Congratulations, New York Times! Trump is the GOP nominee. Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and Monique Camarra of the Kremlin File podcast join Andrea to discuss why the New York Times wants Trump to win, with coverage and an editorial board that normalizes his fascism.
The conversation includes a plan to defeat MAGA, the Bannon Strategy and what the Left can learn from it (without turning into a cult!), why we’re glad that Nikki Haley isn’t the GOP nominee either (she uses genocidal rhetoric against LGBTQ+ people!), and where our advantage is in 2024 and how to leverage it to protect democracy this election and beyond.
Fight for your mind! To get inspired to make art and bring your projects across the finish line, join us for the Gaslit Nation LIVE Make Art Workshop on April 11 at 7pm EST – be sure to be subscribed at the Truth-teller level or higher to get your ticket to the event!
I was headed to The Devil’s Elbow when the lady across from me said: “You know how it is on the river, you gotta wear shit you don’t care about getting dirty.”
We were on a bus to our put-in on the Big Piney. She was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Let’s Go Brandon.”
Her friend laughed, and that was the end of it.
I didn’t say anything. Why would I? I didn’t know her. It was an off-hand remark, not my business. You don’t talk politics with strangers on a Missouri float trip bus. First, because it’s rude, and second, because Missouri state law requires everyone present to be drunk.
But I still wondered. Did she buy the shirt, or was it a gift? Was it something she wanted or an inside joke? Was it Biden she didn’t care about dirtying up, or Trump, or the whole corrupt enterprise — the relentless rerun that makes you spend summer days drifting downstream in a sun-soaked stupor?
Sarah Kendzior
The Devil’s Elbow is a small town off Route 66. It is one of scores of Missouri places named for the Devil: Devil’s Honeycomb, Devil’s Backbone, Devil’s Icebox. You live in Missouri, you spend a lot of time navigating the Devil: his ins and outs, his tricks and trades. You get to know him real well.
Missourians don’t dwell on our demonic toponyms. The Devil is a background player, infernal and ineffective, like the government. “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” the saying goes, but there was a short-sell on shame back when they mortgaged our future.
You tell the truth because it is right to do so, not because it accomplishes anything. There’s a sanctity to insisting your words be your own in a time of groupthink and propaganda and AI. Their cheap signals, your free rebuke. It is better to be free than to be cheap, as a matter of character.
But every now and then, you spot a saying that’s got no truth to it and no lie either. A worn-out relic, not even rising to the level of cliché.
“Let’s Go Brandon” was a phrase that Trump fans popularized in 2021 so that they could say “Fuck Joe Biden” without getting in trouble with people whose opinions they pretend to disregard. It was inane and instantly commodified. “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts and signs and stickers made MAGA profiteers a fortune, until Brandon went and ruined it with his inflation, or so their story goes.
Now it’s faded like other mantras of 2021: “Build back better”, “Pandemic of the unvaccinated”, “Justice is coming”, “Trust the plan”. Words strung together like nooses for a nation being conditioned to accept its own murder.
According to the cruel standards of online convention, I should have photographed the “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt lady, plastered the images on social media, and weaponized her privacy for profit. That’s what the Devil would have wanted.
But I’m in revolt against the Devil. We’re in a new dark era, and in the summer of 2023, I felt it coming around the bend.
They call it The Devil’s Elbow because the sharp turn in the river once blocked shipping traffic, causing people to crash. Now The Devil’s Elbow is where Missourians go to float the world away, rewarded by nature for our refusal to ruin it.
I approach fellow river people in good faith. I don’t know a stranger’s heart and I’m not stealing their peace.
My husband and kids and I drifted past the bluffs. Vultures soared, encircling a lone bald eagle perched on a boulder in the water. We saw cattle escape from a corral and take an impromptu swim. The Big Piney River is big enough for anything to happen.
At one point the “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt lady passed us in a canoe.
“Hell of a nice day!” she said, her clothes soaked with dirty water, like our own.
We could see a century-old truss bridge in the distance, telling us our time was almost up. We slowed down, not wanting the hell of a nice day to end.
In the bootheel of Missouri a bald eagle gazes out at a packed parking lot from a storefront painted like a giant American flag. The eagle is faded and frozen, forever free from flight or fight. “God Bless America”, it says, but this phrase is an afterthought. The real invitation is bold-face and blood-red.
“WELCOME TO BOOMLAND.”
We walk through the doors to our sanctuary.
Boomland is an experience, not a destination. Technically, it is a fireworks emporium, but it is so much more. I like to go to Boomland before the Fourth of July and watch my countrymen load up on Patriot Sticks and explosives with names like “America’s Elite”.
As someone who routinely suppresses an urge to blow up America’s Elite, I have always understood the appeal of Boomland.
Sarah Kendzior
Boomland is a popular stop for anyone driving between St. Louis and New Orleans with an excess of cash and a deficit of discernment. Lately it has branched out beyond fireworks to challenge its Missouri road trip rivals, Ozarkland and the Uranus Fudge Factory, with acres of Americana.
There is nothing one cannot buy, or should buy, at Boomland. As a result, I own many items dedicated primarily to the greatness of Boomland.
I have a Boomland hat and a Boomland magnet and a Boomland keychain and a Boomland mug decorated with a firework-filled sky and an American flag bracketed by IN GOD WE TRUST and UNITED WE STAND. The bottom of the mug has another familiar phrase: MADE IN CHINA.
The Reagan Revolution and “greed is good” remain in full swing, ushering in a level of wealth inequality that surpasses the Gilded Age.
“Progressives, especially, must recognize that preserving constitutional freedoms depends on winning the fight for economic liberties. Treating them as separate goals will ultimately mean losing out on both,” writes Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, the Democrats’ answer to Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society and his $1.6 billion war chest. You’ve probably never heard of the American Constitution Society, because they haven’t been as effective.
In September, Fredrickson wrote a damning piece for The Atlantic explaining why, taking herself and other Democrats to task for packing our courts with corporate-friendly judges under recent Democratic administrations, including the current one. It seemed enough for Democrats that a judge was a woman, nonwhite, and cared about protecting reproductive healthcare. As a result, for decades, our courts have become a rubber stamp for rolling back regulations and defying antitrust laws. Even the Biden-appointed antitrust Elizabeth Warren protégé Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has been powerless against the corporate defenders packed on our courts.
prioritize appointing judges who will uphold antitrust laws and protect unions. To be true allies to women and nonwhite people, who are harder hit by economic downturns, fight for economic justice as the foundation for social justice. The Democrats need to get clear on that and respond with a robust judicial appointment strategy immediately, while there’s still time.
This week’s bonus show, available for our listeners at the Truth-tell level and higher, will feature questions and comments from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. Exclusively for our Patroen community at the Truth-teller level and higher, mark your calendars for the January 18th 8pm ET social media workshop to be held over Zoom–on how to kick our Twitter habit and use our social media voices for good in the world in 2024 and beyond–with organizer Rachel Brody of the movement to Replace Jay Jacobs, the disastrous chair of the New York state Democrats who cost us the House. We look forward to seeing you there! Thank you to everyone who supports the show — we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
To join the conversation and get your questions answered, as well as receive all episodes, including bonus shows, ad-free, sign up at the Democracy Defender level or higher on Patreon.com/Gaslit!
I do not want to talk about Merrick Garland again. It feels like doing homework for a class my country already failed.
But it is necessary to do so. There is a shroud over the USA. It is woven of decades of deceit and impunity, but it is not interminable. There are threads that, when pulled, cause the shroud to unravel and Americans to see the light.
One of those threads is Merrick Garland’s rise to power, and the role of his mentor and lifelong best friend, Jamie Gorelick, in that rise.
I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.
It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.
The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.
Which he is, in the word COMPLICIT.
Sarah Kendzior
Merrick Garland is a cog in the Biden Placeholder Presidency. He serves to streamline an aspiring autocracy into an entrenched one. You can read about that process here.
The Biden Placeholder Presidency was designed to exist between two terms of Trump, Mafia Grover Cleveland style. The threat of Trump returning to office to complete his autocratic agenda is severe. But that he is able to do it – that the US is the only country in history to allow a coup to go unpunished and a seditionist to run for president again – is due to Garland, the DOJ, and their accomplices in Congress.
Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.
Theirs is a time-tested strategy. It is a necessary strategy, since members of the DOJ have worked, or continue to work, for the very transnational criminal networks they claim to fight. Among them are William Sessions and Louis Freeh, FBI heads who went on to serve Semyon Mogilevich and his transnational mafia operation. I explain this complex network in my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.
The FBI and DOJ need to protect Trump, because in doing so, they protect themselves.
Trump knows what crimes the US government carried out because he and officials in his orbit abetted them or witnessed them. These servants of the mafia state would not intervene even when public safety was at grave risk. The longer they waited, the more power Trump accumulated.
As a career criminal with deep ties in business, media, and organized crime as well as access to classified information, Trump now has more leverage over the American government than they do over him.
There are a lot of ways to blackmail a government. Not all of it has to do with individuals and their personal secrets. You could expose horrific prior actions a government did against its own people, for example.
Unspeakable things.
* * *
Trump is a career mafioso trained in the arts of blackmail and bribery by his mentor, Roy Cohn. He and his backers continually threaten physical violence against anyone in their way. But it is not necessary to deploy threats when the ostensible target – the DOJ — is their willing accomplice.
Many fail to understand Garland’s role due to an elaborate propaganda network (the mechanics of which I will break down) and a reluctance to recognize complicity among officials who are often portrayed as feuding. It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.
Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.
As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family, to the point that Benjamin Netanyahu slept in Jared’s bed when visiting the United States.
Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.
It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.
Crises of institutional integrity are beyond partisanship. They cannot be fixed by elections. They can only begin to be remedied when the rot is revealed. The road to accountability begins with evidence, context, and history.
Reckoning with this horror is difficult, but an informed public is a powerful public. Never forget that state officials are paid to serve you. You deserve more than a plate of platitudes meant to weaken your capacity for critical thought.
You deserve the truth, as unpleasant as it may be.
Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation, photographed March 2023
Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.
The HOBBLEDEHOY 