* * *

It was the 30^th of December, and I was driving the Natchez Trace Parkway, looking for Bobbie Gentry.

I didn’t want to find her. I only wanted to know she was out there, eluding everyone.

I wanted her to outwit every man who did her wrong. Many are dead: Bobbie Gentry is in her 80s. She hasn’t appeared on stage since 1981, when, after a series of music industry disputes, she left public life behind with a steadfastness unrivaled.

I was not the first to explore Chickasaw County, Mississippi and other Gentry haunts, hoping for a glimpse of the singer. For over forty years, no stranger has tracked her down. Gentry wanted to disappear and she got her way. She is rumored to be happy. I am likely angrier about the treatment of Bobbie Gentry than Bobbie Gentry is.

It’s only fair when a trailblazing woman gets burned that younger women pick up the torch.

In 1967, Bobbie Gentry destroyed the Summer of Love. The Beatles crooned “All You Need Is Love”, flower-haired hippies swayed — and in July, Bobbie Gentry released “Ode to Billie Joe”, a spare acoustic ballad about a suicide whose true horror was the politesse and apathy which with it was greeted.

What America needed was not love. America needed truth served cold and clever. “Ode to Billie Joe” framed cruel indifference as mystery. Americans ate it up like a southern noontime dinner.

Ode to Billie Joe knocked Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band off the top spot. It made Gentry, who wrote and sang the title track, a massive star. The genre-defying hit — “I don’t sing white or colored; I sing southern,” she explained — dominated the Hot 100, country, easy listening, and R&B charts. Gentry was indefinable, independent, and confident in her dark lyricism.

As a result, she had to be punished. America loves to blame the messenger, especially when the message presages darker days. Some believe the flower power era ended with the Manson murders. “Ode to Billie Joe” suggests the sunny sixties never existed.

“Ode to Billie Joe” is the first-person tale of a family eating dinner on the third of June, “another sleepy dusty Delta day.” They are discussing Billie Joe McAllister, a local boy who died after jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Later, it is revealed that not long before his death, a preacher saw Billie Joe throw something — never named — off the bridge while accompanied by the female narrator of the song. The family members portray Billie Joe’s death as inevitable (“Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge”) and unimportant.

They care more about their meal than his suicide. The song’s most chilling line is “Pass the biscuits, please.”

The parents do not notice how Billie Joe’s death shakes the narrator. In the final verse, it is a year later, and she spends her time throwing flowers off the Tallahatchie Bridge. During that year, “There was a virus goin’ ‘round and papa caught it and he died last spring, and now mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything”.

She recites these horrors like a grocery list.

* * *

In the years after 2020 — when covid ravaged America and protests raged over the brutal murder of George Floyd, only for both tragedies to ultimately be abandoned in favor of apathy — I listened to “Ode to Billie Joe” hundreds of times.

The Summer of 2020 was no Summer of Love. But it was a summer that was supposed to mean something. The next few years were aimed at convincing us that it didn’t, and that we were foolish to believe it would. The real crime was compassion. The real crime was noticing and caring and wanting to make it right.

The biggest villains, in the Biden years, were the messengers: epidemiologists and activists and documentarians of tragedy battling a brigade of pundits and politicians who wanted us to pass the biscuits, please, and ignore that body under the bridge.

* * *

One would think that after “Ode to Billie Joe” — a commercial success and lyrical masterpiece housed in the University of Mississippi library next to Faulkner — Bobbie Gentry would be allowed to do whatever she wanted.

To believe this is to not understand how women are treated in creative industries. When a woman has an unconventional hit, the reaction is often to try to contain her, even sabotage her. Success does not protect female writers — not even from their own publishers.

Instead of gaining support, Gentry found her abilities questioned. “I am a woman working for herself in a man’s field,” she told an interviewer in 1974. Reporters insulted her intelligence. Men took credit for her ideas. She was entangled in industry lawsuits, which she won. She became so wary of management contracts that she limited them to six months to ensure her freedom. Every career move was a tightrope of painstaking navigation and vindicated paranoia.

Her follow-up, The Delta Sweete, was true to Gentry’s vision: enigmatic ballads, raucous soul, and dark southern covers, including “Sermon” (popularized by Johnny Cash as “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”) and “Parchman Farm”, about the notorious Mississippi prison. The US press largely ignored the album and it sold poorly.

“No one bought [The Delta Sweete] but I didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Gentry in 1968. [1] I don’t know whether to believe her, but I’m glad she said it.

When America lost interest in Gentry, she became the first female songwriter to host a variety show on the BBC. She often co-directed, but the BBC would not give her formal credit, and she left.

When America regained interest in Gentry, she headlined Vegas revues and partnered with Glen Campbell, becoming an Americana sex symbol and a southern gothic intellectual all at once. A bandmate described her as “an overpowering presence” who micromanaged her elaborate shows [2]. In Vegas, she married a rich man 31 years her senior and divorced him four months later, making lots of money. She signed on to an “Ode to Billie Joe” movie, making lots of money again.

Enough money to vanish in style.

The 1970s brought the voluntary end of Gentry’s career and some of her best songs. In 1969, she headed to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record Fancy, released in 1970, under the production of Rick Hall, one of few men to consistently champion her talent.

While on book tour this April, I visited FAME. I stood under the Fancy cover: a painting of Gentry wearing the red velvet high-slit gown of her album’s protagonist, a teenage girl named Fancy who slept her way out of destitution and into independence, unrepentant about doing what she needed to survive.

The tour guide played “Fancy” in the very room where Gentry recorded it. I felt like I was seeing a ghost, but it was the indomitable spirit of the song: Gentry’s second and final hit. Like Fancy, Gentry rewrote the rules of a rigged game before she quit it.

Gentry’s 1971 album, Patchwork, was another commercial failure. Produced solely by Gentry, it alternates between character vignettes; musical interludes; and wry, sad confessions — in particular, the closer, “Lookin’ In”:

I'm packin’ up and I'm checkin’ out, I'm on the road again
Feelin’ like I'm in a pantomime
But the words will come to me in their own good time
Tumblin’ and stumblin’ over in rhyme
And the ugliest word that I ever heard, my friends, is sacrifice
It’s an easy out for all you should have been…

She never made another record.

* * *

Bobbie Gentry was so ahead of her time that she had to leave it.

She sang of the south, where she was raised. She lived in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1955, the year Emmett Till visited and was murdered by racists who threw his corpse in the Tallahatchie River. Gentry was thirteen, a year younger than Till.

Was “Ode to Billie Joe” inspired by Till’s murder? No one knows. Gentry refused to reveal what was thrown off the bridge, believing it incidental to the indifference expressed in the face of tragedy. Scholar Kristine M. McCusker hypothesized that the song reflects changing attitudes of southern whites — including whether to show guilt — at the time Gentry penned the lyrics.

“Ode to Billie Joe” reflects 1955 and 1967 and 2025. American cruelty masquerading as respectability is timeless. What’s hard to fathom today is a cutting social critique becoming a mainstream hit. The music industry has been drained of its power to reflect the people, despite Gentry’s themes resonating now more than ever.

This is particularly true since 2021. The pandemic “ended” when officials decided to bury public health data: another sleepy Delta covid day. Sedition went unpunished until public memory became blurred enough to rehabilitate a coup plotter. Promises made in 2020 to end racist police brutality were not only broken but mocked by the very politicians who made them. (In one particularly grotesque example, Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for dying.)

On social media, anyone could join the callous chat. Americans mourning loved ones were berated. Americans hit by natural disasters were told by distant strangers to “just move.” Americans stripped of rights were ignored by former allies. Emotional breakdowns in public places were filmed and posted online so that a person having the worst day of their life could have an even worse one. Americans were told they deserved what they got and what they got was horrific: the agony, and the apathy.

Cruelty was incentivized for profit and boosted by algorithm. Good-faith arguments could not happen when both “good” and “faith” had vanished. But Americans were not supposed to discuss that: not in a way that acknowledged collective pain. We were told to “move forward”, politician code for “turn your back”. Move forward, they implored, justice is divisive to the unjust.

Gentry is foremost a storyteller. Her songs are not overtly political. But tragedy feeds politics, and politics breeds tragedy, and Americans have been both the predators and the prey. There are few who convey the cruelty of abandonment, and its maddening ambiguity, like Bobbie Gentry.

“Ode to Billie Joe” is known as a sad song. But its sadness lies in the absence of mourning. Death came and people shrugged. If they grieved, they grieved alone.

* * *

In December 2023, I belted out Bobbie Gentry songs as I drove through her name-checked towns of Kosciusko and Okolona and Tupelo. I took in the lay of her land, imagining it in her time. But it is still Gentry’s time: it will always be Gentry’s time. In America, every day is the third of June.

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.

[1] Quote from Tara Murtha, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe.
[2] Quote from Tara Murtha, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe.

* * *

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“Now in this world there's a lot of self-righteous hypocrites that would call me bad…”

Inside FAME Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, one of my favorite drives.

The Natchez Trace is, of course, haunted.

A Mississippi swamp that grows rock and roll.

My mom and I get a little silly every June 3…

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:

Mike in Weho: Sarah, very grateful to have you back. You mentioned you stopped doing interviews. I’m assuming it’s temporary. I’ve really missed your Monday appearances on Mark Thompson’s podcast. Will you be going back to that?

SK: Yes, I plan to return to Mark’s show. He is a great interviewer and a kind soul. He and his production team were very compassionate when I had to cancel. I have other interviews with other shows in the works that I’ll also do once I’m feeling better.

Neal P: My question is about popular culture. Are you a fan of comedy? What shows and comedians do you enjoy? Wife of Bath: What book, movie or tv series do you return to as a ‘pick me up’ to reconnect with feelings of joy?

SK: Spaceballs! I’ve seen it over 300 times. It’s as funny now as when I saw it in the theater when I was eight and whispered to my mom “What’s a virgin alarm?” She said she’d tell me later, which led to me yelling in a crowded restaurant, “So, you gonna tell me what a virgin is now?” I love Mel Brooks. I need him to live to 100 for Spaceballs 2! I also love Larry David, Mike Judge, Michael Schur — I watch TV more than movies. I loved Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company. And like all Gen-Xers, I can communicate entirely in 1990s Simpsons quotes.

I also love Hacks. I’ve been a fan since it debuted and recently rewatched the whole series with my husband, who had never seen it. Now that it’s over, I’m blown away by the foreshadowing and attention to detail, which rival any prestige drama. The writing on Hacks is incredible. If you’re a fan, do a rewatch; you’ll notice new things. Hacks is hilarious but also important given attacks on creativity from corporations and AI. It is a defiantly human show. I will watch anything the folks behind Hacks make next. I also admire Hannah Einbender for taking a risk to speak out about Gaza and hope she has a long, successful career.

Valeria: I also write. Looking back over my past writing versus my recent or current work, I notice how much my voice has changed and evolved. How do you see the trajectory of your own writing, and how do you feel about it?

SK: I’ve mostly improved. Some of my best work is here on Substack, which makes me nervous, because I’d like it preserved. Not having an editor has both freed me up creatively and made me obsessive. I’ll edit a piece dozens of times before I post it, which is why I publish less frequently than other writers, but usually my articles hold up years later. My voice is consistent across genres and over decades. Sometimes I find things I wrote when I was a kid that sound like me now. (Between this and Spaceballs, it’s possible I have not evolved since I was eight years old…)

My main complaint is that I’m VERY tired of writing about Trump. I’ve been covering Trump as an authoritarian kleptocrat for over a decade. Because many people are writing things similar to what I wrote a decade ago, it’s uninspiring. I learn nothing new. I read fiction and poetry for pleasure and inspiration instead.

When I was an academic studying Uzbekistan, Uzbek poets complained about how creatively stultifying their dictator was. They told me it wasn’t fear that kept them from writing about him: it was boredom. Since I found him interesting (in a horrifying way), I didn’t fully understand their perspective, but I do now. I take my cues from Uzbek dissidents and write about what I value, not only what I oppose.

William V: I shouldn’t feel the need to apologize for bringing up 9/11, but somehow I do. I believe there is a straight line between 9/11 and Gaza because it is the product of the same worldview, instincts, and power relationships, and probably some of the same people. The evidence of an inside job is staggering. Could you comment?

SK: Never apologize for bringing up 9/11! My newsletter is the place to let your 9/11 theories fly. (Comments are open!) William, you asked me this question in my first Q & A. I stand by my what I wrote, but I’ll elaborate.

In my book They Knew, I wrote about how the “truth” movement was unfairly lambasted and then weaponized by propagandists like Alex Jones. People stopped looking for answers about reasonable questions — like why the US government did not act when it was repeatedly warned — out of fear of seeming “conspiratorial.” It is fine to be “conspiratorial” about an actual conspiracy. And yes, some officials who benefited greatly from 9/11 are involved in the Gaza genocide and/or are in Trump’s crime cult. Netanyahu and Giuliani are the most obvious, but there are more.

A new development since you last asked is the Epstein email release. There is a time gap in the DOJ email trove: 1999-2001. I encourage people to examine this period and ask why. Look into Epstein’s business partner, Trump secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick. It’s not hard to find him: Lutnick and Epstein lived next door to each other at 9 and 11 71^st Street. And look into the officials who “investigated” (covered up) the events of 9/11, in particular, Michael Chertoff and Jamie Gorelick.

Jane G: I adored your article Hanging by a Thread; you introduced me to tatreez. Have you been able to carry on with your crafting through this time? Laura D. S: Can you talk about your weaving? How you learned, if you’re making a product or more in it for the process, what part of your soul does it feed, etc? Chris J. R.: Do you enjoy threading the heddles in preparation? Deciding the pattern in advance? Claire B.A.: What is your favorite needlework that you’ve made? Judith: What kind of a loom do you have? How do you prefer to warp?

SK: Lots of weaving questions! I do a lot of crafts: crochet, embroidery, tatreez and other cross-stitch, pine needle baskets, and more. I wanted to learn how to weave mainly because I love looking at handwoven works. I have a small collection of Navajo rugs, including two by Rosebelle Nez, who weaves “two-face” rugs. I’m in awe of her skill and style. I went to the St. Louis Weaver’s Guild rummage sale (didn’t we all?) and bought a used Navajo loom. I want to learn tapestry weaving, but right now I weave on a Norwood floor loom from the 1970s.

In 2025, my mother-in-law, who is a very good weaver, gave me her mother’s four-shaft loom and started teaching me. I’m still getting used to the elaborate set-up since I mainly do embroidery, where you see results right away. I use a peg board for warping. I like that part; it’s hypnotic. I’m still getting used to the rest: the heddles, the dents, the math! My mother-in-law helps me with things I find hard, like sleying the reed. She has more dexterity than me even though she’s 82. I like that I can carry on her family’s tradition of weaving even though I’m an in-law.

The weaving after the set-up is blissful. I’ve followed patterns but since I’m new to it, I like making up my own to explore new techniques. After my dad died, I couldn’t sleep, and I wove a giant blue cloth. It serves no discernable purpose. When I posted a photo, a lot of people thought I wove away my grief, and subconsciously, maybe I did: variations in blue, complexity and repetition. That big threading error in the middle that gives it a “broken” effect, though — that was just me screwing up! I was too tired to rethread it. But now I like it that way. It’s my favorite weaving.

I’ve only hemmed one side, so it’s definitely about the process for me, not the result. I have a box of fiber arts projects that I want to display but keep forgetting to fix up. (See more photos at the end of the Q & A.)

Very Bright Squirrel: You’ve mentioned previously that you think St. Louis is like Vienna. I poked around on the internet to see if you had written about this, but couldn’t find anything. If you have written on this topic, can you share that work?

SK: In my book The View from Flyover Country, I wrote that St. Louis is a faded imperial capital like Istanbul and Vienna. (I lived briefly in both of those cities.) A century ago, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the US, and St. Louisans boast that we hosted the 1904 World’s Fair like it happened last week. But its glory days are long gone, and like Istanbul and Vienna, there are ruins all around. There are also museums all around and the price of admission is free. St. Louis is grand, cheap, and low-down: this is a faded American behemoth. I’d rather live here than anywhere, even though our recreational pastime is “guns or fireworks.”

Jack L: There is much discussion about possible shenanigans in the upcoming midterms including armed “poll watchers”, screening out eligible voters, and actual manipulation of the vote results themselves (hello Peter Thiel, et al). What do you regard as the biggest threat to free and fair elections? Bruce: Do you think Trump’s going to negate the midterm election by declaring martial law? Dana: Given that so many continue to cling to the [misguided] hope that just voting can bring real change, do you think there is any hope for us?

SK: Thiel left for Argentina after you asked this, which I think has more to do with ruining life for Argentines than with a desire to escape the US, as is often assumed. Anyway, as I’ve said, you can’t vote out the mafia. My advice is to document corruption, support local activists and mutual aid groups, and give them your money instead of politicians. So many laws have been broken by federal officials that oversight is gone. There were no consequences for past election tampering, including threats of violence toward poll workers, and therefore no reforms. Biden wasted his term, which should have been spent gutting out corruption, expanding SCOTUS, and restoring the VRA. I wrote in 2023 that Biden was a Placeholder President for Trump. Both parties are owned by oligarchs tied to organized crime.

Trump may declare martial law. But I don’t think it will be because of elections: he doesn’t fear those. He may do it to stop the political movements unifying around causes like stopping AI data centers. Or he may do it because he’s bored. Maybe Trump will declare martial law to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the USA!

Chris J: How do you plan to celebrate our 250th birthday? I can’t think of a 4th of July in my lifetime that I am less excited about. Mary V.H. 50 years ago I celebrated our Bicentennial in my hometown of Charleston SC. Do you think there is still cause for any celebration? I don’t think I do.

SK: In my family, if a birthday or holiday lands on a bad day — like when someone is sick — we move it to a different day and celebrate then. The actual date is irrelevant. I am usually a sucker for gaudy American pageantry. In this way I am (alas) like Trump, or at least I have the sensibility his advisors seek. But I don’t think Trump gives a shit about the USA. I’ll celebrate the 250^th on my timeline, not his. When that date is remains to be seen.

Cody: Tell me one place to see or thing to do in Santa Fe that you loved! (I’m in my 70s and have some physical limitations; I can walk but not a difficult hike.)

SK: If you’ve read The Last American Road Trip, you know I love Santa Fe! It’s a compact walkable city. Go to the square where the old churches and museums are and take your time exploring; you can see a lot in a small area. Eat as much New Mexican food as possible — and get the Christmas-style chile!

Sallybeane1215: Will you be digging more into the connection between Netanyahu and the Kahanists?

SK: I plan to, though the Israeli government is a grisly subject. Reports of ritualistic sexual abuse and torture of children by Israeli officials and the death of whistleblowers like Shoshana Strook are frightening.

Jacqui: Are the environmental fights around water usage a distraction from the real evil of AI and the destruction of knowledge that we are witnessing?

SK: They are not a distraction. AI data centers present an interrelated threat of stolen knowledge, state surveillance, and environmental devastation. They are ruining life on multiple levels at once, and all facets should be addressed.

Michael L: What, if anything, are you doing to “prep” for the future? Have you taken steps to keep your family safe from the chaos? Nora: What are you doing to help your family be more resilient (for instance, are you growing a garden)?

SK: I addressed this in past Q & As. I’m in an unusual safety situation because I document state crimes. I follow the advice on maintaining clarity that I gave in 2016: I write down what I know and hope that others find my work useful. There are folks I read who give more pragmatic advice: Jessica Wildfire gives prepper tips and Kelly Hayes gives activist tips. I do want to grow a food garden, and fortunately my best friend in central Connecticut is an amazing gardener who inspires me when I visit.

Dolly: Do you know a lunch place in St Louis called Vegan Deli & Butcher? Rebecca: There’s a fantastic St. Louis musician named Slayyyter that’s getting popular. Have you heard of her? KM: Can you recommend a good way to get plugged into STL activism? Or, what to avoid?

SK: No, no, and avoid Wesley Bell! (I’ll look into the restaurant and musician though.) St. Louis activists are quieter about how they organize because we live in a local and national police state. I would start by looking into groups who need help with the 2025 tornado devastation and its impact on marginalized communities.

Richard A: If you go out to eat in St Louis, just you and one companion of your choice, where would you go?

SK: I would go back in time to Goody Goody Diner, which sadly burnt down several years ago. Since that’s not possible, I’d go to the Festival of Nations, where you can get food made by St. Louis immigrants from over 80 countries.

Gary: Who do you think will replace Donald Trump as President once the Grim Reaper gets around to paying him a visit? Donald B: My question is about Presidential corruption. Do you see it ending? If you do, what will change?

SK: I’ll be happy if the country still exists in a recognizable form by then. It’s hard to predict a successor when they seek to kill the population and steal the resources. It’s better to look at who is behind the scenes: the donors, the blackmailers. In a mafia state, the president is only a figurehead.

Karen S: Are there examples in political systems that restore themselves from periods of authoritarian capture and rule? Does the restoration require complete reform? What are biggest barriers for US to move away from autocracy?

SK: We need eradication of corruption, restoration of sovereignty, and a sharp break from digital dependency. We needed it decades ago but unfortunately many only admit the extent of the crisis now. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Worse regimes have fallen: apartheid South Africa, Soviet-era Eastern Europe, etc. I’ve answered this before several times so please look at past Q & As.

Out of a Sudden: Is Lev Parnas to the squishy Left what Maria Butina was to the gun-toting Right?

SK: Yes, in terms of people falling for it. Part of that’s their own fault: You should not let an indicted mafia associate from a group called “Fraud Guarantee” who told Donald Trump that he is the messiah become your political guide. Lev Parnas benefits from short memories and long paywalls. Here’s a refresher from two open sources:

Buzzfeed: Two Unofficial US Operatives Reporting To Trump’s Lawyer Privately Lobbied A Foreign Government In A Bid To Help The President Win In 2020

The Forward: The Soviet Jews Embroiled In Trump’s Ukraine Obsession

Sylvia: How’s your kayaking going? We got scared after I fell out in waters we should have never traveled in. Have you ever had a scary time like that in the water? Also do you play an instrument?

SK: Kayaking is great! It takes my mind off evil people like those in the articles above. I’ve toppled in rivers a few times. The first time I was in a tandem with my husband; they call those “divorce boats”, but we make a good team. I wasn’t too scared: I was glad to tip over so I’d know what it was like and learn for next time. And I play piano; I was very good as a kid until I went the Bobby Dupea route…

Geri: Have you seen the film Sinners and what did you think?

SK: I loved Sinners! My thoughts on Sinners are in this earlier Q & A.

Steve B: Dr. Kendzior, are you at liberty to speak to your current relationship with/connection to thought leaders in the Democratic Party, if that applies?

SK: There are thought leaders in the Democratic Party?!

Cindi: I am in the first year of grief after my wife died in August from cancer. Any energy you expend outward is exceedingly generous 💗 What practices have helped mitigate the “productivity gap” you feel? I am graced to have an employer who has changed my job location to be 100% remote. And, I have reached the stage where most everyone I work with has forgotten about what I’m going through. I am navigating through it but am curious about your mindset.

SK: I am so sorry about your wife. You have my deepest sympathies. Many people responded to the Q&A call with stories about their own losses, and they have my sympathies as well. It is so hard. There aren’t really words, but I’ll try to find some.

American culture does not honor grief. Between my dad’s terminal cancer diagnosis and his death two months ago, I lost several other relatives and friends, and my best friend was widowed. Many of us left grieving faced demands to “get over it” — like there’s a rational timeline or a natural reversion to form. The reality of death is that there is no going back and that going forward takes time: time you can never measure in advance. There is no timeline on grief, and that loss of control is frightening.

I’ve designed my career to be autonomous, but even I feel pressure to “be productive”. I’ve had to accept that it is not possible now. Sometimes I read about other writers who endured tragedy and the time they took off to mourn. If they reemerge, they often do so with greater clarity and a new artistic purpose, one purer to their heart. I can only pray that this is what happens to me and be grateful for readers who stand by me in the meantime.

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Doesn’t everyone make a pine needle basket to match their book cover?

I embroidered Missouri’s state bird! (Pattern by Tanja Berlin.)

A small corner of a piece I’ve been working on since November — it will have over 20000 stitches when it’s done! Pattern by Avlea, my favorite embroidery store.

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:

And here we go!

ZW: The only silver lining to being sick at home is getting to watch endless TV. What have you been binge watching while laying low? Opti: Do you ever feel like there are writers/producers that are knowingly fictionalizing the exact same source material that you write about/report on?

SK: I have pneumonia! Common side effects of pneumonia include a sore throat, chest pain, binge-watching, and Constructing an Elaborate Fan Theory.

My fan theory is about The Wire, which I rewatched for the first time since 2015. I don’t know if my theory is unique since oligarchs have decimated the internet. But since you gave me an opening, I’m dropping it like a body in a Baltimore row house: I think “The Greeks” of season two are based on Semyon Mogilevich.

Mogilevich is the real-life head of the transnational crime syndicate connected to Donald Trump, Robert Maxwell, and other elite predators. I wrote about him in my book Hiding in Plain Sight and in my article “No World Order”, which discusses Robert I. Friedman’s 2000 book on Mogilevich, Red Mafiya. Though labeled “Russian”, Mogilevich is a transnational operative who launched his criminal empire in the USSR, then moved to Israel, then Hungary, then all over Europe, and then to the US. He was based in Philadelphia when The Wire was conceived.

Season two of The Wire was filmed in Baltimore in 2002 and released on HBO in 2003. By 2003, Mogilevich, a citizen of Russia and Israel, was on the FBI Most Wanted List. His crimes included money laundering on an unprecedented scale, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and murder. Nothing was done, because his lawyer, William Sessions, was a former head of the FBI. In 2011, Robert Mueller called the Mogilevich syndicate a profound threat to the US but did nothing meaningful to stop it. In December 2015, as Trump became the GOP frontrunner, James Comey removed Mogilevich from the FBI list and replaced him with a bank robber. But I digress. (Read the book!)

Season two of The Wire begins with a cargo of dead trafficked Eastern European women dropped at a Baltimore dock by a shadowy syndicate with ties to Hungary, Israel, Russia, and other countries — but who present themselves as “Greek” and joke privately about their fake identities, creating new passports with new names. The cargo ship’s destination was Philadelphia.

Here is one of the main “Greeks”, and here is Mogilevich in his 2001 FBI photo:

Oh wait, I have them backward! What a cool hat. On the left is Mogilevich, and on the right is “Spiros”, one part of a possible Mogilevich composite character on The Wire.

As a Polish-American, I don’t want to give spoilers for season two of The Wire, since it is the only show with multiple Polish-Americans that is not a Unabomber documentary. The basic plot is: the Baltimore police investigate a “Greek” syndicate’s human trafficking operation and discover that they are also major suppliers for Baltimore’s drug trade. The syndicate and local kingpins launder their money through a Roy Cohn-like lawyer named Maury Levy, who provides them cover. They take advantage of Polish-American dock workers, who are desperate for money as their livelihood is threatened and who do not understand the nature of the syndicate.

The crime network is so complex and sprawling that the Baltimore unit turns to the FBI for help, only to find that there is a mole in the FBI aiding the syndicate (hey William Sessions and successors!) and that the FBI will overlook transnational organized crime if it benefits the “war on terror” (hey, Israel!)

Season two of The Wire was written when Mogilevich was in US mainstream news more than any other time. He was openly discussed in Friedman’s work, in FBI reports, and in articles like this informative 1999 piece in The Jewish Journal showing how deeply his syndicate had penetrated US institutions, particularly banks.

In the early 2000s, Mogilevich was covered by the Philadelphia press and likely by the Baltimore press, given the geographic proximity, though the enshittification of the internet keeps me from perusing archives. The Wire was scripted by some of the best crime writers in the US. It’s hard to imagine they didn’t know who he was.

It’s also hard to imagine them admitting it: Mogilevich was notorious for making death threats to writers. Season Two is therefore loaded with probable clues (a Russian Orthodox church looms in the distance as the “Greeks” meet; it’s the only time it’s shown) and plausible deniability.

While many Wire fans rightly note that the “Greeks” are transnational in nature and represent capitalism at its most criminal and vicious, I haven’t seen anyone suggest it is a Mogilevich syndicate stand-in. I believe it is. I have more evidence but for the sake of brevity and sanity I’ll stop. So, Wire fans — is the game his game?

I welcome feedback on this theory but not as much as my husband, who has had to listen to me ramble for weeks. On to more fun topics!

Rebecca W: Will we have a nuclear war?

SK: I hope not! I stand by what I wrote here about Trump’s lifelong nuke fetish and the Israeli government’s desire to destroy Iran. I wrote that article three months ago, and unfortunately, it seems to be holding up.

Tonya: Is there likelihood that the ballroom/bunker is to protect the elite from some weapon they plan to use on US citizens?

SK: Yes. They may also want a place to hide should a foreign power attack the US (through nukes, biological weapons, etc), or, to combine both prospects, they may attack the US themselves and claim it was a foreign power. The US is also facing a climate crisis that will bring water and food scarcity — which the Trump administration is exacerbating by selling off resources Americans need — and that may cause unrest. There are many reasons a giant crime cohort wants a giant bunker.

John W.S.: Are we heading into a Civil War?

SK: Not in a North/South sense – and be very wary of anyone who claims that, promotes secession, or tries to get you to abandon The South. There is a cohort of liberal racists content to let marginalized communities suffer without voting rights under the tyranny of the minority and then pretend their goal is to “punish Republicans” when the GOP leadership in Southern states won’t suffer at all. You should support Southern civil rights activists instead.

I also do not think we are in a “Democrat vs Republican” war (most people are in neither party) or a “red vs blue” war (as I’ve long said, America is purple, purple like a bruise). We are in a war of elite predators against ordinary people whom they view as prey. We are in an existential battle against technofascists, oligarchs, ethnic supremacists, accelerationists, and others who want to depopulate the US and strip it for parts. Hey, aren’t you glad I restarted this Q & A?

The upside is that the more people grasp the nature of the crisis, and the more we look out for each other and are innovative in our defiance, the more likely we are to find a way through. I do not think this is a war that good people are destined to lose. I think some folks do not understand the battlefield.

(extra) Ordinary People: What’s one of your favorite road trip restaurants and what’s your favorite dish there?

SK: This is a hard question, much harder than the ones on nuclear and civil war. I go regional. In Texas, I eat Whataburger. Once I searched for Whataburger in Maps and got this image of an America comprised solely of tribal lands and Whataburgers. Since I support the Land Back movement, I found it an inspiring vision:

Just kidding! Sort of. Anyway, I’ve said before that the platonic ideal of an American restaurant is Chris’s Famous Hot Dogs in Montgomery, Alabama: started by a Greek immigrant in 1917 and patronized by Martin Luther King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hank Williams, and more. The hot dogs taste very historic! But mostly I seek out local specialties. In Michigan, I have cherry pie. In Montana, I have huckleberry pie. When I’m near a levee, I eat levee-high pie. What is this delicacy, you ask? Well…

I eat this pie for research purposes, nothing more! (Photo taken at The Blue Owl in Kimmswick, Missouri, where I frequently have research purposes.)

Brisa: In your book They Knew, you talked about how when Republicans are in power, they commit crimes and corruption, then Democrats get into power and don’t prosecute those crimes. Why do you think that is? What is it that makes Dems so feckless, weak and unwilling to take on the corruption? Are they complicit, compromised, or just plain scared?

SK: All of the above. The dynamic is abuser (GOP) and enabler (Dems). I go into this relationship in great detail in my article “Behold, A Pale Horse Race”, which I published in 2023. This dynamic is not new: it’s been there the entire 21^st century.

What has since gotten worse is the control plutocrats, organized crime syndicates, and foreign powers have over both parties. Our sovereignty is gone. Elections are corrupted on a national level, and they are trying to eliminate choice on a local level, which is why House members Cori Bush and Thomas Massie — despite having almost nothing in common — could be ousted the same way. The leverage of the ordinary American has changed: politicians no longer even feign interest in the public good.

There are still Americans who want to serve the public, but the infrastructure is rotted. I have proposed establishing two new parties — not one third party, which could empower the GOP, but two — instead of trying to work within the existing options. They have all failed. The true constituency of Congress is the criminal elite.

Bill D: Could the Democrats run on an avowedly anti-corruption platform in 2026 and 2028 or are too many of them also part of the corruption crew?

SK: It matters less what they advocate than what they do. For example, the Epstein case was in the public domain for decades and the Democrats did nothing (besides countenance child rape). The GOP did the same. Now politicians run on fighting “The Epstein Class”, but that class is their own donors! At the very least, the Dems could stop taking money from entities tied to white-collar crime and/or pedophile rape syndicates. They don’t need to wait until 2028. They can do it now.

Kim R: Have you ever been to the Joshua Tree area or Anza-Borrego State Park in California? During the cooler time of the year, these places have the most spectacular dawns and sunsets.

SK: Yes on Joshua Tree! I wrote about it here, with some nice cactus photos.

Paul B: Do you have a favourite bird?

SK: Herons! One in particular, who I wrote about here. He’s my therapist.

Tracy: Your photos are sublime, both perspectives and lighting. How much do you mess with your camera settings to achieve such exquisite lighting?

SK: Thanks! I don’t mess with settings. I take a lot of photos outside and the scenery does the work for me. I don’t alter photos other than cropping out my finger if it’s in the way. I’ll contort my body to get a particular angle, and I go outside when the light gets good. I’m an amateur and maybe I have a knack for photography, but really, all credit goes to the world for being interesting.

Annie L: May your father’s memory be for a blessing. Maybe you have already written about him but if not, I would love to hear about his life. Josy: What is one thing your father taught you that you hold dear?

SK: Thank you. It’s hard to write about my dad, both because his death is recent, and because he was very quiet and reserved. I am tempted to answer with: “He taught me that ‘Patrick Swayze was not an important part of Road House — I mean, spiritually.’” I wrote this line down after he said it because it was so funny. Years later, I asked him what he meant. But like Wade Garrett, my dad remained a man of few words, thus leading me on a philosophical journey of Road House repeat viewings for answers. My dad really loved Road House.

He also loved to read. We Kendziors are an odd mix of high-brow and low-brow; my mother and sister are the same way. Here is an excerpt from the eulogy I read at my father’s funeral. I’m sharing it because he had no idea that what he did here was important, but it was, and that’s a good lesson for any parent:

“I would not be a writer without my dad. I would not have been a reader, and you cannot become a writer without being a voracious reader. And no one read as much, or as widely, as my dad. Sometimes he would get so lost in a book that he’d forget what he was supposed to be doing, and he’d even read in the shower! Thank you, Meriden Public Library, for your durable cellophane.

“My dad took a book everywhere and he read in every genre: history, mysteries, westerns, sci-fi, and more. He would read complex political epics and total shlock, and I did too. He told me about authors who went on to become my favorites and influenced my own writing.

“When I was little, my dad made me feel like it was normal to leave the library with a pile of books taller than I am and spend all day reading. That was what he did too. We each read alone. He read in his room and I read in mine. We read alone, but we read together.”

SJH: When does living in the US while trying to manage grief become too much and leaving becomes a real option and have you considered this?

SK: That is an interesting question. I’ve gotten a lot of “when should I leave the US” questions over the years and I always say this is a personal matter for an individual to decide, and not for me to guide or judge. But I haven’t seen it framed in terms of grief. I understand the impulse: right after my father died, I could not be home or in public, and ended up walking forty miles or so every week through the woods, walking until I was worn out. My book The Last American Road Trip is a journey through anticipatory grief: a travel story about how much I love this country and how terrified I am to lose it. I was in the middle of writing when my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and while I didn’t comment on it much directly, the feeling is on every page.

They say that grief is love with nowhere to go. But anticipatory grief makes me want to stay. In 2016, I wrote about Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist journalist in St. Louis who knew he’d be killed for his work. “If the laws of my country fail to protect me,” he wrote before he was murdered, “I appeal to God, and with him I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at my post, but I cannot desert it.”

That is how I feel. I’m not deserting my post. I’m not deserting my family — including my widowed mother, my elderly in-laws, the rest of my relatives, and my friends and community, almost none of whom have the monetary resources to leave if they wanted. I can only try to find the good in what remains. And when I have the energy again, join with others to fight to keep it.

Claire T: I work with fiction authors and am an avid reader, and the theme of “memory” has been popping up in interesting ways across various genres in the last couple of years. In these stories, memory is generally under threat somehow. I can’t help but feel it’s a result of our own memories of what we’ve witnessed, lived through, and are currently living through being brazenly denied by those in power. A common question in these stories is “How do you protect memories?” What are your favorite ways of protecting memory from the corruption of those trying to forcefully and covertly rewrite history?

SK: I love this question and think it’s important. Memory is under threat. This is one reason the Pope wrote a treatise against AI. Everything that makes us human — our imagination, individuality, curiosity — is targeted for annihilation. AI is the biggest culprit, but the prelude was the outsourcing of our memories to data miners — many of whom have blown up the mines in recent years, shocking those of us who grew up on the internet and thought that what we had shared here would be preserved.

This includes not only public history and records of events that the powerful want erased (state and corporate crimes, activist movements) but personal recollections, interactions between friends, photos now replaced with AI facsimiles, etc. The old problem was that we had shared too much and could not escape digital versions of ourselves that we had outgrown. Now the problem is the erasure of collective memory as well as our documentation of our own lives. If we cannot remember what has been stolen, we are less likely to fight to reclaim it.

In his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, William Wordsworth wrote that “the inward eye is the bliss of solitude”. One cannot have true solitude in a surveillance state. Tech oligarchs steal solitude in order to seal that inward eye shut forever. One does not wander lonely in The Cloud; you are always watched but never seen. Tech oligarchs drain Wordsworth’s lake of daffodils to make this dystopia possible.

Their vision is shared by fascists who seek to rewrite history. Ten years ago, I encouraged Americans facing autocracy to write down their values and experiences so they can be cognizant of outside attempts to change them. Now those records are at risk. It is a strange feeling to endure mass surveillance and an attack on our individual memories at once. We all feel it, but shared alienation just feels like alienation.

One solution is to record your words in ways you can control. I hate that Microsoft Word and some printers now require subscriptions to work instead of letting you own them and use them in private. They have managed to cheapen self-expression while making it more expensive. The future may lie in the past: pen and paper, typewriters, other analog tools. But it is difficult to share your ideas without using the internet, which means battling algorithms, censorship, paywalls, and AI fakes. They want you to trade your humanity for chatbot hallucinations. They want you to surrender. Don’t.

As Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We need to override the oligarchy. We need to connect with each other now, and we need to leave an accurate history for future generations. It has never been so hard — or so important — to be a human being in public.

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

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Me hiking in Greece in June 2003 — the very same month the “Greek” plot of The Wire debuted! Whoa! (There is nothing to this; I just needed a pretty cover photo. Or so I claim…)

Update 5/27: The first round of answers are up! Click here. I’ll answer the rest in a follow-up article.

Update 6/1: The second round of answers are up! Click here. One more to go.

* * *

Hello readers! Welcome to my regular Q & A, where subscribers send in questions and I answer as many as I can in a separate article.

I have not done a Q & A since my father died in late March. I’ll lay out the Q & A rules in a minute, but first, a few words for my subscribers:

Thank you for staying with me. It means the world during this dark time.

Since my father’s death, I have published infrequently and stopped doing interviews. I did minimum promotion for my book, The Last American Road Trip, which came out in paperback four days after my father died. I have been overwhelmed with family obligations and grief. I have learned that when a parent dies, grief will beat you down no matter how hard you fight. It has taken an extreme emotional and physical toll: my immune system feels like it collapsed.

I am no stranger to loss. But I am shocked by what grief did to my body. I expected insomnia, nightmares, and exhaustion. I did not expect pneumonia, which I now have. (I saw a doctor and should recover fine.) I developed severe complications from preexisting endometriosis, and am still contending with that, with no end in sight. The week my dad died, I was diagnosed for the first time ever with the flu, which turned into laryngitis, and I could barely deliver his eulogy.

I do not want pity. I’m only explaining where I’ve been. I’m an American. Any American who experiences tragedy followed by illness will have two thoughts: “What is taking time off going to cost me, and how will I pay my medical bills?”

Those are deeply dysfunctional thoughts, because this is a deeply dysfunctional country.

This newsletter is my main source of income. I’m relieved that most readers stayed subscribed despite my “lack of productivity”, but I did lose some money. If you’d like to support me — and there’s a perk to that which I’ll detail below — subscribe here:

I debated whether to discuss my health problems in public. I almost never do. But I’ve seen too many grieving workers go through the same thing as me and blame themselves. In 2023, some people in my industry blamed me and called me weak when I took two weeks off after my dad’s late-stage cancer diagnosis. I knew that my choice to take time off to be with my family was right, but I also knew: it was not a choice. You don’t choose when to mourn or get sick. No one would choose either of those, if they had the option. No one would choose to feel this bad.

To my fellow Americans struggling to work after the death of loved ones and/or severe illness: it is not your fault, and you don’t deserve more loss in the form of financial pain. I’m telling you that in part to force myself to believe it. It’s ironic that I’ve written multiple books on this topic, yet I struggle to follow my own advice. That’s how pervasive the American culture of fear is when it comes to illness and grief.

That said — I miss my readers! I miss doing this Q & A. I am returning to it with a caveat: I have no idea what happened in the news between late March and early May, when I got back to work (and promptly got pneumonia.)

During April, I mostly stayed offline. I alternated between helping my mom, hiding in the woods, weaving in the dead of night, and reading over two dozen books, only ten of which were Sweet Valley Highs I found in my mom’s basement. (There is a mortifying Sweet Valley High story that I will tell if I get enough new paying subscribers to offset the price of my humiliation, which is high!)

I stopped reading the news. When I tried to catch up later, I discovered a media even more gutted by oligarchs than before. Technofascists continue to delete the past and lie about the present in order to steal the future. The main way I learned about current stories was through people presenting them to me and noting that I had written about them a decade ago.

The world continues its system collapse alongside mine.

This Q & A is therefore limited to the following: 1) big-picture questions about politics and corruption and the direction of this country; no minutiae about recent events 2) questions on pop culture, nature, travel, etc, because I love those 3) questions about my life or work, within reason.

This will give me something to do while recovering from pneumonia! I may be slower than usual but hope to get responses up this week.

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:

Subscribe now

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. I want my writing open to everyone, regardless of income level. No paywalls in times of peril!

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:

Epstein and the Shadow World – February 27, 2026
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

Note: In the past, I’ve had to shut these Q & As down within 24 hours because of the huge number of responses. Not sure if that will happen this time, but be prepared!

Thanks again, readers, for your kindness and support, and see you soon!

Sarah

The quote on the sign is from my book Hiding in Plain Sight, which I wrote in 2019. This sign and others with the phrase were made by Indivisible St. Louis and placed around St. Louis in 2019-2020. All credit to them for the art and photo, especially Annie Marshall. Don’t ever let pundits tell you that folks didn’t know the truth long ago!

“Aren’t you a brave soul,” a woman said when I emerged. She wore jogging clothes and a knowing smile. I looked like the Unabomber’s little sister.

“Not brave,” I said. “Just walking round the river. Get that springtime weather while it lasts! I went in the woods to watch birds. Plants and birds and rocks and things.”

America lyrics, the last refuge of an American mycological liar.

“Mmm-hmmm,” she said. “You find any mushrooms?”

“If I did, I’d tell you no. And if I didn’t, I’d tell you yes,” I said, since she knew my game. She laughed and jogged away.

I had a pocket full of Missouri Gold: morels, the most elusive of mushrooms. A successful morel hunt is a victory. But the search is the real reward.

The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.

Morels encourage revolt against the digital panopticon. No self-respecting morel hunter posts their hot spots online or reveals their finds in real time. Morels cannot be recorded by Ring or tracked by GPS. They are immune from AI chicanery. Make an AI morel and watch no one care: digital tricks hold no power here. Morel hunters guard their secrets in the analog world: in the depths of the forests and the recesses of their minds. Morels are escape artists, and you escape with them.

I am a member of the morel majority. Every spring, I wait for the surface of the world to shred and the last pure truth to show.

In the forest, you have one mission. You stagger like a zombie until a morel emerges like a brain. You extract it with a loving touch and guard it until it’s time to feast. Nothing tastes as sweet as serendipity.

A proper morel hunt requires that you walk the woods for hours with eyes to the ground. The outside world fades into irrelevance, a distant realm of misplaced priorities like mortgages and jobs. In the real world, the morel world, you seek loamy soil, south-facing slopes, fallen sycamores. You go slow. You dodge branches and climb creek beds. You take nothing for granted.

With this knowledge, you learn not only the mushroom but the land. What you can grasp from the crunch of a leaf or the rise of a flower. You sense when the season is starting and when it’s getting too late. You know that you could be wrong, and that being wrong is the most pleasant surprise of all.

* * *

I have had a banner year for morels and a terrible year for most everything else. I found dozens in three counties and would have found more if the first morels had not appeared when I was across the country at my father’s funeral.

The day after I returned to Missouri, I left at dawn and came home late. I walked miles through the forest, grateful to have a singular and uncomplicated goal. As Townes van Zandt sang, Sorrow and solitude, these are the precious things. It hurt to be near people.

Morels don’t wane like sympathy.

I’m obsessive enough to know when I’ve found barren terrain or got beat to the punch by fellow obsessives (respect), but I keep moving. A highlight of the hunt is stumbling upon bizarre shit in the woods. This year, I found the ruins of a 19^th-century monastery, a shipwreck so far from the river that it rots in a meadow, and a stone staircase to nowhere, making me wonder if morels found there would be haunted.

Did I actually find morels in these places? Shit if I’d tell!

I got scratched, bruised, bloodied, and sore, but never bored. My thoughts stayed captive to the forest floor. When grief ripped through me, I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d missed one, and often I had. That’s the mercy of morels: they are reticent by nature, and when they reveal themselves to you upon your return, it’s like getting the do-over you don’t get in life.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-tasting corpse. Morels aren’t meant to last, so you can’t mourn them when they’re gone.

A week into my quest, the temperature rose. I grew apprehensive. Morels are immune to the evils of the modern age: surveillance, commodification, even industrialization. In St. Louis, they paved paradise and put up parking lots, and morels grew in the cracks. St. Louis is no paradise, more a paradise lost, and its underground rises up on the regular. Morels are no exception. A St Louisan will spend all day scouring distant forests only to spot one in the bushes behind QuikTrip on the drive home.

April’s heat wave ended my season. I stayed in denial and sweated out the hunt, knowing the soil was too dry, the grass was too tall, and, in my heart, that it was over. I had an irrational fear that this was the last time. Then I read of Americans elsewhere enjoying their bounty and knew nothing could outwit the morel. They are incorruptible. They aren’t meant to make sense. They defy prediction, including bad predictions. I could keep on believing.

My real regret was personal. If morel season was over, and I lost my singular goal, something else would arrive to fill the time. I knew it would be grief, and it was.

There were days where I found nothing, but nothing is good enough for me. There are people for whom nothing is good enough, meaning nothing ever satisfies them, and people for whom nothing is good enough because the point is the quest.

The latter type thrives in morel season, when life is brutish, short, and magical.

* * *

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 of four — so I need and appreciate your support!

Note to subscribers: Due to family and health crises, articles are less frequent lately. The subscriber Q & A will return later this spring. Thank you for your patience and understanding!

The World’s Largest Morel in Nevada, Missouri. Photographed December 2022. Now folks can always brag they found a big one.

A morel in An Undisclosed Location.

The remains of a boat in the woods. Imagine wandering along and then having that appear. I know little about it; some locals say it was a military boat that washed up during the Great Flood of 1993. It is not the Shipwreck on Zombie Road I found earlier!

Inside the mystery boat.

The monastery ruins.

My last two of the season. Until next year!

* * *

Looking for reading about corruptible things? Check out my books HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT and THEY KNEW or the newsletter archives!

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.