Russia Wins the Cold War
Andrea Chalupa (00:25):
So here we are on November 19th, 2024, and it looks as though Russia has finally won the Cold War. We are effectively under Russian occupation as all of Trump's appointments so far show, with the exception of Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, in the sense that Marco Rubio is very outspoken for Ukraine posting scripture in support of Ukraine on social media. But the reality is that Marco Rubio, like the rest of the Republican party, has surrendered to the Russian occupation known as MAGA. The rest of his appointments like Tulsi Gabbard, Russian State Media calls her our girlfriend, when teams of Russian hackers infiltrated the DNC hanging out in DNC servers for months as well as Republican servers. They haven't released what they have on the Republicans yet for a very good reason, because it's a compromises blackmail, it's leverage that the Kremlin has on the Republican party.
(01:30):
But when it came to the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign, they were very strategic in how they weaponized their hacked materials from Trump's opposition to inflict ultimate damage, to divide and conquer the Democratic Party in the 2016 election, a very close election helping defeat Hillary Clinton. But the emails they did not release were from Tulsi Gabbard. They didn't touch her in their whole WikiLeaks weaponization scheme. Why is that? She was working in the DNC at the time. And then of course you have Robert Kennedy Jr., who the great British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr, has pointed out, has his own Kremlin disinformation campaign raging. And then there's Matt Gaetz, who's part of the Kremlin Caucus in Congress blocking aid to Ukraine and on and on it goes. Oh, and then you have that Fox News host who's a serial sexual harasser and cheating on his wives just like Trump. And he's got a white nationalist tattoo. And he himself has been wishy-washy on Fox News, to put it politely, against Ukraine. You have a perfect Kremlin cabal of Trump appointments, and this has been a long game. The Kremlin is excellent playing the long game. They demoralized, they infiltrated, they bought off the opposition, they weaponized their corruption. Charles McGonigal, who was in charge of investigating the Russian mafia, was in fact on their payroll. So congratulations to the Kremlin after all these decades on finally winning the Cold War.
Terrell Starr (03:05):
What they're doing is that they're just tapping into what's already here in the United States. And so the same type of misogyny, the same type of manipulation of the church, the kleptocratic frameworks with which Donald Trump operated during this first term, they all are hallmarks of Russia. They very much took advantage of that. And the main thing that we have to think about, the major difference between Russia and the United States is that we do have a civil society. It is a free civil society. It's a contested freedom, and it's always been a contested freedom, but we've always had it. But between the monarchy of Russia, the Soviet control of Russia, and now the post-Soviet rule, Putin's post-Soviet rule, primarily Russia does not have a civil society. We know the number one issue in our country is the people, the millions of people who chose to vote for Trump.
(04:03):
I have always been of the belief that the Putin supporter and the Trump supporter are essentially the same people. They want a king. They want someone to, they want a quote, strong man. But the way that Western political scientists talk about Russia, they talk about Russian society, they frame it in the sense that American democracy has gone beyond that when in fact, American democracy is roughly 50 years old because Jim Crow and slavery in my mind don't constitute a democratic society. We have all these post-election critiques and analysis that says this or that led to Trump winning. But no one wants to critique the voter. Well, black analysts critique the voter because it's white voters primarily. And if it's not white voters, it's a lot of people in Latino communities and a small number of people in black communities who believe in the same sexism, misogyny as everyone else. And so this kremmling cabal of a proposed cabinet that we see right now is, to me, it satisfies the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns. And there are in air intelligence operations, indeed, that's 100% true. But more importantly, I think that it's reflective of our society that actually is as American as it is imperial Russia,
Andrea Chalupa (05:28):
A hundred percent. And this Russian operation of MAGA that has invaded our country, it echoes the period when fascism through the Nazis, took inspiration from the Jim Crow South to pass legal warfare in Germany, heightening it into a dictatorship to oppress and ultimately mass murder Jewish people and political dissidents. That's important to understand. It was fascism there. It was American born and bred and glorified fascism. The Confederacy was fascism. The Confederacy was authoritarianism. The Jim Crow South was fascism. The Jim Crow South was authoritarianism. And that literally informed, instructed, inspired fascism in Europe. And now we have a repeat of that history because Putin's Russia is fascism. They take inspiration from Hitler's regime Wagner, the Russian mercenary group that has been slaughtering civilians across Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela. Remember when Venezuelans brave Venezuelans rose up to put their bodies on the line and say that this was a corrupt election that just happened in Venezuela.
(06:40):
Maduro stole yet another election. He's a dictator. He is trying to stay in power yet again, and they protested him in mass numbers. Russia sent over Wagner forces and the protests were over, people disappeared. And then you have other operations of Wagner forces across Africa committing all sorts of atrocities. And you don't hear anything about that from the pro Gaza left. There's no solidarity for those Africans and several African nations that are being brutalized civilians intentionally killed and raped, including in a maternity ward that's being carried out by Russian imperialism right now and the left. Their silence is deafening on that. And so yes, absolutely, it's our homegrown fascists that are united with Russia's homegrown fascists. And that is what we're facing and that is why we have to look to leadership, to the spiritual struggle, the physical struggle of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King's brilliant memoir that he wrote as a young man capturing the case study of the Montgomery Bus Boycott opens up with his own stories of his life on how he shaped his own personal philosophy of nonviolent resistance.
(07:52):
And one of the stories he shares is how both his mother and father raised him not to accept the reality that they're trying to impose on us, not to accept himself as inherently different because of the color of his skin. His parents raised him with a refusal to accept the system of violence that he was born into, and that was illustrated in one example. He gives in his brilliant memoir, stride toward Freedom, where a white police officer stopped his father's car after his father rolled through a stop sign that happens. He's a busy working father. He rolled through. He didn't stop at a stop sign, he missed it, and he gets pulled over by a white cop, and the white cop says to him, boy, and Martin Luther King's father says to the officer, I'm no boy. And he points at Martin Luther King as a little child and says, that's a boy. I'm a man. And the white police officer was so scared that he was shaking while riding out the ticket and got the hell out of there. So our power lies now in this moment of refusing to accept this system, we do not accept it.
Terrell Starr (09:00):
It reminds me of a line in one of Langston Hughes's poems where he says what you call fascism, we call Jim Crow. I think the main lesson that we take from this election is that freedom is very fragile, and you're going to have these pendulum shifts. That next shift may come in 2026 during the midterms. It may come in 2028. We talk about Trump as if he's introducing fascism into the American psyche. It's always been here through various iterations. And so I think it's important that the way that we talk about America comes from a place of humility and fat. And when we talk about democracy, we need to talk about who it was for. It was for white people. What you look at with this current cabinet that Donald Trump has proposed so many of these people, their main qualifications is bowing down to the Trump, which is very Hitler like.
(09:53):
It's really a matter of how committed am I to this man, not to my country. None of these people talk about the wellbeing and the health of the country for everyone. It's really about themselves. And so you're bringing in a new wave of kleptocrats who have learned the lessons from the first presidential term of Donald Trump. The good news, we do have a strong and robust civil society. We do have a free media problem with it is that I know you saw with Morning Joe their statement that, Hey, we met with them and then we're going to open up communication. And so what that pretty much tells you is that they're going to get in line and get with the program. And so these are people who are willingly making a decision that they're going to capitulate to fascism. There's another problem too. There are so many people who look at them as legitimate journalists and they aren't, right?
(10:49):
So there are TV hosts with opinions, and they're good for what they do, but they're not really journalists. The danger in that is that the masses are not aware of that. And so they are going to be setting the mainstream public identity of how Trump should be viewed for the exchange of access. I'm not sure that their look into Trump world is going to be beneficial to this country. And so you see this kind of complicity that's already beginning to set in. And so I think at this point, the best thing that we can do as independent journalists, as independent podcasters is to really begin at a grassroots level of educating the public of what we're living in the fascism that exists, but the fascism that never left. And one more note about Marco Rubio, Matt Doss, he said that Marco Rubio was basically housebroken.
(11:47):
And so there's no predictability that you can have whatsoever. Marco Rubio, of all the people, regardless of whether you like him or not, I think that Marco Rubio would be a candidate for Secretary of State with Aer candidate for all this work. He's considered qualified, but the rest of them know. But even with Marco Rubio, he is so beholden to the throne as opposed to his country that we can't trust him on Ukraine. We can't trust him on being a competent diplomat because being a competent diplomat depends on the whims of Donald Trump. And if that's fascism that he wants to project, then that's what we and the rest of the world are going to get.
Andrea Chalupa (12:27):
And to all the white people who are scared, because I have some white people in my mentions who don't feel ready for this time, I feel born for this time because I'm Ukrainian. I was raised in this country with people assuming I was Russian. Anytime I say my family's from Ukraine, they would say, oh, you're Russian. That to me was the average American trying to erase me, my heritage, my ancestors, and telling me that I don't matter, that I don't exist. And so I was raised on stories of genocide and surviving genocide, stories that are continuing today in Russia's current genocide against Ukraine. So I feel very ready for this moment. I was born ready. Literally, I have that trauma and survival instinct in my DNA, but to the white Americans who have been here since the Mayflower to those folks, non-white Americans are ready for this.
(13:19):
Terrell all year was telling me that Trump's going to win. And I said, aren't you concerned about that? How can you just say so casually Trump's going to win. And he just look at me and say, I'm black. This is my reality. Already, Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. Native Americans, even to this day, native American women are the most vulnerable group in this country. And then of course, you have the militarized industrial prison complex, which is funneling children, non-white children into prisons that are private. And so that whole Gulag camp system already exists for non-white people. And so the non-white folks are ready because they grew up raised ready. Their parents had to have a talk with them that the average white American did not have to have with their own children. So really the people that are freaking out are the white Americans out there.
(14:05):
But listen, authoritarianism built this country. Fascism built this country through the genocide of slavery and Native Americans, namely. And so we've been here before as we keep saying this show, and we're going to get through it. Now, as for the geopolitics, why was Russia able to finally win the Cold War? That's very simple. Our own founding fathers were concerned about the inherent weaknesses in democracy. It's a republic, if you can keep it. So they saw the writing on the wall, they saw the passion of the masses. They were concerned that this fragile experiment of American democracy would not last. And now here we are. So basically what the Kremlin did is they used our own strengths against us, our freedom of information, our right to speak out, our entrepreneurial spirit. How do they do that? Well, they created bots of fake Americans, inflaming divisions. They created fake Black Lives Matter groups, inflaming division.
(15:01):
They hijacked social media companies, Zuckerberg's Facebook. In 2016, Russia was able to harvest a lot of data of Americans and pump out information that way. In the Brexit vote, there's something like a hundred million bots that Russia was furthering to tip the scales in the very close Brexit vote of 2016. So there's a long list of what the Kremlin was doing, and America hasn't been responding adequately. The FBI and the cia, A to the bare minimum, to confront this threat just like America in 2008 celebrated a Hollywood happy ending with the first black president being elected. And everyone's like, oh, racism solved. And they stopped paying attention. And during the eight years of Obama's time in office, Karl Rove was able to engineer a nationwide takeover. So many state governments fell into Republican hands. They came close to being legally allowed to call a constitutional convention to edit our very constitution, because Americans stopped paying attention.
(15:57):
They thought their problems were over, and Obama was elected, and that was it. And during that time, Trump rose to power through the racist, violent, fascist movement of birtherism. And the same thing happened with the Cold War. The American establishment did a happy dance, celebrated a Hollywood happy ending, thinking they had defeated the evil empire of the Soviet Union. And they danced on those ashes. They all poured into Russia and introduced this shock doctrine of forcing everything to privatize and thrusting the average Russian into poverty. And they're making so much money off the backs of all this. And they thought, we came, we saw, we conquered. You're our bitch now. And what ended up happening is that the Russia desks of intelligence offices around the world began to shrink. And then over time, thanks to George w Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are highly illegal and unnecessary, that gave rise to the terror group isis.
(16:49):
And next thing you know, the Arabic speaking desks, the counter-terrorism desks in the US intelligence were getting staffed up at the expense of Russia and Ukraine. And as a result of that, you had Putin very cleverly manipulating the American establishment saying, we need to be partners now. We need to work together to fight isis. Nevermind that Russian intelligence. Were helping Russians to go fight for isis. I'll link to documentation on that in the show notes. And so while Russia was pretending to be a strong partner for the US in fighting ISIS and containing Iran's nuclear ambitions, they were instrumental in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal at the us, the Obama foreign policy team. They were treating Russia as an equal partner and containing the chaos of the world. Meanwhile, Russia was activating longtime Russian asset, Donald Trump. And if you want more on that, Craig Unger wrote two brilliant books documenting Russia's long game when it came to Trump, called House of Trump, house of Putin, and American Coma.
(17:52):
As one expert who had worked for the Pentagon said to me in November, 2016, think of the election of Donald Trump as the marriage of the Russian mafia in the East with the Russian mafia of the West. So that's what happened. It's been a perfect storm, and that's how their fascist married into our fascists and together are overthrowing our democracy. And that's why the so-called good guys that should be protecting us have been overwhelmed, complacent, nobody acting with any urgency to illustrate this, I happen to have a conversation and a chance meeting with a DOJ prosecutor who said to me, our system is simply not set up to be run by a criminal. Who wants to dismantle it? So oh, well shrug, there you go. And he said to me, but we keep our investigations going and we release what we can of our investigations, and it's up to the American people to decide.
(18:40):
And I said to him, how can the American people decide when they're being intentionally assaulted with the Steve Bannon strategy of flooding the zone with shit Steve Bannon, the whole Trump Russia operation, Steve Bannon and the Mercers funded Cambridge Analytica, which joined with the Russian helping tip the close Brexit vote. They did the same for Donald Trump in 2016. They've had a full on assault against our ability to process information. They've been intentionally flooding the zone with shit and the media the good in the media hasn't been able to keep up with it. And on top of that, you have good old fashioned American greed gobbling up local newsrooms, turning local news from straight news to Sinclair, which is local versions of Fox News. It's been an all out assault on the information space in America. And then of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into a weapon for Donald Trump. And you DOJ federal prosecutor are leaving it up to the American people to decide what you essentially are doing are turning the American people into lambs for slaughter.
Terrell Starr (19:38):
Yeah, so I'm actually on blue sky or bluesky, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but I'm looking at something by Jamel Bowie from yesterday and he said the thing about being a political junkie and that's the two of us, is that you have an extremely difficult time conceptualizing how someone could be totally ignorant of politics. But I would strongly encourage you to imagine the kind of person who Googled did Biden and drop out on November 4th and then cast a ballot on November and moving on another person, another New York journalist quote tweeted him with a they line from Brian Kaplan's book, the Myth of the Rational Voter. And this quote reads about half of Americans do not know that each state has two senators and three quarters do not know the length of their terms over half cannot name their congressmen, and 40% cannot name either of their senators.
(20:37):
So much of this requires us to strongly interrogate our society, and it's a very uncomfortable exercise for the politician because they don't want to insult the person whose vote that they need. That's the number one reason a lot of analysts don't want to alienate the people who they want to organize, for example, or people who they're trying to persuade. Or in many instances, they're just extraordinarily naive like the crew from the Obama camp and the James Carville's of the world who insist on not going away and retiring with the millions of dollars that they made from Obama's exceptional to terms that will never happen again, at least perhaps in our lifetime. We have an intelligence issue with our voting population, and I think that it transcends disinformation because I feel like we've learned, one, we have a political structure that actively discourages people from voting.
(21:41):
You know how many voter ID laws that exist in this country? There are dozens of them, many in the ex Jim Crow states in the north as well, but namely in Jim Crow South. So we actively go out of our way to discourage people from voting. Our education systems don't teach people, teach people civics. And a main reason for that is that we don't have a unified identity. We have a racially divided country. We have a country that is divided on sexism. We have a country that does more to decide who can go to whose bathroom than making sure that kids can have a nutritious free lunch. So we care more about unquote same sex marriage than we do about whether people have access to healthcare. We have a public that's indifferent to it. I don't know if I've said this on the show, but when I went to West Virginia, I was really shocked to how poor these white people were.
(22:39):
And being from the inner city of Detroit where I was very poor, I was blown away that there were white people who could be poor and be in more economically desperate situations than I was as a kid because I thought that that type of economic poverty was just reserved for black people. But when you go to a state like West Virginia, you realize that these white elected officials don't care about their own people because they care about money, they care about power, and they operate in the very same way that Putin operates with Russia. You go across Russia, those people are in abject poverty. And so with what Putin does, he BOLs this population with Russian, this they can never see their economic status ever improved. But if they have the grand prize of Russia, this that is enough of a nectar to keep. That is a narcotic that will keep and different.
(23:45):
And so if we really want to do a diagnosis on what's happening, we have to do that. We had Ellie on the show a few weeks ago who said, if we lose, it's because of white people. If we win, it's because of white people, which is true. No one is going to really have a public mainstream conversation about that because a lot of the people who are at these major networks would have to do an interrogation of themselves. Eddie Gall said days after the election on M-S-N-B-C, it was some well-meaning nice white woman who's making whatever amount of money that she's making who said, well, I just can't believe that so many American people, they were under this economic anxiety. And so Eddie Ga would say, listen, I love you. I think you're wonderful. But I think you can't look at the fact that this is racism because you'll have to look at yourself and you'll have to look at your family.
(24:35):
You'll have to look at your friends and your whole environment. And white people have never had to gauge themselves because the interrogation of our identity and who we are as human beings has always been an assignment for black America. I'll give you a perfect way to really break this down. When I was a teenager coming into the world and figuring myself out, I came home with my hat with the bib of the hat to the back, and my grandmother who was raising me said, the next time you come here with your hat turned to the back, I'm going to smack you so hard that your face will be turned around in a direction where that bib is so that the hat will be on you properly. Her whole point was that I don't want you to be viewed by police as someone who is a criminal right now.
(25:26):
I think that there is a lot to unpack there. But her whole point is that because you are black, there are certain types of stereotypes. There are certain things that are connected with how you look from the sagging of the pants, how you dress, how you talk. This is something that has been drilled into us since we were able to talk and comprehend. And so we have had a deep understanding of our identity. We have had to navigate the stereotypes of who we are. I remember when I was in the neighborhood in Chicago back when I was doing an internship, this is 25 years ago or so, and there were some black kids that turned on the fire hydrants and they were playing around in the water and everything. And so the white neighbor looks at me and says, don't you want to go and ask them to do something about it?
(26:16):
Now, here's the thing. He was clearly afraid of going to those kids because he feared for his personal safety. But there was so much in him even asking me that without him being explicit about it. Basically, you need to go talk to your people. You need to tell your people to get in line. And so there was so much in his request, but that's just another reminder of how if we are considered the good one, we're supposed police everyone else. And I've had many of those conversations at various levels of my existence, white people don't have to exist with that burden. And so when we come to these political moments, there is not any repetition of self critique and self-reflection because they have gone through all these years of fascism, all of this, a historical analysis of this country, and they have not had to be accountable to themselves or anyone else. There is no wonder why we are not able to diagnose the genesis of why we are here, which going back to what Ellie said a few weeks ago is whiteness. We will never be able to overcome what Trump is doing until we interrogate whiteness because this is what he is doing.
Leo Skepi (27:29):
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Terrell Starr (28:00):
And one more thing is that, and we'll probably get into it later on, is that with the recurrent party Democratic party set up, we have so many strains of ideological outlooks that I think that it's unsustainable like the Bernie crew and a OC folks, they need their own party, maybe not a OC so much now, but they need their own group of people because the way that we look at this country and the way that we diagnose it, they're going to always be this economic anxiety conversation that I will summarily reject, right? I will never have a class conversation about what's happening now. They will never change their minds. And so the one thing that the Republicans, why it's so easy for them to coalesce, why they're able to work together with their disinformation ecosystems, a daily caller, Fox News, you name it. Why they're able to work together is because whiteness is their primary unifying factor we have. So we got Gaza, we got Ukraine, we got all this other stuff that creates all these differences that we have to ask ourselves if it's even sustainable, if we want to move forward.
Andrea Chalupa (29:01):
And people shouldn't be afraid of multiple parties in the US because what democracies do like in France, is they form coalitions. They form coalitions, and I do want to say the Democratic Party establishment to quote Amanda Lipman, who is a pillar of the current Democratic Party. She was featured in Biden's 2020 Democratic National Convention. She founded the group run for something. She was high up there on Hillary Clinton's 2016 election writing Hillary Clinton's emails for the campaign. Amanda Lipman is very much considered a new generation Democrat. And what she said this week on social media is that we cannot look to the current crop of leadership to get us through this moment. First of all, they allowed this moment to happen. There wasn't any urgency, there wasn't any creativity. It was just sort of go with the flow and try to appear as normal and calm as possible.
(29:58):
And campaign with Liz Cheney, nevermind that she herself doesn't actually have a base of supporters other than Democrats in the mainstream that are craving normalcy that no longer exists and we cannot go back to it. Everything is burning down now. Everything is over. Our whole goal is to be creative and rebuild from the ashes, and we're going to do it because local organizing is everything. It still matters. The themes of this show do not change. It's what we launched with, which is grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left. You want to stop Trump. You want to keep your family safe, fight like hell in the state where you live, know who represents you and your state capital. Have them on speed dial, get bills in front of them to secure your elections, to expand the vote where you live, to protect the quality of life where you live and fight like hell to ensure that your governor, your attorney general, your secretary of state, all believe in good government and are aggressive fighting tooth and nail for those values.
(30:59):
That is how you stay safe in the years ahead, no matter what. You never give up on that. So the other thing I want to now highlight is what the very weak Biden administration needs to do in the precious time they have left. The reason why a strong man was able to win the 2024 election is because the incumbent in power was a weak man. Biden did the bare minimum for Ukraine in 2022 we're now a thousand days passed. Russia's full scale genocidal invasion of Ukraine and Biden is finally, finally getting around to letting Ukraine use missiles to destroy military targets in Russia used to slaughter civilians. Russia just unleashed the largest barrage of missiles all across Ukraine since the very start of its full scale invasion. That is because of Biden's own weakness, his own hand wringing, his own mythology over fearing escalation, or our government is so deeply captured by Russian interests that Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, is eyeing a job in the private sector after he leaves the White House.
(32:11):
And he sees that the Russians have captured the financial industry that Russians have captured Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry. So Jake Sullivan's like, well, I'm going to have to do business with these guys. So I want to show that I was on their side as well. He's hedging. It could be a combination of both. Biden was a weak man. He projected weakness. Yes, he was great for the workers, he was great for unions. His legislation meaningfully changed lives and meaningfully established a business culture, including in so-called states to make decarbonizing our economy profitable, the infrastructure bill and so on. He did do meaningful things, and he did put all his chips in a very old school Clinton administration way of thinking that it's the economy stupid. If we meaningfully improve people's lives economically, if we lower inflation, we'll be okay. That's not what happened, because things are not normal anymore and they haven't been normal for a while.
(33:01):
And this administration did not meet the moment Biden like a cuck, whatever that word is, let the DOJ let the Republicans and the Russians humiliate him and his family by what they did to Hunter Biden. Merrick Garland's, DOJ was far more aggressive to the President's son than the Russians, than Trump and the MAGA movement. Joe Biden is watching all this and not doing anything to say this is out of control. This is a total hatchet job. You lost a couple of your children. One of your remaining children is being witch hunted by your own DOJ by far right forces in the DOJ, and you're just going to sit back and take that. That is weak man. That is weak man. Part of why we lost is because a strong man will always be picked over a weak man. And Biden was a weak man across the board.
(33:50):
He went to Israel and he said, Israel, no war crimes. Then Israel gets charged by the international criminal court for war crimes along with Hamas, and there's arrest warrants. And Biden doesn't even sanction the low hanging fruit of the terrorists that Netanyahu has surrounded himself with for his own political survival. That looks weak, that looks incredibly weak, and on and on it goes. So I don't expect much from Biden on the way out, but we still have to apply pressure. And so here's what Biden can do to not only protect what's left of our country, but also to protect his legacy, which is always going to be remembered as the transitional president to dictatorship. Biden said he wanted to be a transition president. He's transitioning us to dictatorship. If he doesn't act with boldness now, with the precious time he has left, here's what he can do.
(34:42):
Biden can have an executive order to have US treasury seizes, whatever sovereign funds Russia has in the US and be completely transparent with what those holdings are, and then give that money over to Ukraine as reparations to further fund Ukraine's defense and rebuilding of the country and work with our allies around the world to do the same where they live. Remember, the reason why Putin and his court of oligarchs are collectively the richest people on this planet is because they steal from the Russian people just like Trump and his Kabbalah are about to do to us. So what Biden and our Democratic allies around the world need to do sees whatever Russian sovereign funds are around the world, Russian holdings, and give that money over to Ukraine. Now, this is, again, something they should have done at the start of the full scale invasion, and it projects weakness that they haven't done it yet.
(35:32):
The second thing they can do is rush everything they can long range missiles to Ukraine and work with the allies to rush, rush, rush. Ukraine is finally getting a tranche of defensive aid that it should have already gotten. That's how weak the Biden admin has been for Ukraine. And the third thing is when Obama was on his way out, Obama called for investigations and sanctions into Russia and against Russia, and that led to the FBI's Mueller investigation that needs to happen now into Russia's interference in this election, including investigating Elon Musk and all of the illegal support that he gave maga, including using Twitter as a platform of suppressing democratic voices and pumping out mag and Russian disinformation. There needs to be a new Mueller style and investigation because our press, our media cannot investigate all these crimes alone. They need help. So yes, the Mueller report didn't do shit, but what it did in terms of legal accountability, it did establish a historical record.
(36:38):
It did educate the American public and Russian operations. So there needs to be another Mueller type investigation into this MAGA election, including Elon Musk. The other thing that the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign need to do is they need to have Ace talk with the American people about the integrity of the 2024 election. We did two episodes alone on how MAGA was openly trying to steal the state of Georgia, including that they had hacked election software that is still being used in several states. Was this a fair and free election? Absolutely not. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for instance, the press the vote in a lot of these states. There was several hacking attempts just this year by the Russians of the State of Georgia, and on and on the list goes. So there needs to be transparency with the American people by the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign who have been campaigning all year on how Trump is a dictatorship and he comes to power, democracy is over, and instead they're glad handing Trump and taking photos with him at the White House.
(37:38):
You need to come forward with the American people, have straight talk with them, and be transparent about whether this was a free and fair election and bring to light all of the nefarious things that MAGA and Elon Musk and the Russians did in this election. To tilt the scales for Trump, you need to have that conversation issue reports, and that has to include a vote audit. Listen to the computer scientists, listen to the election security experts who have been warning you, warning you all year, and I'll link to the reports in the show notes for this episode. So Biden, Kamala, and Allied organizations need to come forward, push for vote audits, and have a conversation with American people about whether this was indeed a free and fair election. The other thing that the US and its allies must do is lower the price of oil because Russia builds its war machine off the price of oil and lowering the price of oil is what helped collapse the Soviet Union in the first place.
(38:34):
So if oil becomes super cheap, that's going to hurt the Russian war machine. Biden on his way out needs to pass sanctions on India and other regimes that help prop up Russia's war machine by buying and reselling cheap Russian gas. There needs to be the most aggressive sanctions possible placed on every actor that is funneling money and resources in the Russia's war machine. Do not hold back because this is our last chance to do it. And then Biden has to give Poland America's blessing to use its missile defense system to shoot down missiles across Ukraine to help Ukraine because Ukraine's missile defense is fraying. It's overwhelmed intentionally. And so Poland has asked, Hey guys, can we have your blessing to shoot down these missiles? Poland is a member of nato. They need the alliance's permission to do this. Biden and NATO should let Poland do this, to provide a missile defense shield to strengthen Ukraine's current missile defense shield.
(39:32):
This will show strength. It will not be escalation, and no, it'll not drag us into war because remember, we got dragged into World War II because Britain Chamberlain kept showing weakness and saying, okay, Putin. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, Hitler, we'll let you take a part of Czechoslovakia. Just don't go any further. Okay? And of course, Hitler was like, sure, shrug. And next thing you know, Hitler and Sta and joined forces and invade Poland, and that's what gets World War II started was the West weakness. And then finally, there needs to be background checks by the FBI ordered now on all of Trump's appointments, and that needs to be shared with the public. We need your help in transparency and exposing all the corruption. It all needs to become part of the public record now, oh, and of course, pass through as many judges as possible to fill the benches so we have just a little bit more of a buffer before Trump comes in and pollutes the rest of our court.
Terrell Starr (40:27):
You talk about this dynamic of weak versus strong leader, and I think that with Biden, his biggest mistake was reneging on his commitment to be a transitional president. So as soon as he was elected, he should have been grooming Kamala to run for four years during her vice presidential term. He never did that. And two, Biden, he has a very regal kind of outlook on how he legislates and how he politics, and so him doing all the things that you're saying would require Biden to not be who he's, I don't think it's going to happen, not because I don't think it's a good idea. I think all of your recommendations are sound. They're just not consistent with who Joe Biden is as a human being. And I don't think that Kamala Harris would be the person to do it either, because I think that she's trying to figure out how she's going to consolidate her power to run in 2028.
(41:22):
In regards to Poland, Poland is militarizing at a rate that I believe is faster than any other European Union country or NATO member, and so are in relationships with South Korea to buy military hardware from that country with the Poles and the other Eastern European countries. There are status in the alliance. It's tenable because there are two cultural differences between countries that are former Warsaw Pac countries that were part of the USSR versus countries who weren't. I think that there may be some possibility that they may form their own defense alliance potentially. I don't know what the legalities are within nato, but this current posture right now between the eastern and Western European members of the Alliance, I don't think it's sustainable because their threat perception is too different for this to go on long term. And you talk about talking straight to the American people, Biden feels like he has, but talking straight would require a certain type of literacy from the American public that this election cycle proves that they're not listening to Kamala Harris in the several months that she's been running since the summer, warned people about what Trump would do.
(42:42):
She talked about regulation of corporations and how that helps consumership. I feel like in their own way, they feel like they were talking straight. The thing about a lot of strong men throughout history, when you think about the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world, they're evil, right? Do we know of a strong man who's actually good? When you think about strongman, you think about dictator, you think about totalitarianism, and so what is the definition of a righteous, strong man? I'm not sure that we have it. There may be, but I can't think of one that comes to my mind right now. No, Obama was not a strong man. He was able to defeat the Hillary machine and then go on to be John McCain because he presented his own unique style of what the future could be if you followed him. And that's what Kennedy did.
(43:33):
That's what Bill Clinton did. And notice that when I bring up these people, Clinton was in the nineties. Obama was 2008. So these are people that come maybe every 20 or 30 years or 40 years. And so there has to be something exceptional in all these people. There is nothing exceptional in Trump or Hitler other than their hatred. They tap into something that is so easy to coalesce around because there are so many hateful people in this world. I just believe that with all of your recommendations, we really need to figure out what our version of righteous strength looks like. I don't know if we have that model that people can look to, because at the end of the day, people want to be led, most people to ask them to be proactive. I hate to say it's a bit too much. Now. Maybe I'm severely underestimating the American public or people in general, but most people are not going to mobilize in the way that we are. All of the great movements that happen in the world happen with a few people in the small room, whether it's women's rights movement to get women's rights to vote, the Fannie Lou Hamers of the world. This is a small group of people who made a world of difference.
Andrea Chalupa (44:45):
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the Truth teller level or higher on Patreon. Gaslit Nation hosts come as you are political salons every Monday at 4:00 PM Eastern can't make it live. Recordings are available to our community on Patreon. Our salons are your space to vent, ask questions, and connect with other listeners who also really, really hate Nazis to help Ukraine with urgently needed humanitarian aid. Join me in donating to Roso for ukraine@rosoforukraine.org to help refugees in conflict zones donate to Doctors Without borders@doctorswithoutborders.org. And if you want to help, critically endangered orangutans are already under pressure from the palm oil industry. Donate to The Orangutan project@theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our editing wizard is Nicholas Torres and our associate producers Carlin Daigle. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check at our Patreon.
(45:46):
It keeps us going. Original music and Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Berg, Nick Farr, Damien Ariaga, and Carlin Daigle. Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smite of the New York based Firm order. Thank you so much. Hamish Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the producer level on Patreon and Higher Ice Bear is defiant. Sidney Davies, work For Better Prep For Trouble. Lily Wachowski. John Schoenthal. Larry Gusan, Dee Scott, Ann Bertino, David East, Joseph Mara Jr. Sean Berg, Kristen Custer, Kevin Gannon, Sandra Nans, Katie Urus, James D. Leonard. Leo Chalupa. Carol Goad, Marcus j Trent, Joe Darcy, Ann Marshall. D Sing Field, Nicole Spear. Abby Road. Jans Stri. Rasmussen. Mark. Mark, Sarah Gray, Diana Gallagher Campbell, Abby Zavos, Tanya Chalupa. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you.