It has now been over a year since the worst attack on the Capitol since 1812, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has responded to the ongoing threat of bloody sequel coups and the rapid erosion of our democracy with…a tepid speech. We break down his weasel words and analyze his “probe” that consists of rounding up minor participants and giving them sentences so light or slow that they can commit vehicular manslaughter while they wait, and discuss why he continues to ignore the criminal elites at the helm: Trump, Stone, Flynn, Bannon, Wood, and more.

We break down Merrick Garland’s hollow words and false promises, and also note his failure – and the Biden administration’s failure – to protect voting rights, which are still being eviscerated. We examine the DOJ troll bot farm that spits platitudes and propaganda at anyone who even mildly criticizes Garland, and note the identical phrasing to the troll bot farm that emerged during the Mueller probe. We go on to destroy the bot farm-peddled talking point that Garland was a key player in solving the Oklahoma City bombing plot and in fact shows how he screwed up the investigation in a dangerously similar manner to the way he is handling the January 6 attack. We return to our study of Garland’s corrupt mentor, Jamie Gorelick, and her shadowy history at the DOJ. A broken institution can only be protected by a broken institutionalist, and that is who Merrick Garland is.

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Welcome to the first Gaslit Nation episode of 2022! Just think, one year ago we were all sitting around in a plague waiting for an attempted coup to happen, and now we are…sitting around in a plague waiting for an attempted coup to happen. And by the same coup plotters, too because mafia state enabler Merrick Garland refuses to hold criminal elites accountable!

While Merrick Garland stays the same failure as always, there have been meaningful developments elsewhere in court cases involving criminal elites. We discuss the guilty verdict for child rape trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, partner of Jeffrey Epstein and daughter of Mossad operative and Russian mafia liaison Robert Maxwell. We do a deep dive on the international relations aspects of the case and discuss why the media is whitewashing her crimes and treating complicit actors like Epstein’s lawyer/client Alan Dershowitz as “objective sources”.

We also discuss Giuliani lackey/convicted felon/coup plotter/9-11 villain Bernard Kerik, his long history of criminality, and the documents he provided to the Jan 6 committee. We then turn to the failure of Cy Vance to hold the Trump crime cult accountable (we warned you!) and what the investigations by Tish James and Vance replacement Alvin Bragg may bring. And we pay tribute to Harry Reid, the only official in office in 2016 who was brave enough to tell the American public the truth about Trump and Russia in real time and try to stop our current horrors from happening. RIP.

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Meet the patriots of the Gaslit Nation 2020 Save Democracy Challenge! We speak to superheroes who organized, stayed engaged, and did what they could wherever they were, often facing threats and other pressures, to help save our democracy in 2020. Their efforts matter, made a difference, and planted powerful seeds for protecting their communities, and therefore our country.

We're going to get through the difficult years ahead by fighting for our communities, and that security on the local level helps secure our democracy on a national level. So never forget that we need you, our communities need you, our country needs you, and if you don't know where to start, listen to the inspiring people in this discussion to learn how to help wherever you are.

We're going to hold another Gaslit Nation Save Democracy Challenge where we call on our listeners to stay engaged and do what they can where they can to help get out the vote in the 2022 midterms. Look out for that as we get closer to yet another make-it-or-break-it election in our lifetimes. No matter how dark things get, refuse to abandon each other, and stay and fight to ensure that a new America rises from the ashes of this time of rapid change and uncertainty.

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Since the start of Gaslit Nation in 2018, we've warned of Trump's determination to use violence to consolidate power and stay in power. The earth-shaking 2016 election was the culmination of a coup, and the rampant corruption, purging, threats, harassment of investigators, whistleblowers, and law enforcement that followed was done to ensure that coup successfully entrenched a dictatorship. January 6, 2021 was inevitable, and yes, we even announced a special episode about it in advance. Our democracy cannot survive another coup.

In this special episode, we provide a montage of Gaslit Nation episodes going back to the beginning, counting down to the violent coup attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The countdown continues, and that our democracy currently cannot handle a third coup attempt by Trump and his white supremacist army currently harassing and threatening school boards over the teaching of Black history and vaccine and mask mandates, harassing and threatening election officials over Trump's Big Lie and to ensure their efforts to overturn our democracy are successful next time, and running for office at all levels using disinformation and white rage. This episode is an SOS for our democracy, calling on our public servants and law enforcement to clean up corruption (especially among law enforcement), secure our democracy, and ensure there will be no third coup, one our democracy will not survive.

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It’s that special time of the season again – the time where we commemorate the anniversary of an unpunished coup attempt! This is really an unceasing, round-the-clock kind of occasion here at Gaslit Nation, and we cannot believe we are still discussing the need to prosecute the masterminds of this seditious attack because you losers are too complicit or complacent to protect our country, but here we are. AGAIN. Like a sleigh ride on a mobius strip through hell, this week’s Gaslit Nation takes you on a journey back in time to the many acts of treason committed over the years and the utter lack of accountability for any of them!

Today’s Evidence of Obvious Crimes includes the Mark Meadows’ coup PowerPoint, Trump’s latest televised confession of obstruction of justice, and a bunch of texts from three Fox News propagandists and the most pathetic Trump family member. We debate whether the texts are even real, and both come up with compelling arguments for why you should stop treating this like a game and actually do something about the violent seditionists actively plotting “Coup 2: Now With More Bloodbath” oh my God. We also share important items on our Christmas wish lists -- like voting rights and abolishing the filibuster! -- and explain why you cannot cosplay Succession as a substitute for real justice.

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This week we look at Biden’s big anti-corruption plan – and wonder if anyone will actually implement it! The Biden admin has put out a kleptocracy battle missive that reads like Gaslit Nation’s greatest hits, but will it be another “Iron Triangles” fiasco? (For those who don’t have brains bursting with bureaucratic betrayal, the “Iron Triangles” speech is the one Robert Mueller made in 2011 vowing to crack down on transnational organized crime, which he followed up by spending the rest of the decade enabling transnational organized crime.)

We don’t know what will happen, but we do know that Congress needs to clean House – at home and abroad! Sarah launches into a long story about Paul Gosar, the January 6 Capitol attacks, the unindicted conspirators, the bipartisan obsession with harming AOC, the strangeness of Congress not wanting to defend itself from people who want to murder them, and the donation record of a shady Russian oligarch associate who is funding not only the DCCC, but Nancy Pelosi individually, and keeps upping the donations! Wow, way to battle the kleptocracy, Dems!

Andrea takes on the Biden-Putin video call and looks at the looming Russia war on Ukraine and the humanitarian disaster it will bring for the region, particularly for human rights activists and journalists who are already fighting a brave fight. As always, we implore the Biden administration to abandon Nordstream 2 if they actually want to clean up global corruption.

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This month's song is "Precision Grooming" by Scary Hours. If you have a song you would like to submit for the Art Matters Gaslit Nation Song Series, submit it here!

We’ve got a brand-new coup plot and a brand-new plague variant – and a brand-new Gaslit Nation to examine the nexus of the crisis and the origin of the storm! We start by discussing the coup that the Kremlin is allegedly preparing against Ukraine and review Paul Manafort’s career of evil. Manafort, best known for plotting coups with Kremlin-affiliated actors, has been MIA since being pardoned by Trump in December 2020, and our guess is that he is…plotting a coup with Kremlin-affiliated actors. Just going out on a limb here!

We also explain the differences between various agents of fortune like Rinat Akhmetov and Rinat Akhmetshin, both of whom are oligarch Manafort cronies, but only one of whom was at the June 2016 Trump Tower criminal meeting! (Remember when this kind of information wasn’t eating up your brain?) We also discuss the dire humanitarian situation at the border of Belarus and Poland, where the Kremlin is weaponizing a refugee crisis, and the failure of the West to adequately respond. Andrea provides firsthand updates from Russian and Belarusian activists who have an insider view of Kremlin aggression and advice on how to stop it.

Then we move onto the omicron variant! History has shown again and again how nature points out the folly of man, so it is no surprise that the refusal of Big Pharma to make the covid vaccine free and accessible everywhere has led to tyranny and mutation. We discuss the explosive new Financial Times expose about Pfizer exec Albert Bourla and his shady deals with Western leaders at the expense of much of the world, as well as the Biden admin’s empty promises from the last days of May to get the vaccine patent waived, whereas in reality they’re just going through the motions.

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How do you sell yourself as “the infrastructure president” while allowing a vital piece of infrastructure such as the US postal service to be destroyed?! Turns out you can’t! After a year of Gaslit Nation imploring Joe Biden to remove USPS Board of Governors chairman Ron Bloom so that postal service wrecking ball Louis DeJoy could be fired– and a trollbot farm relentlessly hounding Gaslit Nation for our controversial belief that everyone should get their mail on time -- he has FINALLY announced that he plans to do so in December. Bloom, a sleazeball DeJoy Defender who works for the company that helped bail out Jared Kushner’s debt in a dirty deal under congressional investigation, will be replaced by Daniel Tangherlini, and another USPS member will be replaced by Derek Kan. We do not know much about these guys yet but we are going to vet them, so stay tuned!

We also discuss the fallout of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and how it is part of a broader streamlining of political violence. Rittenhouse has become a favorite of right-wing elites who like to cloak their own lust for power under the veneer of vigilante justice. Like the January 6 Capitol attackers lured into action with promises of protection, he is a pawn in a broader authoritarian play. This broader play includes threats to public servants and election officials and new laws that allow protesters to be run down in the road. All of this is meant to suppress protest, dissent, and voting. It is imperative that officials protect our public servants and voters and push initiatives like voting by mail, which prevents people from being put in the terrible position of making a choice between their safety and their vote.

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Welcome to month ten of post-Capitol attack America in which no elite operatives have been punished for the worst attack on the Capitol since 1812! This includes fascist felon Steve Bannon, who turned his surrender for subpoena dodging into a reality TV show starring himself. We discuss Bannon’s brazen criminality and why the lack of urgency from agencies tasked with accountability is so dangerous. In times of extreme threat, complacency is complicity. It is not a victory for democracy that a coup architect who has expressly declared his intent to destroy a government he once served – and whose state secrets he now possesses – gets a slap on the wrist. It is not a victory for democracy that Bannon still faces NO consequences for the original crime of violent insurrection: a crime that continues today. We also discuss Bannon’s ties to transnational organized crime, exemplified by his choice of mobster lawyer David Schoen to represent him.

Then we turn to Russia’s increasing aggression in Ukraine and Poland, the latter via its proxy state, Belarus, all of which is taking place while US pundits blather about the threat of “woke culture” and other nonsense. Andrea breaks down the disaster of the Nordstream 2 deal and the history of global kleptocracy underlying it, and we ponder the strange phenomenon of professional asshole Ted Cruz being on the right side of an issue. We also discuss the MIA status of NATO and what should be done to defend vulnerable European countries from Kremlin aggression, which has moved from digital warfare to on the ground operations and even into outer space! Andrea concludes the show with her best Andy Rooney imitation as she contemplates the infrastructure plan, climate change, and American materialism.

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Welcome to the Gaslit Nation election aftermath hellhole special! We break down last week’s results and the dire situation in Virginia, where Posh Trump Glenn Youngkin became the governor after a campaign exploiting bigotry and predicated on lies. We look at two big factors in Youngkin’s win: 1) how the GOP’s elite criminal impunity draws white voters to backing raw power, in the hope that this power will protect them and in fear that it will not 2) how the canard of “critical race theory” was weaponized by propagandists and the Dems did little to combat it, despite GOP operatives spelling out the strategy very clearly in March! We also note how Terry McAuliffe fell short and give credit where credit is due for the good Dem campaigns that did win in states like Georgia and New Jersey.

Then we discuss the ongoing witch hunt being conducted by John Durham with the approval of Merrick Garland’s corrupt DOJ. Much like Bill Barr, Durham is flipping the script and investigating the investigators, targeting people who contributed to the Steele dossier and reaffirmed what the FBI already knew: that Donald Trump was a mobbed-up Kremlin asset and had been for years. We have been telling you all year that Merrick Garland is a Trump crime cult enabler who stands in the way of justice and accountability, and his approval of his witch hunt and refusal to take the most rudimentary steps to protect our national security – like enforcing Steve Bannon’s subpoena – shows us to be sadly correct yet again. The reason for the Democratic “enthusiasm gap” is that Biden’s administration gives us little about which to be enthusiastic. Instead, they break promises on the most momentous and existential of crises, including voting rights, civil rights, and the protection of US sovereignty and safety.

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We know there’s a lot going on, but Sarah isn't feeling well and lost her voice. We plan to cover the major news events next week, like the elections and what they can tell us about the midterms, and Joe Manchin’s latest betrayal of the American people. This week, having recently spoken at Congress about the urgent importance of adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and getting arrested in Washington, DC in a protest demanding voting rights legislation, Alyssa Milano stops by Gaslit Nation to discuss this and more, including her new book Sorry Not Sorry.

For more on Alyssa, here’s a condensed version of her biography from her website: Alyssa Milano currently stars in ‘Insatiable’ for Netflix as ‘Coralee,’ the social climbing wife of a disgraced lawyer/beauty pageant coach. Prior to that, she was seen in their hit series, ‘Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later,’ with Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Ian Black, and Judah Friedlander. Milano also served as the host and a judge on Lifetime’s ‘Project Runway All Stars.’ She entered the world of graphic novels with ‘Hacktivist,’ a fast-paced cyber-thriller that follows the young founders of an innovative social media company who moonlight as a secret black-hat hacker team. Milano starred on the hit series ‘Charmed’ for nine years. She began her career on ABC’s ‘Who’s the Boss,’ and has appeared in over 20 films.

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This month's song is "Home" by Via Skies. If you have a song you would like to submit for the Art Matters Gaslit Nation Song Series, submit it here!

Welcome to the Gaslit Nation Halloween Special! At Gaslit Nation, it is forever Halloween AND Groundhog’s Day, so we revisit some familiar villains – Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon – and look at the incredibly shitty horror sequels they are plotting! We discuss the Facebook Papers and Zuckerberg’s desire to control the world while plunging individual nations into autocratic violence and reaping the profits, the continued lack of accountability for the January 6 seditious attack on the Capitol, the new Rolling Stone article naming Republican representatives as accomplices to the coup plot, and the deluded Democrats who think they will avoid the fallout of climate change and intergenerational mafia state corruption. We also praise the few Democratic officials getting it right, like Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, whose tweet we totally stole for the title of this episode!

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This week’s Gaslit Nation explores narrative warfare, from Russia’s Stalinist revisionism (now including an attack on Andrea’s film Mr Jones!) to the “both-sidesing” of the Holocaust in US schools, to the memory-holing of the Capitol attack. We kick things off by describing the Kremlin lackey freakout over a Russian human rights group screening of Mr Jones, Andrea’s film about a journalist who attempted to cover Stalin’s genocide-famine in Ukraine, and we warn that Russian-style censorship is a GOP aspirational goal. We then turn to fugitive felon Steve Bannon and the feckless January 6 Committee, which has discovered the information Gaslit Nation released about Bannon nine months ago – the very same information we urged them to use in the February impeachment hearings but which they ignored!

We then discuss how the publishing industry is protecting the Trump Crime Cult by continuing to churn out books from corrupt officials who witnessed terrible crimes and were rewarded for their silence and delay. We get into bulk book buys as a form of money laundering, the promise of publishing deals as a bribe that provides incentive to stay quiet, and how publishing agreements function as tacit NDAs. We note that Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff are two sides of the same coin – one hiding behind respectability, one hiding behind sensationalism, both portraying a sophisticated criminal operation as mere incompetence or idiocy. This damning evidence display was so long that we had to continue it in our Patreon bonus special, so subscribe at the Truth-Teller level or higher to hear the whole thing!

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It has been over nine months since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and none of the key perpetrators – Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Stone, etc – have been held accountable. And now they are dodging and defying subpoenas! What the Democrats are showing is that you cannot fight hate speech with weasel words and you cannot fight accelerationism with inertia. This whole gang is running out the clock – the GOP, the transnational crime syndicate that backs them, and the Vichy Democrats enabling their impunity. Every day that passes without consequences erodes both our democracy and the sense of urgency about the threats it faces.

Gaslit Nation is blessed with 2020 vision, meaning that we told you all this shit was going to happen in 2020 and officials did nothing about it! We review the course of events that led us to this terrible juncture, including Pelosi’s efforts to block impeachment and witnesses, how the excuse of “bipartisanship” was used to stall the Jan 6 investigation, and the Dems' and DOJ’s current refusal to enforce subpoenas. We then go into corruption at the DOJ and bring you the Villain Origin Story of Merrick Garland. Did you know that Merrick Garland was mentored and brought into government by Jared and Ivanka’s lawyer Jamie Gorelick – and that Gorelick also jeopardized US national security in the 9/11 lead-up and then went on to abet big oil, big tech, racist police, and white-collar criminals? What’s even worse -- this Forrest Gump of corruption continues to advise Merrick Garland today!

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The US government may have avoided a shutdown, but Facebook did not! On Monday everyone’s least favorite data-mining, genocide-abetting tech behemoth had the longest shutdown in its history, less than a day after an explosive interview with a Facebook whistleblower aired on “60 Minutes.” Coincidence? We think not! We discuss the Facebook shutdown, the whistleblower’s revelations, and how dependency worsens the disinformation crisis. We speculate on what Zuckerberg and his dirty partners were doing in their offline interim period and discuss what should be done about this mass surveillance and propaganda system posing as a social media site.

We continue last week’s brain-melting conversation about rotating Biden Blockers Sinema and Manchin, a conversation we are tired of having about a situation we are tired of facing. So maybe the Dems could, you know, do something productive about that! We reveal why Sinema made her heel turn in 2014, discuss why the problems facing Sinema’s constituents are the real crisis, and ponder why the media obsession with “optics” does not include the optics of deportation, poverty, and suffering that Americans endure as a result of her obstructionism.

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The government may be shutting down – again! Thanks to fatuous GOP concern about the debt ceiling, the government may be shutting down by Friday and the Treasury may be out of money by October 18. This is part of a long and destructive pattern that we’ve discussed previously on this show. The last shutdown, which happened under Trump and went from Dec 2018-Jan 2019, felt like a test run for a broader destruction of infrastructure, basic goods and services, and anything else that relies on a functional government. The 2018-2019 shutdown was a sequel to the January 2018 shutdown, which was a sequel to the 2013 shutdown, which itself felt like a test of how much hardship Americans would put up with and how many resources they would do without.

What’s new now? It’s happening under a plague! We discuss the political manipulation behind the possible shutdown, the torpedoing of the Build Back Better plan and other Biden proposals, how the shutdown will affect the midterms (along with voter suppression!) and the snapping of the social safety net under the pandemic. Andrea explains what the debt ceiling is and the economic disasters that will occur if the government shuts down and the Treasury does not function. Sarah wonders what the hell happened with the infiltration of the Treasury in 2015 by the Kremlin and the hacking of multiple government institutions (including the Treasury!) by Russia in 2020. Seems like it might be relevant as we run out of money. So many mysteries to explore!

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Today we examine the most powerful person in the United States -- Elizabeth MacDonough! Who, you might ask? Why, the Senate Parliamentarian, of course! You know, that person who you stood outside for hours in line in a plague waiting to vote for, the person whose policies you studied and advocated and critiqued…oh wait, that’s Joe Biden, the helpless inhabitant of the White House! Once again, the Biden administration agenda is being conveniently held up by the thumbs down recommendation of the Parliamentarian, and once again, Vice President Kamala Harris could simply overrule the Parliamentarian, or the Senate could fire the Parliamentarian…but since the Parliamentarian creates such an amazing excuse for Democratic inertia, they aren’t! And they’re screwing over the American public in the process.

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Remember back in April when we described Joe Manchin as a “an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a lot of money”? Well, the Dem’s most annoying kleptocrat obstructionist isn’t so mysterious anymore! We discuss who’s funding him and why, the illicit and evil business activity in which his daughter is engaged, the attempt to buy off his wife with a government position, and his cavalier attitude toward the destruction of US democracy, infrastructure, and voting rights. The Manchin family has oligarch envy, just like the Trump family. The Democrats had a long time to figure out how to handle him and they did not – and now Americans and the entire polluted planet will pay the price!

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This week’s episode is devoted to the Texas state attack on reproductive rights and civil rights and its ramifications – not just for Texans, but for all Americans. This authoritarian attack codifies violent vigilantism, will inspire baseless reporting of citizens for political reasons, cultivates an atmosphere of vengeance and paranoia, and is backed by a Supreme Court packed with multiple corrupt justices installed by a career criminal Kremlin asset president. The Texas attack on reproductive rights is where theocrats, kleptocrats, authoritarians, white supremacists, misogynists, and secessionists all meet – much like they have in the Trump administration and its GOP backers. Texas is a hostage state, and we encourage you to support the Texans fighting back against their oppressive legislature. We are all Americans and we must support vulnerable Americans threatened by this abuse of power and corruption of law.

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On August 31, the War in Afghanistan – a war that has been going on for nearly our entire adult lives – came to an end, at least officially. We discuss the ramifications of twenty years of war and how different political entities worldwide are exploiting the situation. We situate Afghanistan in the history of other quagmire wars – Vietnam, Iraq – and revising Eisenhower’s 1953 speech on the military-industrial complex, “A Chance for Peace”, a prescient warning which would today be reviled as radical.

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