Tyranny and Mutation
This month's song is "Precision Grooming" by Scary Hours. If you have a song you would like to submit for the Art Matters Gaslit Nation Song Series, submit it here!
We’ve got a brand-new coup plot and a brand-new plague variant – and a brand-new Gaslit Nation to examine the nexus of the crisis and the origin of the storm! We start by discussing the coup that the Kremlin is allegedly preparing against Ukraine and review Paul Manafort’s career of evil. Manafort, best known for plotting coups with Kremlin-affiliated actors, has been MIA since being pardoned by Trump in December 2020, and our guess is that he is…plotting a coup with Kremlin-affiliated actors. Just going out on a limb here!
We also explain the differences between various agents of fortune like Rinat Akhmetov and Rinat Akhmetshin, both of whom are oligarch Manafort cronies, but only one of whom was at the June 2016 Trump Tower criminal meeting! (Remember when this kind of information wasn’t eating up your brain?) We also discuss the dire humanitarian situation at the border of Belarus and Poland, where the Kremlin is weaponizing a refugee crisis, and the failure of the West to adequately respond. Andrea provides firsthand updates from Russian and Belarusian activists who have an insider view of Kremlin aggression and advice on how to stop it.
Then we move onto the omicron variant! History has shown again and again how nature points out the folly of man, so it is no surprise that the refusal of Big Pharma to make the covid vaccine free and accessible everywhere has led to tyranny and mutation. We discuss the explosive new Financial Times expose about Pfizer exec Albert Bourla and his shady deals with Western leaders at the expense of much of the world, as well as the Biden admin’s empty promises from the last days of May to get the vaccine patent waived, whereas in reality they’re just going through the motions.
Download Transcript
Intro Music: Precision Grooming by Scary Hours
Sarah Kendzior:
I’m Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and the upcoming book, They Knew, out in 2022.
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. And so every week for our Patreon subscribers, we do a bonus episode. This week, in addition to answering the questions that our Patreon subscribers and listeners have sent in, we are going to be discussing what's happening to Twitter; the new leadership, the new policies, and how they may lead to a suppression of free speech and the spirit of critical inquiry. And in particular, we're going to be talking about billionaire Republican Paul Singer's control over Twitter and his very dark political history. So, to listen to that and to our entire backlog of three years of weekly bonus episodes, join on Patreon today.
Andrea Chalupa:
I hope to God that Trump is forever banned from Twitter and that ban remains in effect under this new leadership, because I'm enjoying the break.
Sarah Kendzior:
See, I want him banned for future purposes, but I actually want all his old tweets back because they’re evidence. They’re evidence that he pre-planned the coup. They’re evidence of other crimes that he confessed to on Twitter, like, it was a historical record. I think we talked about this before and like deleting/banning him, banning Stone, banning Flynn, I think they just should have put a moratorium on them. Like, You can make no future tweets, but let's leave the record. But anyway.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've got a lot to talk about today and you had some stuff.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, including making art: a reminder how important it is to make art. Art is an oxygen mask. It changes our energy. It helps inspire us and keeps us engaged. And that is why the Make Art Challenge or whatever you want to call it is ongoing where we ask our listeners—our artist listeners—to submit songs they’ve created for our consumption here on the show. And as you heard at the start of this show, the song was Precision Grooming by Scary Hours. Scary Hours is an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti homophobic, anticapitalist project from New Jersey frontman/songwriter Ryan Struck featuring a revolving door of great musicians with aligned incentives. Margins was released in November 2020 on Pyrrhic Victory Recordings to warm critical response. Scary Hours is gearing up for its next release, a full length, which will be formally announced in detail in early 2022. Ryan shared this statement about the song you just heard.
Andrea Chalupa:
“The lyrics for Precision Grooming were based on a quote from the works of Carter G. Woodson: ‘When you control a man's thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it.’”—That is very true.—”We recognize that the entire criminal justice system has been designed by and for the elite white capitalist class while working class and marginalized communities are groomed to remain powerless.” This is, again, from the statement on Precision Grooming, the song by Ryan Struck. “Civil disobedience is curtailed by maintaining the American laborer’s status as an economic hostage. This song was written in response to the Chauvin trial, but we have sadly found it to be even more relevant in the wake of the Rittenhouse verdict.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist and a fucking class traitor and so are the judge and jury who let him walk. Artwork for the single is by John Steinheimer and shows Chauvin's eyes behind a Klan hood and the Capitol building adorned with guard towers, overlooking a chain gang and rows of suburban homes. It was so poignant that we didn't want to just let it rot online somewhere, so we're using the 7” release as a platform to showcase the piece, which you can order through our Bandcamp. All profits from any merch sales will be donated to the ACLU.” So, we'll post that Bandcamp link along with the show notes for this episode on our Patreon page. You can also find Scary Hours on Twitter and Instagram @ScaryHoursNJ. @ScaryHoursNJ. And that brings us to, perfectly enough, the verdict in Georgia and the Ahmaud Arbery case. We want to touch quickly on the trial of the three white men who were found guilty in the Deep South by a mostly white jury. A powerful summary of the case was provided on PBS News Hour by Jonathan Capehart. We'll play that now.
[begin clip]
Jonathan Capehart:
It's a celebration because it so rarely happens. I mean, in this case, as you just talked about, two prosecutors opted not to arrest these guys, opted not to press charges.
David Brooks:
These were the people initially presented with the case who thought, “Nothing to see here.”
Jonathan Capehart:
Right. And one of those prosecutors was indicted for, you know, not doing her job. This was going the way of basically every lynching that has happened anywhere in America, certainly pre and during civil rights where what happened to Ahmaud Arbery would happen, the people who did it would get away with it. If they were arrested and put on trial, they would be found not guilty in a matter of minutes. In this case, the two prosecutors opted not to do anything. And so they had to go all the way to Atlanta to get this prosecutor, Linda Dunikoski, who did such a superb job by relying on the facts. Now, there's a lot being made of the fact that she didn't make race a huge part of her case.
Jonathan Capehart:
She didn't need to. She put her trust in the facts and she put her trust in the jury. And a lot of African Americans, myself included—although compared to the Rittenhouse case, I had a lot more faith in what would happen in the Arbery case—but for a lot of African Americans, to put their fate—even though we're not on trial, but we could, you know, one of our loved ones could have been Ahmaud Arbery—to put our fate in the hands of 11 white people in the Deep South, given the history of this particular case, is a lot to ask for. And the fact that we got guilty verdicts for all three, yes, it's worthy of a celebration. It is a relief. I agree with David: If they had been found not guilty, we would be having a completely different conversation right now. But we still need to have these conversations because what we're talking about right now, there are a lot of people around this country who consider what we're talking about “Critical race theory”-
David Brooks:
Right.
Jonathan Capehart:
When all we're trying to say is like, Look, there's a reason why-
David Brooks:
There's a history here and a legacy here.
Jonathan Capehart:
Exactly. And there's a reason why the Arbery case was followed so closely and why you had those Black ministers in the gallery with the family. But you won't understand that if you don't take the time out to learn the history, to allow your children to learn the history.
[end clip]
Andrea Chalupa:
Once again, history matters. History is how we got here. Critical race theory, the largely college and graduate-level study of how our country's legal system—which literally inspired and informed the Nazis—upholds the abuse of power and inherent violence of white supremacy. Of course, critical race theory is extremely useful and important for understanding today's headlines in America. The Nazis based some of their laws and legal arguments on the Jim Crow South. The American South out-Nazied the Nazis. How can you not want to know that? History holds up a mirror that many people refuse to look into because they're continuing to enforce and strengthen that power system, as we're seeing with the voter suppression laws sweeping our country and the far-right ideologues on the Supreme Court, which has been packed by outspoken racist, Donald J. Trump, whose father was arrested at a KKK rally and who allegedly kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed.
Andrea Chalupa:
And that shows in how he incited violence in the lead up to and at the rally on January 6th that turned into a violent coup attempt to overthrow our democracy. Latest reporting is out from The Guardian that Trump called his “war room”—Steve Bannon's war room at the Willard hotel—several times the eve of the coup, January 5th, demanding, demanding that they stop the election. So, once again, that was not a spontaneous white mob. That was centrally coordinated. That was a violent attempt by the Trump family to overthrow our democracy and install themselves in a dictatorship. And if people do not get arrested, who centrally coordinated that coup—and we mean the people within the Trump family and people who work directly for them and with them—then this will happen again and they will get away with it next time, meaning they will be successful.
Andrea Chalupa:
So DOJ needs to wake up. And people excusing the DOJ need to just study authoritarian history, genuinely, and talk to people who are on the front lines of fighting authoritarianism—countries like Russia and Belarus—for a real education. All right? So since we just had Thanksgiving in America, a holiday that whitewashes the genocide of Native Americans, a genocide that was so brutal and widespread that it changed the global climate, according to a report from the University College London, the original tribe that saved the lives of the pilgrims and 1621, 400 years ago, the Wampanoag tribe, they now say they regret it considering they were repaid for their kindness with disease, genocide, their land stolen, and their population decimated. Thanksgiving itself was a holiday born on the mythology of the pilgrims, but with an emphasis on gratitude to God. It started as a Northern Yankee Christian celebration. The campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday was driven by a woman magazine editor, Sarah Josepha Hale.
Andrea Chalupa:
She used her magazine to publish editorials for well over a dozen years, arguing that Thanksgiving should be a national holiday. And at the center of the movement was the pumpkin pie: an anti-slavery symbol that was the critical race theory of its day. From USA Today: “‘There are these New England abolitionists writing saccharin sweet stories about pumpkin,’ said historian Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. ‘They very consciously saw these pumpkin farms in contrast to the immoral plantation economy and plantation farms in the South. They very specifically and explicitly compared those two landscapes.’ In the mid 19th century-”—and I'm still reading from USA Today.—”According to Ott, eating pumpkins was a matter of identity politics and much the same could be said of Thanksgiving itself. When Abraham Lincoln declared it day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November in 1863, it was the culmination of a long pro Thanksgiving campaign by abolitionist pumpkin lover and home economics icon, Sarah Josepha Hale. Lincoln framed it as a call to ‘heal the wounds of the nation and restore it.’ and the declaration became an annual tradition for American presidents.”
Andrea Chalupa:
So now Thanksgiving, of course, is a major holiday celebrated nationwide where you're forced to come together as a family and, as politely as possible, explain critical race theory to your racist uncle. The abolitionists streak in the tradition of Thanksgiving prevails. If Fox News finds that out, they're going to cancel Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie will officially be canceled. Tucker Carlson will smash a pumpkin live on air with his giant forehead. I would very much look forward to that. [laughs] So that is why I brought this up, to see if we can troll Fox news into leading an anti pumpkin pie campaign.
Sarah Kendzior:
They can borrow the pumpkin cannon that we fired at Pumpkinland in Missouri.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, dear Lord.
Sarah Kendzior:
I love that thing. Alright, alright. So, let's talk about Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
Russia, Russia, Russia.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's going to be another coup. This is the second episode, at least, in which we are talking about a prescheduled, preannounced coup with a date, with all the plans out in the open, and seemingly no effort to deter them. So, Andrea, would you like to tell us what is going on right now with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and all of these various crises caused by a Kremlin that has been operating with utter impunity for nearly a decade?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. Well, first, I want to open by sharing that I was tremendously honored this morning by participating in a Zoom panel discussion with a number of extraordinary Russian and Belarusian activists and leaders. I want to share some of their work now because the discussion was an urgent reminder of what the Biden administration must do in order to stand up to Putin effectively and save lives. These activists, who are putting their lives and their family's lives on the front lines, fighting for democracy in Russia and Belarus, they are the ones that we need to be taking leadership from now. So, I'm going to share a short overview of their bios, their urgent plea to leaders of the world, and then that will bring us into the latest ongoing an escalating aggression by the Kremlin against Ukraine and why it matters to all of us.
Andrea Chalupa:
In this discussion this morning, I was joined by Evgeniya Chirikova, Russia's environmental and anti-corruption campaigner currently living in Estonia because she's forced to live abroad for obvious reasons. Evgeniya is the founder of activatica.org. She's a winner of the Woman of Courage Award and of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Also in the discussion was Nadia Zelenkova, co-owner of a digital agency and partner in Ў Gallery of contemporary arts in Belarus, a Democratic activists currently living abroad and the wife of political prisoner Alexander Vasilevich. Also Tatiana Yankelevich Bonner, the daughter of the dissidents, Yelena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov, of course, is the famous Soviet dissident, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner. Their daughter was on this discussion as well and she's an independent researcher affiliated with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, I want to point out Evgeniya Chirikova, specifically what she was calling for. She pointed out how the Russian Constitution allows the right to protest in Russia, but the pressure on protesters, on activists of all kinds across Russia, has never been greater. Putin continues to really increase the pressure on them. So what they desperately need—what the civil society in Russia needs—is legal support, media support, psychological support, anti-corruption support. And she said, Help activists from Russia and Belarus immigrate and resettle safely abroad so they can continue their work for human rights, with safety guarantees and securely. She said, It is the grassroots activists who will preserve an organization for after Russia collapses. So, that was really interesting and that is incredibly true because Russia is headed towards collapse under Putin. It's inevitable, given how he's running that country, the level of staggering income inequality and corruption. It's not sustainable.
Andrea Chalupa:
She also called on the West to unite in sanctioning Nord Stream 2, stop collaborating with Russia, sanctions now against Nord Stream 2. It's a disaster for human rights in Russia, that whole project. Nord Stream 2 is something we talk a lot about on this show. It is a pipeline from Russia to Germany that connects them directly so Russia can transport its gas directly to Germany, bypassing Ukraine so Ukraine loses out on much-needed transit revenue. And what it does is it increases Germany's dependence on Russian gas, which Russia is currently using as a leverage—as energy warfare—against not just Germany, but the EU, because right now, Russia is limiting the gas supply to the EU, which is driving up gas prices. Why would Russia do such a thing? Because it's a terrorist state. So why the hell is the West further entrenching its dependence and collaboration with Russia?
Andrea Chalupa:
It's suicidal, really. And what you're doing is you're endangering the lives of brave Russian activists like Evgeniya. She also stressed the importance of Navalny, who, of course, is in prison, a political prisoner on trumped up charges. Navalny, she says, gets credit for electrifying a grassroots movement across Russia and bringing a lot of new activists into that movement and that he created a grassroots structure that must be preserved. So Navalny must be kept alive. All of this is extremely important because, as we're going to go through today, Putin's aggression is increasing. He has over 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's borders that are being mobilized right now. And you have movement of heavy artillery and other machinery of war. All that Ukraine's military and other experts are seeing is that it looks like Putin is preparing to significantly escalate his invasion of Ukraine, probably in January or February.
Andrea Chalupa:
If Ukraine falls, you're going to have a major humanitarian crisis right on the border with the European Union, which is going to add to the already massive humanitarian crisis from the Middle East and Northern Africa, which is already creating great strain and pressure on the EU and elsewhere. So, to avoid all that, obviously, something has to be done. There is talk that maybe Putin is doing his usual war saber rattling, waving a gun around in the air like the ridiculous terrorist that he is, trying to freak people out to try to force the Biden administration into another summit by the end of this year. Obviously, what does the Biden administration do? Do you cave to the demands of an actual terrorist? Do you give Putin the summit he so craves? Why would Putin do all this just for a summit? Because it humiliates the West. It shows the world that Putin is powerful, that Putin can get away with all this aggression, and it shows Russians held captive back home how unstoppable and inevitable Putin is. Look at him next to the President of the United States on a global stage. All dictators crave that legitimacy. All dictators crave that global state.
Sarah Kendzior:
It may come sooner. One thing that I wanted to ask your opinion about, and just the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, said last Friday (this is from the Washington Post), that a group of Russians and Ukrainians were planning to attempt to coup in Ukraine next month, meaning the month of December, and that the plotters have tried to enlist the help of the country's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, by the way, is a Manafort crony like many of the wealthiest men in Ukraine. He is not to be mistaken with Rinat Akhmetshin who was also a Manafort crony and a Kilimnik crony, but was at the Trump Tower meeting. Akhmetov is the one not at the Trump Tower meeting. This is like those logic puzzles that you do as a kid where you get to cross off each item.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, Zelensky gave this press conference. He described it as a “press marathon” for local and international media. And he says he has audio recordings obtained by Ukraine's security services that caught the plotters discussing the plans and mentioned Akhmetov by name. He says Akhmetov was not involved in the purported coup plot. He did not add additional details. He did not, to my knowledge, release the tapes. Then to get to what you were just saying, the Washington Post asked Biden about this, and they say, “Speaking in Nantucket, Massachusetts, President Biden told reporters that he would ‘in all probability, have talks with Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin over the deepening tensions.’” So yes, exactly what you were saying, Putin is going to possibly get this summit, certainly get attention, certainly show his prowess and show strength, which will resonate on a domestic level.
Sarah Kendzior:
But for the love of God, I mean, how long is the US going to cower to this? And again, we always have to add this caveat which should be obvious given the nature of our show, but we do not want war. We're trying to avoid military buildups. We try to avoid military action in every situation. We also do not like our country to be hijacked by mafia states. We do not like seeing other countries which are already struggling with corruption issues—much like the US is—like Ukraine being hijacked by mafia states as well, in a much more direct way at their actual borders with actual troops. So anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know what was up and that the other coup—this is the Ukraine coup. I know there are a lot of coups to keep track of these days—may be scheduled for the month of December, 2021, bringing this wonderful, wonderful year to a close. What are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
My thoughts are that I cannot believe I participated in this small panel discussion with all of these remarkable fearless women on this call that are making such great sacrifices, and there were just 15-18 people there, and I just kept thinking, like, You have all the solutions, the world should be looking to you for leadership. So, please, Biden administration—Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan—stop hurting yourselves and stop hurting our national security and the security of all these extraordinarily brave, independent journalists and anti-corruption reformers who have risked and sacrificed so much. Listen to Russian civil society. Take leadership from Russian civil society on how to counter Putin. They know him better than you. They are doing the Lord's work for the rest of us in confronting him and confronting his corruption. They’re literally putting their lives on the line to do this. The whole TikToK generation of kids across Russia, they're the ones who are out there on the street getting dragged by these sadist cops and being disappeared.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I think it's extremely important for us to listen to Russian civil society. And it's very simple, they've been very clear: Sanction Nord Stream 2. Everyone, the US Congress, the Biden administration, sanction the hell out of Nord Stream 2. It doesn't matter that it’s already been built. That was the justification the Biden administration made, saying, “What's the point in sanctioning it? It’s already been built. It was built under Trump.” It doesn't matter. Sanction it now with every lever of sanction power you have so it becomes totally inoperable. I know the Biden administration is going to say, “Well, what about Germany? We don't want to step on Germany's toes.” Germany is pulling another George W. Bush Iraq invasion with this, alright? Just like the US has made some cataclysmic mistakes as foreign policy, Germany is doing the same here.
Andrea Chalupa:
So you must stand up to it, just like countries should have stood up more to Bush with his based-on-lies and inhumane Iraq invasion, okay? When you see your friend trying to drive drunk, what do you do? You stop them and take the keys. Do the right thing. If Germany cannot do it, you need to help them do it. So the US must lead on this and sanction, sanction, sanction, Nord Stream 2. That is coming from Russian civil society. Okay? Then you must fund through grants—and this needs all the support it can get, like programs like USAID and all sorts of programs—fund independent, Russian/Belarusian diaspora media. Wherever it is, fund it. Make sure these activists have all the security support that they need. Make sure that there are people looking out for them and making sure that they're aware of what movements might be dangerous.
Andrea Chalupa:
I know during Ukraine's revolution, Euromaidan, there were Ukrainian organizers who had to flee Kyiv, who came to New York City, and they had the FBI show up at their house saying, “You need to be careful. We've been picking up noise that you're being targeted.” So, do the same for these Russian and Belarusian activists, wherever they are living in the world. Protect them, keep them alive. That was the simple plea from these activists today: Keep activists alive. That's all they said. They said, Keep activists alive and empower them, give them a voice, give them all the resources they need in order to do their jobs and do it so it makes the largest noise possible so the rest of the world can hear. That includes also, as they mentioned, legal support to protect themselves from the frivolous, abusive lawsuits from Putin and his court of oligarchs. That's one of the tools they like to use out of the Kremlin. Also, protect them in terms of psychological support because it's extremely difficult to live with the pressure of a mass murdering terrorist regime coming after you and your family.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, give them all those resources in the name of not just their security and a free democratic Russia and Belarus, but American national security. It was the Kremlin that greatly destabilized the US when it helped bring Trump to power and attacked our election infrastructure, attacked our media, our social media platforms, and continues to turn Americans against each other with its well-funded propaganda machine and asymmetrical warfare and harass US citizens. One thing that these Russians were saying in the call was that they received a lot of access to the Obama administration during Obama's years, and they lost that access under the Trump administration. So just remember, when the Trump administration gets associated with Russia, it is Putin. It's the materialistic oligarch court of Putin, not the real Russians. The real Russians were shut out from the Trump administration. It was the real Russians that were suffering under Trump.
Andrea Chalupa:
So we owe it to them now to stand by them and help them because they're helping all the world right now, because Putin is a global terrorist who's impacting several regions of the world right now. And just to go specifically into the coup and bring home some points that Sarah mentioned, I want to read this from Newsweek on Ukraine's richest oligarch, Akhmetov, who is known as a crime lord in Ukraine. I’m going to read now from Newsweek: “Akhmetov has never been formally charged for a crime, but he once fled to Monaco following Ukraine's 2005 Orange Revolution protests against political corruption when an investigation was opened on him for murder charges. Those charges were dropped in 2006 and he returned from his exile. While in Monaco though, Akhmetov contracted the political consulting firm of Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman of former president Donald Trump's 2016 presidential bid. Akhmetov and Manafort are said to have developed a close friendship, and he was tied to Manafort and Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 us presidential elections because of their shared connection to translator/consultant Konstantin Kilimnik.”—who we now have confirmation, thanks to Congressional reports, is Russian intelligence.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Akhmetov also made US news in August, 2020 when an independent government watchdog found businesses owned by the Ukrainian billionaire received a total of $21 million in small business loans from the US government.” Alright. So, the other thing we need to do—the Biden administration must do, and Congress must do—to counter Putin's aggression is to clean up our own corruption. So, just like the US, Janet Yellen, our treasury secretary, has been leading the effort with our allies around the world to do a universal corporate tax of 15%. That is to try to curb corruption, to curb the epidemic of all these rich billionaires and the super wealthy hiding their money abroad by getting as many countries as possible to pass this standard universal corporate tax.
Andrea Chalupa:
Imagine what Treasury Secretary Yellen and her counterparts abroad can do in uniting the world and cleaning up its corruption, because it is the corruption that Kremlin aggression increasingly uses against us. This is how it keeps Ukraine in a black hole of corruption—it’s the golden handcuffs—and that is how it has been infiltrating the United States, namely through the corruption of the Republican Party. So, we need to not only support Russian and Bearusian civil society abroad, wherever they are—keep them safe and supported, give them whatever they need to do their jobs safely and well—we also need to fight our own corruption abroad. That is how you counter Putin's aggression. You do not counter it by letting him waltz all over you on a global stage.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I mean, what's depressing about this is that Yellen won't even release Trump's tax returns to Congress. She won't update us on Russia hijacking the Treasury in 2015. I mean, this is something that we've covered many times. This was revealed in a Buzzfeed report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier. The whistleblower from that case, Natalie Mayflower Edwards, is now in prison. Yellen is another one, like Merrick Garland, who is abetting corruption through inaction, by treating criminal elites as above the law, which furthers their impunity and also furthers the public perception that they haven't done something wrong, because a very common response to all of this rampant, insidious, really unparalleled level of corruption is, “Oh, well, you know, if it was really serious, if it was really harmful, someone would do something. The Treasury Department would do something, or they at least would tell us what was going on.”
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, a lot of this is old news. These are crimes committed during the Trump administration or beforehand. “Merrick Garland would obviously be arresting Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and others who are on record, you know, Steve Bannon, saying, ‘Yes, uh, we are fomenting a violent coup, we are overturning the results of an election.’” You have Trump on tape threatening various public officials. Like, this is not hard to find. Instead, there is absolute silence. And so for all those folks out there are saying, “Oh my God, he can't talk about it. It would jeopardize the investigation.” The DOJ has a PR branch. Like, they have teams of professionals who are in place to at least communicate to the American public without jeopardizing the integrity of all of these cases what is going on, what values the DOJ holds, what their aims are broadly in terms of justice, in terms of accountability, in terms of who is above the law, in terms of how things like the OLC memo, which was used to excuse Trump's crimes in the past to put this veneer of executive privilege on everything to treat him as above the law.
Sarah Kendzior:
All of those things could be addressed without getting into the very specific details of these investigations, but they're not doing that. We're at the point where a lot of people who are very, very flattering in their portrayals of the Biden administration—folks like David Rothkopf, who goes out of his way to highlight positive things that the administration is doing—they're fed up, also, with Merrick Garland. You could also go into Yellen, into Blinken in terms of foreign policy, you know, we have an ongoing problem with the Biden administration abetting dictators. It's the Kremlin, but it's also the way that they let Saudi Arabia off the hook for the Khashoggi case. It's the constant sycophancy shown to Israel despite their digital surveillance efforts, despite their partnership with people like Jared Kushner.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's the fact that Jared Kushner is out there running around after profiting off a plague and committing, I mean, just a massive, massive list of illegal offenses. In my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, which I wrote in 2019, I simply listed the ones that he had committed in office, the crimes he committed in office—and that was around June, 2019—and just the list itself took up page after page.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Yep.
Sarah Kendzior:
And since then, it got so much worse. That was pre COVID. That was pre coup. And we see him out there using his prior position in the administration to partner with corrupt people abroad, with folks related to his old family friend, Netanyahu. What I predicted he would do... Like, they're not outright saying this, but you know, this is someone who had no respect for national security, no respect for protocol, who lied constantly on his security clearance forms along with Ivanka.
Sarah Kendzior:
And my prediction was always, Kushner is going to use intelligence, classified information, networks, access, etc, to enhance his personal wealth and to bring back the dynastic kleptocracy that Trump was creating while he was in office through blackmail, bribes, threats, incentives, etc. And that's what he's currently doing in partnership with both Israel and a number of Gulf states, in particular, Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration does nothing. This is a massive national security threat. I've always said that Kushner was a bigger threat, in many ways, than Trump. You can go dig into our archives for that one, but I want to remain on point here. Related to this is the issue of Paul Manafort because, as you brought up, he is a close contact of Rinat Akhmetov. He is somebody who has worked as the liaison between basically the Western mafia and the Russian mafia.
Sarah Kendzior:
He was pardoned by Trump shortly before Trump carried out his Capitol attack, and we've heard nothing. You know? He's just out there running around. No one knows what he's up to. My guess—and I'm just, you know, going out on a limb here—is that he's up to helping this Russia Ukraine coup because that's, like, what Paul Manafort does for a living! And perhaps, perhaps there should be people who are not you and me—you know, the journalists, like, sitting in our house podcasting—but people who actually hold the reins of accountability and have the power to do this, to investigate this situation, which is jeopardizing not only the public safety and national security of Ukraine, but our own. This is a very, very dangerous individual and they've decided to pretend that he does not exist and that none of this ever happened. As Taylor Swift says, It was rare, we were there. We know all too well. All too well over five years. This is what happens after five years of coverage. You end up with these references. But anyway, what do you know about this? What's Paul Manafort up to? You got any ideas, any insights?
Andrea Chalupa:
I know that he's an incredibly serious person despite his-
Sarah Kendzior:
Ostrich jacket?
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Exactly. I think that's how he lets loose and self cares, but no, he's an incredibly intense, serious person who's a Kremlin lifer. This is easy money for him. He's in the family. The fact that Paul Manafort could take a bunch of money from Deripaska, the Russian oligarch that won the Aluminum Wars in the Car Bomb ‘90s of Russia where there was an actual body count. The fact that Paul Manafort felt confident and comfortable enough to take a bunch of money from Deripaska and mismanage it, lose the investment, whatever, and be on the hook to Deripaska for money and he was allowed to live shows how in the family Paul Manafort is with the Kremlin. So, if there's anything moving in Ukraine like this attempted coup—which I know is all alleged. It's the word of President Zelensky—it's very much in the realm of possibility given how brazen Paul Manafort's tactics are and all of the criming he's been doing in Ukraine since the time of the Orange Revolution, 2005/2006.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's key that 2006 is the year his buddy Akhmetov felt comfortable coming back to Ukraine after those murder charges, because that's when Manafort was really building up his presence in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin. He was building up their gaslighting Republican Party in Eastern Ukraine known as the blocker regions, which brought a Putin puppet, the Ukrainian Trump, Victor Yanukovych, to power. He was using all these dark arts and propaganda to turn Ukrainians against each other. He was creating fake protests against the US and NATO, as we saw in Crimea. So all the same tactics that Paul Manafort and the Kremlin used on Americans in 2016, sowing division, turning people against each other. That's what he was doing in Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, Ukraine was a testing ground of the same aggressive tactics that were used to help the Kremlin bring Trump to power in 2016. And Paul Manafort pioneered and pushed them first in Ukraine for the Kremlin. So yeah, this coup attempt, I believe it is actually a coup attempt. I know there's still a debate. I do believe that this is an operation that is very much part of the Kremlin's wheelhouse. There was, of course, a Kremlin coup attempt in Montenegro back in 2016. There's been all sorts of blatant, in-your-face meddling by the Kremlin in democracies across Europe. The Kremlin has deliberately created a refugee crisis to flood Europe with refugees and then propped up anti-immigration candidates and political parties across Europe to further divide Europe. Right now, the Kremlin is being extraordinarily brazen by working with Belarus to fly a bunch of desperate refugees from Syria and Iraq and elsewhere to Belarus with the promise that they can enter the European Union that way. That is significant and ongoing.
Andrea Chalupa:
The reason why is because Poland is, right now, under a Trumpian government that's openly xenophobic and anti-immigrant. So by Belarus and the Kremlin putting all of these desperate refugees right on Poland's border, that is creating a humanitarian crisis, number one. And the Polish government's response to that is something that's also potentially very dangerous and explosive because they openly hate immigrants and refugees, even Ukrainian refugees. Ukrainians and Poles are obviously very culturally aligned. Even Ukrainian refugees, or even Ukrainian immigrants, were telling me on a recent trip I had to Warsaw in 2019 that they felt unsafe under this Polish Trumpian government. What could happen is that Poland could really overstep and do something dangerous in reaction to this refugee humanitarian crisis artificially created by Belarus and Russia on its borders. By doing so, that could inflame tensions across the EU and that could then divide the EU
Andrea Chalupa:
Then you could have another independence referendum in a country like Poland. Hungary could follow suit because Hungary has fallen to a dictator who has used all types of authoritarian tactics to consolidate power and stay in power. And remember, Tucker Carlson of Fox News and the rest of his right-wing Trumpian Republican Party loves Hungary and holds it up as a model of what the United States could be. They blatantly do this. So, when you have a divided EU—if the EU starts falling apart and you have more Brexits around the EU—you're weakening an extraordinarily important political alliance that counters authoritarian aggression of all kinds and is an extremely important regulatory body against corporate greed and overreach. The EU passes a lot of strong regulations against corporations to keep people safe, regulations that we don't have the benefit of in the United States.
Andrea Chalupa:
One of the points that the award winning British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr made on our show about Brexit and the tragedy of Brexit and how Brexit and Trump are the same crime—because the same dark forces united homegrown corruption of conservative leaders in the pocket of Kremlin dirty money and all the same dark arts that Trump came to power on were used to tip the very close Brexit vote—and one thing Carole Cadwalladr kept saying was, “We're going to lose the regulations from the European Union that kept people in Great Britain safe, and we're going to have all of these loosening standards and all this deregulation, and we're going to be more like America.” So that's a crisis that could hit European citizens. That's why the refugee humanitarian crisis that the Kremlin and Belarus are deliberately creating to destabilize their enemy, the European Union, and to punish the EU for standing up to Kremlin aggression, generally. That could have a very serious ripple effect to hurt European Union solidarity and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's a tense situation and the most important thing to understand is that Putin has a tendency of being brazen, being extreme and pushing things too far. Again, the way you counter him is you don't buckle. You are not avoiding war, you are not avoiding humanitarian catastrophe by appeasing Putin. In fact, you are embolding those horrific events. You are empowering him. What you need to do is isolate and contain Putin because he does calculate. He does back down. Otherwise, he would have swallowed up Ukraine long ago. Ukraine has done an amazing job standing up to Putin and outsmarting Putin and countering Putin and refusing to legitimize Putin because he's a mass murdering terrorist. So, Ukraine has shown the world how to do it. It's time that the Biden administration followed the lead of all of these brave men and women living on the front lines of Putin's aggression and not feeding into Putin's terrorism.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly. It's a really good thing that there's nothing else new and horrible happening in the world as this very unstable situation plays out in Eastern Europe. Oh...Wait...We have a new plague variant. So, as all these global crises emerge, we are also dealing with the crisis of Omicron. We don't know exactly how bad this is going to be. It wouldn't be 2021 without a new coup and a new plague variant. And, of course, we get a variant that sounds like a title of a William Gibson novel or a B-side by the Blue Oyster Cult. Omicron was originally called Nu but the scientists decided to go one letter further, thus destroying my Gaslit Nation episode title ideas of “Nu World Order” and “Brave Nu World”. But anyway, we have Omicron, which is about halfway through the Greek alphabet, used for plague names, in between the alpha and the omega.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I'm sure that will be of no interest to the rapture fiend anti-vaxxer crowd at all. I’m sure they're handling that development very well. Anyway, as I said, we don't fully know how dangerous the Omicron strand is. We know it's much more contagious than previous variants. We do not know whether it is more lethal. I think the world is going to find out one way or the other in a few weeks. You should be checking with epidemiologists and scientists about this, by the way. Not us. I'm a doctor in the Ross Geller sense. I’m an anthropologist with no particular medical scientific expertise, so please seek out actual medical doctors, medical scientists, because I'm not going to pretend to be. But what we can comment on here in Gaslit Nation—and what we have been—is the politics of the plague.
Sarah Kendzior:
One thing that is clear about omicron is that it emerged largely due to the refusal of Big Pharma to make the COVID vaccine free and accessible outside of wealthy states and western states. That is the nexus of the crisis, the origin of the storm. Variants are much more likely to form when there is a low rate of vaccination and there will be a low rate of vaccination when large parts of the world do not have easy access to the vaccine, which has been true ever since the vaccine has been developed. Unlike when Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine and gave it away for free, the monstrous men running Big Pharma today do not want to make it free. It is notable that they make enormous profits whenever a variant emerges and people need to get new shots. When omicron emerged, Pfizer's shares hit a record high. There have been a lot of lies and a lot of bad theories about COVID and about the vaccine coming from the anti-vaccine crowd, but they are not lying about the baseline greed of Big Pharma CEOs and how these CEOs view mass infection as good for their profit margins.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is not new. This is not limited to COVID. We've seen this in other cases, the most notorious of which is the Sackler family—the opiate peddling Sackler family—granted permanent criminal immunity. And that abhorrent behavior of these corporations has contributed to the distrust of vaccines. Big Pharma's greed bolsters the anti-vaxxers’ suspicion of the COVID vaccine, which in turn makes them not want to get it, which in turn causes new variants to form among unvaccinated folks, which in turn helps greedy Big Pharma CEOs, so, perversely, they end up getting even more money from the people that they've alienated. So, this entire cycle is grotesque. One of the worst Big Pharma CEOs is Albert Bourla, the head of Pfizer who is also a friend of multiple time indicted former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2020, Bourla spoke to Netanyahu on the phone up to 30 times per day.
Sarah Kendzior:
In the beginning of the COVID crisis, this kind of cronyism is why Israel and other wealthy countries, including the United States and most of Western Europe, were already getting booster shots when other parts of the world were struggling to get even basic vaccination. These CEOs do not believe in vaccine equity. And today, the Financial Times has an explosive exposition on this, which I recommend you read. I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes. I'm going to read a little bit about it now. This is the real story of what Bourla was doing last year while he was lauded and people were tagging themselves Team Pfizer and all this weird on Twitter. It says, “By email, text or phone, global leaders have pleaded with Bourla for orders, in some cases hoping that it may rescue their political careers.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“Facing an election battle he eventually lost, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu topped the list, calling Burleigh 30 times. While western politicians rubbed shoulders with Bourla, leaders in many poorer countries were becoming exasperated as the virus ripped through their unvaccinated populations. Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwean billionaire who coordinates the African Union's vaccine team, says they were ‘left treading water until we were drowning’. Late last year, he persuaded Pfizer to supply an initial 2 million doses to help vaccinate some of the estimated 5 million healthcare workers in Africa. He eagerly awaited a draft contract. ‘They kept saying next week. Then we got to April.’ he says. In May, he watched as the European Union struck a huge contract for up to 1.8 billion doses. Infuriated, Masiyiwa wrote a ‘very heavily worded’ protest to Bourla in which he asked what was causing the delay. They eventually received some doses from an initiative run by the Biden administration.”
Sarah Kendzior:
So again, you're seeing that Pfizer had the capacity to vaccinate the world. Healthcare officials from across the world have been saying this. It's not just Pfizer. It's also Moderna. It's these other companies as well. And, of course, vaccinating everybody and doing it quickly helps prevent the spread of this variance, which gets us out of this unbelievable existential hellhole (or at least one of them, we still have climate change) that we've been in since 2019. And so you’d think, you know, given that the Biden administration is the one left dealing with this wreckage, which Trump, of course, helped spread through his amazing COVID team of his daughter, his son-in-law, Michael Caputo, other assorted felons, Steve Mnuchin, I mean, you know, people with no medical expertise who wanted to make a profit off of mass death. That's who was on the American COVID dream team. That's who created a lot of this mess, leaving it for Biden to clean it up.
Sarah Kendzior:
Biden has been handling the situation by basically talking out of both sides of his mouth, along with the rest of the administration. So we have another explosive exposé on this. This one is from In These Times. Biden is saying he is fighting for a patent waiver, meaning that other countries be able to produce the vaccine and not have to rely on buying it at prices they cannot afford from Pfizer or Moderna or other big corporations. In reality, according to Sarah Lazare, who wrote this article, that is not the case. I'm going to quote a little from this: “Biden gave this announcement saying, ‘I call on the nations gathering next week for the World Trade Organization Ministerial meeting to meet the US challenge to waive intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines so these vaccines can be manufactured globally. I endorsed this position in April. This news today reiterates the importance of moving on this quickly.’”
Sarah Kendzior:
This is after he heard the omicron news. And then, In These Times goes on to say: “However, this public statement, which garnered numerous headlines, stands in stark contrast with what the Biden administration did—or did not do—behind closed doors at the WTO on November 29th.” It describes that there was this informal meaning of the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Council (the TRIPS Council), the body that determines global intellectual property rules. “The US declined to take robust action to approve an intellectual property waiver and merely referred back to the remarks that Biden made on November 26th. While the Biden administration has publicly declared support for an intellectual property waiver of some kind, it has not specified whether it supports the specific proposal put forward by South Africa and India in October, 2020, nor has it clarified what changes it would like to see. The effect, global health activists charge, has been a slowing down of negotiations in a context where any delay means more lives lost. ”
Sarah Kendzior:
“Instead, these activists say, the US could be using its power at the WTO to pressure its allies, to stop blocking discussions, and call a general council meeting to pass a waiver.” So, this kind of reminds me of what we were just talking about with the Biden administration's actions toward Russia, where they're up against just brazen corruption, oligarch swindling, plutocrat swindling, lives being lost, and instead of standing up to it, instead of fighting for people's health, fighting for their dignity, they are enabling it. As a result of omicron, there've been a number of travel bans, including on a number of African countries that do not have any omicron cases yet. I should say, we're recording this on Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, European countries that do have omicron cases have not been put on the travel ban list.
Sarah Kendzior:
Omicron was discovered in South Africa because they have a good and honest scientific community that was capable of detecting the variant and decided to tell the world about it, which is exactly what they should be doing. They are basically being punished for their honesty and for their expertise, which is the opposite of what should be happening. Here's a quote here, this is from Al Jazeera. We'll put all these articles in our show notes on Patreon, by the way. This is a quote from South African Health Minister, Joe Phaahla. He says... He's comparing the daily infections in South Africa and some European countries and says: “‘It's ironic that some of the countries that are now reacting in this draconian manner have infection rates of more than 50,000 per day. That's in contrast to South Africa, which reported nearly 3,000 daily cases on Friday, up from approximately 300 daily cases two weeks ago. That reaction is knee jerk and panicked,’ he said, warning that such responses could prompt countries to shy away from reporting new findings.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“‘It is a very counterproductive reaction’ he says, ‘because what it says is that if you have the capability to do genomic sequencing and have a high level of efficiency, those capabilities must be driven underground.’”—This is Phaahla talking.—“‘People will feel it is a ‘risk’ to disclose their findings.’ he argued.” That's a very realistically dire take on the situation and I hope that people listen to him because that's just been the theme of the last five years, is that if you are transparent about something bad happening—about corruption, about organized crime, about a incoming pandemic (which you may remember many, many people denied was happening), about climate change, about all of these major crises that we have to deal with—you'll be punished for it.
Sarah Kendzior:
You'll be punished for your honesty. You'll be punished for being right too early. You'll be denigrated for warning the world. Folks like these researchers in South Africa should be applauded. We've gotten into this cultish mentality, this deferential mode of supplication where people only want to hear fairytales. They only want to hear false reassurances based on absolutely nothing. And when people come forward with hard evidence of a looming crisis that can be mitigated, that doesn't have to be as bad as it is—and that's true for the pandemic, that's true for climate change, that's true for corruption, that's true for all the things we're dealing with now. You know, we're going to deal with hard times, but they don't have to be as hard as they have been. And they are not set for one particular path in the future.
Sarah Kendzior:
It really depends on what people do, particularly people tasked with power, people who have enormous amounts of wealth. We have unequal leverage. And so I encourage you to support those who speak out about these fledgling crises before they become full fledged crises. If we had been doing that as a global society from the beginning, we would have avoided many of the disasters of the last 20 years. And, of course, we have numerous examples of folks speaking out, people in power hearing them loud and clear, and making a concerted effort to shut them up or drown them out or end the subject altogether. That is not going to work. The crisis will always come back to haunt you. You can try to bury it underground but it will reemerge and it will grow and it will be worse. So, a lot of lessons there in that respect.
Outro Song: Precision Grooming by Scary Hours
[Outro theme music, 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 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 Thunberg Foundation that exposes the true cost of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, the 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 Kenzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon. It keeps us going. You could also subscribe to us 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 in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
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