The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Republican Rift in Georgia, and the Protests Sweeping Nigeria

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

In the past month, a fracture has opened up in the G.O.P. between those who grudgingly accept Joe Biden’s win and those who falsely claim that the election was rigged. In Georgia, supporters of Donald Trump have turned on Republican election officials—in some cases, with threats of violence. The Atlanta-based staff writer Charles Bethea explains why this rift is dangerous for Republicans. Georgia’s two incumbent Senate seats are up for grabs in a runoff election in January; the G.O.P. needs to retain at least one to maintain its majority and to give Mitch McConnell near-veto power over the Biden agenda. But the more that the President and his followers attack the election, the less likely Republican voters are to turn out to vote—which would create an advantage for the Democratic Senate hopefuls. Bethea spoke with Gabe Sterling, an election official in Georgia; Lin Wood, an attorney who is fuelling conspiracy theories; and voters at a Trump rally in Valdosta. Plus, protests against police violence took place around the world this year; in Nigeria, they might lead to the undoing of a notoriously lawless and brutal police unit.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. First of all, I just wanted to ask how you're doing. I hope the threats are decreasing, though. I imagine, unfortunately, that might not be true. No, the opposite is true. I'm sorry to hear that. You still have to have security? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't want to get too deep into it, but essentially, we all do. The GOP seems to be at war with itself in the state of Georgia, and that may be more than a figure of speech.

There was another site that was taken down last night that basically had an enemy's list that had the governor of Michigan, me, Brian Kemp, and it had our pictures with a sniper kind of target on it with our home address with a picture of our houses. Jesus, that's unbelievably scary. You try not to think about it. You try to think, oh, these people are just venting, but that was, like, really wildly specific. The state Republican officials who certified Georgia's vote for Biden have been attacked by Donald Trump and his allies, and they view the reporting of clear fact as betrayal. That abuse has turned to threats of violence from Trump conspiracies on the ground.

And meanwhile, Georgia is in a unique political position. It holds the nation's balance of power in its hands. Both of Georgia's Senate seats are up for grabs in a runoff election. The GOP needs at least one of those seats in order to keep the Republicans and Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate, exercising tremendous leverage over the fate of the Biden administration. And yet, the constantly repeated lie that the election was rigged actually discourages Georgia Republicans from voting. One of the Republican candidates, David Perdue, was a no-show for a televised debate against Democrat John Ossoff, which you would think is not

exactly a good look. I've got to admit, I'm as puzzled about some of this as you are. So we're going to check in with our correspondent in Atlanta, Charles Bethay. Charles, welcome. Thanks, David. So over the past month, a lot of the president's supporters have turned, sometimes even violently, on the officials that they see as responsible for conducting the elections, even when those officials are Republicans. You talk to a man named Gabriel Sterling, who is the voting system implementation manager for Georgia. Tell me about Gabriel. So, so yeah, Gabe Sterling was an until recently fairly obscure elections official in Georgia with this sort of cumbersome title. He's also a Republican. He voted for Trump twice. But he's recently come under

fire alongside, as you said, Secretary of State Rathensberger and Governor Kemp, for not doing enough in the view of Trump and other Trump loyalists, including Senators Leffler and Purdue, to tip the election in Trump's favor, however possible. So beginning a month or so ago, Sterling started to hold these really powerful and increasingly emotional press conferences pushing back, often in a lot of detail and data and depth against Trump's disinformation campaign, which ultimately led to threats of violence against him, Raffinsberger, and Kemp. And when I spoke with Sterling just this past week, he told me a website had just been taken down where his name and his address and a picture of his home appeared beneath a sniper target. These kinds of very

explicit direct threats are increasing, according to Sterling and others. And it really shows just how crazy things have gotten here, where you have a Republican election officials who are getting these threats from Republicans who think that somehow, in some warped universe, these Republicans, Trump supporters, have thrown the election to Biden. And they have no doubt that the reason that these threats have happened, it seems, is because they've been kind of, the flames have been fanned by the president of the United States. Absolutely. And Sterling made that very, very clear in his press conference that went viral a few weeks ago. Are you telling me that these threats have only increased since that time?

according to Sterling and other other reports that are coming out I think officials are being more and more open with what the rhetoric from Trump and others is leading to and I think more and more people are starting to get concerned about it when they hear these details is there any sense of how that is affecting the race for Senate this kind of double-barreled Senate race I think everyone is really just locked in to to Trump on the Republican side is really really locked into what Trump is saying. And what Trump is saying is confusing. And we can talk about that. I mean, I was in Val Dasta a few days ago when he came down to South Georgia to speak. And he was trying to do what he's what he's been doing for the last few weeks, which is make two arguments that don't really work well together. One is that he wrongfully lost a rigged election in Georgia and elsewhere. And two, that voters in Georgia have to vote in the Senate runoffs. So it's I think it's hard, and I talk to voters who are trying to wrap their heads around,

do we vote in an election that our president, who we believe more than anyone else, has said is not being run on the up and up. But he's also telling us that we need to vote in it. So it's this mixed message. I'm still going to vote, but I'm worried. Are you going for Leffler & Purdue? Yes. So you have, do you feel at all there's any logic to not voting since there's so much frog going?

on? Because that's what that's a saying, right? That's an excellent question. Like, why vote is? Yeah, Lynn Wood was saying

make them earn your vote. You know, don't vote. What do you think about that? I have to disagree with it. But I, I disagree with what he said, but I understand it wholeheartedly.

Right. Because we are put between a rock in a hard place. And when you, when you deal with those kind of situations, you just have to choose, I guess you can call it

the lesser of two evils. I don't like that argument. Do you know any people who are going to just not vote because they said screw it? They're everywhere. They're everywhere. You know them? Yeah, yeah. I know them personally. Really? Yeah, they're not voting. They're like, how many do you think are out there? Are we talking about a couple here and there? Or we're talking about a lot? Yeah. People, Republicans who say the system is messed up. Tens of thousands. Because that could determine the whole election. That's what I'm saying.

So you're worried, it sounds like. You're a little worried that the Republicans can lose. Yeah. Yeah. Because Kemp won't do. So you said you were in Valdosta, you've been to various other Trump rallies. What's the tone like? Are people more revved up? Are they more violent? The proud boys, the hate group, was present. I stood behind them for a few minutes in Valdosta and tried to listen in on their comments that were sort of hard to hear, but they were enjoying much of what Trump was saying and nodding their heads a lot. I didn't encounter any violence myself at this rally. And I talked to a number of

of people, many of whom were respectful enough, even if they were dubious of what somebody from the New Yorker was doing there. And they just talked about how they, and they seemed sincere in their belief that the election was stolen and that everything Trump was saying was true and that they were, again, trying to parse this double argument of voting in the election, but also continuing to parrot the narrative that the election is rigged. And they were saying what Trump was saying, which is those two things. Charles, one of the figures in Georgia who seems to be pouring fuel on the fire of conspiracy theories about the election is a guy named Linwood.

Linwood is a lawyer who's got a surprisingly large reach, about 800,000 Twitter followers, and he says that Trump won a decisive 400 electoral votes, and he's urged supporters to stock up on, and I quote, Second Amendment supplies. Who is Linwood? And why is he important in the race? He's very important. He's a regionally well-known defamation attorney who made his name defending Richard Jewell, the accused Olympic Park bomber in the 90s in Atlanta. He's also more recently represented Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter. And he's been filing a lot of these

frankly flimsy election-related lawsuits on behalf of Trump and his various grievances related to the election process. So he's come to represent, I think, a very different kind of faction of state Republican from Gabriel Sterling, who we spoke about, would represent those who believe the November election was rigged in some very far-fetched ways, and that the Republicans responsible for the rigging, or at least allowing the rigging, ought to go to jail. Well, where do you think you are with your efforts to advocate on behalf of the election fraud narrative? I mean, how is it going in your view? I think the Georgia patriots are getting angrier by the moment, they are disgusted with the governor, the lieutenant governor, the

secretary of state, and the attorney general. They're going to run them out of office by recall, resignation. I don't think they'll last two years for re-election. I think Governor Kemp and Rappensburg are going to go to jail. Maybe Duncan, too. They're all crooked. In the meantime, he argues Republicans should not vote in the runoffs. boycott them. He told me recently a few days ago that he thinks there are hundreds of thousands

of Republicans in Georgia who would pursue a boycott. They're not going to tolerate the shenanigans pulled on November the 3rd. They're not going to tolerate backroom deals cut by the Secretary of State in the dark of night. They're not going to tolerate people in the Republican Party who do not 100% back an investigation of the November 3rd election. That number seems quite high, but Sterling himself, who called Wood when we spoke, a very unserious man in a serious time, Sterling thinks that there are more than 10,000 Republicans in Georgia who probably will listen to Lynn Wood and stay home. And that could be decisive, right?

That could be decisive. So the Lynn Wood effect, as it's being called by a lot of folks that I've talked to, is really one of the main interesting narratives to follow and potentially decisive narratives to follow in these runoffs. Now, what I've seen of the debates and the non-debat is that Leffler and Purdue are really not talking about issues. They're talking about this. They're talking about stolen election.

They're talking about radical socialist. That's basically what's going on in the state of Georgia. If I'm watching television and I'm watching their ads, is that what I'm seeing? Yeah. And I went to a rally in Perry, Georgia that they held together. about a month ago where Purdue actually said something like, look, y'all, it's not about issues. That's a verbatim quote. It's really just about drawing a line in the sand, preventing Democrats from having unified power in government and doing all these things that are really far-fetched

that aren't going to happen, but that nonetheless are sort of fear-mongering. Like what? So socialism. I mean, that America is suddenly going to become a socialist country, that Puerto Rico is going to become a state. D.C. is going to become a state. The courts are going to be packed. Sure, some of these things perhaps are under consideration, but they were expressing them as certainties that would happen in the near future.

Now, you spoke with a Republican strategist. I repeat, a Republican strategist who told you that without the nut vote, you won't carry a county in Georgia. Now, what does that mean, and how does it come into play in the runoff? Well, he was actually quoting, to be fair, a former Democrat senator from a number of decades ago. I think the quote means that you have to, I guess, embrace the idea that there are a lot of low information voters who have some far-fetched ideas.

But if you want to win in the state, you have to embrace them, tolerate them, humor them. And so that's what I think is being done, especially when you have a candidate like Marjorie Taylor-Green. who, Kelly Leffler, who endorsed Kelly Leffler. Green, as you may recall, and I wrote about this for the New Yorker, was the first Q&N candidate to win office, congressional office. She represents Northwest Georgia, very conservative area. She has some really far-fetched ideas. Leffler has been willing to embrace her. No doubt Leffler doesn't think Q&N makes any sense, but she understands that she needs those voters. So she's willing to wrap her arms around somebody who's given them voice. When we talked in November, it was clear that the Democratic strategy was going to be

turnout, turnout, turnout. Has anything changed? No, I mean, and that's the strategy on both sides at the end of the day. I walked around with Andrew Yang and Martin Luther King the third a few weeks ago as they tried to get out the vote in a southwest Atlanta neighborhood. And their message really boiled down to, if you voted for Biden, you have to do this one additional thing in order to see Biden's, administration and actually try to execute the agenda that they've pitched to the American people. If President Trump's messages that Georgia elections are fraudulent, and Purdue and Leffler's messages

come out and vote for us and let's avoid radical socialism, where does that leave Republican voters who maybe are not so taken up with the fringe conspiracy theories that have been touted so loudly? Well, to be frank, I know I know some of these Republicans, these upper middle class Republicans personally, some, you know, even perhaps related to me, who are inclined to still vote for the Republicans because they want to see government that's not just controlled by one party. The idea of splitting, splitting power is persuasive to a lot of these folks, even the ones again who don't buy any of this stuff. about fraud, about rigging, who find Trump distasteful, who find Leffler and Purdue's attempts to really grovel to Trump, kind of disgusting. They're still willing, I think, to remain Republican, whatever that means now. Charles Bethel, thank you so much. Thank you. Charles Bethay is a staff writer based in Atlanta. The Georgia runoff elections are on January 5th.

Brewerly voting began last week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This has been a year of incredible focus on the police and policing. And not only in the United States, in Nigeria, people have risen up in a movement that's come to be known by its hashtag, end SARS. Now, to be clear, this is not SARS, the virus. SARS, S-A-R-S, is the acronym for the special anti-robbery squad, a sort of undercover unit of the Nigerian police. That squad is notorious. They've been accused of extortion, abduction, and killing. In October, a video service that appears to show a SARS officer shooting a young man who's driving a Lexus. The officer

pulled the man's body out of the car, then got in and drove off. And as happened here after the video of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, people were galvanized and poured into the streets. Anacwa Gemina is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker, and he's been following the protest from the start. In early October, I noticed the hashtag N-SAR's trending. I'm originally from Ghana, and I had joined protest this summer in the U.S. against police brutality. I'd been wondering what it would look like to see people back home in West Africa rise up. Now, Nigerians have protested SARS in the past. The government has even promised to disband the unit. but nothing has ever come out of that.

So this time, I was amazed to see elderly men and women marching, saying they were doing so so that their grandkids wouldn't have to. And also to see in a country where divides can cut deep. Christians keeping watch for Muslim brothers as they prayed, traditional African priests out in the streets, which you rarely see. And other groups like the LGBTQ community showing up in force. I mean, it was really inspiring. Our brothers and sisters are being killed, especially in Lecki.

The murder the lot of people legal. The protests that I went on were very peaceful. They were an incredibly vibrant atmosphere. You had music playing to invigorate the crowd. And speakers would address the local community. My name is Dr. Enyola Anulhuakpo Shoemi. Dr. Shuiimi, is Dr. Shuii means. the political theorist from Nigeria. She's also a fellow at the European University Institute in Italy,

but she's home now in Lagos. Early on, she was taking her children to the street protests, but things got violent when the government cracked down. On October 20th, the Lagos State Government issued a curfew with very little lead time. So they gave like four or five hours of notice. Now, you have to understand that Lagos is a place where it takes you like three hours to get somewhere that it should ordinarily take you 10 minutes. It was clear that they just hadn't thought this thing through. So the Kefew was not entirely followed and the Nigerian army was called in. Soldiers reportedly opening fire on demonstrators in the country's biggest city Lagos. Officers repeatedly shot at hundreds of protesters. At least a dozen protesters were killed in an area

called Lecky Tollgate. It's still not clear just how many. And the thing that was so disheartening about it was that most of those protesters are recorded sitting down and they're recorded singing the national anthem as soldiers are firing bullets into them. I mean, it's all so messed up.

It's so messed up. Now, all of this started because of this special anti-robbery squad, SARS. Who are they targeting? and why? So lots of people have said that the main targets of SARS are young, rich people, especially young, let me not say rich, but young, well-to-do males who, you know, are driving in either their own or their parents, nice cars, who have nice laptops on them,

nice phones on them, who are asking them for bribes or who take their cars from them or their laptops or whatever it is and who say because they're young, they must have stolen the car or whatever. I mean, I guess the thing that I would like us to think about that is that, yes, sure, SARS do target those groups of people, but SARS targets everybody. And SARS probably targets poor people

way more than they target the well off. It's just you don't get to hear about it. They just take their suffering and they carry on along. So why was SARS created in the first place? SARS was created in 1992 as a special unit of the Nigerian police force. This is a peak time of insecurity in Nigeria where there is just so much violence. both by the military and then also by ordinary civilians who are, for whatever reason,

whether it's poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunities, perpetrating crimes that are not normal in the country and that are not, you know, your ordinary crimes that the federal police force is used to dealing with. so armed robberies, kidnapping and such. So that's why SARS was founded. So, Anula, is SARS somehow worse than other police in Nigeria? Or is SARS just a symptom to a much bigger problem? So the answer to both questions is not an either rule.

It's a yes and yes, I think. SARS is both special from the rest of the police force in that they appear. to be able to exert more violence in a way that they don't even hide it. They operated with a particular understanding that their powers were limitless. And they are also part of a larger problem because what we're talking about is a federal police force that is very, very violent. So you have, for instance, let's put some numbers on it. is violent at level three.

And then SARS is violent at level four, right? We're still talking about a level of violence that is just completely unacceptable, kidnapping citizens, raping people on a nearly daily basis. So this anti-robbery squad then was created in reaction to a very specific and real problem that was happening.

Looking at its history, however, it looks like this is not the first time that the public, whom we're supposed to be protected by the squad, has called for the doing away with it. Can you tell us a little bit about that history? I think this is the fourth time that the government has said, oh, we're disbanding stars.

And they don't say we're disbanding stars just of their own initiative. They say we're disbanding stars, usually as a response to a call from the public to disband SARS. Now, these are the loudest. They are the most qualitative and the most quantitative call to get rid of SARS. This is something new. And what made me want to take part is that these were protests that just had so much community engagement.

It was the first time, certainly in my lifetime, that my generation and the generation behind me were doing something collectively. And I'm told consistently that, oh, Nigerians don't protest. We, you know, we suffer and we smile as the song goes. I have my parents telling me about the 80s and 90s and how hard it was to get people out into the streets and having to do protests from Friday to Sunday because people wouldn't protest Monday to Friday.

But Nsars proved them wrong. Why did they happen at this scale, at this time, I mean, there's such a confluence of things. You have COVID. You have people being told that they're not allowed to go and engage in their livelihoods, which in Nigeria is like a do-or-die situation. I mean, you tell somebody whose job it is to go and hawk bread or, you know, peanuts or whatever it is, they're not allowed to go out.

They can't sell their peanuts over Zoom. They can't sell their bread over Zoom. So what you're saying to them is if you go out, you'll catch COVID and die. If you stay in, you won't make your 200 Naira and you'll die. Because we as a government don't give you any, there's no safety net. So here in the US, there's been this call to defund the police, partly because of police brutality,

but also because of multiple failed attempts to reform police departments. In Nigeria, where you are, however, activists and experts, are calling for quite the opposite, for more funding. So what exactly do people want to see there when it comes to SARS or the police? The reason why I think you have what looks like diametrically opposed proposals in both contexts. You have an American context where people are going to defund the police, don't pay the police as much. They get all this pay. And in some cases, they even take it out of state lines.

so they're not using it, you know, for the benefit of whatever community they're meant to be members of. Also, you're using all this money to procure a level of arms and ammunition and a militarized complex that is not necessary for what we deem to be the proper work of police. And then you have in the Nigerian context where people go, okay, these police officers that are meant to be doing this particular kind of job need way more support. They need better support with pay. They need better support with basic things. But do not make the mistake of thinking that when you increase police pay, that is going to make them do their jobs better. They are not killing people.

They are not brutalizing people just because they are poorly paid and they're badly housed. There is a deeper problem in the society that makes it beneficial for them to do their jobs poorly. In all societies, in all modern societies, the infrastructure of law enforcement is always made to protect insiders or whoever the community has defined for itself as being the insiders to that community. And to protect those insiders and sustain those insiders from outsiders. And so the way the police and law enforcement and the community itself treats insiders is always going to be different from the way it treats outsiders. 99% of us are considered to be outsiders in a community on land that we own. And we are perceived by our governments, government after government after government,

to be incapable of ruling ourselves truly. This is our property and this is our society. And the fact that the state is not reflective of our communities, that is the problem. That is the deeper problem. What has happened since the, at least a dozen or so protesters were shot and killed on October 20th at Lake Itogate? Just an array of disappointing things.

The first thing that has happened, I have already alluded to, the government responded as if nothing had happened and that we had basically behaved like wayward children. Then you had the governor of Lagos State who said his office did not call in the army. It turns out that they did. What else has happened since then? We've then had judicial panels, these fake judicial panels, okay, they're not fake. They're real.

They were constituted. But in terms of what they are supposed to produce, which is justice for the people who have complaints against SARS and who have petitions against SARS, is very much doubtful. So, I mean, you just live in a place that shows you time and time again that it really, really doesn't care about you. Aniola Shoyami is a Max Weber Fellow at the Euro.

European University Institute. Last week, activists from around the world, including Greta Toonberg, called for an investigation into the shootings and for the release of all jailed protesters and journalists. Anacwa Gemina reports for The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with addition to Music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.