – personality cults, death cults, conspiratory cults, and a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government that binds them all together! We examine how the GOP has abandoned even the pretense of a platform in favor of blind worship of Dear Leader, Donald Trump and a dynastic kleptocracy run by Ivanka and Jared. We delve into Jared’s latest dirty deals around the world, and warn of the consequences of allowing an anti-American crime family to retain power.
Michael Cohen:
For more than a decade, I was President Trump's right hand man, fixer and confidant. I was complicit in helping conceal the real Donald Trump. I was part of creating an illusion. Later this week, he's going to stand up and blatantly lie to you. I'm here to tell you, he can't be trusted and you shouldn't believe a word he utters. So when you watch the president this week, remember this, if he says something is huge, it's probably small.
Michael Cohen:
If he says something will work, it probably won't. And if he says he cares about you and your family, he certainly does not. He's going to tell you that if you re-elect him, the economy will bounce back, that only he can get us out of this economic crisis.
Donald Trump:
I alone can fix it.
Michael Cohen:
Maybe for those like him. But if you think he cares about working class Americans, you're dead wrong. The president is going to talk to you about law and order. That's laughable. Virtually everyone who worked for his campaign has been convicted of a crime or is under indictment, myself included. So when the president gets in front of the cameras this week, remember that he thinks we're all gullible, a bunch of fools.
Michael Cohen:
I was a part of it and I fell for it. You don't have to like me, but please listen to me.
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, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Sarah Kendzior:
Last night, Monday night, was the first night of the GOP Convention. Half of the speakers–the keynote speakers–at that convention are Trump family-
Andrea Chalupa:
Were on cocaine!
Sarah Kendzior:
Okay. Yeah, I don't want to put a percentile on the cocaine or other substances, but we know for sure that half of them are Trump family members, which is worse than cocaine. Long ago, we warned you that Trump sought to build a dynastic kleptocracy and that this is why he installed Jared and Ivanka in office in the first place. And why those two have been running the government behind the scenes in coordination with a variety of oligarchs, mafiosos, and corrupt political actors.
Sarah Kendzior:
The GOP Convention is a branding operation for the Trump Crime Family. It is also yet another public loyalty oath required of his Republican lackeys who have forsaken any intellectual independence in favor of a rising autocrat. So, I personally did not watch this shit. Did you watch this shit?
Andrea Chalupa:
No, I'm practicing self care.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, me too. Me too.
Andrea Chalupa:
But I did see cocaine trending on Twitter.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Always a good sign.
Andrea Chalupa:
Kimberly Guilfoyle and Don Jr. both came out supercharged with this nuclear explosion of antics that coke users, people who have known coke users, were like, "Oh yeah, they snorted lines of coke before coming out here." That basically eclipsed that whole white powder convention that the RNC had, which I thought was really funny. And I have to point out, there was this article in New York Times Magazine that came out, a profile of Don Jr., showing him to be like the idiot son finally is earning his father's love after all these years.
Andrea Chalupa:
That was the big New York Times Magazine profile, that Don Jr. is emerging as a force that may be the natural political animal in the Trump Family and he has a political future, and Ivanka might actually get outshone here by Don Jr. And I thought that Magazine profile was just so whatever. It was one of those palace intrigues, like this anonymous source said this, this person said this.
Andrea Chalupa:
What it did though, was it allowed Don Jr's idiot squad–they call themselves the Wolf Pack, they're basically professional full time internet trolls that harass people fighting for human rights and trying to hold his father accountable–tt allowed their sound bites in trying to frame Don Jr. as this force, this future of the Republican Party. It allowed all their sound bites to come through.
Andrea Chalupa:
Even though there's snarky asides here and there, and some context here and there, it's really limited considering how complicit Don Jr. has been and the enormous corruption, and human rights abuses, and mass murder through negligence by his father and how he's been party to so much of that in promoting and pushing this horrible regime. So it was really disappointing that that New York Times Magazine article came out trying to present him as a force.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then Twitter corrected it by being like, "This guy is weak. He can't get on a stage without doing lines of coke. He clearly has a problem. His father will never love him." So it was really interesting to see the contrast between that and New York Times Magazine “trying not to be a puff piece” puff piece versus the reality that everyone was calling out on Twitter with that coked out Don Jr. performance.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. This convention is like white power meets white powder. It's bad. I'm not putting myself through watching it. We're going to talk about Eric Trump and his possible legal troubles later in the show. But one thing I've always thought it was interesting about Donald Jr. is that you can see this animosity between him and Trump going back so far. There's a vanity fair profile, I think from 1990, where Donald Jr. was 12 years old and he was talking about Donald Trump and saying, "He doesn't love anyone. He doesn't love me. He doesn't love himself. All he loves is his money."
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is little 12-year-old Donald Jr. who was estranged from his father during the divorce. And then there's all these recollections of him and his time in college about his substance abuse problems. I don't have pity for people who have caused mass abuses of citizens, of innocent lives, of our country and its sovereignty and it's democracy and its sanctity, which he did. So my sympathy here is limited.
Sarah Kendzior:
What I have always thought about him is that he is a disposable member of the Trump family. And we see within this family how disposable people are. We had Robert Trump, Trump's brother, who died recently and Trump didn't really seem to care. He just went golfing. I don't think we know a cause of death. I don't know a lot about Robert Trump beyond that he was in Jeffrey Epstein's black book, and I think the same kind of disposability is there with Eric.
Sarah Kendzior:
We certainly have seen neglect of Tiffany and Barron. These are not pressing national issues, but there's something worthwhile having insight into the family dynamic because as I said, they are attempting to build a dynastic kleptocracy. And he will only favor those who he thinks can carry out the operations of the transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. That does not really seem to include Donald Jr. and Eric, who do things like blurt out to magazines that they're mostly funded by Russia.
Sarah Kendzior:
They say that the quiet part allowed much more than the others. I still think it's going to be Ivanka and Jared as this nexus of power and I'm dreading whatever propaganda is delivered to us this week because it's frightening. It's extremely frightening to have your country fall into the hands of a crime family and become an entrenched mafia state. People will gossip about all of these little nepotistic relationships that line the administration.
Sarah Kendzior:
About McConnell and Chao, about Barr and his children who are installed in the administration, about Giuliani and his child who's in the administration. Then we have the Conways. This is the kind of gossip that people in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian States are intimately familiar with because it's all they have left, because you have the annihilation of the body politic and its subjugation underneath a clan.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are clan politics in multiple senses of the word.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right. And the New York Times eats it up. The New York Times is like the yearbook committee of that palace intrigue gossip of emerging dictatorship.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep. They always have been. Those articles are churned out. As we’ve said many times, the Trump family covers up crime with scandal and people buy into these family dramas, these alleged feuds within the administration, while not following the money, not looking at the incredible breaches of law, at the theft of basic rights, the theft of elections. There's a lot going on. Andrea and I are kind of just nesting for the apocalypse here, barricading ourselves against the next few months, which are going to be very difficult, very chaotic.
Sarah Kendzior:
Unless you are Mike Pompeo, who I want to address here because this is another interesting facet of the GOP Convention. It would not be a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government without a key member giving a speech from another fucking country. Rapture fiend, Mike Pompeo, is addressing the Republicans from Jerusalem, which Trump is claiming he has personally made the capital of Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is not remotely true, although he did move the Sheldon Adelson branded embassy to Jerusalem. This is a cynical ploy to appeal to Trump's evangelical base, to ultra-Zionists and to mega donors like Adelson himself who has poured an enormous amount of money into the GOP while defining himself as a single issue voter, and that issue is Israel. All of this is disturbing and it's a reminder that it is a very bad idea to build policy based on the rapture.
Sarah Kendzior:
That is what Mike Pompeo is about. He has said so openly in speeches that he thinks that this is the apocalypse. He thinks that this is the end times and that he's on the right side of God and the corruption and brutality that he's participating in is something that is divinely sanctioned. Again, this is a deeply frightening thing to have to contend with, with this person as not only Secretary of State, but before that the head of the CIA.
Sarah Kendzior:
So yeah, he will be doing that from Israel and I'm afraid to see how it is used by the media, by political operatives, and by others, because they're going to try to appeal to the worst instincts in people. And they're going to try to frame incredibly inhumane and illegal actions as something that God has willed.
Andrea Chalupa:
People have to have honest conversations with themselves about what their plan is in November should Trump and Barr be successful in stealing this election. What is your plan? Prepare yourself now, especially prepare yourself emotionally so you don't fall into despair. I just think everything that's been unfolding, especially this week alone, it's just going to accelerate from here on out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Don't expect November to bring any relief. It's just going to be an acceleration of this constant far-right plummet towards authoritarianism that we've already been undergoing the last four years. And on top of that, even if Biden and his coalition of voting rights groups and lawyers–election protection lawyers–manages to pull off a victory, a free and fair election in November, we still have to contend with the Trump Family Republican Party.
Andrea Chalupa:
We still have to contend with Don Jr. and his army of professional trolls. We still have to contend with the fact that Lachlan Murdoch–who makes his father, Rupert Murdoch seem like a drum circle-beating hippie–Lachlan won the power struggle. Lachlan won, James is out, so we have Fox News on acid. So, this whole Republican-driven hijacking of our democracy that's been in play for decades...
Andrea Chalupa:
I was telling Sarah just before this, the Bush Crime Family is as bad as the Trump Crime Family. So, all these Republicans saying, "Oh, Trump is not our Republican Party." Yes, it is. That's exactly who you are. You've always been anti-science. You've always been pro superstition. You've always been trying to turn our democracy into a theocracy, even though the founding fathers were very clear on the separation of church and state.
Andrea Chalupa:
You’ve always been chipping away at the rights of women, voting rights. You needed to steal elections in order to come to power and so forth. You've always been the pro corruption, destroying the planet party. The Republican Party is the party of death. Donald Trump is the Republican Party, Donald Trump has always been the Republican Party since the time of Richard Nixon. It's the same players, it's the same bad actors.
Andrea Chalupa:
So all of us need to emotionally accept that we are in a marathon and that whatever happens in November, brace yourself. I'm telling you this up front. Sarah and I have a very long We Didn't Start the Fire, Billy Joel episode today, so I just wanted to get this out of the way first and foremost. All of us have to emotionally brace for impact for the worst happening in November. Remember election night in 2016; have a backup plan emotionally for should that happen again this November 2020.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then, even if we escaped becoming a full fledged dictatorship, prepare yourself for a long term, sustained marathon battle against Karl Rove and Paul Manafort's Republican Party. This isn't going to go away overnight. It may if we continue to stay engaged and stay vigilant, it may, it may get better, substantially better 10 years from now. But not unless we fight like hell election cycle after election cycle. Okay. Continue, Sarah.
Sarah Kendzior:
Absolutely. On that note, about the Republican Party, the third thing I was going to mention that's significant about this year's convention is that there is no platform. They did not bother making a platform. They are recycling last year's platform. They have no intention of addressing or resolving COVID-19, or the Great Depression-level economy, or any of the other unprecedented crises that are afflicting Americans in 2020.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is because their goal is to strip America down and sell it for parts. That has always been their goal. And a sick, weakened, impoverished America is easier to take apart than a strong, healthy, powerful America. They are trying to kill us. You can see that through their actions in response to the pandemic and they don't care who knows. And yes, you're absolutely right that this is an extension of what the Republican Party has been building to since the years of Watergate.
Sarah Kendzior:
And to some degree before, but I think that's when it really took off. Under Reagan, you saw the economic policies take off. It's remarkable that the same individuals are still around. These Roy Cohn proteges of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. You have the Bush family and yet another instance of a dynasty. You can basically look at a lot of the key players of Iran–Contra–who were basically our age, Andrea, when they were doing this–they're now the ones calling the shots.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that's why we've always hoped that people would emphasize the transnational aspects of this crime cult and of its goals more than they do. Because this is not just an American shift, this is a global shift. As for your comments about the Bush family, I think that this thing the Democrats are doing where they're embracing George W. Bush as comparatively "normal” not only is incredibly disrespectful to the victims of his illegal wars, to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, to all the damage that he caused and the country that he left behind when Obama had to come in and attempt to clean it up. There's still a lot that we don't know about the Bush family. I was reading Bob Graham's book–Bob Graham, the former Senator of Florida who was part of the 9/11 commission–and he was very adamant that Americans did not know the whole story of 9/11.
Sarah Kendzior:
And he was not some sort of conspiracy theorist. He was not out there in his theories. He was somebody who was studying the event intimately. And if you read that book, it's basically implied or quite strongly implied that George W. Bush and the Bush family are Saudi assets, much in the way that Trump is a Kremlin asset. We have a long history in this country of the top officials being beholden to other governments in part for resources, and in part, I don't know, for other kind of arrangements.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think for a realignment of the world order. That's why we've had all these episodes where we've discussed, you know, what did the Cold War mean? How did it end? What did it accomplish? That's why we had Timothy Snyder, a renowned historian of that era, also kind of challenging the conventional wisdom of why the Cold War was sought and who won it. His conclusion, as is ours, is that oligarchs won the Cold War.
Sarah Kendzior:
And a lot of the events that have transpired since have just continually shifted control of the world and its resources away from representative government, away from institutional accountability, away from transparency and towards elite domination–criminal elite domination–as this line between government, and corporations, and organized crime, that line began to break down.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, yeah, I just summed up all of Gaslit Nation's episodes in one paragraph, which probably sounds very overwhelming, very confusing. But that's the situation we're in. It is overwhelming, it is confusing. We use this time here to try to make sense of it.
Sarah Kendzior:
I wanted to just ask if you had any comments on the reuse of the platform, because of course, Manafort was one of the people who was key in writing the original one in 2016. If you don't, we can just keep going.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, you mentioned Bush and the Saudis. This is a reminder that the holy war that the Republicans have been raging against Muslims; it's not against Muslims. Because Saudi Arabia is obviously a Muslim nation. It's against poor brown people. They're happy to take oligarch money if it comes from a Muslim, so just be clear about that. So this whole holy war that they're raging, it's against poor brown people and not just Muslims clearly.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's part of the larger extension of protecting white supremacy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to talk a bit later in the show of what Jared Kushner has gotten up to.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm excited for that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, and this realignment of the Middle East, which has been something that's been a goal of his long before he entered the White House. I thought there are multiple international actors whose goal in getting Trump into the White House was actually to get Kushner into the White House, and to get Kushner near classified information and get him in a position where he can make policy decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of Americans or of America itself.
Sarah Kendzior:
They have to do with pleasing these international actors, among them, Netanyahu and MBS. They also have to do, with some degree, with getting him out of the enormous amount of debt he was in before he took power. But we'll get to that in a bit.
Sarah Kendzior:
One thing I've been meaning to discuss more in detail on this show is QAnon. We've discussed that before and I wrote about them in my book, Hiding In Plain Sight, but now, QAnon has reached a broader, more mainstream audience. You're seeing a lot of analysis of it. I encourage you to look for journalists who've been tracking this phenomenon from the beginning. It's easy to misinterpret. It's easy to sort of construe it in a way, without the proper context, in which you're missing some of the things that happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I'm going to just sum up what's happening here. We have QAnon members running for Congress. We had a press conference in which Trump was asked this question that reminds me of like, when Lisa Simpson asked Mr. Burns questions when he was running for mayor on the Simpson, like, "You have the momentum of a runaway steam train, how do you do it?" But it was one of these, like "This group of people treats you as a Godlike figure and says that you're heroically rescuing children. Do you believe it?"
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, Trump is like, "Yes." And honestly, as much as I rightfully go off on Trump, I don't know how else one answers that question. It was just so obviously a planted question that could have been asked in a different way. Anyway, there's been a lot of discussion about is QAnon dangerous? The answer is, yes, to an extent, because any cult is dangerous, and that's what this has become.
Sarah Kendzior:
Blind obedience is inherently dangerous. And because some members of QAnon have a history of violence, Trump is going to use QAnon to stoke violence, particularly around the time of the election and after the election. And so people are saying, "What do we do?" And I have been saying for three years, the only way to neuter QAnon–to strip it of whatever violent capacity it might have–is for everyone, including and especially our officials, to be brutally honest about corruption in government.
Sarah Kendzior:
In particular, to be brutally honest about the role of child trafficking and blackmail over multiple decades, embodied by, but certainly not limited to, the Jeffrey Epstein Ghislaine/Robert Maxwell operation. Because the main claim that QAnon makes that the U.S. is controlled in large part by sadistic pedophile elites is accurate. We have covered this claim on Gaslit Nation for years.
Sarah Kendzior:
And you see examples of it with Epstein and Maxwell, but also in multiple predecessor cases like Craig Spence in the late 1980s or Roy Cohn's blackmail operations, which also involved kompromat over sexual trafficking and abuse of minors. People have denied that these operations existed and they whitewashed the perpetrators for decades. That's why you heard so little about Epstein in the 2016 election, despite his connections to Trump, who of course was accused of raping a 13-year-old procured by Epstein.
Sarah Kendzior:
And also many others involved in the election, whether Bill Clinton or high-ranking officials from other countries–they don't want to talk about this. And it's real. And unfortunately the denial of it, and then eventually admission that yes, this exists, has, I think in the minds of a lot of QAnon supporters, it's validated them. It's saying, "Aha. We were right all along, so the other stuff that they're saying must be true," and it's not.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that's why this has been such an effective operation because the best propaganda has a core grain of truth. And here that truth is all the more powerful because of the continuous refusal of government officials and journalists to acknowledge it. To specify some of the other claims that QAnon has made… first of all, if you don't know the group, the main thing it believes is that there is an anonymous government official named Q who leaves coded clues on the internet.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's been doing this since 2017. What it promises is that Trump has actually been installed in office to take down the "Deep State" and is the savior of children who have been abducted, or abused, or used in plots by criminal elites. And that he is going to bring about justice and to free them. So it taps into this deep emotional core for a lot of people. And I've watched as people who otherwise might've condemned Trump or who might take a different stance on things get pulled into the QAnon network because it was the only one, or one of very few, who were addressing very real cases like Jeffrey Epstein.
Sarah Kendzior:
While it's doing this, it's also making a bunch of absolutely bizarre, but basically I guess benign claims, one of which is that JFK Jr. is actually alive, and leading an underground revolution on behalf of Trump. But it's also made a number of dangerous claims. It's accused a number of public figures of cannibalism, of murder, of child abuse. And it has extended threats to those public figures to the supporters of them.
Sarah Kendzior:
And the Trump administration is tapping into this and trying to demonize ordinary Americans, trying to divide us in a very deep way beyond just Red States, and Blue States, and so forth. It's trying to portray ordinary people as threats, and that in turn has prompted some members of QAnon to make threats. And it's the threats that are the problem, and the weaponization of them for political propaganda. So, as I said, honesty is the only policy here if you want to prevent QAnon from becoming even more of a public safety threat than it is.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's worth noting the timeline of QAnon's evolution. QAnon emerged right around the time of the indictments of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly.
Sarah Kendzior:
Which is when the Trump Crime Cult moved from denial over Russia, moved from the stance of, "Oh, I have nothing to do with Russia," to a flip the script approach in which they accused the other side of what they themselves had done, or they swap out regions and players. Russia became Ukraine and Trump became Hillary Clinton, and so on. It also emerged at the height of #MeToo when elite predators were being exposed and it seemed very likely that Trump's connections to Jeffrey Epstein were going to become an object of focus.
Sarah Kendzior:
QAnon was an early propaganda intervention to direct the attention of those looking at Epstein into a Trump supporting movement where Trump is presented as the savior of trafficked children instead of someone who was a friend of Epstein and was accused in court of raping a 13-year-old. We do not know who started QAnon, but this timing is very likely not a coincidence.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's become an effective movement in part because of the refusal of officials, including Democrats, to take the core claim seriously and to call out the Epstein operation in particular. I have more to say on that as a symptom of savior syndrome. I wrote about that in my book. You see the flip side of the “Mueller Will Save Us” narrative, and the “Q Will Save Us”, or “Trump Will Save Us” narrative. But yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
America has a disinformation crisis, and this has been going on for many years now. We're driven by largely Republican policies. We got to this crisis point because of utter lack of funding for public schools across America. We have hedge funds gobbling up newsrooms across America and laying off journalists that we desperately need as watchdogs today, including local watchdogs where a lot of corruption happens.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have less and less investigative journalism units across the country. Investigative journalism is very costly and time-consuming. It needs a lot of money in order to run. And those jobs have been disappearing over the last couple of decades. And what you have is the consolidation of power of far-right media, far-right media getting stronger, including on the local level with Sinclair buying local TV stations across the country.
Andrea Chalupa:
And running what looks like Fox News on Acid, even more aggressive in its lying than Fox News. So all of this of course is creating a horrific disinformation crisis in America, and disinformation is a public health crisis. We saw, for instance, the Kremlin pushing anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, which has real world consequences. Of course, a lot of that idiocy is homegrown and American companies in Silicon Valley did very little to combat the spread of disinformation when it came to vaccines.
Andrea Chalupa:
And now you have diseases that they shouldn't be getting thanks to the power of science. It's like this dark age that we're entering in with disinformation. We saw disinformation putting the lives of the first Black president and his family at risk with the Birther Movement that was being driven by Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, and the Kremlin as well. So all of this points to QAnon–I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't started by a hostile foreign enemy that was specialized in disinformation, spreading disinformation as we very well know the Kremlin is skilled at this.
Andrea Chalupa:
That was the whole soul and heart of the Mueller Report, that whole deep dive into the internet research agency, that troll factory that was spreading all of disinformation across all available social media channels, supercharged by Cambridge Analytica, a militarized propaganda firm founded by billionaire, Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon. And how that helped tip the scales, not only in our election, but also in the Brexit vote.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a great book on the Gaslit Nation Reading Guide by a professor out of Penn, I believe that did a big deep dive into how social media played an influential role in 2016. So, the first post that I have here in the Washington Post, the very first QAnon post, according to the Washington Post, popped up in October 2017. And what was happening in October 2017? You had Putin's operative, Paul Manafort, who was working through his Kremlin handler, Konstantin Kilimnik, who's a Russian intelligence officer.
Andrea Chalupa:
You had Paul Manafort turning himself in, finally, under pressure to the FBI. That was a big turning point. I wouldn't be surprised if the Kremlin–of course in conjunction with their far-right American maniacs–had this op ready, just as they've used so many ops like this, leveraging our social media channels against us for years. They've done this before, they've had lots of practice at doing this, so why wouldn't they get this in motion to fight back, to sow discord?
Andrea Chalupa:
To incite people to violence, to incite people to hurt themselves by spreading disinformation that actually works against their interests, like not wearing a mask and not getting a vaccine that’ll keep you and your children safe, and all of that. Disinformation is a public health crisis and it is very much in the interest of our enemies to fan those flames.
Sarah Kendzior:
I can't speak for the origins of it. I feel like whoever began, and certainly the people who've contributed to it and helped build it up intimately, understand American political culture, understand internet culture, and understand the biggest weakness of this crime cult is their incredible sadistic brutality. And the fact that whoever you support, whatever you might otherwise believe in, I think most people will oppose child abuse.
Sarah Kendzior:
Most people are horrified by something like Jeffrey Epstein's operation. That's like the glue holding our country together, is no matter what your political persuasion is, you are horrified by him. You want justice for those victims. You want to expose these people. You want to make sure that this never happens again. So I think that one of these tactics was preemptive narrative inversion, much like Pizzagate, where they have to accuse the others of what you yourself are doing while presenting yourself as the savior.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I think another thing that they understood well, and I'm going to just read briefly from my book here. I made a comparison between the acolytes of QAnon and those who were proclaiming constantly throughout 2017 and 2018, “Mueller will save us”, that there were sealed indictments, that there were secret plans. This went beyond just, “I hope Mueller does a good job and I hope that those who committed crimes are held accountable”.
Sarah Kendzior:
It was a form of worship. It was a personality cult. What I wrote here is, "Savior syndrome is a mindset that flourishes during the unstable period of autocratic consolidation when frightened citizens seek to find meaning in the inexplicable actions of their failed leaders. To those under the sway of savior syndrome, once trusted officials are not incompetent or corrupt, they are merely playing 3D chess.
Sarah Kendzior:
It doesn't matter if officials are, in reality, resorting to the weakest moves. “When you don't know what to do, push a pawn” could have been the motto of the Mueller probe. Their motives must be presented as pure; their tactics, impeccable and impenetrable. The abdication of the admired is too much for those seeking saviors to process, no matter their political predilection.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so for two years, one group of political junkies lit Mueller-themed prayer candles, while another parsed Trump tweets for coded clues. Both sides told the skeptics to shut up and trust the plan. Neither side got what they wanted." And so that's where we still are now, unfortunately, as a country. That's why we have the Republican Convention framed in the way that it is, as an authoritarian cult, as a cult revolving around a family.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's why we're seeing savior syndrome flourishing yet again on the Democratic side. I think people have finally abandoned “Pelosi's going to save us”, which is where they went after “Mueller is going to save us” failed. And now it's on the “2020 election will save us”, even though that election is being rigged and compromised before our eyes. So this is a very dangerous tendency that flourishes during times like this, where people are so frightened that they don't know who to trust, they just want to follow.
Sarah Kendzior:
They don't want to think, and so I encourage you–we know, we know how scary it is right now, this is a genuinely frightening time–but try to keep your wits about you, keep your individuality, your propensity for critical thought. It's not bad to ask questions. My issue with QAnon is not at all that they're asking questions about things. I think that that's a healthy, good tendency, and I think that it's being exploited.
Sarah Kendzior:
People who are following this movement are being driven into a dark cause that perhaps they don't fully understand. I think a lot of people on the “Democratic or progressive” side are also tricked. That's my point is that no one has above this. People fell for the Mueller probe. They fell for these false saviors just as a lot of these QAnon folks are falling for Q. So it's not like a matter of intelligence; it's a matter of emotional manipulation. And they're doing it among the most sensitive of topics.
Sarah Kendzior:
Topics that resonate greatly with parents, or just with anyone who worries about children and topics that are rooted in a grain of truth. So yeah, we need honesty. And one of the things that we needed to get to the bottom of is, who is part of this movement? Who is funding this movement? What is the ultimate goal? How will it be weaponized during the election? It's a very tough thing to contend with and people should take it seriously.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. And how do we shut it down? Because whoever started it, it exists now. So it's a big fat target for anybody to manipulate and drive people into dangerous action. That's the issue is like what is big tech doing to stop this? What are local officials doing to stop this? This is a health crisis. And as times are very scary, people are easier to manipulate. People are desperate for somebody to come and fix this.
Andrea Chalupa:
They want to give up personal responsibility because they themselves are exhausted, they themselves are under a great deal of pressure, this is an economic crisis. There's a health crisis, so why is it up to me to fix this? So people are looking for some outside force to come along. And so all of these conditions combined make some people really vulnerable to this cult mentality.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I want to read from this Guardian article from May 2009, that has been making the rounds today because we're up against an actual cult. Trump and his base, they're like a mass suicide of followers refusing to wear masks, doing all these super spreader events. It’s just like that amazing speaker, that young woman at the DNC said, who lost her father to COVID-19. She said that her father had a preexisting condition of trusting Donald Trump.
Andrea Chalupa:
And he, of course, wasn't alone. That's Trump's base. It's a mass suicide cult now. So I'm going to read from this May 2009 Guardian piece that we'll link to in the show notes. "Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, who once taught at Harvard Medical School wrote a paper titled, ‘Cult Formation in the Early 1980s’. He delineated three primary characteristics, which are the most common features shared by destructive cults.
Andrea Chalupa:
“One, a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power. That is a living leader who has no meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group and its source of power and authority.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Two, a process of indoctrination or education is in use that can be seen as coercive persuasion or thought reform, commonly called brainwashing. The culmination of this process can be seen by members of the group often doing things that are not in their own best interest, but consistently in the best interest of the group and its leader. Lifton's seminal book, Thought Reform and Psychology of Totalism, explains this process in considerable detail.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Three, economic, sexual, and other exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie,"–which reminds us of the Steve Bannon arrest for frauding donors to his crowdfunding campaign to build the wall.–“The destructiveness of groups called cults varies by degree, from labor violations, child abuse,”–the child pedophilia happening, the sex abuse happening today, and the human rights crisis that the Trump regime engineered on the border.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Medical neglect,”–don't wear a mask. The whole pandemic–“in some extreme and isolated situations calls for violence or mass suicide.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, fun episode, but people need to confront these things. What you said before, about how do we stop this? I still think telling the truth, as ugly as it is, as horrifying as it is, no matter who it exposes. If the truth comes out, then people begin to have trust in something again. They have faith in something again, something real, something tangible. We have this bifurcated reality, which Trump both creates and exploits.
Sarah Kendzior:
And of course, he's surrounded by skilled propagandists. He's a product of reality TV, he's a product of tabloids. This manipulation of public perception is something that he's extremely experienced in. And we have institutional decline. While these reactions to it are not good, in their socioeconomic context they're understandable, and what we've lacked is transparency and we've lacked accountability.
Sarah Kendzior:
When you see these horrific actors go for decades unpunished, a natural reaction to that is fear. You fear, what will they do to you? These are people who are intertwined with elite institutions, with powerful actors. These are not random criminals on the street, these are criminal elites. The refusal to really tackle this crisis is both damaging–it's making the crisis worse–and it's frightening.
Sarah Kendzior:
Because of course behind that is a lot of blackmail, a lot of complicity, a lot of people doing horrific things while occupying positions of power. That's what we, as Americans–no matter who you voted for or no matter who you support–we're all dealing with that. Odds are, we were not participants in it. If you're just an ordinary person, you're looking down at these actors above who are corrupt, and malicious, and who get away with it continually.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's both demoralizing and frightening to watch and it's tragic for the victims. So I would hope that maybe in some sense, we can pull together as a country to just try to take this system, this coalition of corruption apart and examine it, and bring the perpetrators to light. And on that note, do you want to talk about Jared Kushner?
Andrea Chalupa:
I always want to talk about Jared Kushner, but I do want to point out just to give our audience some breathing room–you on the spin cycle there listening to this in a wheel of fury–I want to share some good news and then we'll go into the lord of chaos and evil, that is Jared Kushner. We can fight our way out of this. Elections of course matter, including local elections, especially local elections.
Andrea Chalupa:
In New York City, where I live, we adopted the Green New Deal and our mayor has a great climate czar who's been actively going after suing the big oil giants for their role in destroying our planet and bringing about climate change, which we're now... And also helping prepare New York City to brace for impact for when Mother Nature's big blue wave breaks. So, there is good news on that front from all these combined efforts.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exxon's market value has sunk to $175 billion. The company has been plagued, in part, by claims that it deliberately concealed the damage that the oil it has long extracted and refined and gasoline was doing to the planet. So it's been dropped from the Dow Jones, which is great news, and that's a sign for things to come. We're finally, hopefully, leaving the age of oil behind and that's happening because of grassroots power. That's happening because of elections.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's happening because officials are forcing accountability. So we do have a way out of this, and that is what we always say on the show; stay engaged, stay vigilant and fight. Take the long view. Go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on our website, gaslitnationpod.com and find something to do there and commit yourself to it wholeheartedly. Just start small, start anywhere and keep going. Because in time, we're going to weed out all of this corruption and take our country back.
Andrea Chalupa:
Don't give your power away, stay active, stay vigilant. And if you want, you could even join me on the evening of September 2nd. I am co-hosting a letter writing party with Swing Left, our wonderful friends at Swing Left, to help get out the vote. You can join from anywhere. That's September 2nd, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern. And at the top of the show notes for this week's episode, I'll post a link where you can RSVP and get access to the Zoom invite. So I hope to see you all there.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, let's talk about Kushner. #KushnerIsEvil was trending on Twitter and I thought that my DMs with Sarah had been leaked. I was like, "Everyone's saying Kushner is evil. It's what Sarah and I say every other day." There's this amazing report that came out in The Daily Beast, a deep dive investigation by Erin Banco who's a fantastic journalist that you guys should all follow on Twitter.
Andrea Chalupa:
And what she uncovers is that Jared Kushner got his back channel to Russia, the one that he always wanted all these years. Remember in 2017, there was reporting that Kushner literally went to the Russian ambassador at the time, Kislyak, and asked if he and his family, the Trump family, could have a back channel to the Kremlin. And Kislyak was probably licking his chops. Couldn't believe what a gift the Kremlin had given itself with helping bring the Trumps to power.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just to read from this article, it focuses on the CEO of a Kremlin Sovereign Wealth Fund who was Putin's proxy. Because Putin of course–like Trump has Michael Cohen and his other proxies–Putin too has his Michael Cohens, the guys that go out and do the dirty work for him. So, to build that bridge, that back channel to the Trump family, Putin had Dmitriev, the CEO of a Kremlin Sovereign Wealth Fund, and I'm going to read from this now.
Andrea Chalupa:
"Dmitriev, the CEO of a Kremlin Sovereign Wealth Fund, was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO, Erik Prince, in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated often at a distance and at times through intermediaries,"–and my common is plausible deniability, it's how this all works–"about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together.
Andrea Chalupa:
“The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies of broken ventilators to New York at the height of the pandemic in the city and according to multiple senior officials.
Andrea Chalupa:
“After the 2016 election, President Putin himself tasked Dmitriev directly with trying to make inroads with Trump's transition team. According to a recent report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller's Special Council Report, Dmitriev got to work actively trying to connect with members of Trump's inner circle, who would eventually wield influence in a new administration. He was particularly interested in connecting with Kushner.” those reports said.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now here's where things get interesting, and the QAnon people might find this especially interesting. "Dmitriev began his outreach to Kushner by connecting with George Nader, a Lebanese-American politiol close to the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed in the United Arab Emirates who helped broker meetings with the incoming Trump administration. Dmitriev's fund, RDIF, had co-invested with the Emirati Sovereign Wealth Fund on a series of projects. The two men had been in frequent contact.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Dmitriev invited Nader to a chess tournament and asked him to invite Kushner. Though Nader never passed on the message, the reports said, over the next several weeks, Dmitriev continued to speak with Nader about the possibility of meeting transition officials like Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. Nader was later sentenced on child pornography charges in the Eastern District of Virginia."
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. So, the next part is some promotion for my film, Mr. Jones, available now on Amazon and iTunes. "In his congressional testimony in November 2017, Erik Prince said he told Dmitriev that, 'If Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine.'”–which is available now, you can watch that story. Mr. Jones–”'After killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.'"
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. So, golden handcuffs time. "It noted that Russian companies would make investments with RDIF, financing to serve the U.S. market in the Midwest, creating real jobs for hard hit areas with high employment."
Andrea Chalupa:
What I just read is the Kremlin trying to sell Trump and the U.S. government on letting them come in and spread the Kremlin's golden handcuffs around, especially in the hard hit Midwest. Remember, Midwest being States that the Kremlin’s proxy, Manafort, was interested in when it came to helping steal the election for Donald Trump. The Midwest States were the focus of the Audit the Vote movement and the recount, focused on election hacking.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is what we've been saying since 2016; Putin has been trying to do what he does with Ukraine, and that is, through his proxies, spread Kremlin linked money around to further their tentacles across the U.S. and further their influence, and they lock you in that way. Your business ties are so close that you're not going to hold them accountable. You want to make that blood money.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's exactly why, to this day, most people have never heard of the Holodomor–Stalin's genocide famine that killed millions of people, the vast majority in Ukraine–because too many in the West and in the UK were making a lot of blood, doing business with the Soviet Union. What the Kremlin is trying to do here is really force and recreate that. And they keep dangling this carrot in front of Trump and the U.S. government saying, "Let us in, let us in. Look at all this great money we can make together."
Andrea Chalupa:
That's what they did under Stalin's government and it worked back then. So, at the Helsinki Hell Summit, this great deep dive goes on to say, "John Bolton pointed out that, 'What both of them, Putin and Trump really want to discuss in Helsinki was increasing U.S. trade and investment in Russia, a conversation that lasted a surprisingly long time given there was so little to say with so few U.S. businesses really eager to dive into the Russian political and economic morass.' Bolton wrote in his book.
Andrea Chalupa:
“It was a point that Dmitriev and Kushner had been trying to get across for a long time.” Right? Because they both know blood money makes the world go round. See my film, Mr. Jones, for more. "’Meanwhile, back in Washington,’ the report goes on, "senior U.S. officials attempted to engage in intelligence sharing with Russia, including information on terrorist financing. But when the U.S. shared intelligence with Moscow, it was rarely reciprocated, and when it was, the information wasn't helpful, officials said.
Andrea Chalupa:
“'Moscow took a lot of license to really push our boundaries and our buttons very harshly as one senior official described it.'" Yeah, because you can never trust the Kremlin. Ask Ukraine about that. Look at Ukraine's long history with the Kremlin during Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers were promised safe passage by Russian proxies, AKA Russian soldiers that invaded their country, and instead they were massacred. You cannot trust the Kremlin.
Andrea Chalupa:
Russia today is being held captive by a KGB agent who's got this Neo-Soviet mindset. Study Soviet history to understand that. Until Russia's free, until Russia is a stable democracy, you can not trust this Kremlin. This is the final piece that I want to highlight. So Dmitriev goes on really pushing this, "Let's get together. Let's be United. Think about all the money we can make." And I'll read from this now.
Andrea Chalupa:
"In May, a U.S. Air Force aircraft landed in Moscow. Officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, carried out the delivery of a 5.6 million shipment with ventilators meant to help Russia fight the virus even though USAID ceased operation in the country in 2012. The agency did not respond to request for comment for the story. In its communique, the U.S. State Department used language similar to Dmitriev's.
Andrea Chalupa:
“'Particularly in times of crisis, we must work together, much like we did during the second World War when the people of our two nations and other allies fought valiantly, suffered great losses and endured great hardship.' Two months after that, the U.S, United Kingdom intelligence communities accused hackers working for the Kremlin of breaking into the networks of groups working on a COVID-19 vaccine."
Andrea Chalupa:
Until Putin is gone, and until Russia's free, we cannot trust the Kremlin.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is quite an article. It's extremely long. It probably could have been four or five articles. Erin Banco did a great job and it's remarkable, the lack of comparative articles, that this sort of reporting, this deep investigative dive in which you're piecing together the actions of various countries and laying out that chronology, it's rarely done anymore. But I kept thinking when I read this:
Sarah Kendzior:
If this is overwhelming for me to read, to look at all these details, what is the average American reader getting out of this? And hopefully what they grasp is that we have a government that is not treating Americans as important at all–even in the midst of a pandemic–that is willing to let them die for money. And that the son-in-law of the president who was installed into office based on no qualifications whatsoever is behind a lot of the worst moves and is connected, not just to Israel, not just to Saudi Arabia, not just to UAE, but to various Russian oligarchs.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it is them that he serves, and it is to them that our money goes, and it's through them that our rights and opportunities are taken away. This last week, folks were excited to see that Steve Bannon was finally arrested in New York. Steve Bannon, the leader of fascist movements and illegal manipulator of elections, was arrested for defrauding people with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign.
Sarah Kendzior:
In my mind, this is like when Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion. The crime is much less than the total amount of damage that he's done throughout his career. Nonetheless, good to see it. But I kept thinking, the litmus test of whether we have an entrenched mafia State is whether Kushner is indicted. They could have gone after him a long time ago, the lies on his security clearances where he lied about illicitly meeting with foreign officials during the campaign, but also before.
Sarah Kendzior:
That alone was enough to get him out of office, out of power early, away from classified intelligence. We're going to be living with the ramifications of Kushner's presence in this position whether he stays or not. If they do actually manage to get rid of him, he's not going to keep State secrets. He's not going to work on behalf of American interests or on behalf of the American people.
Sarah Kendzior:
He is part of this axis of autocrats that is trying to destroy this country from without and from within. So he's incredibly dangerous and it's been alarming to me that Mueller did not indict him, the other officials didn't. And this article is just another example of the incredible damage that he's done and the incredible danger that we're in. And so I ask again, where are our officials on this?
Sarah Kendzior:
Why is he not stopped when there's a pandemic and he is in charge of it, and he's depriving Americans of necessary medical equipment while he makes deals with dirty oligarchs who attack our elections? How much more do you need? How much more clear cut does this have to be? How much longer does the evidence list have to get?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's amazing that Leninist, Steve Bannon, was arrested on a billionaire's yacht. That's the animal farm that Lenin built. All those guys enriched themselves. Stalin was living really well and his henchmen were living really well when millions of people were deliberately starved to death, and liquidated, and several genocides were carried out under Stalin.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, I think we should go out of this episode with a great video by act.tv featuring Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pompeo, Glenn Beck, Rick Perry, and Susan Collins, all telling you in their own words–this is all in their own words–about why you cannot trust Donald Trump. This is the real RNC Convention.
Lindsey Graham:
I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don't know who you are and I don't know why you like this guy.
Ted Cruz:
Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing it. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist, a narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen.
Rand Paul:
My concern is that he would grab up that power and really treat the country as sort of his little bully fiefdom.
Nikki Haley:
Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten.
Marco Rubio:
He's been exploring working Americans for 40 years.
Lindsey Graham:
He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.
Kellyanne Conway:
He says he's for the little, but he's actually built a lot of businesses on the backs of the little guy.
Mike Pompeo:
Donald Trump the other day said that I quote, "If he tells a soldier to commit a war crime, the soldier will just go to it."
Glenn Beck:
I don't think Donald Trump has even read the Constitution, knows what's in the Constitution.
Rick Perry:
A toxic mix of demagoguery, and mean spiritedness, and nonsense.
Susan Collins:
I just cannot support Donald Trump.
Rand Paul:
Donald Trump is a delusional narcissist and an orange faced windbag.
Marco Rubio:
Donald Trump is a con artist.
Ted Cruz:
He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies… practically every word that comes out of his mouth.
Lindsey Graham:
I think he's a cook. I think he's crazy. I think he's unfit for office.
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 U.S., 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 at The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
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 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 firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
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