No unity with accountability, no accountability without the truth

When Sarah Kendzior began to prepare the January 13 episode of Gaslit Nation she tweeted it would probably be a million hours long. Thankfully, she and co-host Andrea Chalupa kept it to two hours and ten minutes. It’s an “extra long episode because we are extra furious.” That’s still much longer than their usual episodes, which I think are about an hour (though it’s been a long time since I listened – I usually work from the transcript, which I’m doing now). This episode is titled Clear Intent and discusses many aspects of the attack on the Capitol the week before. Because various businesses have pulled away from the nasty guy he leaves office $1B in debt. Even though he was impeached again, millions still see him as a victim and their savior whose “landslide” election was stolen. Chalupa said:

Trump started and ended his presidency with the Charlottesville Massacre, a sweeping Kremlin cyber attack, a disastrous and inexcusable intelligence failure, and disinformation-fueled violence enabled by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Donald Trump attacked when we were at our weakest. America was—is—suffering from a pandemic, killing around the total number of Americans that died in World War II. And the Kremlin, which of course helped him come to power, unleashed a massive cyber attack against the US Government and American companies that's being compared to Pearl Harbor. It can take years for us to fully understand and resolve what the Kremlin has done to us. So Donald Trump chose this moment, when America was most vulnerable, to launch a violent coup against our nation.

Chalupa read from an article from The Guardian. There is no shortage of examples of inflammatory remarks coming from the nasty guy and other Republicans. The first calls to bring his followers to the Capitol were on December 19. Within hours his supporters responded to his calls. Louie Gohmert added his voice on January 1, Ted Cruz on January 3, Eric Trump in January 5. And at the actual event on January 6 nasty junior was the warmup act, followed by Rudy Giuliani, and the nasty guy. Kendzior added from an article she wrote back on October 13th. These threats date back to the primaries. They continued in the general election with cronies talking about violence if the nasty guy loses. Then Kendzior revealed the twist – the year of the article was 2016. They’ve been planning this attack for four years. She said:

And all that we've had, over the past four years was our institutions being purposefully dismantled by a Kremlin asset backed by transnational organized crime in order to make this attack more successful, in order to gut the institutions that are supposed to protect us, pack them with lackeys, pack them with violent loyalists and white supremacists. This was coming so far in advance that you literally cannot tell the difference between an article that I published before he was even the President and one that comes out now. … I just want to bring that point home: they've been working for this for so long. And that is why Stone, and Manafort, and Flynn, and Erik Prince's war mercenaries from Blackwater were pardoned right before this election. One, quite possibly, so that they could be advisors and guide the participation of others. But also, to send a signal that there would never be consequences, that this was the winning side, this was the shameless side, this was the anti-American side, and they were openly encouraging people to join it. In that sense, the lack of preparation and the lack of protection of this country and its people is unforgivable.

The nasty guy pardons were a recruitment tool – come join our side and you’ll get away with horrific violence. It invited white supremacist terrorists to infiltrate the police and military. Chalupa mentioned a Twitter thread by ProPublica that documented the plans for the invasion that were in plain sight. That began on December 12, two days before states certified their slates of electors. So why weren’t the police ready? The nasty guy tweeted that his followers should not harm the police “The police were on their side.” Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have made their bid to be the nasty guy’s successor, of earning his blessing and inheriting his base. But that spot was taken long ago by the pandemic princess. And her ambitions are as strong as her father’s. She just puts a prettier face and wider vocabulary on it. And has learned from his mistakes. She needs to be brought to justice so she doesn’t run in 2024. The prince and princess are good at manipulating the press, so are likely to get little scrutiny from the media. Kendzior said the princess could be installed in power if the coup succeeds. The second route would be if the United States collapses and the nasty guy children take power over the pieces – with their Russian and Saudi backers. That is a horrible possibility because the children have no respect for the national culture and treasures. And the third – they are prosecuted and punished for their crimes, the crimes before and during their time in the White House, with thorough investigation of their international mafia network. Kendzior added:

There will be no unity with accountability, and there will be no accountability without the truth.

Chalupa continued discussing the lack of accountability:

Why did these men—mostly white men—storm the Capitol and post videos of themselves committing crimes? Because they were shown by the President of the United States that they too could get away with crimes. And most importantly, they were acting with the support and the backing of the most powerful person in the world. … The crimes they committed in his name, the terror they inflicted under his direct orders, pleased him. It was the plan all along. Trump has spent the past five years putting the lives of law enforcement and regular people in danger. … Practically everything Trump and his administration has done over the past five years was an assault on our democracy. What happened on January 6th was always there in nearly everything he did and said. Trump kept telling us he wanted to become a dictator. Only those who live cloistered in their privilege refused to believe him. … Simply put, the President got what he wanted by inciting an attack on our nation's capital and terrorizing the government officials who refused to make him a dictator. And he got to bask in his supporters’ love and loyalty. Trump remains defiant and a threat. He should be indicted and arrested and prevented from ever running for office again.

I see that points to a flaw in our impeachment system. When someone who is not the president commits a serious crime they are put in jail until the trial can happen, especially if the person is a clear and ongoing threat to other people. Yet, the nasty guy, who people are properly declaring to be a danger to the country (he has the nuclear codes) is allowed to continue with all the power of the job. The Capitol attack is not the end of the violence. I’ve mentioned the state capitols are likely targets. Kendzior said the Christmas bombing in Nashville, which blew out communications for 180 miles in all directions, is a sign of things to come. She’s worried that the fanatics will blow stuff up. Even at the Capitol they didn’t need an enormous number of people to cause an enormous problem. As we saw in Oklahoma City in 1995 one person can blow up a lot. But the lone wolf thing is a myth. But the proper urgent response and unity in law enforcement agencies, Kendzior isn’t seeing it. She said if this was a foreign, black, or Muslim attack

this would undoubtedly be declared a terrorist attack. This would have been just unequivocally denounced by every Republican. Instead, they are supporting it, and the reason for that is white supremacy. And white supremacy is as old as America itself. It is not going away. It needs to be suppressed. It needs to be beaten out of the system. And so we're really in a bind if our representatives are instead calling for unity with the violent white supremacists. I'm all for a call for unity, but the unity has to be against white supremacy, against fascism, against corruption, against transnational organized crime. These should not be difficult things for people to oppose. This should just be like your baseline expectation of democracy in America.

When the opposition is a supremacist mob, blue lives don’t matter. That’s how deep this supremacy goes. Chalupa read a bit from the Washington Post. Two days before the EC certification, Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund asked the House and Senate security officials to request the DC National Guard be placed on standby. He was turned down. The House Sergeant-at-Arms said he didn’t like the optics of declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration. The Senate Sergeant-at-Arms suggested informal contact. All three have since resigned. Sund pleaded for help five more times during the attack. Lieutenant General Walter Piatt said he didn’t like the visual of National Guard with police and the Capitol in the background. Turning to the inauguration Kendzior said the ceremony, like last summer’s convention, needs to be only virtual:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are assassination targets. Trump's backers have made that very clear. They did not go into the Capitol just to break things and take selfies. They went in there to kill people.

Some say if they don’t hold a public inauguration the terrorist have won. But it’s like a wedding versus a marriage. Is the important thing the day of splendor or the years together? We need to get Biden and Harris safely into office. Pipe bombs were found near the Capitol. I had thought they were placed there during the attack. But they were placed during the nasty guy’s incitement speech to draw police away from the Capitol. Sund said this was not a demonstration. The mob was extremely dangerous and extremely prepared. “They came with riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray, fireworks, climbing gear, explosives, metal pipes, baseball bats.” This was criminal riotous activity. They had been incited by the nasty guy. This was clear intent. Arieh Kovler, a political consultant had been monitoring the extremists. He told GQ the attackers were sharing maps, that there would be enough of them to surround Congress. They knew the tunnel system and could prevent Congresspeople from leaving. They imagined mass executions. They were delighted that the nasty guy had called them and that they would finally do something to install him as their Lord and savior. Many had clear purpose – this was planned. Many others wandered, waiting for instruction. Chalupa read the report from Rep. James Clyburn [I mentioned it in a previous post] and the testimony of black police officers [I had also mentioned that one]. Kendzior said she and Chalupa read so much of existing reports is

because people are going to forget. They are going to forget that this was intentional. They're going to forget how it was executed, and one of the reasons they're going to forget is because despite this incredible array of evidence, despite the urgency of the moment and the need to remove Trump and his backers from power immediately, people are not acting in response with that urgency.

Without swift and clear consequences the number of people who agree with storming of the Capitol will grow. So, perpetrators, including encouraging elected officials, need to be punish. We can’t let this become normalized. Kendzior has tweeted some of this so it may sound familiar:

On November 10th, 80% of Americans believed that Joe Biden won, and only 3% believed that Trump won. And then what happened after that? We had weeks and weeks of Trump refusing to concede, Trump taking it to court over 60 times, Trump putting out a vast propaganda operation, lying incessantly, threatening people, not backing down, and getting very little response. What did people do during those weeks of the attempted coup? They denied that there was an attempted coup. They parsed the definition of coup. They had little abstract arguments instead of treating it as a serious threat. So because that happened, and especially, I think, because Democrats and other institutional officials did not respond in kind, voters began to wonder, "Well, maybe Trump is right, because if he's doing all these court battles and people aren't really pushing back that much and Joe Biden's not even really talking about it, maybe it really was illegitimate. Maybe there's something to it.” So the numbers started to grow, and this is the story of the last not just four years but forty years is that people commit crimes in plain sight and officials refuse to hold them accountable. So when Andrea and I come on and tell you things that are just well documented and true, like that Trump is a career criminal who has been working with a transnational crime syndicate for four decades, who's been tied to the Kremlin for about four decades, and all of the other things we tell you that sound like a Tom Clancy novel but are in fact our reality, people say, "No, that can't be right because if that were true, somebody would've done something about it. The Obama administration would have spoken out and never let him run. The CIA would have exposed this threat to America or contained it. The FBI and Comey surely would've let us know beforehand. The media would've reported on it. If Trump had been, say, accused in court of raping a 13 year old girl procured by Jeffrey Epstein,”—which he was—“surely the media would let us know about that." I mean, they think Hilary Clinton's emails are a threat. A child rapist maybe is something that we should think about. But no, they covered up for him. Instead of covering him, they covered up for him. That normalcy bias—this kind of belief that if things are going off the rails, some official’s going to come in and let you know and react accordingly—that created the conditions of Trump's rise, his win, and his ability to take his version of reality and forcefully implement it upon the American public. So one thing that needs to happen now is narrative control. So everything that Andrea has been reading to you, everything that we are discussing, we archive it on our site. We archive it in transcripts. We hope those articles and this information remains online, and we hope that you never, ever forget it and that you never remove it from the broader context of an ongoing threat to the fundamental existence of the United States that has been accelerated for four years but that has existed long before that and has never fully been addressed. You can never forget this. You can never normalize this. You can never find unity with the people who did these actions, and you can never move on.

Chalupa discussed GOP members of Congress wrote a letter to Joe Biden asking him to oppose impeachment. They want unity. AOC responded, but healing requires accountability. This was an insurrection. If there is no accountability we are inviting it to happen again. What do we do now? Ban the nasty guy from holding office. Ban him from social media. Senators Hawley, Cruz, and Graham, all who supported the nasty guy’s efforts should be expelled. The companies that donated to seditious members of Congress should be named and boycotted. Resist the spin machine of far right media, who are the ideological heirs of the traitors who ripped our country apart in the Civil War. No unity with impunity. Protect democracy – the Trump family and its movement are here to stay. Big Tech won’t reform itself. The Facebook algorithm that pumped disinformation should be ended through laws. Kendzior said the police and military are in desperate need of de-Nazi-fication. Put a woman of color at the head of the FBI and diversify its leadership. The FBI also needs a reckoning over how it hid crimes of Russian oligarchs, Jeffrey Epstein, and the nasty guy. Now it needs to tell us how our own domestic terrorists were backed by people abroad. Voices, like James Comey, are saying the nasty guy can’t be investigated. That’s because their own shady past would also be investigated. Kendzior is tired of tweets that say “Comey’s going to save us.” Several other saviors are mentioned. She said:

Look where we are now. We had a siege on the motherf---king Capitol. If any of these people gave a s--- about this country, they would have been transparent, thorough, patriotic, committed, relentless in battling this domestic terror threat and the foreign backers that enable it. Instead, they did nothing, and their greatest propaganda trick was to tell you over and over that it would all be fine, that there was 3D chess, that there was a secret plan, and that people like Andrea and I were everything from Kremlin agents to proto-terrorists to doom's day sayers.

Chalupa traced today’s situation to the Koch brothers and their decades long funding to shift the GOP from conservative to a libertarian that refuses to compromise and also protects fossil fuels. They want to consolidate power. The nasty guy is only a symptom of a much larger disease. Even during the riot they were pushing the Big Lie, saying voting issues must be investigated. But the only voting issue they have is making it harder to vote. If they really want an election audit, start with 2016. Chalupa played the recording of Rep. Conor Lamb from Pennsylvania during the EC certification after the insurrection. Lamb pointed out in Allegheney County the vote counting was done according to laws specified by the GOP. Any claim that the election was stolen is a lie. It is shameful to continue those lies after all that Congress had gone through that day. Of course, his comments caused an uproar in the House. That same night Ted Cruz pushed the Big Lie. Later, Katalin Cseh of the European Parliament tweeted:

More than Trump, Ted Cruz reminds me of Viktor Orbán's style of authoritarianism. The truth twisting, the cynicism and arrogance. Not openly out to dismantle democratic institutions, but hollowing them out to the point that they're dead.

In the last few years Orbán managed to twist Hungary into a dictatorship. It is what Cruz has been doing that the Koch brothers, and other billionaires, pay all that money for. Kendzior said:

There are a lot of ways to blackmail a government. And not all of it has to do with personal kompromat, digging into someone's private life, exposing their secrets. You could expose what government institutions have done, acts they may have participated in along, maybe, with other countries that hurt American citizens—unspeakable things. I fear that we may hear of such things in the years to come, but I think there's no solution but the full truth and transparency. And especially, if you want to neuter a movement like QAnon—a movement based on conspiracy theories and lies—this is the way to do it, because there are greens of truth in the midst of the QAnon morass.

Chalupa went into a long discussion about Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn and their ties to various Russian operatives. This needs to be brought into the light. She concluded by saying America has a long history of white rage, but this latest version “is aided by a mass murdering, xenophobic, terrorist regime, the Kremlin.” Kendzior talked about journalists of color now describing white racists editors who censored their work about the upcoming violence they saw. Kendzior, who is white, had also encountered those editors because the wrote about the plight of black people. Journalists of color are way more likely to expose the corruption around the white editors. It was the black people who immediately saw through the nasty guy. It was the white people who underplayed his threat. Journalism is becoming an elite profession. It doesn’t pay well. It requires expensive education and to live in expensive cities. One can’t really survive without inherited wealth, which people of color don’t have. Something is wrong when so many journalists want their picture taken with Epstein, Stone, and the prince and princess. It’s wrong when we have Russian operatives like Michael Caputo on CNN as an objective commentator of US politics. Chalupa said another aspect of the Big Lie is the government’s response to COVID. She then started her conclusion with:

We should not have to have an assault on our Capitol in order for authoritarian scholars to finally be believed. We shouldn't have to have war like this in order for the Big Tech media giants to finally do what they should have done years ago, and for a handful of Republicans to finally talk to their other members and say, "Stop spreading the Big Lie."

She then talked about the fight ahead and how we can be a part of it and what groups could use our donations. If we shine a light on all that is going on we can build a better, fairer, freer country for all of us.