Stay and Fight!
There’s just three weeks until our long national nightmare ends and a brand-new national nightmare begins! We continue to document the decimation of democracy, focusing on the SCOTUS hearings and the potential appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. We review how the judiciary is usually the last bulwark against autocracy but how in the US, the GOP has structured their autocratic coup around court-packing, putting the rights we rely on to fight autocracy in jeopardy.
Senator Cory Booker:
We're here because in the middle of a deadly pandemic, in the middle of an ongoing election, Senate Republicans have found a nominee in Judge Barrett who they know will do what they couldn't do: subvert the will of the American people and overturn the ACA and overturn Roe v. Wade. That's what this is about. That's why we're here. It's very simple. Senate Republicans know the American people don't want this, but they don't care, because they have only one small window of opportunity to work the system, betray what the American people want. So, they're desperately rushing to complete this process before America starts voting, but they don't have to do this.
Senator Cory Booker:
If one of my colleagues will stand up on this committee, we can hold this over until after an election. If two of my colleagues on the Senate floor agree with their other two colleagues, Republicans, we can stop this. Otherwise, this is a charade when they say this is a normal Judiciary Committee hearing for a Supreme Court nomination. There's nothing about this that's normal. It's not normal that Senate Republicans are rushing through a confirmation hearing, violating their own words, their own statements, betraying the trust of the American people and their colleagues, and failing to take, in this hearing, even the most basic safety protections to protect people around them, all to ensure that tens of millions of people will lose their health care when we're seven months into one of the worst public health crises in the history of our country.
Senator Cory Booker:
It's not normal. This is not normal, that millions of Americans like Michelle and Merritt aren't just scared of a deadly virus, they're scared of their fellow Americans who are sitting in this room right now. They're scared that their government and their institutions will be manipulated by people who could not work through the democratic process to take away their health care and are trying an endrun to achieve that.
Senator Cory Booker:
Nothing about this today is normal. This is not normal. What is going on in America today, in the midst of a deadly pandemic and an ongoing election, having a rushed Supreme Court nomination hearing is not normal, and we cannot normalize it. People are voting right now, the American people should decide, the American people should decide, the American people should decide. I will not be voting to confirm Judge Barrett's nomination.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have some reminders and updates for you. Big old reminder: we are still doing and we will be doing through Election Day–November 3rd–the 1,000 calls or text message challenge. So, tweet at us @gaslitnation on Twitter and tell us what you're doing to get out the vote directly with other voters. Try to send 1,000 phone calls. Try to send 1,000 texts. You may not reach that ambitious goal, but you may end up sending more texts and making more phone calls than you thought you could. That's why we're doing this moonshot challenge.
Andrea Chalupa:
Don't be complacent. Don't believe the polls. The polls do not factor in voter suppression. They really should, because look at these long lines that we're seeing in these battleground states in Georgia and Texas, people waiting in line for several hours just to vote. Of course, we don't know if the election systems are secure. They're still vulnerable. They're still being attacked by Russian hackers, just like they were in 2016. We've got a very vulnerable election system that we're entrusting the vote with. We didn't close all those holes since 2016.
Andrea Chalupa:
We need to make this an overwhelming victory. We need to make this a decisive victory, and we're going to do that by driving out the vote. Join us for the Gaslit Nation 1,000 Calls and Text Message Challenge, tweet us @gaslitnation, and let us know what you are doing to talk to voters directly, how many phone calls you're sending, and text messages you're sending. From the responses we get, we're going to select three people to come on Gaslit Nation in the new year and we're all going to talk about our shared dream... What we're going to do to fight fascism and pull it out by the root which is going to be our long term plan.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, and then next, we want to say hello to a Gaslit Nation listener (or at least her wife is a Gaslit Nation listener) and this is Lynne Huskinson, whose wife told us on Twitter that we helped inspire Lynne to run for office in Wyoming. For four decades, Lynne has called Gillette, Wyoming her home. She is a former coal miner and is determined to fight for a fair economy that helps coal miners and former coal miners like her transition to new jobs with the help of job training.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're really excited that Lynne has decided to run for local office in Wyoming. We wish her lots of luck. She looks absolutely fascinating with all the community organizing work she has done to help workers. We encourage you to check out her work. Visit her campaign website at Huskinson, H-U-S-K-I-N-S-O-N 4hd32.com. We will link to that in the top of the show notes. Congratulations Lynne on doing what we need all smart, empathetic, science-believing Americans to do, and that is run for public office.
Andrea Chalupa:
If Devin Nunes, Mitch McConnell, and these other idiots can take our taxpayer money in serving in elected positions, then what is our excuse not to grab those jobs from them and do that work, when we're far more better qualified than they are? We need more Lynne Huskinsons out there, going for that ultimate goal in flushing these idiots out of power. That's how we're going to reform the system from within.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then we want to say hello to the wonderful team that gave us this really interesting looking documentary that's available now, wherever you stream your films, and that is called Totally Under Control. One of the directors is Alex Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He's teamed up with fellow directors Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan.
Andrea Chalupa:
They made this documentary in secret for several months as an exposé into the Trump Crime Family's corruption at the heart of their utter failure to contain the COVID-19 virus. Again, check out that documentary, Totally Under Control, that's what it's called. Be sure to watch it because it's just this mind blowing exposé on aspiring autocratic corruption and how countless lives are literally at stake. Corruption kills.
Andrea Chalupa:
Jumping off today's discussion, we have, of course, the supreme court hearing of Amy Coney Barrett that's ongoing and very chilling to watch. We will discuss that in this show. Gaslit Nation launched in 2018. We found our voice literally crying and screaming on this podcast during the month of horror in September for Kavanaugh's hearing. Sarah and I figured out podcasting by marching through that hell, and it was absolute hell. I think I spiked my laptop against the ground at one point. I really literally did and I needed a new laptop. So, thank you for all your Patreon donations during that fall of 2018, because you helped me buy a new laptop after I rage-spiked my other one.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Kavanaugh hearings were absolutely brutal. What we're seeing again with this disgraceful shoving through of a Supreme Court judge–the seizure of power–is just as brutal to watch. To give us a recap of what's going on, yet another autumn of hell, with our Supreme Court becoming more radical in the hands of a rabid minority in America that doesn't care about women's rights, the rights of LGBT people and reproductive freedom and all those rights that our secular society, our constitution, wants to hold dear for us. Sarah is going to give a rundown of the Senate hearing thus far.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, excuse me, let me look at my notes here. Okay. “For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life, for these beings fall is the ever normal season, the only weather. There be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No, the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eyes? The snake. What hears with their ear? The Abyss between the stars.
Sarah Kendzior:
“They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts, they beetle scurry. Creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen and surely cloud all clear run waters. The spider web hears them, trembles and breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm sorry. I’m sorry, that's from Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. That was not my Supreme Court notes. It's just so hard to keep them straight, given that it's October and we're led by a mad carnival of soul-devouring monsters, otherwise known as the GOP. I believe that you had possibly a more incisive take, although this is fairly apt.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, yours works too.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think so. [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
We're going to do a big old rundown of this battle for America's soul. It's really scary, obviously, and everyone has a right to feel scared and furious about what's going on, because they absolutely should. As we pointed out, in autocratic countries, the judicial system, that's the cage bars of autocracy. If you have the courts packed with a bunch of fascist sympathizers that were put into those positions of power deliberately, to help establish–consolidate–one party rule in a country, where do you have to go to fight for your rights, to appeal for your rights? It becomes very scary once you lose the judicial system.
Andrea Chalupa:
I remember being at a summit on fighting corruption in Ukraine back in 2015 with all these leading experts from the EU, from the US, from Ukraine, on confronting fighting corruption in Ukraine. One thing I kept hearing over and over again, is get rid of the judges, the judges are all corrupt. Wouldn't it be great if Ukraine could just remove all their judges and get brand new judges? That, of course, can't be done, but it was that feeling of, if you could only get rid of the judges, Ukraine will have such a better chance at finally becoming a strong, flourishing democracy with far less corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
The judges are very much the handmaidens of corruption and autocracy. If we're losing our courts to Mitch McConnell and Trump and the mafia corruption of today's Republican Party, that's tough. That's going to be a tough, generation's long battle. But there is some hope, and we'll go into the hope in the show.
Andrea Chalupa:
Here's a little rundown of what's going on. According to The New York Times, a majority of voters believe the winner of the presidential election should fill the Supreme Court seat. That's obvious. That's just common sense. We remember with Florida in 2000, with Gore v. Bush, that Supreme Court case which shut down the recount in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, which ushered in the apocalypse with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
Here we have, according to Daily Poster, “Amy Coney Barrett, who would be the third justice on the court to have worked for Republicans directly on the Bush v. Gore case, that handed the 2000 election to the GOP. She would be the second installed on the court by Trump. Three years ago, Barrett told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, ‘One significant case in which I provided research and briefing assistance was Bush v. Gore.’ She said she worked on the case with the law firm Baker Botts while it was in Florida courts. She declined to detail the scope of her work on the case and for other clients at the firm saying, ‘I no longer have records of the matters upon which I worked.’
Andrea Chalupa:
“Earlier this week, Trump refused to say that he would peacefully transfer power if he loses the election in November. He further suggested the Supreme Court will likely decide the election.” So, Trump’s openly stealing elections and telling us he's stealing the elections. That's a big part of this, what we're witnessing in the senate right now. Amy Coney Barrett is the swamp. George W. Bush was a disastrous president who, like Trump, hurt America’s standing in the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Bush's Afghanistan war is the longest war in US history. We're still there. Bush's Halliburton war for oil in Iraq helped give rise to ISIS, the terror regime. Obama had to prioritize battling, which spread US foreign policy too thin, helping contribute to Putin to being less of a priority and therefore his aggression going largely unchecked.
Andrea Chalupa:
If there was no war in Iraq, then there would have been no ISIS. Putin would have been the number one terrorist threat and his aggression could have been better contained if the US didn't have to be bogged down in the Middle East, thanks to Bush. Amy Coney Barrett helped Bush become president. She's partly responsible for one of the most disastrous presidents in modern history, and yet people are giving her the Bill Barr treatment, treating her as this respectable figurehead.
Andrea Chalupa:
Elie Mystal in The Nation wrote, "If Barrett ruled like a devout Catholic all the time, that would be one thing, but she doesn't. She rules like an extremist conservative all the time, and just uses religion to justify those extremist positions when it is convenient for her to do so. She ignores the moral and ethical underpinnings of her faith when they conflict with the cruel requirements of conservative dogma."
Andrea Chalupa:
Elie Mystal, in this wonderful, must-read piece in The Nation calls out Republicans trying to hide behind religion in order to further their corruption. When you see Ben Sasse and other Republicans doing this in the Senate, keep in mind, Republican senators are essentially corporate lobbyists. That's how you have to think of them, they're corporate lobbyists. They're there to further a lack of accountability, get rid of regulations and reforms, and just allow money at all costs. Money over life.
Andrea Chalupa:
They'll hide behind their religion to justify doing that. They love to hide behind religion, even though the Republican Party–Trump's Republican Party–shoved through an anti-constitutional Muslim ban. Elie Mystal really beautifully confronts this whole religion shield they're trying to hide behind, which is of course, gaslighting.
Andrea Chalupa:
As we know in the US, we have a separation of church and state. It's a constitutional right, and the founding fathers were very strong on this point. What we're seeing here is Republicans leading us towards a theocracy because they really want to consolidate power. Mike Lee said the quiet part out loud when he challenged the very notion of democracy in America and what a pain that pesky democracy is. From a USA Today op ed, this is by Donald B. Ayer who served for 10 years in the Department of Justice, including as US Attorney and Deputy Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan, and as Deputy Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush. He's joined in this great USA Today piece by Alan Charles Raul, who was appointed to senior legal positions by presidents Reagan, Bush and George W. Bush, and as Associate White House Counsel worked closely on the Supreme Court nomination of Antonin Scalia.
Andrea Chalupa:
They write in USA Today (and we'll link to this in the show notes), "The legitimacy of the judicial branch rests on the principle that judges are independent and unbiased interpreters of the law. A fair process for nomination and selection is crucial to preserving a public perception of the Justices of the Supreme Court as neutral jurists, rather than pawns of the political process. In fact, if this Republican power play succeeds, the Chief Justice John Roberts' recent reaffirmation that, ‘We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges, or Clinton judges’ will be made quite untenable. Whatever one thinks of McConnell's action in 2016 to deny any consideration to President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, and we think it was clearly wrong, an action now to proceed with the Republican nominee for a vacancy arising less than two months before the election.”–Now, it's within 21 days.–"Would flatly violate the principle McConnell announced then to justify the action he took. When McConnell set a new standard for how the Senate would proceed with the Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, the American people understood that this new rule would be applied consistently, should another vacancy to which it clearly applies arise in McConnell's watch.
Andrea Chalupa:
“By going back on his word, McConnell's arbitrary application of rules obliterates any pretense of any justification except the bald pursuit of power. It is flatly inconsistent with the vision of our founders that our government would be made legitimate because it was trusted by and accountable to the people. And if left unchecked, Senator McConnell's move, and the complicity of every Republican senator who refused to consider Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016, but will go along with the vote now, will powerfully testify that the Republicans who control the Senate have no respect for the consistent application of legal rules, but seek only to maximize their own power.
Andrea Chalupa:
“If the senate moves forward with Barrett's confirmation with such crass and naked hypocrisy, then more people will lose faith in our democracy. And as we've seen throughout history, democracies crumble when people lose faith in them. Just think of the consequences for credibility if an election-related dispute makes its way to the Supreme Court, and the vote of a newly installed Justice Barrett decides the case. Sometimes the rule of law calls for restraint and the exercise of lawful power in order to assure public confidence and respect. Greater comity –– or self-restraint and pushing political power to the max –– strengthens American democracy and makes her institutions more successful."
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, gosh. I just want to close this off by saying autocracy is legalized corruption, as I said at the start of this. They bend and change and ignore the laws, using the law, because in an autocratic system, the judges are controlled by the crime family in power. And Republicans have been leading us to this point, which is why they are just the perfect target for Putin's criminality. They came together in this obscene marriage of corruption in 2016, to just further weaken American democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just to point this out even further, Robert Reich, Former Labor Secretary and Public Policy Professor at UC Berkeley, wrote on Twitter, "Court-packing. Since 1969, Democratic presidents have appointed four supreme court justices. Republicans have appointed 15, four of them by presidents who lost the popular vote. McConnell refused even to hold a hearing on Obama's nominee."
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Sarah Kendzior:
All of this goes back to what we said back in the first election in November, that 2016 was not the start of a coup but the conclusion of one and all signs were indicating towards that when McConnell wouldn't have that hearing over Merrick Garland. Because McConnell understands how to transform a democracy from an autocracy. Trump is the wrecking ball. Trump is the vehicle for a wide variety of horrific actors and their separate agendas, and we've gone over that many times.
Sarah Kendzior:
In terms of McConnell’s, it's to turn the US from a democracy to a one-party state led by the GOP, certainly with elements of a theocracy. I don't think that's necessarily his own goal, but it's the goal of the Federalist Society. It's the goal of Amy Coney Barrett, it's the goal of Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, who structure their policy along the Rapture, and they made that clear then, because they understand that the judiciary is usually the last Domino to fall in other countries that have faced these crises. It's the courts that can often reject the brutal policies of a despot. It's the courts that can reestablish rights for citizens, that can strike things down, and that give people some sort of hope that all of the protests they're doing and the votes that they're passing, and just their general voice in a society matters.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, what the GOP did and what they've been aiming to do–basically, since the Reagan era–is tear apart that sense of individual autonomy among those who aren't following their very rigid, very narrow Republican Party line. Since Trump's election, that party line has been utterly subsumed by veneration for Donald Trump, by participation in the crime cult of Donald Trump. I don't know exactly how this will proceed given the uncertainty of the current situation–both Trump's alleged COVID diagnosis/alleged recovery/the election and its contestation–but they've been working at this very methodically.
Sarah Kendzior:
When justice Anthony Kennedy stepped down, that was the moment that my heart sank because I just saw this as the culmination of a plan. Then, of course, when we looked into Kennedy, looked at his son, Justin Kennedy, who had worked at Deutsche Bank handling Trump's finances (this is the same bank that had handled Kushner's finances, Epstein's finances, the finances of the Russian mafia, the finances of Russian oligarchs), you see this interconnected plot.
Sarah Kendzior:
You can go back to our old Gaslit Nation episodes, listen to us break down the Kavanaugh hearings. But one moment from that that I never forgot was at the end of those hearings, when Senator Patrick Leahy just stood up and said, "Yeah, the Senate doesn't exist anymore as a legislative body. The Senate no longer has a voice." We no longer have a separate branch. It is the courts and the GOP overriding everything, overriding protocol, overriding norms, and also rewriting laws. That is the purpose of getting them into the courts. That's one of the reasons that this is so frightening. Even as we're recording this show on Tuesday morning, one of the questions that was asked of Amy Coney Barrett is, does federal law under any circumstances allow a president to delay an election?
Sarah Kendzior:
Barrett, instead of just saying “no”, in referring to the Constitution, she says she'd have to, "Consider, consult, research and is not a legal pundit." Notably, there was very little follow up to this question from Dianne Feinstein, who's doing an atrocious job, but that's its own issue. But these are people, they'll call themselves originalists. They bathe themselves in religion, in Catholicism and also in this faux constitutional veneration, but they don't have respect for the Constitution. They don't have respect for our founders. They don't know how to interpret the Constitution as a living document. It's just another justification for autocracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
These documents that were founded–that were created–by people who were overthrowing a monarchy are being used by people who want to create a one-party state autocracy that, with the appointment of this judge, could last our entire life. Whether the United States continues to exist is its own question, but it will not exist as a democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, it's never been a full democracy, but we've moved incrementally over the decades towards more progress, more freedom, and so forth. It will take us back so far. A lot of people are bringing up abortion rights and Roe vs. Wade, but there's also religious freedom, civil rights, voting rights. We've already seen the partial repeal of the VRA in 2013. We may see the full repeal with her appointment. Voting rights are essential to getting all other rights.
Sarah Kendzior:
So all of our rights are in grave danger here, which is why I hope...the Democrats need to fight much harder. They need to expand the court and be unapologetic in doing so. If there is a contested election in which Coney Barrett and Kavanaugh–two judges who should not be on there because of the illicit and possibly illegal mechanics of how they got confirmed in the first place, if she does get confirmed–if they're making that final decision, and Trump is contesting an election that say, for example, Biden wins in a landslide...my God, we have a constitutional crisis already. We're going to have another one of just incompatible depth of depravity then. It'll make Bush versus Gore look like nothing.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Democrats need to look at this with very clear eyes and stand their ground and not resign and not back down as they have on basically every crisis over the last 40 years. They need to be extremely resolute because our whole country is on the line. If you have kids, what happens to your kids for the rest of their lives, especially your daughters, their rights are on the line, especially if you're a person of color. I don't think I need to tell anybody this. I think anyone listening to the show already is very well aware of that, and that's why these proceedings instill such a sense of panic, because it is autocratic. It is an executive level body, over which we as citizens have no say, determining our freedom, determining our future, and with a very weak opposition coming from the most senior representatives of the Democratic Party and with utter complicity from the Republican Party. The entire thing, it's just one of the most shameful things I've witnessed.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. Our hope–because we promised you hope on this show, and we always try to deliver–our hope is in the local races, and being vigilant of the local races and cleaning up your local politics wherever you live. If we all do that, then local politics becomes a buffer against corruption in the courts, and on the federal level. You can organize locally. It's a smaller little playground for you to dominate. It's easier, it's more manageable. Plus, quality of life issues like voting rights laws, and clean water, clean air, those issues... Oh, and public education, all of those wonderful quality of life issues are determined by state governments.
Andrea Chalupa:
Know who represents you in your state capitol. If that person isn't as smart as you, then take their job. It's that simple. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're flushing the idiots out of power and replacing them with smart, empathetic, qualified public servants. That's what we desperately need right now in order to navigate this very precarious time in our nation's history.
Andrea Chalupa:
We will get there. It’s going to be a generational battle Study history for great insight. There's a wonderful documentary, docudrama, whatever you want to call it, that Leonardo DiCaprio was involved in that I keep talking about to Sarah, and I don't think she's seen it yet, but you should watch it, Sarah. It's the documentary on Ulysses S. Grant, the original civil rights president.
Andrea Chalupa:
This documentary will give you a lot of much-needed perspective on the kind of energy we need right now. Grant lived a very hard life. He was knocked down several times. When Grant desperately needed money, he freed an enslaved man that had been given to him by his father-in-law. This is the equivalent, during that time, of giving away a house for free. He needed that money, and instead he gave an enslaved man his freedom, showing the kind of character he had inside of him.
Andrea Chalupa:
When he rose to the rank of General, he was up against all these fancypants, super intimidating, mythologized, Southern generals, and he went at them like a Nazi hunter. He was relentless, and he was ruthless. It was Grant, just as much as Lincoln, that held the union together. People like to point to Lincoln's team of rivals. Lincoln was sort of the compromised candidate, he was a bit of a Biden candidate during his election when he came to power as president, and he took his rivals in that election and brought them into his cabinet, much like Biden has brought his rivals together. They've teamed up. There's a team of rivals that are running for the Democratic ticket, essentially, in 2020. Very much that team of rivals energy here with Biden.
Andrea Chalupa:
But you cannot have a team of rivals unless you have a General Grant who's going to be your Nazi hunter and be ruthless against the enemy and set and establish strong boundaries. That is what Grant did. He hunted down those Southern generals and dog-walked them for the world to see–these fancypants, Southern generals–and it was just glorious.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think for this time, you need to awaken your inner General Grant. You need to find that energy and own it, and you need to hunt down the Nazis where you live and take their jobs, push them out of power. Speaking of Nazis, we should talk about the Nazi hunter in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who had this FBI plot to kidnap her by this white terrorist organization. The FBI keeps telling us that white terrorism is the greatest domestic threat we're facing today.
Andrea Chalupa:
A group of really disgusting looking men were going to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, put her on trial and then likely execute her, likely rape her. These are Nazis, through and through. She's responded to this with courage. She's gone off and knocked on doors in Michigan. She's shown grace and she's shown that she's not going to be intimidated.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is a heroic act. If you keep in mind what happened in the same sort of frenzied, far-right, white terrorism energy leading up to the Brexit vote in the UK in 2016, we had of course, a far-right, white terrorist assassinate a British MP, Jo Cox. Women are always on the front lines–especially women of color–are always on the front lines of autocracies, growing autocracies. The governor of Michigan is doing an extraordinary job of showing leadership and showing courage during this time, and that's what we need more of.
Andrea Chalupa:
What we should look out for is white terrorism in America being a big welcome sign to Putin and his proxies. There's already amplification of Kremlin and far-right propaganda. You have Putin's propaganda TV borrowing talking points from Fox News, and vice versa. I saw this play out with their attacks against my sister, Alexandra Chalupa, the DNC contractor that tried to warn Republicans and Democrats that Putin was attacking our democracy in 2016, through his operative, Paul Manafort, who was managing Trump's campaign at time. She's been, of course, vindicated many times over.
Andrea Chalupa:
We saw, during the attacks on her, Kremlin and state propaganda and Fox News and other right-wing Republican nut jobs in the US repeating each other's propaganda against her. If the Kremlin and the far-right in America can join together when it comes to propaganda, why couldn't they join together when it comes to terrorism here in the US? Why wouldn't the Kremlin send proxies to these far-right extremists in America to try to share best practices, advise them, do other things? That is what is going on with the invasion of Ukraine, where you have, in addition to that, the full-on Russian military coming in and backing up these Russian proxies on the ground, and creating this ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's the proper Russian military that's invading Ukraine but they do rely on these homespun, wannabe-Rambo terrorists on the ground as well. It's all done in conjunction in Ukraine's ongoing invasion by Russia. That's something to look out for. I'm sure the FBI hopefully is all over that, looking at how the Kremlin is going to try to take advantage of white terrorism being a leading terrorist threat. We already see the amplification of propaganda. That's ongoing.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, so much of this is just a replay of 2016. It's like we got trapped in 2016 and are just reliving it over and over. It is like Something Wicked This Way Comes. We're on the carousel that goes backwards, led by the dark man and his evil carnival. But all of this, the attack–or the plotted attack–on Governor Whitmer that was broken up by the FBI, I remember at the time in October of 2016, which granted, just like now was a crazy news month, this story broke that a group of white supremacist domestic terrorists were plotting–inspired by Trump and on behalf of Trump–to bomb an apartment complex that housed a number of Somali refugees in Kansas.
Sarah Kendzior:
The FBI broke this up shortly before the election, arrested those individuals, and I remember at the time, it was unclear what the election would be. I thought it would be either very close, which was. It was like Bush versus Gore. I thought Trump would probably win, wasn't completely sure. These guys thought he was going to lose and they were ready to honor their martyred victim. And Trump, just like now, was calling for violence.
Sarah Kendzior:
You had Roger Stone back in 2016 calling for a bloodbath, saying there's going to be a bloodbath if Trump loses the election. And so, so much of this is just the same thing again, and again, whether it's Trump calling for his "Second Amendment people” back in 2016, to take out Hillary Clinton or Trump calling, and encouraging mass violence now, as well as continuing to target Hillary Clinton despite her not running for office. And CNBC, Joe Biden was asked by them if he believes that Trump's “Liberate Michigan” tweet (which he tweeted in April, during the coronavirus beginnings when people were refusing to wear a mask), whether that tweet encouraged militias? Biden said, "Yes, I do. Why won't the president just say stop? Stop, stop, stop, and we will pursue you if you don't."
Sarah Kendzior:
So Biden recognizes this and I'm glad he seems to be taking a hard line against it. I don't know what other line you could possibly take unless you are pro-domestic terrorism. But, you know, Trump is. The other difference now, of course, is that Trump has been purging and gutting the FBI. They've been relabeling what the categories of terrorism are. That was an early move when he had Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, was to stop looking at white nationalists and militia domestic terrorists and focus solely on Islamic terrorists.
Sarah Kendzior:
We also have Trump at war with the FBI, to a degree. He already purged it of many of the people who were investigating transnational organized crime, investigating the Russian mafia. He also doesn't want them to be cracking down on these violent militants who will act on his behalf, who will answer his call, for example, after the election, if he sees violence as a means to securing an illegal win, which I think he does. It's a two pronged tactic: One tactic is to have it play out in court–which is, as we just said, why he's been packing the Supreme Court–and to have a replay of Bush versus Gore with three people on the court that were involved in Bush versus Gore ruling on Trump's behalf. The other, I think, is to have so much violence and chaos and misery in the streets of America that people will become frustrated, and they will just throw their hands up in the air and be like, "You know what, put a stop to it, just put a stop to it, because all of this on top of the pandemic is more than I can take."
Sarah Kendzior:
Again, I encourage not just our representatives, but everybody to be very resolute, to really get ready to buckle down and bear it for the next few months, and just stay strong and don't give up your rights. Don't surrender in advance, because times are going to be, I believe, very, very difficult and painful to process. We already know that 2020 is the year from hell, and this is going to be the coda on that year. This is going to be a grand and horrific finale that I do think we'll continue into 2021.
Sarah Kendzior:
But there's the potential for a better way. There is the potential to rebuild, there's the potential to learn from our mistakes, to insist on accountability from our leaders, to never, ever let things like the kind of giving up on the Merrick Garland situation or on Trump, obviously, collaborating illegally with Russia to steal an election in 2016.
Sarah Kendzior:
So many people just kind of wanted to look the other way and hoped it would work out, hoped that Hillary Clinton would get it and then she'd appoint some judges and everything would be all right, and we wouldn't need to discuss all of these root issues of systemic corruption, of systemic racism, of election rigging and the history of it. They all thought that we could just throw those things by the wayside and not confront them. We have to confront them because now we're seeing the tragedy of not confronting them play out in front of us.
Sarah Kendzior:
Just please, don't give up on yourself and don't give up on this idea of a better future for yourself in America. Don't get ready to pack your bags and run. Stand your ground here. This is your country. It is your right to be here. We do have rights, regardless of what the Republican Party thinks about that. I know, Andrea, you had some thoughts along these lines as well.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, but first, Sarah, have you watched that Grant documentary?
Sarah Kendzior:
I haven’t. I swear to God, Andrea, you're getting paid by the Grant people to hype this up. Every time... It's really funny because I'm sure there are people that tap Andrea and my phones and it's always us bitching about female problems or our kids, but in the middle of that, it is like Andrea Chalupa, Grant stand, just going on and on and on about Ulysses S. Grant, and this documentary. She's like for Ulysses S. Grant the way I am about Guns n Roses or something, it's very abnormal. But I think it's useful. I am going to watch it.
Andrea Chalupa:
It’s so good.
Sarah Kendzior:
I have plans to watch it. This week, we're going to nerd it up as a family, learn some history. So, yes, I will. I promise you, I will finally get around to that.
Andrea Chalupa:
My next child gets to be named Grant.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Grant Chalupa, I'm here for it.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm going to raise him like a Spartan. I'm going to throw him out to the wolves and he has to come back with a wolf skin on his shoulders. Okay, basically, everyone's freaked out, they have every right to be. It's as bad as you think, it's probably worse than we all realize. But the name of the game is we're going to stay put, and we're going to fight.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you're in the crosshairs, if they're calling you out by name, if you're going through political persecution, if you are enemy number one through 10 on their top 10 list, you have a right to get out of the country. If your life and your family's life is in danger, you have the right to leave. We're going to absolutely understand if you want to get out. But if you're just some random, white, straight person who comes from financial means and you're like, "Oh, I can't take it anymore. I'm out of here.", you're doing it wrong, and you don't understand what we're up against if you leave, because this terror can find you anywhere.
Andrea Chalupa:
We keep telling you: this is a transnational crime syndicate. It is transnational. One of the major players in this coalition of corruption is, of course, the Kremlin, and the Kremlin is excellent at neutralizing threats. The Kremlin is excellent in thinking and working in decades, and planting seeds that are going to flourish after time.
Andrea Chalupa:
You're thinking you're going to run off to Canada? Well, let me tell you something. A couple years ago, when I was in Toronto, I was talking to friends that work on the frontlines of exposing Kremlin aggression and confronting it, and they were really concerned about socially acceptable oligarchs from Russia close to the Kremlin–but these guys have more of a sheen, they're better at hiding it, they're better at diluting it–they were coming into Canada and trying to host dinners with business leaders in Canada and spread those golden handcuffs around.
Andrea Chalupa:
So they have their eyes on Canada. You want to talk about the UK? Well, we know London is Londongrad and you know that the UK–the government–has been suppressing reports, investigations into Kremlin corruption and how it influences British politics. There's nowhere you can run on this planet. It's going to come for you eventually. Steve Bannon can happen anywhere. White terrorism can happen anywhere. It happened in the beautiful promised land of New Zealand that a lot of people want to flock to, to hide away from this mess.
Andrea Chalupa:
You had a white terrorist shoot up a mosque in New Zealand. It could happen and grow anywhere. Nowhere is safe. If you leave, you look ignorant. You look very ill informed, that you lack basic common sense and understanding of this very core issue that we all have to be vigilant of. There's no point in leaving, is what we're saying, unless your life is immediately in danger, your freedom is immediately in danger, then yes, absolutely, you have every right to go abroad. Russian opposition leaders do that when they need to. So, you're fine there.
Andrea Chalupa:
But stay and fight. Stay and fight. Sarah has witnessed years of the trauma that grassroots organizers have endured in St. Louis. Out of that emerged, a woman that's going to be going to Congress by the name of Cori Bush. If she had left, if she had the means to leave, we'd be deprived of her talent, but she stayed and fought because that is the American story. The good side of America, the progress that has gotten us a lot of wonderful human rights in this country, was built by men and women of color willing to risk their lives to fight for that progress and we stand on their shoulders.
Andrea Chalupa:
For you to leave when we have all this sacrifice that came before us is to be ungrateful for that legacy that we stand on and that we are morally obligated to build on now. The way we win, our hope, our courage comes from overwhelming them, and outlasting them and playing the long game. We're just at the start, we're at the start of pulling out this fascism by its root, and it's going to take a very long time for us to be successful.
Andrea Chalupa:
This energy that we have now, we have to keep bringing it election cycle after election cycle. You, if you're smart enough to listen to Gaslit Nation regularly, then you might want to take yourself seriously as a candidate for public office, city council, dog catcher, whatever that might interest you. A lot of people less qualified than you have done this successfully, so what is your excuse?
Andrea Chalupa:
If you're looking for hope right now, during this time of terror, go to gaslitationpod.com, and check out our Action Guide. One thing you absolutely must do before you pack up your bags and leave this country, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to us, you owe it to all of those who came before us and sacrificed so much to get us much needed human rights here. You owe it to all of us to read Amanda Litman's book on how to run for office, how to take yourself seriously as a candidate.
Andrea Chalupa:
The only person you need to convince is yourself, because once you can do that hard work of standing up to that little vicious voice in your head that tries to claim you're not going to be able to do it, if you can stand up to that voice, everything else after that is easy. So, go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide, read Amanda Litman's book, read that first before you make any plans to move abroad, and really start looking at yourself and those around you as the people we need to run for office and flush out these idiots in the system. That is what we desperately need right now, we need to overwhelm them, overpower them and outlast them.
Sarah Kendzior:
The primary thing I feel like is guiding the political culture of this country, and this has been happening for a long time, long before Trump, is fear of abandonment. It's fear that you are going to suffer and not suffer in silence, exactly, you're going to suffer and scream and people will cover their ears or they'll pretend they can't hear you or they'll look the other way, and they're not going to help you because that's the way that much of our government has worked. That's certainly the way that corporations work, and I feel like that is increasingly the way that people have treated each other over the last two decades, and I think social media has made that worse. It's dehumanized people. It's let people become the objects of mob harassment and pylons that are psychologically traumatic. It's normalized that kind of extensive abuse.
Sarah Kendzior:
So people now, I think they see the situation on a macro scale represented in the Trump administration with an abuser, with an abusive president who nobody seems willing to stand up with. I've heard from so many people that grew up in homes with domestic violence, and they look at this situation and they see Trump as the abusive parent, and then they see Mueller, the House, Pelosi, the FBI, all these institutions that are supposed to stop him–that are supposed to enforce accountability–enabling him, making excuses for him, apologizing for him, pretending it's not happening. The media, obviously, is another example of those.
Sarah Kendzior:
It leaves people in this primal state of fear. I think it's that fight or flight response, that is prompting so many people to say that they are just going to head for the hills if Biden is not proclaimed the winner on November 3rd. I think you should also keep in mind it's going to take a while to probably figure out who the actual winner of this election is.
Sarah Kendzior:
I understand that. I'm sympathetic to that, and Andrea and I are both people who've been targeted by this administration.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, they're coming for us.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, they're coming for us. We're well aware of that. We've been dealing with it for four years.
Andrea Chalupa:
They like to tell us. They like to show us. There's a hit piece by John Solomon that mentions me, that's one of the latest ones.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, that came out today. They have put us through more hell than you know. We don't talk about it that much. We don't talk fully about what we've been through, in part, because I fear that if we do, everyone would just stop participating and people would be afraid to speak out. I just want you to know that we kept going and so many others to have done the same. They're also dealing with threats; threats of violence, threats towards their families, threats towards their financial security, threats to their careers.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think one of the reasons that Andrea and I, we've been psychologically equipped to some degree to deal with this, it is traumatic for us, it is hard for us, but because we've seen it before, and we've seen what happens when people just give up and we've seen what happens to countries when there's a massive brain drain, when the people who understand autocracy and kleptocracy leave, often because they just have to, they don't have a choice. It really is their lives on the line. But the country then begins to die.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I encourage you to stay and fight for as long as you can. On the flip side of that is what Andrea said before, that this is a transnational crime syndicate, and if I were to leave, if I were, for example, to go to Canada, obviously, there would be some benefits to that in terms of how the pandemic is, access to health care, possibly school issues, I wouldn't be safer. I spent my whole career working with and often helping dissidents and exiles from Uzbekistan. They were being hunted down across the world. It didn't matter if they were in Sweden, it didn't matter if they were in Canada. At times, it didn't matter that they are in the United States. They would be hunted down by assassins and by spies from their own government, and digital media and cell phones made this so much easier.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then just a couple other things, for those getting ready to head north or whatnot, it is hard to get asylum. I'm not sure Americans fully understand just how difficult this is. You don't just show up in another country, and they're like, "Oh, hey, welcome." Then you go and get a job, and that's that. It is a bureaucratic nightmare, and it's also unbelievably expensive. That's one of the things that blows my mind when I see all these people saying they're going to move. How are you paying for that? Most Americans don't have more than $400 in the bank, so I'm assuming the ones who are saying they're going to leave have quite a lot of money, which means that the most privileged class–the big taxpayers–are the ones who are getting ready to leave the country and leave behind the most vulnerable citizens, leave behind the most vulnerable areas.
Sarah Kendzior:
Often it's the same attitude I see when people talk about, “oh, just let the south secede”. They'll talk about states like mine, like Missouri, “just let them go”. I'm looking around at Missouri, and I am seeing people like Cori Bush, and I'm seeing people, like progressives who are running in rural districts against high odds. I'm seeing all of our activists and Missouri has some of the most hardened activists, the most brave, committed, resolute people–especially women–that I've ever met in my life. I'm including all of these dissidents I met from Central Asia, because we've been fighting forever. So, people don't back down.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm like, "Oh, so you're willing to just pull your money from them, pull your support from them, pull your votes from the kind of leaders that they're backing? You're willing to just abandon them?” That's what I'm getting at, is you cannot abandon people, and you cannot just put out this view that none of this is worth anything to you in a serious way, that you are the person who walks by when somebody is screaming for help. You're the person who just thinks about yourself, instead of reaching out and doing the right thing and trying to help as many people as you can.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't know why else we're put here, I don't know why else we're on Earth, I don't know why else we're on America, if not to do that, to do what's in your power. There's no magical solution, and none of this is easy. As Andrea said, it's going to take decades to repair, but don't you want to repair it for your children? Don't you feel a sense of obligation towards your countrymen, towards your children for a better future, especially with things like climate change that affect the entire world? Again, you're not going to be able to escape autocratic America, even if you move abroad for that reason.
Sarah Kendzior:
I just don't know what else the purpose of life is. I'm, I guess, optimistically speaking halfway through my life or so, and the other half is dedicated to that. I don't care that much what happens in my own life, I'm thinking about my kids, and I'm thinking about other people's kids, and I'm hoping that these future generations never, ever have to deal with the shit that we've been dealt and the hell that we've been through.
Sarah Kendzior:
If you're looking for a purpose in life, that's it. Concentrate on creating the future, the future that they stole from us, the future that they're trying to make into even more of a dystopian hellscape than it already is. Take it back. Use your remaining power, whatever it is. If you don't know what it is, there are plenty of organizations and groups and leaders and thinkers that can give you advice into finding that. But for God's sake, don't just throw your hands in the air and don't run for the border either.
Andrea Chalupa:
What you just said reminds me of the Grant documentary, where-
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Of course it did.
Andrea Chalupa:
When Grant was struggling in the war against the traitors in the south, and all these fancy generals, and he was losing some battles. What he kept reminding himself during the dark days and reminding the team around him is that we have purpose, we're going to win because we have purpose. That's what Grant was all about, was purpose, and that's why he would go on and become our first civil rights president in sending the military after the KKK.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have purpose. We're ultimately going to win because we have purpose. Sarah just outlined all that beautifully. One thing I want to highlight is there is optimism, right? Virginia is solidly blue now. Virginia being the hotbed of the Confederacy at one point, it's now a blue state. We have a Democrat in–governor–and a lot of amazing women Democrats who led a grassroots movement to take back control. It's been a progressive success story here in Virginia that just passed for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Andrea Chalupa:
Virginia is a great model of the progress that America can make, and the faith that we should all have in that progress if we work hard for it, if we organize, if we stay and fight. But one thing I do want to caution about Virginia is I get a sense, because Trump came out and said that when Virginia is not in play for him. But the fact that Trump didn't say Virginia is in play, makes you wonder what do they have up their sleeves? Today, we have a report from a local news station, WUSA9, an accidentally cut cable has caused the entire Virginia voter registration online system to go down on the last day to register to vote before the election.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's troubling. Then on top of that, we have breaking news that according to the Associated Press, that white terrorist militia that tried to kidnap the governor of Michigan, they were also discussing kidnapping the governor of Virginia. The fact that Virginia is so much on the radar with these weird shenanigans... The kidnapping, and then this mystery of the cable being cut, which shut down voter registration, and then Trump saying Virginia is in play, and Manafort, of course, Putin's operative, is at home in Virginia, where he lives on house arrest. He should be in prison. Manafort is at home, right? What's he up to? What's his contribution to keeping his guy in power so he can finally get a pardon?
Andrea Chalupa:
So keep your eyes on Virginia. I wonder if Virginia is going to be one of those states as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania were in 2016. There's a lot of things that went off kilter in the final hours. Speaking of Manafort and the swamp monsters, there's more excellent reporting, more big financial disaster bombshells coming out of the New York Times on the Trump Crime Family's corruption. The most recent, of course, the New York Times reported how Trump is deeply in debt, which makes him vulnerable to being compromised and owned by a foreign adversary, endangering our sovereignty as a nation, and that he only pays $750 a year in taxes.
Andrea Chalupa:
The New York Times is back with another bombshell, this one illustrating perfectly how Trump is the swamp, which was so obvious to anyone who knows his decades long friendship with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who worked with Kremlin proxies to help steal the 2016 election and bring Trump to Power. Stone and Manafort are as swampy as they get. Stone even has a Nixon tattoo on his back. These guys broadcast their crimes by projecting their crimes onto their opponents. When they say drain the swamp, they really mean feed the swamp monsters steroids, because that is what they have done.
Andrea Chalupa:
From the New York Times: "The swamp that Trump built. A businessman president transplanted favor seeking in Washington to his family's hotels and resorts and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration. Mr. Trump did not merely fail to end Washington's insider culture of lobbying and favor seeking, he reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway's new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interest reign. Using his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades. But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president.
Andrea Chalupa:
“An investigation by the Times found over 200 companies, special interest groups and foreign governments that patronize Mr. Trump's properties, while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported. The tax records along with membership rosters from Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, as well as other sources reveal how much money this new line of business was worth. Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the Trump administration brought his family business, nearly $12 million during the first two years of his presidency, the Times found, almost all saw their interests advanced in some fashion by Mr. Trump or his government."
Andrea Chalupa:
A summary of this latest New York Times bombshell, which we'll link to in the show notes, was provided by Nick Ackerman, a former Watergate prosecutor on Twitter, who wrote, "New York Times reports that $20 million from Trump's Las Vegas hotel was paid to Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing with no clear business purpose or employees, deducted as a business expense and funneled to Trump's 2016 campaign, an obvious criminal scheme to defraud the government of taxes."
Andrea Chalupa:
We'll link to other reporting, just this year alone, on how there's a big complaint that Trump laundered money through his campaign, Brad Parscale. Parscale is also under investigation for financially profiting off of the campaign that he was managing. Bannon, of course, was indicted for stealing donations to build a border wall. They are the swamp monster on steroids.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, they took the swamp and turned it into a moat, and put it around the White House and installed themselves inside, and they're not going to want to leave because they don't want to face any kind of prosecution–which is long overdue–for all of these crimes. It was frustrating to read the New York Times report because so much of it was already written, including in the New York Times. I remember going on Joy Reid's show in late 2016 and talking about some of these business cases, talking about Trump's refusal to divest and how that was going to create a kleptocracy, and that kleptocracy was the most immediate and obvious danger.
Sarah Kendzior:
When I said that back then, it was considered this wild, radical, crazy thing. I think that it was the New Republic who wrote a hit piece on me–a front page cover hit piece–for pointing out what I thought was a very obvious threat that obviously Trump has followed through on, because that's what career criminals associated with transnational organized crime do when they grab the executive branch, is they attempt to rewrite the law so they're no longer breaking it and they abuse their position to enhance their personal wealth.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's crazy to me, I was thinking today how it's only been two weeks since we did that whole episode about Trump's tax returns, about the ones that they initially released, still the same set of returns, I think, but analyzed from a different perspective. Because in between then, of course, Trump got COVID, was cured of COVID, rose from the dead like Lazarus, yet also spread COVID all over the place at a super spreader event. Every other hour, there was a new Republican that was infected.
Sarah Kendzior:
Even by our standards of sorting the shit out for a living, my brain feels completely fried. I don't think that Trump pretended to get COVID to distract from his tax returns, which is something people were suggesting, because I don't think Trump really gives a shit that much about these reports, unless there's follow through on them.
Sarah Kendzior:
As I've said many times, he does not mind being caught as long as he's not punished. But I do worry that generally speaking, it's not just that these stories have gotten lost in the COVID shuffle, it's that people have come to expect this, or a to accept it, I should say, because you should absolutely expect kleptocracy and theft from Trump and from all of his backers. That is literally what they are there to do. That is their plan. You should never accept it, and that's why it was very frustrating that during impeachment, for example, they didn't impeach on emoluments and people kind of just let all of these financial misdeeds and trading positions for favors with foreign countries–things like Kushner getting Qatar to pay down his debt on 666 Fifth Avenue–that they just let that go by the wayside because it sets such an abysmal standard. It's destroyed our standing in the world. It's let a crime family just flourish.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think the trade of state secrets was probably something else that occurred there, and that's not going to be noted on any kind of tax returns. It was important to make a firm stance from the very beginning, and they didn't, and we now have ultra swampiness being revealed again through the New York Times. So I hope people do care and remember their standards, and think about what they've had to pay in taxes. Remember that it is usually the poorest or lower middle class Americans who are audited by the IRS. We have had such incredible deregulation, such laxity towards white collar crime that people like Trump were rarely investigated, and that's one of the reasons he was able to get an office in the first place. It's not just the incredible laxity towards him and his actual crimes, his actual mafia ties.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is someone who never would have gotten a security clearance, much less should have been allowed to win an election or run in an election with the risk that he would win it. It's because they're all living like this. There are so many senators that live like this. People who profited off of insider trading when the coronavirus information was accessible to them. That is our political culture and it's absolutely disgusting, and it should fill you with rage.
Sarah Kendzior:
Never just accept this, that they live this way and you live that way, and that's your fate. You have to actually point it out all the time when you see it and think of ways to fight back.
Andrea Chalupa:
A great way to fight back is going to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com. Stay and fight. You owe it to all those who came before us to check out the section on the Gaslit Nation Action Guide, running for office. Read Amanda Litman's book that we link to there and see yourself as the public servant we desperately need in this moment of history. If talking corpse Mitch McConnell can be feeding off taxpayers' money as an elected official, then you're in. You're good. Just do the work, figure it out. We desperately need you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the truth teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the front lines in the US, China and other hard hit parts of the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org. If you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from Palm oil industry donate to The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. Also, subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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