Critical Rage Theory
This is possibly the angriest episode of Gaslit Nation ever, and that’s saying something. What a nightmare week. We open with a discussion of the ongoing abuse of migrants in concentration camps at the US border, particularly women and children. We call for new Nuremberg trials to bring these criminals to justice and we will refuse to accept anything less if Biden manages to win the White House.
{begin excerpt from Hiding in Plain Sight}
Sarah Kendzior:
On New Year's Eve in 1999, Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. At the time he was underestimated as a threat to world democracy and stability. This was in part due to western perception of Russia as a weakened state. But Putin has also spent decades employing western public relations specialists to soften his image as a ruthless KGB agent who had skillfully navigated oligarch turf wars. Instead, he sought to be seen as the tough but lawfully elected representative of a fledgling democratic country.
Sarah Kendzior:
Among those with connections to Putin was Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP operative who worked in Russia for assorted officials and oligarchs throughout the 1990s. In 2017, Caputo tried to scrub information about these endeavors from the internet. After leaving Russia, Caputo returned to the United States to work at a Florida public relations firm with Stone. In 2015, Caputo, like Stone, became one of Trump's campaign advisors. He was yet another longtime Trump contact with decades long ties to shady Russian businessmen involved in the presidential race. In February 2000, Trump withdrew from his attempt to become the Reform Party candidate after campaigning as a moderate. The nomination instead went to virulent bigot, Pat Buchanan, who ended up being an enthusiastic endorser of Trump's xenophobic 2016 campaign.
Sarah Kendzior:
In 2000, Trump's campaign seemed like a harmless distraction in an era when presidential candidates debated questions like, “How do we spend the enormous government surplus in our booming economy?”, and the biggest political crisis was Bill Clinton's philandering. In the media, reality TV continued to thrive moving from daytime and cable networks into primetime, and forming a new genre in the summer of 2000 with the hit series, Survivor. Survivor became the template for both the construct and ethos of reality TV over the next decade. Strangers trapped together in an unfamiliar setting backstab one another in front of the cameras with one player dismissed in a humiliating weekly ceremony until only the winner remained.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, is one of the most successful television producers of the modern era. But he was never able to realize one of his dream projects. Burnett wanted to create a reality TV show featuring Vladimir Putin that would portray the authoritarian leader to Americans in a flattering light. Burnett's fascination with Putin goes back to at least 2001 when he tried to launch a series called Destination: Mir, and confirmed to the New York Times that Putin was involved in the project. For the next decade and a half, he did not stray from this goal. In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Seeing Russia through its controversial president's eyes has Burnett so excited. He has already reached out to Putin, 62, a noted outdoorsman and former KGB officer. He says he emphasized the show would be devoid of armies and politics. Rather, it would focus on the humans, the nature, the animals of the nation."
Sarah Kendzior:
When it is suggested the Russian leader probably would ignore such a request, Burnett–who recently wrapped filming a Ben-Hur remake in Rome–cracks a smile. “How do you know that? I would think I could probably get through to most people.” So, if he did get through what was the reaction? Responds Burnett coyly, "No comment." Burnett never got his reality show about Putin off the ground, but he did succeed in increasing the Russian leader's domination over the United States. In 2004, Burnett launched the project that did more to rehabilitate and popularize Donald Trump than anything–the Apprentice, The popular reality TV series presenting Trump as a successful and likable businessman and introducing Donald Jr. and Ivanka to everyday Americans.
Sarah Kendzior:
In 2017, Burnett was hired to produce Trump's inauguration as president, which is being investigated as a mass money laundering and espionage scheme featuring a variety of Russian mobsters, spies, and oligarchs. There is no suggestion that Burnett was involved in illicit activity in connection with the inauguration. In the end, Burnett got his Putin reality TV series after all. We just mistook it for an election.
{begin excerpt from Hiding in Plain Sight}
Publisher Credit:
Thank you for listening to this clip provided to you by Macmillan audio. To hear more look for this title wherever audio books are sold.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
I have an announcement! I just want to say this really quickly.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Okay.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. We're about to go deep and dark on this episode, so if you want to blind yourself with the light and find some glorious light then go to gaslitnationpod.com, and from the homepage go find the survival guide–the Gaslit Nation 2020 Survival Guide–and choose something there to help and support, and you will feel a million times better after listening to this episode. So, this episode is going to be hell, and then after you are done listening to it, go find your heaven on gaslitnationpod.com, the Gaslit Nation 2020 Survival Guide.
Andrea Chalupa:
Sarah and I are launching a new contest, which we mentioned in last week's 2020 Survival Guide Special, where if you're doing something to refuse complacency, to refuse to rely on the polls–because all these polls we see coming out do not take into account massive Republican driven voter disenfranchisement. Remember stealing the vote is a long held Republican strategy to come to power and consolidate power. So, if you're refusing to binge watch the decline of our democracy, and you're rolling up your sleeves, and you're turning your despair into hope, and you're getting to work, tell us about it. Tweet @GaslitNation on Twitter, and tell us how you're working hard to save our democracy because it's on us. No one is coming to save us. And we're going to do this together.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, whether you're doing something now already, or you need to find a new project, go to Gaslit Nation 2020 Survival Guide, tweet @GaslitNation and I'll retweet it. And from the ones we get, from the tweets we get, we're going to select three winners to come on Gaslit Nation in the new year and talk about how we're going to Trump-proof and Putin-proof our democracy because we're all in this for the long haul. Whatever happens November 3rd, we still have years and years of fight left in order to finally defeat the neo-confederates, and the madman in the Kremlin that's helping them. And it's not going to be solved in one election cycle. We all need to hunker down and fight like hell. All right, Sarah, continue.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, exactly. And on that note, we don't intend for this episode to be dark and depressing. We're in the vein of my fellow Missourian, Harry Truman, who said, "I never gave anyone hell. I told the truth, and they thought it was hell." And so that's where we are. So on that note, you may remember that in the before time, in the long, long ago, there was a movie called Office Space, whose main character declared that every day was worse than the day before, and so, therefore, every day is the worst day of his life.
Sarah Kendzior:
In retrospect, it is amazing that anyone would make this statement in the golden age of 1999, but that description certainly fits for 2020. This is yet another one of those weeks where idiot pundits and useless politicians who blew off our warnings of fascism, or worse yet threatened us for making them, woke up yet again to the realities of life in an autocratic mafia state. But the worst thing about that life in the US is not Trump's enablers, as bad as they are. And if you want details and how bad they are, listen to last week's episode called The Good Germans. The worst thing is what these people are doing to the most vulnerable people in America, and I will now turn the mic over to Andrea.
Andrea Chalupa:
Whew. Okay. So, we are going to break down some of the latest in one of the darkest chapters of US history unfolding right now in real time. And that is, of course, the human rights crisis deliberately created on the border with maximum cruelty by the Trump Crime Family, and Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon, and all the good Germans that helped them do this and profited from it in the process. Right? Genocide makes those committing the genocide a lot of money, and that's what we see playing out now on the border in our name with our US tax dollars.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, we have, starting out, a whistleblower complaint, yet another whistleblower complaint. This time it is from an ICE detention center where there is a very serious allegation that women were being forced to undertake hysterectomies out of an ICE detention center. “When I met all these women who had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp.” And we'll link to that article so you can read it. I'm also going to read now from a thread talking about why this is deeply troubling and why this is essentially genocide that’s being carried out. This is a thread on Twitter from the great group Bend the Arc, a Jewish action group that works for progressive causes in the US. This is how they break down the extremely startling history–the historical context–of these forced hysterectomies:
Andrea Chalupa:
“Forced sterilization is genocide. ICE is performing mass hysterectomies on immigrant women. ICE is committing genocide. It is part of a long history of eugenics and assaults on reproductive freedom in the United States, a system that directly inspired the Nazi regime. In the 1930s, Hitler and the Nazis were directly inspired by Jim Crow laws in the United States. They sent researchers to study how the US subjugated Black people and inform how they dehumanized Jews, Roma, and other communities.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In the 1927 case, Buck vs. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute that enabled the state to sterilize people with mental illness. This decision resulted in 70,000 sterilizations of people deemed ‘unfit to reproduce.’ In the 1970s, the US government forcibly sterilized as many as 70,000 Native women through the Indian Health Service, a trauma deeply impacting indigenous health. An estimated 25% of Native women of childbearing age are sterilized by 1976. Forced sterilization policies directly targeted communities of color and people with disabilities, including Puerto Rican women, Latinas in California prisons, Black women, Native women, and so many more.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Each instance was violent and genocidal. The film, No Mas Bebes tells the story of how Mexican and Mexican American women in Los Angeles were coerced into involuntary sterilizations. One woman recalls thinking, ‘They must have thought this one has so many kids, we'll just sew her up.’ These shameful practices continued in the 2010s. Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010. Incarcerated folks’ reproductive rights are under attack. In 1973, two Black sisters, Minnie and Marie Ralph were secretly sterilized at a federally funded agency under the premise of getting birth control shots. Their lawsuit drew national attention to how poor Black women are being targeted by sterilization.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Between the 1930s and the 1970s, nearly one third of women in Puerto Rico were sterilized as part of a mass eugenics campaign. This history continues to affect Puerto Rican women and their communities to this day. Forced sterilization is genocide. It's also been US policy for generations, targeting Black and indigenous women, Puerto Rican and Latinas in LA, incarcerated people and people with disabilities. Now ICE is performing mass hysterectomies. We've seen this before. We must rise up.”
Andrea Chalupa:
That's just the latest. Here's some more that's just coming out. This is from Politico: “A federal appeals court has effectively green lighted the Trump administration's plan to expel more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants from El Salvador and Nicaragua and Sudan from the US by ending the temporary protected status they have enjoyed for as long as two decades. In a two-to-one ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court says evidence was lacking that Trump's offensive and disparaging comments about immigrants impacted decisions.” Yes, this is real. It's not the onion. “Literally, Trump's racist comments like saying why allow immigrants in ‘shithole countries’”. That comment, remember? His long, publicly documented history of racism was on trial here, and in a two-to-one ruling, two judges–one appointed by war criminal George W. Bush, otherwise known as Posh Trump, and the other one appointed by Sloppy Trump–outnumbered an Obama appointee whose legal...and the Obama judge on this court in this decision, her statement was essentially banging her head against the desk.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, this is more from Politico: “Judge Morgan Christen also said those challenging the government's action presented ample evidence that Trump's racial bias affected the decisions. She noted not only Trump's ‘shithole countries’ comment, but his claims that Haitians with this status ‘all have AIDS’, and his descriptions of Mexican and Central American immigrants as ‘criminals and snakes’. The Bush and Trump judges essentially said ‘no racism, nothing to see here.’” So this is why elections matter, everybody. We're not just voting for Biden. We're not just voting for our senator. We're voting for our judges. We want a Biden Supreme Court because our country, our democracy, will not survive a Trump Supreme Court. We will be living with the Trump Crime Family and the Bush Crime Family for a generation because of the judges they've packed onto the court. Do you want to comment? I've got so much more here.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, I'm just so angry because these policies were not hidden. They were all announced in advance. They were what Trump ran on in his campaign. You could see in his campaign putting Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and then getting Stephen Miller through David Horowitz, you're getting some of the worst racists and white supremacists in America to devise his immigration policy. You then get concentration camps built at the border, and instead of impeaching him on these camps, stopping these camps, you get people like Pelosi yelling at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others for simply calling them concentration camps.
Sarah Kendzior:
You get people in the media refusing to call them white supremacists, refusing to call them racists, refusing to advocate on the behalf of the people who are trapped in those camps by simply documenting what's happening. Initially, there was outcry. In June of 2018, when the horrific details of these camps–and especially the separation policy of children from their parents came to light–there was quite a bit of coverage, and there was a mass protest to try to stop this. Everyone seems to forget that these protests happen. And then they let it fade away. They didn't treat it as a crime against humanity. This is serious. This is something that goes against the Geneva Conventions. This is something that, should Biden get into office, we need a Nuremberg-style trial of the perpetrators of these severe crimes.
Sarah Kendzior:
And as Andrea just commented, this is not new to America. This is not beyond the realm of imagination. This is in fact our history. And so, when you look at people who are drawing on one hand from foreign oppression, from the Nazi movement–which we know that Trump and Bannon and others admire–from Putin and his horrible policies against migrants, against minorities in Russia, but also especially drawing from the American experience, from what they did to Black Americans, Native Americans. I was thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Civil Rights activist also forcibly sterilized in 1961.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, of course, you should assume that they would go down that path again. And they're also surrounded by a freak show of aspiring Mengeles, of people like Epstein who wanted to impregnate his rape victims and create a super race from his sperm. That is the kind of person that Trump and his crew surround himself with. These deranged, homicidal, just disgusting ambitions where they view... They have a ranked hierarchy of human beings, ranked by race and ethnicity, and they view some of them as objects to experiment on in addition to just sadistically abusing them. We knew all that in advance and officials did not stop it. Congress did not stop it. And then they instantly forgive people who helped either deny or gloss over it, people like Kellyanne Conway when she resigned. There needs to be accountability. There needs to be trials for crimes against humanity. But go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I absolutely agree. We need a Nuremberg Trial in order to weed out all the people that are carrying out this genocide, especially those who are profiting–like John Kelly–from that growing system of concentration camps on the border, deliberately created for genocidal means. And remember that trust fund kid, Anderson Cooper, the son of a Vanderbilt, had the audacity to ask AOC, "Are you calling Trump a racist?”
Sarah Kendzior:
My God.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right? That's what we're up against, folks. That's our mainstream media. That's one of the most famous journalists in America, and most Americans get their information from TV news, from cable news hosts like Vanderbilt child, Anderson Cooper.
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay. So, back to this long history of American genocide and authoritarianism that helped inspire the Nazis. And I'm talking about this history unfolding in real time. So, from CNN: “A US Congressman released internal agency documents showing unaccompanied minors in government custody made more than 4,500 complaints of sexual abuse from 2014 to 2018. In 2019, a Guatemalan father is suing two nonprofits that house migrant children for the US government, alleging his 10 year old son was forced to take psychotropic drugs and sexually assaulted while in custody.”
Andrea Chalupa:
From the AP on family separations: “A two year old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. He's been separated from his parents. A few girls who have also been separated from their parents, ages 10 to 15, say they've been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard.” According to New York Public Defender, Scott Hechinger, here’s a video of a 17-month-old baby returned to her mother, an asylum seeker from Honduras. They were separated and caged by ICE for months. So, we're going to play that clip, so you understand that this is the sound of US taxpayer dollars carrying out a genocide.
{audio clip of crying child]
Andrea Chalupa:
From the Independent, just the other day, it was reported, “Authorities say around 8,800 children have been deported from the United States along the Mexican border thanks to a new pandemic related measure that functionally stripped the rights of those seeking asylum.” Sarah, you mentioned something about that number, 8,800. This is an official number from the Trump regime. Is there any significance to that number?
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, yeah. Well, this is a pattern that has been going on with the Trump administration and these migrant families in terms of how they present information to the media since 2018. Back then, I believe it was the AP reported that 1,488 children were being deported. That is a number that is used by neo-Nazis, both 14 and 88, and then of course, combined. And now again, you see the... And that's a weirdly specific number. It was later proven to not be the actual number. It was just what they were feeding the media as a sick little in-joke. You're now seeing it, again, with 8,800 being the number that's released. In reality, it's above 9,000.
Sarah Kendzior:
They do this because they find it amusing. They also do this so that they can have these kind of like, "What are you talking about? You're so paranoid. You think these numbers mean something, like we're Nazis." It's the same thing with their little hand gestures that you saw from one of the neo-Nazis that was sitting at Kavanaugh's hearing. They are neo-Nazis. They are carrying out neo-Nazi policies, and putting forth neo-Nazi plans and using neo-Nazi rhetoric, and that is how we know they are neo-Nazis. And so, I think that to interpret the use of these kind of numbers, these symbolic actions, as furthering a neo-Nazi agenda and rubbing in people's faces is the correct way to view it. It's the sensible way to view it, and not–as they like to claim–the paranoid way to view it.
Andrea Chalupa:
And 88 is a white supremacist numerical code for Heil Hitler, and that is according ADL, group fighting hate for good. 88 is secret code, and all these hate groups that have had to function underground for so long, they depend on this symbolism so they can recognize each other. And now they've been empowered by the Nazi-in-chief in the White House. And they're all out in the open. And like Sarah said, they're gleefully doing this all in the open as a sick inside joke with each other.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, just to clarify and give everyone a concrete example to Google in case they find this unfathomable. Here's an article from CBS News from September 19th 2018: “Feds say they lost track of 1,488 migrant children.” And then when you go and read the article, it is not actually that number. That is the number that Health and Human Services gave to the Senate and gave to the media, and then it later says it's 1,475. This is their idea of a little funny in-joke to mock the torture and abuse of migrant families.
Andrea Chalupa:
And let me just read that number Sarah, 1,488, right? That's the number they officially gave Congress?
Sarah Kendzior:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). They gave Congress and they gave it to outlets like CBS and other mainstream outlets.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Department of Homeland Security, which needs to be Nuremberged hardcore if we get our country back. So, the Department of Homeland Security gave Congress the number 1,488 as the number of migrants that were separated or moved or what?
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, in this case, it's Health and Human Services. They say, “recently told Senate staffers that case managers could not find the 1,488 children after they made follow up calls to check on their safety from April through June.” And then later in the article they change it to 1,475. And so-
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay. So, here is from ADL, that same organization working to fight hate groups, and they point out that “1,488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the 14 words slogan, ‘we must secure the existence of our people and our future for white children’. The second is 88, which stands for Heil Hitler. H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of White supremacy and its beliefs.
Andrea Chalupa:
“As such, they are ubiquitous within the White supremacist movement as graffiti, in graphics and tattoos, even in screen names and email addresses such as aryanprincess1488@hate.net.”–I'm pretty sure that's Ivanka's email address–“Some White supremacists will even price racist merchandise such as t-shirts or compact discs”–these guys are such losers, they're listening to compact discs–”for $14.88. The symbol is most commonly written as 1488 or 14/88. But variations such as 14-88 or 8814 are also common.”
Andrea Chalupa:
And so, Trump's regime gave the number 1,488, numbering a group of immigrants as 1,488. So they're doing this all intentionally. This is genocide being carried out on the border. And again, a US Court, two judges, one appointed by Trump, one appointed by Bush, both said, "No, this isn't racial. There's no racism that's driving this immigration policy." They're doing it out in the open, and they're gleefully doing it.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, I'm going to end off this overview of kids in cages with Psychology Today pointing out, “It doesn't matter how well provisioned young children are in shelters. We have long known not to separate young children from loving caregivers because you'll deny them the exact forces that make them human. Accordingly, in the last days, we've received critical messages of our recent policy of separating children from their parents at the border from the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the Society for Research On Child Development and others. More will surely follow. By separating so many children from their parents, we are literally changing the course of humanity.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep. No, it's the worst thing that they've done. And that's saying a lot when it comes to this administration. And I think one of the things that's finally kind of set in for white people in America in light of the Coronavirus and Trump's purposeful handling of it so that it kills as many Americans as possible, which we told you in March was intentional. That it was not negligence. It was not incompetence. It was malice. It was a move toward mass death and embrace of mass death.
Sarah Kendzior:
They have finally realized that they too are disposable. That they too may end up treated in the way that they have been treating these migrant families at the border. And that the lack of action against these government agencies, against these criminals, against this incredible assault of basic human rights. When you don't act against it, it builds and builds, and you know that old adage, “first they came for so and so, but I was not them.” I mean, everyone has heard that from the Nazi era. You're watching it play out in America right now. First, they came for the migrants but I was not a migrant so I did not speak out, and they are coming for you. And I mean that very literally, they've announced that they are coming for you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let me just end it on this because this is from June 2020 this year, and this is from the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Family separation policy continues two years after Trump administration claims it ended”. This is all still going on. It's horrendous. It's sweeping. Lives are being destroyed with our tax dollars. Remember that. So, I want to also ground everybody in this age of confusion in the fact that when you hear QAnon–this whole crazy conspiracy theory that is growing in momentum, that's trying to say that Trump is saving the world from an international pedophile ring created by satanists–that's all projection.
Andrea Chalupa:
When you hear QAnon, the real child trafficking crisis, the real actual conspiracy of genocide is being carried out by Trump himself deliberately. Deliberately. So, understand that QAnon is a defensive mechanism. Whether Trump and his supporters, including his supporters in the Kremlin, created it or not, the purpose it's now serving is to deflect from the very real crisis of how children's lives are deliberately being destroyed on the border. So, every time you hear QAnon, flip it in your head to children in cages, kids in cages, kids in cages. These kids are still in cages and this is being done in our name, in our tax dollars. And if we ever get our democracy back, for generations to come, this is going to be considered one of the darkest periods in our nation's history.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, absolutely, and well said. And on that note, let's turn to the latest from Kremlin lackey, convicted felon, and longtime Trump manager, Roger Stone, who is now calling for an “insurrection” if Trump loses, by which he means if Trump fails to steal the election and faces some sort of legal and political repercussions. Stone is calling for federal marshals to seize ballots. He has called for Trump to arrest the Clintons, Harry Reid, and other Democrats. Notably, this is the same threat that Stone made in 2016 when he promised a bloodbath if Trump loses. And in the years between making those two threats, Roger Stone has threatened to murder a judge who then responded by lowering his sentence, and also did not charge him for threatening her murder.
Sarah Kendzior:
The reason that Stone continues to make these threats is because people in power let him get away with it. He is a family friend of many elites, including many journalists like Maggie Haberman at the New York Times. Stone was put on TV as a CNN political commentator in recent years. That is after he promised a bloodbath in 2016, and after being indicted. He is still treated as one of them. So yet again, we see CNN backing a violent white supremacist, anti-government psychopath. This band of criminal elites and enablers surrounding Trump is extremely similar to the ones that surrounded trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who was celebrated by a New York and DC elite crowd after being convicted for raping children.
Sarah Kendzior:
Many of the people are literally involved in both cases and in glossing over their crimes. This is a sick culture rotted from within, and it now holds the executive branch. And again, in terms of the preemptive narrative inversion that we see with QAnon where they are trying to direct people who are genuinely concerned about child welfare, concerned about injustice into a pro-Trump movement–that is another way that they're doing that and Stone himself actually was one of the pioneers of the QAnon precursor of Pizzagate. So yes, all of this is projection. All of this is misdirection, and all of this is disgusting. I have things to add about Stone’s little wannabe protege, Michael Caputo. But do you have any comments on the insurrection?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I mean, Caputo, this Kremlin lackey, this whole Trump Crime Family, there's a reason why they're all united. It’s because there's money to be made in breaking up the US and selling it for parts. These guys are going to get their own little fiefdoms. I mean, it's basically...think about what Putin has said, “The fall of the Soviet Union was one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.” He's brought back Stalin. So under Putin, Stalin has been glorified as this great hero. Stalin, who murdered some of the best and brightest of Russia, nevermind all of the captive colonies like Ukraine and other countries that suffered under Stalinism.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, this is all being deliberately done because what you had with the fall of the Soviet Union, you had all these Westerners go over there to try to profit in the ashes and try to bring in capitalism and make money in building up the new Russia for the 21st century, this new great dawn that they were promising everyone. And so, Putin's basically helping his friends like the Trump Crime Family and Caputo and others do the same to the US. Drive us apart, weaken us from within, exploit our weaknesses, weaponize our weaknesses against us, create all these confusion campaigns like QAnon or at least drive those, support those like QAnon and Pizzagate as Sarah mentioned, to really create all this confusion, so our defenses become so overwhelmed that we can't even tell what's true anymore.
Andrea Chalupa:
So stay grounded in the truth because the truth is your greatest protection. And the truth is, we have a Republican party that's pro-fascism, that is abling and abetting the Trump Crime Family, that has been propped up and was brought to power with the help of the mass murdering xenophobic regime of the Kremlin. And their end goal is to further divide and conquer our country and weaken us deeper from within so we finally break apart. That's it. And they're going to cash in on the spoils.
Sarah Kendzior:
People need to absolutely understand this because this is a different situation than you traditionally would see in a fascist state. I mean, first of all, I'm fine with people calling Trump fascist, calling the Trump administration fascist, because they're using fascist tactics. I think it's also a word that people tend to know more than they know authoritarianism or autocratic. What I don't want to hear is, “we are a nation of laws” or other such horseshit. This is an aspiring dictatorship, but it is different than most dictatorships throughout history.
Sarah Kendzior:
Most dictatorships have as their goal the desire to keep the state intact, to embody the state through the ruler, and then to expand the state. They have imperialist ambitions. That is not the case with Trump. Trump wants the country to collapse. They want the country to break down into parts. Then they want to strip those parts for resources and money, parse them out to their little lackeys. And then that's the end. Basically, this is partly Putin. This is as Andrea said Putin wants his revenge for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which are now all... Those republics became independent states. But this is mostly just disaster capitalism. This is oligarchs and plutocrats uniting to take apart the United States.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is one of the reasons that these secessionist movements that we're seeing with California, with Texas, are incredibly dangerous. They are not going to end well for you. And we may devote an entire episode to explaining this to you. You are not going to be in some sort of Democratic paradise if California is an independent state. You are going to be at the mercy of these exact same transnational crime operators who have joined with Silicon Valley people–the worst of all Californians–and will basically just drain your country–your new country of California–of resources for their own gain.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is extremely important that the United States stay together. And I think it's also important that people examine not just the history of authoritarian rule worldwide, but look at colonialism. Look at the role of empire. Look what white European settlers did to Native Americans. Look what they did to Africans because that is basically how this crime cult, this transnational crime cult, sees the population: utterly disposable. We can be killed off with Coronavirus. We could be put in camps maybe and sterilized. We may be joining the migrants to whom that is done.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our freedom, our rights, it is all utterly worthless to them. You can't make deals with them. They will break deals, just like US settlers broke their deals with Native Americans. And they want the collapse. They want riots, bloodshed, economic collapse. They're openly doing it. You're also kind of seeing this in the UK. But that's its own story. So you need to understand it in those terms, that this isn't even a typical dictatorship. This is not like Hitler wanting to conquer Europe. This is not like Stalin wanting to expand his empire, his Soviet Empire. This is a destruction–a purposeful destruction–of the United States from within by a Kremlin asset and a crime syndicate. That is what this is.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, and even if California said, "To hell with all this. We don't want to be held hostage by Mitch McConnell and the Senate. We're going to have an emergency referendum for independence and become our own republic.” So even if California broke away, California being one of the largest economies in the world, they're going to chip away at you until California breaks up into smaller republics. There's already ideas of that being spread. Look it up. Look up the movement to even break apart California into its own little separate states. So, greed is never satisfied. That's why it's greed. That's what makes it greed. So, our greatest enemy, whether it's Putin or Trump, it’s ultimately greed we're at war with, and greed is never satisfied. So there is no compromise with this beast. The beast just wants to devour all of us, and it will never stop until it gets that, until nothing is left.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. And all of these issues, these domestic crises of the Coronavirus, of the domestic economy, are tied to Trump's dealings with the Kremlin, with the Russian mafia, with these actors who euphemistically call themselves consultants and then, as Andrea mentioned, went to the former Soviet Union in the 1990s to make bank, have no loyalty to America, are completely fine with its dissolution. And of course one of those people is Michael Caputo. And in the beginning of this show, I played an excerpt of the audiobook version of Hiding in Plain Sight, my new book, which has a little section about Caputo. To review briefly, he is yet another Kremlin lackey who worked for Putin as an image consultant, as well as for assorted Russian oligarchs in the 1990s before reuniting with his hero, Roger Stone, in the 2000s.
Sarah Kendzior:
Caputo has long been Roger Stone's little lap dog. He was briefly a campaign manager of Donald Trump in 2015 before Trump dumped him for more accomplished criminals like Paul Manafort. Michael Caputo in the meantime started threatening a bunch of journalists and just random people on Twitter. I was one of them. He went on a tirade against me that was by turns tedious, obnoxious, and honestly really perverted. At one point he said he wanted to put me in his pocket like a fidget spinner.
Sarah Kendzior:
Caputo was then investigated during the Mueller probe, although like many aspects of the Mueller probe, this investigation stopped without a full explanation. The Mueller Report describes Caputo meeting with a Russian who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. It pretty much left it at that until Caputo–also by the way on CNN is a "objective" political commentator, in the meantime-
Andrea Chalupa:
Dear God.
Sarah Kendzior:
I know it just keeps going. And so, in 2020 now with the Mueller probe over and Bill Barr installed as Trump's personal attorney, Caputo joined the federal crime cult that is currently managing the COVID-19 crisis. Trump appointed him the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, which we just mentioned was the department sending out Nazi numbers to the mainstream press.
Sarah Kendzior:
In this role, Michael Caputo has unsurprisingly promoted white supremacists, suppressed scientific research about Coronavirus that he believes makes Trump look bad, which is to say he suppresses the truth. And among the truth he suppresses is the fact that children can catch Coronavirus and spread it. Caputo also accused CDC scientists of "sedition" and "harboring armed insurrectionists." And so, we have gone over on this show many, many times about how it is the core circle of the Trump crime cult that are managing the Coronavirus crisis. This has been a revolving door administration, but certain individuals have been seen as indispensable to it and have remained there for the entirety of the administration's existence, and it is important to ask, why?
Sarah Kendzior:
These individuals are bound either through nepotism–you see this with Ivanka and Jared, you see it with Bill Barr and his children in the administration, you see it with Betsy DeVos and her brother, the mercenary, Erik Prince, not officially in but basically in, you see it with Stephen Miller and his new White supremacist bride also on the virus team–or they are bound through white collar crime, which explains the endurance of Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, both of whom were installed by corrupt corporate raider, Carl Icahn, also formerly of this administration, and who also–all of them, all three of them, Icahn, Mnuchin, and Ross–have long standing ties to the Trump Crime Family.
Sarah Kendzior:
This typical autocratic reliance on an inner sanctum of blood relatives and longtime loyalists explains the reemergence of Michael Caputo who is a long time colleague of Trump and Stone. And so, you may be asking, what is the goal here? What is the endgame beyond money and power? We've explained some of this. It's the dissolution of the country. But the way that is done is through genocide. It's through passive eugenics. It's through mainstreaming mass death now–200,000 dead Americans now–so that they can cause more mass death later. And so, on this note, it's worth observing that the attacks that Michael Pompeo made recently against the International Criminal Court on behalf of not only US war criminals, but his taskmaster Benjamin Netanyahu who he just visited in Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
The reason he made those attacks is because if Trump is reinstalled for a second term, Middle East war and the genocide of Palestinians is going to be a key goal, and he does not want the ICC getting in the way. He also does not want the ICC investigating things, as we’ve said, like the abuses in US concentration camps and the horrific handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, yeah, this is the nightmare come true. This is what we have been warning you about. The US under Trump is a fledgling neo-Nazi state. We told you many times that unless an intervention was made, this was going to be the outcome. But apparently our officials were okay with letting people get sick and die so that you could learn that the hard way. And yeah, I'm done. You talk.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think we're both done, but-
Sarah Kendzior:
Ugh. Sorry.
Andrea Chalupa:
No, we've got a long way to go. We've got a long way to go. This election they desperately need to steal this one, as we all know. For them, it's not just control of our country. It's not all the billions they can make, continue to make off our country, it's control over the world. With the US broken apart and firmly under autocratic control, what happens to Canada? What happens to the EU? What happens to Japan and South Korea and so forth? Greed keeps going. Greed just steamrolls ahead. And so, if America finally falls, really, we're not going to survive four more years of Trump. We're not going to survive his court packing with Mitch McConnell. We're simply not.
Andrea Chalupa:
And if you want to turn whatever gut punch despair you're feeling right now listening to all this, go to gaslitnationpod.com and hold tight to the 2020 Survival Guide. Go down that checklist. Treat it as your checklist to taking back our democracy. Do not sit on the sidelines and binge watch the decline of our democracy. Do not trust the polls. Pretend the polls do not exist because the polls simply do not take into account massive voter suppression, which is a deliberate campaign strategy by the GOP to come to power and consolidate power.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, instead, turn your attention to the 2020 Gaslit Nation Survival Guide on gaslitnationpod.com. You'll find it right there on the homepage and just go down it like a checklist. We created this convenient checklist for you. We not only stand a chance of helping Biden and Harris win the White House, we also stand a very good chance of taking control of the Senate, which would push Mitch McConnell out of power. Democrats need to hold on to two vulnerable Senate races, which are Doug Jones in Alabama, and Gary Peters in Michigan. Hold on to those two and win four more. And there's a very strong shot of winning four more Senate seats. And by doing that, Democrats have control of the Senate, and Mitch McConnell can just sit down to the side, or he gets voted out.
Andrea Chalupa:
And also we must, must, must hold on to the House. Absolutely must hold on to the House. Whatever our feelings are about Nancy Pelosi, if Devin Nunes gets control of the House, it's show trial time. So, please support Katie Porter, support Max Rose, support all of these key House races that were part of the big blue wave two years ago. Again, take however you're feeling right now and unleash that rage on the 2020 Gaslit Nation Survival Guide, which is your checklist for taking back our democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, absolutely. And I want to emphasize the importance of the Senate races here because we know that if Biden defeats Trump, that Trump is not going to concede. We know that there's going to be violence. We know there's going to be a protracted legal battle. And we know the reason for this happening is because Trump needs to hold on to executive power in order to not face prosecution, in order for all of his partners to not face prosecution, and in order for things like the sanctions policy that Russia has that's so beneficial to them. This axis of autocrats, this coalition of corruption.
Sarah Kendzior:
They need that to remain in place. That is something that is particular to this crime cult, and we know how the crime cult apparatus has spread into the GOP. It's spread through dark money. It's spread through complicity, but they also view these Republicans–including these senators, and many House representatives as well–as disposable. And if you want proof of that, go look at Herman Cain's Twitter account where he's tweeting from beyond the grave that the disease that killed him, the Coronavirus, is a hoax. I mean, that is what they do to Republicans in the end. That's what they do to the people who go and–like Herman Cain did–appear at a Trump rally, say how great Trump is, get sick from being at the Trump rally and die. And then have their image, and their own voice, their persona used by them.
Sarah Kendzior:
They view all of these guys as disposable and I don't think that their concentration is so much on the Senate and the House. It's very much centered on the executive branch, on the terrible plans they have for the second term with that executive branch, which will include show trials, which will likely include war in the Middle East, and also allowing Putin to carry out his own territorial wars in Ukraine, possibly Moldova, other places. Anyway, that's why I think looking at these lower races, the House and the Senate, also judges, that's a good strategy. It's harder for them to control all of that at once. We have a personality cult with Trump. He requires subservience to it. He requires full attention to it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Other people like Mitch McConnell are looking at the Senate races very closely. I'm sure they have plans. You should listen to our interview with Jenny Cohn about election hacking through machines. You should also, of course, look at the attacks on the Postal Service. Make your plan to vote. Look at your state's particular rules. This is all in our Action Guide. So, please go consult this guide. Look at that list of senators. If you're frustrated, if you feel like everything with Trump is just such a goddamn mess that you don't even want to get into it and call people on behalf of Biden, go work for the Senate races instead because in the end, that might actually matter more.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the frontlines in the US, China, and other hard hit parts of the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the orangutanproject.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kenzior 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. And also subscribe to our new YouTube channel.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Visenberg, Nick Farr, 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:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon...