A scam on a massive level that was incredibly successful

I haven’t discussed an episode of Gaslit Nation since just before the new year. I get notices of each new episode then think I would rather read the transcript than spend at least 45 minutes listening. Yes, the ability to take notes and quote passages does have a lot to do with my preference. But a transcript comes a few days later and my usual source for blogging (Daily Kos) gives me plenty of material to write about. So I don’t get back to Gaslit Nation. It’s time for a break from Kos. The Gaslit Nation transcripts page shows 20 entries. So my first task was to decide, from a list that goes back to the inauguration, which one to write about today. I chose a recent one, a summary episode: How We Got Here, excerpts from seven episodes stretching back to 2021, a “best of” montage put together by host Andrea Chalupa, that explain how we got into this mess. This transcript page has links to the original episodes for more detail. Up first is Ari Berman, investigative journalist of Mother Jones and author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It. He was a guest on Gaslit Nation in June 2021 and April 2024 Berman starts with the compromises made when the Constitution was written. The big thing was to get it passed, to have a guiding document for the nation. The first compromise was the makeup of the Senate. James Madison was opposed to two senators from every state because he thought states with a minority of the population to thwart the will of the states with a majority of the population. Which is what has happened. The second was the Electoral College. Many framers wanted direct election of the president. But others thought the people could be duped or weren’t well enough informed for that type of decision (hmm, sounds familiar). Also, small states and slave states (key point there) wanted protection. That reminds me of Elie Mystal’s point that the Constitution was written by slavers. The greater point is there were compromises between democratic and anti-democratic forces (there still are).

What we see over and over again is that the constitution that was created was a product of these compromises, and often what happened is the compromises would favor smaller states or would favor slave states, or it would favor wealthy white property owners. So over and over, these privileged minorities were getting preferential treatment in ways that would hurt this much larger and more diverse majority. And I think that's what sparked and laid the groundwork for minority rule to become a reality across the US society and across the US history.

Jump to 2010 and the Republican reaction to the election of Barack Obama. Wisconsin, a great example of the progressive movement, was converted to minority rule through gerrymandering and voting restrictions. Republicans went after labor unions, the primary support of the Democratic Party. Wisconsin became a national model of how to convert a progressive stronghold into minority rule and autocracy. I wrote about Elie Mystal’s book Allow Me to Retort just a few days ago. He is the Justice Correspondent for The Nation and he has another book out, this one Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. He was on Gaslit Nation in February this year. Mystal said that Biden gets credit for good policies and programs. But Biden failed at the most important thing he needed to do. Alas, part of that was he didn’t recognize that thing. That thing was to roll back the voting rights restrictions implemented by John Roberts and the Supreme Court in 2013. The Court had implemented those rules because Republicans recognized the election of Obama as the first black president meant the black people had enough power to elect one of their own. The restrictions were to make voting harder so that could never happen again. That voter suppression was what made the nasty guy’s first term possible. So Biden missed job one listed above. He also missed job two: making sure the nasty guy couldn’t run again. Democrats had a chance to secure the guardrails – and didn’t. We’re paying for that now and will be for a very long time. Mystal does a great job of summarizing my view of Biden. Great policies, but not doing the two most important things he needed to do. Back to Berman. Voter suppression had been going on long before the nasty guy’s big lie weaponized it in 2021. But since then the effort has gotten more intense. Republicans are still working to pass voter suppression laws. Now there is a related effort to overturn election results. That was tried after the 2020 election. Republicans are now working to make that succeed in the future by trying to control how elections are run and managed. In Georgia the state election board can now take over local election boards. Where there are Republicans willing to stand up to the nasty guy they are getting primaried, so the party is in lockstep with the nasty guy. This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stephen Ujlaki created the film Bad Faith about Christian Nationalism. He was on Gaslit Nation in April 2024. Ujlaki talked about Colin Weyrich who had worked for Goldwater in 1964 and co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. He was the one who decided the Republicans should cultivate the Evangelicals, who had stayed away from politics since the Scopes trial of the late 1920s humiliated them. Evangelical leaders were told they would get wealth and political influence if they told their followers that Republicans were the party of God and Democrats were the party of the devil. Many of those followers still believe that. One thing the leaders wanted was protection for their segregated Christian academies. But the rallying cry wasn’t racism, but rights of the unborn. Being against abortion was long a Catholic position, but not Evangelical. But after that deal with Republicans abortion was the reason why the followers were told they needed to vote. Said Ujlaki:

It's a scam on a massive level that was incredibly successful, both the rallying cry and the divisiveness in the country that it caused.

Nancy MacLean is the author of Democracy in Chains, about how powerful plutocrats developed anti-democracy networks to hold the US hostage. She was on Gaslit Nation in June of 2022. The dumbing down of the American public, the huge number of people who believe things easily disproven, began with the ending the Fairness Doctrine of broadcasting in 1986. That doctrine required accuracy and balance on the public airwaves. Its end opened the way for conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. The industry of disinformation became very profitable. Jesse Eisinger is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist at ProPublica. He wrote the book, The Chicken S--- Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (the real title doesn’t have dashes). He was on Gaslit Nation in December 2023. In the early 1970s conservatives noticed liberals controlled the institutions of the economy, government, and culture. Pretty much the power in the country. Louis Powell wrote his famous Memorandum, which earned him a seat on the Supreme Court. That Memo was a conservative call to arms. Wealthy people built the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and a few more while the Koch Brothers built their vast network. The right still claims the left controls the culture when they are actually the ones in control. The left needs to emphasize anti-trust efforts (there is a conservative anti-trust faction). But their efforts are blocked by judges. First, conservative judges did the blocking, but now Obama and Biden judges are also blocking anti-trust efforts. We need a decades long revision in legal thinking. There is the American Constitution Society, the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society (I didn’t know they existed!). Caroline Frederickson, head of the ACS, admitted (back in 2023) they had made a big mistake – they had vetted judges on social issues like abortion, not economic ones. They hadn’t thought to ask about anti-trust, labor reforms, and regulation attitudes. MacLean talked about the Koch brothers. David ran as a candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980. The platform was no public schools, no national parks, no postal service. It did include providing for national defense, ensuring the rule of law, and guaranteeing social order and very little else. The overwhelming majority of people rejected that platform. So David and Charles created their network to use disinformation to make their ideas more acceptable. Koch money and influence helped the Federalist Society capture our courts, especially the Supreme Court. On January 6th, 2021 the 147 members of the House and seven of eight members of the Senate who refused to certify that Biden won were all funded by Koch money. Efforts to gerrymander, suppress votes, and change how elections are run are also funded by Koch money. It’s a stealth strategy to rewrite rules of governance, even the Constitution, to return our government to what it was about 1900. At that time workers had no rights and no voice. There was no Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Only a tiny minority want this vision, which is why disinformation is so central and systematic. Social Security is so widely popular the disinformation on it included the stability of it and dividing current recipients from tax payers by saying it won’t be there when the youngsters need it. Koch money was also behind the Tea Party that appeared in 2009 in response to Obama’s election. They worked to control state legislatures in 2010 and succeeded in 28 states. Those legislatures attacked liberal laws, lying about why that was necessary. They also highly gerrymandered their states and pushed voter suppression masked as preventing voter fraud. Eisinger said that in the 1980s Democrats were crushed by Reagan and became afraid of economic reform. That was their start of no longer being the party of the working class. MacLean said Reagan was good at communicating: “Government is the problem,” and “Welfare Queen.” Though he made a lot of radical changes he did nothing close to what the Koch network wanted. When Reagan understood the cuts he asked for would cut Social Security and benefits for veterans and farmers, his base, he backed off. He didn’t cut spending, but still cut taxes. Between Reagan and Bush II the Koch brothers realized they can’t depend on elected officials. To remain popular enough to get elected again candidates couldn’t be as extreme as the Koch people wanted. That’s why the Kochs turned to disinformation. Anne Nelson is a journalist who has covered a few countries. She also wrote the book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She was on Gaslit Nation in May 2024 to discuss Project 2025. She said:

Institution Project 2025 is a document that was released under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation a few months ago in late 2023. And it is a blueprint for the way that the radical right wing of the Republican Party plans to transform American flawed but functional democracy into a complete dictatorship. That's the short answer, but it goes into 900 pages of detailed information about exactly how they're going to do that throughout virtually every possible branch of the government.

One example from Project 2025 is about climate. The point, as Nelson describes it, is to “burn as many fossil fuels as quickly as possible because the priority is the profit for the profit stream for the fossil fuels industry.” To do that the document says to pull out of climate accords, remove energy ratings from appliances, even remove the Migratory Bird Act. Other parts of it talk about lowering all taxes on the wealthy. Allow fundamentalists to turn the country into a theocracy. Reverse marriage equality. Remove all rights from trans people (and the rest of the LGBTQ community). Challenge the right to birth control. And, the big one, concentrate government power in the White House, including control of the Department of Justice and turning the FBI into secret police. Take over the State Department so cronies become ambassadors able to cut deals at will. Replace all federal workers with loyalists without checking for education or competence. Nelson’s appearance in Gaslit Nation was before the election. I note that because of this comment from her:

Well, I don't think that Trump can win without the support of a hundred plus organizations who signed on to Project 2025.

These are the groups that met with the nasty guy in June 2016 offering money and campaign support. In return they wanted him to stack the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down. Of these hundred groups, about half got funding from the Koch network. That and other funding sources has billions of dollars behind it.