BONUS: Arrest the Seditious Criminals Now
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Andrea Chalupa:
We are recording. All right, everyone. This is going to be a rough, quick take on the attempted violent coup on our democracy, which was a mashup of every Gaslit Nation episode ever. Thank you for all your messages. We've been hearing from a lot of listeners who obviously saw this coming because they've been following along on the show. Sarah and I are two rockets of burning fury right now. We have a lot to share with you. Sarah, do you want to just give me a moment to take a breath and bash this pinata for a moment for me?
Sarah Kendzior:
Pinata full of Congress members. Yeah. I need a moment. This is one of these things where we're both so furious. Before we started taping this, we tried to get our primal rage out of our system. Just so you know, because of the time sensitivity of the crisis we're living in, we're just recording this quick and dirty without our audio editors, right off the top of our heads. Everything you're hearing will not be edited or altered in any way. So it puts a certain amount of pressure on us because we're so, so fucking pissed.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's the same thing over and over. We've had so many moments over the last few years where people say, "Oh my God. No one could have seen this coming." Or we're just overwhelmed with messages and Twitter and email and elsewhere saying that we saw it coming and that people called us alarmists, hysterical, and so forth. A few things about that: people rarely call us that anymore to our faces. They probably do behind our backs. That's the least of what we've had to deal with. We've had to deal with serious threats to our lives. I wrote about this in my book, in Hiding in Plain Sight. I briefly had to have a bodyguard.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're dealing with a mafia state. We're dealing with an aspiring autocracy. We're dealing with a violent neo-Confederate movement of domestic terrorists that invaded the Capitol Building yesterday, and we are dealing with a Congress that has utterly abdicated its duty to protect the American people. Their own offices were raided. Their computers were tampered with. The windows of the Capitol are broken. The police let them in. The police are likely infiltrated. This is another thing we warned you about a long time ago—and they've gone on vacation. They are doing nothing.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I want you to think long and hard about what that means for us and what that means for you and what that means for America in general. We have no one at the helm for the next couple of weeks. We've seen these little resignations from Donald Trump's complicit lackeys and we're supposed to applaud them as if they weren't there plotting and abetting this all along. Those resignations mean nothing, except that another open spot is left for even worse people to join in as Trump goes out with a bang. We have said from the start, the reason that he is in office and the reason that his backers brought him into this office—because it was not a fluke, it was well-planned—was for the destruction of the United States.
Sarah Kendzior:
A United States that is sick and weak and broken and hurting is easier to take apart. A United States that has controlled opposition in certain parts of the Democratic Party where people will do absolutely nothing, even if it's their own offices that are attacked, their own colleagues who are attacked, their own building and place of work that’s stood there for hundreds of years is attacked—they'll do nothing. They will not enforce any accountability. They will not take any responsibility, and they will not protect anybody.
Sarah Kendzior:
So Andrea and I have put ourselves in the spotlight, not because we crave it. We were both doing other things before all of this came along. The things we were doing are not things people do to get attention. You don't go and study Uzbekistan for 15 years because you want to be a media pundit. You don't go and make a film about Stalin because you want to be number one on iTunes. Those are just not things that normally would have drawn a lot of popular appeal, but they did because they are so resonant with the times we're living in, and this is not a good thing. It is not a good thing when the times that we're living in mirror the times of post-Soviet authoritarian regimes, of Soviet-era regimes, or of autocratic regimes in general.
Sarah Kendzior:
Because what happens during those times is that journalists and scholars and artists are threatened severely and that people in general suffer severely. They lose their lives. And you know this. You've seen over 350,000 Americans die even though we know that that death was caused not by incompetence, but by malice, by stealing medical equipment, selling medical equipment, refusing to roll out the vaccine, lying about the disease itself, giving fraudulent medical advice. No one will stand up to them. We are just so fucking sick of it. We know that we warned all of you.
Sarah Kendzior:
I want to say this is not aimed at all at anyone who subscribes to our Patreon because, obviously, if you've subscribed to it, you've heard us say this many times and I'm sure you share our frustration and you share our fear. It just doesn't help at all at this point to sort of say, "So-and-so saw this first," or note that Andrea and I were early. It's very important for the historical record to note that we knew and that other scholars and other people knew because what's predictable is what is preventable, and hey refused to prevent it, and they used ignorance as a cover. There's absolutely no excuse for being ignorant after four fucking years of this.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, my point is we're now down to the wire. He's officially there for two more weeks. A lot of destruction can take place between now and then. I do not think that yesterday's actions were the end. I said from the start we're likely to see a great deal of domestic violence in this time and that it's not going to be like a 19th century style civil war. It's going to be a lot of shootings, bombings, stormings of federal property. These are all things we saw coming because they were already happening. They happened over the summer. They threatened to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
Sarah Kendzior:
They stormed multiple city halls. This is not the bulk of the Trump voters. This is not 70 million people. This is at best, I don't know, maybe a few ... like about the number of people that died of coronavirus at best, maybe a couple hundred thousand, probably more, tens of thousands. It doesn't take very many people. It doesn't take a lot of people to cause an enormous problem. We know that through watching Timothy McVeigh and others throughout our lives cause enormous problems, mass shooters. They're letting these people do that. The police are letting them do it. Congress is letting them do it.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Republicans are encouraging them to do it—Josh Hawley, Trump, the rest—and I see very few people rising up to stop it. When people do rise up to stop it, whether it's antifascist fighters on the street or responsible Congress people, like Cory Bush and Ilhan Omar who are pushing for impeachment, Ted Lieu, who's pushing for impeachment and arrest, those representatives get dragged by the leadership of their own party. They get put down because Pelosi is complicit and so are a number of her colleagues. We have been spelling that out for two years as well in great detail.
Sarah Kendzior:
We take a lot of shit for it, but you really, really need to watch it. It was a mistake to have her in as Speaker and I don't like the attacks on The Squad or other representatives who did that because I think they felt like, "Well, who else is coming in?" They hadn’t organized, they didn't have another option. This is not a woman who is loyal to the United States of America, and we've documented that in great detail. You can go back and look at our old episodes and look at our threads and look at her own words. Never forget that Pelosi, in late 2018 when talking to one of her mega donors, Haim Saban, who has said himself he's a one-issue voter and his only issue is Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
Pelosi said out of the blue, "If the Capitol crumbles, our foremost priority will be aid and commitment to Israel." The Capitol crumbles. Who says that? Why is she bringing this up at all? That was my gut reaction when I saw her say that is, "Why in the world are you talking about an attack on the US Capitol like it's something planned and preordained? Why is Haim Saban talking about it like it's planned or preordained? Why, most of all, would your sympathy not be with the traumatized Americans who have to witness a terror attack on their own country, who have to witness things being destroyed?"
Sarah Kendzior:
So that, honestly, was my first clue that there was going to be an attack on the Capitol. I have been worried about this for two years. And then other things, obviously, added to it; Michael Cohen's comments over and over about January 6th, about something was going to happen in DC on January 6th. Those started a few months ago. And then, of course, you have the militants themselves; the MAGA people, many QAnon people, Trump himself, all saying, "Yes, we're going to storm the Capitol on January 6th. We're going to take back the vote." They announced their plans. There was so much opportunity for preparation and prevention.
Sarah Kendzior:
Instead, we see, one, the police letting them through. No one apparently thought to see whether the police were infiltrated even though they have been all year. Two, we see members of Congress leaving their doors open, leaving their computers open, not password-protecting anything, thinking nothing about our national security even though we were just cyber attacked by Russia in the worst cyber attack of all time. They're letting people in. We've said many times about how Trump has purposefully endangered our national security over and over again for four years.
Sarah Kendzior:
We suspect that the cyber attack that happened was one that he and others in the administration helped move along—particularly in the Treasury—for their own financial benefit and for their own power. I don't understand how Congress could be this criminally negligent to not have extra security, to not prepare for this when they knew it was coming. The reason they knew it was coming is because the people who did the attacks told them that they were going to attack them. Anyway, I'll let you talk because I've been going off.
Andrea Chalupa:
The most dangerous people in America are the ones telling us to move on, refusing to hold investigations, prosecutions, and arrest anyone, refusing and not doing anything to remove the terrorist from the White House immediately. This is what this show has been about from the beginning is accountability. If you see anybody—pundits, anybody—talking about the nation needs to come together, we need to heal, we need unity, let's move on, we need Nuremberg trials for what we're undergoing now. We have the police and the military infiltrated by white terrorists who are letting them in through the front door, literally.
Andrea Chalupa:
We saw that on video. This is a terrorist attack, as we have been saying this since the beginning of the show. 2016 wasn't the start of a coup, it was the culmination of a coup. The stolen election, with the help of the mass murdering terrorist regime—the Kremlin—in 2016 was a 9/11, Pearl Harbor terrorist attack. What we saw last night was another terrorist attack, and there are going to be more without accountability. Pelosi and Jeffries, they must be called out for this. Everybody must be called out for this, about this fake unity, which is so extraordinarily dangerous.
Andrea Chalupa:
From studying authoritarian regimes, let me just tell you: Hannah Arendt, who stared the evil of the Nazi regime in the face, her conclusion was, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." Throw that Hannah Arendt quote at anybody calling to move on, calling for unity. We need a deep dive investigation. We need prosecutions. We need sweeping arrests. If we do not have that, we are all in danger. Our children are in danger. That's so obvious, and that's where a lot of our fury is coming from because we've been screaming about this.
Andrea Chalupa:
What we saw—that storming of the Capitol, the violent coup attempt—it was this horrific, horrific visual metaphor of how the media and Congress got steamrolled by these terrorists from the very beginning with threats that were hiding in plain sight. Let me just break down this for you what an utter lack of accountability and overlooking all this and moving on looks like. In early 2017, Ukraine called in the FBI to help Ukraine find tens of billions of dollars stolen by Putin's puppet—Viktor Yanukovych—and his cronies. Yanukovych, of course, fled to Russia, who was helping him for several years, including while Yanukovych had his snipers firing on pro-democracy protesters.
Andrea Chalupa:
The American Republican operative who served Richard Nixon, who served Reagan, who's a longtime friend and neighbor of Donald J. Trump and his family, Paul Manafort. Paul Manafort, Putin's operative in Ukraine who was using his dark arts to spread conspiracy theories, dividing Ukrainians against each other and also turning an opposition leader, putting her in prison, locking her up. Lock her up. Who was sowing the seeds of division in Crimea against the US, which was later...Crimea was invaded by little green men, as they called them. The military showed up and just seized it. It was a violent coup, what the Kremlin did in Crimea, like what we saw yesterday on the US Capitol, but with soldiers without Russian insignia on them.
Andrea Chalupa:
They had no Russian flags on their uniforms. They just came in—these little green men—and took the Capitol, like what we saw yesterday. Paul Manafort was well-known as Putin's operative in Ukraine. The FBI was investigating him, and what happens? December 2015, FBI director James Comey took the head of the Russian Mafia off the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List and Paul Manafort waltzes right into our election and runs Donald Trump's campaign for president. They knew who he was. They knew who he was. I fucking knew who he was, you know? Instead, what does Comey do? He holds a surreal press conference about Hillary Clinton's emails.
Andrea Chalupa:
He writes an October Surprise letter about Hillary Clinton's emails, tipping the election to Putin's puppet. And then Comey comes out just the other day, this week, saying, "Donald Trump should not be investigated. He should not be prosecuted." Because Comey is selling a book. That is what-
Sarah Kendzior:
It's worse than that. It's because Comey doesn't want to be investigated. That's what I think.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly right.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's partly about his profit, but it's about the fact that he let this happen.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly right.
Sarah Kendzior:
He took Semion Mogilevich off the list. He's the one who follows in the footsteps of two previous FBI heads—Louis Freeh and Jeff Sessions—who went on to work for Mogilevich, who went on to work for the Russian Mafia, who are deeply connected to Paul Manafort and his inner circle. Comey does not want all of this revealed. They do not want that institutional complicity revealed. Every time somebody calls somebody a "institutionalist," what they really are doing is whitewashing that person's criminality which has been made legal through the systems that they have hijacked. That is who James Comey is.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. Just anybody, anybody—Jeffries, Pelosi, pundits—calling for this unity and moving on, they're pulling a Comey and they're putting us in danger. There can be no moving on from us. So all the predictions, all the predictions that we've been making on this show from the very beginning ... The police are a terrorist force. The white supremacists—the militia—they're gearing up. They're coming after us. They're traitors. They want secession. They're all being fueled by the Kremlin. The Kremlin loves this. This is asymmetrical warfare. They're using our weakest links against us.
Andrea Chalupa:
All the dark money fueling the GOP, they're all in it together. This is a slow motion civil war. All this stuff we've been saying, all the warnings and predictions: this is our latest one. If we do not have accountability, if we do not have sweeping arrests, prosecutions, we are in danger. We are in massive danger. Anybody who doesn't fight tooth and nail for this, they're traitors, plain and simple. It's not even that they're complicit. They are putting us in danger just like Comey put us in danger.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Complacency is complicity. I mean, there is no line between that anymore. The chance to turn this around was 2019. I know a lot of people were confused about how adamant Andrea and I were that the Mueller team, one, hurry up the probe, interview and indict every culpable person, including people like Jared Kushner, figure out ways that if the targeted parties—the investigated parties—tried to manipulate the probe, that there's some kind of backup plan. Of course, there was not. Of course, there was a barrage of propaganda online assuring you, “Mueller's got it. Mueller's just dotting his I's and crossing his T's”, apparently forgetting to do so on the word “indict”.
Sarah Kendzior:
That was a propaganda operation. We were targeted by that. The people who were spearheading that were people who were connected to Rupert Murdoch and to other right-wing operatives. There is a giant propaganda movement to tell you that everything is fine, you just need to wait it out, you just need to watch our great leaders play 3-D chess. And then the exact same propaganda tactics were used on Pelosi when, in the exact same week that the Mueller probe ended, she announced that there would never be impeachment of Donald Trump because he was "not worth it."
Sarah Kendzior:
As we've explained many times when she said this, what she meant is America is not worth it. You are not worth it. Your survival is not worth it. Your children are not worth it. None of you are worth it. And she made good on that promise of thinking we are not worth it because we now have over 350,000 dead Americans who did not need to die. So we pushed for impeachment. We wanted an impeachment that was rigorous and broad and covered all of the offenses that Trump committed in office and that also brought forth the necessary context that we were just discussing about the Russian mafia and the infiltration of our institutions by mafia and mafia-affiliated actors, for example, what we brought up with Comey.
Sarah Kendzior:
We felt that that all needed to be aired out and that if people understood just how deep this went—just how awful this corruption was—there would actually be real unity in this country. I mean, these guys go on and on about how much they want unity, whereas, the real push for unity lies in just almost universal disgust with the corruption of our leadership and institutions. The people who stormed the Capitol yesterday—the terrorists who stormed the Capitol yesterday—their alleged beef is, “it's corrupt. It's a swamp. There are child trafficking blackmailer peddlers.” That's correct. I mean all of that is correct.
Sarah Kendzior:
The problem is that they don't see that the leading people of that group are Donald Trump [inaudible 00:20:50]. I mean a lot of people [inaudible 00:20:55] stuff and the conspiracy theory bastion is very well-documented. It's been to court many times. It had predecessor operations with Craig Spence. There's a lot of pent-up frustration about how such sadistic, depraved, disgusting individuals got away with the worst crimes possible—with abuse of children for profit and also to hijack the national security of multiple nations—for a long time. I mean this kind of shit, when you investigate it, it can make you go nuts.
Sarah Kendzior:
I've interacted with people who started out in QAnon. They wanted information about these subjects. They grew a little skeptical with QAnon. Sometimes the friend or a family member concerned about them and their flirtation with QAnon lent them my book or introduced them to this show where they got other information about Epstein and they felt like, "Okay, now I get it. I wasn't crazy to think all this was happening." This really is happening, and the media really is covering it up, and our officials really aren't holding anyone accountable. However, all this other shit about JFK Jr. rising from the dead or zombie cannibals, or whatever they're going on about, is not backed up by evidence. I'll just put it that way.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, my point is they could have done this. They could have had a massive, round-the-clock impeachment trial in which the whole dirty truth of our country was brought to the fore, and I still think that this is necessary. I think this is what the Biden administration should do now because I think, as Andrea said, if we do not do this, we will die as a country. I think truth is the only way forward. You cannot have accountability without the truth. You cannot just go around randomly arresting people or saying “so-and-so needs to be locked up”. You need to present your case and you need to do it without partisanship or political ambition or anything but the utmost humility about the profound failure of our country and its institutions.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then from there, I do think it is possible we could rebuild. What frightens me is that I see among our elected elites no desire to rebuild, no desire to hold people accountable for horrific crimes—the abuse of migrants on the border, the handling of the coronavirus, for deaths. They don't want to hold people accountable for the deaths and the abuse of kids. I'm sorry. I just get emotional because it's so hard for me to believe that there's so little...just nothing. They feel nothing when they see these images, when they read obituaries of these victims. Our leadership—certainly the GOP, but also Pelosi, Jeffries, the rest—they feel nothing about the situation.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's a frightening thing, when you have a moral void in a position of power. God, it's just very upsetting to talk about because this is how countries die. The end of the Soviet Union was somewhat like this. You saw a gerontocracy leading it. You saw incredible corruption from within, natural disasters that were preventable...or not natural disasters, I'm sorry, man made disasters that were preventable, like Chernobyl, wars that the country was dragged into—quagmire wars—for a long period of time. All this sounds very familiar. But the biggest sin, and obviously the roots of the Soviet Union are very different than America, the ideology, the goals, the setup of the administration.
Sarah Kendzior:
But what is similar is this just deep, entrenched corruption, the secrecy, and the aversion to the truth. That's the position that we're in now. We don't deserve that. No one deserves to suffer under a government like that, and there are more and more governments like that every day. The UK is heading in that direction. Hungary, Poland, Turkey, so many other countries have changed so drastically in the last 10 years in the wrong direction, and a lot of it just has to do with a refusal to enforce accountability or even admit the depth of the problem even when your own Capitol is being torn to the ground, even when you have domestic terrorists sitting in the Speaker of the House's chair, leaving her nasty notes, They won't do anything. They won't punish them. They go on vacation.
Andrea Chalupa:
Even Jeff Merkley, a senator of Oregon, who's one of the better ones, even he was saying that, "Oh no. We shouldn't impeach Trump. Let's just focus on getting through this and moving ahead." And then he gets called out on Twitter and now he's saying, "Impeach Trump now. 25th Amendment, he must be removed." So what we're saying is that there's a culture inside Congress where even the good ones can lapse into acting like Homer Simpson in the nuclear reactor, sleeping on the job with a donut in his mouth. There's an air they're all breathing that is disconnected from the larger reality.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's why we keep saying the most reliable power we have is grass-roots power. We've seen that in the miracle of Georgia, the 10-year in the making miracle of Georgia. So do understand, if you're feeling crushed right now, we feel that too. But at the same time, we have full faith in the American people. The problem is that our elected leaders do not ... They're not being honest with us. They're not taking the stands that desperately need to be taken to protect the very soul of our nation. They're not amplifying the voices and the leadership and protecting those people that are national treasures right now because they're seeing us through this in such an honest and empathetic way.
Andrea Chalupa:
So it's those people that we have to amplify and get behind; the Katie Porters, the AOCs, the Ilhan Omars and others who are literally putting their lives on the line by doing this. I do have faith in the American people. We have to—all of us—gather together and just scream from the rooftops that we just demand accountability. Just demand it, because we're not going to get through this as a nation without it. The biggest fear I have is what we saw with the Republicans in the House. The House is a nuclear weapon that could easily take down our democracy. It could be the final death blow upon us.
Andrea Chalupa:
Think about it this way. The Senate has only one Josh Hawley; the House has several Josh Hawleys. The Republicans are very close to getting a majority. If we do not have, over the next two years, the Democrats in the House showing strength, showing conviction, showing moral leadership, showing the American people accountability, investigations, prosecutions, change, they are screwed in 2022. Because if Pelosi leads over the next two years like she did over the last two years, they're losing the majority. There's no other way. There's no better way to show people their vote doesn't matter if you don't use your power that you are elected to use.
Andrea Chalupa:
So they absolutely, desperately have to change now. And I'm scared. I'm so scared that in 2022, it's going to be the same Pelosi and her majority's going to be picked off, and now, the Josh Hawleys control the House. If we lose the Senate too—because we're barely holding onto the Senate—if the Republicans control Congress in 2022, it's going to be painful, painful civil war time. And Biden's going to be stuck. It's going to make 2024 even harder for us to hold onto the White House. We're in this for the long haul. These damn Democrats have to get on the war footing and stop acting like this isn't war.
Andrea Chalupa:
Putin is waging war against the US. He has been for a very long time. He is winning right now. The Kremlin must be watching these images on repeat. Let me just tell you, the revolution in Ukraine, which was driven by independent journalists and activists, it was a grass-roots movement, a leaderless movement. Europe and the US tried to get the Ukrainian protesters to back down and accept Yanukovych and move on. The protesters themselves said, "Go fuck yourselves. This guy has to go today or we're going to run him out." And that's what they did.
Andrea Chalupa:
The people on the ground forced accountability and they got it, against the wishes of Europe and against the US. That was a grass-roots, pure revolution from the bottom up. Putin, with his propaganda machine, called that revolution a coup and said it was a top-down revolution funded by the CIA. I have a lot of well-meaning people on the left who have come up to me and repeated those same Kremlin talking points. What we saw yesterday was a coup from the top, funded literally by the Kremlin. So this is extraordinary to watch. Putin is masturbating to all this footage right now.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Sorry.
Andrea Chalupa:
You have to understand that this is ... How the hell are we going to get into alliances—to strengthen alliances—when we look so deeply unstable, when we have this ticking time bomb that we're forced to live with, which is called the Republican Party? All of that disgusting, smirky smiles and jokes we saw from Sasse, from Lindsey Graham, from the stupid, stupid speech given by Mitch McConnell. These people are traitors. These people are traitors. They cashed in on blood money. They fed this beast that was destroying us from the inside, that was destroying families on the border, that was traumatizing.
Andrea Chalupa:
I can't watch this shit anymore. I really can't watch these traitors anymore. It's hard. It's hard what they're doing to us. But understand, we are going to get through it because we're fucking pissed. My enemies list is so long now and I'm not going to let these guys rest. We have to fight like hell. We have to stay together. We have to stay organized and come after them in 2022 and 2024. How you're feeling right now, bottle that up and just put it inside yourself and let it fuel you and all the work you do to stay vigilant, stay engaged.
Andrea Chalupa:
Every time this shit happens, I get in world domination mode where I start making plans and I start seeing a vision of the future that I want and I start getting ready. Do you understand? So you need to do that too. You need to set up your auto donations to Fair Fight Action. You need to start amplifying all the people who are demanding accountability. You need to start educating yourselves on how the whole process of running for office works, so you can help good people come to power. We need to flush out the system. Pelosi screwed us. We cannot tell you that more plainly. Pelosi screwed us.
Andrea Chalupa:
The People are so much smarter than she gives them credit for because what they did was they expanded her Squad which weakened her power, which put the Squad in positions of power now in the House. Her idiotic moderate Dems who are afraid of their own goddamn shadows and talking out of both sides of their mouth and not addressing that we were under attack and at war, they're gone now. She does not have them—those freaking conformists—to protect her now. I cannot tell you... If she continues the next few years, we're screwed. We cannot let that happen.
Andrea Chalupa:
We cannot count on her to save the day. They're all at recess now when this maniac—this terrorist—must be arrested, dragged out in handcuffs today.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I'm sorry, you don't go on recess without intention. They know exactly what the consequences of going on recess are. This is true of the House, this is true of the Senate. They know that they have a sadistic sociopath backed up by transnational organized crime, already impeached for a crime, Individual One in a federal probe, linked to multiple hostile regimes, working as an asset for the Kremlin for decades on end, encouraging violent attacks on the American people, on American monuments. They've decided to let him tear this country down.
Sarah Kendzior:
They've decided to utterly abdicate their duty, to just let people rot. Let me remind you that as all of this goes on, there is a pandemic that is at its absolute height, where we need competent government. We need federal oversight, and we need people monitoring the vaccine and making sure that a literal death cult isn't sabotaging that. We've already seen that as well. One of Trump's goals was mass death for the sake of mass death. That is how he is. In Hiding in Plain Sight, I document this, his fascination with the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people, quickly.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is something he's professed that he's wanted to do for a long time. He usually would talk about using nuclear warfare and he would talk about how it made him feel nothing. He had this kind of abstract curiosity about it. He's going to keep going. At this point, his pride, to some extent, is injured. But I think he gets off on being the victim. He gets off on being the martyr, and he's going to go out in a fit of annihilatory rage. Every psychiatrist who's an expert on narcissism, on sociopathy, has been warning about this from the very start, that this is akin to an abusive relationship, and you finally have the abuser leaving.
Sarah Kendzior:
That is the most dangerous point for the abused person because there's no controlling them. They'll do absolutely anything, and we saw that yesterday. The fact that this danger is so clearly demarcated, and we now have proof in the shattered glass of the Capitol and the body that was taken out of it and the ransacked office, there's no hypothetical here. It's happening, and they've decided to shrug their shoulders and let people die. One thing I'm worried about, and I've mentioned this before, is I don't think this will be limited to DC. I was worried about this specific day, about January 6th in DC, as I said, because of these strange comments from Michael Cohen, from Pelosi, from Lin Wood, from other people associated with QAnon.
Sarah Kendzior:
I can see this being replicated at city halls, in state capitals, in other places around the country. We still don't know exactly whether the Nashville bomber was operating alone. We know that he was somebody who believed in 5G conspiracy theories and was probably acting to destroy infrastructure. We also know there's a massive infrastructure attack by Russia that no one is doing anything about. You have to ask yourself, why is Congress abdicating? Why are they thinking that the next two weeks are something that we're going to just magically survive?
Sarah Kendzior:
And then Joe Biden comes in, and then what? Because the thing is, once Joe Biden comes in, they're going to try to kill Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democrats. That's not something I'm just inventing. That's literally their plan. They've been announcing it all over Twitter, all over social media. That's why a lot of them aren't on Twitter anymore. They're on Parler. Everybody who studies these movements takes these threats very seriously, people like Talia Lavin and others who have looked at this closely, especially people who were there for events like Charlottesville and have since been studying white supremacist movements, militant movements, conspiracy theorist movements full of violent people, and so forth.
Sarah Kendzior:
They've all been warning, of course, this is not going away. Of course, this is going to get worse when the balance of power changes, at least on the face of it, to the Democrats. They're going to want some retaliatory action and the danger will remain. The thing that's terrible about this is that there is a way out of it. That's why Andrea and I are so frustrated. It's not because we feel like we are permanently doomed for eternity. It's that we keep seeing pathways out, like all the things we suggested in 2019 or sometimes more local things.
Sarah Kendzior:
The reason we pushed so hard for the Georgia election is because we knew it would lead to an actual change in power if they succeeded, and they did, thanks to the perseverance and resilience of Stacey Abrams and organizers—largely Black organizers and activists—on the ground. It is possible if you actually confront the problem and work very hard and you take nothing for granted and you never fucking turn your back or avert your eyes from the danger at hand, which is what they've chosen to do. It is a choice.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's the part that I can't get my head around because, to me, it just feels like more participation in the death cult, that you have a GOP death cult linked to a mafia syndicate that truly sees all human life as disposable. And then you have a cult in certain factions of QAnon where they literally think this is the apocalypse, that Trump is some sort of Christ-like figure, that this is the end times and, therefore, human life is disposable because people become martyrs. This is true in any kind of religious extremist ideology. Why is Congress abetting this? Why are they just kicking back?
Sarah Kendzior:
We can't do a citizen's arrest here. We're just sitting here trying to protect our families, trying to not get coronavirus, trying to just literally survive the next two weeks. We need actual people in our institutions to do their job for the basic survival of our nation. It's so important. Maybe you're an elected official and you didn't think this is how things would go once you got into power. Maybe you thought this would be cushy. Maybe you thought you'd just push through some bills. Well, guess what? You're on the precipice of history. You are the make-it-or-break-it people.
Sarah Kendzior:
When people look back decades from now, they're going to be looking at you, at every decision that you make at this time, and who lived or died as a result of that decision. So think hard about what you're doing now. Think hard about whether you really want this fucking vacation, whether it's worth that much to you or whether human life is worth more.
Andrea Chalupa:
Speaking of the apocalypse, what we are witnessing is a zombie apocalypse. Remember, since 2011, 2012, there's been all these zombie apocalypse memes and people actually going out in the streets of New York and acting out a zombie apocalypse. I'm not kidding. Do you remember this from a decade ago? This was a thing.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I remember thinking that this was such a flavor of the time, just like George Romero's movies getting so popular when the population was in this sort of, like, '70s, stupefied, mass consumerism because all hope had been sucked out of the world mode. But anyway, yeah, go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's what this is. It's a zombie apocalypse because they are brainwashed. Big Tech—Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, the Google juggernaut—they're all complicit in this. They're all complicit in bringing down our democracy like they're threatening democracies around the world. This is going off unchecked. They're finally freezing Donald Trump's social media accounts a little too late. Then of course, we have the far-right consolidation of media, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, a traitor, broadcast to millions of homes across the country, brainwashing people.
Andrea Chalupa:
So there has to be executive orders coming together. Biden needs to gather Dorsey, Zuckerberg, all the companies that advertise on Fox and One America, Newsmax, and whoever those shareholders and investors are. Get them all together in a room. Pass executive orders clamping down on that because it is a virus and it is killing people. It is killing people. This disinformation virus has to be confronted on war footing, on war footing, because this is what this is. We're at war. It was the Kremlin that attacked us, driving a civil war. Now it's a civil war.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're going to have more bombs, more terrorism, people blowing themselves up. This is where we are now. Unless there is sweeping strength and action and accountability and forcing these people who are complicit—the Zuckerbergs, the Jack Dorseys, the advertisers on all these far-right propaganda weapons, they're not channels. They're not outlets. They're weapons being used against us. This is how countries fall apart. They turn on each other. This is why unity matters when you are the opposition, not unity with the enemy. You're saying, "But you're calling them an enemy. You're contributing to this hate speech."
Andrea Chalupa:
They're traitors, and sedition is against the law. There are laws for dealing with this. What we saw were just a couple dozen people arrested. Meanwhile, the George Floyd protest was a police state against protesters. This is-
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and you're seeing ... Sorry. Go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
No, but just...Sarah and I have full faith in the American people. We're crying and we're angry because we don't have full faith in the incoming Biden White House and the Democrats who like to abdicate their power.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I was so disgusted the other day when I saw a tweet from the propaganda apparatchik, Maggie Haberman, whose family literally served as Trump and Kushner's PR agents—The New York Times likes to leave that out of her biography. But anyway, she was comparing what we saw yesterday to the George Floyd protests. I mean, just it was so vile. It was so disgusting, both because, as you just mentioned, the discrepancy in how the police behaved, how they came out and formed their line against Black people who were pushing for freedom, pushing for the right to not to be murdered by the police, putting together a protest out of empathy.
Sarah Kendzior:
But it's just that they can't see the difference between this. What we have here are people who stormed the Capitol and broke into it because they want less democracy. This is the opposite of what you see in basically any protest around the world that's not staged by some sort of mafia-style elite. You see people who will break into the chambers of government because they want more freedom or more justice or more fairness or the Constitution of their country to actually be honored or their dictator to be taken away. That's why they have protests in Belarus. That's why they have protests in Israel.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's why, 10 years ago, we had the Arab Spring. That's the general tenor of protests where people will break into government buildings. The people who broke in yesterday want an autocracy. They want a one-party state. I doubt it's a monolithic group. I don't know the motivations behind everybody who participated in it. I think some people were pulled into a disinformation wormhole through all the tech companies that you just mentioned and we need to analyze how that disinformation was spread. There are already researchers who are doing that, researchers who have recommended, again and again, "You've got to ban these groups because they're going to cause physical violence. They're going to lead to people's deaths."
Sarah Kendzior:
That is, indeed, what happened. But it's just disgusting. The way people talk in these broad, unspecified ways about things like unity or freedom without qualifying, like, what do they mean? Unity with whom and for what purpose, to what end? Freedom for whom at whose expense? Those are the questions the media doesn't want to ask because it opens up systemic injustices and institutional failures that often exist in their own media corporations and they don't want to confront them at all. It's the ultimate both sides-ing. It's so facile and superficial, but it's also just profoundly dangerous.
Sarah Kendzior:
Something that's been very kind of irritating to me and Andrea and to so many others who've been warning about this, people like Bree Newsome, Jared Yates Sexton, Anand Giridharadas, there have been a lot of people who warned about this. And then we get all these, "Why are people paying attention to Chuck Todd instead of to Gaslit Nation?" It's like, just ignore the fucking Chuck Todds of the world. If you see good information, lift that good information up. Help spread it, because these companies—these conglomerates—are never going to reform. They are in bed with PR agencies, with hostile state actors. They've been cowed. They've been threatened, and they've been cowards.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've seen a lot of reporters come out recently and say, "Yeah, I tried to report on this story. I tried to report on this January 6th potential attack. My editors wouldn't let me." Or, "I tried to report on Trump's organized crime. Editors wouldn't let me." Often, the editors are being directed by CEOs. This is an old story. David Cay Johnston, for example—one of the biggest investigative reporters of Trump, a priceless resource on him—he couldn't get anything published about it in 2015 through 2016 because the media was controlling the narrative for the benefit of Donald Trump so that the things that would horrify his base would not be revealed, things like the Epstein-related rape cases, things like him working with drug traffickers, things like him having Trump Tower be a dorm for the Russian mafia.
Sarah Kendzior:
Lots of these Trump voters were pretty excited to vote for an open bigot, for a white supremacist, a xenophobe, a hateful person, someone who wants to "own the libs," someone who hates Hillary Clinton as much as they do. Those are all very attractive qualities in Trump for them. But what no one likes is a kleptocrat. No one likes a thief. No one likes the mafia. The very qualities that all of these Trump voters are complaining about are embodied in Donald Trump. That's the story that the media did not want out then, and they still don't want it out.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's basically why I was kicked off of American TV, yet now appear on Canadian and other television places, because they treat me like a regular journalist who's broken a story. In America, they still have to cover up for the perpetrators of the crime because a lot of those people roam their own hallways. You could see this documented extensively in Ronan Farrow's book, Catch and Kill, about NBC, Harvey Weinstein, Black Cube, all of these horrific entities. So what I'm saying is, and as Andrea always says, is grassroots power is the only power. It applies not just to politics, but to media and to any other element of your life.
Sarah Kendzior:
We need to get out of this mindset where success is somehow defined or dictated by adhering to the preferences of incredibly mediocre white men who are upholding a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. Success is how you treat people. Success is what you bring into the world. Did you leave it a little better than how you found it? Those are ways to live that are not based on money or fame or prestige or all of these hollow inquiries. We could be a better nation, but we have to prioritize what our values are, and this attention economy can be just extremely gross in that way because I think we lose sight of the big picture.
Sarah Kendzior:
The big picture is always who is suffering? Who is abetting the suffering? And how do we stop the suffering? The answers to that are very clear right now. So I just encourage everybody to speak out, speak to your representatives. Don't play this little worship game, this stanning, these little personality cults. Throw all that shit away. You deserve a better government. You deserve a better life. You deserve the truth. That's not complicated. So just try to hold onto that for the next couple weeks.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. America still stands a chance to get through this. Once the brain drain starts and all the top talent, especially coming from abroad, instead of coming to our universities, our companies, they choose other countries out there that they feel are safer and better for their kids, and people start leaving, once that brain drain starts, that's when things are dire. So we still have a chance. We still have a lot of faith in the American people. Look to Georgia for hope. Look to Georgia for hope. A young Jewish senator and a pastor—the reverend of Martin Luther King's church—now in the Senate.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's the civil rights story. That's the legacy of the civil rights movement right there. So that's where we're headed. That's what we're going to fight for. So please don't abandon us. Don't abandon each other. We're going to get through this. We have no choice. We have a lot of talent here that deserves our support and our attention. We're going to uplift each other. That's how we're going to get through this.