A Rightist Revolution: Allan Nairn on Trump Admin's Radical Agenda to Roll Back Social Progress

Such an important interview. - Molly

From Democracy Now! transcript interview with longtime investigative journalist Allan Nairn...

From Attorney General Jeff Sessions to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, many of Trump’s key administration members are far-right-wing figures who are seeking to dismantle the very agencies that they have been picked to head. For more on this right-wing revolution, we speak with longtime activist and journalist Allan Nairn.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest for the hour is investigative journalist Allan Nairn. I wanted to play for you, Allan, just a few clips, excerpts of not Fox, but of MSNBC and CNN introducing their guests.

JOY-ANN REID: Joining me now, MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance and former CIAanalyst Fred Fleitz.

ERIN BURNETT: The former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Mudd.

ANA CABRERA: I’m joined by former CIA undercover operative Lindsay Moran.

HALLIE JACKSON: Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the CIA and Department of Defense and an MSNBC national security analyst.

AMY GOODMAN: So there you have just a couple people, some of the hosts, introducing their commentators on not Fox, but CNN and MSNBC—FBI, CIA, military, increasingly populating the pundit classes on the airwaves.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, many liberals are relying on authoritarian institutions to save them from the authoritarian, authoritarian institutions like the CIA, FBI, Pentagon. If you come from one of those places, you have a better chance of getting on, say, MSNBC than you do if you’re an activist.

AMY GOODMAN: So what about what’s happening today in the media? What about the coverage that we’re seeing and what’s happening? You talk about a rightist revolution taking place. The main thrust of CNN and MSNBC, a number of liberals—this is not Fox, which was talking a lot about how much President Trump has accomplished—in the six-month mark that we just passed, they were saying something like that he’s tweeted 900-something times, passed no laws and only got one Supreme Court justice, that basically no laws—nothing has happened. He’s a do-nothing, speak-everything president. You feel very differently about this.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. First, they have a radical agenda to roll back, essentially, all social progress.

AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the Trump administration and also the very radical Republican Party, which now controls both houses of Congress and 34 governorships and state legislatures. And they’ve already done a lot. I mean, Trump has an executive order demanding that two regulations, on things like health, safety, labor rights, air pollution, water pollution—everything you can imagine—get revoked for every new one that’s put in. They’re allowing institutions like Sinclair Broadcasting, which had an actual financial deal, exchange, with the Trump campaign, a radical right-wing outfit, to expand their TV station holdings nationwide to twice the level that would usually be allowed under the regulatory regime.

There’s many steps that are being taken that are not going to be rolled back, even if there is a change in administration. Even if you got, you know, a left-wing president, once Sinclair takes over ownership of those stations, they’re not going to—there’s no piece of paper they can sign to roll that back. Many of these actions they’re taking have—are either very difficult to reverse or they are irreversible, like death. You know, the various estimates about the repeal of Obamacare perhaps causing 28,000 deaths, 43,000 deaths, that’s not even to mention the amount of deaths that are occurring, the tens of thousands that are occurring, because of our failure, day by day, to implement a full coverage, as under single payer. You know, these consequences are irreversible. And they’re not—they haven’t achieved nearly as much as they could, because of Trump’s craziness. But they are moving.

And they are seeking to take advantage of the fact that the U.S. system is much less democratic than many people realize. There are a series of levers that can be used to overcome democracy, ranging from the Electoral College to a Senate system where a minority of voters have a vast—a large majority of senators, to congressional and state legislative-level gerrymandering, to the possibility of voter suppression, to the House and Senate rules which allow you to block a bill even if it has big support from a majority of the senators or House members. The only way to overcome these structural obstacles is through a mass wave of democratic participation, a grassroots surge. And that’s why they’re so interested in voter suppression, because they want to block that. They want to shrink the pool of voters to be dominated by their supporters.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if the media were covering these issues—let’s talk about what the media is covering. If you turn on MSNBC or you turn on CNN and you go away for an hour or two and you come back, you might think that you had put it on hold and that you just—they were just completing a sentence. And it’s invariably about Russia. Talk about the coverage.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, for many months, you’ve seen like an 80/20 ratio of coverage, Russia/other matters. And I think the fact that the press has done that and that many liberals have let these two commercial outfits, CNN and MSNBC, largely dominate, set their political agenda, that’s one reason why Trump’s approval rating is as high as it is, you know, in the mid to high thirties.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re saying it’s high because of their Russia coverage, their contention that—

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I think if the ratio were reversed and you were giving 20 percent coverage to Russia, 80 percent to the actual substantive acts of Trump and the Republican Congress and the Republican governors, I think Trump’s rating would be down in the twenties, because the fact—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, now it’s only at 33 percent.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, because the facts are so outrageous. But because of the structural levers that the right has—now has control over on every front, because of the structural advantages, I—my own personal guess is if the Trump-Clinton election were rerun today, if the congressional elections were held today, I think Trump would squeak out another win. I think the Republicans would lose seats but narrowly retain control of Congress.

Please continue this transcript, or to watch the full interview, please go here: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/9/a_rightist_revolution_allan_nairn_on?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=db5c641381-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-db5c641381-191574905