Karen of the Senate
This week we examine what drove Koched-up Karen of the Senate Kyrsten Sinema to destroy voting rights on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend. We dig into Sinema’s questionable past and shady backers and debate rumors about her political future. We also discuss the fact that unless Congress nukes the filibuster and passes voting rights protections, it doesn’t matter who runs in 2024, because the election will be determined not by candidate popularity but by the most extreme voter suppression laws since the era before the VRA. We praise the Black activists who continue to fight for voting rights despite contending with a white supremacist death cult in one party and cowardly corporate enablers in the other.
We then discuss Merrick Garland’s valiant arrest of career criminal Donald Trump and his mafia syndicate coup plotters…wait just kidding he arrested a guy who posted as “oathkeeper4lyfe” while announcing his January 6 insurrection plans on Reddit. (Seriously.) We review the career of Yale law graduate Stewart Rhodes, the indicted Oath Keepers leader, and explain that arresting him and ten others is not sufficient to protect our country from coup-plotting militants backed by powerful billionaire networks and a sociopathic cult leader currently on tour doing his best Charlie Manson imitation in an attempt to incite a race war.
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Senator Raphael Warnock:
It's very clear what the Republican Party is up to. They are trying to make it harder for some people to vote, and easier to cheat. We're trying to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. I'm the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. preached, and I take great umbrage when members of this body would use old trite states’ rights arguments, the same kinds of states’ rights arguments that were used against Dr. King back then to push against reasonable access to the ballot right now. And many of these same politicians will stand up in just a few days and they will give lip service to Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, you cannot remember Dr. King and dismember his legacy at the same time. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Freedom to Vote Act is the legacy of Dr. King and if you would give lip service to his name, you need to find yourself on the right side of history, pushing to get these bills done. So I urge my colleagues to do the right thing. If those on the other side refuse to do it, the Democrats will have to act alone. But by all means, we have to act. Dr. King's words are as true now as they were back then: Justice delayed is justice denied. Time is running out. Let's get the job done.
[intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and of the upcoming book, They Knew, coming out this September.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am 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:
Our opening clip was Senator Raphael Warnock calling out the Jim Crow filibuster, protected by Koch dark money darling, Kyrsten Sinema, who we’ll get to later in this show. We need to keep Senator Warnock in the Senate. He is up for reelection this year. If you're angry, channel that rage into making a much needed donation—any amount can make a difference—to Senator Warnock's campaign and get yourself ready to help get out the vote this year. We're going to follow Stacey Abrams’ lead and fight like hell to protect our democracy and keep the fascists on the ropes. This week's Gaslit Nation early show available for listeners at the Truth Teller level and higher on Patreon is the Ask Us Anything Q&A where Sarah and I literally answer any and all questions. So if you've ever wanted to vent, get something off your chest, or bring anything to our attention, this is the place to do it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Come join our community and get in on the Gaslit Nation support group as we hold the line together to ensure a democracy for our children. Today's opening segment is called “Seditious Conspiracy”. As you may recall, in last week's episode we played a clip of Lawrence Tribe, Merrick Garland's former Harvard law school professor who taught the United States attorney general Constitutional Law. In the clip, Tribe called on his former student to bring charges of seditious conspiracy. And that is what Garland has done against Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a dangerous far-right militia made up of white supremacists, many former or current law enforcement or military. They also run for office and are actively involved in their local elections. In addition to Rhodes, who did not enter the Capitol on January 6 but was stationed outside, 10 other Oath Keepers were also charged with seditious conspiracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
You may remember the Oath Keepers as the column of militia men who calmingly worked their way up the steps of the US Capitol through the growing crowd. The charges show there were several experienced groups that showed up to the Capitol on January 6, prepared for war. They held reconnaissance missions several months in advance. They engaged in logistical planning, like getting weapons and bringing the weapons to the Capitol. They regularly discussed fighting, preparing for an op, and going to war. They stockpiled weapons in a hotel in Virginia in case of an all out battle in our nation's capital. When their January 6 operation failed, they stockpiled even more weapons, including $17,500 worth of weapons at the Oath Keepers leader's home. That's, again, Stewart Rhodes. With plans of disrupting the inauguration on January 20, as we had warned on this show—okay? We warned that the inauguration was going to be vulnerable. We warned that there was gonna be more violence.
Andrea Chalupa:
And they kept chatting among themselves about what they referred to as “Civil War 2.0”. CNN reports that several months ago Garland had initially balked at the seditious conspiracy charges. That's the word CNN uses—”balked”. In the months since, federal prosecutors worked hard to strengthen the case, working with cooperators and internal communication between the Oath Keepers. To be fair to Garland—and we can discuss this later, Sarah, if you feel differently, which you may—but to be fair to Garland, a longtime judge, seditious conspiracy charges are extremely rare and difficult to prove so the original balking could of course be read as needing more to ensure a slam dunk conviction. This turning point confirms the insurrection was indeed an insurrection, like we needed that confirmation. In his January 5, 2022 address to the nation, Garland said the DOJ would go after people at any level. The big question remains: Will the founder of the Oath Keepers be as high as the DOJ will go? Stewart Rhodes, the founder, has lived his life escaping consequences. He's a Yale Law School graduate, another privileged white man who knows how to skirt the law. Here is his estranged wife, Tasha Adams, who told CNN she spent years fearing for her life and for her children, calling Rhodes “a dangerous man” to her personally and to the country who has managed to escape accountability. As you listen to this, keep Trump and his goon squad in mind.
Tasha Adams:
He's a dangerous man. He is very dangerous. He lives very much in his own head. He sees himself as a great leader. He almost has his own mythology of himself and I think he almost made it come true, seeing himself as some sort of figure in history. And it sort of happened. He's a complete sociopath. He does not feel empathy for anyone around him at all. And, yeah.
Dan Berman, CNN:
Now, I understand you've been talking to the January 6th Select Committee, so you've been involved in the various investigations here. You say he is dangerous to the country, a dangerous man. What is it specifically you think he did in the events surrounding January 6th?
Tasha Adams:
I think he planned it very carefully. I think he planned for himself to not get arrested by seemingly to stay out of the Capitol himself, but that entire stack—the people that went in, the entire event—to me, I see his fingerprints all over it. And I think even though, from the outside, “Oh, I told them not to go in. We were just there to guard people,” it's silly, but it's also very carefully planned to keep himself out of trouble. And it's what he did on a small scale in our own family. I wasn't even able to get a restraining order—it was denied—because he seemed like such a great guy to the judge. And that's just how he's always been and there's a lot of vindication there seeing him finally having to answer to some type of consequence, probably for the first time in his entire life.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Oath Keepers provided private security to longtime Trump friend and master of the dark arts of stealing elections with the help of the Kremlin, Roger Stone. Garland promised he would go high up. Rhodes cannot be the biggest fish. They must also indict Trump, Stone, Giuliani, Bannon, and a long list of others who, like Rhodes, incited violence, centrally planned in plain sight, and tried to appear clean by not breaking into the Capitol. Rhodes’ strategy to remain clean and deny any wrongdoing is a lot like the strategy of Trump and his inner circle, like the Kremlin Klown Kar holed up in the Willard Hotel war room where they plotted for several days in advance of their January 6 coup on how to overthrow our democracy. Speaking of Trump, the ringleader of this seditious conspiracy held a Nazi rally in Arizona, calling for racial violence, essentially. Remember: Genocides start with hate speech and propaganda. That's the warning of my film, Mr. Jones.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump is focusing his Nazi minions on overtaking local elections that certify the vote, using dangerous rhetoric to justify any means necessary to come to power and stay in power. This is his election stealing strategy for 2024, either to steal the presidency for himself or a posh Trump who will drop any investigations into him, his family, and his goon squad. So whether he runs or not, Trump remains a major threat in the 2024 election. I want to be clear: Trump can be put away now based on the Mueller Report. Garland should stop waiting out the clock. It's a dangerous stare dereliction of duty that continues to hurt Biden's approval rating among his own supporters who breathlessly followed the Mueller investigation and its explosive findings. Here's a news clip from way back when, 2019, confirming Mueller built a case that allows prosecutors to charge Trump once he left office.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, one of the most interesting parts of the testimony today: Mueller admitting why charging the president was never considered while also admitting he believes Trump could be charged after he leaves office. That revelation actually coming surprisingly during a question with Colorado Republican Congressman Ken Buck, who also serves as chairman of the state GOP.
Congressman Ken Buck:
Was there sufficient evidence to convict president Trump or anyone else with obstruction of justice?
Robert Mueller:
We did not make that calculation.
Congressman Ken Buck:
How could you not have made the calculation, the regulation-
Robert Mueller:
The OLC opinion, Office of Legal Counsel, indicates that we cannot indict a sitting president.
Congressman Ken Buck:
Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?
Robert Mueller:
Yes.
Congressman Ken Buck:
You believe that he committed… You could charge the President of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?
Robert Mueller:
Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump has been walking around free for a year, inciting a growing war against our democracy as the leader of seditious conspiracy. The longer Garland waits, the more dangerous the crisis for our country. And Biden's approval rating will continue to pay the price, hurting Democrats in the 2022 midterms and giving the far-right Republicans an easier shot of taking over Congress, which will allow them to further consolidate power and stay in power in 2024 and beyond. Once again, Garland needs to go after Trump now for the charges outlined in the Mueller Report, and he has everything he needs right now to indict Trump.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. And he's had it the whole time. I mean, one of the frustrating things about discussing the Capitol attack, and especially the broader coup and coup attempt that precipitated it, where Trump tried to go through the courts, forged documents, threatened public officials, used—along with Stone—many of the tactics that they had planned back in 2016 when Stone first coined the “Stop the Steal” slogan. This is a strategy that they've had for five years. They had plenty of time to do that. But when people discuss it today—and this is, I think, the fault of the cable news media system and then it's reiterated on social media—they frame it as keeping score. They frame it as a matter of vengeance, whereas this is just about basic public safety, about our sovereignty, about the preservation of our democracy, about an end to elite criminal impunity.
Sarah Kendzior:
The reason that Andrea and I speak about repercussions for the January 6 attackers, especially the elite operatives at the top, is because they are planning a sequel and they hold enormous wealth and power and they need to be stopped, right now, from using that enormous wealth and power. And this vast criminal network and all of the state secrets and intelligence that they gained during Trump's time in office, and that they had beforehand to help get Trump into office, they're going to use that to hurt this country irreparably. If they take over in 2024, there's a number of very bad outcomes that could emerge, ranging from autocracy to civil war to partitioning. And there's also the possibility that we get past this, that we have accountability, that we have an actual attack on transnational organized crime, that all of this comes out in the open, these decades of crimes and coverups.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's what we were hoping for in 2020 because the urgency of that was so obvious given the toll of the pandemic, given the attack on the Capitol. We did not think that we would have to be in a position to convince the Attorney General of the United States, to convince the Democratic Party which had just been under physical assault by insurrectionists that these individuals needed to be [punished] before they acted again. It should be obvious. A loyal public servant, a patriot, does not need to be convinced to protect their own country. They want to. They want to out of love for America, out of concern for its future. And Merrick Garland does not feel that way. He has to be dragged by the public to do the most rudimentary actions. And it's not just people like Andrea and I commenting from the sidelines.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's his own professors. It's people like Lawrence Tribe, as Andrea mentioned before. It's former members of the DOJ. They have been issuing public letters to Merrick Garland. Their most recent one was in January, 2022, right after his speech. This is a mass signed letter from hundreds of former DOJ staffers. We’ll put a link in the show notes. You'll probably recognize quite a lot of the names. I'm gonna read a small part of it: “While the Attorney General rightly counseled patience as the Department moves the investigation toward higher level actors, we urge him to preserve the public trust by holding culpable leaders to account as soon as possible.” Note that: As soon as possible. “His speech appropriately recognizes that if those who hold the most power are allowed to act with impunity while the less powerful are sent to prison, equal justice under the law would be a lie and respect for the rule of law and democracy itself would be in grave danger of destruction. For all these reasons, we call on the Attorney General to continue to translate his important words into concrete actions, to impose accountability on the powerful people who sought to destroy our democracy in every case supported by the evidence.”
Sarah Kendzior:
So this is a politely worded letter. They're sharing their support for Merrick Garland, their support for the DOJ, an institution at which they once worked. But they recognize the urgency and the immediacy of this crisis. I mean, I think basically everyone does except for unfortunately the people who are in charge of managing it as well as the majority of pundits because the crisis has unfolded in plain sight and the perpetrators routinely confessed. And this is also true of the Oath Keepers. Merick Garland may think it takes eight months to find the evidence and bring a case, even though others at the DOJ felt differently, and I'm trying to figure out why exactly it takes so long to find this information when they literally post it on the internet.
Sarah Kendzior:
And here's one example. This is about an Oath Keeper. I'm gonna read a tweet from Ben Collins, who's a reporter for NBC who's been following the Oath Keepers and QAnon and all of these fringe militant groups very closely. And so he write, “If I were an Oath Keeper about to storm the Capitol, I would not have posted ‘Here is a link to a web-based chat. Uses AES256 encrypted database. Could be useful for January 6 communications’ under the name ‘Oathkeeper4life’ on the web forum The Donald”—this is a Reddit forum—”before posting my hotel room.” Like, that is how obvious all of this is. And I watched this on Twitter. As I've mentioned many times, Lin Wood was recruiting these people, giving them hotel information. There were people out there offering to pay for them to come and storm the Capitol.
Sarah Kendzior:
This was a top-down insurrection. This was not like the masses rising up. And this is so true of Trump's rallies where we know that they send out advertisements to try to get people in the crowd to chant certain slogans or carry out certain kinds of activity or have certain kinds of public reactions. Yes, of course Trump has actual supporters and yes, of course some of those supporters are militants, are dangerous, etc. But a lot of this is more reality TV from the master of the form. Trump was reality TV before it existed. He carried out this media manipulation, you know, this incredible false public persona which used scandal to bury crime in the New York tabloids before going to reality TV under Mark Burnett, who incidentally wanted his first show to be about Putin and then chose Trump, but that's another story. It's in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then he switched to social media. This is somebody who understands spectacle exceptionally well and knows how to weaponize spectacle. And the one downside of that for him—the one vulnerability—is that when you have a public spectacle that you're trying to hide behind, you're trying to hide your very sophisticated criminal network behind it, you still end up with evidence like this from “oathkeeper4life” all over the internet. And it becomes really hard for public officials to feign shock. As I've said many times, they feign shock to avoid accountability. You can't do that with January 6 because the evidence was all over the internet in the run up to the event. The event itself was on national television and so all they've been left to do—both the Trump camp and the Democrats—is to try to erode collective memory.
Sarah Kendzior:
They've done this through a variety of ways. The tweets which had this information are gone. Most of them are archived by people who have been studying this event, but they're not immediately there. So when Trump or somebody else lies, or even when a Democratic official lies and says, “Oh, we never could have seen this coming,” etc., what we used to be able to do was instantly bring up a tweet that shows otherwise, a timestamped, chronologically vetted tweet that shows exactly who knows what and when. That is gone. Paywalls have also contributed to that year-long erosion of collective memory. So we're in this position where people are doubting their own mind and then the lack of accountability from the government prompts them to doubt it further. They start to say, “Oh, well, you know, if this was really a big deal, there would be arrests. People would act with a sense of urgency.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Like, people's hair would be on fire. Like, it would look like it did the day after January 6 where if you look at the newspaper headlines for that day across the country—doesn't matter what the political predilection of the state that printed these headlines are—everyone saw this as an attack. Everyone saw this as an extreme danger. Everyone understood that the perpetrators needed to be held accountable immediately, or at least contained immediately so that they don't act again. And Ben Collins, whose tweet I just read who studies the Oath Keepers notes about the individual who he quoted, “This guy's last post was eight days ago.” So he's just been walking around for a year. Now, think about that. Multiply that times thousands of people because that is what you are dealing with.
Sarah Kendzior:
You're dealing with a mass militant movement that is not being stopped. You are dealing with transnational organized crime that is not being stopped. You are dealing with deep, deep institutional rot, the aftermath of the purges and the packing of positions with lackeys that Trump put in place but also the rotten and corrupt act that were in these roles beforehand because, as I've said, this goes back decades. Trump couldn't have gotten into power without a serious layer of existing rot, without enablers already in place within these institutions. And instead of clearing out those enablers and those bad actors, Garland seems to be beholden to them. I'm hoping that this public pressure, which seems to have led to this Oath Keeper leader, Stewart Rhodes, being arrested and others being arrested as well, continues to work because we are very, very much running out of time here. We were running out of time starting on January 7, 2021. We never had the time to wait.
Sarah Kendzior:
And every day that goes by without serious action regarding Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Trump and his crime cohort, it's more were and more dangerous, especially with Trump reemerging, feeling incredibly emboldened into the public sphere, having a speech that is more overt than I think almost any he's given in his desire for a Charlie Manson-style race war, which is what he wants. He wants that violence ratcheted up. He wants it to be blatant. He is no longer telling people to stand by. He is trying to facilitate that level of violence right now. And people should be alarmed especially when, as Andrea has repeatedly mentioned, Garland could indict him right now on the Mueller Report charges for obstruction of justice alone and contain this—contain this menace, contain this threat to the American public that we absolutely do not deserve—and he is choosing not to.
Andrea Chalupa:
The good news is that this administration has shown a lot of signs of responding to public pressure, so that's good. I mean, even Garland's defensive speech on January 5th sounded like he was more talking to Twitter.
Sarah Kendzior:
But that's weird, man.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's super important and it’s our civic duty to speak truth to power and to put pressure on our elected officials because grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left. By raising our voices for demanding justice and accountability and protection and the rule of law, that's leadership. If we do not do that, we're abdicating our leadership. So just ignore the troll bot farms, ignore the cults of personality and speak your truth, stand in your truth and raise, of course, the voices demanding that we strengthen our democracy because if we don't, it's an existential crisis. Lives are at risk.
Andrea Chalupa:
When these far-right fascists come to power… And that's no longer a hysterical statement to call them far-right fascists. That would have been years ago when Sarah and I first started out together. Now it's pretty run of the mill. But when they do come to power, it's game over. We're gonna lose generations of time battling the climate crisis and the mass displacement that's gonna come with it. And we can't afford that. When I talk to activists—human rights activists—from Russia, they look at America as a democratic paradise compared to what they have to work with. So never ever, ever, ever take for granted the many levers of power we still very much have and own and control. Own those. Own your power. And remember: It's up to us now to protect our communities, protect where we live. And all the important seeds we plant, all the infrastructure we build where we live, that is going to strengthen our entire democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're keeping them on the ropes. We're keeping them scrambling and that's where we want them. So rise up, run for office, help good people run for office. If you don't know where to start, we have a wonderful Gaslit Nation Action Guide. It's wonderful because it's so easy. It just walks you through what to do. Your heart and soul, how to get started on all of that. And since it's launch, the Gaslit Nation Action Guide opens with a strong recommendation to read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s autobiography, Stride Toward Freedom, his whole saving the world case study of how he practiced self management skills and team management skills to lead a grassroots effort to take on actual authoritarianism in the South with the Montgomery bus boycott. So if you need a hand to hold, that is a wonderful spiritual hand to hold and that's why we open the Gaslit Nation Action Guide with it. So please, don't despair. Own your power. Recognize how much power we very much have left in this country. And it's power that our fellow citizens of the earth in many parts of the world would love to have at their disposal. We have it. We have it so use it and remember that we're all the leaders that we need right now.
Sarah Kendzior:
Just wanna add one thing to that, which is folks who are examining this from the perspective of law and order and the court system and so forth need to look at how the court systems work in countries like Russia, in authoritarian kleptocracies instead of just assuming that the legal norms and protocol of the United States is either sufficient to battle this or that we are dealing with same type of state apparatus that we had even just 10 years ago. The United States is increasingly a mafia state and there were always elements of that. You can trace that back a hundred years and there are obviously elements of dirty money, dark money, mafia, plutocracy, partnerships with oligarchs, etc. But the rule of law has been so forthrightly abused under the Trump administration using tactics like bribery, blackmail, death threats to public officials, direct actions that in any normal system of perception people would view as treason.
Sarah Kendzior:
And we are increasingly getting there. Before I started covering the United States, I studied authoritarian kleptocracies in the former Soviet Union and I also served as an expert for asylum cases. I would often go to court for Uzbek refugees who'd been baselessly accused of some sort of terrible crime in their home country of Uzbekistan and had to flee and come here. And they would tell me all about how the court system there worked, how to quote one person, “suspicious is the same as guilty,” how bribery and corruption and elite criminal impunity were standard as a way of life. Look at what just happened in Kazakhstan with their protests. Listen to what the protesters are actually protesting. It is that kind of system. It is a deeply entrenched kleptocracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is mafia state rule. It is a country that doesn't have rights, doesn't have freedom, and doesn't have an actual justice system. Read reports from groups like International Crisis Center that go over the abuse of the court system. You cannot just assume it's going to do what you want because maybe it had in the past. This is not Watergate, not in terms of the actual case itself but also not in terms of the country that we are or the government that we just had. So much damage has been done that you need to look at this differently. And so that is my advice for all of these actual legal scholars or fake legal scholars that are all over social media, is look at how the court system works in authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union and see if you recognize some parallels and see what dissidents there have to deal with, what lawyers there have to deal with, what the accused have to deal with. And then think about whether our system, as it stands this DOJ’s actions as they stand now, are sufficient to battle that kind of grim reality.
Andrea Chalupa:
And on that note of nothing is normal, we're going to go into Kyrsten Sinema who puts the Sin in Sinema. That's what we're calling this segment. “She puts the Sin in Sinema”. So as we mentioned, Trump had a big Nazi rally in Kyrsten Sinema's Arizona. We know it's a Nazi rally because he loves to use that sort of carnal rhetoric. We know from Ivana, his ex-wife, that Trump kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed and it shows in his whole long history of Nazi rallies In his rally, he called for Arizona's government to overturn its certification of the 2020 election, furthering his Big Lie which is driving Jim Crow 2.0 laws across the country by a simple majority, yet Sinema can't be bothered to join Democrats in bypassing the filibuster just once to ensure nationwide voting protections. At Trump's rally in Arizona, CNN showed a clip of interviews with Trump supporters praising Sinema and Manchin for obstructing the Democrats and protecting Trump's ongoing coup against our democracy known as the Big Lie.
Andrea Chalupa:
The filibuster, as we've mentioned many times on this show, is a relic of the Confederacy and neo-Confederacy states to block civil rights for non-white people. It took a bloody battle in the authoritarian south to overcome years of oppression protected and furthered by the filibuster. So we had the Civil War and then we had the civil rights movement, which was peaceful grassroots organizing, met with fascist authoritarian violence by local white militias and governments. That is what Sinema and Manchin are protecting and why Trump supporters love them so much. Sinema and Manchin: traitors to our country protecting and serving the neo-Confederacy. In Sinema's case, let's look a bit deeper at the Karen of the Senate. Sinema rushed through graduating high school at age 16 as a valedictorian and finished college in only two years. That might seem super impressive but I'm telling you that's also somebody that isn't socializing, isn't getting to maybe have that proverbial acid trip in the desert where she gets to know herself and the vibrations of the universe.
Andrea Chalupa:
What I'm saying is that's freakish. I mean, maybe there's people who have done that and they've gone on to advance science and the arts in all sorts of needed ways, but pay attention to this. We're gonna get back to it later. Sinema then built a mythology around herself as she ran for office of having been homeless. This, of course, infuriated her parents who assured it wasn't as bad as she dramatized. Sinema effectively switched parties in 2014, becoming a DINO—Democrat in Name Only—when she took money from the Koch-backed US Chamber of Commerce which gave her a leadership award in 2020 since their investment in her has been paying off. Sinema doesn't meet with her constituents. She apparently hasn't had a town hall in three years and doesn't do press interviews.
Andrea Chalupa:
What does that sound like? An authoritarian. As she openly disrespected President Biden, who was on his way to the Capitol to meet with senators about passing urgently needed voting rights laws, Sinema got ahead of him and delivered a big slap in the face to the president and our democracy, especially non-white people most vulnerable to being denied access to the ballot. Republicans are making it as hard as possible to vote and in Texas they're denying applications just to register to vote under their new repressive Jim Crow laws. Sinema delivered her backstabbing speech full of white woman tears and gaslighting on the Senate floor as Biden, again, was on his way to rally Democrats for an urgently needed human rights cause. We'll play a clip of Sinema's speech now. I'm gonna tell them there's
Amy “Dog Park Karen” Cooper:
I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.
Frederick Joseph:
Please tell them whatever you’d like.
Amy “Dog Park Karen” Cooper:
[on the phone] I'm sorry. I'm in the Ramble. And there is a man—African American—he has a bicycle helmet, he's recording me and threatening me and my dog. There is an African American man. I am in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.
Andrea Chalupa:
So that was Central Park Karen Amy Cooper, but you get the idea of Sinema's speech. As Senate Karen gave her speech, she wore what looked like a cross. You might think this is a small detail, but Sinema has a thing for statement jewelry. She famously posted a picture of herself sipping sangria while wearing a “Fuck Off” ring. Yes, the ring actually said “Fuck Off” during a time everyone was pressuring her to stop serving far-right billionaires and join Democrats to save our democracy. So to wear what looks like a cross even though you're openly not a religious person and declined to be sworn in to Congress using a Bible speaks to her campaign to gaslight the American public to soften her as she destroys Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hard-fought legacy to securing voting rights in America. As MLK's son, Martin Luther King III points out, King's own granddaughter has less voting rights today than when she was born.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is decades of work of the Koch political network that Sinema profits from. Efforts to primary and replace Sinema have already started. A chief contender is Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a former marine who was ready to protect the Capitol on January 6 and has stood up to Kremlin aggression in Congress, which earned him death threats from a Russian official. Sinema is up for reelection 2024. Rumors have been flying that Sinema is burning bridges with the Democratic Party because she plans to run for president in 2024. Given how impatiently Sinema sped through high school and college, this would fit a larger pattern of life. In 2024, we'll likely have a Glenn Youngkin type who's going to artfully walk a fine line between slick racist dog whistles and holding Trump and Bannon at arms length while benefiting from their grassroots support, their media disinformation machine, and other financial dark money sources and support.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think Sinema, at the very least, could be setting herself up to run with a posh Trump type as a gaslighting unity ticket in 2024 to “bring the country together” during this polarizing time. The independents Biden won in 2020 to put him over the edge in the electoral college are not loyal to Biden or the Democratic party. Many of them swung to Youngkin in Virginia. Sinema has made herself out to be an independent maverick in the style of John McCain. Even John McCain's idiot daughter, Megan McCain, has called her good friend, Kyrsten Sinema, a maverick and interviewed her to closely tie the association between Maverick McCain and Maverick Sinema. So that's what Sinema seems to be banking on from all this attention: that she has solidified herself as the ideal candidate to win over independents in 2024, and likely as a vice president running mate for a Koch-backed posh Trump. I think that's the silver bullet the dark money corporate-backed Far Right wants to knock off Biden or another Democrat in 2024. And remember, as we keep warning on this show, Americans love sparkly blondes. Blonde, shallow, Wet Seal clearance section Kyrsten Sinema is just the sparkly object enough Americans in battleground states might just fall for.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I mean, I'm hesitant to think that the rumor about Sinema as a prospective presidential candidate or vice presidential candidate is true in part because I think it was put out there by Amy Siskind who for, I don't know, half a decade or so has been a staunch opponent of Trump. Before that though, she was someone who supported Sarah Palin and other very questionable female candidates purely because they're women. That was the most important thing to her. And I don't think she's supporting Sinema. Amy Siskind is not, to my knowledge, supporting sinema. But this is like the kind of framework that she thinks in, looking foremost at gender, at women and that's, to my knowledge, where this came from. The other thing that worries me is whether all of this debate over Sinema is a contender is meant to hide the fact that it really doesn't matter who runs if people don't have voting rights.
Sarah Kendzior:
And right now is the moment that matters, right now with Sinema wanting to uphold the filibuster, doing what seems to be a one-woman job of destroying democracy, degrading all of the Black activists and Black voters who flipped this election in 2020, kind of obfuscating the failures of the Biden administration to do much on this issue but also on all the other things that they ran on. If you look at the platform for 2020, they've broken the majority of their promises and even the one thing that most folks gave them credit for, which was the response to the pandemic and the very quick mobilization to get vaccines out and what seemed to be a very different response from the Trump administration, which of course were making bank off selling PPE and all this horrible stuff and of course just encouraging everyone to get the virus. They're now doing that.
Sarah Kendzior:
They're now pursuing a Let Her Rip strategy with Omicron, which disabled activists and just people who are worried about those who are disabled, immunocompromised, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable to the Omicron variant, they're very worried about what the CDC is doing, what by Biden is doing. Biden could, one, just flat out lose legitimately which is very depressing when you think about. He's running against an apocalyptic death cult and people may still… I don't think that they'll vote for the apocalyptic death cult over Biden. The worry is that they won't vote for two reasons. One, apathy and frustration, you know, a feeling of like, Well, I came out and I voted and I did my part and nothing happened so I'm staying home.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is particularly, I think, younger voters who understandably may feel this way. And then two—and this is the really serious one, the one we've been warning of and that people need to get on right now—is people will want to vote even if they're mad at the Democrats and so forth because they know that the Republicans are so much more dangerous, and then they can't, or their vote gets thrown out as it would in Georgia or other states whose state legislature have this new rule where they can just throw out the ballot. And then, of course, we also have to deal with the fact that if the Democrats do manage to win, the Republicans are going to claim the election illegitimate and then use violence and force. And because there's been almost no accountability from the DOJ, political violence has become increasingly streamlined and normalized. People have come to expect it.
Sarah Kendzior:
The shock that everybody felt on January 6 where people saw with total clarity that this was an attack on our government and an attack on the Capitol and an attack on voting and an attack on democracy, that shock is no longer there. It's been filled with cynicism and agony and frustration and so many other emotions, but shock won't be there. They fully expect dirty tricks and violence and that's a terrible position for a country to be in. You should never ever accept this or sort of think, Oh yes, of course, that's what they do. It's one thing to expect it, as in, you are anticipating a terrible event and you therefore want to do everything in your power to prevent the terrible event. That's why we talk about all this dark, awful stuff like voter suppression or coups or organized crime. We want it to end and you can't end it unless you acknowledge it's there and you acknowledge it's a looming threat.
Sarah Kendzior:
So anyway, all that's to say is that, yes, I could see Sinema wanting to do this. I could see her wanting to be in a position where she gains even more power and more money. And she gets off on performative politics, on gaslighting the public. She's reckless. She's destructive. They don't care about her as a person and it's the systemic problems that will determine the selection. They can float her, they can float Tucker Carlson. They could put all these people out there who are clearly massively unqualified in a traditional sense to have office or even people who are technically qualified, like, say, Mike Pompeo, but are batshit insane and are working with the worst, most evil operatives in the world. He's also somebody who's a potential nominee.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's all irrelevant, in a sense, if we do not get voting rights for everybody. And it is so, so frustrating and heartbreaking, honestly, to see this concern still be dismissed after all this time. I'm even seeing Democratic voters and people who sort of describe themselves as activists—it's always white people, always, always white people writing this—saying, “You know what? We'll be okay because Black people didn't have voting rights between the end of the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and yet Democrats still won.” Like, they'll actually say that as some sort of excuse. And note the “we”. The “we” there is white people. The “we” there is, in particular, white people of middle class and above, people who don't have to wait in line for like eight hours to vote, people who aren't struggling to get to the ballot box, people who are treated better by our government and by our society.
Sarah Kendzior:
Whereas our priorities should always be, you know, look out for who is worst off. Look out for who is struggling, for who's vulnerable, whose rights aren't guaranteed. Start there and then go up. And it's just, it's very… Like I said, it's heartbreaking to see this dismissed. And you brought up Martin Luther King's grandchildren having to fight for their voting rights again. If that doesn't bring it home, that they have fewer rights than somebody 20 years ago or 30 years ago did—a Black American of that time did—it's just… I don't know. They should be far more mobilized and people should be furious. They should be fighting with fury and they should certainly not be attacking the good activists like LaTasha Brown and others from Georgia who are doing that hard work of fighting with fury and with strategy and with compassion for people who are disenfranchised. That's another thing that's missing. But anyway, I've been going on for a while so go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's important to keep in mind that Kyrsten Sinema has certainly higher aims. That explains her whole show boating routine. It wasn't enough for her to meet politely with Biden in the Senate, like Manchin does. Manchin meets with Biden and his people all the time and then just politely—and sometimes not so politely—screws him over, but she makes a show out of it by going on the Senate floor when Biden's heading over. So who is that show for? It's clearly public statements to try to position herself for a bigger role and I think this is somebody, like I said, who has had signs of sociopathic ambition. It's one thing, again, I wanna just reiterate, to speed through high school and college for a greater purpose, a larger purpose, but in her case, her whole track record has been to be a chameleon, to be on the side of whichever is going to be more advantageous for her to come to power and stay in power.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's important for us to keep that in mind, that this is somebody that has larger aims than the power she currently has. We need to shout her down. Kyrsten Sinema's brand is toxic and no matter what she has her eyes on next must remain toxic. If her track record is any indication, she's going for—in her mind—to bigger and better things. It's not enough for her to be a savior for our democracy right now by doing the right thing, the urgent needed thing of a filibuster exception to pass voting rights, to undo John Roberts’ Supreme Court gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Martin Luther King's legacy now hangs by a thread and that's devastating, devastating for not just our country but of course our standing in the world. We are declining democracy. America is ranked as a declining democracy and if Kyrsten Sinema, toxic brand Kyrsten Sinema who is going to incite probably as much hate as any Trump character in the 2024 election.
Andrea Chalupa:
People are gonna be hounding her wherever she goes and confronting her with her crimes and her gaslighting. People have to understand that none of this is a drill. None of this is fun to report on. We wish we had happy news. We wish we were a show that was talking about the latest indictments of Trump’s inner circle. We wish we were a show talking about all the exciting things that Congress was doing to protect us and how urgent it was. We wish we were a show that had more time to talk about other corners in the world that are struggling with democracy right now, but we don't have time for that because we're stuck trying to protect our own democracy and what's left of it. So just remember that we can't do this alone. We need you. And the way you refuse to abandon us and each other and yourselves too, because we can't just stick our heads in the sand, is by going to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide and doing what you can to support those essential organizations there fighting the good fight that need you. We all need you now. Never forget that.
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Andrea Chalupa:
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