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 CIA analyst 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.

AMY GOODMAN: A lot of people must be shocked when you say this.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: On the hand, when you look at the special elections that have taken place—

ALLAN NAIRN: Look at the predictions before the general election, you know. And Trump, during the general election campaign, Trump’s approval ratings were often lower than they are right now. But it shouldn’t even be close. If the press were hammering away at the substance of what this rightist revolution is doing, they would be wiped out electorally.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the fact that they’re saying a foreign power intervened in this election to Trump’s advantage?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the basic allegation is that Russia used U.S.-style election meddling against the U.S. Because that’s half of the mission of the CIA since the CIA was created, to intervene in foreign elections and foreign governments. There was one academic study that cited 81 cases of such intervention just between the end of World War II and the year 2000. Personally, my guess is, yeah, Russia probably did do an intervention like that. But even if the charges are true, even if Russia was the source of the WikiLeaks material and they sent in all the false news through bots, that would have—you could say that that tipped the election, because in such a close Electoral College election, any one of a dozen factors can be said to tip the election. But it would be impossible to make a legitimate case that such Russia intervention had more impact than, say, voter suppression, where, if you look at the voter suppression impact in the swing states that swung it to Trump, those numbers vastly, like in Wisconsin, for example, vastly outweigh Trump’s winning margin. So, if instead of that 80 percent of coverage being on Russia, had it been on, say, voter suppression, Kobach and the state—Republican state legislators, who have introduced a hundred voter suppression bills across the country, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. They’d be—they’d be back on their heels.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have two minutes, and I want to go way back in time. I want to ask you about Attorney General Jeff Sessions. During an October 2015 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he was a radio talk show host, then-Senator Jeff Sessions praised the Immigration Act of 1924, whose chief author in the House once declared it was intended to end indiscriminate acceptance of all races.

SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: In seven years, we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans non-native-born since the founding of the republic. And some people think, well, we’ve always had these numbers, but it’s not so. This is very unusual. It’s a radical change. And, in fact, when the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly. And we then assimilated through the 1965 and created, really, the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants. And it was good for America. And then we passed this law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path now to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Jeff Sessions speaking to Steve Bannon on his radio show in 2015, now attorney general really cracking down on voter rights and immigrants in this country.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. The Trump immigration policy, as announced by Miller the other day, is inspired by the Immigration Act of 1924 and the white—the old White Australia policy. The 1924 act grew out the U.S. eugenics movement, which was pushed by the top academics at U.S. universities, and it claimed to be based on merit. They were using standardized test results to argue, at that time, in 1924, that Nordics and Aryans were intellectually superior, and the U.S.. had to exclude what they called the inferior races, who at that time they defined as Italians, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and Jews. This led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. And also the eugenics movement inspired things like forced sterilization laws. When the Nazis did their Nuremberg racial laws, they specifically cited these U.S. measures as a large part of their inspiration. I wrote—

AMY GOODMAN: The immigration law of 1924.

ALLAN NAIRN: And the eugenics—the broader eugenics movement. I did a chapter on this in the report I did years ago for Nader on the Educational Testing Service.

AMY GOODMAN: Called The Reign of ETS: The Corporation That…

ALLAN NAIRN: That Makes Up Minds, yeah. And that’s what Sessions and Miller and Trump are proposing again. But the key is, as Miller was talking about the other day, he was saying, “Oh, this will be immigration based on merit.” That’s exactly what they were saying in 1924, because the basic claim is Aryan whites have more merit.

AMY GOODMAN: And Steve Miller—

ALLAN NAIRN: Bogus then, bogus now.

AMY GOODMAN: Now Steve Miller is being considered—Stephen Miller—to be the communications chief.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, well, he does communicate their message, in a sense.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much, Allan Nairn, for spending this hour with us. Allan Nairn, award-winning investigative journalist and activist.