Defiance
Gaslit Nation
Gaslit Nation
4.7 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2022
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we kick off by examining a country that is technically a democracy on paper but is actually ruled by an unelected supreme court of theocrats who strip women of their basic rights! Is it the United States? Iran? Does the fact that we have to ask not speak to a broader global attack on women's bodily autonomy?! We look at the brave protests of Iranian women and prepare for a horrific month of rulings on the Supreme Court here in the US. We also note that a woman will become prime minister of Italy for the first time, but of course she is a fascist groomed by Steve Bannon, because it is 2022 and we are in hell.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When the pandemic began, my husband and children and I began gathering together each night to watch old sci-fi shows. |
| 0:08.8 | We did this to establish a family routine because time had lost all meaning, but also because we found comfort and fictional dystopias. |
| 0:19.6 | Outrageous plots had become relatable. We started with Lost, |
| 0:25.3 | the story of confused people trapped in a place they cannot leave, while being bombarded with |
| 0:31.0 | surreal crises fomented by a variety of conspiratorial madmen. We continued with Fringe, the Twilight Zone, and the short-lived 1991 children's series, Erie Indiana. One night we watched an Erie Indiana episode about a man called The Donald, who comes to town posing as a successful businessman, |
| 0:56.6 | turns people into zombies through subliminal advertising, |
| 1:00.4 | and tries to steal their souls because he doesn't have one of his own. |
| 1:05.1 | The Donald, revealed to be the devil in disguise, |
| 1:09.5 | is defeated by his most feared nemesis, the IRS. |
| 1:14.8 | In the early 1990s, Donald Trump, being a consummate tax cheat, was so well known that |
| 1:22.0 | children were expected to understand it as an in-joke. My own children got the reference instantly in 2021, |
| 1:31.0 | just as I had as a child when it originally aired. Meanwhile, on cable, reality took a holiday, |
| 1:39.4 | with Deja News continuing unabated even as administrations changed. Trump's tax dodging was reported |
| 1:47.3 | as a shocking, breaking story, while his actual tax returns remained hidden. First by Trump's |
| 1:54.9 | Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, and then by Biden's secretary of the treasury, Janet Yellen. We were watching |
| 2:04.6 | old fiction while living real-life reruns. While Lost proved relatable, an Erie, Indiana educational, |
| 2:14.5 | my ultimate plague comfort TV show was the X-Files because of its wild conceit that competent people work at the FBI. |
| 2:24.0 | Time for civics class, I would yell to the kids, and we would gather together to watch the opening credits mantras. |
| 2:32.0 | The truth is out there. Trust no one. Deny everything. Fight the future. |
| 2:38.3 | These were the baseline beliefs of the 1990s when distrusting authority was common and then commodified. |
| 2:47.4 | I had just turned 15 when the X-Files debuted, putting me at the tail end of its Gen X target audience. |
| 2:56.1 | I have wondered if Gen Xers are more attracted to conspiracy theories and possibly more adept at deciphering them, |
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