Merkel Betrays Navalny, the Congress Steps Up, and More!
This week we discuss Angela Merkel’s recent trips to Russia and Ukraine while getting played by Putin and his merry band of Western blood money lobbyists, finally some hope in the Congress for democracy-saving legislation (it's going to be a make-it-or-break-it fall!), and the latest with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the US evacuation. We detail why we need a comprehensive investigation of the entire twenty years of war instead of letting Republicans politicize the humanitarian crisis.
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.
Andrea Chalupa:
Today is August 24, Ukraine's Independence Day. Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and today turns 30 years old. The country's culture and national identity is, of course, much older, with Kyiv being seen as the Jerusalem of the Slavs, with an ancient kingdom that gave birth to what would eventually become, centuries later, Moscow.
Andrea Chalupa:
Speaking of Moscow, Putin says they're wrapping up the Kremlin's latest giant leverage over the West, a gas pipeline known as Nord Stream 2, a project that has been overseen by Putin's old crony from his KGB days in East Berlin. Nord Stream 2 is a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, built with European companies and Russian companies, that makes Germany—a leader in Europe—more dependent on Russian gas at a time when Germany should be leading the European Union and bringing Putin to justice, which she's not.
Andrea Chalupa:
Instead, Merkel met with Putin recently in Russia, spoke out of both sides of her mouth, mumbled something rather about freeing Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who was nearly killed by a chemical agent and is held in prison on trumped up charges, as more independent media in Russia is banned and Soviet style repression continues to escalate, as Russians continue to see their income drop under decades of Putin's corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
Putin's Russia is what Florida would look like if it ever seceded from the United States. I will continue to keep saying that because it's true. Just imagine Florida Man as a country, that is Russia. This is like my new tagline for every show. I will put it on a bumper sticker and drive around town. Also, Merkel's visit comes at the anniversary of Putin's poisoning of Navalny, which is likely no coincidence because Putin loves anniversaries. That's well known.
Andrea Chalupa:
Reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was tenacious on taking on the Kremlin and Putin's Reichstag fire war in Chechnya which helped entrench his power, was killed on Putin's birthday. Ironically, the Putin-Biden summit was held around the anniversary of the news first breaking of Russia's hack of the DNC.
Andrea Chalupa:
Anyway, Merkel, queen of Europe, visits Putin for the anniversary of the Navalny poisoning and celebrates by betraying Navalny and all that he and countless brave Russians are fighting for. She doesn't have it in her to stand up to Putin's lawlessness because of blood money, namely the revolving door of European officials raking in money, serving on Russian companies, and acting as lobbyists.
Andrea Chalupa:
Basically, the same blood money lobbyists that exist on K Street in Washington, D.C. are also plaguing the European Union. Merkel then stopped by Ukraine to issue some weak statements out of obligation after her Russia trip. She promised Ukraine that Germany will sanction Russia should it use Nord Stream 2 as a weapon, as expected. But of course, sanctions can be done in any old way to weaken them and make them a slap on the wrist.
Andrea Chalupa:
For instance, we had Bill Browder recently on the show who said to, “go after the money,” go after the Kremlin's money, and Navalny said the same thing by conveniently providing the West with a list of Russians to go after who essentially are the money, who prop up Putin's House of Cards. Instead of sanctioning Navalny's list, which could have been a massive victory for the Russian resistance and therefore the Russian people, who continue to suffer under a deteriorating quality of life and growing poverty and corruption, the West ignored Navalny's list.
Andrea Chalupa:
So there's still not a lot of faith in Merkel's promise to Ukraine, and Ukraine has very good reason not to trust promises from powerful Western allies. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons in exchange for promises from the US, UK, and yes, Russia, that the countries would honor Ukraine's territorial integrity. Ukraine continues to fight for its independence, showing the world how to resist Putin's aggression by not giving into it, and certainly not welcoming the Kremlin's golden handcuffs.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ukraine has gone so far as to ban Russian propaganda and label prominent Ukrainians close to the Kremlin as traitors. We should do the same thing here with several Republican members of Congress, like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of the members of Congress who spent Fourth of July in Moscow and is known for spouting Kremlin talking points in the Senate.
Andrea Chalupa:
Johnson, who is up for reelection in 2022, is now telling people not to rush to take the vaccine, even though it's just been approved by the FDA. Vaccine hesitancy is something that Russia actively worked to spread in its war against the West. A Russian-linked PR firm was recently caught trying to pay influencers to spread doubts about the Pfizer vaccine.
Andrea Chalupa:
All of this is to say, if you don't curb this aggression somehow, by pulling the plug on the Kremlin's disinformation networks, including its allied networks like Fox News, if you don't block their websites, if you don't pass sanctions that go after the heart of the Kremlin's financial war chest, if you don't break up Big Tech, including Facebook, a big disinformation engine by the Kremlin and its allies like the Trump death cult, then you're continuing to let them right in.
Andrea Chalupa:
So don't be surprised if another Kremlin puppet comes to power in the White House, fueled again by Kremlin dark money and disinformation, amplified by Fox News and Facebook. More must be done immediately to protect us from these cost-effective weapons as a matter of national security. Now is the time to get tough on the Kremlin, Ukraine-style, or we're going to be stuck under a Republican one-party rule, and Putin will be gleeful.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting that we're now at the 30-year mark of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of not just Ukraine, but a number of states that were part of the Soviet Union, and it's received with kind of little fanfare, very different from the 25th anniversary or the 20th anniversary. I think, obviously, it's because we're dealing with a global plague with unparalleled rise in this century of autocracy with basically the reversion of a lot of these newly independent states or the satellite states from the Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary and Poland, into more repressive forms of government.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's both depressing to look at and it's also being subsumed by all these greater global crises. But it is, I think, essential to look at it. It's essential to revisit the question of who won the Cold War. Because you've answered that question with what you were just saying: Corruption won the Cold War. Mafia states won the Cold War, both in the former USSR and in the West.
Sarah Kendzior:
What we've seen over the last 30 years is that this division that I think people like to make between oligarchs and plutocrats, between the business world—the licit or legal business world—and the illicit world of the mafia and the underground, that boundary was blurred long ago. I think digital media and companies like Facebook, or data mining companies like Cambridge Analytica and its successors, brought that home even more, and, of course, culminated in the 2016 elections, both here with Trump, but also in the UK with Brexit.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's amazing to me that we are now five years after that point, that point which we knew in real time marked the end, unless there was going to be transparency, unless there was going to be accountability, and unless there was going to be an accurate historical narrative of how we got to this point to begin with. And there kind of was initially in 2016. There were things like the Panama Papers that were emphasizing global corruption, offshore accounts, how that collides with dictatorship, how that collides with the loss of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and all of these other basic rights that had been suppressed and that people were so thrilled had finally come to the former Soviet Union and come to Eastern Europe, therefore eliminating the need for Samizdat outlets.
Sarah Kendzior:
But it's really grim and I think everything that you just described with Merkel and Putin and Nord Stream 2 highlights that. They have decided to trade off all of our freedoms, all of our progress, all of our rights. We are increasingly all in the same sinking boat, and it's a literal sinking boat in the era of climate change and climate catastrophe, in the era of unparalleled fires and floods.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is the kind of stuff we talk about on a regular basis on Gaslit Nation. So, if you're new to the show, welcome. Welcome to the apocalypse. It's also what I laid out in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight. But it's distressing to see the refusal to look at the big picture here, because Trump coming into power led to, for example, how the COVID pandemic was handled. It led to how the 2020 election was handled, and the very predictable, very disastrous attempted coup.
Sarah Kendzior:
The aftermath of that has led to utter lack of accountability for the organizers of that attempted coup, who were the same people who were involved in illicit activity during the 2016 election, people like Roger Stone, or Michael Flynn, or Steve Bannon. We're living in an era of utter lack of accountability and fealty to hostile foreign powers that is less accurately defined as a matter of state versus state than as a collaboration between the worst, most corrupt, and most hostile operators within those states.
Sarah Kendzior:
Again, this is not a buried history. This is something we observed in real time, we documented it in real time, and yet, we are constantly confronted with a congress feigning selective amnesia over and over again, feigning shock to avoid accountability, because that allows them to make these kind of dirty deals like they're doing with Nord Stream 2, like they're doing with basically overlooking extreme human rights violations not just from Putin's Russia, but from Saudi Arabia, from Israel, from other countries that are involved in what we've described as a transnational criminal network, a very elite one, a very highbrow one, one that wraps itself in respectability politics, but nonetheless, is transnational organized crime.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is bizarre to me that we had a Kremlin asset inhabiting the White House for four years, and we all know this. This may sound like a controversial and contentious claim. It probably didn't sound like one to you a year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago, or whenever you still had your last flickering faith in Robert Mueller. Our institutions and institutionalists failed us. They helped the enemy. They helped suppress information. They helped make people not recognize what was immediately in front of them, which is Trump placating a foreign power, prostrating himself to a foreign leader, asking foreign leaders like Putin for, for example, Hillary Clinton's emails at a press conference in 2016, having decade-long histories with the Russian mafia, with Russian oligarchs, and then his campaign staff, of course, did as well and ended up being indicted.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is not a mysterious crime in that sense. What's mysterious about it is the refusal to confront it or to just kind of consider, well, what are the ramifications of this for our national security now? What are the ramifications for our foreign policy? It's just weird. It's not in the self-interest of America or of the Biden administration to look the other way. It never has been.
Sarah Kendzior:
The President of the United States was a foreign asset, and the next administration came in and shrugged it off like they were putting a nail in a coffin with a vampire still breathing and grinning inside. That's the juncture that we're at right now, and I know that there are all these other horrific crises that kind of prompt people to have this desire to put this all in the past, but you can't. Because the crises that we're experiencing now, whether the pandemic or climate catastrophes or global corruption or the rise of autocracy, are all linked to that election result, and the administration that followed, and the deals that were made under the auspices of that administration.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, we need accurate history. We need to be looking back. If the 30 year anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union—a somewhat illusory fall certainly in terms of surveillance state, mafia state corruption—if that prompts some reflection, then good. But I fear it won't.
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
All right, this is being reported today by CNBC, and it's exactly what I was just talking about. Russia is already using gas as a weapon to pressure the European Union. It's already happening. This is from CNBC: “Russia is pumping a lot less natural gas to Europe all of a sudden, and it is not clear why.”—Actually, it's perfectly clear why. The key points from the article state, "European-piped natural gas supply from Russia has slowed in recent weeks, raising concerns about the potential causes behind the drop and its implications for global gas markets. It comes shortly after German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, sought to ease long-running concerns about the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, saying further sanctions may be imposed if Moscow used gas, ‘as a weapon.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
What does Russia do in response to this? It uses gas as a weapon by slowing down its supply to Europe, which will then drive up the price for consumers. So literally, what Ukrainians are screaming about, saying, “You need to block this Nord Stream 2 project,” and even European officials have pointed out that this whole project goes against the climate crisis goals of the European Union.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yet, Merkel has allowed it to move forward, anyway. Biden's White House did slap-on-the-wrist sanctions, but didn't really put teeth into its efforts to stop this. What everyone has been fearing would happen is happening right now, because past behavior determines future behavior. Russia has a history of leveraging its gas, turning off the tap to Ukraine in the dead of winter to try to pressure Ukraine and hurt Ukraine. Now, it's doing it to the European Union.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's not funny, I'm just laughing because this is all so predictable. Just blood money, man. We need more public servants in power across the European Union and across the United States in order to stand up to this, because how much money is worth destroying your future on this planet, your children's future? How much money is worth spreading dystopia around the world?
Andrea Chalupa:
I don't think any amount of money is worth that. But unfortunately, too many people in positions of power in the European Union and North America do, and that's the key issue here.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. Agree. I mean, I don't even know what to say at this point. It's one of these situations where you wish people could see the forest for the trees, but you also wish that people could see the forest is on fire. We had the chance. We had a chance to turn this around. There were multiple opportunities to educate the public about all these interconnected dangers. There were multiple opportunities to change our policies into something meaningful, both in terms of enforcing accountability for crime and illicit activity, but also moving us forward, moving us towards a green economy, moving us towards the kind of... I mean, they're not even solutions, they're mostly just mitigations in an ongoing climate catastrophe to try to make our future a little better, a little safer. To make our children and our grandchildren's future possible.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's one of these things that I'm watching, and I'm seeing all these interconnected layers, in terms of attitudes, from this administration and certainly also from the GOP—more so from the GOP—toward the safety of children, toward the safety of the vulnerable, and basically toward the future. How you treat your country's children, or how you treat children in other countries as well, is a sign of your investment in the future and what kind of life you're envisioning, and what kind of value you place on that life.
Sarah Kendzior:
Obviously, it's a great day to record an episode, because my children are back in public school. My youngest child is too young to get the vaccine and like every parent I know—and I've yet to meet anybody who feels good about the situation, and it doesn't matter how they feel about vaccines, or masks or whatever. It's like everyone loves their children. Everyone is very worried about the pandemic. Everyone is looking for consistent and coherent advice.
Sarah Kendzior:
Those of us who do want to get vaccines for our kids are looking for that date, you know, when is it going to be available? It's not just that there are things that we don't know, because the virus mutates, it forms variants, the situation does change. It's the utter lack of interest in providing the most rudimentary information to parents or even considering this group, this group of under 12-year-old children, as part of American life. They'll talk about their pandemic of the unvaccinated, they'll rail-
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, actually, I'm going to interrupt you right there, because I have a two year old and I'm desperate to get her vaccinated. So, I've been following this closely, and I listened to Dr. Fauci's interview last night at NPR. Because I'm following this. I'm counting down, I'm talking to other parents I see in the neighborhood. The research is in progress. I think it's going to be the next couple months when we might see an emergency approval this fall for children 11 to 5, possibly.
Andrea Chalupa:
But when it's my turn, when it's my kid's turn, that might hopefully come a couple of months later. I don't feel that way at all. I actually feel the information I've been getting is clear, because it's going to take the time it needs to take. In the meantime, we have to take precautions in order to avoid the worst and just social distance, and just be careful.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I agree with you, certainly on the precautions. The information we've been getting, and some of it is we get it from the school systems because they're trying to figure everything out, it's just been all over the map. But it's more just like the lack of outreach or empathy. A lot of people thought that in Biden, they were going to get the antithesis to Trump in terms of just the expression of basic human empathy. Because, obviously, it's like the bar is very, very low here.
Sarah Kendzior:
We had a sociopath, narcissist, sadist in the White House so anything, obviously, is going to be better than that, and Biden is certainly much better than that. But there are just a lot of naturally fear-ridden parents—which includes me—out there wondering about things, getting conflicting information. I don't mean the kind of information like, “Let's inject ourselves with horse treatments,” or whatever the hell people are doing in lieu of the vaccines. I mean, things like, now that the FDA has approved the vaccine, can an older child get it from their pediatrician off-brand?
Sarah Kendzior:
There are all these basic kinds of scientific medical questions. There's this tendency where we're all expected to be like amateur epidemiologists, which is not a good thing to be. I think we've seen the result of everybody trying to be amateur epidemiologists in this country, and in other countries, and it has not gone well. It's the flavor of our time. We literally have, in terms of other failures in this government, like the FBI's failure to bring accountability for the Capitol attacks, for example, there's a group called Sedition Hunters that has managed to identify purely through publicly distributed information, because of course, those attacks were livestreamed and spelled out on social media and shown on television, they were able to identify the perpetrators and notify the FBI and be like, "Hey, man, you might want to like arrest this dude who was threatening to assassinate a bunch of people and bolted into the Capitol."
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, the FBI is like, "What are you talking about? We can't find any coordination." We'll get into that later. But it's just the abdication of not just responsibility, but the obligation to say, like, if they feel like they're in over their head, if they feel like they don't have clear answers, it's the indication of transparency to the general public that I think is, in some sense, an artifact of inheriting the Trump crisis. They inherited an absolute shitstorm that showed how frail and corrupt and broken our institutions are.
Sarah Kendzior:
And the Biden administration is full of institutionalists. They're not going to want to admit this. Even if they weren't the ones who broke it—and I think they might have put some chips in it during the Obama era, but Trump's people came in with a sledgehammer and decimated everything—they're still not going to want to admit how bad off we are. That is the tenor of the Biden administration is basically like, “Everything's cool, take off your masks, we got it under control.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Sometimes they do have it under control, or at least they're capable of learning from their mistakes, so I'm not drawing an equivalency between them and Trump, but my God, I would rather just have the straightforward bad news that's accurate, because then you could use that information to make your decision. Even if the decision is based on, you know, “We don't completely know for sure what's happening,” I'd rather know that too, instead of little pats on the head and placation. It just leads to trouble.
Sarah Kendzior:
How they handled COVID, I think, is a great example of that, it's very “mission accomplished” kind of vibe, and how they're handling Afghanistan... Maybe you should segue into that, because that's another one where there's signs of improvement, at least on the American side of things but... Jesus Christ, I don't know. Do you want to get into that, share your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's fair to point out that these are human beings at the end of the day. They're a team of people thrown together after an extremely tense election where the opponent was openly trying to steal it, and he had the advantage being not only the incumbent, but the incumbent with access to all the pressure points to steal that election. Including putting his lackey, a major donor, in charge of the Postal Service at a time we're all dependent on vote by mail.
Andrea Chalupa:
That was all horrifying in real time. And, of course, he tried to enlist the military to help him steal that election. All those efforts culminated in a real, bloody, violent coup attempt against our democracy, which, as any of those officers on the Capitol steps that lived through that, I understand why there have been so many deaths by suicide since then.
Andrea Chalupa:
When you watch some of those videos, it is gut-wrenching. It must give you nightmares to have witnessed that, been a part of that, been attacked by that mob. So, to inherit all that, to inherit a once in a century pandemic, to inherit an attempted violent overthrow of our democracy by a dictator who's still an extremely active and extremely well-funded, and then to inherit a lot of institutional rot that led to that dictator in the first place, and an economic crisis, and a lot of new challenges in the 21st century that no one's ever had to deal with, including rampant disinformation, including some weird dystopian stingray gun producing the Havana syndrome, which just created some cases in Vietnam, right when our Vice President, Kamala Harris, is about to go to Vietnam.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a lot of challenges that these human beings that we've elected are up against. I think it's fair, first and foremost, to remember they're human beings just like us, with families like ours, who are struggling with unprecedented challenges that are compacted, compounding, and bursting out into further complications, and it's not easy for anyone to deal with.
Andrea Chalupa:
I have no doubt these people are also going with very little sleep, like so many men and women on the front lines in emergency rooms and in factories, keeping our economy going and keeping our services going. Our teachers, our nurses, everybody. So I just think, as hard as this is... We'll get into later in the show what Congress has going, because I have been heartened by reading a lot of what Congress is working on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Maybe if I sound a bit more optimistic than you, it's because I've been digging into the weeds on, okay, well, what are these guys up to these days? I've been looking over their shoulders. Also, when I was doing my Nord Stream 2 research, I was reminded that Greta Thunberg and her friends—the children who have been demanding that they live long, happy lives with good quality of life, and not have their lives cut short or be turned into monster movies because of the climate crisis—their impact has led to an increase in Green parties winning elections across Europe and in the UK.
Andrea Chalupa:
So just know that as hard as things are right now, as challenging as they are, we can all do our bit to help. If we don't have time, we can donate whatever little money we can to groups that are working on the frontlines of the climate crisis, working on the frontlines of the refugee crisis. We have a whole action guide on gaslitnationpod.com with a whole menu of places of where to get involved.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you can't financially help right now, then you can amplify these groups and send out their donation links on Twitter, social media. You can thank the people involved in these groups, lift them up. There's all sorts of ways you could help that aren't time consuming and don't cost any money. But obviously, if you have the means, do donate what you can. But just know that things are happening for good in the world, and that people are meeting this moment. That's always been the way humanity, so far, has moved forward.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I'm largely optimistic. Even though we're about to talk about Afghanistan, which is still a massive challenge and will be for many years to come, the next couple of days especially are going to be gut-wrenching as the United States has until August 31st to pull out its people. A hard deadline the Taliban, so far, is committed to enforce. France and the UK are pushing the US to get more time. But the Taliban, so far, has said that's a firm. “No.”
Andrea Chalupa:
A meeting with the Taliban by the CIA director, William Burns so far hasn't changed that date, but we'll see what happens after August 31st. A round of 60,000 people have been evacuated so far, according to White House Chief of Staff, Ronald Klain. There's also new reporting that Stephen Miller, who made his first film appearance as the baby in Rosemary's Baby, worked his trademark dark arts to ensure our Afghan allies could not be processed and evacuated from Afghanistan.
Andrea Chalupa:
According to the Biden White House, the Trump administration hadn't processed any special immigrant visas for Afghans since March 2020. What I'm about to say bears repeating forever and ever, and to also ground people and the Republican gaslighting that's being unleashed and will only get worse as we get closer to the midterms: The original sin of Afghanistan rests with George W. Bush and his horsemen of the apocalypse; Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice. Obama, yes, led the surge when we should have been packing up all those years and transitioning out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then Trump came in and dropped the mother of all bombs, both literally—he really did drop a bomb called the mother of all bombs—and figuratively, releasing 5,000 Taliban fighters—that's when it was over—and welcomed the Taliban to Camp David, and cut the Afghan army out of negotiations with the Taliban. We're recapping all of that yet again, since people need to stay grounded in the big picture, especially over the coming days as the media breathlessly follows the countdown to the end of August and all that comes after.
Andrea Chalupa:
What's done is done. Any investigations Republicans want into Afghanistan must include what Trump did to set us up for all of this. Trump was the best ally the Taliban could hope for. Could the Biden administration have waited a year or two to have stronger footing in terms of streamlining the visa program first, before pulling out of Afghanistan, spending time getting people out before withdrawing troops and providing air coverage? Yes, but it would have come, of course, at the sacrifice of US soldiers, especially since there was credible reporting that said the Taliban was creating casualties because Russia put bounties on the heads of US soldiers for the Taliban to kill.
Andrea Chalupa:
It worked. There were casualties created because of that. It's a mess. Afghanistan was always going to be a mess. Please have empathy for reporters on the ground who are showing their humanity covering a humanitarian crisis. The criticism I've seen of Richard Engel of NBC News, labeling him anti-Biden or whatever for his criticism of what was, objectively speaking, a rushed withdrawal, even a cable by several people at the State Department made that claim to the top brass at state.
Andrea Chalupa:
Richard Engel reminds me of the Ukrainian journalists during the start of Russia's invasion who were being snickered at by pearl clutching American and British journalists stuck to their desks in Western capitals, far removed from the lived experience of seeing your hometown fall under occupation to a cruel, sadistic, terrorist regime. Let humans be humans, especially in times of tragedy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're not sports fans rooting for our favorite teams. What so many journalists on the ground go through leads to PTSD. And since they are journalists, who like to think of themselves as above the story, not part of the story, it can be hard for them to seek treatment or consider themselves "worthy of treatment", given all the suffering they've witnessed.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let people have human reactions to human tragedy and try to put yourself in their shoes when they're literally in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. Hold space for them and don't let their point of view be a threat to your own sense of security. Richard Engel's reporting from Afghanistan isn't going to lose the 2022 midterms for the Democrats. Not passing voting rights legislation—the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act—will lose the midterms for the Democrats.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's what we all need to be focused on right now. In the end, Biden will be seen likely as having done the right thing, of finally removing the US from Afghanistan, and he will also retain fair criticism for the withdrawal. Looking back on a show from earlier this year, I was right when I said Biden's foreign policy would be different from Obama's. Obama did the surge, sending more and more troops. Biden got us the hell out. Obama would trash talk Putin and rein in Germany and the rest of the EU to pass meaningful sanctions against Putin. Biden has shown Putin the respect he so desperately craves and has let Germany and the EU move forward with Nord Stream 2, an economic weapon that's happening as we speak. It's already being used as a weapon now, that gives Russia leverage over the EU.
Andrea Chalupa:
I always knew Biden's foreign policy would be different from Obama's, but not in this way. He was always talking tough to Ukraine about cleaning up its corruption, and Ukraine has been moving on that front in recent months, so that's good. There's hope that Ukraine can be a model for the post-Soviet bloc, which is what Russia's afraid of, of course. But it would be nice to see Joe Biden's foreign policy team stand up to the axes of autocrats, and they can do that by pushing for much needed domestic reforms, like breaking up Big Tech, curbing disinformation on social media, radio, cable news, by passing a new 21st century version of the Fairness Doctrine to meet our needs today for real, fair and balanced information and coverage and get dark money, especially foreign money, out of our politics. And for the love of God, protect voting rights. So if Biden and his teams, both foreign and domestic, can step up from this challenging time by leading monumental legislation that secures our democracy, our democracy will have a fighting chance.
Andrea Chalupa:
Without these sorely needed reforms, it's pre-surrender. I do have faith they're going to fight it out. Biden appointed some strong anti-monopoly progressives to take on Big Tech. No matter what one thinks of Biden's Afghanistan decision, one can't argue that it was a bold move. Biden has it in him to do what's hard and make tough decisions, and for that, I give him the benefit of the doubt. If he squanders the time he has left, he's leaving his grandchildren and the rest of us trapped with a dystopian future.
Sarah Kendzior:
The main point that I want to make here is I know you're optimistic, and I know you're going to talk soon about some of the initiatives being put forth in Congress, but all of that potential progress means nothing unless voting rights are assured and assured for 2022, not just 2024, ensured for the upcoming election, which may cede control of the House to the Republicans.
Sarah Kendzior:
I agree with you that I don't think at this point that Afghanistan will be the defining issue, although God only knows, because this could go in a number of very bad directions, especially because they have not fully evacuated Americans from Afghanistan, and I could easily see disasters looming. I'm not even going to get into that until something actually happens.
Sarah Kendzior:
But this could have been a spotless, wonderful mission instead of the really catastrophic move it was initially. They've obviously improved throughout the week. Credit to them for that. But even if it had been that, if we lose voting rights, if we lose the most basic and fundamental way to bring representatives in, to bring policies that protect us, then that's it.
Sarah Kendzior:
This assault on voting rights is not new at all. We've done many episodes on it, many interviews with experts like Ari Berman, and Adam Jentleson about the filibuster. This has been a problem they have known is coming for a long time. They still have not made progress on it. They still have not passed the most basic laws to protect or bring back the rights that were eliminated with the partial repeal of the VRA by the Supreme Court in 2013. People are so obsessed with Afghanistan, that people, they’ve forgotten that such little progress has been made.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's all this talk right now about the loss of American honor, the loss of American pride, in regard to us losing the war in Afghanistan. Honestly, I find this kind of talk bizarre, because I'm just like, well, when was this honor? When were these winning wars? What American is alive today to remember us winning a big war? The only one in my lifetime was the brief Gulf War of 1990-1991, which was accompanied by all these kind of lectures from boomers about how they learned lessons from the quagmire of Vietnam, and we would never experience another Vietnam-style war, just as they learned the lessons of Watergate, and we would never experience that level of explicit government corruption that needs you to impeach a president. The president would obviously not commit such acts and would honorably remove themselves.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's very funny to me when I think about this now, because I was hearing all this bullshit when I was 12, 13 years old. I didn't know what the fuck anybody was talking about. I knew about Iran-Contra. I knew that Reagan's administration was corrupt. I didn't know the depth of it until I'd gotten older, because the media behaves in the same way it does now. It's all this ass kissing and bullshitting and covering their backs and not getting into the depths of the crisis.
Sarah Kendzior:
I guess, aside from just, yes, please, for the love of God, pass the Voting Rights Protections Act, the other point I want to make in regard to what you said, is that Chris Murphy, the Senator from Connecticut, agrees with you, because you're correct, in that if we're going to examine the war in Afghanistan, you need to look at all 20 years of it. You need to look at 20 years of corruption, 20 years of lies, 20 years of false promises, 20 years of mistakes.
Sarah Kendzior:
Murphy says, and I'm quoting him here, "We should be doing a comprehensive review of how we got to this moment. You cannot tell the story of what happened around the airport in Kabul without reviewing the decisions made over the last 20 years." I think that this is absolutely right, and I think 9/11 and its immediate aftermath and the decisions made there also need to be called into question. As we've pointed out before, there were people who saw this coming.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are people like Barbara Lee, who was treated as a pariah in the aftermath of 9/11 because she warned of the loss of our civil liberties, and she warned of forever wars. She warned that we would be in this conflict and other conflicts for a long time. She's absolutely right. So, yes, we need a really comprehensive review, and I think they need to extend that to an overview of financial crime of the merging between white-collar crime and organized crime. They need to look at treason and foreign influence operations that have affected our sovereignty and our national security over, again, the last 20 years and more, really, the last 30 years since the collapse of the USSR, in regard to Russia, and further back in regard to other countries.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's this refusal to do this—the refusal to be honest, transparent and extremely thorough—that has led to so many bad and hasty decisions being made today, and so much confusing rhetoric. Everyone would rather have a horse race. Everyone would rather just purely live in the now, stripped of historical context. Everyone wants to choose a side. They want to choose Democrat or Republican, where, in reality, it is both of them.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mets, Yankees.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. They are all to blame. All presidents and administrations who were involved in this war were to blame. Are some to blame more than others? Yes, obviously. The Bush administration is foremost to blame, because they got us into this situation and Biden was left with the responsibility of taking us out of the situation, and did not do a good job. Although, as I said, at least, they're improving.
Sarah Kendzior:
But this… I don’t know… Like I said, it's like voluntary selective amnesia, it's a curse of our time, and it's not a new thing. It's fascinating to me when I read journalism by muckraking reporters of the '80s and '90s, who are just amazed at the utter refusal of people to confront, say, the long tentacles of Iran-Contra, or of 9/11 and the lead up to it, and how that went by so many intelligence agencies without being prevented, things along that line, and they just… They don't want to do it. They don't want to dig that deep, because again, it shows complicity, it shows corruption, it shows weakness, it shows frailty, and everyone wants to be exceptional. Everybody wants to have American exceptionalism, but American exceptionalism is what literally digs our graves.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's no shame in having humility and in looking at your mistakes and examining how they happened and saying, “We need to never do that again.” All those illusions I was taught as a kid listening to Boomer pundits prattle on about how we've learned from Vietnam, and we've learned from Watergate, we need to actually make that true, because all we've seen is this Celebrity Apprentice of rotating felons being put into one administration after another, making the same mistakes over and over again, to the detriment of everyone. To the detriment of Americans, to the detriment of Afghans, to the detriment of ordinary Russians who live under Putin, ordinary people in any country that is struggling with corruption and repression, which at this point is nearly every country in the world. I guess New Zealand gets a pass or something.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are all in that sinking ship together, as I said, and the way out, I think, is through an honest and transparent—not narrative, because that sounds so contrived—presentation of evidence about how we got to this place so that we can never make these mistakes again. All right. On that note, you should tell everyone the good news that you have told me that you discovered which I do not know yet, so I'm in suspense here [laughs] that Congress did something good!
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to say I've been wanting to work in Roman history into this episode, and you gave me the opportunity. When it comes to American exceptionalism, that's what Rome suffered with. Roman exceptionalism. Back in 408 AD, the Romans killed their general, Stilicho, because of a series of campaigns that didn't go so well. Even though he was a very strong general that had always done a really good job before, things were getting very tough. The heat was rising, and he had a couple of bad runs, nothing that he couldn't have reversed with time. But they just had this overreaction to that and had him and his son murdered.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then what happened? Just a few short years later, Rome was sacked because there was no general Stilicho to protect them. That's what historians argue, that the sacking of Rome was hastened, likely, because of the stupid murder that was committed largely based on pride.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's a good thing for people to recognize that when you have empires that are so clearly struggling on the global stage, not to let your pride get in the way, because it's just self-defeating, and it leads to reactionaries rising up and just making the situation far worse. We are seeing that with people having overreactions to Afghanistan.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, it's going to be a humanitarian crisis there on the ground for some time to come, and it's going to be gut-wrenching. What we can all do is listen to Afghan voices that you can find on the ground, lift up aid groups, groups that are giving refuge to the immigrants that are coming over and doing what they can on the ground there.
Andrea Chalupa:
One thing to keep in mind, the Taliban is in trouble. You have a country that is collapsing. You have banks that are literally going to run out of money. You can say, “Yeah, the Taliban is supported by the opium trade. They've got Russia and China.” China and Russia do not want Afghanistan, which is right in their neighborhood, which is very close by to them, to become a terrorist hotbed. China has issues with that, clearly. China would be a major target given the genocide they're committing against their Muslim minority.
Andrea Chalupa:
China is trying to buy off the Taliban currently by saying, “If you behave, we'll recognize you and we'll come in, and we'll build roads and do other things and make you a functioning country, but do not become a terrorist hotbed.” So right now, Afghanistan is a failed state. You have millions displaced by the war. You have just around 50,000 just displaced in recent months of fighting, and you have, like I said, a financial breakdown of banks running out of money and runs on banks. Then you have a pandemic on top of that.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Taliban is going to learn that revolutions are easy, and governing is much harder. Given how decentralized the power structures in Afghanistan are to begin with, they have a lot to contend with. It's certainly not going to be an easy road for them, and that's going to make the humanitarian crisis there on the ground a lot worse.
Andrea Chalupa:
So whatever happens in the coming years in Afghanistan, we all have to be prepared to donate what we can, in terms of time, energy and amplifying voices that we need to amplify to help the people there. All right, now back to Congress. Now, to check in with some surprising progress that is being made, slowly but surely, we're going to run a summary on the situation, an ad by Working Families, Indivisible Team, the Sunrise Movement and Organize for Justice. The ad is targeting the hardline Democrats In Name Only (the Dinos), threatening to block progress for the sake of their greedy, bloodsucking corporate donors. They're being led by Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who, of course, deserves every single Jersey joke you can think of. We'll run that ad now.
Working Families, Indivisible Team, the Sunrise Movement and Organize for Justice Ad:
Joe Biden promised he would build back better, and his infrastructure plan does exactly that; fixing our roads and bridges, making historic investments in clean energy, and education and broadband. Expanding Medicare and child care. But these nine conservative Democrats are sabotaging Biden's agenda because it would make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share. Tell Representative Gottheimer, stop obstructing President Biden and start working for the American people.
Andrea Chalupa:
Negotiations are ongoing. Biden and Americans really need this to pass. Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, are trying to get a compromise budget package of $3.5 trillion, which would provide an aggressive plan and resources to fight climate change. This is, of course, especially urgent given that the recent United Nations report said that it's code red time and if we don't act now, as in now, with big bold changes, we won't stand a fighting chance and the climate crisis will only get worse.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Nancy Pelosi and the progressives in the House are using their leverage smartly to say, “Let's pass the $3.5 trillion budget package first, then vote on infrastructure.” Americans are largely united on wanting both of these packages. A few moderates in the House led by Gottheimer are saying, “Let's pass infrastructure first,” which would, of course, take away all leverage to pass aggressive climate legislation, which is in the $3.5 trillion budget bill.
Andrea Chalupa:
Sinema and Manchin, being favorite targets of Exxon, one of the companies that got us into the climate crisis, say they won't vote for the $3.5 trillion package, giving leverage to Gottheimer. Exxon might win this one, which would be a real tragedy for the whole planet, but Nancy Pelosi is still pushing on. So far, according to reporting, she's determined to push through both packages.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's going to be a very, very busy fall. We should hopefully see them passed before the next recess. Credit where credit is due: If Nancy Pelosi pulls this off, it will be historic and a crowning jewel in her legacy. This is a reversal of what we saw in the last Congress where Pelosi tended to side with the moderates in pumping the brakes on impeachment, and now she's sided with the progressives to push through these historic democracy-saving packages, both infrastructure and the $3.5 trillion budget compromise.
Andrea Chalupa:
So let's help by calling the nine holdouts in the House. You can find their names and phone numbers in the show notes for this week's episode, which is available at the bottom of our Patreon page where we post our show notes and every week's episode. More big moves happening in Congress. House Democrats today will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore key provisions of the landmark civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act, stripped by John Roberts’ Supreme Court.
Andrea Chalupa:
John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, has had his eye on gutting voting rights since his time at the DOJ. There is also a team in Congress working on a compromise on voting rights that can pass in the Senate, which Manchin is involved with. So there's still hope there. It's going to be a busy fall and we all have to do our part to keep the pressure up.
Andrea Chalupa:
Call those nine holdouts in the House. Call your representatives in Congress, demand that they pass voting rights, demand that they pass the infrastructure package, demand that they pass the $3.5 trillion budget compromise. All those programs will be game changers for our country. It is going to be a massive lifeline that we desperately need right now. And with their passage, we stand an extremely good shot in not only keeping the Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House, but possibly expanding them.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Senate map looks favorable to Democrats in this next election cycle. So good things are happening. And know that we got to this point because of all of the hard work that we did together in organizing election cycle after election cycle. We paid for that with our hard work, with helping with Georgia, with doing all the phone calls, the texts, the postcards, showing up for each other, amplifying good candidates online, donating. This is all paid for with our work. So, congratulations to everyone in getting us to this point where we stand a fighting chance.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah I mean I hope we stand a fighting chance. It's always interesting to me when people are like, you know, “Can you offer hope?”, or, “Are you hopeful?” And I'm like, "About what, specifically?" My answer is always, “It depends what happens.” You're right, we did everything we could as citizens. We went out and voted in record numbers during a pandemic, we've been pushing for an end to the filibuster, we've been pushing for voting rights legislation, but this needs to pass, I'll just put it that way.
Sarah Kendzior:
If it does pass, if they get rid of the filibuster, if they pass voting rights protection acts, then yes, we are in a much better position. We're in the position to move forward on a lot of things. We're in a position to have a more just, more fair, safer, freer country. Without that, then Biden will become a placeholder president between an aspiring autocracy and an entrenched autocracy and whatever follows.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is that seminal. So, yes, go out, call the holdouts and everything, call everybody, but... We'll see. I'll just leave it at that because it is out of my hands, out of all of our hands. We've been fighting this fight for a long time. I think it's unfair that so much of the fight has fallen on Black activists, who, of course, will be hurt the most. Black people in America will be hurt the most if these voter disenfranchisement operations, especially in places like Georgia and Florida, if they remain in place. They fought the hardest to get out the vote, and they will be deprived of their vote and deprived of their rights.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are so many powerful actors in Congress and in other official positions who could have done so much more and instead are just like, “Wote over the voter suppression,” or, “Out vote the voter suppression.” You can't. That's what voter suppression is. It doesn't work like that. They do have the power in Congress to remove these obstacles, which is not just the moral and correct thing to do, it's what is politically and legally viable for the survival—the existential survival—of the United States of America.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course they should do it. That it's even a matter of debate is a deeply frustrating thing, and I hope that next week we're in a celebratory mood. I hope that they actually have made the right decisions by then, because yes, then I will have hope for this country. Until then, I'm just going to wait and see.
Andrea Chalupa:
Keep making those phone calls. As Indivisible Guide points out, it's probably just a coincidence these nine House Democrats keep getting—the holdouts, the holdouts on getting this legislation passed—keep getting support from groups that consistently support Republicans. Republicans are ruthless. They're waging all out warfare against our democracy and protecting the growing income inequality gap in America that is staggering, that is blowing through historic levels.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just know that the power is in your hands as well to apply pressure and that all the opportunities we have right now to really turn this country around are because of the work we've done together. Along that note, I want to highlight a wonderful representative of Congress, Andy Kim of New Jersey's third district. He represents the best of America and is an important reminder that we're not alone in this fight, that we have a lot of brave men and women across our government who refuse to abandon us, so we have to refuse to abandon them by staying engaged.
Andrea Chalupa:
Representative Kim was also famously seen cleaning up the US Capitol after the January 6 fascist terrorist attack. We're going to talk more about January 6th, the latest on the investigation, and the fascist terrorism of the Proud Boys in their mob rally recently in Portland, Oregon in this week's Patreon bonus special. I'm highlighting Representative Kim because he and his team have been working tirelessly to help Afghans and help bring people over. They're getting 1000s of requests and they've been working on that effort.
Andrea Chalupa:
We want to thank you and let you know that we see you and just know that all of us are going to stay in this fight and keep the faith that none of us are alone in our work, and that we're planting powerful seeds together.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Oil Change International, an advocacy group supported with the generous donation from the Greta Thunberg Foundation that exposes the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from 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. If you want to confirm the fact that orangutan is pronounced correctly, go to the Merriam Webster Dictionary.
Andrea Chalupa:
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, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher...