Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior

Gaslit Nation is back and we are disregarding your fatuous calls for civility! This week we discuss Trump getting booed at the World Series in an inverted Trump rally of sorts, and what it means for the reality TV president to finally confront a crowd he can’t control. Dictatorship is a brand and Trump’s was tarnished thanks to Americans engaging in a great American pastime – protest!

Tulsi Gabbard is a long-time supporter of dictators--including Assad, Sisi, and Modi--and has backed a number of horrible policies, like making it harder for Muslim refugees to enter the U.S., tolerating Russian war crimes in Syria, voting against the Magnitsky Act, and vouching for the Bill Barr fake version of the Mueller report. We did not think this fringe candidate deserved any oxygen, especially when famous Tulsi Gabbard fans like white supremacists Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson had that covered. 

This week we discuss Rudy Giuliani, his goons Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, their mafia master Dmytro Firtash, and their connections to the Trump/Kremlin mafia states. We discuss the welcome testimony of former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and the latest news on the whistleblower. Then we turn our attention to the horrors taking place in northern Syria, where our Kurdish allies face genocide and the balance of world powers shifts further toward an axis of autocrats.

This was our first new episode since June and we had so much to discuss that it ended up being a two-parter. This week our conversation continues on impeachment, the attacks on “the Squad,” the strategy of Bill Barr, the downfall of the New York Times, Brexit, and much more!

Gaslit Nation is back with an exciting new addition! We are thrilled to announce that Andrea had a baby girl while you were all listening to our prerecorded Get Un-Gaslit Reading Series over the summer. We celebrate the new arrival in our podcast family the way only Gaslit Nation can, by noting that Andrea’s baby shares a birthday with Ukrainian dissident filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and discussing the power of resilience in the face of autocracy. Here’s to the future!

We interview Nicole Hobbs of Every District, a grassroots organization working to flip states blue. Hobbs shares their report called Blue States: A Voting Rights Action Plan that provides a scorecard of states where there’s already political will to expand voting rights. So if you live in a progressive state, do not take that for granted: get to work ensuring that your state checks all the boxes of the gold standard. She explains what citizens in every state can do to fight for voting rights.

This week on Gaslit Nation we devote a whole episode to the climate crisis, featuring an interview with climate change expert Daniel Zarrilli. No major issue is unconnected to the climate crisis. Climate change impacts the economy, immigration, infrastructure, health care, and needs to be factored into every policy debate. One also cannot separate the climate crisis from the rise of autocracy.

If you are on Twitter, you know that there is no one more deeply versed on the Russian mafia’s incursion into American business and politics than New York’s Olga Lautman, a freelance researcher and analyst who worked on Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin and on Malcolm Nance’s The Plot to Betray America, among other projects. Raised on Brighton Beach and fluent in Russian, Lautman was wise to the danger of Donald Trump from the start.

We interview Vanity Fair contributor Craig Unger, the author of the New York Times-bestselling book House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, a must-read and deeply researched book that reminds us yet again that Trump properties are a laundromat for Russian mafia money, and what this means for our democracy.

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where anti-racist activist Heather Heyer was murdered. In this episode of Gaslit Nation, Sarah speaks briefly about the legacy of Charlottesville before Andrea continues our Get Un-Gaslit Summer Reading Series with an interview with sociologist Dr. Crystal Fleming, the author of How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide.

Our little podcast is 1-year-old. We cannot express our gratitude enough to our Patreon donors and all our listeners who helped turn a fledgling biweekly show that we thought only our moms and our far-right stalkers would listen to into a community, giving us the independence we need to speak out on the issues of the day. We end the show by giving advice on how to survive encroaching authoritarianism.

Here is Part II of our interview with the counter-terrorism and intelligence expert Malcolm Nance. Nance is an MSNBC commentator and author who is today best known for being the first person to write THE book about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election as it was happening. (That book – The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election – was published in October 2016). 

Our Get Un-Gaslit Summer Reading Series continues with this two-part interview with the counter-terrorism and intelligence expert Malcolm Nance. Nance is an MSNBC commentator and author who is today best known for being the first person to write THE book about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election as it was happening. (That book – The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election – was published in October 2016).

This week we kick off our Get Un-Gaslit Summer Reading Series with Greg Sargent, the author of the 2018 book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics. Sargent is also known for writing The Plum Line blog for The Washington Post.

Happy Fourth of July! In 1787, Benjamin Franklin famously declared “A republic – if you can keep it.” In these compiled interviews, experienced grassroots leaders tell us how we can keep our republic.