GOP to America: “You Don’t Live in a Democracy”
Welcome back to another newscast of the apocalypse – maybe literally! This week we discuss the multitude of fanatics and kleptocrats descending upon Israel from the US as Rapture fiend Mike Pompeo appears to do dirty deals with the Mossad, and seditionists Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham arrive to rally around soon-to-be replaced (maybe?) prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We praise the brave Texas House Democrats who staged a walk-out to prevent a voter suppression measure from passing, and wonder why Democrats on the national level are not expressing similar urgency.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Intro Music, “Take One Away” by Marcus Persiani: https://trrstore.bandcamp.com/track/take-one-away-2
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:
This is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
The opening song you heard is called “Take One Away by Marcus Persiani”. Marcus Persiani is a New York based pianist and keyboard player who has played with such luminary musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Tito Puente and the Apollo Theater Showtime band under Ray Chew. His compositions and arrangements are featured on the blazing trilogy of albums recorded by the late Bauzá's legendary Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra, one of which, 944 Columbus, was Grammy nominated.
Andrea Chalupa:
Born in Aurora, Illinois, Marcus first played with many local musicians and clubs around Chicago, including touring with Curtis Mayfield and Impressions and Otis Clay, before moving to New York. Now, he's currently freelancing in New York City, and is a member of the Sugar Hill Quartet, which was the featured house band at the famous Lenox Lounge Smoke Jazz Club Friday Night Jam Sessions and at the legendary St. Nick's Pub Monday Night Jam Sessions.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you need an idea of what to do in New York City now that we can go out and about, go back to this bio and check out some of these jazz clubs. I will be doing that. From Marcus: “Instrumental music creates a space in that, somehow, the atmosphere changes when music is played—its resonance altering the surroundings. And jazz (not smooth jazz), along with other ‘grassroots music’ has, to me, a central philosophical lesson: the ability to recognize and reject society's programming and to come up with a new thing. No matter how much noise is around, you can come from something that's your own.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Marcus's recordings, Urban Fictions and Uptown Suite, are available at TRR Records and his arrangements are available at 3-2 Music Publishing. Take One Away is off the album Urban Fictions and the personnel in the record is Keyon Harrold on trumpet, Emanuel Harrold on drums, Rahsaan Carter on bass and Marcus Persiani on piano. We'll link to his music in the show notes, which are always available for every episode that we publish on Patreon.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right, thank you. And on with the newscast of the apocalypse. So, the big news this week is that Israel may finally have a new prime minister after 12 years. This is obviously exciting in a certain respect, because the world may finally be rid of Benjamin Netanyahu, who we have noted many times is a key node in this alliance of transnational organized criminal actors that we've been discussing every week on this show now for three years. I just realized it's like three years of Gaslit Nation.
Sarah Kendzior:
However, since this is Gaslit Nation, this is not an entirely good phenomenon because Netanyahu's potential replacement, Naftali Bennett is incredibly dangerous in his own right. And so who is Naftali Bennett? He is a far-right religious ultra nationalist who strongly opposes Palestinian rights, has represented the violent Jewish settler movement that is currently displacing Palestinians from their homes, and has proposed that Israel unilaterally annex the Palestinian West Bank.
Sarah Kendzior:
Bennett has bragged repeatedly about killing Arabs and in 2013, he proclaimed, "I will do everything in my power forever to fight against a Palestinian state being founded in the land of Israel." Last week, Bennett criticized Netanyahu for not being violent enough against Gaza, saying, "I do not remember such a period of weakness. The state's deterrence is at the lowest point in its history."
Sarah Kendzior:
Bennett's main political partner is Ayelet Shaked, a fellow extremist who said that Palestinian mothers should be killed “before they breed”, and I am quoting her here, "more little snakes." I'm sure we'll be talking about him more in the weeks to come, assuming Netanyahu actually does leave and since this is Netanyahu that should never be firmly assumed. Bennett, anyway, is an obviously important player in the current political crisis engulfing Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
Another matter of concern is that Bennett wants Israeli Jewish control over the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. As we've mentioned in the last few episodes of Gaslit Nation, the Al Aqsa mosque is located on the Temple Mount, is the third holiest site in Islam, and it is where Israeli troops were gassing and beating Palestinians during Ramadan three weeks ago in one of the main events that set off the current regional conflict.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Temple Mount is also the location of the Western Wall, a holy site for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It has long been the goal of both Jewish extremists and Christian extremists, in particular Christian evangelicals, to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and build a Third Temple in its place, thus heralding a messianic era and the end times.
Sarah Kendzior:
It should be noted that in the Christian version of this plan, Jewish people must convert or die before the Kingdom of God appears. So, you know, some conflicts of interest there. As we've noted many times, this is a very anti-Semitic goal and/or theory. Until recently, the rebuilding of the Third Temple seemed like the pipe dream of fanatics, but it is increasingly becoming more viable as the leadership of multiple powerful nations—including the United States—embraces fanaticism and, in the case of the Trump administration, structures foreign policy on either the rapture, as is the case with my Mike Pompeo, who I'll get to in a second, or on expanding Israel's territory in the Middle East, as is the case with Jared Kushner, who I will discuss now. And I put them in the present tense for a reason, despite the Trump administration technically no longer being there.
Sarah Kendzior:
Currently, Jordan serves as the custodian of the Temple Mount. It has done so since 1924, in an arrangement that was made before either Israel or Jordan were nation-states. But last week, The Guardian revealed that in 2019, Jared Kushner and his murderous millennial BFF, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, sought to overthrow the government of Jordan, in order to, among other things, take away control of the Temple Mount from Jordan and divide it between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm going to read a small excerpt of that Guardian article. It says, "When the plan was finally revealed, Jordanian leaders sensed mortal danger in its implicit intention to share control of the Haram al Sharif compound,”—that's the same thing as the Temple Mount—”in Jerusalem, over which the Hashemite dynasty of the King of Jordan has maintained custodianship since 1924.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“Beyond that, the plan rejected many starting points of earlier peace talks, annexing 30% of the West Bank in the Jordan Valley and rejecting the central Palestinian demand of a capital in East Jerusalem. The offering was so untenable to Jordan that the Prime Minister at the time, Omar Razzaz, warned that its peace treaty with Israel was at risk.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“‘Sharing the Temple Mount with the Saudis and the Israelis was definitely something they,’”—that's the Trump administration—”’considered,’ said one US official. ‘They were desperate to get this done and made no bones about blackmailing friend and foe.’"
Sarah Kendzior:
There's a lot more where that came from. You should read this Guardian article, which we're going to be linking to, as always, in our show notes. So, yeah. This situation is incredibly dangerous. The danger is not over simply because the Trump administration is gone. We've discussed many times how certain foreign powers wanted Trump elected as a way of getting Kushner—a lifelong friend of Netanyahu and of various oligarchs from around the world—into power in order to carry out both private kleptocratic initiatives and to rearrange the power structure of the Middle East.
Sarah Kendzior:
What's critical to understand is that these plans are ongoing even though Kushner is no longer in the White House. The biggest example of this is what former Trump officials and GOP members are currently doing in Israel. I'll start with Mike Pompeo. In an unprecedented move, Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State and head of the CIA under Trump, flew to Israel last week to meet up with the head of Mossad, Yossi Cohen, who is about to retire.
Sarah Kendzior:
Foreign officials in Israel were alarmed. One told Haaretz, which is an Israeli publication, "I have not heard ever of a former CIA chief coming to Israel to take part in a farewell party for his Israeli counterpart. The fact that he's also a former Secretary of State and that he will probably be making a visit when the current Secretary of State is here,"—That's Anthony Blinken—"only adds to the unprecedented character of the visit."
Sarah Kendzior:
Guess what else is unprecedented? The same former head of Mossad immediately starting an investment fund with Steve Mnuchin, the oligarch-aiding former treasurer of the Trump administration and a central figure of Trump's crime cult. This fund is intended to work with Gulf states and seemingly put the classified intelligence that Cohen and Mnuchin both gained in their positions to use for profit and potentially for political realignment.
Sarah Kendzior:
This arrangement is against both Israeli and US protocol. Cohen and Mnuchin are joined in their operation by David Friedman, who was Trump's personal bankruptcy lawyer before Trump made him ambassador to Israel. In May 2018, Friedman caused controversy by standing in front of a poster showing the Temple Mount with Al-Aqsa eliminated and the Third Temple in its place. So, we're back to that again.
Sarah Kendzior:
If that wasn't enough, this weekend was marked by unexpected visits to Israel from leading GOP seditionists, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. Cruz, who flew off to Cancun during one of the worst weather disasters in Texas history, flew off to Israel on Memorial Day weekend to proclaim his fealty to the Israeli government and military and to spread propaganda about the recent violence, framing it as instigated by Hamas and ignoring Palestinian deaths.
Sarah Kendzior:
As for Graham, he posed for a picture with Netanyahu while holding up a sign that said, “More For Israel.” This came after the Biden administration gave Israel a massive amount of aid following their slaughter of over 200 Palestinians.
Sarah Kendzior:
So why are GOP senators meeting with Netanyahu right before he may finally be removed from office? This is an important question to ask since we've already seen the desperate moves Netanyahu has made to remain Prime Minister. We're reminding you that Netanyahu has been indicted multiple times and has escaped prosecution by abusing his position to claim immunity from arrest. This may sound familiar. It may remind you of somebody.
Sarah Kendzior:
There have long been rumors that he may instigate a violent conflict with Iran to maintain power and these rumors were heightened when Netanyahu said on Monday, and I quote, "An Iranian nuclear bomb is a threat for the continuation of the Zionist project and we must fight it relentlessly. If we have to choose between friction with our great friend the US and the elimination of this existential threat, the elimination of the threat will come first."
Sarah Kendzior:
There's also been, in Israel, great worry about the safety of Bennett and other members of the Israeli parliament, and that Israel may be headed for its own January 6th style event. I'm going to read a couple of tweets from Israeli journalist and researcher, Mairav Zonszein, summarizing these concerns. She says, "One of the scariest parts of this moment in Israeli politics is that if Netanyahu is finally out, there may very well be violent right-wingers attacking Knesset members and citizens. They are already inciting against them. The fact that Bennett and Shaked are being incited against from the right and require high level security is evidence that Israeli society's most salient political ideology is hatred."
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a fast moving, dangerous situation on multiple fronts with ramifications for the US and for the world. Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, it's clear that the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin has been normalized—that level of political violence, of intimidation and terrorism—and it's a dangerous time, obviously, as you pointed out. But I want to make a global point and then we'll go back to the local discussion of what's going on in Israel. The global point is this: we're up against far-right Animal Farm, wherever it is. Whether it's the Catholic evangelical coalition of the Republican Party uniting with Israel against all Muslims and Brown and Black people everywhere, that far-right Animal Farm is global. It is everywhere.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's in Canada. It's in Great Britain. It's across the EU. It's in New Zealand, it's in Australia. As the climate crisis gets worse, the far-right Animal Farm is going to push their far-right, free market ideology, whatever their religious ideology may be; evangelical, Catholic, this extreme Judaism that we're seeing, the very staunch orthodox—again, not all Christians are bad, not all evangelicals are bad, not all Catholics are bad and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
I understand across the spectrum there’s people working for real human rights and social justice issues and environmental welfare, but what we're talking about is the gaslighting where religions are going to an extreme level to justify horrific abuses of power and corruption to stay in power, and the climate crisis gets worse, destabilizing the entire planet and creating an unimaginable displacement of human beings. Everywhere around the planet, you're going to see mass movements and people living in poverty, largely People of Color, displaced and refugee camps springing up in very rich nations, including very rich nations.
Andrea Chalupa:
Over the coming years, the far-right Animal Farm, if it's not checked and contained through simple law and order, through creating transparency for creating reforms, from rolling back the violence and the destabilization and the rampant inequality caused by deregulation, and so forth, if you don't put the far-right free market ideology in a box to contain it, we're in for a Mad Max future here.
Andrea Chalupa:
And that's not hysteria. That's not hyperbole. These forces, they know the planet's fucked, or they want it to be fucked because of some religious, far out there belief. A lot of these guys, especially in the American Republicans like Pompeo, believe in an apocalyptic doomsday death cult.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to point that out, that it's a time of ideology again, and that it's a free market ideology in Mnuchin's case, and it's an apocalyptic, religious ideology in Pompeo's case. It's a White patriarchy at all costs in the staunch Catholics’ case, and also in the Orthodox, Jewish case, and so forth. We're up against these very dangerous forces, all of us. I'm just pointing that out as a global reminder that the far-right Animal Farm virus, nobody is immune to it, no nation.
Andrea Chalupa:
Please be vigilant of all these issues, even though we're right now we’re currently focused on Israel. We're holding Israel up as an example because we had Netanyahu there, entrenched in power, exercising these dark arts, closely allied with Putin, putting up posters of himself with Putin shaking hands in his campaigns, chipping away at democracy in Israel, normalizing state terror, normalizing intimidation of opponents, normalizing corruption. And now, his time is up.
Andrea Chalupa:
What Israeli analysts keep reminding us of is never ever, ever count Netanyahu out. He is the most dangerous when he's cornered, and currently he is cornered. The coalition to replace him, if it does go through, is a fragile one. It's like, you basically have to be extremely hated to bring such a diverse group together. So Lindsey Graham going over there and spending Memorial Day weekend, which is a cherished American holiday, this is equivalent to all those Republicans that spent Fourth of July in Russia. Right? Like Lindsey Graham-
Sarah Kendzior:
And 9/11.
Andrea Chalupa:
And 9/11. Lindsey Graham going over to Israel for Memorial Day weekend to prop up his buddy, Netanyahu when his premiership is on death's door, is a clear show of support and strength in trying to do whatever the Republican Party can to keep their friend—the mass murdering, aspiring autocrat indicted on corruption charges and facing prison—in power. Because what we're up against is a globally united, far-right Animal Farm.
Andrea Chalupa:
The coalition to remove Netanyahu will not be successful until the new prime minister is sworn in. Until then, we're all holding our breath because no one trusts Netanyahu. He is dangerous and anything can happen as he desperately clings to power at all costs.
Andrea Chalupa:
The opposition has until this Wednesday to form the new government. So, watch the news out of Israel on Wednesday. If they're successful, the new government will be sworn in as early as June 8th. But what's extremely troubling and concerning about this is the new coalition is a deal with the devil. As Sarah already pointed out, Bennett is far-right. He looks like Stephen Miller's older brother and he carries Stephen Miller's genocidal leanings, as it's been widely documented. Netanyahu was his mentor.
Andrea Chalupa:
These morally corrupt ideologues have no problem eating their own. The question is, will Bennett cling to power like his mentor Netanyahu is currently doing? When it's time for Bennett to hold up his end of the bargain and let his more tolerant political opponent, Lapid, take over as Prime Minister, will he do so? Will Bennett step down? The coalition depends on power sharing and the hardliner, Bennett, gets to hold power first. That's the risk the coalition is taking and it's a suspenseful one, as we've seen with Netanyahu's own track record.
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Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. Netanyahu is somebody who has been a seminal political figure in Israel for my entire lifetime. He's somebody whose links into American politics go very deep. This is where he grew up, in part, and studied. He was the Ambassador to the United Nations. He spent quite a lot of time in New York getting to know Fred Trump, among others, Donald Trump, very close with the Kushner family. As we've mentioned before, he would stay at the Kushner's house. He was able to do things that leaders of other countries just simply couldn't do, like in 2015 when he addressed only the GOP in Congress.
Sarah Kendzior:
Netanyahu, of course, he hated Obama. He hates the Democrats. He's very blunt about this. He's very kind of Trumpian in the way that he can make these incredible denouncements, these incredibly hateful comments about people, and he is still treated with deference by the people that he insults. The relationship that Netanyahu has to politicians in the United States reminds me a lot of the relationship that Trump has had to members of the Republican Party, where he belittles them, he degrades them, he insults them, and they just give and give and give and give more.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's the kind of relationship you have if you are working with organized crime, if you're working with somebody who has the power to truly hurt you, if you're working with somebody who can blackmail you, threaten you. They just keep giving and giving. And so, this whole situation, it also brings to mind during the times when folks thought Trump might actually be removed from office and they were like, "Okay, well, then what does it mean if we have Mike Pence? Is that really any better? Because Mike Pence is a far-right, ultra religious ideologues who has all of these hateful positions.”
Sarah Kendzior:
I kind of see this as analogous. I think, with Bennett, you don't have the same kleptocratic node that you have with Netanyahu. Even though Bennett is also from the United States, originally, he's not as immersed in the world of US politics, as Netanyahu was. So there's just a little bit of breathing room there, but the implications for the region—the implications for the world—are so dire, and honestly I'm curious to see what the Republicans will do if Netanyahu actually does leave, whether their fealty will remain with him over Bennett or whether it really is, as they claim, a special relationship with Israel, a loyalty to Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
Again, I think when you're looking at these evangelicals in particular, this is not some sort of nice, noble, let's be friends with democracies. First of all, Israel, under Netanyahu, became a far-right state. Its democratic institutions have eroded similarly to the United States, the UK, Hungary, Poland. It's part of this broader global movement that Andrea was just outlining of repression worldwide, especially in places where there used to be more freedom, or at least more respect of protocols and norms. That's out the window.
Sarah Kendzior:
I am curious what they will do, but a lot of people have very apocalyptic ambitions here. I think Pompeo is really the most dangerous one because he has said himself that he believes the Rapture is coming. He believes the end times are near. When you look at things that are existential threats, like climate change, like nuclear war, like COVID-19, none of these people see mass death as a problem. None of them see the end of the world, really, as a problem as long as they personally are insulated from it.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think there are plenty of manipulative actors who actually don't believe in any of this shit, they're just along for the ride. They're just enjoying the idea of basically ruling over the ashes, accumulating as much wealth and power as possible and then hiding it behind a religious pretext that allows them to market it to the masses so that people don't stop them from achieving these goals. But it's very frightening.
Sarah Kendzior:
Again, I want to reiterate Andrea's point that this is not specific to any kind of religion, it's not specific to any country, and in that sense, it's not inevitable. People can make choices. They can try to stop this, they can try to hold bad actors accountable, and I hope that in Israel, since Netanyahu has been indicted for corruption so many times, I hope he is finally held accountable, because we certainly haven't fulfilled our end of the bargain in the United States by holding Trump and his administration accountable. Instead, we have utter lawlessness and threats of new coups like Michael Flynn made over the weekend, and he's only able to do that, of course, because he was never punished or held accountable in the first place. He was pardoned by Trump.
Sarah Kendzior:
Israel is in danger, the United States is in danger, and the people who are most vulnerable within those countries or with any kind of big, powerful country—in this case, the Palestinians in Israel, and in the United States, basically, anybody who is not White—they are in the most danger because that's the kind of power structure that we are unfortunately dealing with.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mmmhmm (affirmative). Which brings us to the GOP in Texas.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. We spent all of last week's episode just laying out the fact that the Biden administration is doing very little, and the Democrats—the Democratic leaders anyway—are doing very little to protect our country from the GOP onslaught, in particular, the ongoing onslaught against voting rights, that-
Andrea Chalupa:
To be clear, the Democratic leaders that want something to be done are apparently outnumbered or being held back by Democratic leadership.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Everyone, they're always like, who do you mean? So I'm just going to say who I mean. I mean Pelosi and Schumer and, of course, Manchin and Sinema, who we all know are obstructionists and we've talked about that many times, but there's very little pressure on Manchin or Sinema to change their ways. There's very little public pressure, at the least, being applied by Joe Biden or by other members of the Biden administration. We have warned you many times that when people look like they're not doing anything, they're probably not doing anything.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's all this rhetoric like, “Ooh, there's a secret plan, there's 3D chess.” That is almost... Not even almost, that is never the case. We warned you about this with Mueller, we warned you-
Andrea Chalupa:
3D chess is a coping mechanism.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm (affirmative). Yeah, exactly. 3D chess is what people say when they don't understand what's going on. The situation is terrifying, they don't want to confront that terror, so they play little mind games to make themselves feel better, which, I'm sorry, we do not have time for that anymore. My patience has run out. I kind of understood why people were doing this with the Mueller probe because the situation was new, most Americans weren't used to thinking about autocracy, about the mechanisms of organized crime, about the total demolition of norms and protocols. They weren't thinking about what's possible.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are out of the realm of hypotheticals and what you see before your eyes is what's actually happening, and what's actually happening is basically nothing. We are running out of time. We had Adam Jentleson on the show in February. He is an expert on the filibuster. He wrote a book about it. He was explaining the urgency of this moment, that they need to get rid of the filibuster and they need to pass voting rights acts in order to make it possible for our democracy to continue. We do not have four years. We have, at best, until 2022.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm just going to say briefly, and then I think Andrea is going to explain to you more about different voting rights bills that need to be enacted. But when we brought up the Texas House Democrats, these are among the very few people I've seen really doing something, putting it out there, standing up to power, standing up to the American people. So, we salute you, Texas House Democrats
Sarah Kendzior:
And everybody who's been saying, like, “Fuck Texas” or “let them secede”, fuck you, honestly. Anyway, this is what Texas House Democrats bravely did over the weekend. They killed SB7, which was the most suppressive voter disenfranchisement bill in the United States, a bill that made it much harder to vote, purposely targeted racial minorities, and made it much easier for the state legislature to simply overturn the elections.
Sarah Kendzior:
How did they do this? The Texas House Democrats defeated this bill—and I have to emphasize this is temporary, this is going to come back, but they at least staved it off for now—by walking out in unison and making the vote impossible. They did this to protect Texas but also to send a message to the Biden administration, which has been refusing to help them protect their voting rights.
Sarah Kendzior:
One Texas official, Representative Trey Martinez Fischer said and I quote, "Breaking quorum is about the equivalent of crawling on our knees, begging the president and the United States Congress to give us the For The People Act and give us the John Lewis Voting Rights Act." Another Texas official, Representative Erin Zwiener said, "We did our part to stop SB7, now we need Congress to do their part." Do you want to explain what these different bills are?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I want to go into a larger warning about what we're up against so people understand the enemy's justification. Because, for instance, in screenwriting 101, you always have to have your villain justify in their minds why they do what they do. I wanted to enter, together, because it's safer, together, the minds of the autocrats that we're up against, because they are extraordinarily skilled, and very well organized, and they organize through religion. They organize through Catholicism, a form of Catholicism—Again, I have friends who are Catholic who are progressive, so I don't want to put... When we mention religion, in the context of Republicans, you know we're talking about a hardline far-right.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm going to just go down what we're up against in terms of the main arena, which is voting rights, which is if we lose our voting rights, if Biden and Democratic leadership allow us to become a voter-suppressed country, it's game over. Now, to enter the minds of what we're up against and what needs to be done about all this. One thing to note is that in October 2020, when we were all busy trying to defeat an aspiring autocrat carrying out a coup, Senator Mike Lee of Utah wrote an op ed, and that op ed—which we'll link to in the show notes, available, as always on our Patreon page for this week's episode—that op ed is called, “Of Course We're Not a Democracy.”
Andrea Chalupa:
He published this in firstthings.com, which is a Catholic site founded by a Roman Catholic priest who was a close advisor to George W. Bush. It's a hugely influential site among Republicans, among conservatives, and shows how the Republican Party of William F. Buckley, a staunch Catholic and the founder of the National Review, lives on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mike Lee's essay is a modern day version of William F. Buckley's 1957 essay, “Why the South Must Prevail”, where Buckley argued that the White race is the superior race and therefore must do whatever it takes to rule over Black people.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, Buckley went on to become horrified by the extent to which his ideas were carried out in practice, including being critical of the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing by White supremacists that killed four girls, ages 11-14. Buckley was reportedly horrified by that terrorist attack and blamed Alabama's Trumpian Governor George Wallace. But who did Buckley think he was inspiring when he wrote, “Why the South Must Prevail”? Buckley's long career set off the bomb in Birmingham, just as much as the Klan did.
Andrea Chalupa:
Which brings us back to the new version of “Why the South Must Prevail,” provided by Senator Mike Lee, who's the closest the Republican party has today to an intellectual. In October 2020, Mike Lee wrote in his essay, again for a hugely influential conservative Catholic site. He wrote, "Our system of government is best described as a constitutional republic. Power is not found in mere majorities but in carefully balanced power. Under our Constitution, passing a bill in the House of Representatives, the body most reflective of current majority views, isn't enough for it to become law. Legislation must also be passed by the Senate, where each state is represented equally regardless of population, where members have longer terms and where, under current rules, a super-majority vote is typically required to bring debate to a close.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“Thomas Jefferson described the Senate as, ‘the saucer that cools hot passions more prevalent in the House.’ It's where consensus is forged, as senators reach compromise across regional, cultural and partisan lines." Now, I'm going to go back to the comment, because this is me talking. Mike Lee's little piece, his excerpt's over now. This is extraordinary writing. It's gaslighting. Instead of doing what Buckley did in 1957 and argue plainly for White supremacy and voter suppression, Mike Lee in 2020 is leaving out the fact that several districts that decide who goes to the House of Representatives in Congress had been severely gerrymandered by Republicans, which gives rise to far-right extremism in Congress.
Andrea Chalupa:
In the gerrymandered districts, Republicans don't need to worry about a fair contest in the general election, they just need to worry about winning the primary and pandering to the Republican base. Republican gerrymandering is chipping away at the checks and balances in the House of Representatives. Mike Lee also conveniently leaves out that the Senate was a controversial body for the founding fathers because how fair was it, at the time, to give smaller states the same amount of representation as more populous states? But it got pushed through to the benefit of largely rural agrarian slave owning states. That imbalance of power led to more imbalance of power as the slave owning states of the South, like South Carolina, normalized the abuse of the filibuster to impede progress for Black people in America, and the filibuster gets used to the same effect and for the same reasons today.
Andrea Chalupa:
The filibuster is a weapon of White supremacy invented by a controversial body. Alright? And again, the Senate, as Adam Jentleson explained to us on the show, was modeled on the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. If you follow Gaslit Nation, we've explained how Great Britain is awash right now with the Russian oligarch blood money. You had a lordship in the House of Lords, essentially purchased by Russian oligarch, and all of that, in turn—all that Russian blood money, including buying political power in the House of Lords—that chips away at a nation's sovereignty and that's what the UK is facing.
Andrea Chalupa:
You had Kremlin influence tipping the Brexit vote. You have the UK failing to hold Putin's mass murdering regime accountable, even though it's murdering people on British soil. Again, the House of Lords is controversial today in the UK in terms of the sovereignty vulnerabilities that it's creating for that country, and this is where our own Senate was modeled on. It's a power of the elites and the elites, wanting to stay elites, can easily purchase that power, can easily sell that power, and what you have is a growing imbalance of power.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, Mike Lee conveniently leaves all of that out in this neat little essay. What this shows more than anything is that the Republicans are getting better at gaslighting and in their minds, they fear what they see as mob rule. They equate majority rule as mob rule. Increasingly, what they see as a mob ruling in the US is this Marxist takeover. I've been going down the rabbit hole on a lot of these blogs by these far-right influential thinkers.
Andrea Chalupa:
Again, I keep getting brought back to Catholic websites, Catholic thinkers, White men, and White men really believe—in America on the Republican side—that they are protecting humanity from Black, Brown, Marxist violent mobs that are going to bring Soviet bread lines and Soviet mass death and Soviet gulags to America. In their minds, they are completely justified in what they're doing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Of course, by suppressing the vote, they enrich themselves and stay in power, and the whole cycle perpetuates. So, what to do about it now. Today, Greg Sargent shares a letter signed by 100 scholars, where they make a plea to Democratic leadership saying, “You better get serious about voting rights, or else we're going to lose our democracy.”
Andrea Chalupa:
One point that these scholars make—and we'll link to their statement in the show notes—one point they make is that it's not enough to have the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, you also have to have the For The People Act. You need both. Understand, we are fighting not just for one bill but for two bills because our democracy is so imperiled, and the effort to suppress the vote is so well organized. Remember, this is a Koch-funded effort to suppress the vote. Mitch McConnell's on board. The Republicans are carrying this out on the all-important state level.
Andrea Chalupa:
In order to have a fighting chance, we need not one but two bills; the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which is going to restore a lot of the protections that were gutted by John Roberts' Supreme Court in the Voting Rights Act, when they gutted the act, which led to the closure of well over 1,000 polling places across the country and counting.
Andrea Chalupa:
We need the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and in addition, the For the People Act. Two damn bills need to pass in Congress. How are we going to get that passed if Manchin and Sinema refuse filibuster reform? How are we going to get those two important bills passed into law if Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer refuse to go public in making appeals and pressure on Manchin and Sinema?
Andrea Chalupa:
If anybody is thinking to themselves, “Oh, you're going to drive Manchin and Sinema into the Republican Party,” they're already behaving like Koch-funded Republicans by obstructing this. At least we would have that confirmation. If they want to go to the Republican Party officially, let them go. Let them put that on the historical record. That is on them. What we need right now is a well thought out public display of leadership, letting the American people know and going on an education tour, if need be, Joe Biden at the helm of it saying pass these two bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act—two, not one, two—to ensure our democracy has a fighting chance. Anything less than that drives us further down the road of Republican authoritarianism.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. And on that note, Sinema, of course, did not bother to show up for the vote to have a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th attacks. She's been flagrantly going against the will and the platform of the Democratic Party. So yes, all this timidity surrounding them, like, “Oh dear, we must not upset them, or they might do things that are really reprehensible and actually fatal to our democracy.” It's like, yeah, they're already doing that, and it might as well just have it all out on the table. You cannot defeat an enemy—or a potential enemy—if you don't understand it, if you don't understand why they're doing the things we're doing.
Sarah Kendzior:
We did a whole episode about Joe Manchin, about a lot of really troubling things he's done in his past, troubling positions. You can go look at that in our archives. We have not as much on Sinema, and I've seen very little investigatory journalism aimed her way. My advice would definitely be to follow the money because the thing is, if the Republicans do take over, if this iteration of the Republican Party—an openly apocalyptic cult, an anti-democracy Republican Party that is just very overt in that aim—if they take over, that's it. It's tyranny of the minority. It's authoritarian rule.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've seen this happen in other countries around the world. I think Hungary is probably one of the best examples. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere. It's very hard to get rid of. This is what we have been telling you over and over and over again for six years, the two of us together. And, I don't know, folks don't seem to grasp it… Or actually, I think the American people do. Our officials, particularly the most powerful, people like Schumer, and Pelosi and Biden, act as if they don't care.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, if I was in that position, I would be doing absolutely everything possible to ensure that our country retains its sovereignty, to ensure that people retain their rights, to ensure, of course, that people retain their voting rights, both so that the Democratic Party, for which they serve and have represented for so, so long, that it survives.
Sarah Kendzior:
But, just think about what the American people did in November. We were nearing the height of a pandemic. We were dealing with voter suppression that we had never seen, things like the dismantling of the Postal Service so that people couldn't vote by mail, and this, of course, was done by Louis DeJoy, who still has not been removed from his position, but that's another story. People went up against incredible odds, against a sociopathic aspiring autocrat, a career criminal surrounded by mafia operatives, violent White supremacists, all this stuff… and they voted anyway, and they voted in Joe Biden. Then they did it again with Georgia, and they got two Democratic senators for Georgia. They changed extensively the balance of power in the Senate. Those are amazing achievements for American people, and American people should feel very proud of what they did, and they should feel very betrayed by what is going on now, and by how the Biden administration is behaving, and by how the leadership of the House and the Senate are behaving.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Democrats are not a monolith. We've seen a lot of people speaking out, a lot of representatives and senators speaking out and expressing their alarm about this situation. My message for them is, you need to unite with each other. Those democratic representatives who actually care about saving this country, about having free and fair elections, about having the American experiment not come to an end, you need to unite and you need to oust bad leadership, or at least work around bad leadership.
Sarah Kendzior:
I really don't care how you get it done, but you owe people that. You owe everybody that. You owe your country that. If they don't understand that, then I don't know what comes next, but it's not going to be good.
Sarah Kendzior:
On that note, as another example of Biden administration failure to hold criminal actors accountable and to preserve our democracy, we'll very briefly go into what Merrick Garland has been doing. We tried to warn you about Merrick Garland, that this is not a person who should be the Attorney General. He's very quickly proving that
Sarah Kendzior:
His first action which protected, well, Trump, Barr, Mueller and the very corrupt institution of the DOJ, was when he would not release the full 2019 OLC memo describing Trump as immune to prosecution by the Mueller probe. He wouldn't investigate how Barr obstructed the Mueller investigation. This is despite the pleas of Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was the judge in the Roger Stone trial. She basically implored him to do this and Garland has sought to... I guess you could say he's protecting the DOJ. But what does that mean? It means you're protecting elite criminal impunity. You're protecting a broken organization that for decades has been guarding these criminals.
Sarah Kendzior:
If you protect the latest version of Bill Barr being the Attorney General, that opens a can of worms. That means you're going to be looking at things that Bill Barr did in the "good old days" that people like to refer to about the Republican Party that were really not that good. Because what Bill Barr was doing under George H.W. Bush, for example, was letting all the Iran-Contra guys off the hook. That opens up Iran-Contra and so on.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is what I think is going on with Merrick Garland in the DOJ. I tend to think it's less of a personal matter for him, but I definitely don't think he has the guts to actually stand up to powerful criminal actors. I don't think he has the guts to examine the flaws within the system. And I think the worst example of this is that this week, he asked judges to dismiss lawsuits against both Bill Barr and Trump for gassing and beating Black rights protesters who had assembled in Lafayette Square one year ago to protest the murder of George Floyd. Trump, of course, enlisted military officials to help them.
Sarah Kendzior:
Garland, through this action, is legitimating the Trump administration's brutal impunity. He is helping them cover up their crimes. The decision creates a terrifying precedent for future executive acts of brutality against protesters. One of the directors at the ACLU noted that under Garland's argument, and I'm going to quote him here, “The US could have used live ammunition to clear the park and nobody would have a claim against that as an assault on their constitutional rights.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Just a little refresher of what happened that day. I'm going to read very briefly from the Washington Post. I know a lot of folks like to block out things that happened during the Trump administration, and that's understandable, but to take you back in time, this is what was happening one year ago: “Trump called on governors to, ‘Dominate your city and your state’ in the hours before the crackdown. Adding, ‘In Washington, we're going to do something people haven't seen before.’"
Sarah Kendzior:
“Earlier Trump tweeted, ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ as protests raged in Minneapolis. Trump also threatened that if demonstrators outside the White House breached its gates, they, ‘Would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and the most ominous weapons I have ever seen.’” Which is, of course, very ironic because then Trump encouraged violent insurrectionists to storm the Capitol, and that's obviously fine. They're doing it on his behalf. But anyway, that should make clear to you how dangerous this decision by Merrick Garland's DOJ is, and it's going hand in hand with other decisions the Biden administration is making that are wrong and dangerous, like refusing to release Trump's taxes to Congress, to the House Democrats.
Sarah Kendzior:
I believe CREW, the Ethics Organization, is suing Janet Yellen over this, because the House has been demanding this since 2019. Originally people thought, well, of course, the Trump administration is not going to release it. It's his taxes. There's all sorts of damning information there. So why is the Biden administration covering this up as well?
Sarah Kendzior:
I have some theories. They're in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight. You can go and get that. But since we're running out of time, Andrea, do you have thoughts on Merrick Garland?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, if Merrick Garland and the Biden White House continues down that path, it's going to be part of the pattern of what Obama did by letting the same people that created the global financial crash in 2008 in the United States be in charge of building Wall Street back up and paying themselves lavish bonuses with US taxpayer dollars. Then, what happens? There's no accountability, nobody goes to prison except for one random guy, the banks all get bailed out, and Wall Street, again, is a gambling den.
Andrea Chalupa:
Income inequality is reaching historic levels. So, this is going to be Biden's version of that if Merrick Garland and Biden decide to protect the executive branch. To me, it’s just… They cannot do that. They simply cannot do that. We cannot afford for them to do that. It is so deeply dangerous. Whatever justification they may have in their minds, whether they're bought off, whether they're controlled opposition, whether they're all making money from the same trough of corporate donors, a combination of that, whether they think that, in addition to all those things, that if they protect the executive branch then they're protecting Biden from the Benghazi witch hunts of the Republican far-right.
Andrea Chalupa:
What matters now is not to give away your power. It's scary using your power. It's scary sticking your neck out and demanding accountability and standing up to people. It's not ever comfortable. But look at the people who are putting their lives on the line. Look at an activist in Belarus who just slit his own throat in a court to protest Putin's little Lackey, Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, and all the human rights abuses he is carrying out there.
Andrea Chalupa:
If Biden and Merrick Garland and the rest of that White House do not stick their necks out now, they are sentencing future children on American soil of having to put their lives literally on the line to reclaim our democracy.
Music, “Take One Away” by Marcus Persiani: https://trrstore.bandcamp.com/track/take-one-away-2
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to GLAAD, an organization on the frontlines of fighting for the rights of LGBTQ people, at a time when they, especially trans people, are under attack by repressive and harmful Republican legal warfare. Support their critical work at GLAAD, G-L-A-A-D.org.
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.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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