The Greatest Betrayal
Political Gabfest
Slate Podcasts
4.4 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2021
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily, David and John talk about impeachment, whether Americans can be deradicalized, and guest Juliette Kayyem joins in to discuss vaccine distribution.
Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
Emily Bazelon for the New York Times Magazine: “People Are Dying. Whom Do We Save First With the Vaccine?
Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America by John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavrek
Amarnath Amarasingam’s Twitter thread on de-platforming extremists.
Amarnath Amarasingam, Shiraz Maher, and Charlie Winter for the Centre for Research and
Evidence on Security Threats: “How Telegram Disruption Impacts Jihadist Platform Migration”
The music of Ludovico Einaudi
The music of Joan Armatrading
The music of John Prine
The music of M.I.A.
The music of Joan Jett
The music of Maren Morris
The music of Joni Mitchell
The music of Bob Mould and Husker Du
The music of Nick Thompson
Nicholas Thompson for Wired: “To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past”
“Iko Iko” performed by the Grateful Dead
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” performed by Gerry and the Pacemakers
Tusk by Fleetwood Mac
Desire by Bob Dylan
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Here are this week’s cocktail chatters:
John: Nathaniel Popper for The New York Times: “Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes”
Emily: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
David: The Dancing Bird of Paradise Scene from “Our Planet”
Listener chatter from Richard Medlicott: Steven Levy for Wired: “A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?”
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For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment David, Emily, and John talk about the music they turn to in order to clear their heads.
You can tweet suggestions, links, and questions to @SlateGabfest. Tweet us your cocktail chatter using #cocktailchatter. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
The email address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (Email may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank.
Research and show notes by Bridgette Dunlap.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest for January 14th, 2021, the Greatest Betrayal Edition. |
| 0:13.3 | I am David Plotz of CityCast in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm joined from New York by John Dickerson of CBS's 60 Minutes. Hello, John Dickerson. |
| 0:24.3 | Hello, David. And from some point south by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and UL University Law School. Hello, Emily. |
| 0:33.6 | Hey, David. Emily has sunshine. Sun is shining on Emily, unlike the rest of us. I don't speak metaphorically, although that's probably true. On today's Gab Fest, we will talk about the second impeachment of President Trump done in a single day. He's still president, though, and will remain so through the end of his term in six days. Then can the violent and delusional |
| 0:58.1 | and Trump idolizing movement that has captured 30, 40, 25 percent of America, can that be purged |
| 1:08.7 | from American politics? Or we stuck with it? If we are stuck with it, |
| 1:12.1 | how can America continue? And then we will talk about the vaccine crisis, will be joined by |
| 1:17.6 | Julieta Chiam of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to talk about what's going on, |
| 1:24.0 | whether the Biden administration is going to make the vaccine rollout better. |
| 1:28.6 | Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. |
| 1:30.5 | Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, said there has never been a greater betrayal |
| 1:35.0 | by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution than what |
| 1:40.4 | President Trump did to encourage the attack, the insurrection to stop the electoral |
| 1:49.7 | vote count at the Capitol the other day. He was impeached on Wednesday for a second time |
| 1:55.3 | with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats to call for his removal from office for inciting the attack, which left, I think, |
| 2:02.9 | five or is it six people dead? I haven't checked the latest number. So, John, I mean, this is just, |
| 2:10.7 | this has just like been a terrible, this is just like a terrible, sad, tragic week, but let's try to |
| 2:15.9 | make sense of it. He was impeached in a day. Why did that happen so |
| 2:20.5 | quickly? Does it matter that 10 Republicans joined him, even though 95% of House Republicans did not? |
| 2:28.0 | Right. It happened quickly because, you know, there's footage. And then just to help the case a little bit more, the president |
| 2:37.1 | said, you shouldn't impeach me because there might be violence, which was as if he was trying |
... |
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