Sunday, May 10, 2020

Total dismissal of the humanity of people

Today I’m working through another episode of the Gaslit Nation podcast, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This one is titled Hiding in Plain Sight and is an hour discussion of the background and contents of her book by the same name. The book explains the rise of the nasty guy. The episode is Chalupa interviewing Kendzior about the book.

Kendzior’s first book is The View from Flyover Country, which is about the deep social inequalities that made the rise of a fake populist like the nasty guy possible. This is a deep wound of pain. He is the culmination of broad social, political, and economy trends that include the internal collapse of the US, external forces, and the nasty guy’s own ambition.

The nasty guy’s crimes were documented in real time when newspapers actually did journalism. Even so, starting in 2015 Kendzior would tell about these crimes. Journalists would say the story is too dark, then ask for her sources. She would reply: from your paper. Yes, there were other sources. But if Kendzior could dig them out, why didn’t the FBI, among others, not do the same? Why didn’t they create a coherent narrative and share it with the impeachment hearings?

Now that Kendzior had written the book describing all of the nasty guy crimes – and it has become a best seller – people should no longer be allowed to say no one could have seen it coming. Even Congress should be getting word of the book and it should be their job to read it. It could serve as the basis of Congressional hearings – if representatives were brave enough to call them.

Kendzior lives in Missouri, which she considers a bellwether of the country. The first chapter of the book talks about the state.
They see Missouri as inconsequential, but one of the reasons for that is that Missouri, for the last 50 or so years but in particular since 2008, was the bellwether of extremely negative conditions of American life, of dark money, unfettered in elections, of deep corruption, of fractious hyper-partisan movements, the Tea Party in particular, but it was also a civil rights landmark spot.

Kendzoir was born about the time this crime spree began. She has been living with the consequences, the crimes – Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the War in Iraq based on false arguments, the 2008 financial collapse – have never been investigated, the perpetrators not held accountable. It is hard to raise children when leaders don’t have any respect for humanity and there is no organized opposition. Leaders don’t call the nasty guy a liar, racist, or criminal, all of which he is. Beyond that, nobody is acknowledging the emotional burden of living in through all that. That burden is the core of the book.

Elijah Lovejoy was an abolitionist who was murdered about the time of an election in the 1830s. There are many others fighting for what they believe in. In the same way Kendzior wanted to make sure all this was out in the public in case something happened to her. She has had death threats. She wants her children to know why she put herself at risk. Truth matters or they wouldn’t put so much effort into keeping people from telling it.

There is benefit in telling the truth. Though Lovejoy was dead, Abraham Lincoln read his influential works.

Chapter 3 of the book is about Jeffrey Epstein and his sex trafficking. He is one reason why the nasty guy has not be deposed and others around him have not been indicted because of the possibility of blackmail from Epstein’s connections – including Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian Mafia. In 2016 women began to come forward and people like the nasty guy knew there might be trouble.

That trouble included a woman coming forward accusing the nasty guy of rape when she was 13 back in 1994. Her lawyer was about to do a press conference a week before the 2016 election. But the story disappeared. Media wouldn’t touch it even though the Access Hollywood scandal had already come out. People like Bill Barr, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone get involved in the story (see the book for details). There is
this enormous group of complicit actors working to basically infiltrate governments at the highest level, possessing an enormous amount of blackmail, and no resolution, no clarity. … I do know that all of these people wanted this story buried as much as it could be buried and that if it were to go to court, it would reappear again. A lot of secrets about the most powerful and elite people, including Donald Trump, would be revealed.
So Epstein “committed suicide.” And when he died the court cases went away and the coverage went away. Even a couple decades ago media knew Epstein trafficked young girls and became rich for it. He was convicted over a decade ago and court documents are public. But he was portrayed as “financier” or a “philanthropist” who gave “splendid parties.”

This network of Epstein clients – the huge size of his crime – is much wider than Kendzior could tell in her book. But there are victims of these crimes who are still living with the pain. Other people have tried and their efforts were censored from the top.

The Epstein ring is so important because it wasn’t just a sex trafficking ring. It’s one that has its hooks into governments throughout the West. It is connected to the most powerful people in the world.
It's a lot to take in psychologically, but I think that there is an incentive at the top runs of media, not so much on the individual reporter level, but at the CEO level, to suppress all of this both in order to maintain their access to the rich and powerful, but also because, as I describe in the book, media became the playground of the rich and powerful.

The people who are covering these stories are often the sons and daughters of other media and political elites. The New York Times itself is an amazing example of this. And that's why you get puff pieces about people like Ivanka and Jared where they're just presented as normal figures in the White House and not as obviously a kleptocratic dynasty with mafia ties.
As for the girls who were trafficked…
They really do view them as trash. I think they may view most Americans as trash. Most victims of the Trump administration and of these elite mafia syndicates posing as governments, posing as corporations, as trash. That level of exploitation, of total dismissal of the humanity of so many people, that is one of the greatest crises we face as Americans.

It's this utter lack of empathy, this utter lack of concern, for justice. It doesn't even occur to them that this is something that should be covered not just on a political or a national security level, but on a human level because there are real victims here.

Since the nasty guy regime is known for hating and persecuting journalists what is a media company giving up by not telling these victims’ stories? It would be in their own interest to fight back, yet they silence themselves.

The material is juicy. It would be a ratings bonanza (see O. J. Simpson). Running this stuff would be in the financial, political, and moral interest of media companies. They should be jumping all over this. And they’re not. This lack of scrutiny allows the nasty guy to commit crimes in plain sight.

This criminal network is good at trying to destroy the careers of journalists.
I think what kind of journalists you are and what your ultimate ambition is makes you more or less susceptible to their tactics. If you're a careerist, if your goal is to just ascend a traditional ladder and you're not that concerned with the quality of your work, then you're a great target. You're a great mark for the Trump machine because your goal is to just get front-page bylines. It doesn't matter if the story under the byline is accurate. It doesn't matter if the story is detrimental to democracy. You just need to have your name there. You need to continue to ascend that ladder, get whatever kind of institutional approval you want. If you have a conformist mindset, then they will use you. They will manipulate you. I think they're good at spotting people like that, and the people who have been willing to branch out a bit and tell other parts of the story don’t really care that much.
But if you’re interested in the truth you have a lot of resources. They leave clues. They regularly confess to crimes. But you lack an outlet that will let you say it to the broader public. So Kendzior and Chalupa created a podcast.

The current state of the crime family …
This idea that if somehow Trump is removed, things just revert to normal, it's absurd on a number of levels in part because of the Republican Party, but also because this is a dynastic kleptocracy in the making. For Trump to be able to preserve his money, his power, his immunity from prosecution, which is important, and also to preserve Ivanka and Jared and Don Junior's immunity from prosecution because they've been implicated in various crimes as well, they need to stay there as a family.

Ivanka and Don Junior and the rest of them grew up in a very, very corrupt environment. I don't know whether this is as true for Tiffany, and Barron, I just feel sorry for him. But they grew up surrounded by sex traffickers, money launderers, white-collar criminals, the Russian mafia. They were groomed to inherit those roles. They talked a bit about Ivanka's work on The Apprentice where there were properties like Trump SoHo that she was involved in that were just mafia fronts. They were money-laundering fronts.
The pandemic prince was involved enough that one reason why several people wanted the nasty guy in the White House is the prince would get there too. The prince was already a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel because he is a part of the Kushner crime family. His marriage to the princess seems to be arranged between two criminal families.

The princess could easily be marketed as the cool, calm version of her father to become the first woman president.

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