Minority Rule
How do we protect ourselves from a corrupt Supreme Court? How can the gerrymandering crisis be stopped? What were the Founding Fathers thinking? Can the American Experiment survive?
Ari Berman of Mother Jones stops by Gaslit Nation to discuss his new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It. Berman shares insights into the troubling compromises that made the U.S. Constitution, the Koch-funded far-right plan to turn America into a dictatorship, GOP laboratories of autocracy in swing states like Wisconsin, what an American dictatorship would look like, and how to avoid that fate this November and beyond.
This week's bonus show includes a look at the growing campus protests over Israel's genocide in Gaza, Republican "free speech" hypocrisy, the need for radical self-care to build movements, and Ari Berman’s take on the Gaslit Nation Self-Care Q&A, leading to some surprising answers. To get access to our bonus shows and invites to exclusive events, receive all episodes ad-free, and more, be sure to subscribe at the Truth-teller level or higher on Patreon.com/Gaslit! Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
To our Patreon community, the Gaslit Nation Make Art Workshop: The Business Side of Things will publish, along with the transcript, the morning of Saturday May 4th! In the meantime, check out our Art is Survival chat group to connect with other artists in our community of listeners!
Show Notes:
Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People--And the Fight to Resist It by Ari Berman https://bookshop.org/p/books/minority-rule-ari-berman/19994801?ean=9780374600211
Opening Clip: Historian Timothy Snyder schools Marjorie Taylor Greene https://twitter.com/rshereme/status/1781337606808060042
Clip: Medhi Hasan to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "What do you say to a young progressive or an Arab-American who says to you, 'I just can't vote for Biden again after what he's enabled in Gaza.'?”
https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1781120448186462407
Havana Syndrome evidence suggests who may be responsible for mysterious brain injuries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdPSD1SUYCY
Havana Syndrome mystery continues as a lead military investigator says bar for proof was set impossibly high
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/havana-syndrome-culprit-investigation-new-evidence-60-minutes-transcript/
Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68706317
Havana Syndrome: The History Behind the Mystery
https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/04/havana-syndrome-the-history-behind-the-mystery/
Russia Is Buying Politicians in Europe. Is It Happening Here Too? A former CIA officer explains how a vast, pro-Putin corruption network uncovered in Europe is a warning sign for the U.S.
https://newrepublic.com/article/180630/russia-corruption-network-europe-buying-politicians-america
Europe—but Not NATO—Should Send Troops to Ukraine To Halt Russia’s Advance, Kyiv Needs More Boots on the Ground
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/europe-not-nato-should-send-troops-ukraine
Anne Applebaum: “The pro-Russian caucus inside the GOP was defeated on Saturday, and with it Putin's dream of quickly occupying Ukraine. Now the US and Europe need to seize the moment to win, and end, the war” https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1782206525144015039
Netanyahu Resists U.S. Plan to Cut Off Aid to Israeli Military Unit: After months of inaction, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is poised to bar U.S. aid to an Israeli unit accused of human rights abuses
More than 200 bodies found in mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Gaza
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/more-than-200-bodies-found-in-mass-grave-at-nasser-hospital-in-gaza
With Whom are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator – Israel
What to know about the U.N. vote on whether to admit Palestinians as full members
David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio: “I'm a Jew-loving Jew. Anti-Semitism is never ok. Here's what is not anti-Semitism: Peaceful protest, criticism of the Israeli government, calling for an independent Palestine, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, using the term apartheid to describe Israel, questioning Zionism.” https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1782406544287482221
How Johnson came to embrace Ukraine aid and defy his right flank
These 112 House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid
US House passes $95 billion Ukraine, Israel aid package, sends to Senate
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-vote-long-awaited-95-billion-ukraine-israel-aid-package-2024-04-20/
Congress passes bill that could unlock billions in frozen Russian assets for Ukraine More than $6 billion of the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets are sitting in U.S. banks.
Mike Johnson's Campaign Contributions From Company Tied to Russia
https://www.newsweek.com/house-speaker-mike-johnson-donations-russia-butina-1838501
CIA chief Pompeo met with sanctioned Russian spies, officials confirm
Pompeo on releasing 5,000 prisoners in Afghanistan in deal with the Taliban
Mike Pompeo is a Russia hawk, which could be a problem for his friend Trump
Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says
Marjorie Taylore Green: When you want to talk about misinformation, Mr. Snyder, you might actually look a little closer to American media if you don't like what they're saying. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back. Mr. Chairman,
Member of Congress: Does he have the opportunity to respond to the general lady? Sure.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Thank you. I didn't ask him a question. Mr. RA fired.
Member of Congress: You asked multiple questions.
Timothy Snyder: First of all, I'd like to thank the representative from Georgia by making clear with her comments and with her person that any discussion of political warfare has to include Russia, Ukraine, and America. She's just demonstrated that point, I think very powerfully. On the question of Nazis, I've written two books as a historian about Nazis and the Holocaust on the question of Ukrainian nationalism, I am the leading scholar of that subject in North America, and I've been writing about it for 20 years. If the Chamber is interested in the degree of far right participation in Ukrainian politics, you can be assured that no far right party has ever crossed 3%, 3% in Ukrainian election. So of course there are bad people in every country, but by any comparative standard is a very small phenomenon in Russia. On the other hand, the army includes openly Nazi formations such as roic. The government itself is fascist in character, and it is carrying out a war which includes deportation of children by the tens of thousands, the open intention of destroying a state as well as mass torture. So if we're looking for fascism, and if there is anyone who is sincerely concerned about halting fascism or racism, you would wish to halt Russia.
Andrea Chalupa: Hey everyone. Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the must Watch film, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. I'm telling you it is about right now what Putin, what Russia, what MAGA is doing to Ukraine today. It is an ongoing genocide that is threatening the entire world. Why? Because Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. Ukraine feeds the world, especially countries in Africa and the Middle East with incredibly food, vulnerable populations. And Russia has been destroying agricultural output for Ukraine, littering fields that once fed the world full of golden wheat with landmines and so on. So if you want to know why, one of the reasons why we are hit hard with inflation, it's in part because of Russia's war. This is Putin's inflation, the Kremlin's inflation, and they don't have to worry about inflation because they have built up a totalitarian hostage state where they don't have any elections whatsoever.
Andrea Chalupa: Putin's an illegitimate, he's not a president, he's a dictator, and that's how he must increasingly be treated by the world. So watch the film, share it with everyone. And of course, our opening clip, as you heard, because he is a three-time guest on this show is the extraordinary human being and historian Timothy Snyder, who was one of several historical advisors on Mr. Jones and the author of several bestselling books including Bloodlands Europe, between Hitler and Stalin, how those two mass murderers influenced each other. And Bloodlands opens up with the story of Gareth Jones, the real life hero of Mr. Jones, who is his life and career to expose Stalin's genocide, famine, Ukraine, the whole lot more. Tim, in this clip schools Russian shill, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who speaks like she has offshore Russian bank accounts somewhere because she likely does Ottman, the Russian mafia expert, a longtime friend and friend of the show.
Andrea Chalupa: She was telling me that Russian Telegram channels are all a flutter, really furious after this big Ukraine aid vote passed on Saturday. And the big buzz, the telegram channels coming out of Russia are saying, what are we paying these idiots in Congress for? Our money's wasted. All that money we threw at them, and they still eventually passed Ukraine aid. So the Russians did get their money's worth. I want to be very clear about that. As one member, member of Congress pointed out and a piece for CNN, this Ukraine aid package should have been wrapped up by Christmas. And instead even if the Senate votes on it this week, as they will, and Biden signs it this week as he will, and even with the CIA and the US defense ready to ship out that aid, let's say in the coming weeks, it's still reaching Ukraine in full force this summer.
Andrea Chalupa: This should have all been done by Christmas. And I want to also remind everyone this was the bare minimum, the bare minimum just to keep them giving Ukraine a fighting chance. So let's have all a healthy perspective here. What Ukraine ultimately needs is so much more to end the war. Instead, they are being given a drip, drip drip of an IV just to stay in the fight and basically to further a war of attrition. And it's just simply not enough. And I don't want to down everybody's celebration and good time because it was a huge psychological relief. It was a huge relief. You had members of Congress calling soldiers on the front lines of Ukraine who've been eagerly awaiting this news, and it did show that the center held our very fraying, vulnerable, infiltrated institutions held. But Russia still got its money's worth, despite what the furious Russian trolls are saying.
Andrea Chalupa: They absolutely got their money's worth because you had six months of Ukraine being a sitting duck with dwindling ammunition with more and more Iran drones and North Korean missiles getting through Ukraine's fraying defenses, air defense systems, and more and more civilians being slaughtered, including the very significant culturally, technologically innovative hub of haki of Ukraine, which is filled with universities and young people, certainly was before the war. That's where we filmed parts of Mr. Jones. Haki is a very young university city. I don't know what it's like today, but it's been ambushed with missiles since Mike Johnson and MAGA deliberately stopped blocking Ukraine aid successfully for six months. So yes, they did inflict damage. Yes, Trump did successfully serve his masters in the Kremlin for six months. The same dirty court of Russian oligarchs that have propped up the Trump family for decades. If you read the books by Craig Unger, Mike Johnson, why did he finally do what he did?
Andrea Chalupa: Because he had no choice. He had the worst hand to play. He had a one member majority in the Congress and a significant number of Republicans who were joining forces with Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats to pressure Mike Johnson to do this. They could have gotten at least one or two members on the Republican side to flip go independent, and that would be a perfectly normal and respectable thing for them to do, given how toxic MAGA is and given how being an independent these days in a time of hyperpolarization would make them stand out, build some street cred, they could have gone that route and Johnson would've been out completely and humiliated. And so Johnson politically was core nerd. He had an extremely weak hand. He had no choice. He'd ran out the clock. He ran out the clock as long as he possibly could without endangering himself.
Andrea Chalupa: So I want to point out to everyone, Maga the cult of Maga, Marjorie Taylor Greene was not the threat here against Johnson. It was more the Normies of Congress, the mainstream. They outnumbered the MAGA cult and they had the stronger hand to play here and they played it brilliantly and they won. They cornered him and they won Marjorie Taylor Greene and the MAGA cultist. They had overplayed their hand. They had that whole exhaust exhausting leadership battle where they pushed out Kevin McCarthy, the Democrats just watched from the sidelines, let that happen, and that was a big chaotic mess. There was no appetite for that in Congress. That's emotionally exhausting right now for Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene was just a troll, like all talk when it comes to that threat. She's not going to get the backing like she did against Kevin McCarthy, who generally nobody liked anyway.
Andrea Chalupa: So here you had it. The stronger hand was with the Normies in Congress and they won and they won with a very extensive pressure campaign that included Belo evangelical Mike Pompeo, who before his time as a disastrous Secretary of state serving Trump and the Kremlin meeting with Kremlin agents, Kremlin officers in the military that were sanctioned meeting with them on US soil. I'll link to that in the show notes so you can read up on that. Being the Secretary of State that thought it was a good idea to release 5,000 or so Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan, which set us up for disaster. There is a very scary pullout under Biden and so on. So Mike Pompeo was a huge disaster as Secretary of State. He funneled much cheated resources deliberately to Christian groups on the ground in Iraq and so on. He's a proud evangelical who was able to speak that language to Mike Johnson, a fellow proud evangelical.
Andrea Chalupa: Why did Mike Pompeo come out swinging on behalf of cran aid? Because before he was a MAGA idiot, his time in Congress, he was a Russian hawk. He was very outspoken in importance of deterring Russia. So he came from that sort of reaganite culture. So that was a heavy hitter that they used in the pressure campaign of Johnson. And on top of that, you had a CIA director Bill Burns who sat down and said, look, here are the stakes. If we don't stop Russia and Ukraine, there's going to be an all out war with nato. And the big screaming subtext there is Mike Johnson has a son at the US Naval Academy. And like any politician's kid, it's very clear in this tight-knit family, and we know it's a tight-knit family because they were featured on a German documentary where Mike Johnson took his daughter to some evangelical debutante ball where she prompts to have sex with only one man, her future husband.
Andrea Chalupa: How weird is that, right? So we know from that documentary, they're a very tight knit family and that Mike Johnson's son, who's now at the US Naval Academy, surely like any politician's kid, has a sight set on some prestigious political career maybe being a congressman himself. And what's a great stepping stone towards that military service, right? Bo Biden did it fighting in Iraq and came back exposed to lethal chemicals that ultimately killed him. So the last thing Mike Johnson once is for his son to actually see some action in a war. And so he had ultimately a selfish motive here where he thought about his kid amazingly. So when it finally his home came down to him, he did the right thing for his own family. It finally got through to him that if we don't stop Russia in Ukraine, the war will get out of control and soon you'll have to have US soldiers drafted to finally stop Russia.
Andrea Chalupa: We're already at the point, and you can see it in the show notes for this week's episode, that leading thinkers longtime Russia watchers who have been right in their predictions for years, their credibility is strong. They are joining a growing chorus of voices in Europe, which includes President McCan of France saying, we may not have NATO on the ground, NATO soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to stop Russia, but we do need to start normalizing having European soldiers on the ground, countries like France, sending their soldiers to Ukraine independent of NATO, exercising their own autonomy, not as a NATO member, but as a country with their own sovereignty in mind. You already have Denmark sending everything it possibly can to Ukraine because the Danes are scared. They've experienced their own occupation under fascism during World War ii, and they've had all sorts of harassment over recent years by this Kremlin doing all sorts of illegal things in Danish waters and so on.
Andrea Chalupa: And I'll link to that in the show notes. So what I'm telling you is this war is real. This war is global, and Mike Johnson did not see, Jesus did not see the light when it came to this decision. Whatever he may claim, he saw his own flesh and blood being a victim of it. So all of those things combined. The extensive pressure campaign, which included grassroots pressure, which included a lot of reporting in the press, exposing and amplifying his Kremlin links, which are there, which are strong. Remember, he got caught taking Kremlin linked money in 2018, and not just any Kremlin linked money, but money connected to an oligarch who essentially ran Russian spy Maria bna, right? That's not just any Kremlin money. That's money that was core to the whole Moer investigation and the Russian intelligence report. So Mike Johnson was getting massive pressure in the press.
Andrea Chalupa: Then you had growing reporting of how Russia has been slaughtering evangelicals and Christians in Ukraine. So what I'm telling you is it took a massive collective effort to finally stop the Russian backed MAGA blockade of urgently needed bare minimum A to Ukraine, and obviously thank God it happened, but do not normalize that Johnson was some sort of hero of conscience. No, he ultimately had a bad hand to play and he had selfish personal motives for finally doing it, and that was his son. Alright, so there you have, it was wonderful things that the bill included unblocking billions in frozen Russian assets for Ukraine. So Ukraine could ultimately see 300 billion in frozen Russian assets. 6 billion of that is right now sitting in US banks and ready to go just a wire transfer, and we need to expand that number of 300 billion. We need get more of that money because that's really where it hurts them Already you're seeing reports that the yacht industry is suffering from all of these Russian sanctions.
Andrea Chalupa: So more of that, please. Now the final vote count came down to not a single Democrat in the house voting against aid for Ukraine, and half of Republicans, 112 Republicans voted against it. I want to be very, very clear, their six month block was still very much a victory for Putin and all of us knowing that Putin has 112 Republicans sitting right now in Congress ready to do his bidding and vote in his interest, that's a victory for the Kremlin and the Kremlin is going to continue to play that hand the best it possibly can, and this is an extraordinarily dangerous election for all of us, 2024 because the Kremlin is going to pull out all the stops to get Trump back in power. They're going to use all sorts of active measures, intimidation tactics, going after dissidents. Even anyone with Russian blood who's fully American, grew up here, American pastor and so on, and it is an extremely dangerous time for us.
Andrea Chalupa: I've had multiple friends who reach out to me about the harassment campaigns, including one friend with a desperate look in her eyes, tell me that she's being followed ever since her trip back from Ukraine where she was doing humanitarian missions. She's been followed ever since. She's in New York, so wake the fuck up. Christopher Ray's FBI, Biden get Ray out of power after what he did to us with letting January 6th happen. That was an attack against our democracy planned out in the open, and yet Ray is still there and his own FBI agents are reported to have been sabotaging the investigation after January 6th. And the coup plotters are still out there out and about with their podcasts. You have Manafort back officially back on the Trump campaign taking all sorts of pictures being normalized by this media, and you have the New York Times normalizing all of it because they can't wait to get Trump back.
Andrea Chalupa: Why? Because the New York Times is not the newspaper of record as my film Mr. Jones shows the New York Times is the newspaper of power. It always has been. It always will be. They're on the side of power and it's the fascists that exude power for the sake of power. They don't care who they have to steamroll how much money they have to steal. So the fascism is first and foremost a power for sake of power movement. It's not about good governance, it's not about human rights, it's not about environmental justice. It's not about making a world safer for all of us so that children have a livable future, a sustainable future for life here, and that it is about power for the sake of power. And the New York Times is a newspaper about power for the sake of power, and that's why they're normalizing Trump. That's why they are whitewashing Israeli war crimes right now and so on.
Andrea Chalupa: So that is where we are in this moment of time. It's an extraordinarily dangerous year for all of us, especially those on the front lines of human rights work, including dissidents. The threats are back, metaphor is back. I'm pretty pissed about all of this where things stand. So if you think I was going to come here all rosy or just like, oh, Mike Johnson saw the light. No, no, no, no. The danger has never been greater and it pisses me off to live in such an environment. I really wish I had a podcast about something else, okay, purely about filmmaking, purely about something fun and relaxing. But here I am ringing the alarm and calling on Biden to please clean house, to please make this world safe, especially here on American soil, safe for dissonance, safe for people that do this work that we're doing here together, fighting for our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa: It's a very vulnerable time for all of us. It's so important that you check out the show notes for this week's episode where I will have recent reporting on Havana syndrome because it sounds too extreme to be true, but the documentation, the credible reporting is all there. Many of the attacks happened on US soil, and here you have the Biden administration under Secretary of State Blinken trying to cover up those crimes and downplay the fact that over a thousand people, over a thousand men and women working for embassies around the world, the CIA, even the FBI here on US soil and their families were targeted by some advanced energy weapon that the Russians, we know the Russians have been developing since the Cold War. It is documented that in the 1950s through much of the 1970s, the Soviet Union blasted the US Embassy in Moscow with microwaves, US diplomats and other people stationed there became seriously ill.
Andrea Chalupa: That is all documented Again, look to the show notes for this week's episode. It's all there. Secretary of State and War Criminal, Henry Kissinger tried to cover it up. Advanced energy weapons are still being used on men and women today, including as recently, as far as we know, as recently as July, 2023, where a senior US Department of Defense official was targeted. And so they've advanced some sort of energy weapon against us and there's no meaningful response from the Americans other than to try to downplay it and cover it up because God forbid if this should create a panic and suppress the recruitment effort and suppress current missions because what you want is good men and women serving their country in some of these hotspots around the world like Key of Ukraine, but these people, these talented people have to relocate with their families. Why would they accept such a dangerous mission if there's some sort of advanced weapon system that we're up against and there's no real transparent solution on how to confront this and keep our men and women safe.
Andrea Chalupa: So again, this is a global war. This is a global war. It's a dangerous time, and the good guys need to act with greater urgency and more boldness. So no, there is no cheering for Congress for doing the bare minimum for Ukraine, which is doing the majority of the fighting, the dying for all of us in this global war. I want to turn now to Israel and Palestine because of course, the vote on Saturday included 26 billion for Israel. 8 billion of that was going to humanitarian aid for Gaza as long as, of course the Israelis let it through, they have been blocking aid, allowing it to trickle in, making it harder to get to where it needs to go, and they've been causing all sorts of war crimes, mass murdering well over 30,000 civilians. I think the number is now 34,000. The majority women and children, according to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, Israel has deliberately caused starvation in Gaza, which of course breaks international law.
Andrea Chalupa: What you are seeing is Israeli national policy to terrorize mass murder, push out whatever Palestinians remain from the 1948 Nakba, the original push out genocide by Israel against Palestinians sending many abroad, including a neighboring Arab countries. And so what we're seeing is a new nakba to finish the job. That is what Netanyahu and his ruling coalition of terrorists are doing. And because the US government, US foreign policy under Biden is stubbornly sticking to status quo even recently blocking a bid by the Palestinian authority, which is not Hamas, but the Palestinian authority that does have some authority over Palestinians in the West Bank where they are widely terrorized by Israeli settlers, which has grown more brazen in recent years under Netanyahu. So the Palestinian Authority put forward a vote in the United Nations to try to get official recognition as a Palestinian state. The US block the vote, the US' argument is following longstanding policy that they want to establish some sort of peace agreement first between Palestinians and Israelis before establishing a two state solution that is obviously the wrong thing to do and is not meet this moment, especially all the horror we have seen unleashed by Netanyahu's government against Palestinians.
Andrea Chalupa: And so because of the stubborn, proud Zionist US foreign policy under Biden and Blinken, you have these growing campus protests, Columbia, N-Y-U-M-I-T, Yale, they're growing. The vast majority are peaceful, and there's all sorts of disinformation hitting them, and as a result, you have the NYPD being called in to Columbia. You have protestors being arrested, you have faculty marching in solidarity with them being arrested. This to me is the big story, not the Trump trial. If you want to know about the Trump trials going on now, like the H Money case, he's going to get off. You know that, right? You know that. So we don't count on those trials for any form of justice. The big story is stopping this genocide, stopping this genocide, and stopping also media complacency towards this genocide. For instance, there were shocking reports coming around many parts of the world on Nassar Hospital and Gaza, where mass graves were found with several hospital workers with their arms tied behind their backs.
Andrea Chalupa: Many of the victims found in the mass graves were patients. You could see it with casts on their bodies from injuries and so on, and you can try to blame Hamas for hiding behind these hospitals as human shields and so on. But I assure you, this is not the fault of Hamas. Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, if you need me to say it, yes it is. I think Hamas is Animal Farm. Any pro-Palestinian liberation activist anywhere in the world who thinks that their hope lies in Hamas for a liberated Palestine, a two-state solution, you are wrong. Their leaders are just as corrupt and rich and lie and spread propaganda just as blatantly as Netanyahu's terrorists or the Russian terrorists that back both sides of this conflict because it drives a wedge in the global Democratic alliance standing up to the Kremlin right now, and it's dividing Trump's opposition right now and it can successfully suppress the vote in electoral college.
Andrea Chalupa: It's a very dangerous moment right now. What is happening and Biden's foreign policy is making it worse and he needs to wake up. For instance, ProPublica revealed that Secretary of State, Anna Lee Blinken has been ignoring urgent protests and reports desperately calling on him to trigger the Israel Lahey Vetting forum. That panel made up of Middle East and human rights experts is named for Senator Patrick Lahey, a former senator Democratic Center from Vermont, and he was the author of a 1987 laws that require the US to cut off American financed arms and training to any foreign military or law enforcement units that are credibly accused of flagrant human rights violations according to ProPublica. And Blinken has yet to do that. He's flirting with doing it to a select few Israeli IDF units, but the number of soldiers he's considering targeting are very small compared to the flagrant war crimes carried out in front of our eyes by Netanyahu's government, human rights organizations, several of them are united and saying they've never seen anything like this in recent modern warfare.
Andrea Chalupa: For instance, you have Netanyahu already going into Rafa in southern Gaza where 1.4 million civilians are desperately sheltered, crammed into homes. Think of Rafa as a refugee camp and Netanyahu, the Israelis are already bombing it, and Biden and Blinken are just paying lip service and there's no real incentivizing being done to force Netanyahu to stop. It is not in Netanyahu's interest to stop because he has not faced any consequences. Only consequences will stop these people and those who are demanding accountability, demanding the genocide to stop are on the right side of history. Stop. If you are against George w Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, you should be absolutely against what Israel is doing to Palestinians. It is the same side of history, okay? And that's where everyone needs to be right now. David Rothko of the Deep State Radio Podcast sums it up perfectly in a thread I'll link to in the show notes. He writes, I'm a Jew loving Jew. Antisemitism is never okay. Here's what is not antisemitism peaceful protest criticism of the Israeli government calling for an independent Palestine demanding a ceasefire in Gaza using the term apartheid to describe Israel questioning Zionism. And you could read the full thread in the show notes. I'm going to end this segment with a clip of Hassan interviewing Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
Medhi Hasan: What do you say to a young progressive or an Arab American who says to you, I just can't vote for Biden again after what he's enabled in Gaza. What do you say to them?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I mean, I think everyone comes to this prospect in this conversation with a different history, different background, what they bring for an individual Palestinian American that has had their family killed. There is nothing. I mean, I am not here to lecture anyone. I also think that this election is more, in my personal view, I believe this election is about more than president, and also it's not just one election that's happening. We're having hundreds of elections. Yes, the balance of Congress, the balance of the house, the balance of the Senate, and the presidency. And I have a vested interest in protecting democracy, not just here domestically, but globally. And I truly do not believe this as a lesser of two evils type of situation. I think about what conditions do I want to be organizing under in the next four years. We can look at both of these individuals oppositionally as well depending on what issue you have, but I would rather, even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump who is not. He seeks to dismantle American democracy, and I am taking that personally very seriously because we will not be able to organize for any movement towards anything if we are facing the jailing of dissidents. I mean, this is the kind of authoritarianism that he threatens, and we have to take it seriously
Andrea Chalupa: Here to help us take it seriously, is journalist Aari Berman of Mother Jones, who is out with a new must read book on the struggle to save our democracy. It's called Minority Rule, the right wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it.
Andrea Chalupa: So the founding fathers, many of them were inspired by these John Lockean ideas of equality for all of course, white elite men. That's what they had in mind. But they really felt like there were these spiritual revolutionaries, very much of the zeitgeist of their time. And then with the Revolutionary War, all the destruction and instability that this wrought, you had unpaid veterans, many of them permanently wounded who were demanding overdue payment and so on. So they had real mobs on their own soil that they were contesting with during the years following the Revolutionary War, even when you win a war the years after our times of mass trauma, mass instability and so on. So they were faced with growing dissatisfied mobs themselves, and then across the pond, you had Hero of the Revolution, Lafayette, who was in prison during the reign of terror, where you had this popular uprising against the King of France that beheaded the king and queen and so many of their friends and allies and family members in this bloodbath of a guillotine. And against this backdrop of populous terror, you could say our constitution was born.
Ari Berman: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, obviously you have to think about the historical context they were operating in, right? I mean, first off, they thought of democracy in many ways in terms of direct democracy. So they were concerned about assemblies ancient Greece. They didn't want that. They wanted a representative democracy, and they wanted a representative democracy. Most representatives would be insulated from the public. But the fascinating thing is, if you go back and look at the constitutional debates, there was a lot of debate about these institutions themselves, and there was a lot of compromises that the founders made. So it wasn't like there was unanimity on these things. They were aware in many cases that where they were making compromises that a lot of them weren't crazy about. So take the Senate for example, the idea that each state should have two senators, the same number of senators.
Ari Berman: That was something that a lot of the framers opposed James Madison, who's thought of as the father of the Constitution. He was extremely opposed to this idea because he thought that it would allow a minority of states to thwart the will of a much larger majority of states, which of course is what has happened in the US Senate. He signed off on it. He wanted the Constitution to be ratified, but he wasn't happy about the fact that each state had the same number of senators, same with the presidency. There were framers that argued that the president should be directly elected by the people, even back in 1787 that was argued, and a lot of arguments were made against it. They thought that the people would be duped or they weren't informed enough to make a decision or that it wouldn't give enough protection for the small states or the slave states.
Ari Berman: But that was debated at the time. The electoral college wasn't something that the framers had planned all along. It was basically like, we don't want the president to be directly elected by the people, so let's come up with some crazy complicated alternative instead. So there were these tensions, even back in 1787 between democratic and anti-democratic forces. What we see over and over again is that the constitution that was created was a product of these compromises, and often what happened is the compromises would favor smaller states or it would favor slave states, or it would favor wealthy white property owners. So over and over, these privileged minorities were getting preferential treatment in ways that would hurt this much larger and more diverse majority, and I think that's what sparked and laid the groundwork for minority rule to become a reality across the US society and across US history.
Andrea Chalupa: Now, let's fast forward to Wisconsin in recent history and how key swing states and electoral college have become these laboratories for autocracy of minority rule.
Ari Berman: Yeah, so we're fast forwarding many years from the founding. It's basically the kind of same idea that this essentially powerful conservative white minority would rule and would rule a state in Wisconsin that was known for being a laboratory for progressive reform was a place that gave birth to labor unions and the first programs for social security and all of these different kind of reforms. It was captured by the conservative right after the 2010 election. This didn't just happen in Wisconsin, it happened in a lot of other key swing states as well, backed up by a lot of dark money. The idea was there was a whole project within the Republican party both to take back these states in reaction to Barack Obama's election and then to draw new districts that would then enshrine Republican rule for the next decade and beyond. And Wisconsin became the laboratory for this strategy, and the idea was you take away all the democratic rights essentially that would allow you to be ousted from office.
Ari Berman: So they went after labor unions very early on because that was the main arm of the Democratic party and the progressive movement. They passed new restrictions on voting to make it harder for democratic constituencies to be able to organize and cast ballots. They gerrymandered so that it would be very difficult to ever ous the Republicans who were passing these unpopular policies from office. And it was basically an example of how a state could move from majority rule to minority rule, and it was the national model. They felt like if we could do this in Wisconsin, which is a state that was known for good government politics, for democratic reform, if we can do it in Wisconsin, then we can export it all across the country. And while the Democrats control the federal government, we're going to make the states the laboratory for autocracy that we replicate in state after state after state.
Andrea Chalupa: So reading in your book about the Koch brothers dark money political network, the Koch brothers were heavily influenced by their father, Fred Koch, who built up the family fortune and also built up the John Birch Society as well as helped build a Nazi oil refinery.
Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean, these Republican mega donors are the oligarchs of American society, and their influence transcends politics, as you mentioned. I always find it extremely unnerving when I take my daughters to the Natural History Museum and I see the Fred Koch or whatever wing of Charles, David Koch wing of dinosaurs, and I'm just thinking this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you should have named after someone who's spent their entire career undermining basic rights and science as well. But you're right. I mean, first off, the Koch brothers, their father, Fred Koch was very active in the John Birch Society and the John Birch Society was this extremely radical group that really was not just anti-communist, but opposed to the civil rights movement opposed to essentially all kind of modern rights, said that there was this kind of international communist conspiracy that included the civil rights movement that included Chief Justice Earl Warren that included basically all of the democratic movement of the 1960s, and they were very radical and retrograde and very much on the extreme.
Ari Berman: I mean, even the birchers were even too extreme for many Republicans. But their idea started to seep into the Republican party, and the Koch started organizing, and Wisconsin kind of became the laboratory for where these mega donors organized. It wasn't just the Kochs, there was a foundation based in Wisconsin, the Bradley Foundation that was funded by the Cokes and others, and they worked behind basically Scott Walker's agenda in Wisconsin. They wrote the policies that got implemented, things like going after unions and repealing collective bargaining rights for teachers and municipal workers. I mean, that was an idea that came out of the Bradley Foundation and all of the think tanks they funded. I was stunned to see when you look at just how many conservative organizations were propped up by these foundations, these conservative foundations. So there was a lot of money behind the strategy, and it was a well thought out strategy. It was a strategy that predated Scott Walker. It's a strategy that predated Donald Trump. I mean, they basically, since the 1960s when conservatives lost the battle over civil rights, when they lost the battle largely over the cultural norms of America and the country became a lot more democratic, a lot more multiracial and formerly disenfranchised communities were able to win new rights. That then led to this backlash that the Kochs and others started organizing to try to take back the country from all of these other forces.
Andrea Chalupa: Do you think it's possible that America becomes a dictatorship?
Ari Berman: God, I don't know if it becomes a flat out dictatorship, but in a liberal democracy like the kind we have in Hungary where basically we have democratic institutions, but they're actually not democratic, they're controlled by this radical right-wing faction that has rigged every facet of democracy so that only they can win and hold power. I think that's very plausible because I think that first off, there's these built-in biases in our system already. The electoral colleges set up in a way that it favors Republicans more than Democrats because it gives more power to more conservative and wider areas than more diverse and progressive areas. Same with the US Senate, based on the fact that every state gets two senators, so that means that Wyoming has 67 times the representation of a place like California, so small, rural, wider, more conservative states. The places that favor Trump are dramatically overrepresented in the Senate.
Ari Berman: Then you have the Supreme Court that's a product of these two institutions. So then you have an undemocratic way of electing the president, an undemocratic way of electing Congress that leads to an undemocratic supreme court. So I would say these institutions are already rigged in the GOP's favor. The question is, do you have a strong man who comes in and starts getting rid of the remaining checks and balances that exist in the system? That's what Donald Trump wanted to do at the end of his term in 2020. And he was unsuccessful. He was unsuccessful either because there were built-in checks and balances, or he didn't do it through the normal processes, or he wasn't smart enough in terms of how he thought about doing this. The question is, if Trump returns to power in 2024, could he do it? And will that basically be, I think that's basically going to be his overriding priority for a second term, is how to create a quote democracy like we have in Hungary.
Ari Berman: That's not really a democracy at all. And would there be institutions that would fight back against it? I think people think there would be, but you take a closer look at those institutions and what would those institutions be? Would it be the Supreme Court with a six to three conservative majority? Would it be a Senate that's controlled by the GOP? Would it be a house that has a Republican majority? I mean, I don't think if that happens, if there's a trifecta in Washington, I don't know that we can count on any of those institutions to act as a real check on Trump.
Andrea Chalupa: No, without question. And what concerns me is that going into this election where the incumbent is naturally always favored, I worry that there's going to be enough votes for the Republicans and the Senate and the House that we end up with a Republican trifecta because enough people assume Biden's just going to win. So they vote for the Republican for Congress.
Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean, hopefully people are freaked out enough by the polls showing Biden losing to Trump, but they don't do that. But you just look at the situation with the Senate right now, I mean all that Republicans need to do is flip two states that are very conservative, West Virginia, and then a little bit less conservative, but still conservative in Montana, and then they're able to get a majority of Senate seats despite representing just 42% of the population, which I think is incredible. This idea that over and over and over, you have Republican majorities in the Senate representing a minority of Americans. But that would be the situation if Republicans win those two seats. So I mean, that's why they're favored to win the Senate. Then you have the house. The house can be swung by partisan gerrymandering, and Republicans have gerrymandered more aggressively than Democrats have.
Ari Berman: It doesn't mean that Democrats can't take back the house, but it just means that Republicans have more of a built-in advantage going in because they've gerrymandered more aggressively in more places. So I mean, I think there's a very real possibility that there could be a Republican trifecta, and I think if that's the case, Trump is going to act much more aggressively than he did in his first term. I think you've seen, we talked about some of these conservative groups earlier, but the whole conservative ecosystem has basically a plan for autocracy in a second term that didn't really exist in the first term. You have the Heritage Foundation. You have all of the different Leonard Leo of the Federal Society, of all these conservative groups basically saying, we are going to compliment Trump's agenda. We're going to put in a plan to purge the federal government of longtime workers.
Ari Berman: We're going to create a plan for new voter suppression laws. We're going to create a plan for a national abortion law, despite Trump saying it should be left to the states. We're going to create a plan to weaponize the judiciary. We're going to create a plan to go after demonstrators and invoke the insurrection act. I mean, they're talking openly about it. So it's not just Trump. It's that the whole conservative movement has radicalized against democracy as well. And I think that's the scary thing about what a Trump's second term will mean. I think it's going to be a lot more radical and frightening than even the first term would be. I think a lot of people have also forgotten just how frightening the first term was as well.
Andrea Chalupa: Why does it seem like the average American isn't aware of how dangerously close we are to losing our democracy?
Ari Berman: I think because they feel like it didn't happen in 2020 that our institutions held that the election wasn't overturned. And therefore, if Trump tried to do something like that again, it just automatically wouldn't be successful. But I think that ignores the fact that first off, the election can be influenced beforehand, so you don't need to actually overturn it. I mean, that was the whole roadmap that the Republican party has followed after the 2020 election. Let's change the voting laws and other things so that we don't have to steal the election after the fact. We can just rig it beforehand. And that's not to dissuade people from voting. And that's not to say that your vote won't be counted, but it is to say that the laws have changed in a lot of places to make voting more difficult or to make it harder for votes to be counted.
Ari Berman: And so first off, they're trying to suppress votes on the front end, so they don't need to then steal it on the backend. But I think basically there's this thought that, yeah, Trump's kind of authoritarian. He's a loose cannon, he's kind of crazy, but he's not going to actually be able to do any of these radical things. And what I'm saying is he's going to be able to do these radical things. Exactly. I mean, he is running for office basically to insulate him from any kind of accountability. So he can do all these things, both to protect his family and also to protect all of his cronies and the radical people behind him. And I mean, you've studied all of these other countries where this happens, where the entire agenda is basically, let's try to get back in power so we can create an autocratic regime in which all of our democratic opponents are suppressed. And I think that's basically what Trump wants to do. And I think those are, if you look at who Trump's political models are, those are the people that he's frequently invoked the Victor Orban of the world, the Vladimir Putins of the world. I mean, these are the people that he aspires to be like. And so I think we should take him at face value that he's going to try to do the things that he's saying he wants to do.
Andrea Chalupa: Okay. So now let's talk about the hopeful things in your book in Minority Rule. What are some ways that you studied that people are fighting back?
Ari Berman: Yeah. Well, so I tried to make sure that I ended it with some hopeful suggestions. So people didn't read 300 pages and like you said, feel like they're in a Stephen King novel. But I mean, one thing I looked at is just the fact that the efforts to undermine democracy have also led to a movement to try to protect American democracy. And I think we've seen a lot of successes, whether it was a lot of prominent election deniers losing in a 2022 election, or whether it's states passing laws to make it easier to vote or protect other democratic rights. One place I looked in the book is at Michigan, because Michigan is a state that was not unlike Wisconsin, where you had these major interests who had rigged the state politically so that it was very much under conservative white minority rule. And then beginning the 2018 election activists there used direct democracy, used ballot initiatives to expand voting rights, to ban partisan gerrymandering, to make it easier to vote to enshrine abortion rights.
Ari Berman: And this was in a 50 50 state that's very divided. But basically the thing that's interesting is when you put things directly before the voters and you took it out of a D two R context and you actually gave people a way to reform their democracy, it was very popular. So to me, it's not that democratic rights aren't popular, it's that they're blocked by a system at the federal level that is set up to try to constrain democracy. So that's why I think looking to the states and looking to the states as a way to protect democracy is something that I think is really important. And so I think that in general, it's not to give up on the federal system, but it's to say there's a lot of promising things that are happening at the state level that aren't getting as much attention, but that are really, really important both in helping those states, but also providing a national model as well.
Ari Berman: And I also think just in terms of longer term strategy, progressives need to think of what is their 40 year path to reform, because that's what conservatives did, that's what the Koch brothers and other people did in the 1960s. They said, how can we take back the institutions of our country? And they knew they weren't going to do it overnight. They knew it would take a long time to create this kind of Supreme Court to create a Congress, to create presidential candidates who would endorse these radical policies. And to some extent, I think that we need to think about, okay, how do we reform a broken system? Because right now, what I'm hearing a lot of talk is let's preserve the rights we have, and that's really, really important. But preserving the rights we have is not enough. If we don't reform a broken system, there's going to be more trumps in the future because I think as much as Trump is an accelerant, he's also a product of the broken system we have. And I think that's the thing that people miss, is that Trump didn't come out of nowhere. The crisis that we're facing is much older than deeper than Trump, and it's producing autocrats like Trump because when you have such an undemocratic system that allows autocracy to flourish,
Andrea Chalupa: Do you want to be an amazing way to promote your book? And I'm happy to help with this, if we just took the blueprint, their 40 year blueprint, and then reverse engineered it and turned it into a progressive 40 year blueprint.
Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean, you got to start somewhere, right? But it is amazing. I mean, there's this very famous memo by Louis Powell who was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and then later became a Supreme Court justice. And he writes this entire memo basically saying that we're losing, that the business community and other conservatives are losing the fight to the civil rights movement, to the women's rights movement, to the labor movement. And basically, he laid out this whole plan to try to take back all these different institutions to try to take back academia, to try to take back the federal government to try to take back the courts, and one by one by one, they've accomplished a lot of these things. Now, I still think they're losing culturally. I still think they're outnumbered, but they're in a system where basically they've been able to exercise a completely disproportionate amount of power considering how outnumbered they are and how unpopular their policies are.
Ari Berman: Just take the Dobbs decision. People never thought that Roe v Wade would ever be overturned. I mean, even when Republicans very clearly stated they were going to try to do this, people were saying that it's never going to happen. The courts will never do this. Well, then it happened, but it didn't happen overnight. It was a product of that 40 year strategy to say, we want to put judges on the court who will overturn Roe v. Wade? We want to put politicians on the court who will advocate for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. We want to put in place all the conservative legal groups who will file all the briefs and lawsuits to get to a place where we have cases to overturn Roe v Wade. And I think it's that kind of long-term thinking that the right has been really, really smart about. And I think sometimes progressives are kind of jumping from one election to another, one political savior to another, and they're not thinking, okay, what's the roadmap for trying to get what we want? And I think the roadmap for getting, I think the ultimate roadmap has to to try to create a more participatory democracy. I think once the country becomes more democratic, then it becomes a much easier to fight for all of these other rights that people believe in.
Andrea Chalupa: Tell us specifically about the gerrymandering crisis. There was a United Nations report that rang the alarm a few years ago on how bad gerrymandering is in the United States. From your book, you really point out how the 2010 census was a turning point off a cliff for the United States leading us down this dark path of gerrymandering. Could you speak about where we are right now at gerrymandering and what is being done to try to unravel this?
Ari Berman: It's a huge crisis. I mean, first off, the way the US draws its districts is very different than most advanced democracies, and most democracies who'd have a nonpartisan commission who would be drawing districts. Here we have politicians drawing their own districts, which in and of itself is a conflict of interest. And what Republicans did after the 2010 election was they poured a lot of money into winning state legislative races at a time when people weren't really paying attention to these races. And they took over places like Michigan and Wisconsin and North Carolina and Ohio, and then they drew new districts that would entrench Republican rule for the next decade and beyond. And they had a strategy called Red Map where they were very open about this, and it's taken a long time to unwind the strategy. In some places, like in Michigan, it's been unwound through direct democracy, through passing ballot initiatives to ban partisan gerrymandering, which has then led to a different kind of legislature.
Ari Berman: So Michigan banned partisan gerrymandering. And then what happened was the party that got the most votes in 2022 got the most seats, and Democrats took back the legislature. That sounds very basic, but for the previous decade it hadn't happened. Democrats had been getting more votes, and Republicans had been winning dramatically more seats. Wisconsin changed the composition on their state Supreme Court and the state Supreme Court was able to strike down partisan gerrymandering. And then the Democratic governor and the Republican legislature agreed on a new plan for fair districts, which would've never happened in Wisconsin, had there not have been a different kind of court. So that was a different way, it wasn't direct democracy, but it was changing one of those major institutions. So in some places, the process has gotten more fair and the process has gotten less gerrymandered. In other states, like in North Carolina, it's gotten more gerrymandered.
Ari Berman: North Carolina, the Republicans flip control. The state Supreme Court there, they re-instituted partisan gerrymandering. And the legislature just passed maps that in basically a 50 50 swing state are going to give Republicans 75% of seats in the US house. So just from North Carolina alone, Republicans are going to pick up three or four seats in 2024, which makes it a lot harder for Democrats to fight back against it. And I think basically, in my view, the problem is is that this is all state by state by state, that there's no national remedy for this. And the Supreme Court has basically said that not only can you not strike down partisan gerrymandering, it can't even be reviewed at the federal court level. And that's a really crazy argument they made in 2019. But that's the laws. So Democrats had an opportunity to pass voting rights reform under President Biden in 2021 and early 2022, and that would've included a ban on partisan gerrymandering for federal elections, which I think would've been probably the most important thing they honestly could have done, and of all the different voting rights reforms. But it was blocked by the filibuster, which is another anti-democratic remnant, and it was blocked by every Republican, and of course two Democrats, one of whom is no longer Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, and another whom Joe Manchin is not running for reelection. So their legacy is basically they accomplished nothing and blocked the most important civil rights legislation since the 1960s in the process. Well,
Andrea Chalupa: They did what their big corporate donors and one of them to do.
Ari Berman: Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is kind of a textbook example of people that were there to protect the status
Andrea Chalupa: Quo to usher in the oligarchy.
Ari Berman: Yeah, exactly. And that sometimes it's both parties have to be involved to protect these kinds of things, and you buy one party, then you pick off enough people in the other party, and then the status quo is protected. It's one of those things, gerrymandering that's been really detrimental to American democracy. But I think there's also been a lot of activism around trying to change it. Like I said, if you look at the state level, I tell this story of Wisconsin in my book, and from where Wisconsin was in 2010 to where it is now, it's pretty dramatic where you have a democratic governor, democratic, well, not a Democratic, but a progressive supreme court. You have a legislature that is finally having fair elections after being gerrymandered for a decade and a half mean. So things can change. I don't want people to listen to this and feel like everything is static. Things can change. I think that's really interesting. And what's interesting to me is it seems like things change at the state level more than the federal level. And so I think in many ways that is the best place to look for possible reforms
Andrea Chalupa: Without question. And it has to be pointed out as well. The reason why we're getting such extreme candidates, the Republican party is because with gerrymandering, gerrymandering favors the more extreme out of the party. Yes. So once you win your primary for the Republican party, you're set for the general. You just sail on through. That's why we're getting more and more and more extreme MAGA in the federal level as well as the state level. I want to ask you, what do you think of Eric Holder's initiative to try to fight gerrymandering? I've heard mixed reviews of it. I've heard that he's been to kit gloves when it comes with the Republicans seeding too much ground and not negotiating enough, and that it's pretty much impotent. What are your thoughts on it?
Ari Berman: Well, I mean, I think they've been effective in creating a strategy to fight back against gerrymandering. Now, I think the question is how do you want to fight back against gerrymandering? Do you want Democrats to just gerrymander like Republicans are doing, or do you want a fair institutions that would allow for more fair representation no matter who wins? And I think what Eric Holder's group has done is basically argue for more good government institutions under the theory that if there's a fair process, Democrats can win under that fair process. Now, there's other Democrats that just say, no, if Republicans are gerrymandering, we should just gerrymander like they do. New York tried this in the last redistricting cycle. New York basically passed a very, I don't think anyone would argue it wasn't a democratic gerrymander, and it was struck down by the courts and it backfired. I mean, I think in that case, New York would've just been better off following a fair process and then Democrats could have won more seats under fair elections and trying to rig the process and having it backfire.
Ari Berman: So this is a debate within democratic circles, big de democratic circles. My view is that we should have a fair process. I think if both sides are gerrymandering, it just leads to a race to the bottom. And also when Democrats gerrymander, it leads to bad outcomes too, because then there's no competitive elections in those states. And we've seen this over and over. I mean, I've seen this in New York where we live. I mean, there's a lot of uncompetitive elections and there's a lot of corrupt people in power as a result of it. And elections are decided by very small margins in the primaries. And New York has primaries for one election in June and another election in August, and it almost feels like the people in power in New York, which are Democrats, are intentionally trying to keep voter participation low so they can remain in power. So again, I think we should just have a fair process, and to me that would be the best outcome as opposed to saying, okay, well one party rigged the process, so now the other party should just rig the process in their favor. I don't think that's a healthy situation for democracy either.
Andrea Chalupa: All very good points. So you mentioned the Federalist Society in your group as one of the horsemen of the apocalypse along with the Heritage Foundation and the Cokes and many others. What can be done with the 30% or so of judges that the fellow society packed into our judiciary under Trump, including the Supreme Court, what are you seeing as sort of workarounds and reform that can confront that big issue we're going to be living with for at least a generation?
Ari Berman: God I know. I think that's probably the biggest danger to American democracy right now is what Republicans have done to the courts, and not just the Supreme Court, but the appellate courts as well. I mean, we are seeing appellate courts issue ruins that are even more radical than the Supreme Courts right now, whether it's striking down abortion rights in more aggressive ways than the Supreme Court has done or striking down the Voting Rights Act in even more aggressive ways than the Supreme Court has done. So they haven't just done it at one level. They've tried to do it at every level from the district court level to the appellate court level, to the Supreme Court level. I mean, I think that Democrats have made a major mistake in not prioritizing reforming the Supreme Court. I think you just look at how the current Supreme Court was assembled, and I think it was assembled in an illegitimate way, so many different precedents were broken, whether it's the fact that they blocked Merrick Garland for eight months because there was an election, and then they confirmed Amy Coney Barrett two weeks before the election when tens of millions of people had already voted.
Ari Berman: That was one thing that was unprecedented. The way Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court was unprecedented the way that Neil Gorsuch was conformed to the Supreme Court in a way that that seat shouldn't even have been opened. So I mean, I think the current majority on the Supreme Court has been assembled through illegitimate means, and I think the only way to change that is to change the composition of the Supreme Court. And I think that what Democrats are saying is, okay, well, we don't want to wreck the norms of American democracy. Well, I think the norms of American democracy were already shredded for Republicans to get a six to three super majority on the Supreme Court. And the interesting thing about when FDR tried court packing during his presidency when Republicans on the Supreme Court were striking down all the New Deal things, basically that didn't succeed, but the mere threat of doing something led the justices on the court to moderate to feel like they could be held accountable in some ways. And I think the problem right now is the Supreme Court feels like there's no way for them to be held accountable so they can just do whatever they want. Not to mention, we didn't even mention all the conflict of interest that we see with Clarence Thomas and other justices that seem like at the very least should lead them if not to be on the court then to be recusing themselves in all of these cases that are coming up from their political benefactors over and over and over, and they
Andrea Chalupa: Refuse to recuse,
Ari Berman: Refuse to recuse. And there's basically not even any ethics laws. I mean, it's the lack of scrutiny, the lack of accountability to lifetime justices is really pretty astounding. And many other countries have different rules. Many other state Supreme Courts have different rules. Other state Supreme Courts judges are either elected or there's mandatory retirement ages or they serve for a period of time. So there's lots of different ways in which we deal with state Supreme Courts that could be applied to the US Supreme Court as well. If you don't want to enlarge the court for some reason or another, you could just say Justices serve for 20 years, or Justices have to step down when they're 80, or other things that would then make the Supreme Court an institution where one party couldn't just capture it for the foreseeable future or for generations.
Andrea Chalupa: And instead you have President Obama coming out against expanding the court and the other Democrats really falling in line there. Is that being a dead issue?
Ari Berman: Yeah. Again, I think it should have been a live issue, first off, because I think just on the facts, we had an illegitimate Supreme Court, but number two, I think if they pushed it more, it would've maybe led the other justices to moderate exactly to feel like some kind of accountability could be coming. Otherwise they're just going to do as many radical things as they can to stop them.
Andrea Chalupa: Right. Do you think it's possible to abolish the Senate, which your book brilliantly lays out of being just one of the booby traps, the super rich, super white founding fathers set for us that we're living with today and electoral college, which also was engineered to protect the rich and white and slaveholding from direct democracy?
Ari Berman: I think both of them should be changed. I think the Senate should be based on proportional representation, and I think the electoral college should be abolished. I think it would be easier to abolish the electoral college because nobody likes it except for a very small Republican elite that is benefiting it. But you look at the polling, 80% of Americans don't like the electoral college. It hurts Republicans too. I mean, if you're a Republican in Texas or a Republican Wyoming, your vote doesn't matter either. In a presidential election, you might have more say in who the President is because of the way representation is allocated, but your vote doesn't matter either. So if you're a Republican in California, you don't have any power under the electoral college either. So I think there could be an opportunity to abolish it in a way that doesn't really exist for the Senate.
Ari Berman: The problem for the Senate is that basically to change the structure of the Senate, which is that every state gets two seats, every state has to sign off on that. So basically any state could veto the changing composition of the Senate. And that was one of the last things that was added when the Constitutional convention in 1787 was about to adjourn. And I think the founders didn't even think about it that much. But it's very, very difficult to change the Senate. I think the best thing to do would be to change the rules of the Senate to make it operate on a more of a majority rule basis. But ultimately, I think we have to realize that the Senate in America is more skewed than any other Senate in an advanced industrial democracy. So it favors conservative voters more than any other Senate. So even if you want to have a Senate, it has way too much power and it's way more skewed compared to how the rest of the world does democracy. You can make it more like the House of Lords to have it be ceremonial. You could make it so that it has rules that would allow the majority to better function. But I think the way the Senate is now is it consistently allows a minority of people to control a majority of the body. And then very popular policies get blocked over and over and over from becoming law.
Andrea Chalupa: What gives you hope about where things are now and how we might be able to overcome them?
Ari Berman: I think what gives me hope is that the efforts to undermine democracy have led to, in my view, an equally passionate response to try to protect democracy. That it feels like there is a real pro-democracy movement in this country. Whether it's the attempt to prevent Trump from overturning the election or the defeat of major election deniers in 2022 for governorships, state attorney general racist, secretary of state, racist racists that would not normally get a lot of attention, got a lot of attention in the last election, and very radical people lost those elections in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Arizona. So that was a hopeful sign. The fact that the state level, lots of democratic rights have been protected because when I started covering voting rights 15 years ago, everyone said, this is a fringe issue. Nobody really cares. And also, it felt like the kind of thing where people were total over, people don't vote on this issue.
Ari Berman: It's not something that they care about. And I think that's been proven wrong. It's been proven that these democratic issues are very important issues. People do care about them. And it's also core to what our democracy is, that if you care about things like a women's right to choose or criminal justice reform or clean air and clean water, it's very difficult to get any of those things if our democratic institutions are broken. So to me, broken democracy leads to broken politics, which needs the broken policies. And that's why I think starting with fixing democracy is the way to fix all the other issues that people care about as well. But to make sure that we're always linking those things, that people understand that if democracy is rigged, all the other aspects of American democracy are going to be rigged as well.
Andrea Chalupa: This election is here and it's happening and it's bigger than Biden. We have the chance to hack away at corruption at the root by building our power at the all important state level where crucial quality of life issues from voting rights to environmental protections to lgbtq plus rights and more are decided. Carl Rove ran the same strategy for the GOP during the Obama years laying the groundwork for Trump to come to power in 2016. Now we're reversing this dangerous trend, securing key victories in swing states to protect our elections and advance progressive laws in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, even Wisconsin. Another world is possible when we unite and build together. Here's how. Join me, Andrea at State Fair, a giving circle that collects small dollar donations among friends and family to build big power in key states. If 1000 Gaslit Nation listeners set up a $5 recurring monthly donation, that's $5,000 we're sending to turn.
Andrea Chalupa: So-called Red States Purple, and so-called Purple States Blue. Some of the races we've supported one by only a few votes, and we flipped the house in Pennsylvania, flipped the entire house, elected 12 new people, massive. And they have a crazy extra crazy Republican party in Pennsylvania. And that's what we did together through State's Project. Thank you. Your $5 monthly donation will make a huge difference. Join me and my friends at State Fair today. You can sign up@gaslitnationpod.com. Just click on the 2024 Survival Guide on our homepage. Step number two, are there any young people in your life, gen Z or younger, give them the gift of the excellent book Run for something, A real taught guide to fixing the system yourself. It helps people of all ages run for office. So if you are thinking of running for office, be sure to read this inspiring and practical guide, both the book and the organization.
Andrea Chalupa: Run for Something. Encourage, recruit, and train young people to run for office and flex their power. Inspire a young person and anyone you love and trust with empathy in their hearts and science in their minds to run for office today. Number three, help the Helpers. State Bridges is a Sister District Action Network program in which volunteers from across the country fundraise for organizations doing year round power building. And key battleground states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin State Bridges supports organizations engaging communities underrepresented at the polls like Mothers of Color, rule voters and Latinx voters. Sign up to attend a virtual fundraiser and donate to help the helpers at state bridges. Number four, write letters to voters in swing districts with a vote forward. Check out any of their easy letter writing campaigns that have already started and write letters as you listen to Gaslit Nation. We'll be keeping you company most importantly. Number five, check your own voter registration now at Election Protection site vote.org. Make sure you're registered and check in with your family and friends to confirm their voter registration too. Commit to helping five people in your life make a plan to vote and bring them along to a Gaslit Nation phone bank this fall. Because the only ones coming to save us is us. Grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left.