Tis the Season to Prosecute Treason
It’s that special time of the season again – the time where we commemorate the anniversary of an unpunished coup attempt! This is really an unceasing, round-the-clock kind of occasion here at Gaslit Nation, and we cannot believe we are still discussing the need to prosecute the masterminds of this seditious attack because you losers are too complicit or complacent to protect our country, but here we are. AGAIN. Like a sleigh ride on a mobius strip through hell, this week’s Gaslit Nation takes you on a journey back in time to the many acts of treason committed over the years and the utter lack of accountability for any of them!
Today’s Evidence of Obvious Crimes includes the Mark Meadows’ coup PowerPoint, Trump’s latest televised confession of obstruction of justice, and a bunch of texts from three Fox News propagandists and the most pathetic Trump family member. We debate whether the texts are even real, and both come up with compelling arguments for why you should stop treating this like a game and actually do something about the violent seditionists actively plotting “Coup 2: Now With More Bloodbath” oh my God. We also share important items on our Christmas wish lists -- like voting rights and abolishing the filibuster! -- and explain why you cannot cosplay Succession as a substitute for real justice.
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Congresswoman Liz Chaney:
Indeed. According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the President needed to act immediately. They texted Mr. Meadows and he has turned over those texts. “Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”, Laura Ingram wrote. “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”, Brian Kilmeade texted. “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”, Sean Hannity urged. As the violence continued, one of the President's sons texted Mr. Meadows. “He's got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”, Donald Trump Jr. Texted. Meadows responded, “I'm pushing it hard. I agree.” Still, President Trump did not immediately act. Donald Trump Jr. texted again and again, urging action by the President. “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.” But hours passed without necessary action by the President. These nonprivileged texts are further evidence of President Trump's supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight and of the upcoming book, They Knew, out in 2022.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our opening clip was Congresswoman Liz Chaney, the Vice Chair of the January 6th Select Committee, reading texts from hosts for Russian propaganda TV network, RT, Russia Today, also known as Fox News. And these texts were, of course, written to Donald Trump, who literally tried to violently overthrow our democracy and install himself as dictator. This is, of course, not Trump's first coup. We will remind you yet again that Robert Mueller, under oath to Congress, said that Donald Trump could be indicted once he's left office for the crimes outlined in the Mueller Report, crimes committed by Trump and his core campaign team as they subverted American democracy in 2016 with the illegal help of America's longtime foreign adversary, the Kremlin. Trump should be in prison already for his crimes in the Mueller Report, and he should be in prison for being the central force driving the attempted violent overthrow of our democracy on January 6th.
Andrea Chalupa:
We will keep reminding everyone of that until Attorney General Merick Garland finally does something to enforce rule of law in America and literally protect our democracy from any more coups. This should not be complicated, and it's not. Don't listen to anyone who brushes off prosecuting these horrific crimes as “complicated”. Our Patreon bonus episode is, once again, a big community Q&A where Sarah and I answer questions submitted by our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. Anyone at the Truth Teller level and higher can listen to our bonus episodes and join the conversation in the comments. Thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. We always look forward to hearing and learning from you in our Q&A's.
Sarah Kendzior:
Alright. Well, should we talk about this little clip?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. Well, I’m inspired. I think we've been doing it all wrong, Sarah. And instead of a podcast, we should put out a weekly PowerPoint presentation: Here are all the ways to prosecute Donald Trump right now, according to the Mueller Report, according to Mueller's testimony. Final slide: What the hell are you waiting for, Merrick Garland?
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>. Maybe then they will listen. All year long, we've been telling people, Trust your eyes and ears. Trust what you've literally seen on television. Trust the evidence in the public domain of a planned attack on the Capitol, which as we’ve mentioned 3,000 times, we warned you about for months in advance, giving the date, the place, the players, and we even did a Capitol attack preview special. And here we are again with all of these folks who, you know, sort of vacillate between being horrified at what they see, then suffering from selective amnesia and forgetting it all, then saying, Oh, we have all the time in the world to prosecute, and then suddenly doing a 180 again, when of all things, a PowerPoint emerges, a PowerPoint from Mark Meadows, the Chief of Staff, Trump's fourth chief of staff, because he went through chiefs of staff like Spinal Tap went through drummers.
Sarah Kendzior:
He's the one who helped spread the plague. He's the one who helped plan the coup, as we now have more evidence of. This was incredibly obvious. It's just, it is the weirdest thing. It’s like, all year long, you and I and others have been on this steady course, walking a straight line of the truth as waves of propaganda washed up against us, trying to knock us down, waves of propaganda from shark-infested waters. But the evidence has been clear the entire time. You did not need a PowerPoint to see it. You did not need texts—which we're gonna get into—to figure it out. You needed your eyes and ears because they live streamed the coup and they aired it on television and they confessed to it after and they confessed to it and plotted it before.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it's been there the whole time. And the reason you're confused is because a functional DOJ, a functional Congress, a functional government, a government that cares whether or not the country that it represents exists, would've done everything in its power to act with urgency and care to stop them from a sequel and to punish them from this unprecedented attack. And instead, they have done little to nothing. And as a result, people's memories have been scrambled. Right after this attack, over half of Americans wanted Donald Trump convicted. That includes independents. That includes Republicans. That includes people who didn't vote. It was so obvious. And what they needed to do was run out the clock to scramble your memory, to make you doubt yourself, to make you doubt your own perception of what is obvious and right and front of you. And they are doing it again. They are putting out revisionist history, and I've been going on and on. And I know you have things to say, so why don't you talk? <laughs>
Andrea Chalupa:
We should do a live reading of the Mueller Report outside the DOJ, mail copies of the Mueller Report to Merrick Garland at the DOJ, email Merrick Garland links to the Mueller Report. This needs to be a bigger news story.
Sarah Kendzior:
You mean his lack of prosecution for it? Garland's lack of prosecution?
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely. There needs to be more pressure. There needs to be a march. There needs to be a whole grassroots movement demanding that we finally, the United States finally prosecute Donald Trump, according to the crimes outlined in the Mueller Report. This is essentially a charging memo. And the fact that they're just sitting on this… And nobody should be brushing this off. Everyone should be extraordinarily alarmed. Mueller, famously reticent, broke his silence after Barr and Rod Rosenstein tried to do that coverup, which was extremely successful in the short term. And the whole press fell forward. And all those newspapers were saying, “Mueller exonerates Trump!”, right? Then Mueller comes out and says, Actually, no, that's not at all what happened and this is an extremely big emergency and Americans should be concerned about this and treat it like the emergency it is. And he full-on said, “Yes, you can indict Trump once he leaves office.”
Andrea Chalupa:
And, of course, constitutional scholars/lawyers were saying, Actually, you could prostitute him right now, but because Barr, the Coverup King, is AG, you can't, because that’s what authoritarianism looks like. So, I understand that we're all relieved that Trump and his Twitter account are no longer President of the United States, but at the same time, we need to put pressure on these guys. Merrick Garland not doing this is a huge red flag. And what really worries me is that just like when we saw the chaos exploding out of Trump's White House from day one, even before they came to power, right? Because Michael Flynn was indicted for his lies and his crimes, you know, before they even had a chance to start. That was revving up. So, what I worry about is that we're going to get the Biden Tell-alls coming out eventually.
Andrea Chalupa:
There have to be some really strong minded men and women in Merrick Garland's DOJ who are like, inter-officing copies of the report or finding a way to bring it up, you know, around the coffee machine. But there must be some tell-all coming out of Merrick Garland's office because this is atrocious to anybody who cares about American democracy. And I hate the whole Twitterverse of the whole, what do we call them? The fancy set?
Sarah Kendzior:
The savvy set.
Andrea Chalupa:
The savvy set. The cable news fantasy football league of lawyers who are promising all this justice, saying that Mueller is a Marvel superhero who’s coming to save the day. And now they're giving the same benefit of the doubt to Merrick Garland. Merrick Garland's not gonna do anything unless the American people demand it. And it's far past time. We need to start organizing around this.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the reason why it's difficult to organize around this is because a lot of those big resistance accounts on Twitter and a lot of those big resistance organizations, they're dependent on the Democratic Party establishment for funding, for amplification, for all types of coordination and resources. And so they're not going to step out of line. There's a horrible sickness in the Democratic Party that rewards loyalty above all else. Why else do you get Terry McAuliffe as a candidate in a Virginia race instead of somebody more exciting, somebody who hasn't done it yet, somebody that could really energize the grassroots, instead of Terry McAuliffe, who looked tired compared to a fired up Youngkin. They had to run McAuliffe because of the loyalty, because of all the fundraising he's done, because he's in the family. So, for those who are not in the family of the Democratic establishment, a lot of influential resistance accounts, they're the ones who are failing us.
Andrea Chalupa:
They're the ones who are refusing to point out what is right in front of our faces and energize the grassroots. Instead, they say, “Wait for the midterms. Show up for the midterms. Elect all these people back in positions of power,” who aren't calling Merrick Garland out for this, and we're going to be stuck with more of the same. And then one day, we're all going to wake up and be like, Why is the Republican Party in power for 30 years going? Why are we stuck in a dictatorship? Because people who could have done something when they had the chance failed to, right? Because loyalty apparently trumps democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly. That was the point that I was gonna make, is that it is so ironic that the big Mueller stans, you know, the people out buying those Mueller candles and lighting them, making their little shrines, they're completely chill with Garland ignoring the Mueller Report, with Garland failing to act on it, whereas we were very critical of the probe. We felt it was moving too slow. We felt that Mueller was making plea arrangements and deals with people like Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and others that led to nowhere, that led to no consequences for people higher up or ultimately for those individuals. Michael Flynn went on to abet a coup and plan a violent attack on our country. We felt the probe was fairly disastrous even before Bill Barr stepped in and made it worse.
Sarah Kendzior:
We had our suspicions, yet, despite all of the flaws of the Mueller probe, he still produced a report that showed very clearly that Trump committed obstruction of justice and that there are multiple charges that can be brought. And that is because Trump and his crime cult’s spree of criminality, both during the campaign and in office, was so blatant that it is literally impossible to ignore. This is someone who confessed to obstruction of justice multiple times. I mean, he did it last week, but before that he did it on TV to Lester Holt, afterwards partied with Lavrov and Kislyak—two Kremlin officials—in the Oval Office, celebrating the firing of James Comey. Again, this is ironic, because we are big critics of James Comey but nonetheless, we know why he was fired. It was so that the possibility of any kind of legal consequences for Trump could be eradicated. And that is what Trump himself said.
Sarah Kendzior:
So it's really hard to ignore the Mueller Report. That's my point, is that even if you dislike Mueller, even if you are suspicious of this entire apparatus, it is impossible to ignore those findings. Yet the very people who claim that they are supporters of the DOJ, supporters of Mueller, believers in our flawless system of checks and balances and legal consequences, are the ones who are like, “Oh, just give them time, we have all the time in the world.” We clearly do not. And to one final thing, you know, as you said, their big argument is, “Oh, you just need to vote more Democrats in in 2022,” putting aside the fact that a large number of Democrats are genuinely not going to vote. This includes young people. This includes a lot of people who were kind of skeptical about voting until 2020 when we were at the height of a pandemic and they knew that this was a life or death decision.
Sarah Kendzior:
They knew what a second term of Trump would be and they also had been promised a lot of things by the Biden administration. One of those things they were promised was voting rights, that they were going to pass the Voting Rights Act, that they were going to protect those rights. People are deeply disillusioned. And as I've said many times: Of course you should vote. If you can. You very well might not be able to. You very well might be disenfranchised because the Democrats, despite holding the House, the Senate and the presidency, have not done anything to preserve your rights. Neither has Merrick Garland. And that clock is ticking. Those midterms are less than one year away and they had the whole year. We've done many episodes about this. You could go back and listen to ‘Voter Suppression Emergency’. I think that was from May. Our interview with Ari Berman.
Sarah Kendzior:
We did an interview with Adam Jentleson on the filibuster, that was in February, because we saw this as an immediate urgent threat. You've got to fix the broken infrastructure. You’ve got to make it possible for us to have a representative democracy. And instead what happened was states with GOP legislatures passed new unprecedented—at least for our modern era—repressive laws, allowing them to, among other things, simply throw out your vote. Like, if you vote for the Democrat, they're gonna be like, “Eh, nah, it doesn’t count.” Georgia's doing this. I believe Texas is doing this. This is a crisis. And all of this is a crisis that you cannot vote out. You cannot just vote out voter suppression and you cannot do a citizen's arrest of a transnational crime syndicate. That is what we're dealing with. That's how big this is.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is not just about Trump. This is not just about January 6th. This is about an entire apparatus and deep institutional rot and corruption that both facilitates this elite criminal crime spree and embodies it. It embodies it in the sense of elite criminal impunity. And they are just disgraceful to pretend that they discovered this, like, this week, when we're on year five and it's been so incredibly public. It's been so in our face. And they have to keep, you know, basically playing with people's memories, playing with people's sense of perspective of what's important, of what's urgent to address. It's incredibly manipulative. It's effective propaganda in a lot of ways, because it really taps into people's fears. And I think the fear it taps into most is fear of abandonment. It's fear that, you know, I fought this fight. I documented this. I voted, I did whatever.
Sarah Kendzior:
I survived the plague. I did all this, and what for? And then what they want you to do is to just have this kind of like blind gratitude for… I mean, I don't know. For what? You're giving us nothing here. You're helping destroy the country through your silent acquiescence. That's just as deadly at this point as these loud, vociferous, pro-coup Trumpian acolytes. The enablers are the problem here. The enablers hold the power. They hold the cards and they won't play them. Instead, they're just throwing out the deck.
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Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I want to underline the point of enabler. So, personally speaking,I like Joe Biden. I like Joe Biden as president. I think he's doing a lot of great things. I think Merrick Garland as attorney general is dragging him down. According to Bloomberg, I’m reading now from Bloomberg: “President Joe Biden's approval rating dropped to a new low, mainly because of the more negative views among Democrats and independents.” Why would Democrats and independents turn on Joe Biden? Because it was the Democrats and independents who worked tirelessly to make sure that Joe Biden won the election. And they pulled off miracles in Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere. And I want to emphasize that what united Democrats and independents, while I was making hundreds of phone calls for Joe Biden in 2020. And I was talking to all sorts of Democrats and independents across all the key states he needed to win, including Pennsylvania, including Michigan and Wisconsin.
Andrea Chalupa:
And what I kept hearing again and again, especially, of course, from independents, is how terrified people were of Trump and his lawlessness, his corruption. They were all tuned in to all the books out there from all of these law enforcement officers—James Comey, Andrew Weissmann—they'd watched that movie, whatever it's called, The Comey Rule or whatever that was on TV. People were really plugged into that whole Mueller Report subculture that was the mainstream culture for a hot minute, when you had kids in New York City wearing t-shirts with Mueller's face all over it, you know? So we all saw that there was a lawless criminal in the White House who was destroying countless lives, who was weaponizing a pandemic, who incited violence that led to the loss of several lives and a violent attempted overthrow of our democracy. And Joe Biden wants to act like that WASPy family around the dinner table, pretending to ignore that uncle Jimmy is, like, the family child molester, right? They're just gonna tiptoe around that. It's like, you're allowing this child molester to stay in our family unchecked and all the kids are vulnerable.
Sarah Kendzior:
That is a very on-the-nose comparison there, but that's for another day. <laughs>. Go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
What I'm saying is that Merrick Garland and his inexcusable inaction to prosecute Trump for Mueller, that is what all the Democrats and the independents who are dragging down Biden's approval rating are seeing. You cannot allow this mass abuser to treat us this way, and countless allies around the world and innocent people around the world this way. for four years after having come to power illegally. That was the entire point of the Mueller investigation in the first place. Trump came to power illegally in 2016. You cannot allow him to get away with it, and you cannot throw the animals some snacks by releasing these juicy texts between all these famous pundits and one of the idiot sons to their father, right? You're not gonna cosplay HBO’s Succession and think that's going to be a substitute for justice. You absolutely must frogmarch—or whatever it's called—Donald Trump in handcuffs. Do you understand? If you did that, if you followed the law and prosecuted Donald Trump for the Mueller Report alone, starting now, Biden’s approval rating would shoot sky high. All those Democrats and independents will come back to him.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>. And we would be safer as a nation. I absolutely agree with you. That is what they're doing. They're cosplaying Succession. I have some questions as to the veracity of those texts, which we’ll get into in a minute. But this boils down to the thing I always say, which is officials feign shock to avoid accountability. And now they are feigning retrospective shock about this PowerPoint. They are emphasizing the Meadows PowerPoint to make something that was very open and very corrupt seem very secretive and very difficult to understand. It is not difficult.
Andrea Chalupa:
It’s not difficult to understand. Eve Mueller held like a two minute press conference, like, “Let me sum this up for you: You're in danger.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, all of this was just very blatant. For January 6th, they had t-shirts made. They recruited off of Twitter. We've discussed before how the deletion of all of those accounts that participated in the attack, including Trump, Stone, Flynn, Lin Wood, the QAnon acolytes, that marred collective memory. It made people forget just how well publicized this was in advance. But officials need it that way. Officials who are tasked with enforcing accountability need it to seem shocking and new so that their own inaction, their refusal to defend our country, can be excused. But it is inexcusable. The attacks were inexcusable and the refusal to hold the elite operatives who planned them {accountable} is inexcusable. And what they're trying to do is make this attack look unexpected, like they had no idea it could have been coming. Had they only seen the PowerPoint, then somehow we would've been saved.
Sarah Kendzior:
The PowerPoint was tweeted out by La\ra Logan. I mean, I didn't notice it because I already had so much evidence. And to add to that, let's not forget that the impeachment trial of Donald Trump was based entirely on public domain evidence. And they made it only one week long because they felt it was such a slam dunk case because it had all happened out in the open. And they were going after Trump as an individual. They were like, you know, he started this, he brought this mob in. And we noticed at the time they left out Stone and Flynn and Bannon and all these other major participants, but they made their case. They should have brought witnesses. They could have had Mark Meadows then, in February, with his PowerPoint. This all could have been dealt with like nine months ago.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is absolutely deranged that it is coming out now. And the same is true of these texts, but I don't think the texts are real. I mean, and I'm just throwing this out there. This came out last night. Last night, there was this hearing. We played the clip in the beginning of the show. Liz Chaney read all these documented texts between various Trump allies and Mark Meadows. We all know the Chaney family has always been a source of reputable and fine information, never, ever dealing with any kind of, you know, deep endemic corruption, or coverups, or perhaps lies that lead us down certain avenues we shouldn't. I mean, I'm not going to judge Liz Chaney for the sins of her father, but I think this is bullshit. It reminds me very much of the Mueller Report, where there were some parts that were like secondhand information that I felt were bullshit.
Sarah Kendzior:
And they were there to make the American public feel reassured Trump and his goon squad were somehow scared of the law, the same “law” that for decades on end had protected Trump and the mafiosos who bolstered his businesses and helped him gain political power. And this is an example from the Mueller Report. In that report, they describe Jeff Sessions telling the President that a special council had been appointed, and then Trump slumping back in his chair and saying, “Oh, my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” That quote is based on notes from Sessions’ chief of staff, Jody Hunt. I'm sorry. That is total bullshit. Trump would never say that. Perhaps Jody Hunt made that up and told the Mueller team, and then they put it in the report.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I'm not necessarily blaming the Mueller team here, but come on, man. This has been a public figure for 40 years. He knows he's not fucked. He's been collaborating with the FBI and with various corrupt officials—like Rudy Giuliani, for example—for decades on end. He has protection from the inside, but they do this kayfabe WWE bullshit to try to make it seem like they're less organized than they are, that they plot less in advance than they do. They want to make everything seem spontaneous and they want to make it seem like there is internal division, whereas in reality, this is a mafia state. No division is allowed in a mafia state. We have seen what's happened to people who have crossed Trump for real. The people who actually go up against him have their lives threatened, have their lives ruined.
Sarah Kendzior:
We saw this happen with people at the first impeachment hearing, people like Alexander Vindman, who was threatened and punished for being honest and doing what he was supposed to do. And they went as far as removing his brother from his governmental position. That is how mafia states operate. It's incredibly serious. So we have all these texts where it's like, you know, Laura Ingram is weighing in and saying, “This is hurting all of us.” “He is destroying his legacy.” This is after like four years of Trump being extremely pro violence, pro coup. You may remember when he ran in 2016, he wanted the ”second amendment people” to deal with Hillary Clinton, his opponent. So that's already there. You had Roger Stone in 2016 saying they needed to do a Stop the Steal if Trump was not installed as president. And that if this failed—if he were not installed—there was going to be a bloodbath. And bloodbath is Stone's word.
Sarah Kendzior:
So this is very consistent. This is the kind of thing Fox News promoted and encouraged for years on end. We have Brian Kilmeade in these alleged texts to Mark Meadows saying that, you know, “He's on TV destroying everything that you have accomplished.” This is Meadows who was Chief of Staff for like nine months or something. You know, not really a core guy. He's not at the core of the Trump crime cult in the way Stone and Manafort and others were. So, you know, that sounds like horseshit to me. And then the number one, you know, I was a little like, Okay, well maybe this is real, maybe they're just like freaked out to see the Capitol under physical attack because it's jarring, it's upsetting. Maybe there's some little drop of humanity and patriotism left in these people, but then I see Hannity, Hannity involved here. Hannity, the third client of Michael Cohen who only had three clients.
Sarah Kendzior:
And let's not forget, Michael Cohen has been deeply entrenched with the Russian mafia his whole life. And yes, Michael Cohen has done some decent things since. He was the only one to testify to Congress. He got as close as anybody did to telling the whole truth about this, and I go back and forth about him because I'm like, Well, if he told the old truth, they’d kill him. But nonetheless, not a great career there, really not somebody you want to be hanging out with and having as your “lawyer”. He's a fixer. He's an operative and we know that. Michael Cohen himself admitted that, that he ran around threatening people on behalf of Donald Trump since 2006 when he became his lawyer. And then we have mastermind Donald Trump Jr. allegedly texting, “He's gotta condemn this ASAP. The Capitol police tweet is not enough.” <laughs>
Sarah Kendzior:
And I'm sorry. The more I look at this, the more I'm like this is total horseshit. And then Mark Meadows saying, “I'm pushing it hard. I agree.” This is nonsense. They're throwing a little bit of West Wing into this Succession plot line. They're pretending that at heart, they just got out of control. They didn't plan it and announce it and recruit people for not just months on end at the end of 2020, but for several years, setting the stage for this. This is absolutely… I don't know. I'm voting that this is total bullshit, that it's used to satiate gullible people who are rightly very discouraged by the lack of action from the DOJ and from Congress, but also to give this kind of veneer of divisiveness within.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then they're probably gonna find some kind of scapegoat, some kind low level guy. Then that guy will probably make some sort of bullshit plea deal saying he's gonna spill it all. You know, maybe it'll be Mark Meadows, who they're holding in contempt. I also personally hold everyone involved in this situation and contempt. That is my own contempt. Anyway, they're all running around unpunished, planning coup 2, and that's been going on all year. So, pardon me if I do not accept this evidence at face value. This looks like a big old hunk of bullshit to me. I don't know. What are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think the texts are real because it reflects this dynamic of what's being shown in these texts, Fox News pundits and idiot son Don Jr saying, “You gotta call this off.” The reason why I think it's real is because so much of Trump—and any authoritarian scholar will say the same—so much of Trump reminds us of the rise of Hitler. Hitler's camp was a camp of true believers and also cynical power grabbers. And I think the Fox news hosts and the idiot sons are true believers, without question. They're true believers, but I think it's more Bannon and Roger Stone and others that were in that war room—and Paul Manafort of course, because he would do this in Ukraine—that were embracing the violence, that were driving the violence. You had that one member of Congress who came in with body armor. Mo Brooks was wearing body armor to Trump's rally.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, just like in Hitler's camp, with the rise of Hitler, you had that dynamic where you had willing stormtroopers, willing—not just the stormtroopers themselves, but a lot of his early believers were like, Yeah, we've got to cleanse our country with blood. They were blood hungry and that's the Bannon side of things. And I think you have another camp of true believers that thought Hitler's great, Hitler's exactly what the country needs, Hitler's going to protect us. But when they see the reality of Hitler, when they see the reality of Trump, there is, even for the most cynical, even for a true believer who cannot wait to give it to the Dems and cannot wait to crush the so-called communist Left, I think when you see the violence of the siege on our Capitol—the Capitol that these media figures have been to for work and on other occasions—when you see that literally under siege before the eyes of the world, I think that is a terrifying sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I think even some of the men who brought Hitler to power had moments right on the cusp of his takeover of Germany where they were like, Wait a minute,. They had little moments of that. And so I'm not surprised by these texts. I think these texts are real, but I do not think these texts are any substitute for actual justice, which is prosecuting Trump for the crimes in 2016 and, again, for literally, literally inciting and orchestrating a violent attempted overthrow of our democracy. These texts cannot be entertainment for our mainstream media. These texts do not satisfy. All these texts are going to do is drive home the problem Biden has by losing support from Democrats and independents who saw with their eyes what was happening to our democracy and the serious danger we were under and remain under, and are looking at Biden and thinking, hHw can you not prosecute this guy?
Andrea Chalupa:
How can you not prosecute him by now? These texts are no substitute for actual justice and these texts should not be bantered around as entertainment, as meaningless entertainment, and these texts certainly do not excuse anybody from prosecution or investigation. Just because any of these characters clutched their pearls when they saw police officers being bludgeoned to death on live TV doesn't excuse them from a thorough investigation and being dragged before Congress, if need be, and being held in contempt of Congress, should it come to that. I think in terms of the media figures writing these texts, am I surprised by that? No, because they're all about branding. They're all about messaging and the flag they wrapped themselves in was that Trump fascist flag, the blue and black flag, which, you know, the American flag is blue and black, and that represented supporting the police no matter what, even though the police are nonchalantly executing people on the street and it's repeatedly being caught on camera and nothing is being done about this, right?
Andrea Chalupa:
The 2020 election was all about the police, the police, the police. You had Attorney General Barr arguably breaking the law by conveniently taking all these trips across the country, including to key states Trump needed to win and that Republicans needed to win in Congress, to talk to local police forces. So that's a really convenient time to take that trip, Attorney General Barr, appearing with all these police forces, knowing the press is going to be there, knowing it's covered in the local community as a big deal. And so they really made police their campaign slogan for the 2020 election: Law and order, police, Nixon. Right? That was his thing too: Law and order.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so to see these Trump supporters waving these Trump flags, these Confederate flags, and wearing all this Trump gear beating up police officers while the image makers at Fox News who carefully crafted this whole narrative see it suddenly slipping apart because it's confronted by reality, that's why you have the image makers freaking out over the image, right? “Oh, you're disrupting this carefully packaged narrative we've been pushing all year, what are you doing?: And Don, Jr. chiming in there <laugh>, like Kendall Roy chiming in there, is obviously his desperate attempt to try to… You know, he sees that dad it's dead. He sees that the dictator is being overthrown and he wants to salvage the base for himself. He wants to salvage some political career, some political future for himself because out of all the idiot kids, Don, Jr. is actually the hardcore true believer. Ivanka's in there for the infomercial.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ivanka's in there to sell earrings and cash out and make a bunch of Saudi dirty blood money and become so, so oligarchy wealthy, like a super oligarch, that she's untouchable legally and will just skate through the rest of her life, avoiding all accountability for her crimes and corruption. That's what Ivanka's there for. But Don, Jr. actually believes all this stuff and he could run for office someday or be a kingmaker in endorsing people running for office. And so he was probably like, “Dad, you're dead, but I'm young and I have a future, so cut it out.” So that's why I believe the texts for all those reasons. These same dynamics played out in Hitler's camp as well.But what I'm warning the select committee—the January 6th committee—what I’m warning Democrats, what I’m warning President Biden: You need to give us actual justice.
Andrea Chalupa:
People need to be indicted. People need to be thoroughly investigated as quickly as possible with as much information shared with the American public. The same cast of characters—I should say the same criminals—that orchestrated the 2016 coup that brought Trump to power illegally with the Kremlin's help, that same cast of criminals, they're the ones that were centrally organizing and driving the violent coup attempt against our democracy on January 6th. They had a war room. They had a PowerPoint. They did it once, they did it again, so are you going to let them do it a third time? Do you understand what we're saying? And if President Biden cares about his approval rating, he will prosecute Trump because that is why you are losing Democrats and independents. They see with their eyes and you have betrayed them. You need to finally put this out there that this needs to be done. And if Merrick Garland is not the one to do it, for whatever reason—we've highlighted his weaknesses on previous shows—then appoint someone else. Appoint someone else.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and it's about so much more than his approval rating. The thing I struggle with is why doesn't Joe Biden want to protect the United States of America? Why doesn't Merrick Garland want to protect the United States of America? Our country cannot take this. It literally can't. There are people who want it to fall apart. It's like, yes, they're seeking autocracy, they're certainly seeking a mafia state autocracy, but for many of these players, particularly those connected to transnational elements—meaning Flynn, Manafort, in particular Jared Kushner and Ivanka and their partners abroad in Russia and Israel and in Saudi Arabia—they want the United States to collapse. And it's not gonna collapse neatly. It's gonna collapse into an absolute bloodbath that will be exploited by plutocrats and oligarchs. We've already gotten a taste of this from COVID from the amount of money that billionaires have made during this two year period and the way that everybody else is struggling.
Sarah Kendzior:
And there’s very little there. This is a national security issue. This is a public safety issue. This is an economic issue. We're not out for revenge here. We need to be protected from extremely wealthy, extremely powerful, extremely connected malevolent actors who have made their intent abundantly clear. They've made their treason abundantly clear. They made it clear in 2016. They were openly stating their alliances and their loyalties to other countries and their willingness to collaborate with the intelligence services of other countries in order to hurt the United States. This is not difficult to parse. It is not difficult to see who is wrong and what they've done. As I said, they continually confess to these crimes. And we are in danger. This trickles down from the top. Ordinary citizens are not going to be spared and have not been spared.
Sarah Kendzior:
If Congress and if others had followed through on the threat of Trump from before he became the president, or, you know, say, after the first impeachment hearing—the 2019 hearing—we would've perhaps had somebody else in charge when COVID arrived. And then perhaps we would've not had over 800,000 Americans dead. Every decision that is made has a reaction among ordinary, everyday people who maybe don't recognize a lot of the names that we're talking about. They're still affected by all these decisions and they're affected in a terrible way. And it doesn't matter who they voted for and it doesn't matter where they live. We're all in this together, unfortunately. We're all on this sinking ship together. And I'll just tell you, you know, folks who don't know the full story of what's up here, a lot of that has to do with the inaction from Biden, from Congress, from the DOJ, because they think if this were really serious, if I were in grave danger, they would act with urgency.
Sarah Kendzior:
So it must not be serious. And the flip side of this, of course, is Fox News, who fully embraced the Tucker Carlson model of being extremely pro-coup, of buying into a lie about the legitimacy of Biden's win, and then constantly telling their audience, “Yes, yes, yes, you are in danger. You're in danger from people who wanna subvert an election. You're in danger from anti-American elements and it's all just projection.” The people we’re in danger from are those individuals, these elite operatives from Fox News, from Trump's crime cult, from transnational organized crime and so on. And they know that a very effective way to negate the reaction that anybody with common sense would have is to preempt that narrative. It's preemptive narrative inversion. So if they now hear members of Congress saying, nearly a year after the Capitol attack, “Yes, yes. We’re in grave danger. We need to live with urgency.” They're gonna be like, “Well, no, you're just reacting to Fox. You're just reacting to Tucker. You're just flipping the script.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Whereas it's actually Tucker Carlson, of course, who flipped the script. And that is why all of this needed to be addressed immediately in January and February. Aside from COVID, there was no higher priority. It is certainly of higher priority than an infrastructure plan that is probably not even going to get passed because this is a war on the mind. The most damning evidence against the Trump crime cult is their own words, and if you forget what they said, or you diminish its importance, you mix it up with new “revelations” that are actually very minor compared to what you witnessed and heard with your own ears and saw with your own eyes, it is very easy for them to get away with their abhorrent plans and it is very easy to deceive people and get them to sign onto that.
Sarah Kendzior:
They're doing an absolutely terrible job of fighting an information war because that's what this is. And we've been in the trenches since 2016, and like you said, the Democrats have abandoned everybody who tried to fight that war honorably, who tried to fight it through documentation, through telling the truth, through speaking truth to power. You are demonized if you do that. So, I'm really wondering, Who are you working for? What are you working for? What are your values, Merrick Garland and Joe Biden and the rest of you do-nothings? What are you fighting for? We know what you're not fighting against. You're not fighting against corruption. You're not fighting against institutional rot or organized crime, but are you fighting for anything? That's the question that I have.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to point out that Denmark ranks consistently as one of the happiest countries on earth and also one of the least corrupt countries on earth. Hmm. <laughs> A governmental body in Denmark just sentenced their former immigration minister to 60 days in prison for breaking the law by illegally separating several couples that were asylum seekers and minors. According to Danish law, couples are treated as a single unit, and yet she was separating these underage couples, even if there were children involved. And her hardline stance against immigration, especially asylum seekers, was hailed across Europe's far-right, which of course is allied very closely with the Kremlin, including depending on Kremlin financing and disinformation warfare, as well as allied closely with Fox News and Bannon and the whole Trumpian movement that tried to overthrow our democracy not once, but twice.
Andrea Chalupa:
So if this Danish minister in one of the happiest and least corrupt countries in the world can face justice, can be sent to prison for her crimes, for breaking the law, we can do it too. Or can we? Are we just such a miserable country at this point, and so blatantly corrupt, that we've already lost our democracy? That's the real test here. That's the real test. We're very aware of all the limitations and the pressure and the workload that President Biden and his team are under. We know all about Manchin and Sinema. We regularly cover them on this show. But we have to ask ourselves, Is it already lost? Is our democracy already lost? And when you see that approval rating—and I keep going back to that because Biden is doing a lot of great things. This infrastructure deal that he did, this bipartisan infrastructure, that's going to transform lives.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's been pushing, along with progressive leaders in Congress, to do a meaningful reconciliation package and I do believe that will ultimately go through because they've worked so hard on it to abandon it. It's going to go through ultimately, I believe. He has done an amazing job with the vaccine rollout. It's not easy, the many challenges that he's up against. But one sore area that was central to his campaign, because he openly ran on confronting authoritarianism. He openly made his election as a choice between dictatorship and democracy and he included Black history in that discussion, saying we have to do more for Black men and women who have suffered the most injustices in this country. And those are the people that worked the hardest to get him over the top in an election that was openly being stolen before our eyes with Louis DeJoy being intentionally placed as head of the Postal Service to slow down our mail in a pandemic election and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
We saw it all happening. So Biden needs to return to the central roots of his victory and finally give the American people the justice we so desperately need in order to secure our democracy and stop this further slide into authoritarianism. Okay? And it's going to be the non-white communities that helped get him over the top that are going to suffer greatly. As part of this big text message dump, you had Jake Sherman, who's a longtime gadfly or whatever the hell, he's a longtime inside-the-beltway reporter. He's one of those guys, you see him on TV, you can tell that he's saying what needs to be said to keep his sources happy. He's brokers in inside-the-beltway gossip, essentially.
Sarah Kendzior:
He's a court stenographer.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's a stenographer, as we call him. You may remember him from his walk-on roll in Mr. Jones, my film about Kremlin disinformation.
Sarah Kendzior:
<laughs>
Andrea Chlaupa:
He was one of those guys that would've just been forgotten in history because he just towed the party line in exchange for access. There were plenty of Jake Shermans in Moscow, 1933, doing what they needed to do to keep the paycheck coming and the access coming, alright? So Jake Sherman comes out and says, “Oh, by the way, that one text message that came out in Congress of somebody pleading for help inside Congress was me!” <laughs> And I'm laughing because isn’t that so like a white man?
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>
Andrea Chalupa:
You leveraged your power and your privilege to build a career for yourself, to get all this money and power and access, and then suddenly your life's under threat and you’re panicked. The text message he wrote was, “We are helpless.” Yeah. Welcome to how non-white people feel, Jake Sherman, and have felt for a very long time. Those who are coming from marginalized communities, we all feel helpless right now. The reason why Gaslit Nation keeps going is because we're tired of feeling helpless. And it's about damn time that Biden takes his approval rating seriously and addresses why he's losing Democrats and independents. It's because he's refusing to address the monster in the room. The monster was successful in subverting our democracy and getting away with a coup in 2016 and the whole investigation into his 2016 coup said, “Yes, he can be arrested once he's out of power.” And yet, he's walking around free and golfing.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm <affirmative>
Andrea Chalupa:
And then the monster does another coup in 2021 and all we're getting is juicy text messages. Are you kidding? We speak on behalf of all Americans when we say we are helpless and we are tired of feeling helpless.
[Outro theme music, roll credits]
Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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