The Project 2025 Bill
Gaslit Nation
Trump’s “Big Evil Bill” sped through Congress, to sell off public lands, gut healthcare, destroy rural hospitals, outlaw state AI regulation for a decade, make it harder to take out loans to go to college, and unleash an immigration enforcement regime bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. ICE will now have a budget bigger than the FBI, DEA, U.S. Bureau of Prisons combined. This is an oligarchy fever dream that will painfully backfire on everyone. Trump’s Big Evil Bill is the blueprint of Project 2025 in action: a theocratic, authoritarian takeover of our democracy. This bill will...
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Brett Kavanaugh is Ruining People’s Sex Lives
Gaslit Nation
This week on Gaslit Nation, we’re joined by the fearless, brilliant Carter Sherman, an award-winning journalist at The Guardian and one of the sharpest voices covering reproductive rights and sexual politics. Her new book, , is a battle cry for Gen Z, a generation navigating the fallout of a stolen Supreme Court, Me Too, incel culture, and a pornified internet. We dive into how young people are rewriting the rules of intimacy in the face of political oppression. Carter’s reporting brings us inside the bedrooms and minds of Gen Zers who are coming of age in a country where Roe v. Wade...
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Read and Resist: The Gaslit Nation Book Club
Gaslit Nation
After Trump’s return to power in January 2025, Gaslit Nation launched a book club not just to inform, but to fortify. Each selection is a lifeline offering strategy, moral clarity, and community in an age of disinformation and despair. This isn’t just a book club. It’s a survival toolkit for our time. Read with us. Build with us. Let’s overcome the chaos together. Join us on the last Monday of every month at 4 PM ET at the Gaslit Nation Salon for a live discussion of that month’s book or film. Recordings are available on Patreon, along with bonus shows, ad-free episodes,...
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How to Contain Russia (Listen to the full episode on Patreon!)
Gaslit Nation
At a time when democracy is under siege from Kremlin-backed strongmen to MAGA disinformation machines, this week’s Gaslit Nation bonus show offers much-needed hope. We unpack the NATO summit, celebrate a major grassroots victory in New York City, and also discuss how to contain Russia with security expert Candace Rondeaux, author of First up: NATO is finally stepping up. All member nations, except Spain, have committed 5% of their GDP to defense and security by 2035. Predictably, Trump is already trying to take credit, but this shift isn’t about him. It’s a direct response to...
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Anne Applebaum: How Democracies Fail
Gaslit Nation
With the world on the brink of another war, there’s no one more essential to hear from than Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Red Famine (which cites Andrea’s grandfather, a Holodomor survivor), Twilight of Democracy, and Autocracy Inc. In this urgent conversation, we go to the frontlines of authoritarianism, from MAGA’s playbook at home to Putin’s alliances abroad, from Orban’s Hungary to the rising threat of war with Iran. We begin in Poland. In 2023, a broad democratic coalition ousted the far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ Law and Justice...
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Impeach Trump Now
Gaslit Nation
Welcome to the skeptic’s guide to impeachment. Why is a third impeachment effort of Trump necessary? Because demanding impeachment puts every member of Congress on trial, revealing who we can trust and who is bought off. Meet unanimous consent: the Senate’s dirty little secret, and the power Democrats refuse to use. Imagine if all it took to stop the Senate in its tracks was one simple word: No. Unanimous consent is a very real procedural quirk that gives every single senator, regardless of party or seniority, enormous power. All they have to do is deny consent. Just say no, and...
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Putin’s Sledgehammer
Gaslit Nation
This week, Gaslit Nation welcomes a leading expert on the future of warfare and U.S. national security , author of the new book . Before there was Trump vs. Musk, there was Putin vs. Prigozhin. It turns out the oligarchs trying to kill us are just a couple of scorpions trapped in a jar. Two years ago this June 23rd, Yevgeny Prigozhin led an armed mutiny of his infamous Wagner group, getting within 125 miles (200 km) of Moscow. In her book and this gripping conversation, Rondeaux unpacks what Wagner really is—and what it isn’t—debunking the myths surrounding Russia’s...
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They Want You to Be Scared. Don’t Give It To Them.
Gaslit Nation
A message from Gaslit Nation to our listeners about the When something bad happens that's clearly meant to intimidate people into silence, the best course of action is to shock and demoralize the perpetrators by channeling your rage and grief into standing up and speaking out. Don’t back down. You're not alone in this. We have our community, and countless others refusing to be silenced. Join us at a protest today. And if you're in NYC, be sure to vote for Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani. Find your Early voting starts today! Show Notes: Minnesota Lawmaker Killed, Another Wounded By Suspect...
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We Are All Artists Now - TEASER
Gaslit Nation
Yes, things are dark. But if history has taught us anything, it’s this: regimes fall, because people rise. Some soldiers will follow orders. Others won’t. And that fault line? It’s where dictatorships begin to crack. Just ask Romania in 1989, as we discussed in our March episode, Meanwhile, Trump’s team can’t even staff the Pentagon, . No one who can put one foot in front of the other wants to work for “Whiskey Pete.” Five-year research grants canceled in year four. Science is being purged, not for savings, but for submission. Stalin would be proud. So what do we do? We...
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How a Christian School Kid in Indiana Saw the Fall of Democracies Coming
Gaslit Nation
This week, we’re joined by the brilliant , a scholar, writer, and all-around truth-teller. Chrissy is a leading voice in exposing the Christian nationalist movement, the exvangelical uprising, and the growing marriage between the American and Russian far-right. She also happens to be a trans woman with a PhD in Russian history and a wild journey that took her from a fundamentalist Christian school in Indiana to teaching in Moscow. Chrissy and Andrea go way back to the early days of calling out Trump’s ties to Russia when doing so earned us hit pieces, smears, and even being called CIA...
info_outlineIn 1816, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) birthed science fiction during a rainy vacation on Lake Geneva. Inspired by a vision of a man crouched beside the corpse he reanimated, Frankenstein warned of what happens when man tries to play God. Two centuries later, the monsters are real, and they’re called Musk, Altman, and Zuckerberg.
Today’s tech titans, like Frankenstein’s Victor, race to build superintelligent machines in their image: soulless wannabe-gods with devastating reach. Gil Duran, of the Nerd Reich newsletter, connects this to A.I. worship, quoting a billionaire obsessed with “creating God” through algorithms. M.I.T.’s annotated Frankenstein likens Victor’s horror to Oppenheimer’s nuclear regret. We’ve entered a new atomic age, but instead of bombs, it’s information weapons and hacked minds.
As Pulitzer-nominated journalist Carole Cadwalladr warns, this is what a digital coup looks like. A.I. is trained to replace journalists, strip away privacy, and deepen inequality, just as Gaslit Nation has warned since 2018.
What’s the answer? Community. Skill-sharing. Nature. The real world. Jack Welch, once worshipped like Musk is today, gutted G.E. with fear-based leadership. Now he’s a cautionary tale. So will today’s tech gods be.
Mary Shelley saw it coming. “Frightful must it be,” she wrote. We agree. But there’s power in human connection, in rejecting the machine's illusions. Frankenstein’s monster was abandoned. Let’s not abandon each other.
Join our resilience salons. Find your people. Build the future together.
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Show Notes
The song you heard in this week’s episode is “Unspoken Word” by Evrette Allen: https://soundcloud.com/user-726164627/unspoken-word-mix-13/s-GEvlnfQnmh4?si=954f31de09d644948d51a225224bd7ba&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Nerd Reich: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein
After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley’s novel? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein
Astronomers have determined the exact hour that Mary Shelley thought of Frankenstein. https://lithub.com/astronomers-have-determined-the-exact-hour-that-mary-shelley-thought-of-frankenstein/
AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era Generative artificial intelligence tools, now part of the everyday user experience online, are causing stress on local power grids and mass water evaporation. https://www.wired.com/story/ai-energy-demands-water-impact-internet-hyper-consumption-era/
Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism? https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism
Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE
Self-styled prophets are claiming they have "awakened" chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/