The Polonium Tea Party
This week’s Gaslit Nation explores narrative warfare, from Russia’s Stalinist revisionism (now including an attack on Andrea’s film Mr Jones!) to the “both-sidesing” of the Holocaust in US schools, to the memory-holing of the Capitol attack. We kick things off by describing the Kremlin lackey freakout over a Russian human rights group screening of Mr Jones, Andrea’s film about a journalist who attempted to cover Stalin’s genocide-famine in Ukraine, and we warn that Russian-style censorship is a GOP aspirational goal. We then turn to fugitive felon Steve Bannon and the feckless January 6 Committee, which has discovered the information Gaslit Nation released about Bannon nine months ago – the very same information we urged them to use in the February impeachment hearings but which they ignored!
We then discuss how the publishing industry is protecting the Trump Crime Cult by continuing to churn out books from corrupt officials who witnessed terrible crimes and were rewarded for their silence and delay. We get into bulk book buys as a form of money laundering, the promise of publishing deals as a bribe that provides incentive to stay quiet, and how publishing agreements function as tacit NDAs. We note that Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff are two sides of the same coin – one hiding behind respectability, one hiding behind sensationalism, both portraying a sophisticated criminal operation as mere incompetence or idiocy. This damning evidence display was so long that we had to continue it in our Patreon bonus special, so subscribe at the Truth-Teller level or higher to hear the whole thing!
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight. And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, a film that the Kremlin doesn't want you to see. No, literally.
[audio clip of Kremlin lackeys protesting a showing of Mr. Jones in Moscow]
Andrea Chalupa:
Last Thursday night in Moscow, a human rights and history organization called Memorial, the oldest NGO in Russia and certainly one of the bravest and most relentless, hosted a screening of Mr. Jones. Around 30 young masked men crashed the screening, shouting things like “Shame!” and demanding that people leave and calling the screening “over”. Police arrived, but instead of holding the masked men accountable, the police locked the doors and held the audience and the event organizers trapped inside the building for several hours, questioning the people inside, demanding to know how they heard about the screening. The police handcuffed the front door of the building. Commentators in Russia pointed out that the photograph of the front door in handcuffs represented Russia today. Lawyers for the organization had to enter the building through a window and supporters of their work and members of the community showed up to gather outside.
Andrea Chalupa:
Eventually, the audience and organizers were allowed to go home at around 2:00 AM. The police confiscated several computers and cameras, some of which the organizers were able to get back. It's important to note that this is part of a larger pattern of escalating repression in Putin's Russia against facts, against history, against dissent. Putin is scared. He's a terrorist holding Russians and their future hostage. As one Russian friend said to me, “At least in the Soviet Union there was an ideology people could get behind. With Putin, there's nothing,” nothing but a mafia state. Putin stands for nothing but his own greed. Russia, as Putin very well knows, is a powder keg, which is why the authorities continue to clamp down on something as simple as a movie screening. The organizers of the screening of Mr. Jones in Moscow, the group called Memorial, the group I mentioned, it's one that we've discussed over the years here on this show.
Andrea Chalupa:
You may remember the story of Russian historian, Yuri Dmitriev, who headed a Memorial office in the Northwestern region of Russia. Dmitriev was arrested on trumped up charges for his work exposing Stalin's mass murder and the Great Terror. He discovered and dug up a mass grave of Stalin's victims. So for this, he had to be punished and history rewritten by the authorities. For years, Putin’s thought police worked to destroy this man's life just for researching history, including arresting him on piles of trumped up charges, including sexually assaulting his adopted daughter. From a 2020 article in the New York Times: “The Russian authorities have frequently used accusations of pedophilia to demonize their critics, apparently calculating that sexual violence against minors is so offensive that nobody would speak up for the accused. Mr. Dmitriev’s case, however, attracted widespread condemnation as an example of Russia's highly politicized justice system with scores of respected Russian scholars, writers, artists, and historians rallying to his defense. Human Rights Watch dismissed the charges against Mr. Dmitriev as spurious.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“The European Union also weighed in, demanding that the historian be released and the charges against him be dropped. His defenders believed that the case was driven mostly by politics, particularly a desire by the authorities to defend historical narratives promoted by president Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin has made the celebration of Russian history, particularly the country's role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, the bedrock of a state ideology in which Russia is always a victim of crimes committed by foreigners and almost never a perpetrator of crimes against its own people or other nations.” So, why does this all matter? Because dictators and aspiring dictators know they’re illegitimate. They know. They're the ones spinning a web of deceit and catching all their victims in their web of lies, of violence, of gaslighting, of blackmail, of bribery, and so on. Dictators and aspiring dictators rely on inventing their own reality to come to power and stay in power.
Andrea Chalupa:
They leverage their invented reality against their enemies, including getting their brainwashed followers all worked up to do the dirty work for them, like harass their opponents, even kill their opponents, commit acts of political violence. When charismatic Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin—Boris Nemtsov, a man who united Russians and Ukrainians, who said Crimea belongs to Ukraine—when he was murdered, it was pointed out that the Kremlin may have, of course, killed him. Or, the Kremlin created the conditions for Nemtsov to be murdered. The Kremlin created an environment that was so toxic to anyone who spoke the truth that anyone could have killed Nemtsov. We see this today in the United States where dark money groups are fueling the ban on studying critical race theory. According to US news, there are laws banning and tightly controlling how racism and an America's long history of white supremacy that built this country is taught in schools in Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia.
Andrea Chalupa:
According to NBC news, “a new Texas law” that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial issues” has led one Texas resident, Jake Berman, to come forward to speak at a school board meeting to share his painful story that as a student decades ago at that school, he suffered such horrific antisemetic bullying that he contemplated suicide. We'll play a clip of his speech where he's addressing how there simply are no two sides to the Holocaust. And that is what this Texas law would force teachers to show their students, the “other side” to the Holocaust, which is Holocaust denial, which is anti facts, anti history, anti reality, and it's the kind of ideology of hate that is driving the base, that is driving these brainwashed followers that are mobbing school board meetings, that are running for office and passing these laws, that are promoting and trying to pass laws for the Big Lie that Trump won the election. Now, they want to use this legal warfare on students to spread their brainwashing and their war against the truth. Now we'll play the painful story of Jake Berman that he so bravely shares to fight for the truth.
Jake Berman:
My name is Jake Berman and Southlake has been a part of my life since my parents moved here before I started kindergarten in 1994. My parents moved my brother and I here for this very school district, at the time a 3A district that claimed to offer one of the best public secondary educations in the state. This was consistent with my experience for a time, as I was able to learn from excellent teachers and administrators alike. It was one of those administrators, then the Dawson principal, that strongly urged my parents to pull me out of the district in eighth grade. I was subject to a rash of bullying, almost all of which was antisemitic in nature. I received everything from jokes about my nose, to gas chambers, all studying for my bar mitzvah from a Holocaust survivor as my primary tutor. Last week's occurrence was assuredly a misstep and a mistake, not due to any internal feeling from her.
Jake Berman:
And Dr. Ledbetter’s statement correctly stated that there are not two sides of the Holocaust. And I'm very thankful for Dr. Ledbetter using such clear language as this elucidates the reality of the ridiculous and stupid law here in the state of Texas. Here are the facts many of which in this country want to either whitewash or ignore. The facts are that there are not two sides to the Holocaust. The Nazis systematically killed millions of people. There are not two sides of slavery. White Europeans enslaved Black Africans in this country until June 19th, 1865, a moment we’re barely 150 years removed from. There are not two sides to Jim Crow. There are not two sides to racism. And that same oppression continues today. These are facts. The other facts are that I, a Jewish kid born in Dallas, was bullied on a daily basis for my religion for almost two years in this very district, nearly driving me to suicide before thankfully being removed from the environment, thanks to an administrator.
Jake Berman:
I still struggle with the depression that started at Dawson middle school in 2003, to this very day. The message you and the state are sending to your teachers opens the door for more of this type of behavior in your students. If you don't think that these same attacks are happening in your schools today with regard to someone's skin color, gender, or religion, you're sorely mistaken. You have the opportunity as a district to lead this state that's sorely in need of leadership in its education department, as shown by its 38th ranking nationally. There are 8,400 students in the district whose minds need to be cultivated and developed and hundreds of extremely capable teachers, administrators, who desperately need to be supported. This is a crossroads for the state and for this district. One path is an opportunity to lead and be on the right side of history. The other will cost you and your children a quality education they very much deserve.
Andrea Chalupa:
Far-right dark money—namely, in this example, led by the Koch political network—is driving the mobbing of school boards when it comes to passing necessary measures like mask mandates, vaccine mandates, so we can finally end this pandemic. This is all part of the far right's alternative version of truth that they need in order to, as Steve Bannon likes to say, “flood the zone with shit” and use anger to drive people to the polls, drive people to run for office, drive people to believe that Big Lie that Trump won the election, because if they can rewrite history, they can come to power and they can stay in power and they can terrorize their enemies in the press, in science, in academia. They can terrorize their enemies that are fighting for tough legislation to finally combat climate change. Truth is the number one battlefield for control over the soul of the nation, and you have all these dark money groups waging war on the truth. What we're looking at today is a new Tea Party movement in America. The Tea Party movement was a dark money, Koch-led, Koch-funded movement, and it transformed the political landscape in America. But this time around, it's something darker.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. It's the polonium tea party movement. Everything you said brought to mind remarks I made right after Trump “won” the 2016 election after he was installed into the presidency, at any rate, and people were asking me for advice. I was saying, If you want to understand the situation, if you want to understand what's to come, you need to understand, first, foreign authoritarianism, both current with people like Putin or Victor Orbán or all the other resurgent neo-fascist movements in Europe, but also the history of selective autocracy in the United States, how violence and repression and grotesque brutality was a state sanctioned process against native Americans, against Black Americans, at various points in history against Japanese citizens—Japanese American citizens—during World War 2. I think the other side—the Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Koch money GOP side—realizes this as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
Everything that you're describing, these school board policies, this attempt to really limit what the American story is, is a reaction to the protests of 2020, you know, the Black rights protests. And to just Trump forcing all of these discussions out in the open to a country that was deluding itself that it was “post racial”, that Obama had ended racism. That kind of mentality was not just a delusion shared among citizens, but one that was codified in law. When the Supreme Court, in 2013, partially repealed the Voting Rights Act, they did it under the false premise that racism was over, that there wasn't systemic institutionalized racism against Black Americans in particular anymore. That was the case they made. And then I think within a couple of weeks, Trayvon Martin was killed. George Zimmerman was acquitted for that murder.
Sarah Kendzior:
It was an ominous time and we're seeing the aftermath of it now. But yeah, people should look at what's happening—the reaction to Mr. Jones, to your movie in Russia—and how they fear that, they fear the truth about their own history being put forward in such a straightforward way. Because they're undergoing their own rehabilitation with Stalin, with dictators of the Soviet past. And that's the model that these operatives in the United States are following. Putin's Russia is the US future unless people really are honest about the corrosion of our institutions, about the crimes of our past, and can put a vision forward where that honesty is not thought of as detrimental. There's a famous quote from James Baldwin that I think I'm about to paraphrase atrociously, but he basically says, you know, I love America. I love America so much that I feel obligated to criticize it relentlessly.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's how I feel too. And I think that that's what this show tries to exemplify because it's only through that critique, it's only through that honest assessment of history—including all of the hypocrisies, including all of the atrocities—that you can move forward and create a better future, one that doesn't just deny these things exist and try to shove them into some dark corner, because that does not work. If you've learned anything from the Trump administration, you should know that that does not work. And unfortunately, that's what they're doing now, still. I'll let you respond here, but we could go straight from this into the memory-holing of the coup and the incredibly ineffective attempt to hold the elite organizers of the January 6th Capitol attack accountable nine months after the fact. But, I don't know. Do you have other thoughts you want to say about this first?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I think in America's case especially, white supremacy is a power structure that we're all born into. And so it's like a fish in water. It's hard for you to see what's in front of you unless you're somebody who's nonwhite who has to raise their children differently and has to worry about their children differently than white parents do in a society like ours. I think in the last couple of years, certainly with the George Floyd protests, certainly with Trump and all of his abuses, white people were waking up to the whole history and the current power structure of white supremacy. Black wall street in Oklahoma city. A lot of Americans are finally learning about all of these painful chapters. Redlining and how financial institutions deliberately deprived nonwhite people financial lifelines and that literally destroyed communities and neighborhoods and transformed cities.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have to understand when we talk about history, it's never about the past. It's always an explanation of where we are and how we got there. It's, of course, as simple as that and as critical as that. If you look at Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, arguably the worst genocide committed by Stalin (and he committed several), he transformed an entire region of what is now Ukraine. Over time, that region became increasingly Russified. Generations of Russians came in, and what did Putin do? He justified those Russians for his excuse—not that he needed one—to invade Ukraine. So, Putin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine is building off of Stalin's mass murder in Ukraine very directly. From all my years of studying Stalin's genocide famine Ukraine, I wrote a piece back in December 2013 using it as an example of how we could easily see, predict, that what was going on in Ukraine wasn't just a revolution, that the country was headed for war because of the partition lines that Stalin's genocide famine had created, which Putin then brutally exploited.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, history is never past. It's always there right in front of us. There's the trauma that gets passed down through generations. We know that now, increasingly through the DNA that trauma gets passed down through generations. It's what holds generations back. It's what gives white people greater wealth, inherited wealth, and therefore a massive advantage in life. And nonwhite communities are held back generation after generation. So the reason why they want to attack history is because they want to deprive you of a very natural and understandable explanation for your pain and trauma. And they want to hold you back from healing and they want to hold you back from progressing and moving past that trauma, and finally building a more inclusive, fairer, freer country.
Andrea Chalupa:
They want to maintain that power structure and they, in fact, want to make it even more brutal. That's what's so scary about all of these thought police laws, what can and cannot be studied in schools. You heard all the states I listed off. It's several. Several. And the example in Texas where the Holocaust is coming under attack in Texas. So all of this is scary. It's thought police level. And what it's going to lead to is increasing self-censorship. People are going to have to choose between standing up for the truth and having money coming in to put food on the table and pay their mortgage. Because what if they get fired if they dare teach a class or teach a book that's politically not okay? This is very Orwellian. And, of course, the side that is doing it is the one that claims that they're being victimized.
Andrea Chalupa:
The reason why they claim they're being victimized is because that's part of the dictator's playbook. Trump is victim number one in his mind, and he's always fanning the flames of his base and reminding them that they're the underdog, that they're the victims, and the reason why they can claim that is because they are outnumbered by the facts. They are outnumbered by the science. They are outnumbered by the power of truth and the truth scares them. And that's where their victim mentality comes from. But also, Trump needs that victim mentality in order to continue his crusade and justify in his mind and plant that poisonous seed in the minds of his brainwashed followers.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. And I think we're going to be seeing more of this, you know, these self-proclaimed “canceled” people who podcasts and appear on television and headline conferences and make a shitload of money. They're all going to be claiming victimhood and I think when it comes to fugitive felon Steve Bannon, he's definitely going to try to do this and to add onto this sort of pseudo martyrdom of Trump's lost cause. They're basically modeling this on the Confederacy. They're trying to tap into that. You know, this is a glorious crusade, so to speak, to take back our patriotic rights, blah, blah, blah. These are kleptocrats. These are aspiring autocrats. These are people who are hooked up to the mob. These are the exact elites that they condemn. They are everything that they claim they are condemning.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so on that note, I’m gonna give you a little update on Bannon. Note that we are taping this at 10:30 Central Time, Tuesday morning. Today, the House is expected to recommend a contempt of Congress charge against Bannon. They're supposed to vote on this and then send that recommendation to the DOJ, where Merrick Garland is hanging out, protecting the Trump Crime Cult. You can listen to last week's episode. What did we title that Andrea I'm forgetting… Oh, running out the clock, running out the clock. Listen to last week's episode, Running Out the Clock for the full story of Merrick Garland. Also, check out the Patreon bonus because there are so many, so many horrible things about Merrick Garland and his mentor, Jamie Gorelick, that we went over time. That may happen again today.
Sarah Kendzior:
We'll see. So anyway, the January 6 Committee, which was formed in July, has finally issued a report about Steve Bannon, who has evaded their subpoenas. You may be thinking, Wow, they've had like nine months to put all this together, what kind of insights have they found? What new information is the January 6 Committee unleashing to the world? Well, it's the same information that we over here at Gaslit Nation told you… Well, first of all, before the Capitol coup, we did a preview special. We did a Capitol attack January 5th preview special because all of this was on the internet and we all knew it was going to happen. So, you could go find that. Then, on January 7th, we did an episode called Clear Intent, and we talked about Steve Bannon. And, here, I will just read a little paragraph from the January 6 Committee report where they are giving some info about Steve Bannon.
Sarah Kendzior:
They say, “Mr. Bannon appears to have had multiple roles relevant to this investigation, including his role in constructing and participating in the Stop The Steal public relations effort that motivated the attack. His efforts to plan political and other activity in advance of January 6th and his participation in the event of that day from a war room organized at the Willard Intercontinental Washington DC hotel,” you know, they describe how he speaks with Trump, and then they quote the exact same quote from Bannon from January 5th promising bloodshed and revolution saying, “Everything's going to go down tomorrow” that we have been playing on this show for nine months. And we're not unique in finding this quote. Bannon said it on a podcast. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find this stuff. So, only now are they talking about it. We had recommended that they play that clip during the impeachment hearing for Donald Trump—his second impeachment hearing, to be precise—because it's so damaging. And they just ignored it.
Sarah Kendzior:
They ignored Steve Bannon. They ignored Roger Stone. They ignored Michael Flynn. They ignored Lin Wood. Meanwhile, Twitter goes and deletes all their accounts. So, that record is then stripped from the public domain. It begins to leave collective memory, and the history of January 6th is rewritten. That's what's been going on for nine months. This is a purposeful attempt by the DOJ and the FBI to strip away the urgency of the crisis. And then meanwhile, on the right, you have the Trump Crime Cult and Fox News and all of their right-wing lackeys rewriting this narrative as a crusade that they are going to pick up again to create a sequel, to have yet another attack, yet another cou. This is one big, slow rolling coup. What’s really distressing here is that, you know, this isn't just a matter of... God, I don't want to say it's not just a matter of a fight for our country, because it could be bigger than that.
Sarah Kendzior
But on a practical level, when you look at like, well, what have they done for Steve Bannon? They gave him a head start. They gave him a nine month headstart, even though he confessed his crimes as they were happening and even before they were happening. They have been letting this asshole—this Goldman Sachs Harvard Hollywood elite operative asshole loaded with money, tied to fascist white supremacist movements all around the world—run around while the Republican Party decimates the right to vote and lays the groundwork for a legalized coup, for electoral autocracy, in the midterm election, and then again in the presidential election in 2024. And the Biden administration is not taking this seriously at all it seems. There was recently a very damning quote in The Atlantic from journalist, Peter Nicholas. He says, “I asked a White House official about those who are frustrated with inaction on voting rights protections.”
Sarah Kendzior:
And then he says, he's quoting the official here: “‘Every constituency has their issue.’ the official said. ‘If you ask immigration folks, they'll tell you their issue is a life or death issue, too.’” It's like, holy shit. You know, this is the right to vote. This is the foundation upon which all other rights rely. This is why Biden is in office, is because activists, particularly in Georgia, where they turned the state blue in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of a protracted effort from the executive branch to overturn their votes, in the midst of incredible voter suppression efforts, they did that. They got the Democrats the House, the Senate and the presidency. And people did that nationwide. But I want to point out how difficult it was to do that in Georgia and in other Southern states because those are the states where there are new suppressive voting restriction laws, voter suppression laws, that are being passed so that this could be legal, so that you can no longer take it to court.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's disastrous. It's going to impact everything. This big ol’ infrastructure package that they're putting together? Gone. All of it, gone. Healthcare, the economy, public education, everything hangs in the balance with the right to vote. You need to look at this. You need to look not just at the villains of the situation—which is obviously Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Kushner, and so on and so forth—but why are these democratically-run institutional apparati letting them get away with it, giving them that much time? And I'll stop in a second, but one thing I think is important to remember is that this is a network that runs on blackmail and threats, just like how Andrea was describing the Kremlin and Putin and their oligarch mafia network. The United States under Trump ran the same way.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's not just under Trump, really. It kind of runs that way in general. And sometimes this kind of blackmail is personal. It’s things like connected to, for example, Jeffrey Epstein, and information that spies and operatives like him—
Andrea Chalupa:
Who trafficked young Russian girls.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, who trafficked young Russian girls and trafficked young American girls, and it was connected to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Russian mafia. I mean, really, like a big global initiative. I wrote about this in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, if you want the whole sordid story. So, there's that kind of blackmail, but then there's the blackmail of state secrets. And here, it's very important to remember that Steve Bannon, when he was serving in the White House for about seven months basically as Trump’s chief advisor, he had access to everything.
Sarah Kendzior:
Like, if you have questions about some major events in American history, like say, the assassination of JFK or RFK or 9/11, or everybody's finances, or everybody's taxes, or, you know, whatever you want, he could get that. Jared Kushner could get that. Michael Flynn, I guess, in his little two-week run, could get that. And these are people who have no respect for protocol, law, order and they feel like they can act with utter impunity, especially during that time, because Trump was the president. It's like, who the hell is going to stop them from getting whatever kind of information they want and weaponizing it in whatever kind of way they want? And they're out there running around. Bannon was supposed to be in prison. He got pardoned. Flynn got pardoned. Manafort—there's another one—got pardoned. Roger Stone got pardoned. They're all just running amok with their foreign ties.
Sarah Kendzior:
A bunch of them are registered foreign agents. Manafort is. Flynn is. Tom Barrack is one for the United Arab Emirates. And these guys go way back. They go back decades and they've been plotting this. They've been plotting selling the United States. It's like a fire sale. It's stripping the country down and selling it for parts. And they're going to use whatever means necessary to accomplish this, to make all the money that they want, and to make sure that they remain immune from any kind of prosecution or repercussions. And I think, you know, clearly all of these people have committed a multitude of felonies. We’ve watched it play out year after year after year, and they face no consequences and they don't even face—with the exception, I think, of Bannon right now—the consequences of an investigation. There should clearly be an investigation into Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Sarah Kendzior:
And we explained last week that one of the reasons there probably isn't is because their lawyer is Merrick Garland’s mentor and best friend. Their former attorney, Jamie Gorelick, who got them into the White House, was that individual. So, you know, this is a real mess. It's a real litmus test of whether we are an entrenched mafia state and whatever the rationale is behind it. I mean, maybe they're just lazy and incompetent. That's something people like to throw out there. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems. I tend to think it's as bad as it seems because as I said, this is a mafia network. This is a transnational crime syndicate, formerly masquerading as a government, now protected by another administration. So, yeah. Andrea, do you have thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a lot of reason to think it's as bad as it seems because we've been dealing for decades with institutional decline. You don't get a president Trump installed with the Kremlin's help overnight. That happens over decades of our institutions failing us, and rampant misogyny and rampant white supremacy. As we saw with coverage of James Comey when he was FBI director, the failure of our US gymnastics team, the betrayal, happened on Jim Comey's watch. And that was systemic. You had the FBI academy, several, several women coming forward to say that they faced misogyny, which held them back in their careers to become FBI agents. They took it all the way up to James Comey and he just piled on. That's just one example. So why would we have a lot of faith in our institutions to save us when it's our institutions that got us here, and they've been further weakened by four years of Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner literally purging our institutions and putting in lackeys.
Andrea Chalupa:
And selling God knows what of... I don't want to say state secrets because we don't have any proof of that, but selling access, enriching themselves at the expense of US national security, certainly. Christopher Steele was in the news recently defending his Steele dossier and holding tight to the claim in the Steele dossier, this long, persistent rumor, that the Kremlin did have kompromat of some sexual nature on Trump from his trip to Moscow, the notorious golden showers video that might exist somewhere where Trump allegedly watched some golden shower show by a couple of prostitutes in a hotel room, on a bed that the Obama's slept in on their trip to Moscow. Steele is holding to this. And one of the points that Steele made was that the reason why he believes the tape is real... And people have asked him like, well, where is the tape?
Andrea Chalupa:
When are we going to see it, this Trump sex tape? And Steele has basically explained that there's no reason for us to see it because the Kremlin has gotten what they wanted out of Trump. That's certainly true. It goes along the whole entire checklist. They disrupted the Western Alliance. They weakened the Western Alliance. They certainly weakened and humiliated America and its standing in the world. We had such an incompetent president at the time of many crises. He crashed the economy by failing to stop a perfectly preventable pandemic, which killed now climbing up towards a million American lives. And the president of the United States—Putin's puppet, Trump—led, led, the mass murdering propaganda campaign against mask wearing, which saves lives, against the vaccine, against all of these health measures that people needed to take seriously. As we saw in that beautifully produced Democrat National Convention special on TV for Biden, one of Biden’s supporters said, “My father died because his preexisting condition was believing Donald Trump.”
Andrea Chalupa:
And that speaks for the countless people who could be alive today if they weren't brainwashed by him. And it's that brainwashing, it's truth as a battlefield that the Kremlin relies on, that Trump relies on. And I've never understood all of these Russiagate skeptics—a lot of them tend to be white men—who fail to overlook how culturally aligned Trump and his whole following is with Putin and his following. They're xenophobic. They're anti truth. They have this victim mentality. It’s raging nationalism. Both movements are being led by these pied pipers of corruption who are hurting their own base. Putin is hurting regular Russians, just like Trump is hurting his supporters. And they're both staunchly anti immigrant, pro war, pro shows of force, military parades and all that.
Sarah Kendzior:
And fiscally connected, literally. Literally trading money. They are oligarchs and plutocrats working in tandem, and so it is somewhat enigmatic that people who are rightfully critiquing hyper capitalism in the United States and corruption and white-collar crime are reluctant to critique the exact same thing happening in Russia and then note that these factions are working together and have been working together since the collapse of the Soviet union. And in some cases before, but go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, it's just oligarchs enriching oligarchs and using good old fashioned scapegoating to come into power and stay in power. There's no mystery to it. I think a lot of the Russiagate skeptics get hung up on the paperback novel sounding of this Keystone Cops goofy of spy espionage. We have Carter page Gilligan's island flopping around with these Russian spies. The Kremlin clown car really is that stupid. These criminals really are that comic. I mean, Paul Manafort with his hair dye and his officer's leather jacket. And Deripaska, a brass knuckle thug of an oligarch who literally won the aluminum wars in Russia in the car bomb ‘90s. These guys are cut from central casting. If you were to make an Adam McKay style film about all this, they are really kind of ridiculous and on the nose in a sharp satirical way.
Andrea Chalupa:
I do want to point out that Deripaska in the news today, where the FBI is raiding his home in Washington DC. Deripaska, of course, is a node of the whole Russiagate crime. He was a longtime handler or associate of Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort allegedly ripped him off. That's how embedded Paul Manafort was with the Kremlin family, that he felt comfortable enough getting some money from Deripaska and not returning it. And so Paul Manafort famously offered his services to run Trump's campaign for free. And there was some email out there that said something along the lines of, If he does this, if he manages Trump and gets Trump to win, he'll be straight with Deripaska and others. So, it was basically, why would Paul Manafort work for free other than settling a debt with a big time Russian oligarch mobster? And Deripask, even as the Russian opposition, Navalny’s group, even reported that there was an alleged mistress of Deripaska’s that came out to show how Deripaska took a very keen interest in Trump's election and Trump coming to power.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, Deripaska is very key to this. As we saw from the Steele dossier, one of the things that still the Steele dossier did get right, is that Paul Manafort was very much the Kremlin's operative in uniting the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. He was the go-between guy. He was doing the Kremlin's dirty work in Ukraine for a decade before he came over to manage Trump's election for president. He managed Putin's puppet, Yanukovich, for many years and was the right hand to the king there. And so the fact that Deripaska’s back in the news and the Feds are raiding him… We will be covering that in an upcoming episode. And hopefully there is some justice there.
Sarah Kendzior;
That is some very interesting breaking news there. And hopefully we'll have an update on that next week. So, you know, we’ve spent most of this episode talking about narratives and narrative warfare and how it's a life or death issue, like what Andrea brought up with the Trump follower whose preexisting condition was believing Trump's lies about COVID, which is something that unfortunately happened to a lot of people in our country and in people living in other dictatorships around the world. With Trump, you know, I'm going to get into this and then I think we're kind of running out of time, so I'll probably continue it into the Patreon. One of the things that's happened in the aftermath of Trump leaving office is this eruption of books written by former administration officials, the majority of whom are complicit in the crimes and who are using these books as an attempt at reputational rehab not just for themselves, but for all the implicated parties.
Sarah Kendzior:
And there's a strategy involved here. I've said many times, this is an administration that covered up crime with scandal, and they also have reporters whose job it is basically to do a kind of de facto PR in the way that they cover this administration so that the most severe crimes, the most horrific information, is either misrepresented, selectively represented, or told to us so long after the fact that it's harder to prosecute in a court of law. The publishing industry is complicit here, and I am not reading any of the books by these corrupt Trump administration people, but I would absolutely read a book about bulk book buys as a form of money laundering, about the promise of publishing deals as a bribe that provides an incentive for people to stay silent in real time while they're holding office, and about how publishing agreements can function as tacit NDAs, as nondisclosure agreements, for people who are witnessing crimes, witnessing illicit activity, but know that they're going to stay silent because they want that payout to come in.
Sarah Kendzior:
And when you have booked buys, as I explained, coming out in bulk, you know that that payout is coming. But first, I just want to clarify that I'm not talking about the kind of books written by people like Alexander Vindman or Fiona Hill, civil servants who did what they needed to do in real time, who put their lives on the line in real time, who testified in court. I'm talking about people like John Bolton, about that lady who worked for Melania who's so inconsequential I can't even remember her name. I’m talking about Donald Trump Jr., the king of the bulk book buys, whose books were purchased by the Republican National Committee. I'll get into that in a little bit, but first I want to talk about Bob Woodward. Bob Woodward is basically riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels.
Andrea Chalupa:
That sounds delicious, by the way.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] It does. The Trump administration has been incredibly lucrative for Bob Woodward who made his bones during Watergate. He became known as this great truth teller along with Carl Bernstein, you know, bringing the truth of the crimes that Richard Nixon was committing to light in the Washington Post. It created this kind of myth of him as a heroic Crusader. That is not Bob Woodward. I'm not even sure that was Bob Woodward back then in the 1970s, but it definitely has not been how he's been behaving for the last several decades. So, just some recent things that he's done; Woodward was informed in February about COVID that it was airborne, that it was lethal, that it was going to kill us all unless there was some kind of intervention here. And he said nothing. Trump knew this. He knew Trump knew this.
Sarah Kendzior:
They both knew this. And they lied. Trump lied to the public and Woodward kept his mouth shut and people died as a consequence. So that's… I don't even know these titles. Don't get these books. Get them from the library if you're going to read them. That's my advice on that. His newest book reveals things like Trump wanted to use nuclear weapons in his final days, which is something we basically knew about anyway because Pelosi had had to go and meet with the military and came back with this kind of assurance like, Well, he says he's not going to use them, so we're all going to be cool. I don't actually know what the hell went on there. I'm kind of interested in the real story of that, but I know I'm not going to get it from Bob Woodward because he is a court stenographer.
Sarah Kendzior:
He uses that Watergate credibility to narrow the narrative and to serve the interest of power and he's been doing this for a very long time. And Joan Didion, the essayist, just obliterated him all the way back in 1996. She wrote an article called, “The Deferential Spirit”, about Bob Woodward, which is just so, so brutal. I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs and then we’ve got other people to discuss. Maybe we'll continue in the bonus. Anyway, here's Joan Didion on Bob Woodward in 1996, a couple excerpts: “What seems most remarkable in this new Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insider's inside story and each of which went on to become a number one bestseller. These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent. That this crude personalization works to narrow the focus, to circumscribe the range of possible discussion or speculation, is, for the people who find it useful to talk to Mr. Woodward, its point”.
Sarah Kendzior:
“What they have in Mr. Woodward is a widely trusted reporter, even an American icon, who can be relied upon to present a Washington in which problematic or questionable matters will be definitively resolved by the discovery or the demonstration that there has been no discovery of the ‘smoking gun’ or ‘the evidence’. Should such narrowly defined ‘evidence’ be found, he can then be relied upon to demonstrate ‘fairly’ that the only fingerprints on the smoking gun are those of the one bad apple in the barrel, the single rogue agent in the tapestry of decent intentions.” So, wow, that is 25 years old and that is a template that describes every Woodward book that has been written since. It also describes a great deal of the court stenography that comes from the mainstream press, that comes from the New York Times or the Washington Post, where there's an utter refusal to look at the complicity within institutions, to examine the rot, to widen the scope, to look at things in historic context.
Sarah Kendzior:
They will look at Trump as this kind of like, He came in and then things went bad. But the road on which he trod to get into that position, that is what they don't want to look at because they helped build the road. People like Woodward paved the way for Trump just as much as people like Bannon and all these overtly psychotic, violent individuals. These reporters who insist on the integrity of institutions when that integrity is just blatantly absent, and who try to come up with these retrospective narratives that reframe in the American imagination how we see our politics, how we see our society, how we see our possibilities, they are guilty in that respect. And they become emulated because they are best-selling authors and because they were this cloak of respectability. That cloak suffocates the truth because the truth is very ugly.
Sarah Kendzior:
And the truth is often very hard to decipher and it doesn't fit neatly into these kind of narratives. But what Woodward did recently with these two books, with the withholding of information in real time and what all these other Trump goons did by withholding information in time, it hurts one group of people the most, and that is the American public. Because Congress is not serving them. These committees are also belatedly putting out narratives about imminent national security threats, and we have to exist in this society. This isn't some abstract foreign policy debate or some abstract white-collar crime problem. This trickles down. This is the actual trickle-down economics. It's the trickle-down economics of white-collar crime and we all have to live with the consequences. We have to live with extreme income inequality. We have to live with politicians who feel completely unaccountable to the American people, who feel like they are so powerful because they're getting so much dark money that they could slight the president's agenda as it's backed by 96% of Congress, which is, of course, what Manchin and Sinema are doing.
Sarah Kendzior:
But if they were doing it, other people would do it, too. We have a country that is enthralled to very dark forces and has been for a very long time. And what reporters like Woodward do is come in and try to pretend it's light, it's airy, it's a narrative. It plays like a television movie in your head. It's not that. It is the darkest, most unfair and cruel shit. And the humanity that's stripped out of that is really, I think, the worst crime of all. That's what deference is. That's what Joan Didion was talking about, is deference to power.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think that's an important conversation that we're going to continue in this week's bonus, the early show that everyone can get by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher. It comes out on Tuesday afternoons. And I just want to say for your Woodward example, elitist voices do their part in the war on the truth. If you go back to Mr. Jones, the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, it's all about Walter Duranti, the fancy New York Times Moscow bureau chief who was a genius at muddling the truth and letting elites like him get away with corruption and mass murder. And he did this in order to have a right-hand seat to power. That is dangerous to the truth, just like Bannon's foot soldiers, just like the Koch dark money political network, just like Trump and his victimization army, all of these power structures combined are waging a war against the truth. That's why it's up to all of us to stay vigilant and to stay in the game and fight back. And take an example from the group in Moscow, Memorial, the oldest NGO in Russia. They continue to fight for the truth against great odds, and we have to take what happened to them as not only a warning to us, but also a case study of how you have to keep showing up for your communities and keep fighting for the truth, n o matter what, because it's worth it.
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:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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