It is March 2021, and we are at Palo Duro Canyon, four years after our original visit and my promise to the kids that we would return. We are staying in Canyon, Texas, a town south of Amarillo. We skipped Cadillac Ranch because I had nothing left to say.

We are in Canyon to get a break from the plague. We drove in from Dallas, where we celebrated a belated Covid Christmas at my sister’s house. It was the first gathering of my family since 2019, my newly vaccinated parents falsely believing they were now immune. A fake Christmas, a fake cure, a fake government, a real end.

I thought 2020 was the demarcation point between Then and Now, but I was wrong. Americans could still see in 2020. They had 2020 vision: the ability to see through the lies of tyrants and say “no more.”

The fatal flaw of 2020 vision is that it fades when you close your eyes. Close your eyes or be chastised: those were the rules of 2021, when people were ostracized for grieving, slandered for sympathizing. A chorus clamoring for justice was seduced to silence by the sweet succor of a soft-focus death cult.

“It’s over,” people would say in 2021. I would agree without knowing the topic because there were so many options. The pandemic? The coup? The protests? America? There were so many things we were not supposed to discuss it was hard to keep track. With the denial came the blood, the breakdowns, the rise in rage that experts pretended was mysterious. It was not. There is a saying that grief is love with nowhere to go, but grief with nowhere to go is . . . this.

My road trips now required careful regimens to elude death. But we took the trips anyway, because to stay in place was to elude life. Nothing could beat the open road, and nothing could deny the pain in the eyes of everyone I encountered on it. No one could deny the horror of what had happened except for the government and the media, who denied it until the public joined in their delusion. This is not a partisan thing; this is a liar thing.

I was out for escape. Palo Duro fit my criteria: isolated, outdoors, ageless. It fit 2021’s criteria too: cursed. One week before we arrived, a tornado hit the town of Canyon, causing no casualties but massive damage. I was sure we would not make it to Palo Duro, sure that I was looking at another promise to my children I could not keep.

But nothing can defeat rock so weathered and worn. That’s how it found its shape in the first place. We got to Canyon and rented a house at the end of a dirt road, where only wild animals could find us.

Our first day at Palo Duro was idyllic. In the morning, we hiked through a maze of sun-colored hoodoos, each more enchanting than the next. In the afternoon, we rode horses along the canyon edge, the site of brutal battles between the Texas government and the Comanche in the 1870s. The sky was a brilliant blue, the canyon a cauldron of history and color—and I felt nothing. I felt as empty as the plains around me—not like I was disappearing into a void, as I desired, but like a void was disappearing me.

In the evening, my husband grilled dinner outdoors while our children played nearby. I could hear them through the window. I kept away because I wanted them to be happy. They had spent most of the past year in virtual school, praised for their efforts for the “quaran-team.” When school reopened, my daughter would gather her books and her violin and a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD that contained four vials of our saliva to be tested by doctors at Washington University for a deadly disease. This was our life now.

I wanted my children to explore the world without fear. Palo Duro gave them that chance. I wanted them to be free. But I wanted to be free too, in a way that did not benefit anyone but myself, so I stayed inside. I loved my children and did not want them to see me eyeing the canyon edge like a temptation, like a conclusion.

I paced the house, browsing the owner’s books in an effort to distract myself from bad ideas. They told the history of this slice of Texas, this panhandle of sorrow and survival. One of the books was a collection of letters by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whom I knew best from her paintings of New Mexico. But it was in Palo Duro that she’d lost herself and found her vision.

“I don’t know how to begin—don’t know that I have anything to say—only all inside I’m crazy and I don’t know what over—how—why or anything,” she wrote. I stopped pacing and began to read.

“What in the world is the matter with me these days anyway,” O’Keeffe continued. “I feel full of wheels and empty spots—Out of kindness to the rest of the folks I ought to leave everyone alone—I feel like a curse to everyone I talk to.”

O’Keeffe’s letters were written in 1917: during her world war, her pandemic. She wrote with increased desperation as World War I raged and the Spanish flu lay in wait. Hired to teach art at West Texas State Normal College, she was swept away by the beauty of the plains, comparing their vastness to “what comes after living.” She stopped painting city streets and started creating southwestern color.

O’Keeffe made New Mexico her home in 1949. But West Texas settled into her art like a permanent prelude. In the book, her letters were accompanied by her pictures of Palo Duro, jolting in their familiarity. She spent three years climbing the canyon walls, painting landscapes that “looked like Hell let loose with a fried egg in the middle of it.” She dreamed of having the freedom of a man, “so I could hunt for that big loneness—away from folks—I don’t think I’ll have the courage to go as far as I want to alone—being a woman—I wonder—is it much different?”

I read her mind like a time traveler gone full circle. Sometimes a book takes you to another place, and sometimes it clarifies where you are. O’Keeffe longed for a “dust-colored vacation,” and I did too. Ashes to ashes, I thought, and watched smoke rise from the grill.

As night fell, I put the book back and joined my family outside as my husband served dinner. I pretended I was fine and I was not convincing. He knew I was in a bad place, but no one knew the depths, because I could not fathom them myself. For the first time, I was out of words. The sun vanished into blackness, and I looked up for glimmers of hope, and felt none of the wonder that had marked my previous sightings of the sky.

I had spent a year blocking out memories. The gulf between past and present was too painful to process. But as I gazed into the night, my family by my side, memories forced their way back. Memories of the same Texas sky in 1998, in 2007, in 2017, emerging like stars when your eyes adjust to darkness, at first few and dim and then bright and all at once, leaving you wondering how you did not see them before.

I felt something—a crack in the numbness, a wave of grief waiting to be unleashed, an ache I welcomed because it meant I could still feel. The constellations had not changed. My mind gripped them like an anchor.

“I want to pick holes in everything folks call Art,” O’Keeffe wrote in 1917. Her colleagues did not understand: not her paintings, not her pain. She left Canyon one year later. She became sick during the pandemic, and her father died. But she never questioned the purpose of her time in Palo Duro.

“I’m not trying to do Art,” she explained. “I’m digging stars.”

* * *

Thank you for reading! I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family, so I need and appreciate your support. I am deeply appreciative of my subscribers’ patience during my family tragedy. New articles to come!

Palo Duro Canyon, March 2021. All photos by me.

Palo Duro Canyon, March 2017. We fell in love with it. I promised my kids we would return. We did not know the world to which we would be returning.

Don’t let anyone tell you Texas isn’t beautiful!

The answer to “How many geology photos are you going to post?” is “Never enough.”

Heading into the canyon, walking toward the sun.

Announcement: My dad died two weeks ago. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023. Every article in this newsletter was written while my dad had cancer, including this one, which is full of good memories of my dad. I’m republishing it in remembrance of him.

I am reeling from his death. But I am slowly getting back to work. The paperback edition of my book, The Last American Road Trip, came out the week he died. I am doing a limited, local tour. Two events are this week. The first is April 15 in St Louis at the University City Public Library, 7-8:30 PM. The second is April 18 at 10:45 AM at the Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, MO. Read a newly published interview about my book here.

To my subscribers: thank you for your patience and your kind comments. It is comforting to know you are there. I hope readers, new and old, appreciate the article below — one of my earliest pieces for this newsletter. I will write something new. But for now, I need to remember.

Dedicated to my father, Larry Kendzior, 1950-2026. RIP.

* * *

In the late 1980s, my father drove my sister and me to school. He had a maroon Toyota Camry. When he sold it to my uncle, we named it Doc: “Daddy’s Old Car”. We liked it when my uncle brought Doc over, because the car revived old memories. My favorite memories were of songs.

Doc was not a fast car, and the drive to school was perfunctory — for my father, at least. For me, it was a musical adventure.

My dad would pop in a cassette, unconcerned with the audience of small children in the backseat. He was in his 30s, which seemed very old at the time, but which I realize now is shockingly young — young enough to still buy new music.

He had a rotation: Neil Young’s This Note’s for You; Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl and A Black and White Night; The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, after Congress passed the Buying Only Old Music Everyone Remembers (BOOMER) Act requiring all dads own that album; U2’s The Joshua Tree.

And Tracy Chapman’s self-titled 1988 debut, with the quietly devastating “Fast Car.”

I have been startled to see how many people were introduced to “Fast Car” the same way I was: by their fathers playing it as they drove. This is how country artist Luke Combs, who covered “Fast Car” and performed a reverent Grammys duet with Chapman, discovered it too.

In the late 20^th century, American dads played a Black female folk singer’s poignant anthem of a dead American Dream, and their children took note.

My dad wasn’t trying to teach me anything with “Fast Car”. He just liked Tracy Chapman.

But I listened, wide-eyed, as it described the country I was learning to fear to love.

“Fast Car” is not a relic of its time but tragically timeless. Combs’ cover could stay faithful because nothing in this country got better. That “Fast Car” can be passed down through generations without requiring explanation is both a songwriting triumph and a grim indictment of America.

A song about Reagan-era struggle became a song about 21^st-century survival. When my teenage children hear “Fast Car”, they do not wonder why the narrator cannot escape poverty or why a person with a job still has to live in a shelter. Those things happen all the time.

What shocked them was that, once upon a time, the nation sang along.

I was so overwhelmed watching Chapman perform that I burst into tears. When the song ended, I stopped watching the show, unable to think or function, only feel.

Even now I struggle to write, but I am writing about this, since I can’t concentrate on much else.

Because with one note it’s 1988 again: fall breeze through rolled-down windows, little backpack on my lap, my father’s face in the rearview mirror, a deep voice proclaiming from the speakers that she had a feeling she could be someone. My disappointment when the searing chorus hits just as we get to school, and I have to go, and my father pulls away.

I remember when we were driving, driving in your car.

*          *          *

“America needed this,” commentators said, referring not only to the mastery of the duet, but to its crossover appeal in a hateful time, and this is true.

“Tracy Chapman deserved this,” commentators said, referring to the standing ovation she received, and this is true, too. Chapman looked luminous in an almost literal way — her face glowing like the moon, her voice deep and ageless as the tides. She was the force I had discovered as a child, when I marveled how she wrote lyrics brutal and beautiful at once.

America deserves this, I thought to myself. We deserved to have our pain acknowledged, and that is what Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs did. Americans were crying in relief — and with nostalgia for when recognition of pain was an ordinary act.

Times were never easy — the endurance of “Fast Car” proves that — but people were not always so publicly derisive of those suffering, and music was often an avenue of empathy.

“Fast Car” was one of many political songs to emerge in what I call An Anomalous Era of American Accountability, a fleeting time in which problems are confronted and the public demands change. They occur every couple of decades.

I describe this era, and its music, in my book They Knew:

We exited the most recent Anomalous Era of American Accountability in 2021, around the time I wrote that passage, and returned to the Dark Times of American Impunity.

But unlike in the late 1980s, we lack a national soundtrack to our pain.

The music industry has been dying since the advent of digital media. But now the destruction seems purposeful: top-down, vengeful, intended to destroy music’s political power. The 1980s and 1990s songs I describe would never be sanctioned by executives or travel so widely. We would never be allowed such cohesive outrage.

That is why it was so reassuring to see Chapman reemerge on stage. She still sang, we still listened — and she had passed the torch while remaining the source of its light.

Combs no longer sang by himself. We didn’t sing by ourselves either. It was such an unfamiliar sensation, this sense of possibility: that you could be someone, be someone.

And not be someone alone.

*          *          *

I was nine when “Fast Car” came out. I was forty-four when I visited my parents’ house and stole my dad’s Tracy Chapman cassette.

I took it home to St. Louis and listened to it with my Walkman by the public pool, my sunglasses hiding my tears. I stole his Roy Orbison cassettes too, even though I already owned that music in other forms. I wanted to remember what it was like to be nine, hearing a great song for the first time with my dad.

Sometimes you can say a lot without saying much at all. Sometimes a singer says it for you. Sometimes the most mundane actions have a lasting effect.

My family broke up the sixteen-hour drive back from my parents’ house at a sports bar near Cleveland. We were eating dinner when the Luke Combs cover of “Fast Car” came on. Customers began to sing along, and so did I, pleased with this new version, excited by the spontaneous comradery.

There were couples in their 30s and 40s, some with small children. I wondered if their dads had introduced them to “Fast Car” too. I wondered if they were struggling, if this restaurant was a special night out.

I wondered what they expected out of life as 1980s and 1990s kids. What it meant to be raised on a song that told us to not expect much from America, but whose narrator dreamed of more, because she could not help it — no matter how much it hurt.

And then, suddenly, “Fast Car” stopped. We were all too shocked to say anything. By the time a televised game broke the silence, it felt wrong to complain. The moment had passed. The song was over.

But it wasn’t really over. There was just a delay.

Today Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a hit again. I texted a video of the performance to my dad, who has not watched the Grammys since the 1980s, if ever. My children are listening to it with me, and my husband is playing it on the guitar.

I know we will sing “Fast Car” as a family. I know we will sound absolutely terrible, and that decades from now my kids will remember when they used to sing “Fast Car” with their dad — and their mom.

And that maybe, it’ll mean more than they knew, the way it did for me.

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is free but is made possible only by paid subscribers! If you like my writing or my work in general, please consider a paid subscription — it’s the only way I can keep this going.

My dad’s Tracy Chapman tape from 1988

Remember liner notes? As a kid, I used to analyze every word.

I am in an emergency family situation. You can get the gist here.

I won’t be sending out a new newsletter for a little awhile. I feel obligated to tell my subscribers, since you have been so good to me. This newsletter is not my hobby: it is my family’s income. Please be patient at this very difficult time.

I was hoping I would have more time to write something. All I have is photos from recent trips. When I look at them, I feel a little better. They make me remember there can be happier times. I hope if you are going through something terrible, they give you some comfort too.

I will be back. Thank you for your support.

I took this photo from inside a slot canyon. I had no idea the bird was there until I saw the photo later.

A shadow of myself, joining the landscape. In Canyon de Chelley, earlier this year.

Lone bird in Monument Valley.

“I’ve been broke; the sky is free.” — The Last American Road Trip

New Mexico ghost town cafe.

Petroglyphs in Canyon de Chelley. Someday, I’ll write more about this place.

The only White House I respect. Canyon de Chelley.

Cadillac Ranch graffiti, Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t paint this; I just took the photo. Psalm 46:1 says: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble."

Let’s hope so.

Love,

Sarah

My book Hiding in Plain Sight covers transnational organized crime, the multi-decade rise of Trump and decline of the US, and Jeffrey Epstein. It contains Epstein court documents that politicians now pretend are new. Hiding in Plain Sight was a bestseller in 2020. The reaction to Hiding prompted me to title my next book They Knew.

Published in 2022, They Knew covers mafia states, corrupt US institutions, and why some dismiss tough questions as “conspiracy theories”. Chapter descriptions are here.

I started this newsletter in 2023. I don’t believe in paywalls in times of peril, so I am deeply appreciative of subscribers who choose to pay and keep me going! Join here:

Since I have new subscribers and long-term subscribers who enjoy history, I made a list of relevant articles I wrote on three topics in the news: political corruption, Jeffrey Epstein, and AI. I also added a pop culture section, because everyone needs to read about Beverly Hills, 90210 after reading about Meir Kahane.

The articles are in chronological order. I hope they help you trace how we got here so we can find a way out. I also hope you enjoy my original writing and photography. I don’t use AI. I try to create beauty out of the ugliness of this world.

I’ll be online less often this month for family reasons. This reading list should keep you busy in the meantime. I’ll be back with a new article as soon as I can. Thank you!

Political Corruption

Behold, A Pale Horse Race (Nov 2023): On elections without choice and genocide without consequence.

Servants of the Mafia State (Nov 2023): Why didn’t Merrick Garland stop Trump? Because his lifelong mentor is Kushner’s “ethics lawyer”! It gets worse from there.

Bearing Witness to the Disappearing World: (Nov 2023): Are political officials trying to bring on the apocalypse? [Note from 2026: Sure seems like it!]

America’s Legal Soap Opera (Jan 2024): On the DOJ Infotainment Complex.

Welcome to Boomland (Jan 2024): Death cult politics in a spectacle state.

The Aftermath People (June 2024): Why winning is about far more than elections.

Last Chance, USA (July 2024): Relive the 2024 election, road trip style! You’ll be rewarded with the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

Totem and Taboo (Oct 2024): On transnational organized crime in a discarded US. Preview of The No World Order.

The End of Days Inn (Nov 2024): On Trump’s evil plans. Guess what, he did them!

Intermission (Dec 2024): On the loss of the US pop monoculture and public domain.

The Confluence: (Jan 2025): I’m Cosa Nostradamus: I predict organized crime!

The Black Place (March 2025): On emotional survival in an autocracy.

The Lost Vortex (May 2025): Why didn’t the Democrats act in 2021-2022?

The United States of Flying Carp (Oct 2025): I wasn’t going to include this one, but then Trump declared a War on Carp, so…

A Shining Mausoleum on a Hill (Jan 2026): On ICE and being American.

The No World Order: (March 2026) On the Israel/US war on Iran.

Epstein and Maxwell

Red Lines (May 2024): On Blinken’s Maxwell connection and Trump’s kill list.

Laura Palmer’s House (July 2025): Epstein as understood through Twin Peaks.

Jackhammering Into the Sewer (Feb 2026): Wading through the Epstein files.

Epstein and the Shadow World (Feb 2026): A Q & A on Epstein.

AI and Big Tech

Eating Rocks (May 2024): If the grid goes down, how will I know which rocks to eat?

Killing Time, Again (June 2024): Caleb Carr’s 2000 prediction of the 2026 tech hell.

The Red, White and Blue Screen of Death (Sept 2024): The day the internet died, and the zombie internet returned. (Note: This article is a reader favorite.)

The Miners (Feb 2025): On Musk and AI. Also, about a mine.

Soul Stripping (August 2025): Against AI, again.

Pop Culture

Driving in Circles (Feb 2024) The generational longing of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”.

Brenda and Dylan Are Dead (July 2024): The most Gen X article ever.

Searching for Bobbie Gentry (June 2025): America’s culture of cruelty and the singer who documented it — and then vanished.

Dvorak Lived in Iowa (Sept 2025): If you’re a parent, this one is for you.

The Empty Stage (Nov 2025): If you’re a child — or a Johnny Cash fan — this one is for you. Therefore, it’s for everyone. Including me, right now.

Thanks again! If you’re looking for more, here’s the full archive. See you soon!

Lake Michigan at The Indiana Dunes, July 2020. I describe my time here in The Last American Road Trip, out in paperback March 31! Get signed copies at Left Bank Books.

“A horrible world war is coming,” Kahane told journalist Robert I. Friedman. “Tens of millions will die. It will be the Apocalypse. God will punish us for forsaking him. But we must have faith. The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead: all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated. The amount of suffering we endure will depend upon what we do between now and the end.”

Kahane did not live to see his vision realized. In 1990, the year Friedman published The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, the 58-year-old Kahane was shot to death while giving a speech imploring American Jews to move to Israel. The alleged assailant, Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair, was acquitted by a jury but sentenced by the judge. In death as in life, the circumstances surrounding Kahane are murky and violent.

Friedman had an eye for figures of the 20^th century who would define the 21^st. Ten years after The False Prophet, he published Red Mafiya: his investigation of a transnational crime syndicate whose members came from the USSR and spent the 1990s infiltrating governments and corporations worldwide. The head of that syndicate, Semyon Mogilevich, put a contract on Friedman’s life.

Death threats were nothing new for Friedman. He’d been getting them from Israelis ever since he wrote the Kahane biography. Friedman had also angered the FBI by claiming they could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and correctly warning, years in advance, that the towers would be attacked again. Wary of institutional constraints, Friedman embraced the freedom of a freelancer. In 2002, Friedman died of cardiac arrest. He was 51.

He never saw the future he worked so hard to stop.

Red Mafiya gained a cult following during Trump’s first term. The book elucidates the structure of Trump’s life and presidency: a merger of organized crime, white-collar crime, and government by criminals who elude, then rewrite, borders and laws. Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives.

Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we’ve been frozen in hell for forty years.

The False Prophet, on the other hand, is largely ignored. It is in demand but hard to find: used copies of the out-of-print book sell for over $100. I bought mine before the Kahanists — Kahane’s acolytes — returned to power in Israel.

I’ve been wanting to write about The False Prophet for years. I held back since it scares me more than any other book. If it were only history, I would not be so frightened. But The False Prophet describes current events: the extremism that Kahane espoused, and Friedman documented, now dominates Israel and in turn, the United States.

I was born during the Iranian Revolution. As a result, I’ve spent my entire life listening to US officials call for war with Iran. In Israel, the calls are even louder, drowning out reasonable voices who know such a war would be apocalyptic.

The architects of the Iran War know that too, but do not care. Elderly fanatics — from Netanyahu to Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra villain who served in nearly every administration of my life — understand that the time to see their goals reach fruition is running out. Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle.

“This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years,” Netanyahu said as the war began, thanking “the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military.”

Netanyahu now says openly what he said behind closed doors in 2001: “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

One cannot understand the Iran War without understanding the Kahanists. But I rarely see analysts mention them. Maybe they did, and it was behind a paywall. If a war crime is subscription-only, does it make a sound? Is that sound a stifled scream?

* * *

Meir Kahane was a terrorist. The New York-based Kahane became an Orthodox rabbi before working as an undercover informant for the FBI to spy on Black Americans, whom he obsessively hated, believing, as Friedman writes, that “Black demands for equality would somehow sabotage Jewish achievements.” In 1970, Kahane and his followers plotted to mass murder the Black residents of Crown Heights.

In his spare time, Kahane worked secretly for the CIA to promote the Vietnam War and partnered with Italian-American mafia head Joseph Colombo. The union between Kahane and Colombo was brokered by mob lawyer Barry Slotnick, who later brokered another union: the prenup for Donald and Melania Trump.

In 1968, Kahane formed the Jewish Defense League with the stated goal of “combatting antisemitism”. The reality was violence. The JDL carried out bombings, shootings, and other acts of terror under the guidance of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a veteran of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi. Kahane was popular with New York Jewish businessmen who sought, as Friedman relays, to “do something about the n-----s”. They showered the JDL with money.

In 1971, Kahane, convicted for manufacturing explosives, fled to Israel: a path his murderous American acolytes would emulate in the decades to come. He started his own political party, Kach, and turned his wrath on Arabs: seeking to drive Palestinians out of Israel, and as Israel expanded, all Arabs out of existence. Kahane was a genocidaire. It is grimly ironic that he coined the phrase “Never again”: a phrase invoked by people who oppose genocide anywhere, but which Kahane meant to apply exclusively to the Holocaust and its Jewish victims.

At first, Israel welcomed Kahane. In 1984, he was elected to the Knesset. But many Israelis rejected his policies (which included a ban on Jewish-gentile relations and perpetual warfare against neighboring countries) and his methods (blowing things up.) By 1987, only 21% of Israelis approved of his views. In 1988, Israel banned Kach for racism, and the FBI allegedly turned against their informant. In response, Kahane renounced his US citizenship, but continued to visit until he died.

His legacy endured. In 1994, Kahanist Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians worshipping at a mosque in Hebron. Later that year, Israel declared Kach a terrorist organization. In 1997, the US added the group to its terror watchlist.

Kach remained on the US terror watchlist until May 2022, when Biden removed it. The removal was ominous. The Biden administration claimed the group was “inactive”, but nothing could be further from the truth: the Kahanists were now in the Knesset. They had regrouped under new names but never changed their fascist ideology.

In 2021, Netanyahu, who, like Trump, was indicted and widely disliked, built a new political coalition out of the remains of Kach. He found support in a younger generation of Kahanists who celebrate genocide and align with white supremacists. The coalition includes Itamar Ben Gvir, a leader of the fascist Otzma Yehudit party who led the Kach youth movement as a teenager in the 1990s. Much as the second Trump administration is more extreme than the first, Netanyahu’s return to power was made possible by a coalition of once-derided fanatics who exult in violence.

Under prior US terrorism rules, Kahanists like Ben Gvir would have been sanctioned. Thanks to the Biden administration, they operate freely, meeting with Evangelical extremists like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Following the October 7 attack, the US showered Israel with a record amount of money and backed the ensuing genocide of Palestinians. Now, under Trump, the US aids the most extreme government in Israeli history in one of its oldest plans: war on Iran.

And one even older than that: the end of the world.

* * *

By the 1970s, Kahane was convinced he was destined to usher in the Messianic age. While proclaiming all Jews to be the chosen people — “We are not equal to the Gentiles. We are different. We are higher,” he said — some Jews were more chosen than others. At the top of God’s list, according to Kahane, was Kahane.

“Kahane was swept up in a kind of Messianic passion,” Friedman recounts in The False Prophet. “Words like apocalypse, redemption, and Messiah took over his political vocabulary…The JDL was rapidly evolving into a fundamentalist cult with Kahane — like some medieval cabalist — twisting and turning the Torah to explain why expelling the Arabs would usher in the Messiah.”

Americans may find this rhetoric familiar. Several high-ranking US officials have proclaimed themselves chosen for office by God instead by US voters. Though of varied faiths, they all believe their duty is to serve Israel. They serve Israel at the expense of the American people: both their tax money and their peace of mind.

Among them are Mike Johnson, who said his state visit to Israel was the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy; Chuck Schumer, who told the New Yorker he was placed in the Senate by God to protect Israel; former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who based foreign policy around the Rapture; and of course, Trump, who said that Israeli Jews view him as “The King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.”

Trump was told that he was the Jewish Messiah by Lev Parnas, a felon with ties to organized crime who has since reinvented himself as an anti-Trump pundit. Parnas’ declaration was based on Jewish gematria and made in a conversation that Trump was not aware was recorded. Parnas gave Trump a gift from rabbis in Ukraine and Israel and encouraged Trump to ask Jared Kushner, whose criminal family has been friends with the criminal Netanyahu family for decades, for clarification.

Trump seemed unmoved by his divine destiny: the messiah, after all, is an unpaid position. More mysterious is why Parnas — a transnational criminal until he was caught — and his son came to be leading operatives for the Democratic Party during Biden’s term. That seems spectacularly unwise, but then again, doesn’t everything?

Americans have a history of basing policy on the Apocalypse: one could ostensibly date it back to the Puritans. But extremism became sharper after Reagan’s embrace of the far right. Cabinet officials like James G. Watt, for example, opposed environmental protections because the end was nigh; might as well drill. The younger George Bush allegedly spoke of the End Times prophecy of “Gog and Magog” while his cabinet framed the invasion of Iraq as a holy war. Whether they believed it matters less than that they got the catastrophic result they desired.

No country benefited from that catastrophe more than Israel.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, devised a plan for “Greater Israel”: an Israel that subsumes six surrounding states, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. For decades, “Greater Israel” and “The Yinon Plan” were dismissed by Israeli officials as antisemitic myths.

The idea that Israel is not pursuing “Greater Israel” would be more convincing had Israeli officials not put emblems of “Greater Israel” on IDF uniforms; invaded Lebanon and proclaimed it part of “Greater Israel”; announced that Israel would also conquer Jordan and parts of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq and call that “Greater Israel”; made a “Greater Israel” amulet for Netanyahu; and displayed maps of “Greater Israel” that exclude Palestinians, whom Netanyahu calls “Amalek” while declaring their fate is to be slain.

The idea of “Greater Israel” dates back to Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, but Yinon devised its borders for the post-WWII era. In 2007, Wesley Clark, a US general who opposed the Iraq War, recalled that ten days after 9/11, he was given a memo on “how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Over the next twenty-five years, every country on that list was a target of US and Israeli military incursions.

Now, in 2026, we arrive at a full-fledged attack on Iran from the most autocratic regimes in both Israeli and modern US history. Regimes that respect neither international law nor the sanctity of human life and no longer make a pretense of doing so. Regimes that seek to destroy the world while wrapping themselves in mantles of piety and prophecy.

For Kahanist Israel, the goal is clear: the fulfillment of the “Greater Israel” agenda. Iran has long been an obstacle to that agenda by funding regional militia groups that oppose Israel and by declaring itself Israel’s steadfast enemy. That Israel’s government is bad does not make Iran’s government good. Iran’s government commits massive human rights violations, including the slaughter of protesters.

But that is not why Israel attacks it. They attack Iran because it’s in the way.

For the US, the motive is questionable, for there is no domestic benefit to an Iran War. After the disastrous Iraq War, the US regained international respect for about five minutes in 2009 when, in a fit of delirium, international observers awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush.

Obama went on to pursue war under a different name, through drone strikes and administrative protection of corrupt financiers. Obama was followed by Trump, who horrified allies and pleased dictators in proportion to their relative sadism; then Biden, who backed a genocide; and once again Trump, now an American autocrat tasked with carrying out the long-planned attack on Iran.

There is a myth that the Iran War is driven by Christian nationalism. The myth is so powerful that it spurred articles about events that never occurred, like a debunked narrative from an apparent huckster, Mikey Weinstein, claiming that the Pentagon told troops they were fighting to bring Armageddon on behalf of a Christ-like Trump.

The most disturbing part of this narrative, besides that it went viral despite being fabricated, is that it reflects wishful thinking. There are American Christian nationalist fanatics who see the Iran War as a holy war and wish their faith were the central concern. But more influential are ultra-Zionist hawks, like Elliott Abrams, who never recovered from the Iranian Revolution and have sought revenge since 1979. (In the 1980s, some of these alleged “foes of Iran” worked out their complicated feelings by making illicit weapons deals to supply Nicaraguan death squads.)

Christian nationalism is not the main motivation for the Iran War. Nor is it about Trump’s desire for autocratic consolidation (the war impedes it, given its massive unpopularity); nor is it a distraction from the Epstein files (I’ll get to that); nor is it about Trump’s desire for Middle East peace (I’ll get to that when I stop laughing.)

The Iran War is being fought for Greater Israel — and for annihilation. The doctrine of annihilation is not unitary. Christian fanatics, Jewish fanatics, secular accelerationalists, and technofascists seeking depopulation all have their own agendas.

There is a desire to usher in the messianic age, but that gets tricky with competing Messiahs in play. The only certainty is carnage in the Middle East, possibly culminating in the destruction of Al Aqsa Mosque and the building of the Third Temple: a goal shared by Jewish and Christian extremists (though the extremists diverge radically in what they think happens once their preferred Messiah shows up) that horrifies Muslims worldwide and would expand the war to multiple fronts.

This is not a New World Order. This is a No World Order.

* * *

In 1973, Senator J. Wiliam Fulbright went on TV and announced that the US Senate had become a subsidiary of Israel.

“The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much. We should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel. This is a most unusual development…. The great majority of the Senate of the US — somewhere around 80% — are completely in support of Israel, anything Israel wants. This has been demonstrated time and again and this has made it difficult for our government.”

His statement was controversial then, and uncomfortable now, but accurate. Funding Israel is the only issue on which Congress unites, even when it is to the detriment of the United States. AIPAC is a near-universal donor to US politicians on both sides of the aisle, and Israeli spyware steps in when folks get feisty.

Fulbright was worried about the Jackson Amendment that would allow Jewish emigration from the USSR to the US. This was one of the causes Kahane proclaimed to care most about while carrying out terror campaigns that had nothing to do with it. When the amendment passed, it allowed innocent Soviet Jews facing oppression to find freedom abroad. Unfortunately, it also allowed Mogilevich and other mobsters to get to the US, where they made their fortunes with partners like Donald Trump.

Trump came of political age in the 1970s New York of Meir Kahane. He was mentored by mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a secular Zionist who partnered with other Zionists, Jewish and Christian, in pursuit of money and power. (Cohn, like Netanyahu, would engage in antisemitism against other Jews in order to achieve his goals.) Like Kahane, they recognized Israel’s utility as a “get out of jail free card”. Mafiosos hightailed it to Israel when RICO or sanctions rolled in. JDL terrorists found sanctuary in Israel after committing brutal murders, like the 1985 assassination of Palestinian-American interfaith peace activist Alex Odeh.

Trump’s father, Fred Trump, became friends with Netanyahu in the 1980s, when Netanyahu was Israel’s ambassador to the UN. The friendship extended to Donald. Trump’s closeness to Netanyahu grew stronger when Ivanka Trump married Jared Kushner, whose family was so close with the Netanyahus that Netanyahu used to sleep in Jared’s bed (when Jared was not in it.)

Jared Kushner works closely with Netanyahu and brokers foreign deals “for the US” despite not being a member of the Trump administration. No one in Congress does anything meaningful to stop him. An unelected son-in-law carrying out the will of an autocrat is typical in a kleptocracy. The unusual part is that Kushner is not working for the country for which his father-in-law is president.

Trump is not in control of the Iran War. Netanyahu is, and Kushner is his lackey.

Trump enjoys violence but is wary of war. War is unpredictable and Trump cannot function in unscripted reality for too long. He likes overseas attacks to be “one and done”: a dramatic plot twist in the season finale of his reality TV presidency. Kidnap the president of Venezuela; drop a MOAB on Afghanistan. Why? To show he can.

A quagmire war is another matter: one Trump wishes to avoid. Too messy, too boring, and too likely to wrest control from him to others.

Trump’s propensity for “one and done” overseas attacks should stoke fear: there is an obvious and terrible way to do a “one and done” on Iran. Trump likely hopes killing Ayatollah Khamenei is enough to satisfy Israel, along with the international coalition of scumbags who made their own trades and investments with an Iran War in mind. Given the plans for Greater Israel, a dead Ayatollah is unlikely to suffice. The Iran War may not prove a Trumpian season finale but a series finale — for Earth.

Though much has been made of Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons, the only countries in this war that surely have them are the US and Israel. Israel spent decades denying that its nuclear program existed. It locked up whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu, who made the mistake of giving documents proving the weapons’ existence to the Daily Mirror, not realizing that Robert Maxwell, who owned the Mirror, was not a “British media magnate” but an espionage operative for Israel. Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad and thrown in an Israeli prison.

This is the same Robert Maxwell who sired Ghislaine and played a role in Iran-Contra with Trump pals like arms trader Adnan Khashoggi (a relative of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was murdered allegedly with Kushner’s approval to please his friend, Saudi leader MBS.) The same families appear, again and again, in a transnational crime network that profits off war.

Many reacted to the Iran War by proclaiming it a distraction from the Epstein files. Aside from the grotesque nature of declaring the mass murder of civilians, including children, a “distraction”, the Iran War can only remind one of Epstein and Maxwell, for many of the same people tied to them are also tied to this war.

It reminds people that Israel slaughters girls and the Epstein operation rapes them and the US government abets both.

* * *

Did the partial release of the Epstein files push Trump into a war he would rather avoid? Possibly. Trump usually does not need to be blackmailed into evil: he’s a volunteer. He is largely incapable of shame. Anything that can control him has to be worse than what has already been revealed. Given Netanyahu’s half century of close ties to Trump and Kushner, Epstein’s ties to Trump, and Maxwell’s connection to Israel, it is likely that if anyone has that kind of blackmail, Israel does. (This does not rule out other countries from having it as well.)

How does this end? In Trump’s mind, the “one and done” attack may be nuking Iran. Trump has been obsessed with nuclear weapons since the 1980s and expressed a belief that the world will end in nuclear war. In 1984, he said that Roy Cohn wanted him to study nukes for his future. Trump’s trepidation turned to intrigue in 2016, when, while running for office, he said, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Trump may cope with his fear of annihilation by being the one who can push the button.

In ideal circumstances, rational powerbrokers would do everything they could to curtail this catastrophe. But Trump is surrounded by warmongers like Netanyahu who have spent decades planning an Iran War. They are not going to stop now. Netanyahu’s own power relies on Kahanists who see committing mass murder as part of their divinely mandated destiny. In the US, Christian nationalists like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth applaud the war, along with Kushner: some in Kushner’s sect think the Iran War means Moshiach is on the way.

Over the past decade, operatives built a narrative to present Trump as an arbiter of an apocalyptic and messianic age. The least convincing participant has been Trump, a void of a man who now may feel he has no choice but to strike the final blow. The tragedy is that it’s the rest of the world that is out of options: other than to show our opposition, retain our moral code, and help each other the best we can.

Robert Friedman concluded The False Prophet with this warning:

“Between now and an apocalypse that Kahane could well trigger, world Jewry should come to terms with how powerful a force Jewish fundamentalists like Kahane have become, and then do something to stop them before they destroy Israel and poison the future of the Jewish people. That, too, is up to us.”

Friedman was Jewish and wrote out of heartache for the future he foresaw. His investigations of terrible people were motivated by compassion for those who do not deserve to suffer under their sway. That includes people of every ethnicity and creed.

We can no longer prevent an Iran War, but we can shine light on the past and let the facts inform the present. I wish officials had heeded Friedman’s warnings in 1990, when I was a child. I wish they had at least tried. There are children who need us to try now. That is reason enough to do right, regardless of all that’s gone wrong.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all, including exposes on Epstein, Trump, and their enablers. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four — so I need and appreciate your support!

Behold, a pale horse! It was pretty. Added because something in this apocalypse article needs to not be horrific. Photo by me.

If you can afford to become a paying subscriber to this newsletter, please consider it. It keeps my articles open to all and feeds my family of four! You also get the perk of submitting a question for the next Q & A:

On to Epstein! This section of the Q & A is for Michael T, Mark S, Rebecca, Patricia, Frances, John K, Bill C, Barbara, Robert, Leslie, Donna, and anyone whose name I’ve missed. I’ve shortened and simplified your overlapping questions. My answers are briefer than my thoughts, so feel free to discuss more in the comments section.

Will the Epstein files bring accountability?

SK: Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US. We’ve seen predators face arrest in other countries. In the US, we’ve seen them resign from jobs. This gives me little hope since MeToo produced more backlash than justice, and many who lost power later regained it. I do think the release has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades. What’s revealing is that they view redacted emails by predators as more credible than consistent statements by victims. There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt.

What can we do to help bring justice?

SK: Save documents, curate them, and comment on them thoughtfully and with respect for the victims. The Trump admin has already deleted some documents, is withholding many more, and relies on media to normalize sadism and bury crime in spectacle. Reject that. The breakdown of search engines means we need responsible curation more than ever. This applies not only to Epstein but to ICE or any act of mass abuse. One of the greatest threats we face is the deletion of history. Everyday folks can help preserve it if they organize information together. Nick Bryant and others have been pooling resources on Epstein’s network. I have little faith in our representatives, seeing as they knew about Epstein all along and did nothing, but there is still stigma in being a pedophile protector. Pressure officials for truth and accountability and call them a pedophile protector if they resist.

Will the rest of the files be released?

SK: As I’ve said before, I think they were waiting to release an Epstein trove once: 1) they felt they had consolidated power 2) AI was so ubiquitous that the veracity of the evidence would be questioned. That moment is now. We have seen a lot of emails, though one period of interest — the time around 9/11 — is largely absent. We have not seen much video. I believe the most damaging information is on video. We know Epstein had rooms wired with cameras to film pedophiles assaulting victims. I will not watch that if it comes out. But it may come out, and should that happen, the assaulter will claim it’s fake. This wouldn’t have been a convincing excuse a decade ago, but it will be now due to AI. I’ve wondered if Grok posting child pornography on demand shortly before the Epstein files were released was a trial run for this tactic.

How much was Bill Barr involved?

SK: Probably a lot: he’s been called “The Cover-Up General” since the early 1990s, when he buried Iran-Contra and other crimes as Bush’s AG. Epstein and Maxwell are closely linked to Iran-Contra through a number of vectors, but mainly Maxwell’s family: her father, operative of Israeli espionage Robert Maxwell, and her siblings and their government surveillance tech deals. Barr is the guy you call to bury things.

Barr was likely pulled out of private practice to bury the Epstein evidence for Trump, since emails show increasing worry from Epstein’s cohort when MeToo erupted. Barr became Attorney General in late 2018, right after the Kavanaugh confirmation, when MeToo was at its height. In addition, Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, hired Epstein to teach at a private school in the 1970s, which helped facilitate his ties to high finance. Donald Barr also wrote sci-fi fantasies about intergalactic pedophiles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. (What kind of deranged “coincidence” has all that?!) I cover Barr and Epstein in depth in Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew.

Epstein worked for the Rothschilds. What’s up with that?

SK: Treat the Rothschild family like you would anyone that is like the Rothschild family: any billionaire, multinational banking family involved in corruption and war for centuries. Their history needs to be meticulously investigated, and that should not be controversial. It does not mean every Rothschild is guilty by default, and illicit activity in the family is not rooted in Judaism. It’s rooted in entrenched power that breeds impunity, much like the British Royals. There are people afraid to examine the Rothschilds for fear of being labeled antisemites, and there are also antisemites hurling baseless accusations. Both approaches are bad and dangerous.

The role of Rothschild family members with ties to Epstein and Maxwell should be examined. Work that the Maxwell and Rothschild families did for foreign states should be scrutinized for overlap. Common ties, like Alan Dershowitz or various banks, should be investigated. It is irresponsible to drop the topic out of fear. But do not lump in all Jewish folks with Epstein and the Rothschilds — and never do it in my newsletter in the centennial year of Mel Brooks! That’s no different than lumping in all Muslims with Al Qaeda or Catholics with predator priests. Or all Americans with Trump! Keep digging, but don’t smack bystanders with your shovel on the way down.

What’s up with Zorro Ranch? And his UK bank statements? And other stuff?

SK: I’m a big picture person: I can only see the forest for the treason. Details are best examined by people living near where the crimes took place, who know the land and institutions. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez lives in New Mexico and has been tracking ranch activity and recommending local journalists. As for the UK, Carole Cadwalladr knows the Epstein case and might know the answer.

That’s the gist of the Epstein questions! He lurks throughout the rest of the Q & A as he does in real life. But on to other topics:

Sylvia: I have heard you speak about the dangers and terrible influences of AI. Yet I find myself reading the simple comparisons of products that pop up when I look for info on something like how to keep squirrels from eating tulip bulbs. Whatever AI search that comes up has a lot of useful suggestions I can follow up on and products I’ve never heard of, and I can then ask for a comparison list. Can you say anything about AI uses for helping us sort through huge masses of information?

SK: I don’t trust AI for answers on anything. Here is an example of why:

SK: Malachai and Isaac are not my children — they are the main characters of the 1984 horror movie Children of the Corn! Children of the Corn is hilarious; I watch it every Halloween and have talked about it online. As a result, AI says I live in a cornfield with my demon spawn. I’ve decided AI is the real “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”: no one knows why it’s there, but everyone keeps doing dumb things to appease it, and the special effects suck. Keep an eye on those squirrels and tulips…

B-saint-c, Sandra, and Dan all asked questions about the Pentagon and AI and the role of technofascists in state surveillance. I’m writing a general response:

SK: The advanced nature of digital surveillance means we cannot compare the current autocracy in the US to any in history. It’s a global crisis playing out here more because of Silicon Valley’s control over US politicians and institutions. The battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon is evil vs evil. Anthropic is the lesser evil this time, because they at least see the dangers of their own technology. The Pentagon sees the dangers, too, but embraces them. They don’t care if our nuclear arsenal is run by the same tech that thinks I gave birth to the Children of the Corn.

I am appalled by Big Tech and the “pre-crime” NSPM-7 initiative. It is easy to wage psychological warfare when you can quickly create a profile of a person you don’t know by scraping their online content. Tech profiles often get facts wrong, but that itself is dangerous, and has led to deportations and arrests on fraudulent grounds.

Criminal elites are pushing AI hard because they desperately need us to trust it. They want us to think a wise robot decreed that a migrant was dangerous or a protester was violent. They want us to stop thinking and researching things ourselves, which is why they replaced search results with AI summaries. Eventually they want us to submit to a social credit system where we are forced to obey their political dictates in order to do basic things like ride public transportation, apply for a job, access healthcare, etc.

How do we fight back? My advice is to see tech as a tool and not a friend. If it’s necessary — like, say, you write a newsletter for a living and have to engage on social media sites that you can’t stand — use it. Otherwise, live like it’s 1999. Disregard metrics. Get rid of devices that track you. Don’t chat with bots. If you feel the need to monitor yourself, do it on paper. Last week I found a notebook of times of day and yellow and brown dots. I realized it was from when I was a new mom in 2007 tracking when I changed my baby’s diaper. Thank God I couldn’t put that shit — literal! — on an app. It would have trained me to put private health information online that could be weaponized later. Use the good parts of the internet — the ability to communicate with people across long distances, for example — and shun the mechanical eyes.

Karen S: Your piece about your trips to Twin Peaks uncovered your visceral reaction about the tightrope of voyeurism vs awareness. That voyeurism or strange joy is also projected in the newly discovered descriptions of abuse found in the Epstein files. Child sexual abuse on the scale of Epstein or the Catholic Church is possible because of the infrastructure of denial. My thought is that on the surface our rights are being stripped away and on a deeper level we are being stripped away. What are some examples of collective ways you’ve observed denial culture effectively challenged? Throughout history or in our current predicament?

SK: That is a great question. I bolded one of your sentences because it’s important. The Epstein files are meant to encourage voyeurism and dehumanization when they are dumped en masse with no meaningful accountability for the perpetrators. The DOJ seeks to turn personal pain into mass content and the media complies. They want to satisfy us with spectacle so that we drop our demand for recourse. It falls upon us to be vigilant and guard our souls — to keep them from being stripped away.

The architecture of social media is designed to favor grift over contemplation. People don’t deny the depth of depravity of Epstein and his cohort anymore. But they are getting acclimatized to it, and they will eventually be acclimatized to the lack of justice. The next step is normalization. It may be hard to imagine the sadistic Epstein acts being regarded as normal — there are universal taboos in those emails — but the world just witnessed a live-streamed genocide by Israel. Denial of Israeli war crimes is now gone, but no one is punished for them. Challenging political culture often rests on individuals and small groups of people being persistent and not giving in, even when those around them surrender to depravity. Folks still have a moral choice. If you stick to your morals, sometimes people are encouraged and stick to theirs, too.

Velma: Now that the files are more abundantly available, do you think that puts you less at risk for aggressively speaking out, or is that me and wishful thinking? Or does that put you in the crosshairs more than ever. (I do understand that maybe retribution could still be at play). I feel like there’s so many people either jumping ship or turning on them so fast it’s making their heads spin and maybe those are the more pertinent targets. Thank you for all you do and willing to do!

SK: Sometimes I plot how I’d best kill me if I were my enemy and I have some great ideas. I’m not sharing them though! For years, there were attempts to censor Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, and I was getting death threats at the same time. But I doubted people would act on the threats because it would create a Streisand effect and draw people to my books. Now Epstein is everywhere, so I’m unsure what threat my books pose. I did focus on an Epstein associate without knowing he was one (Vitaly Churkin). I couldn’t figure out why so many people wanted to kill me over the Churkin sections of Hiding in Plain Sight — now I know!

I can’t base my life around threats or I’d be wasting it. I’m not scared of dying but I am scared of not living. I agree there are much bigger targets than me. I try to stay underestimated. I weave a fine line and then I walk it. Now it’s time to stop talking!

Brennan: I usually ask about the downfall of western civilization. This time, since I want to just snuggle with my toddler and watch cartoons, I’ll ask something more on my mind: what was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon to watch growing up?

SK: I’m not sure which was my favorite — though I did like that show where Mr. T solved mysteries with a team of gymnasts; I had to doublecheck that I did not hallucinate this — but every weekend I watched hours of USA Cartoon Express. I’d wake at 6:00 am and watch until it went off the air, which is like seven straight hours of cartoons. One year, an education scholar came to my elementary school to study the “gifted” kids and our TV habits, under the assumption that good students watch less TV. I personally destroyed that woman’s thesis thanks to USA Cartoon Express!

K. Smith: Is this a great time to be a billionaire or what? However, I sense a blowback coming. Do you think we the people will be able to reduce their political power and wealth? If so how?

SK: The redistribution of wealth since covid is obscene. There is no historic parallel. It’s particularly alarming since so much money went to the tech sector and we are a tech-dependent society. This is why I encourage autonomy from Big Tech (especially smartphones) and funding independent creators and small businesses instead. There is space between being a billionaire and living paycheck to paycheck, and to get to that more comfortable place — and restore some of our power — we should support local businesses and labor unions and shun tech dependency. Our money is chump change to billionaires: they are trying to reshape our values and our sense of possibility.

Nick: Looking at the next three years, what should Americans stop assuming will “hold,” but likely won’t?

SK: The postal service. I’m not saying it will not exist, but it’s been threatened since Trump’s first term. Between Biden’s refusal to remove Trump’s coup partner Louis DeJoy, GOP calls for privatization, and the SCOTUS ruling that mail is no longer guaranteed, USPS is in danger. I worry that the attack on USPS is linked to talk of partitioning the US: you don’t need a national postal service when you don’t have a country. Written mail is also immune from digital surveillance and therefore is seen as a threat to technofascism. I’ve long been alarmed by the attack on USPS. It’s a bipartisan gutting of a popular institution we thought would always be around.

Cody M: Do you read fiction? If so, what are you currently reading? I really like some of the pre and post-pandemic books. I just finished Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. It was good but really loved her post-pandemic novel Sea of Tranquility.

SK: Of course I read fiction! But I’ve been slacking. I was reading Don DeLillo (and White Noise counts as pandemic fiction foreshadowing) and Mao II was next. Instead, I read Hello Darlin’, the autobiography of Larry Hagman. JR wins again!

Nancy: Why can I not shake the feeling that the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother is awfully convenient for an administration bent on cowing the press? But a pro hitman would never have been caught on camera, right? It’s just lucky for Trump?

SK: That story is strange. We no longer have a news monoculture, and I’m not trying to follow the story, but I hear details anyway. In the 1990s, there were a number of celebrity violence stories — OJ in particular — where coverage shifted political culture and elevated corrupt lawyers to prominence. I have no idea if anyone linked to Trump created this situation, but his cohort would certainly exploit it. It’s worth watching whose profile gets raised. It’s also simply a sad, unnerving story. We live in a time of sweeping nightmares — like Epstein — so it’s possible this story attracts mass attention because a tragedy about one family is easier to process.

Jeffrey: If you were to arrange a Substack live video convo with someone soon, who would you most like to do it with? (For example I’d be really interested if you did one with Peter Pomerantsev, author of e.g. ‘How to Win an Information War’.)

SK: I’ve vaguely committed to a couple — stay tuned! And yes, Pomerantsev is helpful. I read him in grad school to understand Russia and now he sheds light on the US.

Steve B: Have you developed a way to tell if a politician is *not* part of the corrupt system that has failed to hold Trump and all those associated with him accountable?

SK: AIPAC is somewhat of a reliable indicator. They target not only people who critique Israel, but people who critique sedition. They funded Trump’s seditionists! But they’re not a failproof indicator: Marjorie Taylor-Greene didn’t take AIPAC money (which is commendable) but still backed the attempted coup. Financial transparency is important. Follow the money and the plutocrat networks.

Extraordinary People: If we were going to take a road trip from Oregon to St. Louis, how many days should we spend there exploring the city and other reasonably drivable sites around Missouri with St. Louis as a base? What time of year is best to visit? What are a couple of “must see/must do” attractions? Love your travel logs and you’re inspiring us to make more memories before things get even worse. Thanks!

SK: St. Louis has fantastic free museums. I recommend the art museum and the zoo year-round. The botanical garden is awesome and cheap. City Museum is worth the price. Some of my favorite places are outdoors. See a Missouri show cave; the classic is Meramec Caverns. Do a river float trip; if you’re short on time, do the canoe trip near the Arch with Big Muddy Adventures. The old cemeteries of St. Louis are incredible: visit Bellefontaine. Eat dessert for every meal at Fountain on Locust, Crown Candy Kitchen, and Ted Drewes. The best seasons to visit are spring and fall. Summers are miserably hot and winters are rough. State parks are awesome (and free); Elephant Rocks and Ha Ha Tonka are worth the drive. Now tell me what to see in Oregon!

Marina: What do you think about Whitney Webb? Is she reliable? She asks a lot of right questions but her cooperation with RFK JR and blatant antivax stand is a bit off.

SK: I’ve read some of her articles and thought most were solid and well-sourced. Her work on transnational organized crime overlaps with mine, and she’s done good research on technofascism. We share common interests and enemies. That she and I do not know each other, and have never interacted, shows how much of this conspiracy was in the public domain. We came to the same conclusions independently because they’re true. I’ve seen her with Glenn Beck and RFK Jr and agree that’s not great. My guess is she wanted her message out and used them to deliver it.

Terri: I found you on TV news shows years ago (Rachel Maddow to be specific) and have followed you ever since. Then I stopped seeing you on shows. Did you decide that you didn’t want to play anymore or was it something more like the corporations were afraid of why you were saying and stopped asking?

SK: I was never on Maddow’s show. The shows I was invited to repeatedly were Joy Reid, Jason Johnson, Zerlina Maxwell, and Tiffany Cross. You may notice a theme. When MSNBC fired their Black anchors, I was gone too. I was never on TV as often as people think; maybe three times a month. Viral clips left folks with the false impression I was a regular. I don’t want to be a corporate pundit; I live in Missouri. I turn down TV during float trip season because weekend morning shows interfere with my canoe time. The real stream always beats the cable stream! But yes, I did piss off TV execs when I called the Trump admin a “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” on air, so wariness on their part was a factor too.

Josie: Would you ever consider developing and hosting another podcast?

SK: Unlikely. I like being a guest on podcasts, but writing is where my heart is.

Mkpokit: Today, here in N. PA., I was trimming brush around the garage when I heard and saw a pileated woodpecker fly by signaling spring is on its way. What is your favorite springtime activity? Ours is planting the veggie garden.

SK: Kayaking, wildflowers, and the morel mushroom hunt!

Brent: Why the hell is Jared Kushner “negotiating” with Iran? I feel like I know the answer based on everything you’ve written previously, but please discuss. His involvement with everything from Russia to Gaza to Iran leaves me with a sick feeling.

SK: Kushner is the most dangerous person in the Trump fold. I’ve said since 2017 that he is my litmus test of whether the US is an entrenched mafia state, and we keep failing. He is not an official member of the US government, but we are not really ruled by the US government: we are ruled by a shadow government, and he is a reigning member. He rose to prominence through nepo baby status and long ties to a network involved in transnational organized crime and Israel. There are people in this network who consider Russia, Gaza, and Iran to be one war. They seek to repartition the world because they consider themselves its masters. They view other human beings as disposable. This is why they collaborate with technofascists pushing AI replacements.

Carmen: Is it naive to question why politicians are talking about all that will be done when the Dems take back the House, instead of discussing the plan/strategy for safeguarding the elections? Especially in light of the fact that Trump has remarked that elections may never be necessary again. We know Reps plan and execute. What am I missing? Darrell: Why aren’t the Dem leadership (wink wink) running around with their hair on fire protesting this raping of our constitution and rule of law? They don’t seem to be taking this rising fascist state seriously.

SK: The Democrats are a failed party. I do not think either party should exist at this point. I would be happy if two new parties arose to counter both the Dems and the GOP. The GOP is a party of abusers, the Dems are enablers, and this dynamic has been in place for the entire 21st century. The Democratic leadership is behaving no differently than they did before, which is the problem. It is the level of threat that has changed: failed democracy became fledgling fascism became an autocratic mafia state, and all the while, Dems collaborated with internal enemies and continue to protect them. Their refusal to focus on election integrity — a problem which dates back decades! — and instead fundraise off our fear is a key example of their failure.

Mary VH: Do you share your frustration and feelings with your US Congressperson and Senators? I do but they all support Trump and even though I sometimes get replies I wonder if I’m wasting my time. Same goes for my state legislators but I do keep at it with them. My state SC is mostly going after women and LGBTQ rights.

SK: No, but they already know what I think.

Chad C: Republicans have proven they cannot be allowed to have power for the foreseeable future. Should a democrat win the presidency in 2028 what things can he/she do to make drastic changes? Make D.C. a state (there’s two democratic senators right there), expand the Supreme Court?

SK: Making DC a state and expanding SCOTUS were mainstream Democratic propositions in 2019 that Biden then labeled radical. They should be returned to the mainstream platform. Abolishing ICE and destroying the concentration camps should be a foremost objective. But the Democratic leadership must be ousted first. There are some Democrats who understand the fascist threat and have good ideas, but they have been punished severely by their own party — ousted, in some cases. Most Dems serve the public nothing but empty promises and taunts about GOP threats that they won’t actually fight. We need a candidate that can beat the old Dem vanguard and the GOP.

Curt: I have an 18-year-old son, and wow, the manoshpere is relentless on social media. I fear he gets more of that influencer slop than any realistic, sane viewpoints. The algorithms don’t help. Any suggested folks for him to follow that counteract this mogging culture, which leans right wing?

SK: That’s scary. My son is 15. I warn him about algorithms. But he’s a teen; I can only hope he listens. My advice is to try to keep kids offline as much as possible: not in a punitive way, but by making sure they have fun analog hobbies. If he’s influenced by “manosphere” propaganda, show him something that lets him see a woman’s perspective — nothing hectoring, nothing that says there’s something inherently wrong with being a guy (there’s not!), but something that shows how real women are hurt by this subculture. Boys are hurt by it too, for that matter, but often it’s easier to convey the danger through women because the “manosphere” trains them to believe any man who shows vulnerability is weak.

Mike in Weho: What IS the worst that can happen? What scenario(s) can you speculate? Is there anything we can do to prepare in advance? I recall you mentioning, (as recently as your last newsletter), something to the effect of horrible scenarios you were still too hesitant to write about. Can you tell us now?

SK: It won’t help to tell you terrifying things I suspect are happening unless I have enough evidence. We are dealing with very sadistic people. My predictions are accurate because I do extensive research before I share them. If I’m confident about something, I will tell you, as I always have. For now, there’s enough bad news already!

Kristen L: If you could pick up and move to any country in the world with your family, whether for a year or for a lifetime, where would you go? I ask because lots of us think about leaving, and most decide everywhere is going to have the same problems as here, so we stay put. But it’s nice to wonder about sometimes, as an idea.

SK: Ideally, we’d be vagabonds and see as many countries as possible. It can’t happen because I have elderly relatives and people who depend on me. I wish it could. There’s no country where I’d feel safe, but we’d live on the run until we saw the whole world.

Thanks everyone! If you’d like to submit a question in the future, join here:

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A real paint-by-numbers conspiracy! I painted this in 2020 and found it in a box labeled “Sarah’s Pandemic Art”.

1:00 pm UPDATE: I’m reopening the comments so I can copy them over and organize them in the Q & A, and so folks can continue conversations. But I won’t be responding to any additional questions, just to what’s already here. Thanks!

3:00 pm UPDATE: I answered some of the more personal questions directly in the comments section! Check and see if you’ve been answered already. I’m leaving the more widely asked questions (Epstein!) for the Q & A.

Never in my years running this newsletter have I received as many emails asking “What is happening?” than in the last two weeks — so it’s time for another Q & A!

For those new to this feature, here’s how it works:

1) To ask a question, join as a paying subscriber, and post your question in the comments section below:

2) I will answer as many questions as I can in a separate article. I bundle questions and address common themes. Please keep your question brief and ask only one!

3) The article with my answers will be open to all. In other words, you need to be a paying subscriber to submit a question, but not to read the Q & A.

I call this feature “Just Answering Questions” because there are topics that, if I were to raise them out of the blue, would be like exploding your inbox. If you’ve read my books on Trump, Epstein, and autocracy, you know they cover disturbing ground. Here, you choose the topic — and I’m just answering questions!

If you are already a paying subscriber, you are all set — you can submit a question in the comments section below!

If you’re not a paying subscriber, this is a good time to become one. This newsletter is funded by volunteers: I can keep it free because people who can pay do. In recent months, some folks have had to drop subscriptions due to job loss. I want my writing to stay open to everyone, regardless of income level. This newsletter is also my livelihood and keeps my family afloat. If you can afford to pay, please consider it.

I am very grateful to paying subscribers and I offer these Q & As to thank you.

Here are past Q & As. You may find the answer to your question there already. If not, they serve as an interesting record of our times:

A Nation on Thin Ice – January 23, 2026
Welcome to Leaving the Party, Pal! — December 4, 2025
PanoptiCon Artists— October 10, 2025
Mafia State Survival – August 29, 2025
Fake Feuds, Real Crises – June 13, 2025
White House vs Road House – May 12, 2025
We’re Already in the Aftermath – February 26, 2025
Trump Term Two – January 17, 2025
Just Answering (Many) Questions! – November 18, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Flamethrower! – October 30, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Answers! – September 30, 2024

I also did an interview this week about American autocracy on the Mark Thompson Show, so check that out too.

I hope to get the new article out this weekend. But I am dealing with family tragedies as well as political chaos, so please be understanding of my situation. Thanks!

Note: Past Q & As were so popular that I had to shut down submissions within 24 hours. That may happen again, so let’s go — leave your questions in the comments section below!

But which way?! (Photograph by me; February in Missouri)

I finally felt ready to return to Zombie Road. 2026 leaves you ready for everything and nothing. I live in a nightmare echo chamber where topics I covered for over a decade in my books and articles — autocracy, institutional complicity, extremely specific details of the Epstein/Maxwell case — are now repeated by the same pundits and officials who dismissed them when it mattered most. They buried crimes in silence, then noise, and now spectacle.

The lack of accountability stays the same.

People ask if I feel vindicated. It’s an evil question. I wanted justice, not approval. No one needed to vindicate me. I knew I was right: I wanted the world to make me wrong. Facts are facts, and cowards are cowards, and belated recognition of obvious crimes does not negate the harm done to victims.

What the truth can do is shine a light to a better future. But officials behave as if the future is foreclosed. They rush toward evil in every form: genocide, eugenics, the replacement of humanity with artificial intelligence. They are part and parcel with the predators they were supposed to expose and condemn and prosecute.

They always were.

* * *

I go to Zombie Road because it doesn’t lie, no matter how it changes. The haunted path winds between hulking hills that were once Native American burial mounds. I pass a signpost that says “Zombie West, Zombie East” with mileage markers for trails.

Over the past decade, Zombie Road got gentrified. One of St. Louis’s most notorious sites — where locals claim to see the reanimated corpses of train robbers and Civil War soldiers and “a shadow nest of children” on the cliffs at night — now boasts mountain biking and hilltop McMansions. County officials decided to lean into the zombie lore instead of feigning respectability. It was the right move.

“Zombie West, Zombie East.” That’s how it feels to live in the middle of a technofascist criminal syndicate spanning the globe.

We no longer watch the news: the news watches us. Stories written by robots are posted on websites that suck personal information from our phones and hand it to data miners controlled by oligarchs. “Journalists” brag that they rely on AI to map the child rape networks that they once denied existed; the networks that include the very oligarchs breeding the AI. They dig humanity’s grave and stagger back out of it.

“Fake news” used to mean propaganda or inconvenient truths that Trump deemed lies. Now fake news is news written by non-human entities hallucinating a counterfeit reality. It is fake without motive, fake for the sake of being fake and making you lose confidence that anything can be real. It is zombie news for zombie consumption.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” St. Louis native Maya Angelou famously said.

When people refuse to admit that a conspiracy of wealthy predators is real — even though it has been documented publicly since Epstein was first indicted in 2006, confirmed by dozens of victims over decades, and investigated by journalists who were threatened by the perpetrators and their lawyers — believe that these denialists were acting as enablers the first time, and never grant them your trust.

They are zombies. They eat pain and spit it out as content in an attempt to inure you to the depths of depravity. They want voyeurism, not accountability. If they wanted justice, they would have believed the trafficked child rape victims the first time. If they had integrity, they would have not only surrendered their access to criminal elites when the story broke years ago but been ashamed that they ever coveted it.

I believe in redemption, but not for this. Not for the predators, not for the enablers. This has always been a clearcut case. This has always been a spiritual war.

* * *

The shipwreck lies on a sandbar off deep blue water where icebergs drift like silver rafts. This stretch of the Meramec River is isolated and idyllic, an oasis of driftwood and birdsong. Locals nicknamed it the River of Death for all the people who drowned here. Euphemisms do no good in a dystopia.

I’d seen the shipwreck when the water was high enough to form a barrier around it. Now the river ran low, and a brush trail led to a steep incline where I could climb down to the ruins. I could see the hull and a rusted red entryway shaped like a shack. A tree grew in the midsection. It had been there a long time.

I’ve been told this is not really a shipwreck, but the remains of a gravel barge that crashed some fifty years ago. I still call it a shipwreck, because you still call this a government, and that crashed some fifty years ago too.

I was a woman alone on the river of death in winter. This adventure was unwise, but no more unwise than investigating an international crime syndicate of wealthy pedophiles for ten years, so I decided to explore.

I slid to the ground and peered into the barge. Rotting equipment lay by a pile of tires. Someone else had been here. Iron hooks lined a concrete outer wall where the boat used to dock. I wondered why no one bothered to fix the ship or remove it. I don’t want them to do that: the wreck is too interesting. It made me feel like a child again, a child unbothered, a child unaware of how her country treats children.

I felt safe in my shipwreck because I was far from the men with the yachts.

* * *

I hopped over ice puddles and climbed back to Zombie Road. I followed the train tracks into the woods and walked past the skeleton of an animal, hollowed out so only its head and spinal cord remained, and wondered what picked it clean.

I thought of all the people who had walked this trail for centuries, and the terrible things they had witnessed, and how nothing seemed to match the horrors in my 21^st-century mind. The patterns of elite criminality and complicity, the patterns I can’t comprehend why others refused for so long to see.

I sat on a bench and closed my eyes and mourned the unbelieved.

When I looked up, two trees were hugging. One stretched out its branches in a warm embrace and the other leaned in. They were in love and they didn’t care who knew it.

I felt grateful that whatever part of me let me see the dystopia coming let me see that too.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all, including exposes on Epstein, Trump, and their enablers. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four — so I need and appreciate your support!

Shipwreck! All photos by me, February 2026.

Two trees in love.

The River of Death.

Zombie Road.

A former inhabitant of Zombie Road.

Alone in the wreckage.

I was sitting on a window seat watching a construction crew drill into the sidewalk below. I didn’t want to stand on a floor that trembled. Everything valuable threatened to fall. A photo of my children flipped over like a memory I couldn’t trust.

Outside, a stream of liquid coated the road. The workers gathered in a circle and looked down at something terrible. One picked up the jackhammer again and drilled deep and hard. The rest stood back and watched while he did it. I closed the windows, but I could not block out the sound or the feeling of earth giving way.

When will this stop, how can I make it stop I started to write, then deleted it. I saw my original text. I wrote instead:

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accidentally summarize the state of the nation.”

* * *

Two weeks later, the DOJ released the Epstein files. The first people I looked up were the ones who tried to prevent my two books on Jeffrey Epstein, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, from being published. The next were the people who threatened to kill me for writing them. The ones whose names I know, anyway.

Looking through the files, I felt an old familiar sensation: this was the first time in years I got search results without an AI summary. I try to configure search engines to avoid AI, but Big Tech learned to override tricks like writing “-AI” or “-fuck”. The new robot overlords stole my old hobby of researching the technofascists who birthed them. The public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone.

I remembered when I found documentation of Trump and Epstein’s rape cases over a decade ago, and wrote about them, and thought people would care. When a timeline was a chronology on a social media site and not an alternate reality about which you fantasize: an alternative reality in which predators face consequences.

Then I felt another familiar sensation: I was jackhammering into the sewer now too.

When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That’s what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.

They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.

Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.

This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn’t be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.

Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I’m done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.

In the Epstein files, I found primary source documents related to events I described in my books: email invites to pedophile parties, open and cavalier. The brazenness stemmed from a lifetime of elite criminal impunity. I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap.

They like their worlds small, like the children they rape.

* * *

In 2021, I read the personal archives of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who had covered many of the same criminal networks as me. I wrote about him in They Knew as an example of a journalist murdered for going down this road, but he was more than that. He was a lyrical writer, a tenacious researcher, and a poetic soul. I felt invasive looking through his unpublished work. This is not how it was meant to be seen: by a stranger nearly the same age as he was when he was killed. Casolaro was 44 when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel on August 10, 1991.

I remember shaking when I found a paper with Robert Maxwell’s name and address on it. “The European,” Casolaro called him. I took photos of the documents. After I did that, my phone was hacked and died. I had to go back and do it again, this time with different precautions.

Robert Maxwell was an espionage operative who procured Israeli passports for mobsters in the USSR so they could expand their criminal network worldwide. After he died falling (or being pushed) off a yacht in 1991, he was given an elaborate hero’s funeral by the Israeli government. Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Epstein, continued her father’s criminal operations, which included human trafficking.

Everyone I’ve just mentioned died in a suicide called a murder or a murder called a suicide, except Ghislaine, who is benefiting from the largesse extended by Trump and his Kushner-affiliated backer, the Aleph Institute.

I don’t want to write this article. Can you tell? I did not want to write books about crimes this depraved either. But it felt like the right thing to do: maybe exposure would bring consequences. Casolaro expressed hesitation, too, due to the enormity and danger of the topic. But he knew he had something, and he put his heart into his work.

That’s the irony: this work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you’ve lost too much already to let them take that too.

* * *

Two years after They Knew, a documentary about Casolaro came out. I couldn’t watch it. When you spend a lot of time with someone’s unpublished writing, it feels both intimate and exploitative. I didn’t want to feel the latter.

I had also recently watched The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, a documentary about journalist Maury Terry and his struggle to prove a satanic group was involved in the murders committed by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Terry was traumatized by his search. Desperation for clarity on the case consumed his life.

The documentary was released in May 2021. This was when Google still worked and most news sites were not paywalled. After watching, I read Terry’s 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, and began looking up the officials he described as blocking his inquiry.

Once again, I found pedophiles in positions of power. For example, Eugene Gold, the Son of Sam prosecutor, admitted to assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Tennessee, a crime that would normally get a man life in prison, but in 1983, the judge let it slide. Gold had announced in 1981 that he was resigning as an attorney and would devote his life to serving Jewish causes. He moved to Israel in 1982. As CBS reported, Israel allows American pedophiles to become Israeli citizens. (You should print this report, as ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss now runs CBS.) Gold never faced punishment for sexually assaulting a child. He returned to the US and lived to be 100 years old.

I’m telling this story now because it’s hardly unique. I’m telling this story because it may disappear with the rest of the public domain into AI controlled by oligarchs. I’m telling this story for that 10-year-old girl in Tennessee.

The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, Tik-Tok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history.

They want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them.

* * *

Across my street is a barricaded sidewalk where the construction workers were jackhammering into the sewer. A loose plank of wood lies on top. Hole, it says. Underneath, a sea of shit, barely covered. It’s Groundhog Day and the second Trump administration is one year old.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all, including exposes on Epstein, Trump, and their enablers. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four — so I need and appreciate your support!

Where the sidewalk ends.

Groundhog Day. Not everything that repeats is bad.

There are a lot of questions, so you’ve got a nice long Q & A to curl up with in the snowpacalypse! I’m going to publish this before the electricity and my mind give out. As Lonnie Johnson sang in 1938, “My brains is cloudy, my soul is upside-down.” On that note, let’s kick it off with thoughts on sin and Sinners:

Frank G: It seems there has been very little cultural reaction to the US becoming an authoritarian, oligarchic, severely economically stratified nation in the past 10-15 years. Other repressive eras in our nation’s history produced huge cultural responses in music, art, literature and film, but it seems to me we are not really seeing this now. Am I reading the situation correctly and, if so, what do you think is the reason for this? Ciri500: The trajectory of the music industry the last 25 years has set things up so that music becomes more generic. Most musicians cannot afford to spend time making music as many people no longer buy physical media…If rich kids are the only ones making art and music, it won’t be as rabble-rousing and it won’t challenge the status quo. What do you think of this theory?

SK: Like politicians, entertainment companies have stopped trying to win us over: they instead focus on inserting things we don’t want (like AI) without our permission. The merger of Big Tech with Hollywood is one of the worst things to happen to American pop culture. The rot brought on by AI, algorithms, and “anti-DEI” racism is notable given the creative richness and diversity of the last two decades. The industry that boosted a show like Reservation Dogs just a few years ago is gone.

But cultural responses are still there. People still make art to reflect our time: it’s just a matter of whether their efforts are heard and recognized. I got your question on a rare day: the day Sinners got a record number of Oscar nominations. Sinners — a tale of vampiric white supremacists and Black cultural resistance during Jim Crow — is a commentary on our current era and its historical precedent. In the 1930s, Black music was an act of rebellion. Making Sinners is an act of rebellion now. Singing the blues is bearing witness; juke joints spit at the idea of white corporate control; and Sinners takes on race, crime, law, and other heavy issues in a wildly entertaining way.

In repressive eras, horror is where the unsaid can be said (see The Twilight Zone in the censorship-heavy early 1960s). The two movies that best respond to the political culture of the past ten years are Sinners and Get Out: another Black horror film. These films combine sharp political critique and visceral thrill and do so with vivid, original style. Their impact is one reason the Trump admin and its Hollywood backers deploy their racist “anti-DEI” policies: they’re afraid, and not of the supernatural.

You’re right that the last few years have felt flat and dull. Peak TV ended after decades of shows reflecting on the moral crisis of the US (Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.) We’ve been flooded with boring shows about the ultra-rich; this shift started around 2022. The downfall of TV was preceded by the downfall of the music industry: the murder of radio, MTV, and the musical pop monoculture — and with it, the counterculture that had formed in reaction. Like streaming TV, digital music is siloed and repressed by algorithms. Politically conscious songs exist but are hard to find. Americans still long for them: that’s why the “Fast Car” duet in 2024 entranced the nation.

A Declining Democracy: What did you think of Carney’s speech at Davos? In some ways I thought it was a great “emperor has no clothes” moment, and in others I thought it didn’t go far enough. I’d love to hear your take.

SK: It was novel not to be lied to, even though the honesty was about the evils of my country. I’m glad Carney dispensed with the notion of the “rules-based international order.” Belief in institutionalism — and denial that institutions have been protecting transnational organized crime all along — is how we got to this crisis. I discuss that (normalcy bias, savior syndrome, etc) in my book They Knew.

My one major critique of the speech is that, while of course the US government is responsible for its actions, those actions are made possible by global oligarchs, mobsters, and plutocrats. As I’ve been saying for a decade, the US is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. In order to defeat the US mafia state, you need to defeat the billionaires backing it. That means confronting so-called “allies” like Israel and so-called “enemies” like Russia. Their worst actors are one and the same: men of multiple passports and digital currency. It means addressing Silicon Valley and the emergence of a global surveillance state shaped by fanatics like Musk and Thiel. Overall, I found his speech encouraging. I just hope he sees the big picture.

Victoria K: I saw a Norm Finkelstein interview in which when he was young, he asked his mother, a concentration camp survivor, how she survived. She said that people who got the bread for soup are the ones who pushed and shoved others to get to the front of the line. The basic conclusion being “Good people don’t live.” This an ethical conundrum I think about frequently. How do you view this aspect of the moment we’re living in?

SK: I appreciate Finkelstein’s critiques of Israel and his condemnation of the exploitation of the Holocaust by bad actors. He does not shy away from examining the darkest aspects of human nature, to say the least. But I can’t draw broad advice from this anecdote: I don’t think any of us know how we’d act when struggling for survival. There are gray areas, but keeping your moral integrity is crucial, or else your soul dies before your body. He may be right that “good people don’t live” but there’s also “good people who commit horrors cannot live with themselves.” (To be clear, I don’t think jumping the line for food to survive is a big offense; I think murdering someone is.)

Alice L: You write frequently that Trump is more of a kleptocrat than a fascist. Recently I noticed that you also say that this misdiagnosis is part of why we’re being so unsuccessful at stopping him from being so destructive. What would we be doing differently if we viewed him as a kleptocrat?

SK: As I wrote in Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, Trump differs from traditional fascists because he has no loyalty to the US and will happily sell off parts of it to foreign backers. In the last year, Trump has embraced the typical aggressive imperialism of a fascist dictator — threatening Greenland, Venezuela, etc. He is following that path much more than he did in his first term. At heart, though, he is a mafioso and kleptocrat. The world is a corrupt real estate deal; its people incidental — including the people of the United States. To deal with Trump, one must reevaluate leverage and realize that the existence of the US is irrelevant to him even if he is its president. Instead, focus on the transnational criminal network and dismantle that.

Beth: As a Canadian, I am watching Trump’s antics with alarm. How do you foresee the Greenland annexation talk playing out? Are we going to witness the US starting multi-front wars for Greenland, Canada and more? Brennan: It’s pretty clear that we are now in the phase where Trump openly bullies other countries with the implied threat that they don’t have nuclear weapons and he does, just as you highlighted in Hiding in Plain Sight, where he is quoted as far back as the 1980s saying he wanted to be president so he could use the US nuclear superpower status to force other smaller countries into bending the knee. So now what? He invades Greenland? Simon: Do you think Greenland starts the end of USA empire? It began with Reagan and hinged on Dubya’s response to 9/11. 47 is playing the Nero fiddle role.

SK: Trump operates as president the same way he did as a “businessman”: he is entrenched in organized crime. His main tactics are bribes, blackmail, and threats. His main weapons are the courts, propaganda outlets, and lawyer fixers and operatives, some of whom will privately threaten to kill you. We saw the Trump model in the lead-up to January 6. It began with denial, then a threatening call to a Georgia official, then court battles that he lost, and finally a violent attack — and then ensuring complicit actors are installed to protect the elites behind that attack.

This is the same strategy for Greenland. It is currently being approached as a “deal” in which inhabited territory, largely populated by indigenous people, is treated as real estate. This plan is more elaborate than “purchasing Greenland”: it involves mineral licenses and Arctic trade routes and other oligarchs. Military invasion is not Trump’s first line of offense — but threatening it has other advantages, like making Europe hate the US and want to kick it out of NATO. That’s a longtime Trump/Putin goal.

It is important to note that the Greenland plot was devised by lifelong Trump partner Ron Lauder. Lauder is a fanatical Zionist deeply connected to Netanyahu and Russian/Israeli oligarchs like Roman Abramovich and Lev Leviev. His brother, Leonard Lauder, was one of the men who arranged for Trump to be sent to the USSR in 1987, along with Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin and future Russian ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin, who died under suspicious circumstances in 2017 and was revealed in 2023 to be an Epstein associate. I wrote about Lauder and Churkin in my 2020 book Hiding in Plain Sight.

I have more I could say about Ron Lauder — a scion of the Estee Lauder empire; born rich, like Trump — but the key point is how he seems to view sovereignty. As an ultra-Zionist, he appears to see it as irrelevant for every country except Israel. If Israel’s territorial expansion means butchering indigenous people or invading other nations, so be it. Many of Trump’s closest advisors seek to weaken the idea of sovereignty to provide a pretext for Israel’s genocides and wars, which are their top priority: far above the welfare of the US. I’m not being speculative; Trump backers like Sheldon Adelson (who died in 2021) admitted their loyalty to Israel over the US. Given the outsized role Israel’s leaders and American ultra-Zionists play in determining Trump policy, disputes like Greenland need to be considered through an ultra-Zionist lens.

Disregard for sovereignty benefits other Trump partners like the Kremlin as they try to justify their invasion of Ukraine. The goal is an intertwined network of oligarch-run mafia fiefdoms, with, as Carney noted, no post-WWII international order to constrain it. This is why some of the same people “negotiating” over Gaza are also “negotiating” over Ukraine. By “negotiating”, I mean striking mafia deals. I do worry that the disregard for sovereignty will lead to a threatened invasion of Canada. If Trump does this, he’ll likely press on two weak points: 1) Alberta right-wing separatists 2) French-speaking separatists. My advice for Canada is the same as for the US: stick together! The more you are split apart, the easier it is to take you over.

Larry H: Luke Kemp’s fascinating book Goliath’s Curse starts with a discussion of the collapse of Cahokia, which he links to his overall thesis about how “civilizational” collapse is really more about the overthrow of elites and can sometimes lead to better, more egalitarian lives for the subjugated. Are you familiar with his work, and what do you think about the thesis?

SK: I haven’t read that but now I want to! As a graduate student, I studied archeology at Wash U (across the river from Cahokia). There was no clear consensus among archaeologists for why the Mississippian People abandoned Cahokia. Kemp’s book came out in 2025 so I’m curious if there’s been an update.

Sebastian: It amazes me how you have predicted what has happened to this country. Do you think that behind this bellicose push to own Greenland is the influence of Peter Thiel and his cohort in order to establish a “freedom city” there? I noted that his disciple, JD Vance, was the first one to visit the island even though he was not welcomed. I would love to know what you think...

SK: See my other answer on Greenland. I don’t think Thiel is the main influence, but he shares the desire for minerals for tech. I do think he wants to establish a “freedom city” but my guess for where that nightmare experiment will be tried is Gaza. They want somewhere small; Greenland is enormous. As for Vance, he gives Randy “I can’t put my arms down!” Christmas Story vibes; he wants to seem like a big man in the snow.

(extra) Ordinary People: What is a good/the best source of daily news these days? Judi: What/who are your go-to news sources?

SK: I have none. It’s an incredible statement given that I cover the news for a living. But I cannot think of a single outlet that is reliable, not run by oligarchs, and not paywalled. There are individual writers doing a good job, but no big outlet where I can get an accurate rundown of daily news. I emphasize primary sources since so many corporations use AI and make things up. I used to have a curated social media list of experts, but it no longer works because either people quit or the social media outlets themselves (Twitter and BlueSky) block these accounts.

Jac Qui: I am stymied why people keep referencing DJT’s dementia or mental health. He says and does outrageous things: that isn’t a departure from his normal presentation. Even if he did have some cognitive issues, would it change anything in the current administration? I’m sure they have contingency plans.

SK: I agree. The focus on his health is wishful thinking. It’s easier to believe he is weak and demented than a powerful kleptocrat backed by a well-honed network of fanatics. They wanted to think he was sleeping through his trial because he’s a tired old man instead of an asshole flaunting a preordained outcome in his favor. People also want to see the MAGA cult end, and I do think it will when Trump is no more. But the organized crime structure will remain until it is gutted out of our institutions.

Karen: When you discuss the goals of elite criminal networks, please discuss how ICE and use of Palantir tracking takes this to a different level. I’m in Minneapolis and anyone ICE interacts with is photographed by them (not exclusively in arrest or detainment scenarios). They have traffic stops and photos are taken. My community is a suburb: residential and quiet and restaurants are regularly being raided and now are closed. I am here for a funeral and members of my family who are citizens and people of color cannot travel here for fear of their safety. The speed at which this is happening makes it hard to understand the overall goal.

SK: First, I am sorry for your loss. It is very hard to deal with family tragedies in the midst of political violence. You are right that the use of facial recognition technology by Palantir and other tech companies makes this conflict different than those of the past. Technofascists want to create a system in which basic actions — driving, accessing shelter, getting food — are linked to “good behavior” and in this case, protest participation. We need to fight this through (among other things) breaking smartphone dependency to the degree we can, rejecting AI (which they use to monitor people), exposing technofascist plots, and avoiding self-censorship.

Vicki: Try as I might, I keep coming back to the uneducated inability of a huge number of persons who still do not/cannot comprehend the horror that is unfolding around us. In a state like Missouri (and many others) I blame the decades-old, systematic assault on public education and the denigration of higher ed. They cannot be ignored but they seemingly cannot be made to understand. How does any way forward deal with this reality?

SK: I don’t think higher education has much to do with it. Look at our old governor Eric Greitens, the Rhodes Scholar fascist who got indicted for blackmailing a half-naked woman he tied to exercise equipment in his sex dungeon basement. I do think an unwillingness to learn about past horrors in US history has left many unprepared for current horrors, but formal education isn’t a factor.

Jane: Does your dog travel with you? If he doesn’t, what’s it like for you and him when you return? Sweet looking pup!

SK: My dog Twizzle stays at the kennel when we travel. She loves it there because they baby her, which is how it should be. Twizzle is a rescue dog who, in her first year of life, was abandoned, shot, impregnated, and found starving on the street. We adopted her from the Humane Society when she was one. She has since transformed into an unrepentant hedonist and we do our best to keep her that way. What Twizzle has lost in street cred she has gained in treats, blankets, and human handmaidens.

Chris: Scientific studies come out fairly often that show COVID infections can lead to long term harms for anyone: brain changes in even seemingly recovered people, immune systems that don’t fully recover after 20+ months, etc. While authorities at first claimed kids are magically immune to its long-term harms, Long Covid has now surpassed asthma as the leading chronic illness in children. Do you foresee Americans taking heed and donning masks again where it matters most: airports, airplanes, and medical settings?

SK: One of the great threats of the Trump admin is the continued lack of research into covid and long covid. Biden’s admin tried to ignore covid but RFK Jr’s approach to science is overtly hostile, with research budgets eliminated. This leaves long covid patients in a position where they don’t know what is happening to their own bodies and doctors struggle to treat them — and fear even discussing the disease. There are commonsense things that can be done to mitigate covid: replacing air filtration systems, avoiding indoor crowds when possible, and yes, wearing a mask in airports and hospitals. I don’t think masking will become commonplace because it is politicized. It should not be controversial to wear a mask, and it should be required in medical settings. I’ve got an aunt on hospice who relatives are afraid to visit because her facility doesn’t require masks, so I understand the deep frustration of this question. I lack the scientific expertise to offer an alternative solution.

Ronna R: I listened to the interviews with Sascha Riley. I have followed this story for about 10 years now and feel like his story makes perfect sense. Like pulls all the threads together. Have you listened and if so, what do you think?

SK: I couldn’t bring myself to listen to all of it, but I got the gist. I’ve covered Epstein in depth, and it does a number on my soul, so I pace myself. However, the Riley case brought to mind both the Franklin scandal and the Craig Spence trafficking cases, which I describe in They Knew. These cases also involve the rape and trafficking of boys. Nick Bryant has done a lot of research on this topic. (Interview here.) The Clarence Thomas connection that Riley mentions has a lot of evidence to back it up.

Ciri500: In the last Q&A you mentioned someone knows Epstein using the present tense. Do you think Epstein is still alive, and if so, how did they do that?

SK: I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t think he committed suicide. I think he was either murdered or is alive. If they could cover up a murder (with malfunctioning cameras, missing guards, etc), they could sneak him out. I’ve wondered whether the source of the recent “Epstein leaks” is Epstein. I also had a strange experience before Trump returned to office. An individual who used to work for an organization tied to Epstein, but who detests Epstein, drove across the country to tell me in person that he knows, for a fact, that Epstein is alive. This person does not have a reputation for embellishment. I cannot attest to the veracity of this claim. But I wouldn’t rule it out.

Arc of a Diver: Do you think Minneapolis is ground zero for civil war? Arguably, it started at the constitutional convention, blew up in 1861, and has simmered since, but for how we generally think of a civil war, is Minneapolis today’s Ft. Sumter?

SK: I don’t like the Civil War analogies because 1) people try to divide the country on North/South lines or red/blue lines and those are facile divisions 2) this isn’t a civil war so much as a federal invasion by a mafia state. Minneapolis is less Fort Sumter — which was the result of South Carolina and other southern states declaring secession — than it is a role model in how to fight a siege. I hope I am not speaking prematurely, but I’m encouraged by the solidarity the city has shown.

Anthony: Though there isn’t a one size fits all answer, it would be interesting to read your “broad brush” on daily habits/activities/information consumption that help in maintaining sanity/well being/productivity in activism.

SK: I’m struggling with that whole “maintaining sanity” thing! But what helps me is 1) going outside, especially to hike or kayak, which is hard given the weather 2) music; I have music on all the time 3) crafts, especially weaving or embroidery, because it’s repetitive, pretty, and makes me feel like I accomplished something concrete 4) watching TV with my family at the same time every day; we enjoy the ritual and the conversation 5) visiting historic sites, both for curiosity’s sake but also because they shed light on the present. So, to make a “broad brush” recommendation: nature, art, family, road trips, and routine.

Foosgroup: I’m concerned about the system enabling Trump. Even if he goes, the system with all the dangerous people remains. Should we start by focusing our efforts on winning one big thing at a time? Getting rid of one person is not going to help; they would be replaced by the next in line. Donna: All members of Congress, the Senate, the military, and federal employees take an oath to protect the US from enemies both foreign and domestic. Why are none of them stepping up to meet this threat?

SK: Good question about the oath, Donna! It’s good to remind people that they broke a promise, even as they are attempting to normalize dereliction of duty. The American people are being invaded by a federal mafia state. I don’t want to hear “but they voted for this” when only 22% of the population did, and most Americans condemn ICE and Trump. As for the corrupt system that upholds this administration, it extends beyond our borders, and yes, one bad president will be replaced with another. I don’t think focusing on winning one big thing at a time is the answer. Achieving lots of small goals at once is. If we all focus on local concerns while also showing support for fellow Americans holding the line in big battles like Minnesota, we have a better chance of winning. Diversity of tactics is good when you’re getting hit on multiple fronts.

Rebecca: Everyone says, “Midterms! Midterms!” when it’s 11 months away and Trump has already wreaked so much destruction. I’m worried that even if we do have an election, it may happen with ICE at every voting precinct. Then there’s the very real fear of compromised voting machines. Your take, please?

SK: People should focus on the here and now much more than on the midterms. As I write this, Minneapolis is under siege and responding with a general strike. Locals there say the solidarity is unlike anything they’ve experienced. Whatever happens in Minneapolis, they have shown the power of the people. Everyone donating to politicians will get more done by giving to mutual aid or local activist groups instead. It is too early to predict election activity, but the answer doesn’t lie there anyway. The Democrats won the executive, Senate, and House, and look what happened!

Mary V: What do you think about the fact that people can’t stop talking about the Epstein files when there is so much information already available through transcripts and testimony of victims? The media which I don’t watch is not going to play video on the nightly news of the abuser. How are we going to survive this nightmare?

SK: This is what I’ve been saying too — there’s enough to indict! They are releasing a slow drip of horrific acts of abuse to torture the victims and desensitize spectators. We know the names of many perpetrators: they’ve been public for decades. They’re still out there and some of them are helping direct this government. I want to know the roots of Epstein/Maxwell. I’ve written two books tracing it to the 1970s. But that’s not the point of the DOJ “revelation industry”. I’m with you — this is a disingenuous act when divorced from preexisting knowledge and accountability.

Dennis C: It’s hard to see a way back to any semblance of sanity in this country. What do you think will be the first “real” step towards that? JV: It seems like integrity went “out of fashion.” I was a small child at the time, but I keep thinking of Nixon — and how his party eventually stopped enabling him — compared to the greedy cohort surrounding Trump, who enable him every step of the way. Do we have any hope of restoring integrity as a value in our American culture?

SK: The first step to decency in terms of the government would be an admission of institutional complicity and an apology to the American people. This should be followed by mass resignations. Officials shouldn’t be expected to be forgiven: the point is to do the right thing and gut out the rot. As seen in the unified reaction to Epstein, there is a great hunger for honesty, even if it means confronting horrors. I do not think any of this will happen; it’s just what should happen.

As noted, integrity is shunned. There is an incentive against it. Until that incentive structure changes, sadism rules. But there is a difference between a top-down political culture and what we create ourselves. Americans are helping each other regardless of official directives, and that shifts the culture on its own. I’m encouraged by protest efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere and mutual aid efforts. I’m also encouraged by the growing denouncement of digital dependence. The long phase of denial that has marked the last ten years is giving way to something new.

As for restoring integrity, the only way to do it is to live your values and model that for others. Integrity is the one thing that once you lose, you can’t get back. Integrity is a form of power that no oppressor can touch.

Chad C: Trump will no doubt pardon everyone in his administration, but can a court in another country go after these people? Similar to the Nuremberg Trials.

SK: I wish! This is why the criminal elite has gone so hard after the ICC. Maybe Carney’s realism about the dead “rules-based order” will inspire new routes to justice.

Gauri: Do you think there’s going be to be another shutdown? What is needed to make Congress functional again? Separate non politics q: I’m a huge believer in local honey and general honey magic. Somehow I think you would have some killer honey knowledge! Any fav tips on how to save the bees?!

SK: I’m terrified of shutdowns. I get scared they will use it as an excuse to destroy things like national parks. It is possible we will get another. I also share your worries about bees, but I don’t have expertise here, aside from my inability to turn down local honey wherever I go. If I’ve been in your small town, chances are I bought your homemade honey. Anyway, contact your state conservation department. People there know ways to help, like which plants you can plant in your yard to attract more bees.

Laura H: Do you think Trump has any red line he won’t cross/low to which he won’t go? Do you think he’s still answering to his puppet masters or has he gone rogue?

SK: There is no line Trump will not cross. There is only self-interest. His pursuits are now rooted in greed and sadism, because he has already attained impunity and power. He is old and afraid of his mortality. He is also incapable of shame. However, he does understand shame. He knows there are universal taboos that, if exposed, will give him a level of infamy that he does not want. There are very few taboos that cause this fear. Those universal taboos are pedophilia, child murder, and incest. Trump’s usual response to committing a moral offense has been to shift political culture so that his offense is normalized, as he has done with his extreme bigotry and crime. Keep your eye out for new attempts. It’s notable that there is a propaganda effort to normalize child murder — for example, the genocide of Palestinian children — and the advent of AI child pornography all while the Epstein case looms in the background.

K Smith: Going real dark, what’s the chance of nuclear war (human extinction) in the next 3 years?

SK: Yikes! I don’t know. I’d say the chances of human extinction in three years is very low, like under 1%. The odds of retaliatory nuclear war are low. The likelihood that someone uses a tactical nuke, perhaps only one time, are moderate to high. The leading contender for this act is Trump. Trump has held a lifelong belief that the world will end in nuclear annihilation. In recent years, he has talked about wanting to be the one to push the button. I believe this is how he copes with his fear. It is one of many reasons he should have been disqualified from candidacy in 2016.

On that fun note, that’s it — thanks again, everyone! If you’d like to submit a question for next time — or simply keep this newsletter going — become a paying subscriber:

Lake in Missouri, January 22. Photo by me. No alterations or crops: that’s our life and sky.

UPDATE, Friday 4 PM: The answers are up! Check your mail or here.

Hello subscribers (and future subscribers!) Are you clinging to the cliffs of insanity? Finding our new world order inconceivable? Then it’s time to drop a question in the Q & A! For those new to this feature, here’s how it works:

1) To ask a question, join as a paying subscriber, and post your question in the comments section below:

2) I will answer as many questions as I can in a separate article. I bundle questions and address common themes. Keep your question brief and ask only one!

3) The article with my answers will be open to all. In other words, you need to be a paying subscriber to submit a question, but not to read the Q & A.

I call this feature “Just Answering Questions” because there are topics that, if I were to raise them out of the blue, would be like turning your inbox into the pit of despair. If you’ve read my books, you know they cover disturbing ground. Here, you choose the topic. And I’m just answering questions — as you wish!

If you are already a paying subscriber, you are all set — you can submit a question in the comments section below!

If you’re not a paying subscriber, this is a good time to become one. This newsletter is funded by volunteers: I can keep it free because people who can pay do. In recent months, some folks have had to drop subscriptions due to job loss. I want my writing to stay open to everyone, regardless of income level. This newsletter is also my livelihood and keeps my family afloat. If you can afford to pay, please consider it.

I am extremely grateful to paying subscribers and I offer these Q & As to thank you.

To get a taste of the action, here are past Q & As. You may find the answer to your question there already. If not, they serve as an interesting record of our times:

Welcome to Leaving the Party, Pal! — December 4, 2025
PanoptiCon Artists— October 10, 2025
Mafia State Survival – August 29, 2025
Fake Feuds, Real Crises – June 13, 2025
White House vs Road House – May 12, 2025
We’re Already in the Aftermath – February 26, 2025
Trump Term Two – January 17, 2025
Just Answering (Many) Questions! – November 18, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Flamethrower! – October 30, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Answers! – September 30, 2024

Note: Past Q & As were so popular that I had to shut down submissions within a day. That may happen again, so let’s go — leave your questions in the comments section below!

The Cliffs of Insanity! (Missouri version.)

Her grave is simple and white. She is surrounded by veterans of every war from the American Revolution to the Black Hawk Revolt to Vietnam. America lived in Illinois, which became a state when she was two. She died aged 53 in 1873, eight years after the Civil War ended. I wonder what she thought was coming.

The headstones surrounding America Myers are battered and worn. Some bear the scars of repair: patchwork tombs of broken remembrances. Others were long rendered indecipherable.

America is buried in Waterloo on a cliff overlooking the American Bottom.

It sounds like I’m making things up, but it’s real. I wasn’t in Waterloo, Illinois, seeking metaphors: I was looking for bald eagles. I didn’t see our national bird make his annual migration. Instead, I found a cemetery and wandered into an empty tomb.

I didn’t feel like writing this week, but God decided to lay it on thick, so here we are.

The American Bottom is an Illinois floodplain where one of the largest indigenous societies, the Mississippian People, lived in the 12^th century. They built cities of such grandeur they outdid London in population. No one knows why they fled two centuries later. Today the region is known as Cahokia Mounds, and American Bottoms is a wastewater treatment plant.

Near the grave of America is a crescent of stone. “In Memory,” a sign says. “The stones making the patio in front of this bench, are made from the Tombstones of the many people buried here. LOST FOREVER IN TIME.” The patio was built by Columbia Boy Scout Troop 320. They did a good job.

Past America, past the heartbreaking graves of dead children, past the fallen tombs of forgotten soldiers and their wives, past the prairie grasses that grow defiantly above the poisoned soil, is the mausoleum. It was built by businessman Stephen W. Miles in 1859 for his family but now looms empty on a hill. An open doorway topped with a gargoyle invites you to enter.

I walked in and stood between rows of hollow crypts. Through the door, I watched clouds cast shadows and light burst through. I took photos, capturing crosses formed from slabs where bodies once lay. I felt safe and sad. The first feeling was novel; the second, a chronic condition of the 21^st century. It was an honest place, this mausoleum on a hill. It was a hopeful place, restored with purpose, open to the sun.

When I posted a photo of the mausoleum, a man showed me a painting by a 14-year-old girl from Ukraine. She had painted a darkened doorway uncannily like the one in which I stood, down to the cracks in the floor. Her door looked out at the classic Ukraine scene: a golden field and a bright blue sky. This is what I saw in Illinois, too.

The images were so similar that I took them for an omen. I didn’t consider that the omen may have been for the US, also under invasion by a corrupt government, more than an omen of freedom for Ukraine.

I had forgotten that America was buried six feet under, surrounded by veterans who were assured that their sacrifice would prevent the tyranny under which we now live.

“People were free to select their own plot,” said a sign about the cemetery. I want to be free to select my own plot instead of living under unpunished treachery. I want my plot to be something more than a hole in the ground or a hole in the head.

* * *

In 2025, I saw the Mississippi River in Minnesota for the first time. That meant I had seen it in every state through which it flows, a feat I celebrated with unease. The goal of the Trump administration is to strip the US for parts. The Mississippi River is one part, and the Great Lakes are another.

I have seen the Mississippi River in every major city from its New Orleans basin to my St. Louis home to Minneapolis, which means I’ve seen it roll by police brutality and white mob violence in multiple places, as people have for as long as this country has existed, and well before.

Waterloo is near East St. Louis, Illinois, where a white mob slaughtered Black residents in 1917. Across the river in Missouri is Ferguson, where I ran from tear gas and police batons in 2014. Ferguson, which rid me of any illusion of how far the police would go, and how little most people would care after the initial outcry.

The Mississippi River is a migratory flyway, and not only for birds. Pundits and politicians fly in and out too. Minneapolis, where the George Floyd protests invigorated a mass movement for racial justice only to later be demonized, is familiar with fair-weather friends.

In December 1811, a record earthquake in Missouri made the Mississippi River flow backward. I thought of it in 2020 as Minneapolis rose up under police siege. I think of it now, as residents try to oust ICE and Minnesota mom Renee Nicole Good was shot dead by an ICE agent who called her a “fucking bitch.” Ferguson had rolled upstream.

People try to distinguish between ICE and police, but they operate as a tandem force. ICE is a new and unnecessary creation, formed in 2003, that wages a war of terror on civilians. ICE obeys the wishes of elites who seek to break the law. For everyone else, ICE promises only fear. Good’s crime was that she was not fearful enough.

Minnesota residents, determined to protect each other from ICE, are afraid — and brave. The two are not mutually exclusive. To fight on behalf of others in the midst of abandonment from officials, derision from the press, and the threat of fatal force: that’s not Minnesota Nice, that’s Minnesota Noble.

Minnesota police should be protecting residents from an invading federal force. But that is not what police do. Police have been trained to attack those whom they are tasked to serve and protect. They are told to back ICE — armed agents abusing and kidnapping their neighbors — and to fear punishment if they refuse.

This is not a civil war. This is a federal invasion by a mafia state.

The mafia state wants to strip the US and sell it for parts. The Great Lakes region, in the climate change era, is a valuable part. Minnesota, a Midwest Democratic stronghold, is an inconvenient part. Minneapolis, with its diverse immigrant population and history of police violence, is a strategic part.

ICE has been battering Americans and aspiring American citizens for two decades. It was rewarded for its brutality with an enormous boost in funding by Joe Biden. ICE funding was further increased by Trump, who also granted them explicit impunity.

It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped.

The gulf between law and justice is wide, but public understanding bends like the Mississippi River, the river where Dred Scott’s daughter was born stateless, the river that divided the enslaved from the free. Americans have been misled by pundits who proclaim the US a “nation of laws”. It makes no difference if the US is a nation of laws when courts are selective in their application. Autocracies are nations of laws, too.

The US is a nation of targets. A felon is the president and random civilians can be kidnapped without recourse. State-sanctioned violence was the inevitable result of the Biden administration countenancing sedition and refusing to prosecute Trump and other elites for crimes, no matter how brazenly they confessed them.

* * *

They say you are defined by the company you keep. These days I am defined by ghosts. Since 2025, I’ve been roaming cemeteries to the point that their residents feel like friends. My worst fears can’t be realized here: you can’t kill what’s already dead.

But the mausoleum on a hill is alive. When I looked it up after returning home, I was horrified to see old photos of its white marble covered in graffiti, its cemetery a mess of overturned stones. The recent repair is more than aesthetic. Volunteers put the puzzle pieces of American history back together. Every cemetery is a road map of American life, a bulwark against the annihilation of memory.

I spent my childhood listening to Ronald Reagan call America “a shining city on a hill, teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace” while his friends planned our country’s demise in a scheme later christened Project 2025. The “city on a hill” ideal of freedom for all has been recited from the Puritan era to the present by politicians who refuse to honor its principles in practice.

I’ve abandoned the shining city on the hill. But the shining mausoleum on a hill: that I can embrace. The shining mausoleum on a hill is real. I’ve seen its decay and its revival. I’ve born witness to its recreation and redemption. I’ve studied its dead: the names, the dates. My fellow Americans fallen in Waterloo.

We go to cemeteries to grieve. I grieve for strangers because I don’t want the part of me that mourns tragedy and spurns injustice to die. In a country where officials act like death no longer matters, here lies a grand rebuttal.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four — so I need and appreciate your support!

Inside the shining mausoleum on a hill. All photos by me, January 2026.

America Myers, 1820-1873.

The mausoleum.

A patchwork grave, repaired with care.

Evelyn Meyer, 1919-1921; Hannah Meyer, 1921-1921.

I am driving around Dallas the day after Christmas. The Texas Theatre is near Oswald’s residence, an unassuming home with a sign offering tours. I decline: I came to see the graves of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ewing Building where they shot JR. I can only handle so much crime at once. But Dallas never cared about that.

My phone offers “news”: pseudo-revelations about Jeffrey Epstein that his victims told in the 1990s, back when Stanley Kubrick was making Eyes Wide Shut. The media ignored the victims because the media are friends with the predators. They dismissed them until 2025, when media itself crumbled and US institutions abandoned even the pretense of law. Now the predators are purchasing social media outlets, the last bastions of unfiltered inquiry, like they’re plugging leaks on their yachts.

There is a theory that Kubrick’s tale of satanic elites was inspired by Epstein — or at least, by people like him. I don’t doubt the latter. There are more people like Epstein than anyone wanted to know.

I drive over a white X painted on the road. I realize I’ve passed the book depository where Oswald allegedly shot JFK and am now in the place where he died.

X marks the spot where the modern American downfall began. It happens fast when you’re a Dallas stranger: the grassy knoll is there and gone before you feel the gravity. I wonder about locals who drive here every day and if a presidential corpse marker is something a person can get used to.

I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.

It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too.

* * *

Every year my husband and kids and I drive from St Louis to Dallas for Christmas, and every year we stop in Arkansas or Oklahoma to make it interesting. In 2024, we saw a bootlegger’s lair, a Bigfoot Museum, questionable Viking runes, and the Center of the Universe (which is in Tulsa, of course.) In 2023, we visited Christ of the Ozarks and retraced the Trail of Tears. Both years we stayed at a haunted hotel.

The route between St. Louis and Dallas is one of the most interesting in the world. Buried crimes abet enormous absurdities. We stopped in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where white supremacists were tried for sedition in 1988, to see the World’s Largest Christmas Pickle. We had a Whataburger picnic in Paris, Texas under an Eiffel Tower replica topped with a red cowboy hat, and drove past the unmarked sites of lynchings until we found the highway again.

Our 2025 trip was bookended by caves. I love caves. It is soothing when the outer world matches the dark state of your soul. It makes you search harder for the light.

I have seen every show cave in Arkansas and 18 out of 20 in Missouri. This feat qualifies me for an Explorer’s Club Patch, which I was gently told by a park ranger is meant for small children. I sent for it anyway. In a cave, I feel like a child, awed and protected. There is no cell phone service in a cave. There is only the unbending truth of ancient geology, and the ever-bending bullshit of an Ozarks tale.

Old Spanish Treasure Cave is near Bentonville, where the Walton family built the Walmart fortune. According to legend — in the Ozarks, there is nothing else with which to accord — they were preceded some 300 years by Spanish conquistadors who mistook Arkansas for El Dorado and decided to search for gold.

The conquistadors found gold but were run out of the region by (take your pick) murderous bandits, Osage tribesmen, or a giant bear. They buried their bullion in the cave, drew a vague treasure map, and died before they could return. In the 19^th century, a man in Madrid discovered the map inside an old family Bible. He sailed the high seas to Arkansas to begin the conquest anew, only to die upon arrival — but the legend did not. American miners picked up where the Spanish left off. The bounty is said to be worth over $300 million.

There are dozens of variations on this tale as well as real archeological evidence of Spanish inhabitation. Our guide led my family through layers of rock and history, a maze marked by ancient fossils and plastic conquistador skeletons. The raw beauty of life and the stupid things we do with it.

Stalactites and stalagmites shimmered, but far fewer than in centuries past. Lust for gold led Westerners to destroy whole sections of the cave, demolishing in seconds what took millions of years to form.

“Tourists broke it too,” the guide said, gesturing at a chipped and ragged stretch of ceiling. “In olden days, they’d get a soda straw [a small hollow stalactite] as a souvenir.”

I considered what it must be like to break a stalactite, to shatter a record of time like it meant nothing. Caves are alive. The tips of soda straws have drops of water filled with the minerals that help them grow a millimeter or so per year. They linger like teardrops waiting to fall. When one falls on me, it feels like a tear of joy, a sign that the world perseveres in darkness.

My mind wandered to the modern conquistadors: the oligarchs mining the earth to build data centers for artificial intelligence. Political frontmen want us subservient to both the oligarchs and their technofascist tools. They will sacrifice humanity and destroy the climate to get there. The latter is not new; the former is. The net of disposability has widened to include everyone but them.

Oligarchs are breaking and buying history the way Ozarks tourists snapped off stalactites decades ago. Show caves are lessons in damage done: how man has a choice between respecting the environment and living with it, or destroying it for mementos that thieve joy from everyone else.

When you delete the past, you steal the wonder of discovery. Childlike wonder is key to the show cave. Their modern stewards tend to be conservationists who guard the real treasure — the transcendent geology of the underworld — from robber barons above.

No one knows what happened to the conquistadors. It’s assumed they returned to the heart of Spanish territory, Latin America — perhaps, to what’s now Venezuela. Venezuela, where the US government and its oligarch partners have decided to rape the land the old-fashioned way: for oil.

What goes around comes around — but that’s not really true. What goes around can be destroyed and never seen again. What the oligarchs want most is no one left to tell the story, and no one left to love what once was.

* * *

On the way to Dallas we stopped in Tuskahoma, the Capitol of the Choctaw Nation. The Capitol building, built in 1884, is now a museum of Choctaw history. Exhibits on Choctaw crafts, self-governance, military service as Code Talkers, and oppression by the US government line the walls. “Chahta Sia Hoke – I am Choctaw!,” one wall read, surrounded by photos of Choctaw people over centuries.

In December 2023, my family inadvertently retraced the forced exile of the Choctaw: driving the Natchez Trace in Mississippi, their original territory, and then stopping in the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, where they were forced to live on reservations after walking the Trail of Tears.

I wrote about how the 19^th-century fate of the Choctaw mirrors the 21^st-century fate of the Palestinians — only to learn that Israel had abused the Choctaw, too, and recently. In 2006, lobbyist Jack Abramoff was indicted after stealing $15 million from the Choctaw, whom he described as “monkeys,” to give to Israelis to build a “sniper school” for murdering Palestinians.

Outside the Choctaw Capitol Building is an intricate silver sculpture called The Eternal Heart. It commemorates the bond between the Choctaw and the Irish. In 1847, the impoverished and displaced Choctaw heard about the Great Famine in Ireland, a weapon of British imperialism, and sent the Irish $170 — equivalent to about $5000 today. In 2020, the government of Ireland returned the favor by giving aid to Choctaws at the height of the pandemic.

The generosity of the suffering Choctaw to the suffering Irish is deeply moving — not only in its selflessness, but because it was never forgotten or taken for granted. The Irish remembered. A bond was forged. In that bond lies hope: that if we recognize the shared fragility of the world under the oligarch boot, and give of ourselves even in hardship, we gain strength in solidarity.

Being on the “right side of history” is romanticized. It often means you were wronged and people cared too late. You are acknowledged after the fact, and the fact is oppression, with your survival trumpeted like cheap equanimity. How nice that we’re both on the right side of history, now that the walls we built to contain you are loosed!

The Choctaw not only committed a kind act: they committed a defiant one. They remained human in the face of constant dehumanization. They stayed on the right side of history in real time. The Irish returned the favor and have been among the most outspoken nations about the Gaza genocide and other atrocities.

In the 21^st century, defiance is compassion; compassion is defiance.

* * *

In northern Arkansas lies War Eagle Valley, named for bloody battles between Union-supporting Missourians and Confederate Arkansans. Its most famed monument is War Eagle Mill, where, in 2019, my son found a fossil in a boulder by the waterwheel.

He was eight and excited. We left the fossil alone, both because I can’t carry a boulder, but also because we wanted others to enjoy the serendipity of the find.

I didn’t return to War Eagle Mill until 2025. I searched for that fossil like I was trying to revive 2019 — before covid, before ubiquitous AI, before Trump term two — but couldn’t find it. I was after lost time: for what else is a fossil but found time? I imagined pressing the fossil and discovering it was a magic button that would transport us to the past. I prefer the past to the future because I know it’s there.

War Eagle Cavern lies a few miles from War Eagle Mill. Before it became a show cave in the 1970s, the cavern had been home to the usual Ozarks residents — Native Americans, bandits, bootleggers — and now was inhabited by 75,000 bats.

The guide led us down a rocky forest trail. He said he used to be a goat herder but was now a caretaker of the cave. He apologized for being tired and explained he had two toddlers at home. I looked at my two teenagers, remembering when they were smaller than stalagmites, and felt the deepest envy at his plight.

“Treasure this time with them, it goes by fast,” I said. He looked at me with the uncomprehending eyes of a man who hasn’t slept in three years.

We walked through a wide open-air passage and descended into the dark. I felt my senses heightening and dulling at the same time, a reversal of misfortune. This is why we had come. In a year of constant sorrow, I craved reliable relief.

We navigated a karst dreamworld of twisted tubes and sloping spires, our guide explaining their geology — until he suddenly stopped. He signaled to us to be silent and pointed his flashlight at the ceiling.

A lone gray bat slept upside-down. He was very small.

“This little guy got left behind,” the guide said softly. “Bats clear out of the cave every season. But he’s a juvenile and got confused and separated from his tens of thousands of friends. I keep an eye on him and make sure he’s doing okay.”

One by one we were permitted to walk under the little bat, as quietly as we could, so we would not disturb him.

We were the invaders.

Bats are vulnerable creatures. In the early 2000s, white-nose syndrome arrived in the US, reducing the bat population by millions: up to 90% in some caves. It paralleled the decline of everything in America we used to take for granted.

We shuffled through the cave until my daughter spotted something flickering in the distance and asked what it was.

“Good eye!” the guide exclaimed after inspecting. “That’s a tricolored bat; they’re rare. I didn’t know he was back there hiding. I’ll have to keep my eye on him too.”

My daughter later confessed she was inquiring about the egg sac of a horrifically large spider that lives in the cave and didn’t see the bat at all, but that was okay.

War Eagle Cavern makes a circular route. As we retraced our steps toward the gray bat, our guide looked worried. He thought the bat had stirred and wondered if the next tour group should be allowed to pass. I was touched by his concern. It was the concern of a good father.

Slowly, silently, we walked under the baby bat and bid War Eagle Cavern goodbye.

* * *

Dallas is a tangle of highways laid out like nooses choking the American Dream. Between them lie oil and tech companies scraping scars into the Texas sky. I still like to visit. Dallas is bad in an honest way. The sins and crimes of America are laid plain. That we do not fully understand them is laid plain too.

Days after we returned from Dallas, the US invaded Venezuela. They kidnapped its president. The agenda is oil, but the motive is what it always is: because they can. If no one stops them, they will do it again: to Cuba, to Iran, to Greenland, to outer space.

There are no limits and there are no regards. Taking for the sake of taking, abusing for the sake of abusing. Snatching everyone from a random migrant to the president of a sovereign state. Congress asks to be briefed on the illegal action next time round. Eyes wide shut, bank accounts wide open.

The drive between St. Louis and Dallas is one of the most interesting in the world because so much remains untouched by big business. It is infamously inhospitable. I want it to stay that way. Fossils instead of fossil fuel profiteers. Legends and lore from humans instead of chatbots. I prefer my bullshit homegrown, my lies artisanal.

I prefer people who protect wildlife and document history’s horrors while honoring those who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do.

Americans are being pulled into something worse than war. We are being pulled into a global realignment in which our existence is inconvenient. The ruling class doesn’t want to spill my blood: they want to kill my soul and hope that I don’t notice. They want the same for you, whoever you are.

The invaders love an endangered species, and humanity is on the list.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article in the archives remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

The United States of America, 2026. (Old Spanish Treasure Cave, December 2025.)

The movie theater where they caught Lee Harvey Oswald. Dallas, Texas.

The World’s Largest Christmas Pickle. Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Little gray bat. War Eagle Cavern, Arkansas.

The Capitol of the Choctaw Nation. Tuskahoma, Oklahoma.

C’est magnifique, y’all! Paris, Texas.

I’ve got dozens of photos of this in case anyone wants to make a horror movie.

Searching for the light. December 2025.

Everyone knew 2025 was going to be rough. But it is one thing to anticipate hard times and another to live through them. The highlight of my 2025 was engaging with my readers: here as this newsletter grew and on tour for The Last American Road Trip.

I have a box of letters, cards, and homemade gifts from readers. When I’m feeling down and useless, I look through it, and I am heartened that the human connection forged through writing remains strong.

The Last American Road Trip reads differently than when I wrote it in 2023 and 2024. I am glad I preserved that time: who I was, who my children were, and what it was like to travel through the United States as a mother of two from 2016 to 2024.

Sometimes I imagine if there were a diary by a mom who hitched up her carriage and took her kids to every territory of the collapsing Roman Empire; or a travelogue by a mother who road-tripped with her children through every republic of the Soviet Union in the 1980s — would I read it? Yes, yes, I would!

I both love and hate this analogy. I’d rather The Last American Road Trip endure as a chronicle of adventure in turbulent times than as a record of the end of the American experiment. I do not believe we the people are over: if the book has a lesson, it is that love endures above all. It is a good read for those who seek to preserve the best of our country while defying the worst of it. Scroll to the end for photos of our journey!

I am grateful that I can support my family through writing. Most of my income comes from this newsletter. I keep it open to all, relying solely on volunteer paying subscribers. I refuse to paywall in times of peril: this newsletter will remain free even when America is not! If you’d like to keep it going, please subscribe:

I spent 2025 writing articles that I hope stand the test of time. I do not write in reaction to the news cycle: in part because it feels like déjà vu, given how heavily I covered the first Trump administration and wrote these stories already. But mostly because when so much beauty is stolen from the world, I want to give some back.

2025 felt like an assault on what it means to be human: everything from this administration’s disregard for the sanctity of life to the imposition of AI to the erasure of history. My articles touch on these themes. But they also discuss the wonder of the natural world, American underdogs who played by their own rules, and the art and pop culture of the analog era. I hope they help reset the balance.

I’m taking time off for the holidays. In the meantime, enjoy the writing!

1. The Confluence. After inauguration, I had a case of the blues, so I did what any blues artist does: went down to the river to heal my soul.

2. Searching for Bobbie Gentry. In 1967, a wildly talented singer-songwriter captured the cruel apathy of contemporary America — and then vanished.

3. The Miners. The key to going viral is to include Henry Schoolcraft’s poem written from the perspective of Missouri minerals being mined by evil plutocrats. (Also, some choice words for Elon Musk.)

4. Laura Palmer’s House. I took a Twin Peaks tour in Washington state and wrote about what David Lynch and Laura Palmer mean in the Jeffrey Epstein era.

5. Dvorak Lived in Iowa. On my daughter leaving for college and a serendipitous trip through a Midwest farm town.

6. The Black Place. I drove through rural New Mexico retracing the steps of Georgia O’Keeffe and learned to embrace the Black Place.

7. The Empty Stage. My most personal article. On Johnny Cash, a Nashville family reunion, an Ozarks magical excursion, and the search for redemption.

8. The Craftsman. I cope with autocracy the Midwestern way: weaving, embroidering, and basket-making. Better a basket than a noose!

9. Heat Exhaustion. On Mamdani and the national mood.

10. Soul Stripping. A battle against AI — and against my doppelganger.

11. In tribute to Rob Reiner, this list goes to 11: The Lost Vortex. A search for a portal in southern Illinois and how 2022 was the last best chance to make US politics right.

There is more where that came from: including life lessons from Leatherface, the peril of flying carp, T.S. Eliot’s inadvertent muse — and you can read it all for free!

* * *

When I conceived The Last American Road Trip as a travelogue, I was hoping it would include photos. Since photos are expensive to print, I would have happily settled for black and white maps and an index. Unfortunately, my publisher gave me nothing. (I am awed by the reader who sent me an index she made herself! I may share it later.)

Here are photos of places from The Last American Road Trip. I hope you enjoy the ride! Thanks again to everyone who got me through this year: readers, indie booksellers, friends, family — and writers, artists and musicians, past and present. See you soon!

Wild horses in Wyoming, August 2019.

Wonders await in western Kansas. June 2024.

Abandoned barn on the backroads of Missouri, November 2021.

The Craters of the Moon, Idaho, August 2019.

A photo of me at White Sands, New Mexico, March 2017. Squint hard!

The 10,000-pound abandoned head of Ronald Reagan. Branson, May 2017.

We did not die of dysentery! An Oregon Trail thrill in Nebraska, August 2019.

Sunset at Cadillac Ranch, Texas, March 2023.

The Lilypad Room in Onondaga Cave, Missouri, May 2022.

Monument Valley, Navajo Nation, March 2023.

Route 66 in Texas, March 2023.

The Blue Ridge Parkway in the preternaturally beautiful fall of 2020. North Carolina.

My children in awe of North Dakota. July 2019.

The town of Santa Claus, Indiana. Local elves answer children’s letters! December 2017.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Michigan, August 2022.

Where Thelma and Louise took the plunge. Utah, June 2018.

There was no screen: the glow of fresh snow lit the night. I couldn’t turn it off. 2025 had scrambled and stolen the seasons. Summer lasted until late October, followed by two weeks of fall. Now white light flooded my room like the inverse of a shadow.

Winter was early. I felt stuck and circumscribed, like living inside an app. I avoid apps when I can. The ones I have line my phone like little prisons. “Walled gardens,” they call them, like you can stop to smell the roses and the hills don’t have eyes.

Sometimes I think how the flat earth movement gained popularity when the apps did. A flat earth seems easy to step off and leave behind. I picture a flat earth rotating like a plate in the microwave, laden with comfort food ready at the beep. Safe and shallow, warm on command, instead of an iron magnet drawing heat from a relentless star.

It’s 3:30. I’m restless at night because I won’t get to be restless in the day. I won’t walk it off like I’ve done for months. In summer, I looked for birds; when the birds migrated, I looked for turning trees; when the trees shed their leaves, I found a new place to wander, new friends to see.

But I can’t go and make my visit. My friends are in the graveyard, and Bellefontaine Cemetery is closed for snow.

* * *

Bellefontaine Cemetery is a historic site of sophisticated grandeur that fades the moment you hear a St. Louisan pronounce it “Bell Fountain.” It’s not the worst example of Missouri French: “Ver-sails” and “Bo-Dark” (Versailles and Bois D’Arc) win. But it’s a contender.

No one says “Bellefontaine” like I do. “Bellefontaine” fuses my past and present into an involuntary barbaric yawp. My St. Louis fake French combines with my Central Connecticut Polish-American accent: yes, that is a real thing, a niche accent studied by linguists. You can read about it in The New York Times.

My Polish ancestors passed down their glottal stop, leaving me incapable of pronouncing “mountain,” “button,” or any word with a “nt” or “tt” in the middle.

“It’s called a GLAH’-uhl stop,” I explain uselessly. I resent it when people attribute my pronunciation to a lowbrow trend instead of a lowbrow heritage. I will not change my accent — nor could I. It’s an insur-MAH’ihble problem.

But in St. Louis, problems collide.

“Goin’ to Bell FAH’-uhn!” I say in Polack French, sounding like Chopin, if he were drunk. “Hope I don’t get HAUH’-ed by a PHAH’-um!”

There’s the regal Bellefontaine and there’s my “Bell FAH’-uhn:” a make-believe land where I alone utter the password. The dead of St. Louis know I swallow consonants, not pride. They don’t judge my speech because they guide my subconscious. They enter it through the door where my accent is.

In the cemetery, surnames from street signs spring to life. They have first names and birthdays and stories set in stone. They are my neighbors of history, and I visit them because I know they won’t leave me. They can’t: they’re already gone. I don’t need to worry that one day I’ll wake up and they won’t be there, the way I worry about everything else.

I drive through the gate and head to the friend of a friend, another St. Louis writer hypnotized by the city, to the point that it seeped into his poems.

“Hello, Prufrock,” I say, and park my car next to T.S. Eliot’s subconscious muse.

* * *

William Prufrock was an immigrant from Germany who started a furniture company in St. Louis in the 19^th century. In the early 20^th century, his son, Harry, built up the business by slapping PRUFROCK on street signs and full-page newspaper ads. Among those who saw them was the young T.S. Eliot, who grew up downtown on Locust Street. I’ve visited his house; it’s a parking lot covered in weeds.

In 1914, 25-year-old Eliot moved to England. In 1915, he made his literary debut with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: an agonizing confession of longing and self-loathing from the perspective of a middle-aged man struggling with the meaning of life. He is caught between what might have been and what never would be and the paralysis of his own self-expression.

Eliot did not mean to name his tormented narrator after a St. Louis furniture salesman. He admitted decades later that the act was subconscious: “I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated.”

Eliot refashioned himself an Englishman, but St Louis stuck to his subconscious like gooey butter cake. The brown sludge river in “The Dry Salvages” was not the Thames, but the Mississippi. The yellow fog of “Prufrock” was not London, but Locust Street. “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done,” Eliot wrote.

There is a recording of Eliot reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. He has a British accent, despite his St. Louis upbringing. He has an old-school St. Louis accent, despite his British pretensions. I’d call it a transatlantic accent if I could say that: he’s “transatLAH-ic,” caught between worlds. It’s a relatable plight.

Critics savaged “Prufrock” on publication. By the time Eliot recorded it in the 1940s, he had lived through two wars and found fame, but he never lost his miserable roots.

“To roll it towards some overwhelming question/ To say ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,” T.S. Eliot intones from YouTube, six decades after he passed. “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’— If one, settling a pillow by her head/ Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.’”

I found Prufrock’s grave on accident. I was wandering Bellefontaine’s spectacular necropolis of the celebrity dead: William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame; William S. Burroughs; Rush Limbaugh; beer barons including both Anheuser and Busch. They lie in crypts with sphynxes and obelisks and lascivious angels modeled on flappers. They weren’t what I was after.

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” Eliot wrote in the poem. “I do not think that they will sing to me.”

Nor to me.

I did not know what I was seeking. But I go to Bell Fountain to find it. For decades, I’ve wandered notebook in hand, writing down the names of the people with the most interesting graves. I would go home and look them up and find a wealth of information online: blogs, newspapers, history forums. Those are gone now, lost in broken search engines and AI slop. All that remains are books and stones.

The scariest sites in Bellefontaine are the QR codes near graves of note. I refuse to use a QR code in a cemetery. It would feel like performing an exorcism. I would rather be left with the whole of my imagination and the figments of facts I find.

I would rather be led to William Prufrock, whose tomb I stumbled upon without knowing its story. Could it be… I wondered — and it was. I had subconsciously found T.S. Eliot’s subconscious.

AI has no subconscious. With AI there can be no soul searching because there is no soul. There are no questions, only inputs and prompts. There is not even the possibility of being paralyzed by the minutiae of life, because there is No Life. The dead of Bellefontaine are infinitely more alive than AI will ever be.

Prufrock’s grave has a wreath on the front and a vase on the top. He died in 1913, as Eliot was revising the poem bearing his name. There is nothing to indicate the monument’s significance. You just have to get lucky, and that day, I was.

* * *

In May, Bellefontaine was hit by a tornado and briefly closed. The tornado was among the worst in St. Louis’s history, and hit the north side, where Bellefontaine is located, particularly hard. It decimated long-loved lands, turning arboreal havens like Forest Park into fields of decapitated trees. I waited a long time to return to Bellefontaine.

When I returned, I was relieved: it was damaged, but its soul was intact.

In 2025, it felt like everything was disappearing. Often, it objectively was. My daughter left home, my father has terminal cancer, my city got hit by a tornado. Democracy is desecrated, seasons are slain, history is being erased. We are offered AI simulacrums as consolation for our loss. The same AI that drains our water, steals our jobs, and annihilates independent thought and collective memory.

Cemeteries are sanctuaries from AI. They combine art, history, and nature in one place. They safeguard history and chronology, and honor lives lived that were real. AI may be the antichrist, but it cannot outwit the dead.

“Prufrock” is a meditation on the grief of an unlived life. The narrator struggles to find the right words and fails — but it is in his struggle that the reader finds meaning.

You surrender that struggle by turning to AI for answers on what Eliot called “the overwhelming question”. When you ask AI what the meaning of life is, you concede that it must be AI: how else could AI respond, for what does it know of being human?

* * *

In November, my daughter returned from college. We headed to Bell Fountain. I explained that I spend my days roaming cemeteries and she said that she missed me.

We walked through the remnants of fall, the leaves that changed too fast and fell too soon and too late. I showed her graves, for I have known them all: the marble sexpot statue commissioned by a wealthy horndog and trapped in a glass case for eternity; the mysterious sculpture of a girl known only as Poor Cecile; the tomb of David R. Francis, ambassador to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, marked by a hooded ghoul.

I wondered what would land in her subconscious and in mine. The names, the dates, the voices dying with a dying fall. We passed Prufrock’s grave on the way to the car. I stopped and took a photo.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Everyone,” I replied.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the primary source of income for my family of four, so I need and appreciate your support!

The grave of William Prufrock. All photos by me, fall 2025.

Herman Luyties got so hung up on a woman, he commissioned a 12-foot statue of her and put it in his home. He ordered that upon his death, she be sealed in a glass box for eternity.

David R. Francis, scaring the shit out of everyone since 1927.

The grave of William S. Burroughs with offerings of coins, pens, and poetry.

What happened to Poor Cecile?

Crypt of the Busch beer baron family, with VENI VIDI VICI carved at the top.

Bell Fountain on the day I returned.

I am grateful for new paying subscribers since some folks had to stop paying due to the economy. I understand that: it’s why I refuse to paywall. But if you can afford to become a paying subscriber, please consider it. It keeps articles open to all and feeds my family of four! You also get the perk of submitting a question for the next Q & A:

Steve: I’ve read all of your books and essays. When I pass along some of your essays or when I had our book club read Hiding in Plain Sight, many people say you’re too depressing for them. How do you respond to this?

SK: Fellow Missourian Harry Truman, when accused of giving people hell, said: “I never gave anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” The same applies to me. Only I never nuked a civilian population.

Our global plight is objectively depressing. But the most depressing thing of all is dishonesty. A problem must be acknowledged in order to be solved. I write because I believe that things can change for the better. The more we know, the greater our ability to create a just world. If truth didn’t matter, elites wouldn’t try so hard to suppress it. So I’ll keep telling the truth, hard as it is to hear, and hard as it is to write.

Kas: I just started rewatching The X-Files (having not watched since it originally aired) and I’m finding the show so comforting. I think because of the 90s throwback vibe and its basic premise that the government is always lying to you. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on The X-Files, especially since you wrote beautifully about Twin Peaks ---which I assume has some similar motifs.

SK: I was and remain a big X-Files fan! It debuted when I was 15 and was a formative influence. I wrote about it in my book They Knew, along with its spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, that negated the “no one could have imagined 9/11” canard by having the World Trade Center nearly attacked by a plane in the first episode. I also wrote about it in The Last American Road Trip because of course my first teenage road trip was to Roswell. (Millennium also appears in that book — and you should watch Millennium season two along with Twin Peaks; they are excellent and reflect our era well.)

The X-Files is an exceptional series, especially the Morgan and Wong conspiracy arcs and the Darin Morgan episodes. I relate to Clyde Bruckman and wish I didn’t. I could go on about XF forever; when I was in college, I covered the show for Fangoria and interviewed Kim Manners, among others. (I just discovered someone put that interview online back in 2000; how delightfully mortifying now.) I may write about X-Files for this newsletter. But I feel like I wrote several X-Files books that are, unfortunately, non-fiction. The X-Files wasn’t quite ahead of its time: it reflected a dark continuum and debuted in the decade with the greatest freedom to discuss it.

Donna: I know this will not go over well with a lot of people because he is very well respected and loved (including by me), but I’d like to know your opinion of how President Obama fits in with everything that has been happening in our country since forever. How do we square his public persona and seemingly outraged righteousness to Trump and his regime with him being smack dab in the middle of Bush/Trump? Did he know and do nothing, was there nothing he could do? Tom: I wonder if in part we got Trump given that nothing was done by the Obama administration after W and Cheney lied us into Iraq? No consequences was a reward for continued behavior.

SK: This is a legitimate concern. I wish people would chill and let elected officials be criticized by the public they are supposed to serve, and in this case, failed. Obama knew about the severe threat Trump and his criminal cohort posed. If I knew based on information in the public domain, then of course the president knew — as did the FBI, CIA, Congress, etc. This is not solely on Obama.

But Obama was a popular president who focused on appeasing his enemies instead of telling painful truths and preventing greater harm to the American public. His popularity gave him unique leverage to push for accountability for the crimes of prior administrations, but he squandered it. Many of his crises were inherited — Bush’s economic crash, the Iraq War, etc — but Obama hired horrible cabinet members who made them worse. (Some of whom, like Lawrence Summers, worked with Epstein.)

Obama at times displayed a cavalier attitude about the carnage his admin caused abroad and economic misery at home. That cavalier attitude extended to Trump, who was a known mafia associate even while he was hosting The Apprentice. It was always an emergency that Trump could grab the presidency — and it would have been easy to emphasize that Trump was a national security threat since his history was public. Obama treating Trump like a joke made people believe the threat was not serious.

Every president gets targeted by operatives for exploitation. Trump is being used as a bulldozer to break the US down for parts. I said in 2023 that Biden would be a Placeholder President between two terms of Trump. Many yelled at me for saying it, but that’s exactly what happened. Obama was used by operatives to hurt the national imagination: to get America’s hopes up and crush them and to stoke racist vitriol (the latter of which was obviously not his fault.) But Obama is an intelligent man with great self-control. It is worth asking why he, at the least, played along with bad actors.

Dennis: The amount of fundraising texts I get daily is ridiculous. Have the Democrats looked at the possibility that these non-stop requests are doing more harm than good?

SK: I couldn’t tell you, since I, Sarah Kendzior, blocked the Democrats long ago. But “Stanley Kendzior” continues to get spammed, so I’ll share his view. Stanley tells me that the Democrats are digging their own grave and sealing democracy inside. First, election integrity is in jeopardy and party panhandling is salt in the wound. Second, the great unifying issue of the 2026 election (should we have one) is corruption. Begging broke Americans for cash while being backed by billionaires is grotesque. Stanley also doesn’t appreciate the threatening tone of the Democrats’ emails. (Scroll to the end for an example!) “Stanley Kendzior” says he is relieved he does not exist and wishes the Dems would stop soliciting his specter through my phone.

Richard: I’m of the opinion that the biggest threat to humanity isn’t climate change or a pandemic (or even Trump and his minions) — it’s AI and the scary, relentless development thereof. Our intellectual development as a species has far outpaced our moral development; cognitively, we’re still operating with the same tribal, heuristic brain we had a hundred thousand years ago. Except now, the billionaire/trillionaire tech bros are in charge. Is this something you might address?

SK: I agree with you and have addressed AI in these articles:

“Soul Stripping”: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/soul-stripping
“Eating Rocks”: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/eating-rocks
“The Red, White, and Blue Screen of Death” https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-red-white-and-blue-screen-of
“The Confluence”: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-confluence

I also touch on AI in other articles and Q & As. I hate AI. I do not use it. I ban it in my home. I believe it is ruining the world in every way a world can be ruined. I agree with you that it is much more frightening than Trump and his minions. AI works to destroy the parts of ourselves — our empathy, creativity, defiance — that combat authoritarianism. They are attempting to mold the ideal fascist objects. They are aggressively pushing technology we did not ask for and removing the ability to opt out. I wish articles written by AI were labeled, like food tainted with poison. AI works should be shunned. I’m somewhat encouraged that my view on AI is not a fringe one: this is the oligarchs’ imposition, and we must push back.

Rebecca: Kash Patel doesn’t fit the ethnic profile for this administration. He’s lazy and ignorant because he doesn’t care to learn anything about his job. He’s stealing from taxpayers IN PLAIN SIGHT by flying to bro events and with the SS protecting his girlfriend. Do you think the GOP will join Dems in ousting him? And Hegseth? My real question is, why are they being tolerated. What do they have on whom?

SK: The new Trump administration members are stand-ins for power players behind the scenes. The real kleptocracy is being run by people like Kushner, Thiel, Witkoff, Adelson, Bannon, Musk, and other plutocrats and mafiosos — including foreign leaders like Netanyahu, MBS, and Putin. Patel and other cabinet officials are cast members in a White House reality show that even Trump holds in such low regard that he gleefully bulldozed his own set.

Trump’s backers wanted a younger and more ethnically diverse group for his cabinet because it makes the Dems, until recently led by weak white octogenarians, seem outmoded. Trump’s cabinet picks required no attribute other than shamelessness and cult loyalty. There are valid grounds to impeach several of them, especially Hegseth. But both parties are so tainted by the lack of accountability for the first Trump admin — which set a standard of normalizing sedition, among other crimes — that they feel attempts at accountability are futile. However, impeachment sets a moral standard that matters even if they stay in office. The worst sin is not to try. I wish Democrats had learned that the first time around: if they had, we wouldn’t be here for the second.

Jesse: What is the last movie you saw in a theater? I wonder what someone with your knowledge/perspective thinks about recent films like One Battle After Another, Civil War, and The Zone of Interest, among others. I wish we had more movies about the current political moment like they did in the 60s and 70s. My recommendation for you is First Reformed.

SK: I’ve been to a movie theater only three times since 2019 because of covid concerns. The only new film I saw was Sinners, which I loved. It combined so many of my interests and surprised and thrilled me! The other two I saw at the revival theater: The Lost Boys, because vampire Jack Bauer with a mullet is something my children needed to experience on a big screen; and Bubba Ho-Tep, which I had to see in theaters after waiting 20 years. Only the classiest fare for me! (I truly adore Bubba Ho-Tep though.) I will watch the movies you recommended at home, even though they feel like documentaries. Granted, The Lost Boys feels like a documentary these days too…

N Compton: We are moving to the east coast to be closer to our kids and grandkids. I am making myself crazy trying to game out whether life will be better for us if we live in a blue state or purple state. Do you have any wisdom to share that will make our decision more reassuring?

SK: Moving is a personal decision. In the Q & As listed here I answer questions from people with different concerns. Every state is a purple state: what place is right for you varies. St. Louis, Missouri is right for me because it’s cheap, full of historical sites and nature, and half of my family lives here. But I would never tell, for example, the parents of a trans child to stay in a state whose government has decided to revoke their child’s rights. That’s why I don’t give broad advice about moving.

Mary: I spent Thanksgiving out of town with family who are mostly Trump supporters. I didn’t enjoy myself and you could cut the tension with a knife. Took me a couple of days back home to relax some. Do you have to deal with this tension with family and friends?

SK: I don’t have Trump supporters in my family. I do talk to Trump voters, but rarely about politics. The only time I tend to engage with Trump fans in depth is when I try to bring facts about Trump and Epstein to light. Sometimes I’ve helped Trump voters understand the broader story of that network. When those folks feel better informed, I’m glad. It doesn’t always go well; sometimes folks get angry at me. I’m sorry you had to deal with stress in your family — that’s very hard, especially on holidays.

N: There’s online talk about the New York Times and its political coverage, but very little online talk about the Sulzbergers—the family that has run the NYT since the 1800s. How is it that a multi-generational media dynasty has managed to evade scrutiny so completely, even as its crown jewel is constantly under a microscope?

SK: Great question. I would love to read something in-depth, well-sourced, and written by a human being on that dynasty. I am wary of Americans who play outsized roles in shaping history but dodge scrutiny. (Roy Cohn and Meyer Lansky, two of the most influential Americans of the 20^th century who are rarely taught in school, come to mind.) I assume the NYT has a rigorous legal team that dissuades exposure of internal affairs. What exposes exist (like The Trust) tend to be old and timid. Furthermore, reporters likely do not want to anger a media giant. When I was writing Hiding in Plain Sight, I was urged to omit references to NYT’s complicity, even when that complicity was conceded by the NYT itself. I left most of it in anyway.

Brennan: Have you read Jörmungandr by Adam Zarnowski yet? He cites you frequently. I just finished reading it and haven’t felt this enlightened about what’s going on right now after reading a book since I read Hiding in Plain Sight or They Knew.

SK: I have not and wasn’t aware he cited me! I will have to look into that.

Marina: I believe Ukraine will win but with the US throwing brave people of Ukraine under the bus, will Europe finally collect their scaredy-cat asses? They will be next.

SK: I worry Ukraine will lose territory. I believe the reason the war has dragged on so long, and that Biden did not act quickly in giving Ukraine the tools it needed to win, is because of a mafia/oligarch war beneath the traditional imperial land invasion Putin is waging. That underground criminal network, always there, has risen to the surface. The long war weakened the economies of both Ukraine and Russia, making them ripe for manipulation by terrible actors like Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff. European states should grasp that what happened to Ukraine could happen to them. I worry corrupt European leaders will seek to emulate the mafia tactics of the Trump admin instead.

Connie: What’s the real game plan for getting rid of immigrants? To get the “lazy white boys” to work and off welfare/disability?

SK: Top officials seeking to get rid of immigrants, like Stephen Miller, are evil and racist. I don’t think their motive is economic because they ultimately seek to replace nearly all workers with AI. They don’t care about poor white people either. They are sadists who get off on tormenting immigrants, especially immigrants who aren’t white. They also target people who’ve been in the US for decades in order to flaunt their power and cultivate a climate of fear. They want the very concept of citizenship to be in question and its protections to be diminished for all.

Victoria: Is there any hope left that our government would work to stop child predation in this country? It’s ubiquitous and fathomless, and one of the most heart-breaking aspects of these times. I know it always existed, but it’s a daily onslaught of perps, with a faux-shocked media. BTW, I never in my life imagined thinking about Trump giving Bill Clinton a bj, but here we are.

SK: There should be a limit to how many generations of teenagers have to discuss Bill Clinton getting a blow job. I did my time as a 1990s teen and now my poor teenage son and his generation have the Worst Boomer Image Ever in their heads. This should not be an American rite of passage!

As to more serious matters, I’m watching more people investigate the Epstein case — but I keep wondering where they were before 2025. The evidence was already there; victims spoke out for decades. I also wonder why reporters won’t trace the history of child abuse weaponized by the government — like the Craig Spence case or the Franklin Scandal — and reconsider it in light of Epstein; or look more closely at the mass abuse of migrant children by the state. Loathing of pedophiles is something almost all Americans share. Unfortunately, our government is run by pedophiles, friends of pedophiles, and people blackmailed by pedophiles. I do not expect them to provide a solution since they are a big part of the problem.

Guari: A non-politics q for you bc I can’t take much more right now! I know you are an avid kayaker. What are your thoughts on foldable / inflatable kayaks? I have never owned any kind of kayak and as a petite woman, I’m intimidated by lifting one up onto a car roof and hauling it around. Please share your wisdom!

SK: I love non-politics questions! Last month I bought an Oru foldable kayak — the most basic model on sale at half price. I only got to try it out once before winter came, but I’m cautiously optimistic. I wouldn’t take it on a river with rocks and rapids, but it seems great for paddling around a lake. I wanted a kayak that I could lift easily, and this seems to fit the bill! I’ll let you know more when the temperature rises.

Patricia: It is obvious US wants Venezuelan oil. Mass media is pushing the “narc” rationale for our involvement. What is your take on the situation? Jendi: Why is Trump targeting Venezuela? It makes no sense from a foreign policy standpoint, so is this some kind of mafia shakedown? What do you think he wants from them?

SK: I am not a Venezuela expert, but I have some theories. For the sake of space, I discuss Venezuela in this podcast interview starting at minute nine: Trump Ties to Russian Mob, Sarah Kendzior. I’m interested in the role of Elliott Abrams, who was a key Iran-Contra player. I think we are seeing a shakedown plot akin to Iran-Contra, with multiple countries and multi-state actors involved. Trump’s network is a mafia network: for Venezuela, it is useful to view it as a rival cartel.

Jennifer L: Sarah, do you boycott Spotify and Amazon? Understanding that boycott may play into the hands of those wanting to tank our economy, I also feel like it’s one small thing we can all do along with supporting small businesses. For me it means being more mindful about purchases. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this on a deeper level if you’re comfortable to share more about this.

SK: I boycott Spotify. It was easy because I never streamed music. I wanted to own my collection and not rely on internet when it doesn’t work on Missouri backroads. When I learned about how Spotify rips off artists, it became a moral boycott. As for Amazon, I use it as little as possible. I make part of my living from Amazon, so when there is a Kindle sale, I’ll tell people, since not everyone can afford my books. But I hype up independent bookstores much more. (Speaking of, get signed copies at Left Bank Books in St Louis!) Supporting small businesses is the way to go: the strike against big corporations is less important than strengthening the underdog for the long run.

Sarah: Trump is clearly unwell. It seems like he has had a couple of strokes, and by now we know that when he says something like, “it wasn’t my brain they scanned,” that it was definitely his brain. He’s constantly falling asleep, even in the creepy all-praise-the-great-leader cabinet meetings. Yet there is no clear successor and the bond his voters have with Trump doesn’t seem to extend beyond Trump. What do you think the mafia’s plan is for handling this situation?

SK: I still don’t trust reports that Trump is unwell in a serious way, through the MRI gives me pause. He is old and showing signs of senility. I’m inclined to think he’s using the old mobster tactic of feigning frailty to deceive people for personal gain. I also think he doesn’t care about any of his responsibilities as president, so if he’s falling asleep, it’s because he doesn’t bother with a pretense of concern — he flaunts his lack of concern. As for the successor, see the next question:

Jack A: How can we explain the whole Republican Party offering such loyalty to Trump? They act as if his regime will go on forever. Even now, with some fissures appearing in his support, he still seems to command a tightly run ship. Does it all boil down to money, which always seems to be available to the GOP? John T: What happens to the Republicans after Trump? Who wins the game of thrones?

SK: There have been many attempts to groom a Trump successor: DeSantis, Haley, Vance, etc. They all failed. In a horrible way, Trump is an advertisement for the limits of AI, because he has a human charismatic draw that is impossible to emulate. The mafia network — which is the real danger — may pass through different hands, but the cult will die with Trump. That leaves openings for a new frontman. (Trump is not running this ship; he’s a passenger wearing a captain’s costume.) Some who now oppose Trump after years of supporting him, like Tucker Carlson, are eyeing those openings. The “Never-Trump” GOP may try to make a move, but they have historically failed to win elections and instead coopted the Democrats into GOP Lite.

Donors will have the biggest impact on who the successor is. How Americans react, though, is in our hands. We do not have to accept a corrupt successor, just like we do not have to accept Trump. We should build up community power now, so we won’t be scrambling when there is an opening. The departure of an authoritarian leader does not always lead to democracy but there tends to be a chaotic period where rights can be regained and new power built.

Bert: My view is that the US Supreme Court Majority is issuing unconstitutional opinions on its ‘shadow’ docket, also known as its ‘emergency’ docket. Unless this unsustainable process continues to the end of time, it will someday end. What is your vision of SCOTUS returning to actual US legal scholarship? (Extra) Ordinary People: How does the Supreme Court, its rulings, its abuse of the shadow docket, its laughably false public facing messaging, etc. and the Republican/Trump appointments over the last couple of decades fit into the international crime syndicate masquerading as a government? Who is using whom? Are they on equal power footings? What are we all missing about the courts?

SK: SCOTUS is a tyrannical body. It protects organized crime and protects institutions like the FBI who also protect organized crime. We would not be in this position if they opposed organized crime, and you should view cheerleaders of the FBI — and especially of people like Garland and Mueller — as handmaidens of organized crime. They are rewarded for covering up criminality under the guise of “institutionalism.”

Future candidates should push for the abolishment or expansion of SCOTUS so that its tyrannical reach is suppressed. Corrupt members, like Clarence Thomas, should be ousted. The timidity around this serves no one but the criminal elite.

Kelly: Do you have any advice on parenting in an anti-AI way that isn’t going to completely backfire?

SK: Encourage analog hobbies: reading, art, music, sports, exploring nature, etc. It is more effective to show kids how fun the world is than to take their gadgets away. If that doesn’t work, show them examples of AI gone awry. AI often botches details of kids’ shows and video games when it spits out its summaries, and that can prove to a young child that it is not to be trusted.

Andrea K: The corruption and criminality in government is so thorough and systematic with Private Equity bleeding the entire country dry. Do you think that there is anything that will be able to cut through? William: Do you see any countervailing organized political movement to our fascistic kleptocracy?

SK: I don’t know but I don’t rule it out. What’s most likely to succeed are targeted local movements that serve community needs, including emotional needs, like simply showing you care. The heartlessness of kleptocracy leaves people feeling scared and alone. Just knowing that other people are trying can help. It’s an important first step.

Paul D: Do you think a new, third party should be formed, possibly in an effort to escape the baggage of the existing Dem party, or whether the Dems can be redeemed?

SK: Both parties are tarnished brands. Multiple generations have grown up with no faith in them, and that lack of faith is warranted. Many refuse to vote Dem out of anger for unforgivable acts, like backing wars or genocides, even if they recognize the danger of the GOP. Dem politicians should, at the least, experiment with third parties.

I was rereading an article I wrote about Election Day in 1990 and remembered that my childhood governor was an independent who started a party called “A Connecticut Party” the year he ran for election — and won! This is a murky childhood memory for me, but it’s both weird and a little inspiring. Given public frustration with foreign money in politics, an independent party named for a state can be an appealing entity. I can envision new parties that lose the tainted national Democratic brand while still retaining the good parts of the Democratic platform.

Whitney: Hi, Sarah. I think these are end times, but I don’t get depressed about it. I do wonder how it will all turn out, though. I could see how moving power back to local governments would be much more accountable, but how might that work, if you think it would work? Thanks.

SK: It’s hard to answer because each state and city is different and has its own issues of corruption, but yes, the smaller the scale, the better chance at accountability. Reviving local media would be paramount to that endeavor.

Tracy: It seems each day brings another depraved action/policy/statement that feels surreal in its ignorance and cruelty, not to mention illegality, and yet our so-called opposition party is mostly silent. Calling my “representatives” feels pointless. What’s the best thing we as citizens can do to push back against this normalization of fascism? Janine: Writing about the current climate — this perfect storm of government corruption, conspiracy, capitalistic excess and authoritarianism with a dash of big tech takeover —feels to be like trying to run in quicksand. Given that you are an expert in writing about collapse(s) before, during and after they happen, how do you manage that quicksandy feeling?

SK: Honestly, it’s hard. It gets to me the same way it gets to you. I have to seek out experiences that give me joy, usually exploring outdoors or listening to music. There’s a cruelty in the world that is hard to bear. That’s why it feels worse than the first Trump term: we didn’t have the level of algorithmic control, exploitation of crisis, and political betrayal that we have now. I try to write beautiful things. There is so much beauty being stolen from the world that I want to reset the balance. I document what’s happening: accurate information is hard to find, and I want a record of this time. If we move toward a better future, we will need detailed accounts of how we got here so we do not revert. Those are just things I’m doing though —they’re right for me and reflect my skills. Think about what’s best for you — and don’t feel bad about taking breaks. These are tough times.

Dan R: Does Steve Witkoff know Jeffery Epstein? It would help with my ‘connect the dots’ game of ‘Worldwide Crime Syndicate Bingo’.

SK: Not sure, but I suspect yes. I also appreciate that this question is in present tense.

Will B: You take a lot of epic long road trips. So do I. Do you have any rituals or tricks you use to stay awake during long stretches of the more boring parts of your drives?

SK: I sing really loud. It keeps everyone in the car awake!

Rebecca: On a lighter note, what holiday movies do you like to watch this time of year?

SK: We have Christmas at my sister’s house. My brother-in-law and I have little in common — except our awesome shared taste in Christmas movies. We watch them together with the kids. Our favorites are National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Die Hard. I can watch the scene with Chevy Chase in the attic a thousand times and never stop laughing. Die Hard is a perfect movie — and of course it’s a Christmas movie! Scroll down to see the holiday cross stitch I made in loving tribute to Die Hard.

OK, that’s it — thanks again, everyone! If you’d like to submit a question for next time — or simply keep this newsletter going — become a paying subscriber:

Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmers! I cross-stitched Die Hard.

Stanley would like to be left alone.

UPDATE 12/3 5:30 AM: Questions are now closed because there are a lot! I will answer as many as I can as soon as I can in a separate article. Thank you very much!

Hello subscribers (and future subscribers!) Welcome to my regular Q & A. For those new to this feature, here’s how it works:

1) To ask a question, join as a paying subscriber, and post your question in the comments section below:

2) I will answer as many of questions as I can in a separate article. I bundle questions and address common themes. Keep your question brief and ask only one!

3) The article with my answers will be open to all. In other words, you need to be a paying subscriber to submit a question, but not to read the Q & A.

I call this feature “Just Answering Questions” because there are topics that, if I were to broach them out of the blue, would be like throwing a bomb into your inbox. If you’ve read my books, you know they cover disturbing ground. (Lately, the disturbing ground I covered years ago is being repackaged as “news” so that the powerful can feign shock and dodge accountability!) Here, you choose the topic — and I’m just answering questions!

If you are already a paying subscriber, you are all set — you can submit a question in the comments section below!

If you’re not a paying subscriber, this is a great reason to become one. This newsletter is my livelihood and your support keeps it going. I don’t believe in paywalls in times of peril.

I have been able to keep the newsletter free because people who can pay do. Lately some folks have had to drop their subscriptions because they lost their jobs. I don’t want to run a newsletter that leaves people out based on income and circumstances they cannot control. I don’t want to paywall the archives.

But in order to keep my writing open to all, and to support my own family, I need your help. If you’ve been enjoying my years of free work, this is a great time to become a paying subscriber. I’m going through tough times myself and could use the support.

I am extremely grateful to paying subscribers and I offer these Q & As to thank you.

To get a taste of the action, here are past Q & As. You may find the answer to your question there already. If not, they serve as an interesting record of our times:

PanoptiCon Artists— October 10, 2025
Mafia State Survival – August 29, 2025
Fake Feuds, Real Crises – June 13, 2025
White House vs Road House – May 12, 2025
We’re Already in the Aftermath – February 26, 2025
Trump Term Two – January 17, 2025
Just Answering (Many) Questions! – November 18, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Flamethrower! – October 30, 2024
Just Answering Questions: The Answers! – September 30, 2024

Note: Past Q & As were so popular that I often had to shut down submissions within a day. I suspect that may happen again, so let’s get rolling — leave your questions in the comments section below!

I am the Alpha and the Omega and the Automart; send me your queries and I’ll try to answer them fast.

After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.

We didn’t know it would be the last.

Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.

There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.

I had taken the kids to the Johnny Cash Museum the day before. I showed them his guitar, his crucifix ring, his handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues.”

They shrugged. They knew Johnny Cash — his baritone blared through their childhoods — but preferred the Glen Campbell Museum, where we belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy” karaoke to the horrified amusement of other patrons. Nashville was in full “Nash Vegas” mode and the kids lapped up the flash. Being in the Johnny Cash Museum was too much like being at home.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” my son said when he found me on a bench, tears streaming down my face.

“Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m watching the last music video Johnny Cash made before he died. He was dying in this video. He was 71, the same age my parents are now. I was so scared they would die when covid came. I still am. I keep thinking about it and how lucky we are to see each other again.”

“And celebrate the anniversary,” he said. He was ten.

“That’s right. Watch with me. You can see a whole life in this video. You can see life go by so fast. Decades and decades, memory and regret, time too fast to bear.”

* * *

I look at family photos from our 2021 tour of the Ryman when I can handle it: my children with my father in the year before the cancer came. When a stage was what brought us together instead of what tore us apart. My father was diagnosed at stage four: terminal. Since then, we’ve lived on stolen time.

Our family reunions have turned into group texts about metastases and symptoms and signs. The endless search for signs: a cruel component of cancer, that evil guessing game. Trying to predict the future when the only certainty is that there won’t be one.

That’s when I put on Johnny Cash and cry for redemption. I’m not sure whose.

My dad is still here. A clinical trial extended his life beyond the initial prognosis. He got to see his musical hero, Neil Young, endorse my newsletter in December 2024. I never heard my dad so excited about something I had done. Forget my books — Neil Young liked my writing, Neil Young knew the name KENDZIOR! Neil Young has no idea how happy he made my family. It felt like a miracle that my dad beat the odds to see this surreal collision of his worlds.

That’s what happens when you are a Johnny Cash fan with a dying father: you look for signs. Then you look elsewhere, away from soulless technology, away from the corporeal void, toward what lasts when life won’t.

* * *

In September, I was talking with another writer about the collapse of the US media. We were bemoaning the glut of writers on Substack and longing for a business model that valued collaboration over competition.

“Do you remember The Highwaymen?” I asked.

“I loved The Highwaymen.”

The Highwaymen were a 1980s outlaw country supergroup of middle-aged men: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Johnny Cash. Poets and prophets set to Casio keyboard production that somehow made the songs scarier instead of sillier. I had been playing the first Highwaymen album on a loop, in particular, the ominous sing-song “The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over”:

Ol’ Father Time is a-rumblin’ and a-rappin’
Standing at the window, thumpin’ and a-tappin’
Everybody’s waiting for something to happen
I hope it don’t happen to you!
You know that Judgement Day is getting nearer
There it is in the rearview mirror
If you duck down, I could see a little clearer — all over this world!

“We should form The Highwaymen, but for writers,” I said. “Like four really good writers and we’ll help each other out.”

“I call Willie,” my friend said instantly. I agreed; he is Willie.

“I’m not sure who I am,” I said. I’d been on a Kristofferson kick since he died, and like Waylon, I am lonesome and ornery, though not mean.

Then I laughed. Who was I kidding? “I call Johnny!”

On October 10, I defended Johnny Cash against a widely derided Wall Street Journal article by an author who once thought him uncool. As a joke, I quote-tweeted the piece on the social media site BlueSky, writing, “I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die”, a reference to Cash’s infamous “Folsom Prison Blues” lyric, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” People laughed at my line and moved on to real problems.

Except for the BlueSky administrators, who suspended me a month later. On November 10, they deleted my account. Days later, they announced on BlueSky that I had threatened to murder a writer, removing my one-liner from the Cash context. Because they banned me, I couldn’t see them lie: a reporter sent me a screenshot.

My friend saw the reason for the ban and wrote: “Are you fucking kidding me?!?!?”

“At least now I know which Highwayman I am,” I said.

BlueSky reinstated my account after outcry but never apologized for portraying me as an aspiring killer. I encouraged folks to focus on other banned users, like Palestinians documenting genocide. Then I set about my real business: reclaiming my past.

The main reason I wanted my Bluesky account back was to grab photos I had taken of birds. I didn’t bother to explain this to the terminally online of BlueSky. They don’t care about the real sky. Their world is loveless and literal. They don’t understand nature or poetry or music, and they don’t understand me.

The ban was inane, but I did not like getting dragged into a spectacle at a vulnerable time. My dad’s clinical trial drugs had stopped working and I was breaking down. When BlueSky deleted my account, I was already gone. I was doing what I do when the pain gets too much: hitting the road and driving until I could vanish into the woods.

* * *

There is a part of the Ozarks I go to when life is so unbearable, I worry I will end it if I find no salvation. It has never let me down. I rarely write about it.

The land knows me. This sounds arrogant and superstitious. I hope I’m not falling prey to hubris by confessing it, but I do so with gratitude. I can feel recognition in the air. Every time I am there, something magical happens. The botanist George Washington Carver wrote that nature will share its secrets if you love it enough. That has been my experience, and I believe it cuts both ways.

I do not drink, do drugs, go to therapy, or take antidepressants. I don’t judge people who do. But when I am on the river or in the woods, it is for the same reason: to heal or at least find enough reprieve to keep going.

And to look for signs, or when I am lucky, have signs look for me.

2025 brought nightmare weather: a record tornado in St Louis, record cold, record heat. There was no autumn: green leaves fell to the ground like a mockery of hope. The flailing fall felt like an outward manifestation of my inward sorrow. Fall is the season of death, but it is also the most beautiful, and it had stopped unnaturally, like an infected body that would not die or heal. Nature was locked in unchanging agony.

Until early November, when I went to Don Robinson State Park and had a supernatural experience. That was the first sign.

I can never tell this story, I thought as I drove home. I want to, but people will think I’m insane. However, since Bluesky already has people thinking I’m a killer, I can risk it.

I have written about Don Robinson State Park before. It is not my secret place, but it is the most special place that I can easily visit. The park was created by Don Robinson, a millionaire recluse who lived like a pauper and bought the exact amount of land as Central Park but let it remain wild and free. Robinson donated his property to the Missouri state park system when he died.

In Don Robinson State Park, the drab world of delayed fall was gone. There was an explosion of color, as if the entire season had arrived in one day. I walked the trail in solitary wonder. That is another great thing about Missouri state parks: if you get there early, you are almost always alone. Gold, orange, red, bright yellow, even neon green: I was a fragment of Don Robinson’s kaleidoscope, rolling around inside.

I wandered in awe and then felt something in my hand: I was holding a leaf. I had not plucked it nor did I catch it. I was simply holding a leaf and did not know how it got there. I put it in my pocket and kept on.

At the end of the trail is Don Robinson’s grave. I’m going to return the leaf to him, I thought. I’ll put it on his grave. Folks in Missouri often leave coins or stones on the grave of Don Robinson. This idea isn’t as strange as you might think.

What was strange was the wet shape on the gravestone the same size as the leaf I held. I could not discern what caused the marking. The morning was cloudy, but it had not rained in days. I placed my leaf on top of the shape — and instantly, the sun erupted, lighting up the Ozark foothills in a dazzling display.

I grabbed my phone to take photos and document the depth of the change. My leaf was like a key that opened a portal of sunlight.

I aimed my camera upward, only to find an eagle soaring in what had become a clear blue sky. The clouds had vanished. As I tried to snap a photo of the eagle, two more joined it. The three birds flew in a circle over my head like they were performing a dance. I put my phone away and watched. Within minutes, the birds departed, the sun retreated back behind the clouds, and all returned to how it was.

I walked to my car, trying not to think that the ghost of Don Robinson had emerged to show me the beauty of the world in exchange for my leaf, but it seemed like something he would do.

The second sign came days later. Trying to calm my racing thoughts, I walked the perimeter of Creve Coeur Lake, a place I kayak so often I know its waterbirds and like to believe they know me. Like Don Robinson, Creve Coeur had exploded in color. It was breathtaking enough to gaze at golden trees reflected in a mirror lake at golden hour — when on top of that, a rainbow appeared. A rainbow leading to the pot of gold that is the forest of Creve Coeur, French for “broken heart”.

I usually prefer remote regions. But I like Creve Coeur because it’s popular with immigrants. It is a joy to hear people marvel at the same rainbow in different languages.

I decided that on Monday I would drive south to my sanctuary in the Ozarks. Nature was healing, and it was healing me. I felt almost human again. Something was telling me it was time.

* * *

Johnny Cash was a cover artist. He was a dynamic original songwriter — as “Folsom Prison Blues” made clear —but he is probably the best cover artist the music world has known. Not only country, but any music at all.

When Johnny Cash covers a song, it becomes a Johnny Cash song. This was obvious to everyone when he covered Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, the song whose video I was watching at the museum, but it is true of every song he recorded.

I listened to Johnny Cash covers when I was writing my book Hiding in Plain Sight, because writing non-fiction feels like being a cover artist. I am reinterpreting a world that others have built, breathing new meaning into old memories, trying to convey in emotion what was forgotten in facts.

One of my favorite Cash covers is of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” for the way his voice nearly breaks at the lines: “You won’t read that book again/Because the ending’s just too hard to take.”

That’s how I felt about Hiding in Plain Sight. It’s how I felt about the 21^st century, since the 20^th century was all over, all over this world. A technofascist hell had taken its place: a world where Johnny Cash is replaced with AI; a world where walks in nature are replaced with virtual reality facsimiles.

Cash came from Arkansas. When the kids were young, we saw his childhood home in Dyess. I wrote about that trip in the first draft of my book The Last American Road Trip, but like the sections on Bobbie Gentry or any southern singer, I was told to take it out, that it was irrelevant. I repurposed the Gentry section for this newsletter, and it was one of the most popular essays I published.

The corporate world hates soul. As a result, it hates the south. The south is the cradle of American music: folk, blues, bluegrass, country, gospel, rock. The songs of the south are inextricably bound to nature. They often bemoan natural disasters, which leads to musings on God, which leads to warnings of God’s ruthless ways, and the need to cleanse one’s soul, and guard it, and save it.

The south has no monopoly on American music. Motown is Detroit. Rap and punk thrived on the coasts. But it is the cradle. And cradles are where you go to be reborn.

Not too far from my special place is a section of river where people get baptized, and on many an occasion I’ve wanted to do it, not to join an organized religion, but because I love the water that much.

Johnny Cash was a man of faith and a man of sin. He suffered and overcame, and left a record of those trials.

It is the same beauty that I see in this part of the Ozarks, with its ancient towering boulders, and crystal waters that can rise in a flash flood and kill you, and towering trees of thorns, and deep rumbling waterfalls beneath the ground.

The parts of America I love best lie over karst formations, where water seeps through the soil and forms intricate caverns invisible from above. This includes my Missouri and Cash’s Arkansas and Tennessee.

The man in black above and the earth in black below.

* * *

I have been to my sanctuary about a half dozen times, and these are some of the things that happened:

I saw the aurora borealis — twice. Neither time was forecast. I had driven to a clearing in the forest to see the Milky Way and instead was greeted by the northern lights on the two occasions they were visible in southern Missouri.

I walked to a creek wondering if anything good would ever happen and within seconds found a rare fossil.

I reached into a river and pulled out a rock with my son’s name etched on it not by human hand.

This is only a sampling: some secrets are between the land and me.

On Tuesday, I went for a walk at dawn and was greeted by another rarity: frost flowers. A frost flower is a curling piece of ice that emerges from a plant when moisture is pushed through the stem and hits the frozen air. They grow in delicate spirals and last hours before they melt, leaving no trace.

I have seen frost flowers a few times. But I never saw them like this: bountiful fields of silvery white, so many I at first mistook them for litter and was annoyed. I wandered in the cold for hours, examining each one. No two frost flowers are alike.

Had I been able to sleep well, had I not been up early with anxiety, I would have missed the frost flowers. By the time I drove out to the trail I planned to hike, they had melted. My sorrow had become my solace.

This is why I think the land is watching out for me.

My hike began at The Devil’s Well. A long staircase leads to an iron gate blocking you from plunging a hundred feet into an underground lake. The lake is assumed to reach the river to which I was headed, but no one knows for sure. All you know, as you climb above it into the Ozark mountains, is that you are towering above a secret world.

Like Don Robinson, like Creve Coeur, the five-mile hike was lit with vibrant foliage. By now I was used to it, though never unappreciative, since I had feared fall would never come. My goal was to hike to a river cave I had paddled in 2023. Rumor was you could climb to the outside of the cave and see a spot the painter Thomas Hart Benton had immortalized eighty years ago.

I veered off the main trail onto the cave trail and climbed down to the river’s edge. The view was identical to Benton’s painting: even a frail tree leaned at the same angle. I climbed into the cave, where the water is as turquoise as the Caribbean. Last time I was here, it was with my husband in a canoe, trying to navigate without hitting the walls. This time, I could appreciate its grandeur: a ceiling of stalactites and intricate limestone formations.

I was not alone. There was an elderly fisherman who told me he had been fishing in the cave for fifty years, because it was the most reliable spot in winter. This was his special place, not mine, and I let him be.

That night the sky performed a symphony: the Milky Way, a shooting star, and then the aurora borealis, pink and green and white. I walked to a pond and caught its reflection. I couldn’t believe I was given so many gifts at once.

This is proof of God, in my eyes. Proof that redemption is possible. I don’t see the wonders of nature as a reward so much as an invitation to keep trying. That for one night my suffering is recognized and relieved in magnitude equal to the weight I carry.

* * *

In remote parts of the Ozarks, my cell phone does not work. I cannot receive texts. I can get internet in places with WiFi, so I knew I was part of an internet controversy, even though I was not participating in it. I knew that at some point, as I drove north to St. Louis, my phone would erupt. I have never turned on social media notifications because I don’t hate myself. But texts alone would do it this time.

They poured in when I reached the highway. Many were from friends concerned I was censored. Others were from family, but I needed to drive several hours, and I would lose it if something new and bad had happened to my father in the one day I was away. I needed to hold on to the magic of that land for as long as I could.

I put on my iPod — I am never giving up my iPod — and sang outlaw country for outlaw terrain. Waylon, Johnny, Townes Van Zandt, Bobbie Gentry, Sammi Smith. I wondered for the hundredth time whether Gary P. Nunn lifted the melody of “London Homesick Blues” from Kris Kristofferson’s “Just the Other Side of Nowhere”. I wished social media was still the sort of place where you could ask a question like that and not get reported as offensive by an angry bad faith mob.

“I taught the weepin’ willow how to cry, cry, cry,” I sang to The Highwaymen’s “Big River”. “And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear BlueSky…”

BlueSky is a bad place for people who like blue skies. Who like wild lands and poetic allusions and don’t live their lives to train AI modules, but to escape them.

It is not a place for Johnny Cash fans. Johnny Cash constantly sang about death. Killing in rage, killing in regret, getting executed for just and unjust reasons, natural disasters, the wrath of God, the loss of loved ones, the loss of yourself.

On social media, you are not supposed to talk about death. It is seen as uncouth and is cloaked in non-words like “unalived”: non-words that don’t even rise to the level of euphemism. They are the neologisms of humans self-censoring to dodge the rebuke of robots. What has become of us?

* * *

For months, I’ve had chest pain. It eases when I’m in the wild: away from the computer, away from social media, away even from the expectations that come with a newsletter like this.

It did not occur to me until now that my chest hurts because I need to get so many things off it. The main one being that my father is dying and I am struggling to process the dread and the pain. I have lived in anticipatory grief for over two years, with the slow collapse of the world forming a Greek chorus to my private tragedy.

It is a terrible time to be a person and a worse time to lose a person. I fear the years ahead, picturing the empty stage. Is an empty stage a space you enter or a void you feel? Stages of cancer, stages of grief. I shot straight to acceptance when I heard the news. My father always told me I did things too fast. Acceptance does not help the pain.

I look at our photo on the Ryman stage and hold the memory tight. That was a frost flower day, an aurora borealis day. A day that a decade ago would be mundane but turned rare and then gone. That day was real, that day was ours, and that is how I will remember my dad.

I look at the photos of birds that I retrieved. In kayaking season, I sent my mom a photo of a bird every day to cheer her up. I wanted to make sure I had all of them. Those birds are for her, like the secret spot in the Ozarks is for me. Like music is for all of us, from my father’s Neil Young to my Johnny Cash: transcendent comfort in the eternal friends of song.

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the primary source of income for my family of four, so I need and appreciate your support!

Handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues”. All photos by me.

Inside the river cave.

Frost flower.

The northern lights.

The rainbow.

Sunset over a broken heart.

To many, I’m best known for my writing on Trump, Epstein, and transnational organized crime. Watching the news this week has been like living in a Black Mirror episode where the horrors I uncovered for the past decade — particularly in my books Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew and in some essays on here — are presented round the clock as new information, which I am forced to relive as faux-“revelation”.

I appreciate the journalists who are doing new investigative work. But many rehash conclusions I published years ago: conclusions I desperately wanted officials to act on to stop sadistic state-sanctioned abuse. They did not.

Some of my readers have asked if I feel vindicated. There is a great difference between vindication and justice. There is still no justice for the victims of Epstein or containment of the perpetrators, who continue to hold great power. I still get death threats for my books while wealthy pundits profit off pain.

What can I say? I shed blood on the page, and they serve it up like sangria.

When I started this newsletter in 2023, it was in part to escape the news cycle. I had just completed a book, The Last American Road Trip, that was a mix of memoir and history and travelogue. I enjoy exploring new territory.

I loved that on Substack, I could write about anything — and I have.

Over time, without realizing it, I wrote a series of essays on American celebrities: iconoclasts and eccentrics, rebels and recluses, icons who suffered under corporate control. Musicians, artists, lovers of the outdoors. It’s an eclectic group of people, with a little Gen X nostalgia thrown in. I did not expect that one of my most beloved essays would be about Beverly Hills, 90210.

I gained a lot of new readers this week, so I thought it might be nice to share a sampling of my work. Click on the title for the full article. I will be back with a new piece soon, after I get some rest. I’ve been feeling inspired by Johnny Cash lately…

Beverly Hills, 90210: Brenda and Dylan Are Dead

“I don’t know how many futures they threw away, but I know that one of them was supposed to be mine.”

Bobbie Gentry: Searching for Bobbie Gentry

“Over the last four years, as cruelty flourished and creativity fell under fire, I turned to Gentry. She didn’t compromise; she didn’t cut and run. She outwitted the industry that sought to suppress her. She had faith that her work would endure after she left the stage — and it did. Gentry destroyed respectability and then did the most scandalous thing of all: abandoned fame for freedom.”

Harry Houdini: The Red, White and Blue Screen of Death

“Pop culture is now considered dangerous. Billionaires want it destroyed even though it’s profitable. It’s not worth it to them anymore. It’s the wrong power, in the wrong hands — yours. Your memories are the tech lords’ enemies. They seek to scramble history, erasing touchstones until you no longer recognize your world. They monitor you as an object but discard you as a person. You attract scrutiny, but not care. So when the machine went down, I felt apprehension — but also, release.”

Tracy Chapman: Driving in Circles

“In the late 20th century, American dads played a Black female folk singer’s poignant anthem of a dead American Dream, and their children took note. My dad wasn’t trying to teach me anything with ‘Fast Car’. He just liked Tracy Chapman. But I listened, wide-eyed, as it described the country I was learning to fear to love.”

Twin Peaks: Laura Palmer’s House

“Twin Peaks is my comfort show: not because it makes me feel better, but because it assures me the world is worse and that I am not alone in noticing.”

Antonín Dvořák: Dvorak Lived in Iowa

“These days I am a constant traveler on the Dvorak Memorial Highway. New memories overwhelm. Dropping you off at your dorm, telling you I love you, hugging you goodbye. Feeling an aimless heartache, like I’m picking up a book I started when I was 28 and put down for 18 years. Now I’ve not only lost my place — I’m not sure I still know how to read.”

Gunnar Hansen: My Friend Leatherface

“Gunnar Hansen made me feel normal. It was normal to love Moby Dick and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was normal to abhor violence and watch horror for entertainment, in the hope that somehow the entertainment would convey the grief in the American air, even in that glorious illusion of 1999, the sole year I could be called an optimist.”

Elvis Presley: Elvis and the Edge of Reality

“You are never safe in America, even when you’ve made it — even when you are an ‘it’ upon whom things are made. That’s the worst part, Elvis knew: to become a brand and lose being a person.”

The Blue Oyster Cult: Fearing the Reapers

“Maybe you think I’m stupid, despite my credentials as a VIP of the Indiana Bacon Festival. But at least I’m sincerely stupid instead of artificially intelligent.”

Don Robinson: How to Get Lost

“I have seen a lot of wonders in that park, but none matches the reliability of solitude. I’ve learned that what leaves you alone is better than anything you could find. It is safe to cast your burdens down there because no one can throw them back in your face.”

Georgia O’Keeffe: The Black Place

“She wanted to show a cruel world something beautiful without lying.”

Caleb Carr: Killing Time, Again

“Caleb Carr was kind to me, and I always remembered that. I remember it every time I sign my own books for my own readers. I didn’t know about his struggles. But I’m glad he stuck around. He knew enough about the world to mourn the future more than the past, and he kept on writing anyway.”

Henry Schoolcraft: The Miners

“It’s not that my heart’s not in it. It’s that my heart is in everything.”

With gratitude,

Sarah

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I greatly appreciate your support!

Once upon a millennium, I was a Record Town cashier at the mall…

A notebook from the New York Daily News, where I earned $40,000 a year in my first job out of college: a job that later became an unpaid internship and now is probably done by AI. A Nokia cell, used for making calls: what else could a phone do? A card for a video store in Astoria, where I paid $900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

And the object that shifts Before to After: a keychain adorned with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, and God Bless America. I don’t know where I got it. But I know when: September 12, 2001. I attached it to my purse and wore it without irony, for a time.

At the Daily News, I worked in the “web room” with the other twentysomethings. Our job was to put a replica of the print paper online. This was a monotonous task performed between the hours of 7 pm and 3 am, but I didn’t complain. A job was a job. The nights left my days free to explore New York City, and I did so with abandon.

I rode subways to every borough, getting off at random stops just to see what was there. I experienced everything firsthand because no other experience was possible: Google Streetview was not there to deter or entice. The streets of New York were paved in serendipity.

In 2002, I felt the ground shift: the march of corporate CHUD out of the sewers and into the boardrooms. New York’s criminal underground had risen to the top. The FBI, which had investigated transnational organized crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, abandoned that pursuit after 9/11 for a narrow focus on Islamic terrorism.

Ordinary New Yorkers paid the price in both freedom and in cash, as prices rose to reflect the white-collar crime economy. The New York I loved was vanishing. It was destroyed not in a day by the 9/11 attacks, but over years by post-9/11 greed: the soaring costs of rent, public services, entertainment, and more.

The city was pricing its diverse residents out when not surveilling them on baseless grounds. The anonymity of the crowd was replaced by the ubiquity of the police. A corrupt mayor, Giuliani, asked for elections to be canceled so he could stay in power. Unsuccessful, he helped install a billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, as his replacement.

That was when I decided to leave. I took a souvenir: my Daily News co-worker, who I married after we quit.

* * *

Everyone who lived in New York City has a variation on the “why I left” tale. But my time there was unusually tumultuous: 2000-2003. I had one “normal” year and two years dominated by the worst attack on US soil in history. I worked at a tabloid that both documented sacrifice and normalized corruption. I captioned photos of firefighter funerals and I uploaded Iraq War propaganda.

I still explored the city. But now subway signs told me to report on strangers, to view New Yorkers not with curiosity but suspicion. I felt plutocrats grasping at my grief, gathering it like clay for the foundation of a new city — a worse city.

It was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2000. One of my main tasks at the Daily News was posting photos. We had three divisions: news, features, and sports. Everyone worked on all three, except for me, after I guilelessly inserted a photo of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill where baseball guy Paul O’Neill was supposed to be. “SARAH IS NOT ALLOWED ON SPORTS!” became the mantra of every night manager.

Despite my well-deserved ban, there was a sports story that caught my interest. Baseball player John Rocker made headlines in 2000 for insulting the 7 train and the people who rode it — and then New York City itself.

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners,” he said. “You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there.”

“But that’s the best thing about New York!” I exclaimed to my coworkers, and it remains true. I have never experienced the incredible diversity of languages and cultures and food in such a compact space, especially in Queens, my favorite borough. It’s why I thought I would never leave.

I had to, though. I could not afford to stay on my salary. I moved to one fallen imperial capital — Istanbul — and then another — St. Louis. I wondered if New York would buckle under its corrupt excess and join them as a fellow city of faded grandeur. I wondered if it would allow the dignity of ruins. I wanted proof I had not invented the New York in my mind.

When I returned in the 2010s, New York had transformed into bland rows of luxury stores and banks. When I returned in 2022 to do a book event at The Strand, it was a fledgling technocracy of QR codes and digital currency.

The city’s tangible quality, the literal feeling of New York, had been scrubbed clean, eliminated like newsprint. I hid in The Strand, an old store surrounded by old books, like it was a holy bunker.

I returned one last time in 2023 to see my daughter play violin at Carnegie Hall. Behind me were rows of seats named after the oligarchs I condemned in my books.

Maybe this is why the media doesn’t grasp the depth of corruption, I thought. The bad guys bought the whole town.

* * *

On Tuesday, I woke at 3 am to discover that Zohran Mamdani was mayor. His win was attributed to blue-collar, young, and immigrant voters. People who will be here for the future regardless of whether overlords have deemed them worthy of one. People who have no choice but to fight for that future with all they’ve got.

I turned on his victory speech. Mamdani immediately mentioned Eugene Debs, the socialist politician, and I laughed, thinking, Oh, he’s gonna get shit for that!

By chance, I had spent the afternoon eating Halloween candy and binge-watching Family Ties, because I’ve apparently decided to live up to the ideal of adulthood I had when I was six. The Family Ties episode was about how Alex P. Keaton, young Republican, learned to appreciate and defend the speeches of Eugene Debs, even though Debs was a socialist. I wondered if a show with this plot could air now. I wondered if Bari Weiss was burning Family Ties reels on the Paramount lot.

I closed my eyes, hoping the relief of a Cuomo-less political world would lull me to sleep, but was jolted by Mamdani’s shout-out to “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.” I had never heard an American politician mention Uzbeks outside the confines of terrorism. It was a welcome change.

You may think I’m focusing on trivialities. Of course I am: he’s been the mayor-elect for twelve hours. I learned the hard way, through Obama and “The Squad” and every other charismatic sell-out, that actions matter more than words. Election Day is but a day. The structural stranglehold of the mafia state can undo the will of the people. When Mamdani is in office, I will judge him by his deeds.

What right do you have to judge, Missouri yokel? the political cult may scoff. For one, New York is an international city. I would like to see if Mamdani makes good on his promise to, for example, arrest war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit.

But mostly I want New Yorkers to get what’s theirs: affordable housing, accessible food, free transportation, and respect.

Respect for ordinary people is the main quality stripped away from New York in the decades I was gone. In those decades, New York uplifted a large number of extremely corrupt characters: Trump, Giuliani, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Bernard Kerik, Eric Adams, and Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few. They were given glory that they did not deserve.

They made headlines — or with teams of PR professionals replacing media, the headlines made them. But the regular people who have long made New York a dynamic place were denied opportunity. They were overwhelmed with the struggle for survival and sneered at by the politicians who are supposed to serve them.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani treated New Yorkers with respect. His behavior was greeted with shock, and then appreciation. Whether it translates into policy remains to be seen, but it translated into votes — and, hopefully, into a cultural shift that goes far beyond one politician.

* * *

Dick Cheney, whose shadow loomed over the New York I inhabited, died the morning Mamdani was elected. It felt like an omen of transformation, as did the annihilation of the Cuomo dynasty. A new chapter to end the dark prologue of the 21st century.

But I cannot let myself believe it. It’s too early. I’m packing my longing away with my Nokia and my notebook and my 9/11 keychain and my extinct video store card from the now expensive Astoria, home to wealthy professionals like Mamdani.

Much as my old job turned into unpaid labor, my $900 Astoria apartment now rents for around $3000. To my shock, this is considered cheap in some New York circles. Mamdani was criticized for living in a $2300 a month Astoria apartment allegedly meant for poor people. I cannot fathom how any poor person could afford a $2300 apartment. In this way, I am content to be an outsider to New York.

But I am not an outsider to the corruption crisis: no American is. I know what it’s like to dream and what it’s like to be betrayed.

Look into the crowd at the Mamdani rallies and you see glimmers of the old New York, a skyline of light shining in their eyes. You see that gleam and don’t know if it will turn to triumph or tears, and that’s the trick.

I want Mamdani to be the man they believe he is. I want New Yorkers to be the people they dream of being. I can picture a better world even if I am uncertain. I pack that vision away with my mementos too — not because I don’t believe in its promise, but because I want to keep it safe.

What is New York’s past, if not possibility?

* * *

Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I greatly appreciate your support!

I took this photo in 2020 when I was cleaning out my basement during the “shelter in place” era of the pandemic. I found other items from my New York years, like a deck of cards autographed by the guy who played “Big Pussy” on The Sopranos. I have no idea how I got it or when I met Vincent Pastore. That is the magic of New York I want restored!

Signing books at The Strand in 2022.