As is typical for this podcast the hosts take a good chunk of time, in this case about 20%, before they settle into the topic at hand. This time they mourn the end of the candidacies of Warren and Sanders (he hasn’t conceded yet, but it is nearly impossible for him to win). We need those progressive ideas.
And on to the episode topic. Chalupa has been instrumental in making the film Mr. Jones about a Welsh journalist who “risked his life and his career to expose Stalin’s genocide famine in Ukraine that was mass murdering millions,” as Chalupa describes it. The film will soon come to a theater near you – if theaters weren’t closed. So maybe this is a good quarantine movie. The film’s director, Agnieszka Holland, wanted the title to be, “Human Farm.” The saying in Ukraine is that the oligarchs believe, “the people are the shit we grow our money in.”
That is what corruption is. That’s how the American healthcare industry sees American citizens.
So find your community, strengthen it, and fight for it. Make sure everybody understands the issues, including the likelihood that the election will be stolen. And because of that threat of theft it’s not enough to just vote. Think in terms of decades of working to get our country back. And, yes, the virus will make community formation difficult.
We have a real propaganda war waged against us. Every weakness (such as Sanders fans being upset at his loss) will be exploited against us. Corporations, and the mainstream media they own, will gaslight us to say socialism for themselves is great but care for those who fall through the cracks is communism. People need to feel included and be able to raise questions to sort what’s real and what’s not.
Biden swept Super Tuesday in spite of very little ground game because of white supremacy. Black people voted for Biden because they don’t trust white people. They can’t risk Sanders because the white people needed to defeat the nasty guy might stay home. We need Sanders’ progressive voice, so take on white supremacy and reach out to people of color.
On to discussing the plague. Of all the topics Kendzior, who studies authoritarianism, has done on this podcast, the coronavirus scares her the most because of the ways it can be weaponized by the nasty guy and his sadistic backers. Those backers want a “GOP one-party state, a mix of a mafia state and a theocracy. On the way to doing so, causing as much devastation and suffering as possible.” Which the nasty guy discussed openly in 2014. So a virus that kills millions and crashes the economy, something their actions have made more likely, is something they are rooting for.
Italy went from 3 cases to lockdown in 20 days. That’s how fast this virus can move. The virus is pushing out the normalcy bias. People who tried to deny atrocities, fascism, rising racism, and climate change are being forced to confront these things.
After mentioning the disaster in Iran, with many government officials sick and dead, Kendzior said:
What all these different countries are showing us is that the more democratic the country, and the more transparent and prepared officials are in their response to the virus, the better the odds of survival, the less likely that there is panic.
Kendzior praises those in difficult settings, exhausted medical staff trying to help people whose government screwed it up. So those in positions of power in the US, you’ve got to work around the nasty guy, find another way. Give accurate information, give free treatment to those terrified of the expense of the virus. Inequality and the denial of basic resources has never been so stark.
Even in times of great evil there are heroic people running towards danger or just toiling away in the dark. The coronavirus may force autocratic governments to open up because they have to work with other governments. It may force them to put humanity first.
There is a banality of evil, which is choosing to be neutral. But refusing to stand up to evil is being evil.
From the beginning the nasty guy’s strategy has been to deny the virus exists, let it spread as widely as possible. He has begun to concede the virus is real – because his new Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, is under self quarantine. But it is unlike him to present himself as its greatest victim (it’s a Democratic hoax to bring me down!) unless he feels assured he will survive it.
Then there is the economy. We’ve seen the stock market drop. And that is because of real consequences of lost sales and lost jobs. It is unusual for the economy to drop because of a medical disaster affecting the entire world.
Hopefully the way out is humane with universal health care, the end to disaster capitalism, more environmental awareness, and consideration of families when someone is sick. But we’ll have to fight for them.
Of the current moment Kendzior said:
This is the moment that fascists crave. They crave a chaotic situation in which people feel so panicked and so helpless and so dependent that they can just come in and carry out whatever act of brutality they want, and pass whatever repressive laws they want. Whatever little threads that were left of our democracy will be just torn asunder possibly not to return for a very long time.
We need to be vigilant on a public health level but we also need to be vigilant about our political health. We need to keep these guys in check. We need to stay a few moves ahead of them.
The talk turned to Democratic politics. When the primaries are over, vote blue no matter who. We have to keep the House and the GOP majority in the Senate is vulnerable.
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