All about blood money

Here are my notes on reading through the transcript of the episode The GOP Is an Unregistered Foreign Agent: Part II on Gaslit Nation with hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. The audio for the episode is about 45 minutes. I’m going to mostly summarize rather than quote because while they have something important to say, both of them can meander when they talk. This entire episode (and I’m sure all of their episodes over the last two years) is about supremacy.

* Why are people still surprised at what the nasty guy and his minions are doing? For example, people were shocked when Attorney General Bill Barr didn’t follow the rule of law. But that’s literally why the nasty guy hired him. It has been obvious who Barr is since 1992 and the Iran Contra story.

* The New York Times has been constructing and releasing the narrative the nasty guy wants to tell. They’re acting just as partisan as Fox News. They kept Hillary Clinton’s email story alive for over a year. They seem to interview the same six swing voters who, strangely, always turn out to be nasty guy fanatics. And within an hour of the nasty guy calling for the death of the whistleblower, the NYT put out enough information for people to guess his identity. (Since then the nasty guy has scorned the wistleblower, saying “He disappeared.” Well, when the president wants you dead, of course you disappear. Sheesh.) So think about who you’re giving your money to.

* A quote from Chalupa:

At the heart of the Republican Party today, which is propped up by the Russian-funded terrorist organization, the NRA – the heart of the Republican Party is blood money. This is all about blood money. So if you’re wondering why Putin is meddling in all these democracies – he has to escape accountability because he wants to hold onto his blood money. When the Western Alliance stays strong and united and passes sanctions, that’s crippling on his economy. That hurts his oligarchs. His oligarchs can’t be fancy and free spreading their blood money around in Western capitals because there’s suddenly a stigma on them. And that’s why you’re seeing such an overlap of all the same players, because it’s the greed and it’s the money that unites them all. And they’re putting all this money above human life and above our fragile planet.

So, yeah, Putin is going to do all he can to keep his stooge in Oval Office because there is a huge amount of blood money he doesn’t want to be held accountable for. And that stooge is willing to be the stooge because he has the power to be cruel to those lower in the social hierarchy.

* Ukraine President Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption mandate. Then he got squeezed between trying to fend off Russia invading his country and the nasty guy trying to corrupt him.

* Cahlupa said there were a lot of issues that could have impeached the nasty guy (starting on the day of his inauguration). But Speaker Pelosi knew that the GOP and their base wouldn’t care about kids in cages or that white supremacy is the biggest terrorist threat in America. They’re all about protecting white supremacy. So Pelosi waited until she could speak her enemies’ language, that not helping Ukraine is a national security threat.

* Kendzior is not convinced. The GOP stopped caring about Ukraine back in 2015 when Russia invaded Crimea. Remember that the GOP is funded to a great degree by the Russian backed NRA. There’s also Russian backing of the Evangelicals who say they think the nasty guy has been put in power by God. There’s also Russian backing of many white supremacy groups.

* Chalupa counters that even if the GOP is beholden to blood money, aid to Ukraine (that $400 million the nasty guy held up) had strong support from both parties. So centering impeachment on Ukraine is a way of shoving that vote in their faces.

* Kendzior replies that Pelosi isn’t doing this because of the law or the Constitution, she’s doing it to either please or get back at Republicans. Kendzior then goes into a long description of what Pelosi has done to block impeachment.

* A quote from Chalupa:

The bad guys always move faster than the good because the good have to deliberate, they have to build consensus, they have to maintain the norms. Meanwhile, the bad guys are trampling all over the norms. So that’s why, in recent years, we’ve had this acceleration of the bad guys winning, because the good guys are just too slow to catch up to what’s really going on.

* A lot of Republicans know what is going on with Russia. Former Speaker Paul Ryan even said as much. But instead of doing something about it they’re quietly retiring.

* What Chalupa and Kendzior are working towards is to get these corrupt people out of power, from dogcatcher to president. And we need to educate each other to make it happen. We’re in a fight for our lives.

* Paul Manafort has been a Putin operative for a decade before the 2016 election. It’s an obscene crime getting this Kremlin puppet elected. Manafort knew he’d get caught. So he had a strategy, a media narrative to attack whistleblowers and investigative journalists as traitors. He’s already succeeded with Serhiy Leshchenko, a top journalist in Ukraine who would have been a top performer in the Zelensky government. That is a crime against our world’s future.

* Even though we got the transcript of the nasty guy trying to corrupt Zelensky before dirt was invented on the Bidens, there was already a casualty. The nasty guy was able to get Zelensky to bash Germany. The EU is one of the largest donors to Ukraine and that little episode drove a wedge between the EU and Ukraine – much to the delight of Putin.

* As Chalupa and Kendzior have said on many of these episodes the nasty guy has had political ambitions for 30 years and had ha funding by Kremlin-associated oligarchs since the early ‘90s, nearly as long. So, yes, he will carry out Putin’s bidding on Ukraine. The nasty guy’s focus is on his personal wealth and power, then maybe on the fate of Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And way down on the list is America.

* People are astonished that the nasty guy has incriminated himself with that Ukraine transcript. Kendzior says, yeah, he incriminates himself all the time. He’s been doing it for three decades because there has never been any consequences. That’s why he surrounds himself with fellow criminals.

* These plutocrats and oligarchs want a no-deal Brexit (the same people who influenced our 2016 election influenced the Brexit vote) because they want to make money off the collapse of Great Britain. That’s how they reacted to the Great Recession. That’s why they want wars. They want to profit off the climate crisis. They don’t care about suffering. We need to expose those crimes and the political systems that put them in power.

* The people in charge of carrying out the violence of a regime – Stalin’s Secret Police, and today’s ICE – are attracted to those jobs because they’re inherently sadists. They relish in it.

Kendzior talked about prizes and reputations, which many people are concerned about:

Judge people by their actual actions. What are they doing? Who are they working with? Are they funded by a sex trafficking pedophile? Are they covering up for a transnational mafia?
…
If I have a bad reputation, I personally don’t care. … I care about right and wrong, and I care about my principles, and I care about my country, and I care about whether people are suffering.
…
What matters is how you treat people. What matters is what you bring into the world. What matters is what kind of person are you and what are you doing for others? That’s what it comes down to.

So stay engaged. It’s going to be horror, but don’t look away. Take a break if you need to and come back.

Chalupa said:

And the #1 rule is, when you have abusive autocrats in power, community is going to save you. Community is the only power we have left. Community is what funds Gaslit Nation. Community is what keeps us going. So in any situation of abuse of power, large or small, turn to your community. Build a coalition. Get everyone together. Get to know each other by name, and that’s your sense of security. Show up together. Show up for each other. Hold each other accountable to keep showing up. That is the power.