Sunday, July 26, 2020

This is a grenade

It has been a while since I’ve read an episode of Gaslit Nation, a podcast put out by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled American Gestapo. After a week of violence in Portland, OR I thought I should get their view of it, even if the topic doesn’t come up until ¾ of the way through the episode. I first wrote about Portland on Friday, July 17. This episode was posted Wednesday, July 22. Since I waited for the transcript I’m writing this one Sunday, July 26.

Kendzior jumped right in saying that the nasty guy struck a deal in 1977 to remain tax free for 30 years. This is from files kept by Soviet, then Russian intelligence agencies with some help by Czech Security Services. Did the nasty guy strike such a deal? What is in it? These questions are not just unanswered, but unexamined. At least outside the IRS and maybe other government agencies. This is about the time the nasty guy was introduced into the world of corruption by Roy Cohn. The nasty guy learned that wealth is power and this pact allowed him to be above the law. This position was likely supported by criminal actors and hostile foreign states. “This disturbingly parallels his present day actions as president.”

On July 20, a couple days before this episode posted, a gunman opened fire at the home of federal judge Esther Salas. Her son was killed and her husband seriously wounded. On July 15 Salas had been assigned to a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank. This bank has been featured in many episodes of Gaslit Nation for its links to Russia, the nasty guy, and other criminal people. It was the only bank to lend to the nasty guy in the early 1990s and is the preferred bank of Russian oligarchs. It acts like a mafia bank. Or a Nazi bank, which it had been, propping up authoritarians in Russia and around the world.

Threats against federal judges are on the rise since the nasty guy took office. Kendzior lists a couple: T.S. Ellis in Paul Manafort’s case and Amy Berman in Roger Stone’s case. Then there are the threats against the witnesses in the nasty guy’s impeachment hearings: Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, and Marie Yovanaovitch. So it seems the attack on Salas was a mafia style warning to her and other federal judges. It’s terrorism, a mafia culture of terrorism.

Chalupa said whether the Salas hit was a lone gunman or a deliberate assassination doesn’t matter. It’s the same culture. And the whole crime cabal, of which the nasty guy is a part, is pushing this culture.
You do not need to have some mafia kingpin having his goon squad pick up a phone and have one of their idiots go out and shoot up a judge. You don't need to be that direct anymore. It's enough to fan the flames of violence and incite this culture of terrorism.
Kendzior talked about narrative inversion. Jeffery Epstein actually ran a child trafficking organization. But it was Hillary Clinton who was accused of running such a ring out of a pizza parlor basement. That became pizzagate when a man, inspired by this lie, came to that pizza parlor with guns.

Kendzior said the Salas hit probably wasn’t a lone gunman. The shooter had a long involvement with Russian mafia operators. Many people, Manafort and others, are Russian mafia associates. This story is mostly untold because:
it's a story that makes people uncomfortable, because it just shows the sheer level of complicity and of Western arrogance, and the combination of incompetence and malice that also defines our modern era.
Chalupa said the progressive movement faced a series of assassinations – John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. This was trauma to progressives. It made many feel they had targets on their heads. Once the nasty guy started the birther movement against President Obama Michelle Obama felt she and her children were included in that target. That feeling of being a target is perhaps why Obama was too moderate for many progressives. And why many progressives are wimpy.

Chalupa was leaving for Ukraine a few years ago and asked a friend for advice about safety. He said if you come for people’s money, they’re going to kill you. She said she wasn’t. He replied she would be fine. Chalupa said that statement applies to America too (and likely many other places). Martin Luther King declared a full-on war on poverty. He came after people’s money. A month later he was killed.

Kendzior said a lot of what this podcast talks about is white supremacy. That will be the core of an American autocracy.

That makes me wonder about the murder of MLK. He had been a civil rights leader for more than a decade by then. So was it about MLK coming for their money. Or was it a black man talking about coming for white money? Meaning he died because of white supremacy, because whites having money and blacks not having money was the key way in keeping blacks people mired in poverty and thus at a lower place in society.

Together Kendzior and Chalupa talk about this time of virus. One reason why white people are involved is white people are being hurt. Yeah, the virus is more deadly among people of color and many of the people who are on the economic front lines (grocery workers) or have lost their jobs are people of color. But this time white people are hurting, have been laid off and are dying, too. White people are seeing, it’s not about political correctness. It’s about white supremacy that is so eager to kill and impoverish black people it doesn’t care if white people also end up dead. And white people see so this is what it feels like to live under an occupying power.

Chalupa predicts in this time of world chaos Putin is going to seize Ukraine. Who would stop him? Merkel in Germany and Macron in France act like they don’t want to face Putin. Even if Biden wins and overcomes attempts to steal the election, what can he do?

On to the American Gestapo that is now in Portland, OR. Kendzior said no, this is not being done for ratings on Fox News, or appeal to the base, though both are nice side effects.
This is real. This is fascism, pure and simple. They are doing it because they are an aspiring fascist regime. This is not a trial balloon. This is a grenade. They are trying to eliminate the right to protest and they are harming real people in real time.

That the elimination of the right to protest is the Trump administration's goal was made clear on Monday when Trump released an executive order defining support for and participation in protest involving statues and federal property as "terrorist activity". A notable aspect of this executive order is that it also labels “assisting” in the protests in any capacity as “terrorist activity”, which means that those who do things or did things like donate to bail funds, but weren't actually present at the protest could also be labeled as terrorists. They refer to "recent violent acts," meaning that this order is potentially retroactive.

This is extraordinarily dangerous and it mirrors the kind of legal edicts that you see in authoritarian states, where any dissident, any opponent of the government, is labeled a terrorist under a sweeping and broad definition.
Chalupa:
Autocrats, and aspiring autocrats like Trump, they need sadists to be their shields. By inflicting terror, they protect the autocrat. By inflicting terror, they intimidate their political opponents. They avoid accountability. Trump is deliberately encouraging empowering this culture of terror in order to protect himself and stay in power.

They're doing this all intentionally to seize and stay in power. Everybody looking at all the polling that “Biden's ahead, Biden's ahead”, the conversation we need to be having is what do we do when these autocrats create all these legal mechanisms–as Barr did with covering up the Mueller Report and burying the Mueller Report–what do we do when they try to create some legal mechanism and all this statewide terror to steal this 2020 election that they know they would lose if it was free and fair?



Sarah Kendzior tweeted:
Trump is not trying to win the election. He's trying to *steal* the election. A person who wants to win an election tries to win people over and expand their base.

He's using the same strategy he had in 2016, which is to build a cult movement instead of an election base. He can then weaponize that cult for violence whether he loses or is reinstalled. They're not thinking in terms of Nov, but beyond it, using multiple mechanisms of control.

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