BOB GARFIELD This is On the Media, I'm Bob Garfield.
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STERLING I'm going to do my best to keep it together because it's all. Gone. Too. Far. All of it.
BOB GARFIELD That was Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia elections manager, at a press conference Tuesday in what felt like the strongest public rebuke from a Republican official against his own party since Election Day.
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STERLING Death threats, physical threats, intimidation, it's too much. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Sterling went on to list a series of recent threats by conservatives, including ones targeted at two Republican election officials, for the sin of debunking Trump world conspiracy theories, namely that voting machines converted Trump votes into Biden votes. One of the targets, Christopher Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was fired by the president and harassed by Trump campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova.
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STERLING Joe DiGenova today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot, to be shot. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD One militia member filmed a MAGA mobile caravan swarming the roads surrounding the Georgia Secretary of State's house. Blasting their horns and demanding electoral justice.
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MILTIA MEMBER All right. We're rolling. Beep. Must be a 100 cars out here today [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD One young election worker in Georgia, an employee of the suddenly vilified Dominion Voting Systems, was doxed for performing a routine task.
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STERLING A 20-something tech at Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an EMS, to a county computer so he could read it. It has to stop. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Why would they stop? The whole point of a big lie is to mobilize the partisan gullible. Oh and to monetize them too. Trump has used the voter fraud grift to raise nearly 200 million dollars since Election Day. Thus, on Wednesday, he and his legal team updated their bizzaro conspiracy narrative, now focused on the aforementioned voting machine company.
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TRUMP Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip. You can press a button for Trump, and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this? [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Not only have his election fraud theory been repeatedly shot down by courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. The Washington Post review of vote tallies found that in 81 percent of swing state counties that used Dominion software, Trump won. Even Attorney General Bill Barr, hitherto reliable for using the weight of the Justice Department in Trump service, said no vote in any precinct was so far found to have been undone by fraud. That message was heard loud and clear by the president, who reportedly hinted Barr will be fired. Bloodied but unbowed, Trump's Four Seasons total lawyer Rudy Giuliani pressed for legislative relief. In a hearing staged by sympathetic Michigan legislators, Giuliani unveiled the campaign's new star witness, Mellissa Carone, a former Dominion contractor whose testimony a Michigan judge had found, quote, simply not credible. On Wednesday, she found herself further doubted by Republican Representative Steven Johnson, whom Carone promptly fingered as part of the conspiracy.
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JOHNSON We're not seeing the poll book off by 30,000 votes. That's not the case.
CARONE What did you guys do? Take it and do something crazy to it?
JOHNSON I'm just saying the numbers are not off by 30,000 votes. So.
CARONE I know what I saw.
JOHNSON Are you saying that they're filling in.
CARONE I know what I saw. And I signed something saying that if I'm wrong, I can go to prison. Did you? [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Shortly thereafter, it would seem, as you already know, if you have the Internet, Giuliani got at least some of the relief he sought.
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GIULIANI the answer that I gave you is they didn't bother to interview a single [AUDIBLY EXPELS GAS] witness just like you. They don't want to know the truth. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD But the real star of the Dominion Circus is Sidney Powell, the lawyer who was fired from the president's legal team last month on the grounds of being from outer space. A Trump campaign official told The Washington Post that Powell was, quote, too crazy even for the president. Not too crazy for Fox Business, however.
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SYDNEY POWELL Well, I can hardly wait to put forth all the evidence we have collected on Dominion. Starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez. It was funded by money from Venezuela and Cuba, and China has a role in it also. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD Powell did not mention Altair IV, the Forbidden Planet, which was perhaps an oversight. So naturally she made the rounds of Fox channels, including spots on Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, who was just dying to hear from the testimony of the random witnesses who 13 courts have dismissed as irrelevant.
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DOBBS Listen, if these people have something to say, we've got to be able to hear them. When these people can speak, I'd love to have the chance to interview them. Sydney, thank you. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD As for Dobbs, he gets credit for platforming the obscure lawyer in her journey from eccentricity to conspiracy addled cartoon character. It was on his show a few weeks ago that Powell first uttered her now famous catch phrase.
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POWELL I'm going to release the Kraken. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD The Kraken, the giant sea monster from Scandinavian folklore. Later, mishmashed with Greek mythology in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, remade in 2010. The catchphrase comes from a scene when Zeus sends the beast to wreak havoc on a human city.
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ZEUS Release the kraken. [END CLIP].
BOB GARFIELD In a matter of days, hashtag release the Kraken went viral as a rallying cry for the far-right groups, hoping the Trumps team's flimsy legal challenges would flip the election and own the Libs big time.
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LOYALIST OK, everybody set for a good weekend. I sure am, because Donald Trump administration has released the kraken. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD It was QAnon Joe McCarthy's list of 205 State Department communists and Charlie Brown's football all rolled into one. But wait, had Powell or her followers even seen The Clash of The Titans? At the film's climax, our protagonist Perseus vanquishes the kraken, turning the monster into a pile of stone rubble that comes crashing into the sea. Which brings to mind another misapplied movie reference by another disgraced former Trump employee. That time when Brad Parscale, former reelection campaign manager, likened to the 2020 campaign's grandeur to that of the Death Star from Star Wars. The Death Star. The mothership of the quasi fascist empire that was famously blown up by the good guys. Death Star, Kraken, the Republican health care plan, they all sound so cool and big and triumphant, kind of like the Great Awakening, or the storm. The vague prophecies that animate the members of the QAnon cult. Who, by the way, went all in on the Dominion conspiracy theory.
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WATKINS So you have the issue of the person who is inside the tabulation machine, which is just a normal Windows 10 computer. Are they manipulating the vote before it goes to the flash drive?
ANCHOR When American News spoke with Ron Watkins, a large systems technical analyst who has been poring over the Dominion Systems Manual. [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD A large systems technical what? In fact, Ron Watkins is the former site administrator for 8kun and 8chan, the far-right Internet forums that incubated the QAnon conspiracy theory. This is a man who literally had the authority to post as Q, the mysterious messiah for which the conspiracy theory is named. Many assume Watkins himself is Q. So why would OAN, on his first TV appearance obscure the simple facts about his past? The same reason why Dobbs and Hannity somehow omitted Sidney Powell's fall from grace. The same reason why the Trump legal team is relying on uncredible witnesses like Melissa Carone. In a reckless final effort to retain power, Trump World can locate no actual experts or persons of reputation to flog their delusion. So they make demi-celebrities of D-listers and the previously disgraced. Like birtherism, perfect phone call, and COVID hoax - stop the steal is built upon a flimsy tissue of lies. But yet, as they say, it persists. In our world, the real world. The Kraken has crumbled to the sea. The Death Star has been destroyed, but in the right-wing media, the parade of fictions goes marching on.
That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder, Jon Hanrahan and Eloise Blondiau with help from Ava Sasani. Xandra Ellin writes our newsletter. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineers this week were Adriene Lilly and Josh Hahn. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week, I'm Bob Garfield.
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