"Yes, Virginia, There Is a Transnational Crime Syndicate!"
Welcome to the Gaslit Nation election aftermath hellhole special! We break down last week’s results and the dire situation in Virginia, where Posh Trump Glenn Youngkin became the governor after a campaign exploiting bigotry and predicated on lies. We look at two big factors in Youngkin’s win: 1) how the GOP’s elite criminal impunity draws white voters to backing raw power, in the hope that this power will protect them and in fear that it will not 2) how the canard of “critical race theory” was weaponized by propagandists and the Dems did little to combat it, despite GOP operatives spelling out the strategy very clearly in March! We also note how Terry McAuliffe fell short and give credit where credit is due for the good Dem campaigns that did win in states like Georgia and New Jersey.
Then we discuss the ongoing witch hunt being conducted by John Durham with the approval of Merrick Garland’s corrupt DOJ. Much like Bill Barr, Durham is flipping the script and investigating the investigators, targeting people who contributed to the Steele dossier and reaffirmed what the FBI already knew: that Donald Trump was a mobbed-up Kremlin asset and had been for years. We have been telling you all year that Merrick Garland is a Trump crime cult enabler who stands in the way of justice and accountability, and his approval of his witch hunt and refusal to take the most rudimentary steps to protect our national security – like enforcing Steve Bannon’s subpoena – shows us to be sadly correct yet again. The reason for the Democratic “enthusiasm gap” is that Biden’s administration gives us little about which to be enthusiastic. Instead, they break promises on the most momentous and existential of crises, including voting rights, civil rights, and the protection of US sovereignty and safety.
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[opening audio clip: The Sunrise Movement Confronts Joe Manchin]
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:
And our opening clip was Joe Manchin leaving his yacht club and getting into his Maserati—the luxury car of choice for crooked politicians—and being confronted by young activists from the Sunrise Movement, demanding that Manchin support much-needed climate change programs in the upcoming reconciliation package, which Manchin and the Democrats must pass if we stand a chance against the existential threat of climate change. So, there's a lot of news. We're running an early show for subscribers to our Patreon at the Truth Teller level and higher. Look out for that. Normally we answer questions submitted by listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher, which is like a support group of venting and addressing what's keeping everybody up at night, but this week, since it's been a while since Sarah and I caught up due to her bad cold last week, whatever we don't get to in this week's public show will go straight to the Patreon early show and we'll, of course, answer some questions.
Andrea Chalupa:
So check that out for more and early access to Gaslit Nation. Before we begin a massive deep dive into the growing authoritarian threat, Sarah and I would like to congratulate Gaslit Nation listener, Nicole Speer, who, according to her Twitter bio, is a Boulder City Councilwoman-elect, a mom, a scientist and activist, a Christian who is giving her allegiance to the ethical demands of the universe. Nicole won her race for Boulder City Council on Tuesday night and wrote on Twitter that she was inspired to run for office by our little podcast and all those times we begged good people like Nicole to run for office. And we're begging you wherever you live to run for office. Congratulations to Nicole, her family and friends for all their hard work. This is exactly what we need to clean out the system. Elect more Nicoles to office. If you're thinking of running or want to support good people running for office, check out the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, congratulations to Nicole. And so, as Andrea said, I was out sick last week, missed a lot of news, was generally off Twitter, came back on and just saw the mantra, “Stop the show. People are dying” and had no idea if it was about a particular event or just the general American sentiment. So, yeah, it's been quite a couple of weeks. Andrea has a big rundown of last week's election aftermath. And so do you wanna get that kicked off?
Andrea Chalupa:
I sure do Sarah, but first you should know: I told everyone last week that you couldn't be on the show because you sold your voice to a sea witch in exchange for democracy in America.
Sarah Kendzior:
I heard. So it's all gonna work out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah
Sarah Kendzior:
Everything's good. We'll just keep telling folks that. That's what... I could make a snide comment now, but we'll just get into the nuts and bolts of things, I think, instead.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. Election 2021. As we have warned repeatedly on this show, Democrats are frustrated with Biden for all the reasons we've already listed many times, and it's depressing the Democratic vote. As we warned, there is an enthusiasm gap between Republicans who are fired up, as we've warned, by white supremacist leaders Steve Bannon and the rest of the goon squad doing what they do best: flooding the zone with shit. They're driving out the vote on a red bloody wave of white rage, as we saw in Virginia where the overall vote was high, even among Democrats, but given the enthusiasm gap, it was higher for Republicans, which allowed Posh Trump Glenn Youngkin to defeat longtime Washington insider and former Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe. When you look at Biden's low approval rating, that includes Democrats. Why might that be? I mentioned Steve Bannon a moment ago. Steve Bannon, who received a pardon for his fraud crimes from Trump after advising Trump on how to stay in power, working the war room of the January 6th violent coup attempt, Steve Bannon was called to testify to Congress and defied the subpoena.
Andrea Chalupa:
Whether he'll be held accountable for that now rests with Merrick Garland. Where are the charges? Where is the indictment? We're still waiting. Meanwhile, Garland lets the Trump Train carry on their banana republic-style witch hunt in special counsel John Durham's investigation of the investigators. Durham was appointed by Bill Barr and is very much operating as an extension of Bill Barr, the cover-up king. Durham's latest indictment reads like a Fox News broadcast to turn the tables on the Russia investigation and essentially use smoke and mirrors to invent some crime to cover up the very real sweeping crime of Trump coming to power with the Kremlin’s help. Garland likely is allowing Durham to continue his work so that he appears impartial, and he's no doubt being defended on cable TV by the pundit legal class. Just imagine the outrageous headlines—the fire and fury—if Garland would shut down Bill Barr's banana republic-style witch hunt to investigate the investigators. The pundit legal class would clutch their pearls and Fox News and Tucker Carlson would foam at the mouth live on air for 24 hours, seven days a week, week after week. The rage would be a ratings and fundraising bonanza for Republicans.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, to appear very respectable indeed and impartial, Garland seems content to let three people indicted so far by Durham on very thin charges—the kind you'd see in Putin's Russia—and suffer tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in legal fees defending themselves against the United States government headed by Biden. I want to point out once again, Biden is allowing a witch hunt to destroy three people's lives—fake indictments to feed the far-right fake news machine—and they're engineered to somehow cover up Trump's very real crimes and corruption, crimes the years-long Mueller investigation said are “criminal” and can be prosecuted once Trump leaves office. Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, so far has refused to pursue any charges against Trump. The case has been methodically outlined in the Mueller Report. If you want to know why Biden's approval rating is so low among Democrats, it's because we're still stuck with Bill Barr in the DOJ in the form of Durham's banana republic-style witch hunt.
Andrea Chalupa:
And Garland not only allows Bill Barr and the rest of the Trump Kremlin Klown Kar to use the people's DOJ—our Department of Justice—for their own unethical and unjust, cruel political means, and it's because he continues to deny the American people justice. The latest indictment is of a Russian national accused of lying to the FBI, even though the lies in question were immaterial to the investigation. So, it's a stretchm and the indictments are all about right-wing narrative warfare. Durham's investigation is the equivalent of the time Ken Starr had Susan McDougal in chains for refusing to testify against the Clintons in his Whitewater investigation, producing a photo splashed across the media, furthering the Right Wing-driven narrative warfare that the Clintons are corrupt. Attorney General Merrick Garland is allowing our Department of Justice to be used for right-wing narrative warfare. Attorney General Merrick Garland approved John Durham's budget to wage narrative warfare against the American people.
Andrea Chalupa:
The far-right already has a massive and growing propaganda machine. They don't need the Department of Justice helping them with their information warfare, inciting people to real world violence, inciting people to run for office based on lies, inciting people to drive out to the polls to vote, storming the polling booth based on lies. And people have to understand that there is real harm being done. We're paying with our tax dollars for three people to be put through hell—financial and legal hell—over what amounts to super thin charges, largely immaterial to the investigation. One indicted individual, a cyber security lawyer named Michael Sussmann, came to the FBI to alert them of Trump's Russia ties and wasn't clear on who he was working for at the time. And so Durham indicted him. So be careful if you go to the FBI with a tip, because whatever you say to them can and will be held against you if it can be used in the Far Right’s narrative warfare against the American people.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am so disgusted by this. We worked tirelessly to get rid of Trump and Bill Barr so we can finally sleep at night and Merrick Garland continues to leave us vulnerable. Merrick Garland contributes to Biden's low approval rating among Democrats and the enthusiasm gap between democratic and Republican voters. As we keep warning you on this show, we all lived through hell and demand healing and justice. Enough is enough already. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Merrick Garland must be replaced by someone who can meet this moment and refuse to be used by the authoritarian Far Right.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. I think it's so interesting that so many of the things we warned about—if Trump would have won, if he would've stayed in for a second term—are happening regardless under Merrick Garland, who is just continuing Bill Barr's agenda in a more muted form, I think without some of the more ominous developments that would have incurred had Barr remained there.But the Durham Flip the Script strategy of, “let's go after the people who have warned us about treason, who have warned us about national security threats, let's prosecute them,” that is exactly what we said was going to happen if Trump was going to have a second term, and it's happening anyway. And I know you have more to say, but I just want to clarify what exactly we're talking about for the folks who aren't up on the John Durham witch hunt investigations. This is yet another faux crisis about the Steele dossier in which people cannot see the forest for the treason.
Sarah Kendzior:
They are bogged down in salacious details. They are once again missing the big picture. So, the Steele dossier, as you may recall, was the document initially leaked to Mother Jones reporter, David Corn, on Halloween 2016, so we’re now on a half decade of bitchin’ about the Steele dossier. That was sort of a rough draft of an investigation into Trump and his illicit ties with Russia, into what Manafort and other people involved in the campaign were illegally doing regarding Russia and other things. And it is, of course, where the claim about the “pee tape” that Trump hired prostitutes in Moscow to piss on a bed that Obama had when slept in, you know, and other, as I said, salacious claims are in there. Those claims are not the point. The takeaway—the big takeaway—from the Steele dossier was the assertion that Trump had been a Kremlin asset since at least 2011 and that the FBI had known that the entire time.
Sarah Kendzior:
And, you know, if you look at Robert Mueller's speeches from that time, particularly his speech, “The Evolving Organized Crime Threat”, also known as the Iron Triangles Speech, he talks explicitly about the Russian mafia and how it gets its tentacles into government institutions, into shady corporations, in particular, things like real estate. He basically outlines what's to come, but instead of doing anything about it, they enabled it. And we have gone over this on the show again and again and again. And so this week, one of the sources for Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, was indicted by John Durham in this fascist investigation, accused of making false statements to the FBI. As Andrea noted, you know, if you go to the FBI, they will use this against you.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's just amazing to me that we have had this situation now explicitly for five years in which treason and sedition, any profound national security crisis involving the infiltration of our institutions, including the Department of Justice, by hostile foreign states and by traitorous Americans is just streamlined and normalized and blown off and thought of as no big deal. This is the crisis of our time. We warned Democrats last year that this is the crisis you need to address head-on. You need to enforce accountability. You need to bring about transparency. You need to be forthright with the American people about how the Obama administration failed you in that time before Trump came in, the CIA failed you, the FBI failed you. All these institutional actors failed you. And there are complicit actors, a multitude of them, within the GOP, and there are complicit actors within the Democratic party, and we are supposed to be fighting for America.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are fighting for our country. That is where our loyalty lies. That is where your loyalty should lie. You know, governments and officials, they'll come and go, but what our country stands for, what kind of country we're going to be, that is something that we, the people, are supposed to decide. And we, the people, did not vote for a hostile foreign state to run our elections, to hijack our democracy, and to basically hold the reins of the Department of Justice so that those who expose criminality are punished and those who practice criminality are protected, indefinitely, with utter total impunity. That is the work of Merrick Garland, that was the work of Bill Barr, and it continues today.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
The legal pundit class on cable news that normalizes all of this is complicit. All right, so back to our election coverage. The race that sucked the oxygen out of the room was, of course, Virginia. Posh Trump Glenn Youngkin, a long time Mr. Moneybags at the Carlyle Group who's worth around $200 million and financed his campaign with $20 million of his own money, won the election by relying on good old fashioned classic Republican racist dog whistles, like promising to ban critical race theory from being taught in schools, even though it's not taught in schools. Critical race theory is the study of systemic racism as it pertains to the law and it's taught in graduate schools and college courses, not to kindergarteners, as Republicans and Fox News would want you to believe. To reassure the suburban independent voters he needed to win, Youngkin kept Trump at a distance, casually denounced some weird Bannon event that he did not attend, where they saluted a flag that was carried by white supremacist terrorists at their attempted violent overthrow of our democracy on January 6th. Youngkin one with the help of Trump's base because he appealed to Trump's base with his racist dog whistles.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Republican Party is back. Youngkin presents a model that the Republican Party will now try to emulate across the country, but how long can sociopathic egomaniac Donald Trump remain on the sidelines and be content to be used while held at arm’s length to drive out the base before he turns on the Republican Party? How long can this shaky arrangement last? Will Trump tolerate it because he's been told that all these victories, like Youngkin’s, will help him lay the groundwork for coming back to power in 2024? The state governments oversee local election laws and the certification of the vote: Is why Trump is playing along? Republicans were also helped in Virginia because Terry McAuliffe apparently was a bad candidate. Several community organizers in Virginia took to Twitter to air their grievances of having felt sidelined by a corporate centralized campaign that forgot the urgent importance of getting on the ground and inspiring and empowering a grassroots engine.
Andrea Chalupa:
Terry McAuliffe is the so-called electable candidate, the safe mainstream white guy who turned out to be not very electable. And, of course, many in the media blame progressives because we live in a corporate controlled largely far-right country. I'm not talking about the population where progressive policies like the ones in the Democrats’ reconciliation package are hugely popular, but the political structure that very deliberately favors the rich and powerful and white; the Senate, the electoral college and a media and election system that has largely been left unregulated and deregulated, allowing the flourishing of dark money—including foreign money—into our elections, and rampant disinformation driven by corporate giants like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. So, the underdog progressives fighting tirelessly to drag America to join the rest of the world when it comes to paid family leave, universal and affordable healthcare, universal pre-K and quality public education for all ages, cleaner, sustainable economies, and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're behind the rest of the world and the reconciliation package that Democrats are trying to pass will help us catch up, just a little bit. And we're continuing to lag behind the rest of the world if we do not pass this reconciliation package. It’s that urgent. Instead of running on this populist message to appeal to working voters of all races, by the way, and framing Youngkin as an out of touch elite who thinks he can buy himself the Virginia governorship, McAuliffe didn't seem like he had his heart in the campaign. He didn't have a clear electrifying message. He overlooked COVID fatigue, especially with parents stuck with their kids at home in Zoom school with schools being closed, when he said that parents shouldn't have a say over their kids’ education, a big campaign gaffe that framed him. All that goes to show that we need to finally put to rest the myth of electability.
Andrea Chalupa:
You need a candidate with convictions, with a plan on how to alleviate people's suffering, suffering that is increasingly profound with the historic income inequality gap where the poor and middle-class are expected to shoulder the tax burden while oligarchs and corporations continue to hide their money abroad—like so many corporations do—and leave paying taxes to the rest of us. Adam Jentleson, the former Deputy Chief of Staff for Harry Reid, who we've had on the show to discuss his brilliant must-read book fact-checking the myth of the filibuster, pointed out that Obama ran a populist campaign against Mitt Romney in 2012, and it worked. If Republicans are going to pick themselves up and dust themselves off by running Mitt Romney candidates, then Democrats need to rely on that same populist message. I was in Virginia during the 2012 presidential election and I remember well seeing a brilliant TV ad of a factory worker who erected a stage at his factory.
Andrea Chalupa:
And he talks about how he and other workers are building this stage, and then later, when the factory workers are all assembled, Mitt Romney, who worked at some vulture financial firm at the time, gets on the stage and fires everyone. The worker on the ad then says, “I spent the day building my own coffin.” Now that's a powerful ad. That shows how deeply and dangerously out of touch the oligarch class is. The oligarchs are already protected by the Republican Party by decades of institutional decline, by the far-right ideological Supreme Court, by corporate-owned media, by an ever-expanding far-right propaganda machine. Oligarchs don't need the Democratic party to protect them. Instead, the Democratic party needs to cut through the noise by being George Bailey versus Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, a film that was so populist that the FBI—the great protectors of the rich and powerful in America—issued a statement warning that It's a Wonderful Life was socialist propaganda, or something to that effect.
Andrea Chalupa:
Progressives will always be blamed because too many people with large platforms in the media overlook that America is held hostage by a far-right power structure. If we weren't, no one would know or care who Joe Manchin is. If white Democratic leaders want to support their Black base—the backbone of the Democratic party—they need to confront the oligarchs because who hurts the most? Who's the most vulnerable when it comes to poverty, economic crisis, bad schools, bad roads, polluted drinking water, and all sorts of infrastructure crises because oligarchs refuse to pay their fair share in taxes? Nonwhite communities. When idiots try to make these election losses about “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory and the other favorite buzzwords on Fox News—the number one cable network, especially in the lead up to Tuesday's election—Democrats need to hit back by exposing the oligarchs for what they are and presenting solutions and a plan on how to get our country back from unchecked corporate greed.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's not difficult messaging. Many people voting against critical race theory have no idea what it is. It's the latest iteration of “Build the Wall.” Racism will always be there and will always find its latest rallying cry, so Democrats need to hit back with a unifying, populist message to unite all those who are deeply hurting at the expense of the growing income inequality and wage gap in our country. And the way you do that is you start right now by hitting home that all of the policies and all the programs in the reconciliation package that would help America catch up towards the rest of the world are hugely popular. And you beat that home, all of you, united in your Democratic caucus, and you refuse to let Republicans gaslight the country.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, it's so frustrating to watch because everything you're saying is very obvious—or should be obvious—to Democratic officials. Oliver Willis and other people who study political public relations have been advising the same path, but one of the things that blows my mind about the lack of preparedness to the “Critical Race Theory debate” is that the Right Wing has been very blatant about this plan. This is just like everything that the Trump administration did. They tell you their plot in advance. And in this case, they literally spelled out the script for the rest of the year for the culture war that they wanted to launch. In March, 2021, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo wrote on Twitter, “We have successfully frozen their brand ‘Critical Race Theory’ into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’ We have decodified the term and we'll recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, thank you, Christopher Rufo. That was very informative. That really should have helped the Democrats prepare for this onslaught, prepare for this propaganda, prepare for what Fox News was going to flood the airwaves with for 10 months. But instead, they did not. They have these kind of fatuous debates about, you know, defining the term, not defining the term. As you mentioned, it's an academic term. It's a term that's used in legal schools. It's not being taught in schools, but that's not the point, because what Rufo understands and what the Republicans understand—and what Trump understood very well—is how to tap into emotion.
Sarah Kendzior:
And the dominant emotion of America right now is fear, and that fear is translated into rage. And it's the desire for a scapegoat by people who have been traumatized by two years of a global pandemic, as well as everything else that's on top of it, as well as things like the attack on the Capitol and the lack of accountability for that attack. That is what I think happened in Virginia. You do have people, you have white parents, embracing racism, embracing xenophobia, but I think that that is in part because they look at other white supremacists or they look at a blatantly racist president or a white supremacist operative like Bannon living above the law, holding power even though they are out of office, seemingly controlling the government and influencing society, even though they have broken its most fundamental norms and laws for a series of years. They staged an attack on our country and they are not punished for it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I think that strikes fear into people. And I think when you're a certain type of white person, you then bend to that power. You submit to it because you know that if you don't submit to it, it may come for you. And the proof of that was COVID. It was the Trump administration's handling of COVID; that they let it spread everywhere. There was this kind of mythmaking in the beginning of, “Oh, you know, they're just trying to let Black or Latino or low-income communities die, people who wouldn't vote for the Republicans, people don't care about them.” No, it was everyone. It was using a pandemic as a form of genocide, as a form of depopulation, because a depopulated country is easier for them to control. They are kleptocrats. They are oligarchs. They do not care about any of you.
Sarah Kendzior:
I live in Missouri. I live in a state with a lot of poor white people, middle class white people. They do not care about those white people either, even if those people are voting for Trump. They do not care about their base because they rely on rewriting election laws, codifying disenfranchisement, putting in new regulations that allow state legislatures to simply throw out the votes, as they're going to do in Georgia, as they're going to do in Texas). They don't need to win you over. They don't even need for you to be alive. That is how they cling to power. It is through these illicit maneuvers. So, how you feel about them is irrelevant. And I think people know that. Whether they consciously know it or not, they've endured the hardship of a government that is absolutely apathetic to mass death when it's not overtly embracing it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that is a terrifying thing. And honestly—I’ve said this on previous shows, I said this at the beginning of the year—that when the pandemic “ends” or at least dies down to the point that schools are reopened, businesses are reopened and so forth, people are coming out of their homes, we are going to relive the Red Summer of 1919, which followed the Spanish Flu of 1918. And that Red Summer was a bunch of Americans coming out of their house after being locked inside from a plague for a long time, full of vicious, xenophobic, bigoted sentiment, stoking white mob violence. We saw it in Tulsa, we saw it in all these cities throughout the entire country. It's not particularly regional because they look for that scapegoat. They look for that outlet for their rage and that outlet for their trauma. And the Republicans, I think, understood that this was going to happen. And so they laid that groundwork.
Sarah Kendzior:
They laid that critical race theory groundwork, which is a phrase I think they just embrace because it sounds bad. If you have no idea what it is, then you just hear “Critical” (”Oh, that's very negative. I don't like that so much). “Race”, then white people are like, “Ah, my God. Another conversation about racism. Here we go again.” “Theory” sounds abstract, sounds like something too complex for your children to be hearing in school. It hits all the sweet spots for them. It has nothing to do with what the phrase actually means. It has nothing to do with the vast body of academic literature behind. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's true, that there is systemic racism within our institutions and this should be studied.
Sarah Kendzior:
It should be examined. And, you know, a bonus for them, of course, is that if you stop examining this, then you stop examining voter suppression and you stop looking at all these voter suppression laws that have been passed and the fact that the Democrats have abandoned their plan to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights act. I mean, if they're still doing it. I sure as hell haven't heard about it. They don't seem to be treating it with particular urgency. They are not, to my knowledge, also getting rid of the filibuster so that this plan could be enacted. They, too, don't seem to care about winning over their base, about ensuring that it stays with them, about ensuring that people are able to vote and that when they vote that their votes count. And that is mind boggling to me. And they now see the results of this in Virginia and elsewhere.
Sarah Kendzior:
But I mean, what do you think is even going on there? How is this not the foremost matter of urgency for them?
Andrea Chalupa:
For Democrats?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Why is voting rights still.... Even if they pass their big whole infrastructure thing for two years or what have you, whenever the… Or one year, I guess, whenever the Republicans get back into power by taking the House, what is the point of any of this if people cannot vote, if their votes are being overthrown, if we've lost representative democracy? What do they think they're even accomplishing when the timeline is incredibly limited, even if they do manage to achieve some sort of short term success?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, the focus is the old campaign adage, “It's the economy, stupid.”, where they're hoping that by juicing the economy through creating jobs in the massive infrastructure bill that was just passed, that Biden's gonna sign, that those wheels are going to be put in motion and those jobs are gonna be created over the next year, money is going to start to flow. It's a slow process. They're hoping that with all of that money coming in, the market will stay up. So, basically they're trying to keep the economy strong going into the midterms. That's the first thing they seem to be doing. Obviously the economy was devastated by COVID, so they're trying to bring that all back so they don't get punished in the midterms where people tend to vote—at least the old campaign adage says—using their pocketbook, with, you know, with their financial anxiety.
Andrea Chalupa:
But obviously there's—as we go into on the show all the time—a massively, deeply funded, right-wing Astroturf, Tea Party movement 2.0 rallying all the racists together. I mean, it's classic Karl Rove, it's classic Koch political network dark money, all of it. And that is something that the Democrats have to get serious about what a strong unifying, populist message and also voting rights, voting rights, voting rights, Or we're screwed. Or we're going to get a shellacking. I mean, a lot of the maps that are being drawn with the redistricting that's going on now is a bloodbath in some states for Democrats. So, we're going to get into all of that as we go along. I want to get back to election night because we're going to wrap up the Virginia section and what it all means, and then go into some Democratic victories that are being overlooked.
Andrea Chalupa:
As I mentioned, Virginia is sucking all the energy out of the room when there's a lot of amazing things. It was a historic night, actually, for Democrats on election night 2021. So while there has been great progress made recently, in recent years, in Virginia, it is still Virginia after all—the home of the former capital of the Confederacy—and Virginia put up a massive resistance to desegregation of schools. Segregation academies—all white private schools—continue to exist in the state, passing on proud white supremacy to a new generation. And the Daily Beast is now reporting, as I just mentioned, the dark money apparatus behind Posh Trump Glenn Youngkin's victory. I'll read from this Daily Beast article now that we'll link to in the show notes for this week's episode, that you can find as always on our Patreon page for this week's episode.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In Virginia, one of the key leaders against critical race theory is Ian Prior. If Prior's name sounds familiar, that's because you may have been one of the tens of thousands of Americans to receive emails from Prior in one of his many different former roles; Press Secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Justice Department Official during the Trump administration, Communications Director for the Karl Rove superPAC, American Crossroads, and now, a GOP operative behind two organizations that have inflamed attacks on so-called ‘critical race theory’ in Virginia's public schools. Prior runs Fight For Schools, a state-level PAC which emerged this year to challenge educational decisions in Loudoun County and mobilized behind Youngkin. The candidate turned to Prior’s group for fundraising and voter outreach efforts, and state election disclosures show that the organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign. Over the last several months, Prior, whose children attend Loudoun County schools, has appeared on Fox News at least 15 times to discuss critical race theory.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“According to a Media Matters analysis, he has been introduced on those shows as a ‘Loudoun County parent’ and a ‘father’ who went from ‘concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist.' Media Matters reported in one such appearance last month Prior was identified by the host as a ‘parent’ while the graphic on the screen labeled him Vice President at Mercury Public Affairs, a DC lobbying firm with a history of representing controversial foreign clients.”—Mercury Public Affairs, I believe, is a group that Paul Manafort worked with. And I want to point out something we should all be aware of. From NBC News: “Schools facing critical race theory battles are diversifying rapidly, analysis finds. Student enrollment data suggests that these conflicts tend to occur in communities that experienced significant demographic shifts in recent decades. An NBC News analysis of 33 cities and counties where school districts have faced rancor over equity initiatives this year and at least three recent school board meetings finds that each has become less white over the last 25 years, reflecting a national trend.”
Andrea Chalupa:
The critical race theory school board riots, they remind me of the busing riots in Boston, 1974. In a city where segregation of white students and nonwhite students was deliberate and by design, the solution was to bus nonwhite students to white schools and white students to nonwhite schools in what is known as busing. A literal war zone broke out in what is now known as the Busing Riots. Election day 2021 saw the victory of the new busting riot in Virginia. From Axios: “A new PAC focused on electing conservative candidates to public school boards by raising fears about how racism is taught won 3/4 of its 58 races across seven states on Tuesday.” So it wasn't just Virginia. This was spread across seven states.
Andrea Chalupa:
But what else did we see on election day? The first nonwhite and first female mayor of Boston was elected: Michelle Wu, in Boston, the site of the busing riots. So, progress is possible. Evolution is possible. We can and are building a more secure, safe, and inclusive culture driven by empathy, the common good, and common sense. Our Vice President Kamala Harris, as she famously pointed out to Joe Biden in a Democratic primary debate, was a product of busing. She was a little nonwhite girl who had to go out on the front lines every day, just by going to school. And now kids today in areas with rapidly changing demographics, in a country of rapidly changing demographics, are once again on the front lines of desegregation through these inclusivity programs that white parents are driven to confront at these increasingly aggressive and disruptive and dangerous school board meetings. School officials are also on the front lines: educators just trying to do their job and provide a fact-based education to their students and not whitewash the darker chapters of our history like some Russian textbook glorifying Stalin, the kind we see now under GOP ally Putin.
Andrea Chalupa:
CBS News published a news link to a documentary they produced asking “How young is too young to teach rac?” It went viral for all the wrong reasons. Nonwhite people on Twitter, from Black to Asian to Southeast Asian to Arabic and so forth, responded to the piece by sharing the story of when they first experienced racism. And again and again, it was like the tweets that streamed during the Me Too Movement, where women shared their sexual assault stories. Here, you had tweet after tweet of stories of how people experienced racism for the very first time as children—five years old, kindergarten, preschool—from teachers from other students. The resounding point was, if non white children are old enough at age four or five years old to experience racism, then white children who are born into the bubble of white supremacy are old enough to learn about it.
Andrea Chalupa:
And, of course, the education materials can be age appropriate, but if white children are learning the N-word at home and are learning it's acceptable to mock someone for the color of their skin, for their hair, for their headscarf, then educators must counteract that through diversity and inclusivity initiatives. Because if you don't—if you let the busing riots of today win—then you're kicking the can down the road like Ulysses S. Grant did as our first civil rights president when he eased up on the South and allowed the KKK terror police to rise and rebuild a narrative war to justify and cover up the crimes of being traitors to our country. If you're empowering an ideology of ignorance, you have to do the work now and not shrink from it and not excuse it as economic anxieties. Today's bus riots are being waged using far-right dark money, the sprawling far-right propaganda machine, and a largely white mainstream media that remains safely cloistered in its whiteness.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our mainstream media is the white bubble, which is why you're going to hear economic anxiety again and again, to explain white rage. Remember, all racial progress in America has been met with white rage, from the rise of the KKK after the Civil War, to the massacre of Black wall street in Oklahoma city, to the Chicago race riots following the social changes of mass migration and Black people serving in World War I. It was inevitable that the first Black president would be followed by Donald Trump. That was the next chapter in America's long history of nonwhite progress being met with white rage, and we're going through it again, and we'll get through it again, as long as we don't shrink ourselves and refuse to meet the moment with strength and conviction. And I want to remind everyone to not lose courage and always remember that grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left, and to work together and find your people, find your community, and build coalition and stay in the fight, stay engaged. And here are some energizing victories from a historic election night to keep in mind going forward into 2022 In Georgia, Democrats flipped 41 seats across 21 counties. The New Jersey curse was broken. Bill Murray, uh, sorry, Phil Murphy-
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Wow, I really was off Twitter for awhile.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Phil Murphy, Governor of New Jersey, broke the New Jersey curse. His margin of victory is greater than Youngkin's margin of victory in Virginia, and he broke a 44-years-long curse of New Jersey not reelecting Democrats. There are other historic victories on election night. From NPR, as mentioned, Michelle Wu is the first woman and Person of Color to be elected Boston's mayor. Pittsburgh elects Ed Gainey, the city's first Black mayor ever. Eric Adams becomes the second Black mayor to lead New York city. Cincinnati elects Aftab Pureval as its first Asian American mayor. Abdullah Hammoud becomes the first Arab American and Muslim mayor of Dearborn, Michigan. Alvin Bragg is Manhattan's new District Attorney, the first Black person to hold the job.
Sarah Kendzior:
I just want to interrupt you very briefly here to note that this means Cy Vance is leaving, and as we warned you over and over, Cy Vance is doing nothing. Cy Vance did not indict anybody or anybody of significance. He did not bring down Trump. We warned you that he was dirty, that he had a long record of letting criminal elites off the hook, everybody from Harvey Weinstein to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to Ivanka and Don Jr. And then we were screamed at relentlessly for five straight years that “Cy Vance is coming,” just like Mueller, just like Comey, just like Garland. They're all full of shit. Cy Vance sucks. We have proven our case. I don't know what the new guy's going to do. I do not have high hopes, but I think he will still be better than Cy Vance. Anyway, continue.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, according to the New York Times, Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's new District Attorney, sued Donald Trump 100 times.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, I like him already. [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] All right. So, more victories from the Associated Press: Voters re-elect Black Iowa mayor targeted by pro police group and Amanda Litman, of the essential organization Run for Something, who we've had on the show—a group that helps young progressives run for office and has helped around 630 young progressives win races since the organization was founded five years ago—provides a thread on Twitter, which we'll link to in this week's show notes, listing several victories for young progressives on election night. It's worth reading if you're depressed by the media's obsession with the Virginia governor's race. So keep that in mind that the power is ours. Become the new power, refuse to back down, and with a message reminding us of the importance of that, here is Greta Thunberg speaking at the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow
Greta Thunberg
This COP26 is so far just like the previous COPs, and that has led us nowhere. They have led us nowhere. Inside COP, they're just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously, pretending to take the presence seriously of the people who are being affected already today by the climate crisis. Change is not going to come from inside there. That is not leadership. This is leadership. [cheers] We say, “No more Blah-blah-blah. No more exploitation of people and nature and the planet. No more exploitation. No more Blah-blah-blah. No more whatever the fuck they're doing inside there.” [crocheers] We're sick and tired of it and are going to make the change, whether they like it or not.
[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:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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