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Attack! Attack! Attack! Deny! Deny! Deny! Before Russia and Roger Ailes, Trump rose to power with the help of mega-lawyer and mega-villain Roy Cohn. That playbook is on full display in Trump’s cabinet picks—a confederacy of lawless kleptocrats. Roy Cohn would be beaming with pride.
Gabriel Sherman, the investigative journalist and screenwriter, joins Gaslit Nation. Sherman is the writer and executive producer of the new true-crime American horror story, The Apprentice, starring Jeremy Strong as Cohn, Sebastian Stan as Trump, and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, directed by Ali Abbasi. When the film was released just before the election, Trump attacked Sherman, inciting a wave of anti-Semitic harassment. Trump’s goon squad of lawyers failed to stop the film’s release, despite their best efforts. They did manage to scare away all but the most morally courageous film distributors. The Apprentice chillingly brings to life Cohn’s twisted mentorship of Trump. Our conversation with Sherman took place shortly before the 2024 election and remains an urgent reminder of what we’re up against. The good news is that we can apply the same defiant strategy against Cohn’s devil apprentice.
We here at Gaslit Nation wish you and yours a restful and peaceful holiday for those who celebrate American Thanksgiving. For our Patreon subscribers at the Democracy Defender ($10/month) level and higher, be sure to get your questions in for our listener Q&A, produced thanks to your questions and comments. To our Patreon community, see you at our Monday 4pm ET political salon over Zoom. Joining us this coming Monday is Susan Greenhalgh, the Senior Advisor on Election Security to Free Speech For People, on their efforts to protect the 2024, including through recounts. If you haven’t joined a committee yet, check out more info on those projects here. Thank you to everyone who supports Gaslit Nation—we could not make this show without you!
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Show Notes:
The featured song for November 2024 is “2 Red Cups” by Evrette Allen. Check out her work here! Submit your own music to be featured on Gaslit Nation! We’d love to hear from you!: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-d_DWNnDQFYUMXueYcX5ZVsA5t2RN09N8PYUQQ8koq0/edit?ts=5fee07f6&gxids=7628
The Apprentice (Trailer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvPRxy9kmSg
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–And Divided a Country https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-loudest-voice-in-the-room-how-the-brilliant-bombastic-roger-ailes-built-fox-news-and-divided-a-country-gabriel-sherman/11736897?ean=9780812982732
Computer Scientists: Breaches of Voting System Software Warrant Recounts to Ensure Election Verification https://freespeechforpeople.org/computer-scientists-breaches-of-voting-system-software-warrant-recounts-to-ensure-election-verification/
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Twenty-four civil society organizations working in seven Latin American countries, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, released a November 2024 report titled “Impact of state censorship measures on the right to freedom of expression in the Americas,” which included information provided during the 190th regular session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in July 2024.
The press freedom groups work in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Nicaragua.
The report named three types of indirect censorship that are evident in the region and are being used to stifle freedom of expression: stigmatization; forms of social control facilitated by new technologies with surveillance capacity; and the judicialization of freedom of expression on matters of public interest.
The report made several recommendations, including developing a model protocol that addresses the standards established by the Inter-American system regarding the freedom of expression ofpublic officials, the rights and obligations involved, and their impact on state communications and the digital world.
Read the full report here.
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A video has been shared in Chinese-language social media posts that claim it shows the body of a U.S. soldier, who was killed while fighting in Ukraine, spotted at an American airport.
But the claim is false. The video shows a ceremony dedicated to a U.S. Air Corps private killed in World War II. The U.S. has said it would assist Ukraine by offering supplies and training but not by sending American troops to fight there.
The video was shared on X Nov. 9, 2024.
The one-minute and 38-second video shows six people in what appears to be military uniform removing a casket covered by a U.S. flag from a plane and placing it in a white hearse.
“This is what happens when U.S.soldiers die in Ukraine and are shipped back to the states,” the post reads.
Similar claims were shared on X and Weibo, with some users questioning if the U.S. had entered the war fighting for Ukraine.
But the claim is false.
Non-profit honoring forgotten soldiers
A combined reverse image search and key word searches found a video that shows similar scenes as those in the social media clip.
The video was posted by Honoring Our Fallen, a non-governmental organization that provides support for the U.S. fallen and their family members.
Laura Herzog, founder and CEO of the Honoring Our Fallen, told AFCL that the soldiers shown in the footage were actually her organization’s staff members.
Herzog noted that the ceremony captured in the video was dedicated to a U.S. Air Corps private killed in World War II named Harry M. Seiff, not a soldier involved in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
The Department of Defense, or DOD, notes in a press release that Seiff died in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines on Nov. 14, 1942, following his capture by Japanese forces that year.
Seiff’s remains had lain buried in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial for over 70 years as an unknown soldier before being disinterred in 2018.
Scientists running DNA tests then confirmed the identity of the deceased and the body was finally interred at the Los Angeles National Cemetery on November 14, 2024.
No U.S. troops in Ukraine
According to a White House statement released following the signing of a bilateral security agreement with Kyiv during the 2024 G7 summit, the U.S. would assist Ukraine by offering supplies and training, “not by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine.”
Additional military assistance announced by the DOD to Ukraine on Oct. 16 did not include U.S. troops.
The defense department said in September that the U.S. had committed approximately US$56.3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the war began in February 2022.
But a list of the various forms of U.S. assistance does not include troops from any branch of the U.S. military among its items.
Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.
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It now appears to be a question of “when, not if” Chinese security personnel will arrive in Myanmar, with Beijing looking to secure its strategic interests in the war-torn country and those of its ally, the military junta that has lost large chunks of the country since the 2021 coup.
The Irrawaddy online news outlet reported that the junta formed a 13-member working committee on October 22 to prepare the groundwork to establish a “joint security company” with China.
According to the report, the committee, chaired by Major-General Toe Yi, the junta’s deputy home affairs minister, is currently tasked with “scrutinizing the importing and regulating of weapons and special equipment” until Beijing signs a drafted MOU on forming a “security company.”
After that, according to the narrative from Beijing and Naypyidaw, Chinese personnel would join a “company” — more like a militia — alongside junta troops, which would be tasked with defending Chinese strategic and economic interests in the country.
I’m told that China will send troops from the military and police in a “private” capacity, giving the fiction of detachment.
Yet this would not be a joint venture in anything but name.
Does one seriously think that Chinese troops or police are going to listen to the Myanmar generals who have lost battle after battle to ethnic armies and ill-trained civilian militias over the past four years?
Moreover, there is no reason to think that the China-junta “militia” will stick to merely protecting Chinese nationals and Chinese-owned businesses in Myanmar.
Chinese projects delayed
It is true that Chinese assets have come under increased levels of attack from anti-junta forces in recent months.
There is some logic, if you’re sitting in Beijing and Naypyidaw, in wanting to allow Chinese forces to help command most of northern Myanmar, giving junta forces a better chance of mopping up rebel forces elsewhere.
The civil war has delayed key Chinese projects in the country, such as the long-planned China-Myanmar Economic Corridor between China’s Yunnan province and Myanmar’s Indian Ocean coast.
Strategically key for Beijing is a port it wants to build in Rakhine state, allowing China to import oil and gas from the Middle East without ships needing to pass through the Malacca Strait, a potential chokepoint.
This would be essential in the event of a conflict in the South China Sea, during which the Philippines or Taiwan could try to blockade Chinese trade, including oil and gas imports on which China’s economy depends.
My sources say that the majority of the PLA contingent will be deployed to Rakhine state.
According to statements released by Beijing, almost certainly intended to construct a peace narrative ahead of the deployment, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told junta leader Min Aung Hlaing in August that he hoped “Myanmar will earnestly safeguard the safety of Chinese personnel and projects.”
When Min Aung Hlaing visited China earlier this month, his first visit since the coup, Chinese Premier Li Qiang instructed him to “take effective measures to ensure the safety of Chinese nationals, institutions, and projects in the country.”
The reality, as Beijing knows well, is that the junta cannot ensure these things.
That’s the entire reason why the “security companies” are deemed necessary by the Chinese government.
Offensive operations
Once Chinese security personnel are on the ground in Myanmar, the fiction that they’re just standing guard outside a few industrial compounds or pipelines will become difficult to maintain.
Indeed, they’re likely to have no choice but to mount offensive operations.
The most obvious reason to expect this is that many Chinese-run enterprises are in territory currently controlled by resistance groups that will presumably need to be taken by Chinese forces.
If not, why would Beijing make a u-turn on its existing policy, which had been to cajole and pay the ethnic militias to leave Chinese entities out of their fight with the junta?
Secondly, after years of dallying, Beijing now clearly thinks that it cannot trust the anti-junta National Unity Government (NUG), presumably because it’s too pro-Western, nor most of the anti-junta ethnic militias – even those who have taken money from Beijing.
Chinese authorities reportedly detained Peng Daxun, the leader of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), a militia that has inflicted heavy casualties on the junta, after he was summoned to Yunnan for a parlay last month.
This may be a temporary detention pour encourager les autres, or it may be Beijing trying to dismantle disloyal militias more permanently.
Yet, in essence, Beijing has now thrown its weight behind the junta because it presumably believes China’s interests would be best served by an outright junta victory.
So if Beijing thinks the ultimate way of protecting Chinese business interests in Myanmar, for now and in the long term, is for the civil war to be ended and for junta forces to win the conflict decisively, the difference between Chinese security personnel conducting defensive and offensive operations is paper thin.
Why wouldn’t Beijing use its troops to bring about its overarching goal? Why would Beijing overlook the opportunity to end a civil war that it wants over?
Anti-China sentiment
Why would Beijing merely send personnel to defend Chinese factories and pipelines for a few months or years if it thinks there is the possibility that forces hostile to Chinese interests could eventually take power nationally?
Under these circumstances, Chinese personnel would think it justified, under the narrative of “safeguarding the safety of Chinese nationals, institutions and projects in the country,” to wage offensive assaults against anti-junta forces across Myanmar.
Granted, the junta is touchy about being seen as a lackey of Beijing — or about Myanmar becoming a protectorate of China.
That is why Beijing has offered platitudes of a joint “security company,” a fiction to get around Myanmar’s constitution that forbids the deployment of foreign troops.
But what position will the junta be in to dictate what Chinese personnel can do or where they can go once they are in Myanmar?
Lastly, does one imagine that anti-junta forces won’t retaliate against Chinese intervention, especially when that intervention is so clearly on behalf of the regime?
Anti-China sentiment is running high in Myanmar and will boil over once Chinese troops and police step foot in the country.
One can very easily imagine an escalating campaign of attacks by anti-junta forces on Chinese interests – increasing the incentives for Chinese security personnel to launch offensive operations.
Once Chinese boots are on the ground in Myanmar, this means direct intervention by China – not merely an economic peacekeeping effort by joint “security companies.”
And Chinese personnel will have to conduct offensive operations – not just stand guard at Chinese-run factories and pipelines.
David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. He writes the Watching Europe In Southeast Asia newsletter. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.
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“On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.
Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.
Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed by the US. Her platform of extreme neoliberal shock therapy was rejected by the electorate. Most Venezuelans oppose her call to privatize nearly all state institutions serving the people – schools, hospitals, public housing, food assistance, and the state oil company, which funds social programs. Nor is there any popular appetite for Machado’s plan to radically reorient foreign policy to subordination to Washington and support of US imperial wars in Ukraine and Palestine.
A hagiography, such as this one by the Times, includes an investigation into the life and miracles attributed to the would-be saint. The article on Machado, penned by one Julie Turkewitz, does just that and more. The article also unintentionally reveals that the far-right opposition advocates foreign intervention to overthrow the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. Its title clearly states: “Trump to Save Her Country.”
It took the US until November 19, nearly four months, to declare González as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela. The recognition likely signals a shift in the lame-duck Biden administration’s policy from negotiation to all-out hostility towards Venezuela, paving the way for a smooth handover to the new Trump team. Previously, Washington simply called for a “peaceful transition.”
The miraculous opposition primary
Turkewitz reported that Machado won “an overwhelming victory in a primary race.” She uses the weasel-construction “a primary” rather than “the primary,” because Machado’s “primary” was not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate. That NGO, as the article admits, is funded by the US.
Machado prevailed in a crowded field of 13 candidates with a miraculous 92% of the vote. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.
The Times intimates that Machado “galvanized a nation” around an opposition agenda. That is something Uncle Sam has so far failed to achieve despite a quarter of a century of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
The empire’s newspaper of record reports that Machado is “wildly popular.” But that’s in the halls of the US Congress, where she was vetted and then anointed “leader of the opposition” even before the so-called primary in Venezuela. Unfortunately for Machado that popularity with the Yankee politicos did not travel as well back home. In Venezuela, even within her corner of the far-right, Machado is resented. Far from unified, the opposition in Venezuela is today ever more divided.
Contested election results
The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ).
González, the person whom the Times declared the winner, came in second with 43% of the vote, according to the official count. González claimed that he had evidence that proved he won the presidency, but he refused to show it to the TSJ, even when he was summoned to do so.
Moreover, the Times reports that the US-backed opposition has tallies from some 80% of the precincts, which were published on a private blog site. Sources supporting the Venezuelan government then published analyses showing that evidence to be bogus, while counter claims from those favoring regime change purport to confirm their validity.
The problem of privately posting evidence, while refusing to submit it to official channels, is that it leaves the Venezuelan authorities no constitutional path for accepting it even if it were valid. The question ignored by the article is: If “their team collected and published vote-tally receipts” proving its victory, why did they not settle the matter by submitting them?
The answer, not one that the Times would admit to, is that the far-right opposition and its US handlers never made a good faith attempt to win the election.
Washington’s strategy was to delegitimize the election, not to win it
The opposition’s platform could never be a winning ticket, which they knew. The only way to achieve it would be an extra-legal regime-change operation predicated on delegitimizing the democratically-elected government. And that is precisely what is being played out today in Venezuela.
There were a number of more moderate opposition figures with experience and popular followings. Had the US been interested in simply an electoral defeat of the ruling Socialist Party, they could have backed a less extreme candidate and offered to ease their punishing “sanctions” on Venezuela. Instead, Washington backed the far right, which took the supremely unpopular position of advocating for yet more sanctions on their own country to precipitate regime-change.
With nine other contenders on the presidential ballot, name recognition was important. Literally nobody had heard of González until Machado personally chose him as her surrogate. She had been disqualified from running back in 2015 for constitutionally mandates offenses.
Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, lacked ballot status because her party had boycotted recent Venezuelan elections in keeping with the far-right’s stance that the Venezuelan state is not legitimate. Once the party decided to again participate in the electoral arena in 2024, she could have petitioned for recognition of her party. But she didn’t bother.
González, who had been in retirement, had no political following or experience. He had been a Venezuelan diplomat to El Salvador back in the 1980s, where he had been implicated in supporting US-backed death squads.
Maduro crisscrossed the country in an all-out campaign effort, exhaustingly visiting over 300 municipalities. His ruling Socialist Party, in power since 1999, had cadre in every corner of the country who were mobilized. They didn’t need to be told that an opposition victory could mean not only loss of a job, but they might face retribution from the far right.
In contrast to Maduro’s strong ground game, the US-backed opposition was weak in the streets. González himself sat out the campaign in Caracas, while Machado barnstormed the hinterlands with a paper poster bearing his visage. Indicative of popular following were the turnouts at political rallies, both during the campaign and after, where Maduro attracted many times more supporters than González.
Forecast
The Times not only maintains that González “won the July vote by a wide margin” but he “should be taking office in January.” González, too, claims he’ll be back in Caracas for the inauguration. After the election, he voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain in a transfer negotiated with Caracas and Madrid governments.
The Times further reports that Machado predicts Maduro will voluntarily “negotiate his own exit.” Even more fantastic, the Times asserts González “garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.”
In a revealing lapse from her otherwise editorializing, Turkewitz correctly reported that Machado “has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.” Conveniently omitted is that effort included a number of coup attempts, including the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed then President Chávez. Machado signed the infamous Carmona Decree then, which voided the constitution and disbanded the courts, the legislature, and executive.
That 2002 coup lasted less than 48 hours because the people of Venezuela spontaneously rose up and confronted the traitorous military. If Machado indeed had the backing of 7 in 10 Venezuelans, she too could have taken the presidential palace regardless of the official election report.
The Times calls her Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” for her “steely resolve.” Meanwhile Hinterlaces, reporting from Venezuela, speculates Machado has fled the country:
The failure of the insurrectionary strategy in the absence of a social explosion or a rupture in the Bolivarian civic-military alliance, the lack of convincing evidence on Edmundo González’s alleged electoral victory, since they do not really have the minutes to demonstrate it, convinced Machado to leave the country.
Nicolás Maduro will be inaugurated on January 10. As confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court, the majority voted for him to continue Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.
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