A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Hey you guys, did you hear – we’re living in a burgeoning authoritarian state! Much like we have been for the last four years! This week we discuss the delayed revelations of the punditry, what’s behind their unwillingness to state the obvious for so long, and ponder how long their clarity will last until collective amnesia kicks in again. More ominously, we examine the continued annihilation of the court system under Trump’s Roy Cohn reincarnation, Bill Barr. – GASLIT NATION
In a week when the GOP Senate will likely take their criminal president and crown him criminal king, we look at the big picture – treason, disinformation, and how to resist. Much like the Senate trial itself, our conversation centers on Ukraine. This week Andrea interviews Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk about how disinformation makes its way from the Kremlin into western media and even into western courts, as demonstrated by a recent court case in Italy in which online Kremlin propaganda formed much of the “evidence”. This situation can happen anywhere, including here in the United States. Andrea and Olga also discuss censorship, state violence, and the difficulties in being a journalist in an era where multiple regimes seek to annihilate the very concept of truth.
Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa are experts on authoritarian states who warned America about election hacking years before 2016. Here, they take a deep dive on the news, skipping outrage to deliver analysis, history, context, and sharp insight on global affairs.
Writer and scholar Sarah Kendzior argues freedom is about what it means to be human, so we must protect it at all costs.
One of the most common refrains when a democracy collapses into an autocracy is that no one could have seen it coming.
The motivation behind this myth is the absolution of the powerful. After all, what cannot be predicted cannot be prevented, and therefore the failure of officials to safeguard our freedoms should be forgiven. This is the story we hear as Donald Trump approaches a possible second term and the U.S. plunges into unprecedented turmoil.
The premise, of course, is a lie.
What “No one saw it coming” tells you is who the powerful consider to be “no one.” “No one” are the multitude of marginalized Americans who warned in 2016 that their rights had always been on the line and would be even more so now. “No one” are the people who knew that a future American autocracy was possible because their ancestors had been subject to past ones: slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, and other forms of legal subjugation that were destroyed only through decades of defiant demands for their eradication.
This week Gaslit Nation gives in-depth context to the ongoing shitshow of the Senate impeachment hearings. We discuss what’s behind the media blitz of Giuliani goon Lev Parnas and the incriminating texts indicating the Trump crew was planning an attack on former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. We then analyze the GOP for what it is – an appendage of a transnational crime syndicate – and detail the institutional failures that allowed it to get there.