FURY
This week’s episode is devoted to the Texas state attack on reproductive rights and civil rights and its ramifications – not just for Texans, but for all Americans. This authoritarian attack codifies violent vigilantism, will inspire baseless reporting of citizens for political reasons, cultivates an atmosphere of vengeance and paranoia, and is backed by a Supreme Court packed with multiple corrupt justices installed by a career criminal Kremlin asset president. The Texas attack on reproductive rights is where theocrats, kleptocrats, authoritarians, white supremacists, misogynists, and secessionists all meet – much like they have in the Trump administration and its GOP backers. Texas is a hostage state, and we encourage you to support the Texans fighting back against their oppressive legislature. We are all Americans and we must support vulnerable Americans threatened by this abuse of power and corruption of law.
Senator Dianne Feinstein:
Do you agree with Justice Scalia's view that Roe was wrongly decided?
Amy Coney Barrett:
So, Senator, I do want to be forthright and answer every question so far as I can. I think on that question, I... you know... I'm going to invoke Justice Kagan's description, which I think is perfectly put. When she was in her confirmation hearing, she said that she was not going to grade precedent or give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. And I think in an area where precedent continues to be pressed and litigated, as is true of Casey, it would be particularly... it would actually be wrong and a violation of the canons for me to do that as a sitting judge. So if I express a view on a precedent one way or another, whether I say I love it or I hate it, it signals to litigants that I might tilt one way or another in a pending case.
Senator Dianne Feinstein:
So on something that is really a major cause with major effect on over half of the population of this country who are women, after all... It's distressing not to get a straight answer. So let me try again. Do you agree with Justice Scalia's view that Roe was wrongly decided
Amy Coney Barrett:
Senator, I completely understand why you are asking the question, but again, I can't pre-commit or say yes, I'm going in with some agenda because I'm not. I don't have any agenda. I have no agenda to try to overrule Casey. I have an agenda to stick to the rule of law and decide cases as they come.
Senator Dianne Feinstein:
As a person, I don't know if you'll answer this one either. Do you agree with Justice Scalia's view that Roe can and should be overturned by the Supreme Court?
Amy Coney Barrett:
Well, I think my answer is the same because, you know, that's a case that's litigated. It could, you know... Its contours could come up again, in fact, do come up, you know, they, they came up last term before the court. So I think, you know, what the Casey standard is. And, um, that's just, it's a contentious issue, which is, I know one reason why it would be comforting to you to have an answer, but I can't express views on cases or pre-commit to approaching a case any particular way.
Sarah Kendzior:
I’m Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding In Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And you know we do two shows a week, so if you want our second, which is the early show, check out our Patreon. You can sign up at the Truth Teller level or higher. And this week's bonus is going to be Sarah and I answering questions from our listeners who subscribe at the Democracy Defender level and higher. We do an Ask Us Anything. These questions are really interesting for us because it gives us a sense of the mood in this country—because we have a very diverse listenership across the country—and it gives us ideas for how we shape our coverage. Plus, we're all suffering through the apocalypse together. So that's why you can feel included with that. So come join our bunker on Patreon and you'll get the early show which comes out now Tuesdays afternoon.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right, well, on that note, I think you had a Texas sized rant serve up on this week's developments.
Andrea Chalupa:
A big old Texas-sized oil spill in our democracy. All of this horror show of fury that's been happening coming out of Texas, it reminds me, Sarah, of the hellscape that you and I and the rest of the country went through in September, 2018. It's actually the three-year anniversary of the Kavanaugh month of horror. Remember Kavanaugh was submitted?
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh yes. I remember we called that Rape Month.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, it was Rape Month.
Sarah Kendzior:
But then every month was Rape Month.
Andrea Chalupa:
It was when our little podcast-that-could just started going, just started to get off the ground. We’d just launched and suddenly we're hit with attempted rapist Kavanaugh being installed on the Supreme Court, given all of his dark money connections, given the mysterious $200,000 or so debt that was scrubbed clean, given his testimony where he could have lied under oath, given the sham FBI investigation that was not carried out, it was a really painful time. And it was a really painful initiation, and you and I doing Gaslit Nation, I remember it was like some of the first times we were crying on the show and screaming and all of that anger and that trauma. And the weird dreams that I had have been having going along with it have come back since this extraordinarily triggering event out of Texas, which we're going to go through today If we don't stop it, if Merrick Garland or whoever should come in as Attorney General if Merrick Garland is not the man for this moment in history, this could be the death knell of our democracy for so many reasons that we're going to go over today.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is not hyperbole. This is not us being “hysterical women”. This is us having studied authoritarian states for many years, well over a decade now, each of us, and as we were always saying, in a declining democracy, in a dictatorship, the judiciary are the jail bars that hold in and deny you all your rights and freedoms. That's happening in dictatorships like Belarus, where one opposition figure was just sentenced to over a decade in prison simply for leading a peaceful protest. She's now a political prisoner, thrown away, her life taken from her for simply exercising her rights. So, what I'm saying is that the judges, the legal warfare, all of that is ramping up by the Republican authoritarian movement and it's extremely serious and dangerous. We need all hands on deck, including the powers that be, urgently, to stop this. So now let's break this all down with the abortion ban.
Andrea Chalupa:
As we saw, the Texas abortion ban, which we discussed in last week's bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers, is yet another reminder of why you hardly ever see female dictators. Americans, like many corners of the world today to varying degrees—from Afghanistan to Russia, to Syria, to Poland, and the United Kingdom, and too many other places—are up against the threat of patriarchal terrorism. This is not only a war against women but a war against LGBTQ people as well, who, by their very existence, challenge the rigid, harmful confines of who gets to be considered a human under a patriarchy. In predominantly White societies trapped under or threatened by patriarchal terrorism, all non-White people are also relegated to objects to ensure the unchecked power of the White male ruling class. Needless to say, Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are determined to drag America back to its roots and calling on vigilantes for help.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Texas abortion ban provides a fancy institutionalized spin on the increasing White terrorism plaguing our country. The Proud Boys now can rally around the law in Texas and hunt down people even considering getting abortions. This is the type of law they will cling to in order to justify their violence and make it seem no longer fringe, but now part of the establishment. And the Supreme Court, with a cowardly, shadowy abdication of duty to uphold the Constitution, let them do it. The Texas abortion ban is legalized fascism and the Supreme Court, packed by an illegitimate president brought to power with the help of a xenophobic, mass murdering terrorist regime—Putin's Kremlin—and this illegitimate president who has a history of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, who was raised by an infamous racist arrested at a KKK rally in New York, refused to stop the fascist Texas abortion ban because fascism is the end goal.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you do not believe us, Google the definition of fascism and flashing before your eyes will be today's headlines on the growing threat of nationalism in America; the cult worship of a dictatorial leader, violent suppression and harassment of opposition, including the press, racial and other scapegoating and so forth. The entire Republican agenda is now a fascist White terrorist movement often hiding behind the veneer of respectability with such harmful groups as, now, the Supreme Court, the Federalist Society, the Heritage foundation, Freedomworks, the Family Prayer Breakfast, the Chamber of Commerce, Republican trifecta states, bewildering New York Times columnists, cable news pundits, and a whole list of White men and White women and token minorities who have chosen power and greed over the public good. And they're doing it against the will of much of their hostage states known as so-called red states. In Texas, for instance, if 11,000—only 11,000 in a state as large as Texas—if only 11,000 votes had flipped across nine districts in 2020, Republicans in Texas wouldn't have had the power to ban abortions and pass one of the most restrictive voter suppression laws in the country.
Andrea Chalupa:
This comes according to a great group we should all be supporting and following called the State Government Citizens Campaign, a group of like-minded people working, volunteers, community organizers, working to flip state governments from red to blue to avoid tragedies like what's unfolding in Texas. The Texas abortion ban is legal warfare against our democracy, much like the court packing by the Federalist Society, the voter suppression laws across the country amplifying Trump's Big Lie, all of that paid for by a massive amount of dark money. Look at Jane Mayer’s piece recently in The New Yorker, all about the dark money that's fueling these voter suppression lies all based on Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and justifying expanding voter suppression laws and putting the power of our elections in the hands of right-wing partisan ideologues. It's the same legal warfare you see in authoritarian states and declining democracies like Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where opposition leaders face intrusive and expensive audits, for instance.
Andrea Chalupa:
Authoritarianism isn't always tanks and brutality. It's also really expensive lawsuits and investigations, and, like I said, financial audits. All of this is done to financially ruin and harass and demoralize and crush the opposition, completely ruin their lives, and therefore, they don't have any energy or any resources left to fight authoritarianism. This is what we're seeing now in Texas, where anyone can turn in others for getting an abortion or helping someone, even an Uber driver can be sued. And those lawsuits can earn the so-called bounty hunters thousands of dollars. These so-called vigilante laws like the Texas abortion ban aren't limited to abortion. Republicans are also going after the rights of local governments to pass mask mandates, ensure environmental protections and so forth, using vigilantes to carry out their culture of fascism, like George Zimmerman and the Stand Your Ground law in Florida, which allowed Zimmerman to get away with murdering a child walking home from buying candy.
Andrea Chalupa:
These so-called vigilante laws are dangerous loopholes in our constitution. They're steamrolling our constitution. Our constitution protects us from the state… Or it should, but these vigilante laws empower individuals to bully others and literally destroy people's lives. As designed by the Republican hijacking of our democracy, any right-wing ideological judge, like the majority of the Supreme Court and roughly one third of judges packed into the courts by Trump and Mitch McConnell, can look the other way, claiming individual rights, free speech, religion, religious freedom, and that they're just standing their ground. Currently, a Texas state judge temporarily halted the rights of Texas Right to Life and its associates from suing workers and abortion providers at Planned Parenthood. That's a very small but much needed reprieve. Tik Tok activists have flooded the Gestapo website where people can report anyone trying to get an abortion or helping someone get an abortion.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then what else is happening? A clever young person who represents the hope of our nation, this young person by the name of Sean Black, created a bot that lets you flood the Gestapo website with spam. GoDaddy, the company that hosts this website—the Gestapo website in Texas—kicked the Texans’ fascist movement off of its platform and refuses to provide their services now. Uber and Lyft promised to pay the legal fees of any drivers sued as part of the Texas abortion ban. So, there are always creative ways to fight back, just like when Trump tried to pass a Muslim registry and suddenly non-Muslims started registering and flooding the system. So as dark as what's happening in Texas may be, there's a lot of light shining right back into the face of that darkness. Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged on Monday to come up with a way to fight the ban and promised to protect women in Texas seeking to get an abortion.
Andrea Chalupa:
Jill Wine-Banks, a Watergate and federal prosecutor, wrote on Twitter, “I’ve not criticized Garland until now. This is not a response to Texas law. That law eliminates need for violence and substitutes a law to interfere with constitutional rights of anyone who is or could be pregnant. Civil rights suits are what he should do.”—Yes, completely agree.—”The Texas abortion ban is unconstitutional. Abortion is protected under the Fourth Amendment. Roe vs. Wade determined that. If the right-wing cowards on the Supreme Court want to make overturning Roe as part of their destructive legacy, then they're going to see a wave of backlash across the country. This fight isn't over. It's far from over.” And we encourage you to go to Women's March on October 2nd. Dress safely, wear your mask, do whatever you need to do to protect yourself and those you're with. Do your best to show up on October 2nd, find a Women's March near you. I will be joining you at the March in New York.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. Well, thank you for that and for all of that information. Just to kind of reiterate what you were saying, you know, I noticed a shift in online discourse over the week and, unfortunately, online discourse is often what we have to contend with in the era of COVID, which in itself makes things worse because I think people are only seeing superficial discussions. People are afraid to be vulnerable in public, people are afraid of both death threats and of death cults, of death cheerleading. And I think it's made every contentious debate even harder to have. When I was watching people react to this abhorrent ruling, I noticed a switch in what had once been total denial about the authoritarianism that we're facing, you know, this institutionalist rhetoric of, “the DOJ will save us” or “Biden will save us” or Pelosi or whoever, these rotating saviors that we've seen being vouched for on facetious grounds ever since Mueller began his probe. Suddenly all the folks who were going on that line switched to total despair where it's basically like, “there's nothing to do.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“It's over, we are doomed. There's nothing we can do but submit.” Sometimes Andrea and I would get accused of the latter, which was always bizarre to us. You can look through our archives, look at our action guide, look at what we've actually said all along, which is never submit, always be defiant, always fight back, always think for yourself and always think about others. Always look out for others. Be compassionate and be brave and stand up to power because this whole thing, whether it is denial or despair, both of that is trying to steer you into an authoritarian mentality where you're just going to accept the absolute most brutal outcomes, not just for yourself, but for the most vulnerable people in our country. And among the things I think people are being pushed to accept is secession and secessionist rhetoric.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm gonna get to that in a second, but, you know, we've been warning you about this for a while. I'm just going to read something I wrote right after Trump was elected in November, 2016. You may have seen this article. It was called, We're Headed Into Dark Times. So I’m just going to read the last few paragraphs because they apply for today as well. It says, “I will rearrange my life so I can fight this fight because I am fighting for my country and I never give up on my country or on my countrymen, but I need you to fight too, in the way that matters most, which is inside. Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control. It is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do. You do it because everyone else is doing it, because the institutions you trust are doing it and telling you to do it, because you are afraid of what will happen if you do not do it, and because the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter until it dies. That voice is your conscience, your morals, your individuality. No one can take that from you, unless you let them. They can take everything from you in material terms; your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely. They cannot take away who you truly are. They can never truly know you, and that is your power. But to protect and wield this power, you need to know yourself, right now, before their methods permeate, before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.”
Sarah Kendzior:
And so that essay is now housed in my book, Hiding In Plain Sight, and when I wrote it, I recommended that people write down what their expectations are for themselves, for society, for the government, of moral behavior, of things that they would never do or never believe, because I feared that over time, you will be either forced to believe them or just your moral compass shifts with this ceaseless cavalcade of brutality and also outside catastrophes—the catastrophes of climate change, the catastrophes of COVID—all of which push people, somewhat understandably, into a very fearful position. And that fear does lead to hatred and cruelty, and it also leads to boldness on the behalf of those who are putting these sorts of laws into action. We've had lots of talk over the last five years about the Overton Window, the sort of standard of what is moral and right.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think like three years ago I said something like, you know, “American democracy was defenestrated through the Overton Window.” Like, it had already moved. And so laws like this shouldn't come as a shock. They should come as repellent, they're outrageous and horrible and you should fight them with everything you've got, but, you know, they tried the same thing in Missouri in 2019, they tried basically this same law and it was at the last minute that it was struck down. We were about to be sort of the test case for America in Missouri and I do worry that, of course, Texas is going to inspire and embolden similar policies in other states that have tried to outlaw abortion before but didn't quite have the momentum. And now that momentum is growing. So, I’m just gonna make a couple of comments on what Andrea said in her excellent opening there.
Andrea Chalupa:
Thank you very much.
Sarah Kendzior:
You are so welcome. One thing is about fascism as the end goal. And that's something that I sort of agree with. I certainly agree that fascist tactics are being used, that people with a fascist outlook are in positions of power. We've discussed on this show how Trump and his administration brought together basically the worst of humanity from every state and from countries around the world. You have theocrats, you have White supremacists, you have kleptocrats. They are all using authoritarian tactics. They all are acting above the rule of law. They are all stripping the rule of law and human rights and civil rights from the people who they see as beneath them while posing as populists. The one area where I feel like this is not quite fascism is because, as I said in Hiding In Plain Sight, they do not value the state as an entity.
Sarah Kendzior:
The state is just something to sell. And that's why Trump was so difficult to battle because there wasn't the same form of leverage. This version of the GOP—this Trumpist version of the GOP—does not care if the United States falls apart. They do not care if there is civil war. They do not care if the supply chain gets disrupted. They don't care if there are riots or chaos in the streets. They do not want order in that way, and Trump was very clear about this. He said this openly on Fox News in 2014, that that's what he was aiming for. And then he went on to praise Putin. I've cited this interview many times, but it gets more and more revealing every day as you watch this vision literally play out. And this, of course, is not just Trump's vision, just as this is not his geopolitical design.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is something that Republican extremists in the United States have been working towards for over 40 years through groups like the Federalist Society, through these little secretive legal foundations, putting forth people like Brett Kavanaugh, putting forth people like George Conway, who, for some reason, a bunch of you trust and clearly should not. What I'm getting to here is that the sovereignty of the United States is in grave danger. And it always has been. I mean, obviously, when you have a career criminal mafioso Kremlin asset installed with the help of other self-identified foreign agents, people like Paul Manafort, people like Michael Flynn, and then of course the others; Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, people who are trying to create the situation on a global scale. You know, they're doing the same tactics in the UK with Brexit. They're doing the same thing right now in Brazil, these extremist right-wing movements designed to cause as much destruction as possible.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think the end goal is to split up countries into more manageable parts. And, of course, Texas is an ideal one for this because Texas has long had a tradition of actual homegrown secessionists, ones that were not AstroTurfed. They were small. They did not represent at all the majority of Texans. They've been openly encouraged by Kremlin operatives. Casey Michel, the journalist, was one of the people who first discovered this and began writing about this because they were so sloppy in their social media presentation. A bunch of Russian operatives had a Facebook group called something like, you know, “love Texas shape”. And it was just... It was so ham-handed and so poorly done, but nonetheless attracted a lot of adherents, got people to participate in actual on the ground marches for Texas secessionist movements, other kinds of toxic and destructive movements.
Sarah Kendzior:
I've gone over this point before, but as Andrea correctly noted, Texas is a hostage state. It is a state that already had voter suppression laws and now has even stricter voter suppression laws. It is a gerrymandered state. It is a state that is flooded with dark money. And it is also a state that is full of liberal, leftist, Democrat, whatever you want to call folks. It is not full of people who want this law. It's not full of people who love Greg Abbott. It's not full of right-wing extremists, although it certainly has them. The majority of Texans are not being represented by their own government. And I understand the situation very well living in Missouri where the exact same thing happens, where we literally vote on ballot initiatives that are quite progressive—you know, getting rid of dark money, raising the minimum wage, protecting labor unions and so forth.
Sarah Kendzior:
And our legislature just shoots them down. They don't care if we live or die. They don't care whether our will is represented. And you’ve certainly seen this for a variety of Texas officials over the last year, whether it's Ted Cruz packing up and going to Cancun during a climate catastrophe that ended up killing Texans or the way that Greg Abbott is handling COVID or this new law. You are seeing emboldened extremism in action. But the reason it's called extremism is because it is not representing the mainstream of Texans. So please stop attacking the hostages of the hostage state on the internet. I see this over and over again. This is like, “oh, well, why don't you move?” Like that's so easy. I don't know how people move. I don't know how people get the money to move.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I don't know where they think they're going to go to. This is a point that everybody needs to understand, is that as Americans, we are in this together. What happens in Texas is going to happen in other states. You're going to see it attempted in “blue states” as well because every state is a mix of different political entities. And you're seeing a lot of kind of bottom up movements trying to take over things like school boards, basically doing what the Tea Party did about a decade ago, which was a successful way of political manipulation. And they are backed by big money to do these initiatives and carry them out. So everyone nationally is facing this kind of battle, but also you should be on the side of your fellow Americans who are Texans.
Sarah Kendzior:
You should be on the side of justice and have compassion for the women of Texas to have to bear the brunt of this travesty. And so a couple other points here, obviously this is an issue of reproductive rights, but the bounty hunter aspect, honestly, is the part that is new and frightening and, I think, could have broader implications beyond just issues related to reproductive rights. Andrea brought up the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and these Stand Your Ground laws, like, this is creating or exacerbating really a vigilante culture that people want codified in law. And this one is particularly bad because it relies on thought crimes. If a woman is even suspected of getting an abortion, having an abortion, if a woman, for example, had a miscarriage and then is accused of having had an abortion, she can be targeted by these vigilante bounty hunters who will be rewarded for their cruelty and for their lies.
Sarah Kendzior:
If you look at how this sort of thing would play out in a overtly authoritarian state, what you would see are women being targeted for reasons that have nothing to do with abortion or pregnancy or anything like that. It's going to result in women being targeted because of their other political positions, because somebody doesn't like what they're doing, because they're related to somebody who is a target of the government. This can be used in all sorts of ways. It is very common in authoritarian states for people to go after the relatives or friends, the loved ones, of an individual who is causing the government trouble, and go after that person because they know that the other person won't back down. It's a very effective tactic. Texas is a very big state, so I can easily see this being used on the loved ones of activists all over the country.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are a million terrible ways that this can go. So again, please be supportive of the people who actually have to live under this law and please understand the broader ramifications for the country as a whole. There is nowhere for you to escape to. You're not going to end up living in some kind of, you know, blue, liberal paradise. If you want to talk through how that will play out, I would be happy to do an interview someday, or we could do a special, very special Gaslit Nation, because there are so many things here that you need to consider. Like, what happens to our military? What happens to our nukes? What happens to our infrastructure? What happens to our power grid? What happens to our food supply?
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh you’re talking about secession.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I’m talking about secession.
Andrea Chalupa:
If blue states broke away. Look, I live in a deep blue blue state, which is New York state. New York state can't even fix New York City’s subway system. So, I don't trust New York state to even run its own country, if New York state were to break off and be the Republic New York.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly. And we both have had governors who were sexual predators that had to resign. Missouri and New York are one in this respect. Sorry, go on. I was just thinking of points of commonality.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's all a pipe dream. Even if you live in a deep blue state, as Sarah said, it's just simply not that simple. The price tag of running your own country is very high and obviously everyone's taxes would have to go up. We're all interconnected anyway through these grid systems and so forth. So, breaking apart and becoming a European Union of independent countries and just having maybe some central governing body as the EU does, that's not an option, I believe, for the United States. Either way, we're stuck together, whether we like it or not, and we have to learn how to push back effectively and with more conviction and urgency from the top, as we've been seeing so far. Because a lot of these communities, especially non-White communities, are shouldering the biggest burden of fighting authoritarianism. And that has been the history of the United States of America as taught through critical race theory, which is why they want to ban critical race theory, because ultimately it is a history of resistance and how to stop the Republican fascist tactics and strategies.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. They don't want people to learn about the part where the oppressed prevail or gain ground or win or change people's conceptions of what is right or just, or what they are entitled to as a result of their birthright. They want those facets of history to be gone. I think they also do not want a discussion of elite criminal impunity. And that's something on this show… We often refer to it with regard to transnational organized crime—to people like Jeffrey Epstein or the Sackler family, these sort of billionaire high power individuals—but, you know, elite criminal impunity is also the Tulsa massacre of 1921. It's the unpunished White supremacist violence of the Red Summer of 1919. And it's George Zimmerman. I mean, it's this idea that due to your birthright, the color of your skin, the place that you were born and the laws that people have created to protect and elevate people like you and your rights over the rights and the dignity and the freedom of others, you know, that is elite criminal impunity.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's stretching the definition of elite somewhat in the latter case, but that is the history of this country. It's something that everybody needs to come to terms with. This law is going to play out in a way that disproportionately hurts impoverished women, that disproportionately hurts women who aren't White in Texas, women in rural areas. There's going to be all sorts of groups that are traditionally the more vulnerable groups in our country that will be disproportionately affected by this. And so no, the answer is not to leave all of those people, all of those women, in the lurch, to abandon them, to denigrate them, to blame them for what has happened by saying, “you voted for this” because odds are quite good that they did not, and in many cases could not because of voter suppression, so you also need to look quite closely at the voter suppression laws.
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, there's going to be new lawsuits aimed at Texas over that. But do not fall for this Republican rhetoric of secession. They want Texas to secede. They want to have their little oligarchies because they're easier to control that way. And one more thing I just want to bring up, you know, I have friends who grew up in the former Soviet Union, and especially in Central Asia and the Ferghana Valley where Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan all basically intertwined. You know, Stalin carved out the borders so they're obviously insane. But this used to be a place where people could cross the border to see their neighbor, to work in another company. Like, it was considered one. And I'm not praising the Soviet Union here, but I'm saying it is traumatic when an area that you thought of as your home, where your friends live, where your family lives, where your loved ones live, suddenly becomes a place where you need to show your papers, suddenly becomes another country where you need to show a passport.
Sarah Kendzior:
And if it is ruled by a dictator, which is what it would be here if these little hyper right-wing oligarchies are formed, they will be ruled by absolute fanatics; kleptocrats, possibly theocrats. It is not going to be easy and they're going to try to circumvent any kind of sense of unity, of Americanness, of togetherness of “We're here to help each other.” They're going to try to destroy that. But just sort of think on a practical level, what would it mean to not be able to visit your own friends and family if they live in Texas? Which is certainly true for me. The other thing you need to keep in mind if we haven't convinced you yet is they will invade you. They will, 100% invade you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Certainly, through disinformation and terrorists.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think they're going to flat out freaking invade you because-
Andrea Chalupa:
The Proud Boys will keep Proud Boying.
Sarah Kendzior:
The vigilantes! You know, if you're going to get 10 grand for saying some woman had an abortion, imagine if you're offered even more money to get to do the thing you've been wanting to do privately, maybe, for awhile, which is pick up arms and basically do a January 6, like, all over the place. Like you've got your new little “liberal utopia” that, you know, maybe a few “blue states” broke off and formed one, you're gonna get invaded. You're probably going to lose because all the big money is currently helping bolster these absolute fanatics in places like the Texas government, the Missouri government, Florida and DeSantis’ government and so on and so forth. I don't know what the hell the Democratic party and their donors are doing, but they sure as hell are not helping the people who need to fight back.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's like chronic underfunding, under-fighting, a refusal to accept reality. I mean, I don't think it's actually due to lack of understanding, I think they just basically don't give and they’ve left people out on their own. And that's been the history of the Democratic Party when it comes to accountability, when it comes to being assertive against Republican tyranny or any kind of tyranny for decades on end. I think people thought that because Biden was dealing with the aftermath of Trump who made all of this so much more blatant and brazen than it had been before, a lot of things that were subtext became text screamed through a bull horn at a rally. And so there was really no denying the authoritarian goals of the Republican Party anymore, the lawlessness of them, how they're intertwined with hostile foreign states, how they're intertwined with corrupt corporations, on and on and on. The Biden administration is denying it.
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, Merrick Garland has failed us in a multitude of respects. Again, just go back in our archives and find the Merrick Garland episode because we list quite a lot. If I list them again, you'll have another hour of commentary on your hands. They are not fighting as if they care whether this country survives. I'll just put it that way. That's true in every respect. It's true in regards to the attempted violent seditionist coup on the Capitol on January 6th. It's true in regards to this new law-
Andrea Chalupa:
Even a federal judge was shocked by how all of those White terrorists were getting off the hook.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. They're letting people go. They're not going after the organizers. We know who the organizers are. The FBI's pretending they don't know who the organizers are. We know because they told us. They announced it online. And we told you. It is Michael Flynn. It is Roger Stone. It was Lin Wood. And it's very interesting to me because after-
Andrea Chalupa:
Steve Bannon.
Sarah Kendzior:
Steve Bannon. Yeah, absolutely. He was recorded on January 5th.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously Trump himself.
Sarah Kendzior:
And Trump and Trump's family, and also people like Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, you know, these sort of bridges between the elites and groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and also just randos who got on the internet, got very fired up, printed out some t-shirts calling for a civil war and then tried to proclaim that they were tourists after they got caught. And those are the only people they're actually going after—and they barely are—this low-hanging fruit.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think one of the reasons that there's been this selective amnesia in response to the multitude of blatant crimes that the Trump administration presented is perversely because he is not on Twitter. And not just that he is not on Twitter now, but that they deleted all of his past tweets in which he would announce his crimes, you know, ongoing crimes. He would announce future crimes. He would confess to past crimes and his accomplices would do the same thing. Michael Flynn would do it. Lin Wood, in particular, was doing it before January 6th. I was watching him as he built up aspiring insurrectionists, as he reassured them that this is what the Trump administration wanted them to do, that they would not be in any kind of legal danger.
Sarah Kendzior:
That it was something necessary for them to do. This was all out in the open. And then after the attack, Twitter, after years of Trump doing things like threatening to nuke North Korea over the internet, suddenly decides that Trump is too dangerous and not just prevents him from tweeting, but just they nuke his whole account. And they get rid of all the other accounts. They get rid of a lot of the Q Anon accounts. They get rid of evidence. They get rid of collective memory. They get rid of the trail and this, combined with the switch of administration into Biden—and I think just a general desire of people to want to forget such a traumatic event, such a horrible period in our nation's history—it has skewed the perspective on how much danger we were in and how obvious it was and who failed to stop it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then that has caused people to not question so much like, “Well, why aren't they stopping it?” Every excuse that these little bot-brained farms throw out—I honest to God can't tell if these are people or if they're paid operatives, if they're people expressing their honest opinions, or if they're automated. That's how much personhood has been crushed in this digital era. But for, what are we on now? Eight months? All you hear is, “Oh, well Biden's only been there for eight months.” Before that, it was six months. Before that, it was three months. How many years will it be before you stop uttering that insipid phrase along with all of the others; “They're just dotting the I's and crossing the T's.” “They can't tell you what's happening because it's a top secret investigation and they're working behind the scenes.”
Sarah Kendzior:
It's like, dude, we knew what was happening. We watched it on TV. We watched on the internet—which you have now deleted—and we see it happening now because they're still going. They're still out roaming free trying to stir up insurrections in other countries, trying to facilitate them in our own, using the politicization of COVID and of masking and vaccines to try to create incredible fear and incredible cruelty within our population. And we're already—all of us, I don't care who you voted for—everyone is traumatized. Everybody's exhausted. Everybody, I think, is either succumbing to their worst instincts or trying very hard not to. And again, I encourage everybody not to. I encourage you to have compassion for your fellow American, for everybody who has to live through this time. It really is, you know, this is the worst of times, and this is the worst of times.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's not a real bright side here. I don't know what will happen as we push through because the climate crises really kind of throw a wrench in that. They throw a wrench into our conception of the future. We've always said on the show that fascism doesn't last forever. Fascist movements have been defeated. Authoritarian movements have been defeated. There is no country that is bound for that fate inherently, but it does require people to push back vehemently. I think a lot of the secessionist rhetoric, a lot of the vigilante stuff, the sort of dissolution of federal institutions, even the loss of something as basic as the US Postal Service and the fact that the Biden administration won't fight for that to function, that is a signal to me that elite power players, again, do not care if this country survives, or they would not let these institutions to which people depend on, especially during a pandemic, they would not let them rot away. They would not let the ties that bind us fray and break. That's all of great concern to me now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to highlight some things we can do to push back. We can name and shame and boycotts are incredibly powerful. The civil rights movement, of course, came out under Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King made a name for himself globally by leading the Montgomery bus boycott. And that is a powerful case study on grassroots power changing the world. That is why we opened the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s memoir that he wrote fresh off the Montgomery bus boycott; how he did it, how he organized himself and others. And it's just a powerful, powerful guide on community organizing and how to effectively take on corporate-backed authoritarianism. So please check that out. I want to just, in the spirit of that, highlight—thanks to Judd Legum of Popular Information—Judd and his team painstakingly put together the major corporate donors to these sponsors of Texas' abortion ban.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we will link to this in the show notes for this week's episode, which you can find as always on the Patreon page for this week's episode. Some of these companies that we need to name and shame include Spectrum (the cable provider), AT&T, USAA, We Are Farmers, United Healthcare, Anthem, Inc., General Motors, CVS (the massive pharmacist chain), State Farm (another insurance company), Comcast, NBC Universal. There's also UPS, Walmart, Chevron, Deloitte, Toyota, AllState, Bank of America, British Petroleum (BP), Cigna, and United Airlines. So those are some companies that if you can avoid them, absolutely avoid them. If you can write a letter to their CEO, if you can tweet at them, name and shame them and demand that they move their money away from these authoritarians in Texas who are waging war on our democracy and our constitution with these misogynistic laws, please do so.
Andrea Chalupe:
And again, we'll link to Judd's tweets of Popular Information in the show notes for this week's episode. And I also want to push some other solutions to all this. We don't need to just surrender to the situation There's solutions. There’s a way out of this. There's always a way to push back against fascism. The bounty hunting, for instance, works both ways. If someone gets outed for turning others in, for helping women get an abortion, as long as it's verified that this person did that, they can be named and shamed. It works both ways. In terms of the conditions we're up against now, authoritarianism and fascism breed in times of economic crisis, political instability and rampant propaganda. We're currently facing all three of these crises at once. The solution is to boost our economy through a 21st century New Deal by passing the $3.4 trillion infrastructure package, which not only provides a much-needed safety net, which will transform lives and lift people out of poverty.
Andrea Chalupa:
It will also transition us towards cleaner energy and other aggressive measures to combat the climate crisis, which is why Exxon lobbyist Joe Manchin—who regularly meets with Exxon, according to someone who worked there—is against it. We also need to secure our democracy against political instability by passing protections against voter suppression, relied on by Republicans in many states to hold on to power and threaten our presidential elections. We can do that right now by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act. As for disinformation, bring back a 21st century version of the Fairness Doctrine and also the Telecommunications Act, which both saw the rise of Fox News and the right-wing media deathstar after they were repealed. Those two systems of regulation protected our media against polarization and monopolies. Now, they're gone, and you've right-wing media like Sinclair gobbling up local news stations.
Andrea Chalupa:
So there are measures that can be taken for all of us—White, non-White, man, woman, non-binary, LGBTQ, doesn't matter.—we can all live in a safer, peaceful, prosperous America. It can be done. Another world is possible. There is a roadmap to do it. And these laws can be introduced now at the state level to grow these all important movements, to further these urgent conversations. Communities can come together into a national movement. If you need more ideas and steps to combat the hate we're up against, go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com and choose how you want to be the light in the world, because we need you. This moment needs you. Everyone counts. We're going to get through these soul defining years together because we simply have no choice.
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 cost of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Afghanistan. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate at the Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kenzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. You 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 on 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 Smiyth 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 and Patreon and higher, especially the first two who did not get thanked in August. So we're going to thank you profusely for many weeks to come…