Beware the Savvy Set
This month's song is "Home" by Via Skies. If you have a song you would like to submit for the Art Matters Gaslit Nation Song Series, submit it here!
Welcome to the Gaslit Nation Halloween Special! At Gaslit Nation, it is forever Halloween AND Groundhog’s Day, so we revisit some familiar villains – Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon – and look at the incredibly shitty horror sequels they are plotting! We discuss the Facebook Papers and Zuckerberg’s desire to control the world while plunging individual nations into autocratic violence and reaping the profits, the continued lack of accountability for the January 6 seditious attack on the Capitol, the new Rolling Stone article naming Republican representatives as accomplices to the coup plot, and the deluded Democrats who think they will avoid the fallout of climate change and intergenerational mafia state corruption. We also praise the few Democratic officials getting it right, like Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, whose tweet we totally stole for the title of this episode!
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Intro Music: “Home” by Via Skies
Sarah Kendzior:
I’m Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
The song you just heard was “Home” by Via Skies. “Via Skies is the musical vision of singer/songwriter, Jeff Gonzales and producer/songwriter, Chad Cussen. After years of recording, touring with bands and a move to Chicago, Jeff returned to his hometown of Mesa, Arizona, where he released his solo EP, The Lights Just Went Out... With the help of a “Musician’s Wanted” ad, Jeff met Chad, who had been producing music for several years in the area. Via Skies formed gradually in Mesa with the duo recording at Chad's Red Room studio. Combining the soft alt country notes of Jeff's previous solo work and Chad's textual style and music production, they are currently working to complete their debut album slated for release in 2022.”
Andrea Chalupa:
From Jeff, he provided this artistic statement: “‘Home’ was one of those songs that shot out of me like a cannon. All of the ideas came to me quickly. It felt like an epiphany. I wrote it as I was finally starting to realize what truly matters. I spent my late teens and 20s touring in bands, finding creative ways to be self-destructive. I suppose this song is at least in part about finding what and who is important to you and truly valuing them. With a spouse and children now, I find my perspective has allowed for this gradual transformation. Thanks for listening.” And you can find Via Skies on Twitter at @viaskiesmusic and learn more on their website at viaskies.com. And if you'd like to submit your own song to Gaslit Nation, please do so. You can find the link on where to submit your music on the Gaslit Nation Twitter and at the top of our Patreon page for this week's episode. We want to hear from you.
Sarah Kendzior:
Alright, well, welcome to the show everybody. It's another beautiful day here in America, here at Gaslit Nation, and I've come prepared with nothing to say, which I call “Pulling a Mueller”. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Andrea, for the latest news on Facebook.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. I'm happy to fill in and be the opposite of Mueller, which would be Gaslit Nation. So that's appropriate.
Sarah Kendzior:
Which would be honest and full of truth and meaning, but go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I just want to say this is also the Gaslit Nation Halloween Special.
[Halloween SFX]
Andrea Chalupa:
Sarah and I celebrate our friendship anniversary on Halloween, the day we met, over the hashtag, #TrumpSexTape. If you want the whole backstory for that, listen to our first three episodes that lay it all out there. It's not just the story of one of the greatest crimes in human history, Trump and the Kremlin hijacking our democracy in 2016. That crime scene also birthed a beautiful friendship and it's been Halloween Groundhog's Day ever since. And if you hear any banging in the background, it's because I am trapped in a haunted house called America, and desperately trying to get out. So, no, there is some construction near me. So, we're going to start off with Mark “Zombie Army'' Zuckerberg [scream SFX] to get our Halloween addition going. Zuckerberg continues to create his global zombie army like some Bond villain through his disinformation machine known as Facebook.
Andrea Chalupa:
The zombie maker, Facebook, has caused massive harm worldwide and the company knows all about it and doesn't care. It continues to profit off these harmful practices, which they justify as growth. Thanks to brave whistleblower, Frances Haugen, a data scientist and former product manager for the Civic Integrity Team at Facebook who left the company out of frustration over its refusal to keep the public safe, journalists at several news outlets have been combing through a treasure trove of documents from Facebook known as the Facebook Papers. Here are some of the damning details of how Zuckerberg, who is worth $121.6 billion, maintains his blood money empire. From the Washington Post: “A personal decision by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads to a crackdown on dissent in Vietnam. Measures to suppress hateful, deceptive content are lifted after the American presidential election in 2020 as pro-Trump groups disputing the legitimacy of the election experience meteoric growth. A dummy test account on Facebook in India is flooded with violent anti-Muslim propaganda, which remains visible for weeks on the real account of a frightened Muslim college student in Northern India.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“A trove of internal Facebook documents reveals that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions, and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.” Whew. All right, that's quite a lead and we'll be linking to that article in our show notes for this episode, which you can find on our Patreon page as always. And all of this reporting that's coming out with the Facebook Papers on several outlets is, of course, a chilling reminder of how disinformation is a Molotov cocktail thrown at the vulnerable. Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook. The buck stops with him. If he wanted to put an end to the weaponization of his social media platforms, he could do it but he's continuing, once again, not to. Defying public pressure, congressional pressure, and pleading from targeted groups, Mark Zuckerberg continues to endanger countless lives around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Even as the Facebook Papers are being scrutinized and reported on in the press, Facebook continues to pump out disinformation persuading people not to get vaccinated, which puts their lives and the lives of those around them—especially young children—in danger. This is all happening so multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg can make even more money for himself and his shareholders. There's no other motivation but greed. As the saying goes that I once heard in Ukraine, “The oligarchs see the people as the shit they grow their money in.” The zombie army and their terrorized victims, including the police officers who separate PTSD from protecting our democracy from Trump's violent white supremacist mob on January 6, are just the shit Mark Zuckerberg grows his money in. He will not change. He refuses to change. The government must then step in and do what Facebook cannot.
Andrea Chalupa:
The company must be broken up. It must be fined out of existence. It must be forced to pay reparations to the lives destroyed, including to the families of the victims killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, the white supremacist who used Facebook to organize a killing spree in Kenosha, Wisconsin. To underline this point, here's the level of deception being pushed shamelessly by the greed machine of Facebook. From the Washington Post again: “Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94% of the hate speech it finds, but in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5% of all hate speech on Facebook.” The article goes on to show how Facebook curbed disinformation and misinformation in the 2020 election, then stopped those safeguards after November 6 as the Stop The Steal movement rapidly grew on Facebook, leading to the violent coordinated attack on our Capitol which led to the deaths of several people. Zuckerberg himself didn't want to provide Spanish language resources for the 2020 election to ensure credible information because he saw that as “political”, or whatever. As bad as Facebook is in the US, driving out online hatred and turning it into real-world violence, Facebook is even more dangerous across the rest of the world where the safeguards are utterly lacking and far less what they are in the United States, especially in non-English speaking countries, making Facebook a dangerous weapon for authoritarianism. If you're wondering why dictatorship has been on the rise, it's in part because of Facebook.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Sarah Kendzior:
There's that saying that money is the root of all evil, and I think for Facebook, evil is the root of all money. It's not just about money. It's not just about profit. It's not just about greed. It's about power and control and it's about world domination. They've created a network that any intelligence agency would envy, that, if it had been described to us 20 years ago, we would have just reeled in disgust and said, “Well, of course we're not going to voluntarily put our own information out there.” And this is also true for Google, for Twitter to a lesser extent, and that's a terrifying thing. And I know you're going to get in more about the effect of this, about how it creates authoritarian systems within states, but one of the most unnerving things to me is, as we've been saying for years, this is a transnational crime syndicate that is operating behind the governments of multiple countries, including the United States, including Brexit UK, including Hungary, Russia, all of these countries that have lurched to the right.
Sarah Kendzior):
But it has one mechanism behind it. I mean, not only one, but they are sharing information is my point. There's a nexus of groups that are treating data, including Facebook, including Cambridge Analytica and its successor companies. There's a hive here and the job of law enforcement, the job of any government that values its sovereignty, that values its national security, and that prioritizes the public safety of its people needs to be to break that hive apart, to expose it to the world, and to take people like Zuckerberg out of control. Just to sort of emphasize the point you brought up, in the Washington Post, they quote a former vice president of marketing who left Facebook in 2020, Brian Boland, “The specter of Zuckerberg looms in everything the company does. It is entirely driven by him.” That is what he says. So on our Halloween theme, you can add the specter of Zuckerberg. But anyway, go on
Andrea Chalupa:
With hyper capitalism—with unchecked, unregulated capitalism, frankly—money is power in Ukraine. The oligarchs are power centers. They own a bunch of media and they use it to fight each other. You had one oligarch who had his own private militia and literally had his own shark tank where he would throw live animals and that was in his office. So, yeah, Manafort… Or sorry, Zuckerberg—
Sarah Kendzior:
Ha!
Andrea Chalupa:
Zuckerberg—another Kremlin useful idiot—Zuckerberg is, as I referenced earlier, is a Bond villain at this point. He's been a Bond villain for some time now and in reference to the Kremlin, all of his moral corruption, Facebook being so rotted to its black, gross center, it's the Freddy Krueger center. I’m really pulling these Halloween references out. It was all useful to the Kremlin in helping bring Trump to power in 2016.
Andrea Chalupa:
All of this is about power, which is why these oligarchs in America don't want to be regulated. They don't want to be taxed because they prefer being masters of the universe, racing each other to space, being above everybody else. It's about taking away their power. That's how they see it. If it was a matter of sharing some of their wealth to build some bridges, to finance some public schools, to keep people out of poverty, they’d have no problem doing that to some extent, because they'd look at all the studies of how that benefits society as a whole. What they want to avoid is what they see as a “culture of entitlement”, that if you give an inch to the people, they'll take a mile and next thing you know, their power is gone and they've been effectively muted.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so that's what it's all about. It’s a power struggle right now. Because they could afford to hunger. They could afford to rebuild America. Just our oligarchs alone can afford to do that, free colleges and whatnot. All the very wealthy in America combined can pay for what we need to be a strong, secure country again, to fight climate change, which is a national security crisis. And they're not doing it because they don't want to give up being masters of the universe. Zuckerberg loves being a Bond villain. It's getting back at all the girls that didn't have time for him when he was a kid. You know? So this goes really deep with this psychopath. All right, so, more with the Bond villain. Zuckerberg has recently been personally added to a lawsuit by Washington DC District Attorney Karl Racine, who writes on Twitter that his investigation revealed that Zuckerberg was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook's failure to protect user data”.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is in reference to the stolen Facebook data used by Cambridge Analytica, the militarized propaganda firm launched by white supremacist leaders, Steve Bannon and a far-right American oligarch, Robert Mercer, to help bring Trump and the Republicans to power in the 2016 election. One thing I want to note is the interesting backstory of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has had an illustrious career working as a data scientist for major tech companies, Google, Yelp, and Pinterest. Her eyes were open to the horrors of disinformation and misinformation when she lost a close friend to the black hole of online conspiracy theories. Her story is all too common. One of the many questions received from our listeners is how to get through to friends and family who have been brainwashed by conspiracy theories spread by tech giants like Facebook, companies that continue to prioritize profits over human lives and separating families and friends in the process. I, too, have someone close to me who has been sucked into the black hole of conspiracy theories and it's painful. Facebook is literally separating families. Our stories are all too common and it's far past time the government steps in and finally puts a stop to Facebook and the unchecked greed of tech giants. This must happen now, as soon as possible, because the damage and destruction is ongoing and more innocent people will be killed
Sarah Kendzior:
On that note, as you mentioned before, Facebook was an integral part of spreading the disinformation that led to the Capitol attacks, or at least helped facilitate them. It was one of many mechanisms of digital media that the Trump crew—in particular, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Lin Wood—used to recruit militants in real time. And this is something that we watched play out in real time and we did shows about it in real time. And I spent a lot of time on Twitter, in particular, watching this process happen, where there are a lot of folks drawn into QAnon, drawn towards Trump fandom in general, who were somewhat hesitant about participating in a seditious attack on their own government, but were goaded by Lin Wood, by these henchmen of Trump, to do it. And so the evidence was all over Twitter.
Sarah Kendzior:
The same thing was happening on Facebook. This was all documented. This is all out there to find, so there's—in one sense—two sides to the disinformation coin. It's used to mold militants. It's used to facilitate illegal action, but it leaves an evidence trail behind it. And that evidence trail, on Twitter at least, is deleted, and I believe on Facebook as well, which is leading to an assault on collective memory. We named this show really well. I'm glad we went with “Gaslit Nation” because we are now the only country, I think, in world history to memory-hole a coup. To be told constantly not just by the people who perpetrated the coup that it was not a coup, but by the opposite side, by the Democrats—who, of course, they were trying to stop from getting into power—by the media.
Sarah Kendzior:
They don't full-out deny it in the way that the Republicans do, but they are reluctant to speak bluntly about the severity of the threat and the fact that that threat remains ongoing because people have not been held accountable. You really need to start asking some tough questions about that, if you haven't already, because a functional government does not need to be convinced to prosecute people who launch a seditious violent attack. A functional government would want to do it in order to protect the country, whereas the government that ultimately wants the coup to succeed would be doing everything that Congress and the Department of Justice and Merrick Garland have been doing all year long. And we went into this in previous episodes, you know, prevaricating, stalling, denying, putting out requirements that would never be fulfilled, like a bi-partisan investigation of a coup that was enabled by one party, and as we're going to get into, by specific representatives within that party, within the government, people who are committing treason.
Sarah Kendzior:
So we need to examine the perpetrators, but we need to examine the enablers just as much, especially this many months in. We're approaching 10 months after this attack. And it's easy to examine the perpetrators because they announced their crimes in advance. They document their crimes as they're happening and they brag about them after. Contrary to what you're hearing from the FBI, this is not hard to figure out. The evidence is right in front of you and the perpetrators use that to their advantage, the fact that people are programmed to believe that crimes can not take place in plain sight, that if they do so, then they're not really a crime, that somehow secret information has more validity than things that you witnessed with your own eyes and ears, that somehow anonymous sources are more reliable than criminals simply confessing the crimes to the public.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have become hardwired to believe this. I think this goes back to before when I was born. This dates back to Watergate, but we certainly saw it play out with WikiLeaks in 2016 and just with any kind of anonymous sourcing about things that are publicly evident in general. We saw it with the Mueller Report, when we were like, yeah, that's all the stuff that we watched them proclaim in public and that's already been reported. And you're literally just grabbin’ articles here and there, Robert Mueller, and putting them into a narrative and then refusing to prosecute. So, yeah, you should ask some basic questions of who benefits here, who benefits from this lack of accountability, what mechanisms of accountability exist, and are the people who could be using them doing so? Are people acting with appropriate urgency?
Sarah Kendzior:
Are they acting with transparency? The answer to the latter is no. And I just want to add one little quote here from a Senator who actually is doing his job, at least in the sense of having a moral compass and understanding the crisis at hand. This is Brian Schatz, a Senator from Hawaii who tweeted the other day, “A lot of people are trying to pretend it wasn't a coup. Beware the savvy set, especially in Washington, DC. There's always a market for someone to scold people for freaking out, even when there's good reason to be freaked out. It was a coup. Don't give me some new evidentiary standard.” And I'm just like, Tell your colleagues, man, because if everyone could just get on board with identifying the crisis we face, we might actually be able to confront it. We might actually be able to get somewhere. But if you're denying that, if you're denying everything you witnessed, then we're in a place as a nation, as Abraham Lincoln predicted, it's suicide. It's collective suicide through denial, through dismissal, through the downgrading of a dangerous threat.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, several members of Congress (clearly on the Democratic side) tweeted out the Rolling Stone story relying on two anonymous sources, saying that as organizers of January 6th, they worked regularly with six members of Congress—Republican members of Congress and/or their staff—so when several members of Congress are tweeting this story out and saying things like, “You need to read this”, there's truth to this reporting by Rolling Stone. It's clear. The House investigates. They know that these members of Congress were involved in this. That's why they are promoting the Rolling Stone’s own reporting. Hopefully more outlets will come out and corroborate this, but also, we saw it all happen out in the open, as we keep saying on this show. And I want to break down this Rolling Stone story that's going around, that everyone is linking to, and some very fancy legal pundits are trying to throw cold water on.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Let's not rush to conclusions.”... People like Neal Katyal who famously defended child labor to the Supreme Court in a big Nestle case, that guy. When we saw all this happening out in the open, when we saw Lauren Boebert of Colorado give Nancy Pelosi's location, we saw all of the rhetoric to incite violence that these guys were throwing out leading up to January 6th and on January 6th, Mo Brooks had fricking body armor on that day, of course there's coordination between members of Congress and the far-right activists on the ground of January 6th, which was all obvious. I mean, the Rolling Stone article just basically ties up together what we already know, what we saw happen with our own eyes, the history we all just lived through. So, I'm really tired of the legal pundit class, in a time of great crisis to our democracy, trying to pump the brakes on what is obvious and what we can all see.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm (affirmative). And their new little tactic, by the way, is to propose a special counsel. You know, we went through months and months and months of us warning you about Merrick Garland, about just, you know, listing things he did. I had a viral thread, in part taken from the show, of just terrible actions that Merrick Garland has done while in office. And about half of that thread was written back in May, just adding up the things he'd done before March and May and saying, you know, We have a serious problem here. We have an enabler. We have an enabler of a mafia state and there needs to be pressure applied to Merrick Garland to do his job, or he needs to be removed. And so all of these people just screamed at me and harassed me and were like, “Oh, just be patient. Just wait.” This is the same crew.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are the people who brought us, “Mueller's going to save us,” or “Bill Barr is trustworthy,” or “Cy Vance is on the case.” These are the same people who have been spinning baseless narratives of sealed indictments and secret saviors. So, you know, how did that work out for you guys? We've got, what? Nearly a million Americans dead from a plague? We have an unpunished attack on the Capitol. We have a bunch of felons—including Manafort, Stone, Steve Bannon—pardoned by the president who we kept saying you need to impeach, you need to convict, you need to expose, you need to make sure he does not wield this pardon power, and over and over and over again, we're just told, “Oh, be patient. Wait.” And then some bureaucratic process emerges to gum up the spokes. We hear this little mantra over and over again.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Oh, they're dotting the I's and crossing the T's”, except in the word indict. We hear, “Oh, the wheels of justice, you know, they roll slow but they grind fine.” It's like the wheels of justice have knocked democracy down and left it in the road like roadkill. It is such an insane situation, these pacifying predictions. And now, of course, their new one is “Let's have a special counsel,” because they know that this will take forever under the Democrats. They know they'll have to go through this big rigmarole of appointment, of finding the right person, of cutting out conflicts of interests. They've now basically acknowledged that Merrick Garland is a conflict of interest because he is acting as Trump's personal attorney in multiple cases, just as Bill Barr did. This is the same situation as May, so do not trust this legal pundit class that always—always—wants to move things down the line, does not want to enforce accountability, plays down the danger of the crisis, plays down that we are facing an existential threat to our national security and our sovereignty and we have been in this situation now for over half a decade. Trust your eyes and ears. Trust your instincts. What you see in front of you is what's there. And when it looks like nothing is happening, it's because nothing is happening, not because there's a secret savior operating behind the scenes, just getting everything in line. You should have learned your lesson from Mueller, from Vance, from Comey, from whoever the hell you had faith in that was baseless. Have faith in yourself.
Andrea Chalupa:
They're not doing their job until you see Steve Bannon in handcuffs being escorted into prison for contempt of Congress. That should have happened already. And I don't have a lot of faith in Merrick Garland to enforce that charge. And then Trump should have been indicted by now. The one thing I will say Mueller did give us was an entire report, The Mueller Report, about how Trump could be indicted, and here's one way. Mueller even broke his silence to counter AG Barr’s cover-up memo with Rosenstein. Mueller broke his famous silence to say, “No, actually this was very serious. Americans should be extremely concerned about this.” And so why haven't we indicted Trump now that he's no longer president and we no longer have that trumped up, stupid, highly political DOJ memo that they used to protect Trump while in office? Why can't we arrest him now, just based on the Mueller report, indict him just based on that? Is it an option that is on the table that the DOJ refuses to use? And instead they're defending Trump in a lawsuit of sexual assault.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. And as you said, there are specific charges in that Mueller report. There are multiple counts of obstruction of justice, and this is something that Merrick Garland could do right now. There's nothing holding him back. There's always this sort of fictitious belief that there's some sort of protocol holding people back from doing their jobs. There's not. They're just refusing to do them, the same way Janet Yellen refuses to release Trump's tax returns even though that was something that the Biden administration promised, the same way Biden will not fire Ron Bloom in order to shift the balance of power in the Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service to fire Louis DeJoy and be able to have us get our mail again. I mean, do you know how seminal, how basic something like the Postal Service is to a country and what it means when the president won't even protect that, won't even protect the most basic rudimentary piece of infrastructure?
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, one of the few agencies that's basically universally beloved until now, until Louis DeJoy took it over,I mean, that to me is a sign that the Biden administration is willing to let the country collapse—because keep in mind they're doing this during a pandemic where people have more reliance on the mail than they usually do—and is possibly seeking it. I can't find other justifications for their behavior because it is so incredibly destructive to our country. And we're seeing the ramifications every day and they don't have the old excuse of, “Well, you know, we're not in power,” which was fair in 2017. It was less fair in 2019 when they took control of the House. They could be doing a lot of things right now—Merrick Garland, in particular—and they're not doing them because they're too busy protecting a criminal syndicate.
Sarah Kendzior:
Whether that's through complicity or threats on a personal level or threats on an external level, threats to national security, or blackmail, or bribes, or all the other tactics that this crime syndicate uses—that the Trump Crime Cult uses. And, you know, you may be listening to this thinking, Well, that sounds very dramatic. But we've been through this. We went through this in Trump's first impeachment. It's also documented in the Mueller Report. It's documented in the second series of impeachment hearings and it’s documented in an enormous number of books and articles. These are, in fact, the tactics that they use. This is a mafia state. It is not as entrenched as the mafia state of Russia or Azerbaijan or others from the former Soviet union, but it is indeed a mafia state that is empowered by plutocrats, by corrupt billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, who we were just discussing, and so forth. We are losing our democracy in real time and we have been for a long time. But the breaks need to be pumped right now. We do not have time to waste. Anyway, I know you want to get through this Rolling Stone thing, so we should go back to that.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to say it's not just us in our little podcast screaming about this. I was talking to a white middle-aged male—older than middle-aged, who I will not name because I've just referenced his age—who is very much that independent voter demographic that the Democratic Party is so desperately trying to win in swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida and other places. And he was telling me like, you know, obviously he supported Biden like any sane person in 2020. And he was telling me how deeply disappointed he is about Biden's performance so far, the failure to get anything major done other than the pandemic work that has been good. But in terms of all the big structural programs that need to happen, standing up for our democracy with a full-throated endorsement of securing voting rights against this Republican authoritarian threat, holding Trump and that whole Kremlin Klown Kar accountable, indictments of all those people and all their corruption, not just the violent attempted overthrow of our democracy, but the years of blatant corruption, he's deeply disappointed in Biden.
Andrea Chalupa:
The American voter knows. The American public sees what is happening. And it's why Biden's approval rating is tanking right now. They need to wake up and finally give the American people what they fought so hard for in the 2020 election, making phone calls, knocking on doors even though it's a pandemic, making donations to all of these political races even though they couldn't afford it. You know, people really showed up in 2020 to protect our democracy from a literal authoritarian threat that was trying to install himself and his family as a dictatorship in America. People showed up and did what is very rarely done, which is voting a wannabe dictator out of power. And we paid a price for it with that violence on January 6th. The very least Biden can do is give the American people what they fought for, which is justice. And we don't have to remind everyone that justice delayed is justice denied. Right now, we have a Biden administration and all the people around him—his advisors, Garland, of course, we keep coming back to who’s responsible for this—they are determined to let Trump and Bannon, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and all those complicit in their crimes and criminality get away with it.
Andrea Chalupa:
They are helping. They are like Barr, the former attorney general, with his coverup. Okay? They are aiding the coverup. They're weakening our democracy from within if they do not do anything. Okay? We keep telling you on this show that once you lose your democracy, you enter a black hole of corruption and then the brain drain starts. And then the only way you can get it back is if you have a generation or two of martyrs that literally puts their lives on the line like they're doing in countries like Russia and the Philippines, where journalists have to risk going to jail, risk being killed, just to get some semblance of democracy back. Once you lose it, it's gone indefinitely.
Andrea Chalupa:
And it's extraordinarily difficult to come back to where we are, even today. So please Biden, if you call yourself a transitional president, what are you transitioning us to? Dictatorship? If you don't fight for justice, if you don't stand by your convictions, if you don't build off of the work of the first civil rights president Ulysses S. Grant—a boyfriend of the show—if you don't do that work, we're screwed. We're royally screwed. Our children are screwed. This is a code red situation and you need to be full-throated on filibuster reform. You need to be full-throated, finally, on indictments. You need to stop acting like the Mueller Report never happened and that it's not a convenient charging memo for indicting Donald J. Trump. You need to stop acting like all of these facts don't exist, because they do. Because otherwise, you're contributing to the Republican gaslighting of America.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and just a final point on that: It's not just a matter of this Trump Crime Cult slinking away. It's not just a matter of what they did during those four years in office that they went unpunished for. It's the fact that they are preparing for a sequel and they're doing it openly. That's what Steve Bannon is doing. That's what all the other members—Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Lin Wood—that's what they're doing with these rallies. This is not a simple grift and this is not a campaign, this is an aspiring autocratic takeover. And if you do not protect voting rights, if you treat voting rights like this optional element of democracy when it's in fact the foundation, you are surrendering to that crime cult, and we all know it. When you are disenfranchising people and we're watching these new laws get erected in Georgia, in Texas and all these states where people came out in a pandemic, in the face of white supremacist threats, in the face of threats to poll workers, and they came out and got you in, and you're saying, “Yeah, your right to vote, that's negotiable,” you know, other things like tax benefits to corporations or whatever the hell they're protecting, climate change, that's also negotiable. I mean, it's insane. The priorities, they're not just skewed, they're not just greedy. They are so incredibly self-destructive. The Democratic Party and the Biden administration are setting up a system where they can never win again, and I don't know how they don't know that. I mean, they're allowing a system to exist where even if people do everything they did in 2020, even if they come out in droves, if they try to overwhelm voter suppression—which should never be our job, by the way. That should never be something that you ask the American public to do. You should be prohibiting voter suppression.
Sarah Kendzior
You should be overturning those anti-constitutional laws. But anyway, even if we do this, there are now laws that say, Well, we could just throw out your vote. We're just going to flip it. If you voted Democrat, we're changing it. We're changing it to Republican. There are no rules anymore because you have refused to enforce accountability. And that's the consequence. But we bear that consequence. We, the public, we, the people bear that consequence while you sit off, you know, with your millions or billions of dollars, and just what? Watch from above? Watch the floods, watch the fires, watch the planet, destroy itself? Like, what is the end game here? That is what I'm always wondering about these Democratic elites, because while they may think that they are immune from consequences, we know, as I said, one consequence is they will not hold office. But this is an existential threat. This is a planetary threat. This is a threat of sovereignty. This is a threat of national security. And their children will not be immune from it. Their grandchildren will not be immune from it, no matter how much money they have. So I just keep thinking, What is it that they want? What kind of world are they envisioning that's so important that they would just let all of this go and risk this crime cult or similar successors coming back into power?
Andrea Chalupa:
It's baffling. It just shows an institutional mindset when our institutions have been failing us and got us here with their rot. I want to also point out that anybody who dismisses warnings of experts in authoritarianism and how it works and writes us off as doomsday profits or whatever, and says, “Don't listen to them. They're just trying to demoralize you,” anybody who, yet again, writes us off—because Sarah and I are very used to being in that space of being written off—I promise you that they are the Trust the Plan Folks. “There's a Plan.” They’re the 4D Chess Folks. And they've been trying to sell you that snake oil for so long now. They're the ones who are losing us time. So, as much as it'd be wonderful to take the opium of those people and numb yourself to all this, we don't have time for that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Reality is a much more trustworthy friend to make than trying to numb yourself with false promises. You've got to get in the game. You've got to fight because guess who is fighting? Non-white communities. They're the ones who have been paving the way for progress all these generations in America. And America is built on white supremacy and lives and breathes white supremacy. It's the non-white communities that have been fighting for their children's futures and have been risking their lives to do so because they have no other choice. So, a lot of [non-]white people don't have the luxury of taking that opium. A lot of rich people, no matter what color your skin is, elitists who have made it and want to leave the rest behind, it's going to come for you. Eventually, the threat comes for everyone. If you don't believe us, look at the pandemic.
Andrea Chalupa:
The pandemic opened a lot of people's eyes to white supremacy, in part not just because of viral videos of George Floyd, but because people's lives were so grossly disrupted. And they're like, how did this all happen? Why am I worried about my parents and my grandparents now, who I can't see because of this pandemic? And it's because, oh, there's a white supremacist leader in the White House and actual Nazis in the White House, and suddenly white people were like, Okay, white supremacy is coming for me, now I understand how it works. This threat comes for everyone. Everyone. We all have to live and breathe and fight like it's an existential threat, because it is. Don't trust the snake oil salesmen trying to pump you full of false promises again. All right, so let's walk through this Rolling Stone report.
Andrea Chalupa
The violent attempted overthrow of our democracy, which led to the deaths of several people and threatened the lives of elected officials and attempted to install Donald Trump and his family as a dictatorship was centrally coordinated by Trump, Steve Bannon, and several Republican members of Congress. We know that because it all happened out in the open and we saw it with our own eyes. Much of the coordination was happening out in the open. As we've often pointed out in the show in our January 5th episode called Traitors and Patriots, we warned the January 6 attempted coup was about to happen and we announced a Patreon bonus special in advance. Steve Bannon famously announced the coup on his podcast as well during a time he was advising Trump on how to stay in power. There was even a war room in the Willard Hotel that featured Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and other members of the Kremlin Klown Kar.
Andrea Chalupa:
Rolling Stone, with their article that sums up what we already pretty much knew, from the article: “January 6th protest organizers say they participated in dozens of planning meetings with members of Congress and White House staff. Two sources are communicating with House investigators and detailed a stunning series of allegations to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a blanket pardon from the Oval Office.” Again, I want to point out that several members of Congress on the Democratic side shared this article. They shared this article, several of them, saying, “Read this.” Okay? So there’s clearly, clearly a truth to this reporting. According to the article, those members of Congress are a who's who of American traitors; Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who famously tweeted about how speaker Nancy Pelosi's location as the Capitol was under attack, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Mo Brooks of Alabama—Mo Brooks, who wore body armor that day in preparation for battle—Louie Gomert of Texas, and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.
Andrea Chalupa:
These are Republican members of Congress. So according to the article, which I’m going to read from now, “The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, described participating in dozens of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to president Joe Biden was being certified. ‘I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,’ the organizer says. ‘I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another, or their staffs.’” Alright. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff for the Trump White House who was seen in videos with the Trump family as they were tailgating the coup on January 6, was a regular in planning calls with organizers reportedly. Some super fancy respectful lawyer pundits in the media are trying to throw caution on the Rolling Stone report because it's based on two anonymous sources and hasn’t been corroborated by any other outlets yet. But come on, this was a crime—once again—carried out in the open
Andrea Chalupa:
As just one example of this, CNN and previously reported that in December, 2020 in the weeks leading up to January 6, representative Paul Gosar—who was named as part of the planning committee of a January 6 coup according to the Rolling Stone piece—fired up a crowd of Trump supporters in Arizona with a false promise that the election could be overthrown and essentially incited the crowd to storm the Capitol, saying, “Once we conquer the Hill, Donald Trump is returned to being the president.” Again, this was all happening out in the open. Whoever didn't see January 6 coming and allowed it to happen should be removed from power, and that person includes the FBI Director and longtime member of the ideologically far-right court-packing Federalist Society, Christopher Wray. [background construction noise][haunted SFX] Sorry. There's all these, like, haunted bangings around me because the spirits are trying to get in.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's the ghost of justice. [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. Speaking of the Federalist Society, that brings us to the Willard Hotel war room. According to the Washington Post, for days leading up to January 6, Team Trump kept a war room in the fancy and historic Willard Hotel steps from the White House. They probably didn't want to use the Trump hotel because they knew they were committing crimes, and the Trump hotel was already part of an investigation due to grossly inflated prices during Trump's inauguration and misused nonprofit funds that benefited the Trump family business. The Willard Hotel command center included legal scholar John Eastman, a member of the far-right ideological court packing Federalist Society who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Eastman famously provided the Eastman Memo, a strategy memo on how to overturn the election. That legal warfare continues with aggressive voter suppression laws in the states that can be stopped if Democrats in Congress, led by a Biden, reform the filibuster to pass urgently needed voting rights laws.
Andrea Chalupa:
Also in the war room was Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who picked up where Paul Manafort left off, working with Kremlin-linked sources to smear Democrats and help bring Trump to power in 2020. Another regular was Bernard Kerik, the former NYPD commissioner who was there as an investigator. The NYPD Union endorsed Trump, reminding us yet again that there's a strong and proud, openly fascist element in the NYPD. There are plenty of viral videos of NYPD violence that further confirm this. This is the same NYPD that recently assaulted a guy for asking some of their officers to wear a mask on the subway and blocked the Brooklyn Bridge protesting the vaccine mandate because their minds are so warped by far-right conspiracy theories, apparently. The Trump war room worked to ramp up pressure on Pence and local Republican state leaders to do their part in overturning our election and install a Trump family dictatorship.
Andrea Chalupa:
It also managed communications for the coup and was the central coordination command center working for Donald Trump, who should already have been indicted by now. The urgent questions remain; Why didn't anyone stop them? Why hasn't anyone thrown Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the other organizers of the violent attempted overthrow of our democracy in prison? The same people in power who failed to stop the coup are now failing to administer justice. Let's look at longtime member of the Federalist Society Christopher Wray. Wray and other white men and women in power failed to stop the violence of January 6 because they did not want to stop it, or else they would have. There is a long history, not just in America but in other parts of the world, of corporations and the elite being comfortable with far-right violence because it terrorizes and keeps the left out of power. Because God forbid rich people should pay more taxes to help the poor.
Andrea Chalupa:
We cannot emphasize this enough: We are up against the same elites who chose Hitler instead of risking the left coming to power. This is a very old story and we're living through it yet again. And it's aided by people like that coward, Kyrsten Sinema, who went from being a staunch anti-war activist Green Party candidate, to Democrat, to a Koch-backed corporate shill Republican because she—unlike Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Maxine Waters and too many other non-white members of Congress—could not take the heat of having the courage of her convictions, so she sold out. Kyrsten Sinema is the very definition of white fragility. She took a bruising in her first campaign for Congress where Republicans relentlessly attacked her with dark money ads. When she ran for reelection, she didn't have the courage and the strength to go through that again, so she sold out to the far-right backed US Chamber of Commerce, becoming one of the very few Democrats they supported that year, a year that the Koch money network lavishly spread its money around, including to the US Chamber of Commerce.
Andrea Chalupa:
Kyrsten Sinema became a corporate shill because it's comfortable and threats and personal attacks are hard. She now hides behind the gaslighting of calling herself a Maverick and palling around with John McCain's daughter, Megan McCain, who is a dangerous example of nepotism, who was as prepared and responsible for the power of her role as a public pundit as a 24-year-old Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the kid of a famous armorer who manages guns on film and TV sets who had no business and not nearly enough experience to manage the guns on the film set that led to the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Nepotism kills. Nepotism is destructive. Sinema's BFF, Meghan McCain, is also an example of that, and Sold Her Soul Sinema is too weak and cowardly to see that. She’d rather fight for the extremely wealthy and be the champion of American oligarchs during a time of historic income inequality than have the courage of her convictions and support a game-changing infrastructure package that must tax the very rich in order to succeed and Build Back Better.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is who we're up against; Christopher “Armageddon Day” Wray, Kyrsten “Sinful” Sinema, and “Greed Machine” Manchin, the elite monsters who are happy to sell out our democracy and countless innocent lives to Trump and Bannon's violent zombie army, which keeps growing by the day, thanks to Bond villain, Mark Zuckerberg. The only way out of this is if Democratic leadership in the White House rises from the dead and replaces Merrick Garland with a Jamie Lee Curtis-type who will take on the monster of Michael Myers with a vengeance. This has been another terrifying Gaslit Nation Halloween special. But then again, here at Gaslit Nation, it's always Halloween.
Outro Music: “Home” by Via Skies
[Roll Credits]
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 Oil Change International, an advocacy group supported with a generous donation from the Greta Thuberg foundation that exposes the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Afghanistan. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon. It keeps us going. And you can also subscribe on YouTube.
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 on Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenb\erg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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