Why Does the GOP Vote to Hurt Their Own Base?
Wow, something good happened! This week on Gaslit Nation we give credit to (and criticism of!) the American Rescue Plan Act, which begins the process of digging this country out of the giant hellhole we’ve been plunging into for several decades. The stimulus plan, despite being littered with broken promises, nonetheless will make a tangible difference in the lives of many suffering Americans, which is of course why no Republicans voted for it.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Reverend William Barber:
Billionaires have made nearly a trillion dollars in the midst of this pandemic and when I see people who are dying from poverty, and people who are poor and low wealth workers are the last to get any help, but the first to suffer. For over nine years, we haven't raised the minimum wage, it was $7.25 now, $2.13 for tip workers, and these politicians want to hold poor and low wealth people captive in poverty and play games. Republicans want to block, because many have never seen a wage hike they like, and Democrats run on one thing, and then when they get in office, too scared to run on what they said they were going to do, worried more about some kind of false notion of compromise. Don't you remember the three fifths compromise kept us in trouble for 250 years and we still haven't gotten over?
We need a change.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones, 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. Over the weekend, the Senate passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus meant to help Americans recover from the public health and economic disaster of COVID-19. It was passed one year after the virus prompted worldwide shutdowns and upended American life as we knew it.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, I urge you to look back at where we were one year ago. The Democratic primaries had not yet ended, both Warren and Sanders were still in the race, and voters were making demands to fix the deep structural flaws that had allowed Trump to rise to power in 2016. As we’ve said many times, Trump was not an aberration, but a culmination. While much of his rise and ultimate installation was abetted by illegal activity, it was also made possible by the exploitation of American pain and injustice.
Sarah Kendzior:
A very obvious way to prevent that kind of exploitation, a way that is also morally sound in its own right, is to simply pass policies that strengthen the rights and opportunities of ordinary Americans and protect them from falling off the fiscal cliff at which most Americans reside. One year ago, mainstream political campaigns were demanding policies like a higher minimum wage, student debt relief, affordable health care, and an end to the dependency on gas station dictatorships—like Saudi Arabia and Russia—that are also affronts to human life.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then COVID-19 came, and the attempted coup came, and the violence came. It came over and over again, in waves of disease, in waves of desperation, in waves of deception that exhausted this country's capacity to fight for itself. People are still fighting—you heard Reverend William Barber, the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, still fighting for a fair wage in our opening clip—but they are also settling for scraps, because scraps are what they are being offered. Their representatives who swore to stand by the American people are often settling as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
Some of this is a result of negotiation with the GOP, which has refashioned itself as an apocalyptic cult seeking one-party rule, and which has been reliably apathetic to both mass death and treason for the past four years and beyond. It is worth noting that not a single Republican voted for the stimulus plan, not because they thought it didn't help enough, but because they thought this long delayed and stripped down bailout still provided too much.
Sarah Kendzior:
In other words, much of this is not the Democrats fault, but some of this painful situation is due to the fact that the Democrats know that many Americans will settle for scraps instead of settling the score, and that they will convince themselves that this is what they were promised, even when it objectively is not. They will tell themselves that $1,400 is really $2,000. They will tell themselves that something is better than nothing, and they tell themselves this out of fear, because the alternative—that few officials really have the back of the American people—is too painful to contemplate after this year of profound grief and loss.
Sarah Kendzior:
But as I've said many times, keep your standards high, even if you do not think that they will be met. I said that during the Obama era, during the Trump era, and now I'm saying it during the Biden era, because while presidents may come and go, your fundamental value as a human being does not. The American political and economic system is designed to make you feel like you are worthless. But you are worth more than they tell you, and part of the struggle of the next few years is resisting the cult mentality in groupthink that tells you to not ask for what you deserve. It's time to reverse the old JFK maxim and ask what your country can do for you, because lord knows that in 2020, we all did more than our share.
Sarah Kendzior:
So Andrea, what are your thoughts on the stimulus package?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think that's the North Star that we all need to follow, is demand better—always push for better—because that's how you get progress. I, like so many, was disheartened that we did not get $2,000 checks, but $1,400 checks. Of course, there was the big vote against raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which is where it needs to be. The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since something like 2009 and it's one of the contributing factors to why we have crisis levels of income inequality that we haven't seen since just before the Great Depression.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you look at the senators, the eight on the Democratic side that voted against raising the minimum wage, their states have—with the exception of Arizona, which we'll get into later in this discussion—with the exception of Arizona, those Democratic senators from New Hampshire, Delaware, they have low state-mandated minimum wages for those states. So it goes to show that they're just out of touch with this larger crisis of income inequality that is a real human rights crisis.
Andrea Chalupa:
People should not be making poverty wages. People should not be having to juggle several jobs and work constantly just to put food on the table. Poverty gets inherited generation after generation. We do not live in a meritocracy. We live in a growing corporate oligarch-driven power structure where we're dependent on an oligarch—Elon Musk, to drive our space exploration, now. We're dependent on oligarch Jeff Bezos to own the Washington Post and keep those journalism jobs in business at a time when newsrooms are shrinking.
Andrea Chalupa:
We shouldn't have an economy and a democracy that is dependent on oligarchs being benevolent. That's the danger here. We need to bring back the middle class, we need to expand the middle class, we need greater fairness. If you look at the countries that have strong social safety nets—like Denmark, famously—they also have high levels of happiness, they have high levels of education (because university and higher education are free), and they also have extremely low levels of corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
While we're not there by any means, we need to make that our standard and push for greater equality and fairness in our economy, because it translates to greater equality and fairness in our democracy. You see that again and again in examples where we’re fighting to become like Denmark. I do want to say, if you stay grounded in the reality that America is a far-right country—we have our systems so skewed towards benefiting that minority slave-owning, property-owning class. The Senate was established, for instance, to be like the House of Lords in the UK.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you stay grounded in that reality that America is largely a far-right country in terms of how the power structure is skewed, and that we're still dealing with the fallout of the Reagan revolution, which sold everybody on the gaslighting of trickle-down economics, that the more wealth that the top makes, the more comes down to us bottom feeders, which simply isn't true. Instead, it's exploded income inequality levels in the US.
Andrea Chalupa:
On top of that, the Reagan revolution also got rid of the Fairness Doctrine which exploded the far-right propaganda machine in America, which is trying to continue to gaslight people into thinking that everything is fine. As a result, you get Republicans voting against the Rescue Plan. That's what you get. The reality of Republicans doing that is so abnormal. We're going to go into that in this discussion.
Andrea Chalupa:
A major American party that holds so much power in our country—that could easily come back to power in Congress in 2022, that could take the White House in 2024—the fact that they voted against the American Rescue Plan is a massive, massive red flag for the rest of us, because all things considered, now that I've listed off the disappointments and the larger context of what we're up against in America, all things considered, the American Rescue Plan is historic. Don't take that from me, take that from America's favorite curmudgeon, Bernie Sanders.
Andrea Chalupa:
I checked in with Bernie Sanders on Twitter to see, well, what do you think of it? Because if he wasn't happy with it, he would tell us. He would be so outspoken. Bernie Sanders wrote on Twitter, "The American Rescue Plan is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country." If he didn't think that, he would not say that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then he goes on to share a rundown of what we did get. I know you touched on some of this, I will touch on it again because it's important. Bernie Sanders writes that, “The American Rescue Plan is increasing direct payments to $1,400 for working class Americans. It will cut childhood poverty in half, housing assistance for 12 million Americans struggling to pay their rent, unemployment benefits boosted, safely reopen schools,”—there will be funding for that—”funding for vaccine distribution, funding for vaccine production, relief for restaurants, relief for small businesses.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Then US Senator, Brian Schatz, another good guy, he represents Hawaii. He is very progressive. He writes on Twitter that, “The American Rescue Plan is the biggest investment in Native communities in history. It'll cut child poverty in half,”—Again, that's a big point here.—”Justice and financial help for Black farmers, money for vaccinations, rent relief, direct cash, money to prevent layoffs in local government. Elections have consequences”, he reminds us.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then, journalist Dylan Matthews, who writes for Vox, also just wanted to frame it for everyone to how historic this is, he writes, "Still kind of stunned and heartened at the scale of the American Rescue Plan. The 2009 stimulus was 5.5% of the 2008 GDP. The Rescue Plan is 9.1% of the 2020 GDP, and it creates a child allowance that will, knock on wood, be very hard to roll back."
Andrea Chalupa:
So yes, there are disappointments, but what we're seeing here is a Democratic party that learned from its mistakes under Obama. They fell short of the economic rescue plan Americans needed from the 2008 economic crash, which was engineered in large part by George W. Bush and his deregulations, and Wall Street just became a gambling den run amok. Obama came in and he carried his big olive branch of bipartisanship, and Mitch McConnell and the Republicans took it and beat him with it.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Democrats massively blinked and Americans—left, right and center—paid the price for that. Now that the hands of power is back with the Democrats, they're showing that they learned and they're being bolder now. They're being unapologetic now. They did not get the bipartisanship they wanted, but they're still standing on this as a historic victory.
Andrea Chalupa:
Even the biggest critics of the Democratic Party establishment, like Bernie Sanders, are going on cable TV and praising the American Rescue Plan to the high heavens as historic and progressive and never been done before in modern history, and we need to take that as a major win. All of us who worked so hard, even when we were extremely tired and didn't have it in us to make phone calls, to write postcards, to knock on doors in 2018, and 2020, we are responsible for this. This is on us. We created this. We made this possible.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have to understand fully that we are, as Americans, coming out of a very big black hole of this American far-right tragedy that was engineered over decades, and we're trying to climb out of it. We have to keep up the ferocity of 2018 and 2020, because every election cycle, we hold on to our victories and we expand our victories and we remain vigilant, we keep showing up for each other, we are going to get closer and closer and closer to building a fairer economy and democracy that works for everybody.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely right. I think the key thing here is it is possible to pass policies that improve American lives. It is possible to try to bail us instead of bailing corporations out of these holes. It's still not enough. We're so far deep in the hole. We're like 40 years deep in the hole, if you want to attach it to Reagan, although, obviously, parts of it go back quite a bit farther than that. A lot of it is embedded in our government structure, and that's what worries me is that if they do not tackle these systemic issues, and the structure of our broken institutional bodies, and all of the things we've been covering on Gaslit Nation for two and a half years—basically the transnational crime syndicates masquerading as governments that want to destroy democracy—if they don't handle that, then all the Biden administration is going to be is an interlude between autocrats.
Sarah Kendzior:
Any progress that they make during this time has the potential of being destroyed. So, while I'm very glad that they are making some progress—and obviously we are worlds away from what we would have been dealt had Trump been in term two. I mean, we'd be seeing show trials, we'd be seeing an extreme regulation of freedom of assembly, free speech, just a horror show.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think people have kind of blocked out that field of imagination. We saw enough. We saw enough with the mass death and the violent attempted coup, that people are forgetting what we could be potentially living in now. I think that that plays into this fearfulness about challenging anything the Biden administration does. People are very traumatized for a very good reason and I think that that makes them want to just accept everything or see that things are impossible, things can't get done.
Sarah Kendzior:
A prime example of that is the filibuster. Maybe we should briefly discuss Manchin and Sinema. In last week's episode, we had an interview with Adam Jentleson, who is an expert on Senate procedure and who believes that, ultimately, the filibuster will be either abolished or reformed in order to pass voting rights, which are central to keeping this going. Voting rights is what will protect us from having the Biden years just be the interlude between autocrats.
Sarah Kendzior:
So far, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have been pro filibuster, and therefore, anti-voting rights. But Manchin recently said he's reconsidering his position. Then Biden came out and was like, "Nah, I'm good, man. I like the filibuster." I don't know what the hell to make of that. Did you see that? Because I'm still sort of processing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right. I understand that Biden's saying that and I think Biden is still very much in a hostage situation until he gets his full cabinet in place, including Merrick Garland. I believe that the Republicans are slow-walking Merrick Garland's appointment to be the next attorney general for the simple fact that they're trying to shrink the time he has to do what he needs to do, which is investigating all of their corruption and how complicit they were in the crimes committed by Donald Trump and his family when they were in power, when they thought they were going to get away with it by stealing the next election.
Andrea Chalupa:
So that's what's happening there, because it's not normal for the attorney general to be delayed to this extent. The last Attorney Generals were all confirmed in February. Here we are in March, heading towards middle March. That's what's happening there. In terms of Biden's position on the filibuster, it all comes down to the man responsible with saving Joe Biden, and that is Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who is determined to get filibuster reform and is promising that he's going to get the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed in Congress and on Joe Biden's desk to sign this August.
Andrea Chalupa:
That cannot happen unless the filibuster is reformed or gone. So if Clyburn—the man that saved Biden—wants this, I'm pretty sure Biden is going to come around to it, because there would be no President Biden without Jim Clyburn.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I hope so, and I hope it's just... One hopes that common sense will pave the way and that the Democrats realize that if they do not pass this Voting Rights Act, it's not only annihilatory toward democracy, but toward our sovereignty as a country and toward the existence of the Democratic Party as anything other than either controlled opposition or just flailing opponents. But in the past, they have sunk themselves. It's good that they are outright saying, “We have learned our lessons from the Obama era.” There are still these gestures towards bipartisanship and trying to reach across the aisle towards people who want to punch them in the face, but I think that they give them a chance. The Republicans are not taking that chance. They're not taking these opportunities to work for the betterment of the country. As a result of that, the Biden administration, I think, like as you said, it becomes more emboldened to just pass the goddamn acts, just pass the bills, pass the policies, even if it's a 50-50 vote, even if they don't have a single Republican on board, because it's their job to serve the American public. it's not their job to placate corrupt Republicans from an authoritarian apocalyptic cult.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just as important, just as game-changing as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act being passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, is statehood for Washington, D.C. That would be a big game-changer in helping us tilt the power back to be more fair, because if you look at the whole discussion over the minimum wage—Right? Which we didn't get, the $15 an hour minimum wage increase—across the country, there's only one place that has a $15 minimum wage. It's not California. It's not New York State. It's not Massachusetts, Washington State, Oregon. It's the District of Columbia.
Andrea Chalupa:
Washington, D.C. has a mandated $15 an hour minimum wage. If you want to lift people out of poverty, if you want to take on the crisis of income inequality, if you want to resolve that human rights crisis, and put us on a healthier path as a democracy and an economy, get statehood for Washington, D.C. You're not going to get statehood for Washington, D.C. until you reform or kill the filibuster.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, exactly. And for Puerto Rico, if they want it.
Andrea Chalupa:
If they want it, yeah.
Sarah Kendzior:
If they want it. What's interesting is I saw that Schumer was opposed to this for some reason, and all I kept thinking is, AOC primary and I wanted to—[laughs] We will see.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] AOC absolutely must primary Chuck Schumer, that would be amazing.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, God.
Andrea Chalupa:
Can we talk about Kyrsten Sinema who gives all quirky girls a bad name?
Sarah Kendzior:
Go for it.
Andrea Chalupa:
It doesn't matter what color your hair is, or what kind of boots you wear, or how you dress, it's who you are on the inside. Kyrsten Sinema reminded us of that, the Senator of Arizona, when she walks out into the Senate chamber, she taps Mitch McConnell—who is the Grim Reaper of American democracy—taps him on the shoulder, really goes for him to make sure that he sees her, to buddy up to Mitch McConnell, power for power’s sake Mitch McConnell.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then she goes into the very center of the Senate chamber and does a thumbs down with a bit of flourish against raising the federal minimum wage. This sent Twitter's blood pressure into a boil and Kyrsten Sinema was just getting called out relentlessly, especially given that in the past, she'd released statements in favor of raising the minimum wage.
Sarah Kendzior:
She was in the Green party.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, and this made absolutely no sense because, first of all, her other senator, her colleague from Arizona, Mark Kelly, he voted to increase the minimum wage. They have the same exact voters. They have the same exact voters, so there's no real thought process here of this being some political 3D,4D chess move. In addition to that, there was a big movement in Arizona to raise the minimum wage to over $12. Arizona has one of the highest minimum wages in the country. Here, she did this theatrical thumbs down with a bit of flair.
Andrea Chalupa:
It reminds me of Office Space. You know how that character works at that TGI Fridays, and has all that flair? Kyrsten Sinema was decked out in flair, and voting down giving essential workers—the people that everyone's praising and gaslighting—refusing to give them a raise. She's self-destructive. Does she want to be primaried? Because everything she did is going to be used against her from the left and the right.
Andrea Chalupa:
Clearly, Kyrsten Sinema has outed herself to us as not being very clever, and not being the right person morally for this time of crises that we're getting hit with. I hope to god that Arizona, which fought valiantly to protect our democracy in 2020, has the progressive infrastructure in place to remove her from power, because she's overstayed her welcome.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. The entire situation with her is baffling. I hope that it is resolved because we have giant crises still remaining from the previous administration and all the networks of power that brought mafia operatives into the White House, that weakened our institutions, and that love to take advantage of useful idiots, which is a category I kind of wonder if she's fallen into, given that little buddy tap with McConnell.
Sarah Kendzior:
Granted, we've seen that before. We saw Kamala Harris and Lindsey Graham doing a little fist bump, we saw Pelosi and Barr choking about the prospect of Barr actually facing justice for his crimes. There's some disturbing little linkages that pop up every now and again, but hers is much more severe. What she did was so just anti her own constituency, anti her own party, anti what's right and moral. It seems like she'd be useful to a lot of people if she doesn't have that baseline sense of self.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly right.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's a disturbing thought.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly right. And with Dianne Feinstein being on her way out, hopefully—because there's persistent rumors of Alzheimer's and Dianne Feinstein has her own blood money corruption in terms of scandals with her husband being financially unclean in a very big way and Dianne Feinstein could have been investigated for insider trading, along with Burr and Kelly Loeffler and others and wasn't, and in exchange she was very friendly with Lindsey Graham and blessed the shoved through confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, one of the least experienced and qualified ever to go through a confirmation hearing.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's almost like Kyrsten Sinema... If we lose Dianne Feinstein, hopefully soon, inevitably, soon, it's almost like Kyrsten Sinema is buying to be the next Dianne Feinstein, just that waste of space, Democrat in name only, and a useful tool to the Republican Party in the Senate.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and this is why they need to make a policy about senators or any kind of representative not being able to benefit through stock trades, through their spouses financial dealings. I was looking at a list of the senators who opposed raising the minimum wage and they're among the wealthiest in there. Then, Kyrsten Sinema is a blank slate, and it'll be interesting to see how her own wealth changes while she's in office.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is one of the most toxic qualities of our system, is not just dark money being poured into campaigns, but this influence peddling and this ability to buy representatives. It's not new. It's been around since the founding of this country. I think there's no country in the world where this does not happen, to some extent, but the amount of millionaires in the government is absolutely outrageous. There are very few, I think, in the Senate who aren't, who haven't met that threshold, and that's disturbing.
Sarah Kendzior:
I want to get now into Biden's international policies which play into this dark money-
Andrea Chalupa:
But before we do, because that's going to be a dark conversation, I want to stay with the light just a little bit longer, because there has been good news for us to acknowledge, because we built this good news ourselves with our hard work. That brings us to Alabama, where Amazon employees are in the center of a major labor movement, where they're voting whether to unionize. From Reuters, "Workers at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on whether to become the first employees in the US to join a union at one of the country's largest employers."
Andrea Chalupa:
This pro labor movement in Alabama received a big boost of support from Biden himself. We will play a clip of that.
Joe Biden:
I've long said America wasn't built by Wall Street, it was built by the middle class, and unions built the middle class. Unions put power in the hands of workers. They level the playing field. They give you a stronger voice, for your health, your safety, higher wages, protects us from racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Unions lift up workers, both union and non-union, and especially Black and Brown workers.
Joe Biden:
I made it clear—I made it clear when I was running—that my administration's policy would be to support unions organizing, and the right to collectively bargain. I'm keeping that promise. You should all remember, the National Labor Relations Act didn't just say that unions are allowed to exist, it said that we should encourage unions.
Joe Biden:
Let me be really clear. It's not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union, but let me be even more clear. It's not up to an employer to decide that either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers, full stop, full stop. Today, and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important, a vitally important choice as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race, but it reveals the deep disparities that still exists in our country, and there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. No supervisor...no supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences.
Joe Biden:
You know, every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union. The law guarantees that choice, and it's your right—not that of an employer—it's your right. No employer can take that right away. So make your voice heard. God bless you all, and may God protect the workers and their families who are trying to figure out how to make it fairly. Thank you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mike Elk, a reporter at Payday Report writes on Twitter, "The tide has turned at Amazon and Alabama completely in the union's favor. Biden's support was a game-changer. I've never seen anything like it." So Biden is standing by the bust of American civil rights activist and labor leader, Cesar Chavez, that he keeps right next to his desk in the Oval Office. Good for him. That's something for us to be grateful for in terms of, we built that. We made that possible.
Andrea Chalupa:
In terms of what the outcome could have been if we didn't engage and stay vigilant and work as hard as we did, let's turn to the Republican Party because there's some really important reporting coming out of the Washington Post by our friend Greg Sargent, who we've had on the show. He explains why Republican leaders are committed to hurting their own voters. He writes, "When every Senate Republican voted against President Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue package over the weekend, it revived a question that analysts have asked about the modern GOP for decades; why do so many conservative Americans vote against their own economic interests? A new analysis by three leading political scientists theorizes this question in a fresh way by comprehensively analyzing the political economy of red states, relative to that of blue ones.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“In so doing, they have captured some striking truths about this political moment. It's key finding: we are in the grips of a paradox, even as areas that vote Republican continue falling behind blue America economically, helping widen those oft discussed regional inequalities between cosmopolitan and outlying areas, GOP elites everywhere are growing more committed to an increasingly uniform and regressive agenda that does little to address the problem. Red America is falling farther behind, but the politicians who represent it at all levels have gotten more unified on an economic agenda that hurts the people who live there."
Andrea Chalupa:
Jacob Hacker, the Yale political scientist who co-authored the analysis, told Greg Sargent, "The $1.9 trillion package includes large stimulus checks to most individuals, extended unemployment benefits, a big infusion of aid to state governments, and a new child cash allowance that could cut childhood poverty in half. Every Senate and House Republican voted against the package. Yet, this sort of ambitious agenda will help address the deepening regional inequalities that have become such an intense preoccupation in our politics."
Andrea Chalupa:
“The new analysis, which was shared with this blog, and is also co-authored by political scientists, Jacob Grumbach and Paul Pierson, for a forthcoming book on American political economy brings deep historical context to this problem. ‘For decades, throughout the 20th century,’ it notes, ‘The industrial economy combined with large federal expenditures, particularly in the South, drove a great economic convergence in which poorer states steadily caught up with better off ones. But more recently, the development of the knowledge economy, whose benefits are largely concentrated in cosmopolitan hubs, has reversed this trend. Meanwhile, in many red states, mostly in the South, the model of weak unions and low wages..."—This is why Alabama is so important right now, frontlines on this labor movement— "which made them competitive for business inside the national market, is faltering in the face of globalized production."
Andrea Chalupa:
"’Blue America is increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy’, the analysis concludes, ‘While red America is struggling to find a viable growth model for the 21st century.’ How did this happen? ‘A big part of the problem,’ the authors argue, ‘Is conservative governance.’"
Sarah Kendzior:
It's a weird thing for me to hear with my representation by both Cori Bush and Josh Hawley, living in a "blue city" in a "red state". A lot of times when I hear those sorts of studies, I'm like, what exactly do you mean here? How are you defining cosmopolitan? I live in a region of 3 million people in a state of 6 million people—a largely rural state with the exception of a couple of other cities of Kansas City and Springfield. My city is very poor.
Sarah Kendzior:
I live in a rust belt city and the same is true of Cleveland, Detroit, all sorts of places that fall more into an ambiguous designation, a purple state. What we do have in common, though—and this is where I agree with the study—is Republican governance. If you have a Republican governor, you're getting a different kind of vaccine rollout. You got different policies about the coronavirus. You have things happening, like in Missouri, they voted for progressive policies, they voted to get rid of dark money in governance, they voted to raise the minimum wage. They voted for labor unions. These are things that people in Missouri, including people who are Republicans, including conservative voters, we all voted for these ballot initiatives.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then we have a GOP state legislature and governor that shut them down, making it impossible for us to move forward. Even when we get our shit together and get out on the street and get people to come out for these, they just overrule us.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I feel like that is the model of what would happen nationally if the Republicans continue to gain ground in these states. It's extremely demoralizing and depressing. It's also a reminder to the National Democratic Party, that states like mine, or Alabama or any southern state, we need help. We need financial support for our candidates. We need people to have our backs instead of just dismissing us as “this is red, this is blue”, these categories are set in stone, because what we have is the tyranny of the minority and it's brutal to live under, particularly during a pandemic, when I'm watching how things go out in other states, and then...we discussed the situation in Texas first with their storm, and then their mask mandate where all these assholes on Twitter appear and are like, "Ha, you deserve it. You voted for it."
Sarah Kendzior:
In reality, no. There's gerrymandering, there's voter suppression. Also, people don't deserve to die, period. But that's its own thing. But it's an unequal system. We have an unequal opportunity to fix our political system. So that's frustrating in its own right. I think that's why when you meet activists—progressive activists from red states—they are extremely attuned to corruption, to endemic institutionalized corruption. Obviously, this is not unique to red states. We could look at Andrew Cuomo, who I think we're going to, hopefully, have time to discuss later in the episode. It's all over blue states. Trump is a product of the "blue city" of New York.
Sarah Kendzior:
But all that just goes to show you is, we're all fucked up. This whole country is a mess. As I've said many times, America's purple like a bruise, but it's the corruption and dark money and overrule of the people's will that we need to pay the foremost attention to and just not make assumptions on what people want versus what they're being given.
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely. Final point on this: I have optimism, cautious optimism for Biden and the Democrats learning their lessons and finally listening to us and moving forward. I have cautious optimism. And again, wait until Merrick Garland gets into his office and starts his work. That's a loaded hostage situation. For example, Mitch McConnell and Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao. She was... Barr's Justice Department declined to investigate her for corruption after a government watchdog found that she had used her position for nepotism to help her family, because that was very much... She was part of that whole pigs at the trough Trump family corruption. She was put in that role for a reason because she was one of the team.
Andrea Chalupa:
Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell's wife, could and should come under an investigation by the new Attorney General, Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell knows that. Biden knows that. This is a standoff. This is all part of why they've been dragging out this nomination hearing and the confirmation. I think once he's in, things are going to start to shift and ramp up. They have to. And Jim Clyburn needs it to happen, and if he wants it to happen, it's going to happen. That's what I believe.
Sarah Kendzior:
I was going to say, if he gets in, that's when you ramp up the pressure more. That's when we all ramp up the pressure more. We don't kick back and say, “Oh, Merrick Garland is going to handle it.” My God, if you've learned anything from the past four years, it's just this endless parade of savior syndrome from people who don't deserve it. Mueller, Pelosi, Comey, Cy Vance—they've all failed you. What works (sometimes) is grassroots pressure.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now that we actually have the Democrats in office, we need to keep applying it. We also need to keep applying it in regard to Biden's international policies, which are extremely problematic, especially compared to the success that he's been having with the vaccine rollout and the COVID relief. We've discussed many times on this show how Donald Trump is backed by a transnational crime syndicate made up of mafiosos, corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs, and murderous state officials—almost none of whom have faced consequences, despite decades of ruthless collaboration.
Sarah Kendzior:
We discussed this in the archives of our show, as well as in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, and I'm going to greatly simplify all of this by saying that the main countries involved in these plots, which basically go back to about the Iran-Contra era, are the United States, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. We'll get to the UK in a bit because we have to discuss Megxit, because Gaslit Nation always discusses Megxit.
Sarah Kendzior:
But first, I just want to draw a little attention to some recent Biden policies towards these countries, which exerts such a dark influence over our politics that are very troubling. The first one, of course, is Saudi Arabia. Biden has decided not to sanction murderous millennial leader, MBS, despite naming him responsible for the brutal murder of Washington Post Journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was hacked to death with a bone saw after writing articles critical of both the Saudi regime and of Trump.
Sarah Kendzior:
Jared Kushner is said to have abetted the crime or at least have been aware of it, and Trump bragged that MBS was going to be let off the hook. This led to an expectation that Biden would be different, but so far, no. This is a few excerpts from CNN: "Two administrations said sanctioning the Crown Prince, known as MBS, would have been ‘too complicated’." Then CNN says, "It could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom. As a result, ‘The administration did not even request the State Department to work up options for how to target MBS.’ one State Department official said.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“Another current administration official said that sanctioning the Crown Prince was never a ‘viable option’. ‘The Biden administration failed to keep Congress informed in the run up to the actions that they planned to take.’ two congressional aides said. ‘This led many on Capitol Hill scrambling two Fridays ago to try to figure out what was coming. In refraining from imposing sanctions directly against MBS, administration sources say that they are making a pragmatic bet to preserve diplomatic relations with the Saudis.’"
Sarah Kendzior:
This is just disastrous on so many levels. As Andrea said before, you cannot rely on an oligarch to protect freedom of speech. We have a Washington Post journalist massacred by a foreign country, the previous administration cheers it on, the current administration does nothing. Our freedom of media is tenuous, but also, this is a human being. This is a life lost. This is an act of extreme and blatant brutality, and they have named MBS as the killer and have decided to move on.
Sarah Kendzior:
In the future, we're going to do an episode more directly devoted to Saudi Arabia and the very troubling history of interlinked criminal operations and just violence. Collaborations of violence between the US and Saudi Arabia, acts of violence from Saudi Arabia, or abetted by Saudi Arabians, against the United States. There have been some disturbing revelations about 9/11 in that regard. I'm about to go on to yet another refusal to enact sanctions, but do you have any comments specifically on this, or shall I bring the blows down on Navalny and Russia and then you want to-
Andrea Chalupa:
Bring the blows, I'm ready.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. Unfortunately, this is not a one off for Biden. We are seeing the same pattern in the Biden administration's treatment of Russia following the Kremlin's attempted assassination of dissident Alexei Navalny, as well as a multitude of other crimes committed by Russia, including the worst cyber attack on the United States in our history, election tampering, and much more. See, once again, the Gaslit Nation archives for that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Many we're expecting the Biden administration to finally impose meaningful sanctions on the oligarchs which power the Kremlin, but they are refusing to sanction Russia's most powerful business people and bankers, oligarchs with whom Navalny has long said the West would have to sanction to get the attention of Putin. He even provided a list to that effect before he was imprisoned.
Sarah Kendzior:
Bill Browder, the pioneer of the Magnitsky Act, which is meant to hit the pockets of criminal oligarchs and others committing human rights violations, has also condemned the Biden administration's actions as way too little and actions that do not touch Putin's billionaire cronies.
Sarah Kendzior:
So just what the hell is going on here? Why is Biden being so weak at standing up to these transnational murderous forces?
Andrea Chalupa:
You want me to answer that?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, if you want to weigh in on Russia, because I got a long thing with the next offender., if you want to get in on this one while time is ticking.
Andrea Chalupa:
On the domestic front, the clock is ticking, Biden's got to act fast, he only has until 2022. On the foreign policy front, he has a bit more time but the urgency is still there because you have Navalny sent to one of the worst prisons inside Russia, where he essentially is sent to die. So, the clock is ticking in that regard. I do believe though, I'm telling you, get Merrick Garland in, because he's going to go down for the whole crime syndicate, including Mitch McConnell, who benefited personally when in terms of his state, getting that Oleg Deripaska money in the form of an investment in a big aluminum plant in Kentucky.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oleg Deripaska did this after getting a slap on the wrist in the form of sanctions, though his sanctions rolled back. He is a mob dup guy who was considered persona non grata in the US. He tried very hard to try to change that, and he finally got in, thanks to Trump and Mitch McConnell.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think, once again, we're going to see a different Biden. I hope to god there's teeth there, because Biden knows what he's up against. Under Obama, as his vice president, he said something to Putin that was really funny, something like, "I don't think you have a soul." [laughs] He said something-
Sarah Kendzior:
Versus George W. Bush praising the Putin soul.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Putin was like, “We understand each other.” Biden sounded a lot like me when he was telling off the Ukrainians in Kyiv, saying, "God dammit, get your act together. Clean up your corruption. It's being weaponized against you here in Ukraine." Biden knows, he knows better. I do have hope, let's just give him time. He's ahead of schedule when it comes to the vaccines. If I sound really optimistic in today's episode, it's because there's no more-
Sarah Kendzior:
There's a microchip in your vaccine... [laughs] Sorry. It’s a microchip talking, everybody.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, exactly. I was snowed in, in Brooklyn, I couldn't leave my apartment. Everything was off. But no, I feel spring coming for America, I feel a thawing, I feel that things are turning. I'm somebody that is very grounded in how dire our situation is, and I do see a light cracking through. I think that's just going to ramp up the more Biden gets his footing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Remember, Republicans are being obstructionist in terms of even allowing that footing to move forward. I do think that Joe Manchin is coming around. If you look at his voting record, including in recent years, there were some surprising pro environmental votes that he has taken recently. I think that grassroots pressure is amped up, unlike ever before. Remember, we got Trump in the first place because all of us thought that we could just kick back and have our democracy be on autopilot, and that was it. We are no longer like that. We have found each other. We have found our communities. We have found our protection through our communities, and we are watching them, and we are marching, and we're organizing and we're ready.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think with this hypervigilance of a nation that's been traumatized—because one byproduct of trauma is hyper vigilance—I don't think we're going to allow Biden to have a domestic policy or a foreign policy that lets this mafia state off the hook. It's a mafia syndicate. It's international. It transcends borders. It does business with fancy law firms and accounting firms in the major capitals in the west and the east.
Andrea Chalupa:
Donald Trump was a marriage of the Russian mafia in the west and the east, and we're not going to allow that danger to hang over us and our families any longer. Biden will learn that soon enough from us.
Sarah Kendzior:
I hope so. I'm about to bring counterpoint to that, and the counterpoint, unfortunately, is Netanyahu's Israel, which, much like Saudi Arabia, is a collaborator with the United States. The US is at least willing to label Russia as a hostile state, as a human rights violator, not so much with Israel. I'm going to go into a particular case with a former Obama official, who is now a Biden nominee, and how complicated that situation has gotten due to the US's relationship with Netanyahu and other mafia-aligned forces coming from Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
The US has continued its relationship of coddling Netanyahu, despite him continuing to carry out brutal human rights violations, including denying Palestinians vaccines and trying to force other countries, like Honduras, to toe Israel's party line by threatening to withhold vaccine sales to them if they don't. There's a lot to go into that there, and I'd also like to note that Israel's on the 38th straight week of protests against Netanyahu who has been indicted multiple times.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's a complex situation, it's not like everyone there is rooting for him, in the same way that everyone here was not rooting for Trump. But today, I want to focus on one particular case, and that is the nearly entirely dropped story of mercenary Israeli intelligence agency, Black Cube, and the role that they played in threatening a Biden administration nominee. That nominee is former Deputy Assistant to Obama, Colin Kahl, who is currently being grilled, Neera Tanden style, over his past tweets, which in my view, were benign and appropriate tweets.
Sarah Kendzior:
Kahl was nominated to be Biden's Undersecretary of Defense Policy. What is mind blowing to me here is that the real horror story surrounding Kahl—not his tweets, but a story where he is the victim—is being almost completely ignored, including in articles about the confirmation hearings. I will sum this up. In 2018, Kahl revealed that in 2017, somebody in Donald Trump's orbit hired the Israeli intelligence firm, Black Cube, to go after former Obama officials, in particular Kahl and Ben Rhodes, who were both instrumental in negotiating the administration's Iran deal.
Sarah Kendzior:
In May 2018, Kahl wrote a long and horrifying Twitter thread about his ordeal. Since you all are so interested in his tweets, I'm going to read this thing so that there is no confusion about what he said. I will begin. He says, "In May of last year,"—here he means 2017—"Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal. Tonight, as my wife read this story that date triggered a very creepy memory. Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in D.C.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“One day out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. This ‘UK person’ said, ‘she’ was flying to D.C. soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fun network. This is not a generic Nigerian prince scam. This person had all sorts of specific information on my wife's volunteer duties at an obscure D.C. elementary school. There was a website for the firm—which no longer exists, by the way—but it had no depth to it, and there was no detailed information about the ‘UK person’ who reached out to my wife.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“My wife shared the email with me and a few people we knew in the finance and education fields. All agree that the entire scenario seemed implausible, and seemed like an approach by a foreign intelligence entity. To test the implausibility, my wife kept trying to encourage the ‘UK person’ over email to meet with other school fundraising officers and leadership while she was in D.C., providing relevant contact info. But the ‘UK person’ kept insisting that she had to meet with my wife.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“At that point, my wife stopped corresponding. This all happened in late May 2017, and early June of last year”—meaning 2017—”Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel Op and coincided with Tim Trump's reported efforts to ‘dig up dirt’ on me. But the fact that I even have to think about the possibility that my family was targeted by people working for the president is yet another sign of the fundamental degradation of our country that Trump has produced. There is now considerable evidence that the person who approached my wife was indeed working for the Israeli intelligence firm, Black Cube."
Sarah Kendzior:
That was his Twitter thread. His story was confirmed many times, foremost in a New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow, but then it inspired a fledgling Congressional investigation. This is where it gets very interesting. On July 12th, 2018, House Representative Elijah Cummings demanded an investigation into Black Cube. That's how significant this targeting of Colin Kahl was, and I'm going to just read a little bit of that letter, which he wrote to Trey Gowdy, another Republican who has left the mafia syndicate known as the GOP for greener pastures.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, Elijah Cummings writes, "I'm writing to request that you issue a subpoena to Black Cube, a private intelligence agency based in London, Paris and Tel Aviv, to produce documents that it’s withholding about its reported participation in a dirty ops campaign against former Obama administration officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl at the behest of associates of President Donald Trump."
Sarah Kendzior:
“On May 5th, 2018, the Guardian reported that Black Cube was engaged to orchestrate a dirty ops campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. A source with knowledge of the engagement reportedly stated, the idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who are pivotal in selling the deal making it easier to pull out of it. On May 24th, 2018, I sent black cube a letter joined by Ranking Member Eliot Engel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee releasing new documents confirming that Black Cube attempted to obtain information about Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl through their family members on multiple occasions. We requested that Black Cube provide information about who engaged and funded Black Cube for this black ops operation, as well as what communications Black Cube may have had with Trump administration officials or aides of President Trump.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“On June 7th, 2018, Black Cube responded to our requests through a letter from its counsel who refused to provide the documents we sought. The letter stated that, ‘Black Cube takes exception to any suggestion that its work is unlawful or otherwise improper’, but it did not provide any of the requested information about funding for the black Ops operation or the firm's communication with President Trump's aides."
Sarah Kendzior:
So, Cummings goes on to subpoena a variety of documents on that situation. You may be thinking to yourself, “well, wow, that's incredibly horrifying. That's incredibly damning. Here we have a transnational crime organization, a mercenary intelligence operation, aimed at US officials, abetted by the President of the United States. My God, they must have really gone to town trying to prosecute that one and find out what's happening.” No. What happened here? Elijah Cummings died. He died abruptly in the fall of 2019. After his death, no one in Congress seems to have continued the investigation.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't know why. It's a really big deal, and this is not the only dirty initiative that Black Cube has been involved in. It also raises questions, of course, about Jared Kushner and others who are very close to Netanyahu and others who opposed the Iran deal in a fanatical way, also close to Netanyahu, people like Mike Pompeo, for example, Steve Mnuchin, et cetera. This is the kind of investigation that the Obama administration should pick up. But I don't see any sign that they will do that, due to their relationship with Netanyahu and Israel. Maybe if Netanyahu is out, this will change.
Sarah Kendzior:
No one has raised the issue, to my knowledge, since the Democrats took control of the House in 2019, despite the fact that it was Obama administration officials who were Black Cube's targets. More information has come out. Ronan Farrow ended up doing a deep dive into Black Cube in his book Catch and Kill, where he described his own terrifying ordeal of being targeted by them as he investigated the Harvey Weinstein case, because of course, Harvey Weinstein also employed Black Cube to stalk people, threaten people, silence people. It's a really horrifying phenomenon.
Sarah Kendzior:
This story is like so many stories—the Epstein Maxwell case, the mystery of who funded Brett Kavanaugh and paid off his debt, the mysterious alleged suicide of GOP operative, Peter Smith, who was engaged in illicit electioneering and died mysteriously in a hotel room, we never found out what's up with that. You could add basically everything that Erik Prince has done to this list. These are stories that have dropped off not only the public radar, but have seemingly dropped off the official radar as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
But it is so important that Congress revive Elijah Cummings' fledgling investigation of Black Cube, especially when Black Cube endangered an official to the point where he is now struggling to be confirmed after a disinformation and smear campaign was launched against him. You have to ask, when the Republicans are protesting Colin Kahl being in this position, how much of the information that they're saying comes from this dirty ops operation? People aren't even asking that question and I think that that is strange. I think it's a big deal, and they need to get back to pursuing it, and it's very frightening that they seem too intimidated to do so.
Andrea Chalupa:
Completely agree. Also, Elijah Cummings was looking into Ivanka Trump's use of personal emails.
Sarah Kendzior:
And he was investigating Michael Flynn very early. Elijah Cummings, we've discussed him. He was on top of everything, and the loss of him in Congress was a massive blow. He was bravely forging ahead where very few people were going. At some point, we should just read off all the Elijah Cummings investigations that were dropped, because it is a discredit to his legacy, and also, a wound on our country—on its security and safety—that these investigations were never properly pursued after his passing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. If President Biden wants to honor the Black voters and organizers that got him into power, he needs to continue on the investigations of Elijah Cummings, and also ensure that we get a $15 minimum wage because the majority of Americans that earn minimum wage in this country, that depend on it are people of color—women of color—and also pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect our democracy. That's what we need to see from President Biden moving forward, an acknowledgement that he would not be president of the United States without the hard work and sacrifices of Black Americans and all the leadership that they showed on the ground against actual authoritarianism in our country.
Sarah Kendzior:
Strongly agree. There is one country left in my little list of key players in the transnational crime syndicate, and that was the UK. I know you had some thoughts on the UK, thanks to Megxit and the Oprah special. Do you want to share your views on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, I do. Simply put, Meghan Markle was pregnant and became a mother for the very first time, all while being a target by the Brexit mainstream media that drove a hate campaign that got Jo Cox—a member of parliament—assassinated. Genocides, political violence, all begin with hate speech. As has been widely documented, the mainstream media that gave us Brexit, that drove the assassination of Jo Cox, targeted Meghan Markle—a pregnant woman of color, a new mom of color—viciously, relentlessly.
Andrea Chalupa:
I cannot imagine the hell she went through. In that Oprah interview, yes, there was more of it that we did not hear, but Oprah gave us the edited version that spoke loud and clear on which senior members of the Royal Family had several conversations concerned about the skin color of Meghan's future child. We all know who it was from listening closely, and it was-
Sarah Kendzior:
Wait, I don't know who it was. I think I know.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, it was clearly. All the signs were there-
Sarah Kendzior:
Charles. Right?
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely.
Sarah Kendzior:
And Camilla, right?
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely it's Charles. Yes-
Sarah Kendzior:
I think it was also Camilla.
Andrea Chalupa:
Of course. The British monarchy is a eugenicist society. They're all about breeding, and they're all about protecting their bloodline. Here you have a Black woman marrying into the family and, of course, they're going to hound her, not just the senior Royal Family, but all of the royal freeloaders that are filling up all those dorm rooms in Kensington Palace and elsewhere, living off the dole. None of these people have Black friends. This is a huge deal that a Black woman married into one of the most powerful eugenicist societies that ever existed.
Andrea Chalupa:
The prevailing mainstream British media, driven by Rupert Murdoch—who was raised by an infamous eugenicist in Australia—is, of course, actively destroying her. This isn't casual racism. This isn’t old fogy generational racism. This is blatant racism that put the life of a woman and her unborn child and then her child, Archie, in danger. There's no other explanation for it. This is clear as day. If you don't understand this, then maybe get some Black friends.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep. Just to add one more thing to this, I think we discussed this the first time we did Megxit, we did a Megxit episode, because the British Royal Family are immersed, as we’ve said, in the same transnational crime syndicate that we keep referring to, this loose, sometimes loose, sometimes tight, connections of oligarchs, mafiosos, plutocrats and corrupt state actors, who are engaged in all sorts of criminal activity, money laundering, sex trafficking, and rape.
Sarah Kendzior:
We see this most explicitly in the British Royal Family with Prince Andrew, who was a client of Jeffrey Epstein. I wrote about in Hiding in Plain Sight, and I've covered many, many times in this show, who trafficked underage girls so that wealthy men like Prince Andrew could rape them. What's amazing to me, and what's amazing in the Oprah interview, is how Meghan discussed how brutal the UK press was, how they were driving her to suicide.
Sarah Kendzior:
We saw the same thing happen, of course, with Princess Diana. She had that same kind of reaction. Meanwhile, it takes them forever to relieve Prince Andrew of his real duties, of his status, to even get into what he had done. It basically took the alleged death of Epstein in prison and the, I guess, the prospect of more lawsuits, although, of course, his alleged death conveniently makes many of these lawsuits impossible for him to be brought to the fore as an actual villain, as an actual monster, of the British Royal Family.
Sarah Kendzior:
I wonder, I look at the tabloids, I look at who runs them. I keep thinking about the fact that Jeffrey Epstein's partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, her father, Robert Maxwell, was a Mossad agent, but he also was a prominent UK publishing tycoon, and he dominated the tabloids of the 1980s that targeted Diana in the same way. There are so many seedy connections between international intelligence operations, the money that goes in and out of these sorts of massive dynasties. This includes not just the dynasty of the British Royal Family, but of—here we go again, with it being a very small world—the Khashoggi family.
Sarah Kendzior:
If you look back to Princess Diana, you will find yet another example of the British monarchy freaking out when a member of their family dates somebody who's not White. In this case, it was Diana's boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, who was killed with her in the car crash in 1997. Dodi Fayed was Jamal Khashoggi's cousin— Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Washington Post journalist, who Biden will not sanction Saudi Arabia for, that I mentioned before. Jamal Khashoggi was also the cousin of Adnan Khashoggi, who was a key player in this inner criminal circle of Robert Maxwell, Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, you know, a variety of people; Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, I could go on and on, involved in transnational organized crime posing as government in the 1980s.
Sarah Kendzior:
It largely emerges around Iran-Contra. Adnan Khashoggi was in trouble for arms trading and other criminal acts during that. All of these people managed to remain unpunished. But it's an incredibly small world. It's an incredibly dark and contaminated world. I can't blame Meghan at all, or Harry, for that matter, for wanting to flee it.
Sarah Kendzior:
You may be thinking, oh my God, like the way Oprah poses a rhetorical question, "You guys have so much money, you have so much privilege, how can you complain about this?" But it's like, they stared into that darkness, into the sickness and depravity of the ultra rich and their elite criminal impunity, and they ran the other way. They got the hell out of there.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a story of racism, but you can't separate racism from this kind of elite criminal impunity. It's quite rare that the people in this world that get away with it are not White. That Whiteness serves as a protection along with that incredible inherited or stolen wealth. So, yeah, a lot going on in Megxit.
Andrea Chalupa:
For the next season of The Crown, I want to unmask the heavyweights in the shadow that are part of the administration of running The Crown, the Black Cube in the firm, if you will, all these people running these hit pieces where they take a story where the reality was that Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle cry, and these shadowy agents then plant the story that it was that Meghan Markle made Kate cry. Kate Middleton and Will, leave them out of this, because there is hope for them. This is Charles and Camilla, through and through, and the Black Cube of the Monarch.
Andrea Chalupa:
If any hit piece comes out about Gaslit Nation, me and Sarah, you know, it's because we are right. I want to also say, Harry nails it in the interview with Oprah where he says, “They rejected their greatest gift, which was modernization”, and that's what Meghan Markle brought them with her huge success with the Australia tour, and they couldn't handle it. Shame on you, Charles and Camilla. You went through this hell yourselves. You knew how to come out on the other side of it, and you refused to provide that protection and help for Harry and Meghan.
Andrea Chalupa:
The fact that Prince Charles stopped taking his son's calls when his son became a father for the first time, that breaks my heart. I don't care how much money and power you have in the world, your happiness and sense of self comes down to love. If the closest relationship you have rejects you during your time of need, that is everything we needed to hear on who the hell was daring to come after baby Archie and his skin color.
Sarah Kendzior:
Amen. All right, well, we're going to continue, I think, some of this discussion in our bonus. Please sign up and join us on that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, we are, because I've got more. I've got a page of notes.
Sarah Kendzior:
I've got more. I've got stuff on Cuomo. We have extended our time. This is a reason to become a Gaslit Nation Patreon subscriber. If you want the independent media, if you want media that will tell you all the horrific stories that are not being planted by mercenary intelligence operations or by people like Robert Maxwell, then you need to come to us. So, please join us on Patreon where we will continue this talk.
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.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org, and if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan Project at 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 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, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
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