“It's a tough time for the truth.”

An interview on politics, music, journalism, tech, and our not-so-inevitable doom.

This is a transcript of an October 8 interview I did with journalist Brendan Toller of WPKN. I encourage you to listen to it here! Since the interview aired, I got requests for a transcript. The interview covers many of the articles in my newsletter as well as other topics. It’s a useful conversation for these times so I’m printing it here. My thanks to Brendan and WPKN for giving me permission. The text was lightly edited for clarity.

Brendan Toller: Welcome, Sarah. I'm going to quote one of your latest newsletters on Substack [“Hanging by a Thread”]:

“People ask how I'm doing. I laugh at the chasm of the question. How is anyone doing? Climate catastrophes, genocide, the election from hell.” Your thoughts?

Sarah Kendzior: I'm trying to remember during which hurricane I wrote that, what with another one bearing down. This is a very difficult time. I could have listed a dozen other catastrophes. There’s a surreal aspect in that we're expected to go on with our lives and our jobs and raising our families and doing mundane tasks while catastrophes happen around us.

That it’s fallen so heavily upon the shoulders of ordinary people shows the extent of not just institutional failure, but how we've been conditioned to kind of accept that institutional failure as our failure. I hear this from people all the time: “What more can I be doing? Can I, you know, vote this out?”

Basically, they’re asking: Why is no one fixing anything? Why is nobody handling this? They start to internalize it and think it’s their fault. So to start, I want to tell people it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that there’s climate change. It’s not your fault that the government failed you on multiple fronts. It’s not your fault that there's endemic corruption. It’s their fault.

BT: That’s right. To read your substack to me is to enter a new reality. You have the media binary of right versus left which has gone on for years, but you see things at a deeper level. If you don’t mind, I’m going to just read some of your passages and then have you respond because they’re just so to the point. Here's one: [“Cheap Signals”]:

“Right-wing pundits claim that the DOJ does not have evidence of Trump’s guilt, instead of admitting the truth: the DOJ has had evidence on Trump crime for half a century. But they don’t want to use it, for they are in a mutually beneficial corrupt relationship. Over decades, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate corruption merged, solidifying their anti-American agenda in the 21st century. 2016 was not a rupture, but an acceleration of the plans of a dark transnational alliance and the institutions that protect it.

“Trump, protected by the FBI and DOJ for a half century, is the deep state he pretends to fight. And Biden, who entered Congress in 1973, the same year the DOJ started investigating Trump, is a career silent witness.

“Contrary to popular belief, bipartisanship is alive and well. You need a both-sides approach if you’re not only going to kill us all but make us root for our own demise. In short, the Trump administration was a crime syndicate masquerading as a government, and the Biden admin is a government masking the crime syndicate.”

SK: That's unfortunately still the case. Sometimes I get flack for paragraphs like that. What people don’t understand is that when I criticize the abuser/enabler dynamic in our political system and criticize both parties, it doesn't mean I’m saying the parties are identical. In fact, by their nature, they need to not be identical, or even similar at points, if they’re going to work toward a broader corrupt goal and achieve it.

The throwaway line that I hear, especially from Democrats, is, “How dare you say they're the same? Trump is so much worse.” And I'm like, look, I wrote two bestsellers about The Crimes of Donald Trump. His decades of mafia ties, all the horrific things he did before he got to office and then in office. You don’t need to tell me!

But there’s a reason he was able to even get to that point and it has to do with institutions that in many cases don't have a partisan affiliation. One of the most frightening aspects is that they don’t even have a particular national affiliation. There are individuals and groups that are not working in the interests of the US or any particular country. They’re non-state actors tied to organized crime.

They are people that have multiple passports, offshore accounts, digital currency — all these things that cross state borders and challenge our idea of what autocracy or kleptocracy really is. This was never covered well in the media, but I felt like there was a fighting chance to get at it during the Trump admin years because his bombastic nature attracted interest in the backstory. But that interest has gone away with the media itself, which is severely gutted.

We’re not seeing a lot of investigative work. There are a lot of folks who I think truly don’t know what’s going on, even though it has in fact been reported. But it’s hard to find that knowledge with broken search engines, suppressive algorithms, media companies that fired so many of their workers, etc.

It’s a tough time for the truth.

BT: Another passage: “Biden is a placeholder president whose tenure allows liberals to accept atrocities they would have protested under Trump, including the elimination of a functional public health system, cop cities, vicious border policies, and genocide in Gaza. These policies have been branded as Biden or Trump instead of as right or wrong. They are all wrong.”

SK: When Biden dropped out and Harris came in, I had a brief fleeting feeling that maybe there would be change. Maybe this dynamic will finally end. Maybe she’ll move away from the policies of the Biden administration, which I do think were meant to make liberals and Democrats accept things that they never ever would have accepted under Trump. Things they would have spoken out against five or ten years ago.

The Biden administration did this slowly. It was this little drip, drip, drip effect of gradually normalizing mass death.  I remember when the number of covid deaths surpassed the number of people who died on 9/11, people were horrified. Then suddenly we’re at a million, and they just stop counting. The same thing happened with Gaza. When the initial deaths passed 1000, people were horrified. Then you get to 40,000 and they’ve stopped counting — in part because the Israeli military killed the people who count them.

Getting people used to mass death is a prelude for getting them to accept mass murder: not just in Gaza, but anywhere in the world, including the United States.

This is really frightening. At heart, people are scared. They’re traumatized. I think a lot of what seems like heartlessness isn’t always. It’s a defensive reaction against a vicious system that doesn’t respect the sanctity of human life.

This cuts both ways. On the MAGA side, you see a lot of people recognizing the viciousness and the violence of the Trump administration and thinking, “Well, if they’re gonna be that way, I’m not gonna be the target. I’m gonna be the person with the gun. I’m gonna be the person who aims. I’m gonna be Kyle Rittenhouse and be the celebrated hero.”

On the Democratic side, they used to reject that behavior and philosophy. For a while, they took the opposite approach: We’re going to dig deep. We’re going to pull out the roots of American history. We’re going to examine systemic racism, violence — how things got this way. And then we’re going to try to turn it around.

But now they’re emulating this obsession with access to power. What they do with power once they have it — that’s irrelevant. All that matters is winning. People keep asking Harris’s staff, what are her policies? What is she going to do to fix these problems? And they're like, “How dare you?! How dare you ask about policy? We need to win first and then we’ll figure out the policy.”

And I’m like: Well, I want to know what I'm voting for. And they’re like: What — are you gonna vote for Trump instead?

And I’m like, obviously not. But I still want to know so that I can prepare myself and my family for whatever horrific plot you have in mind. Because the Biden administration had its own horrific policies, and I had to fight to protect my family from them. From getting sick, from getting fired, from increasing regulations on speech. I lost my rights in Missouri under a Republican legislature that’s extremely repressive and the Democratic federal government did nothing in response to help people in states like mine.

I want to know someone’s policy platform as a means of self-protection. How am I going to navigate the new horrors that you throw my way? I deserve to know that as an American citizen. It shouldn’t be seen as an offensive question.

BT: Absolutely. Moving to tech. I want to read this rather long passage, but it's just so well put and so well written [from “The Red, White, and Blue Screen of Death”]:

“I don’t buy a lot of stuff because I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t use a lot of technology because I don’t like it. I don’t like it because the people who control it are bad. They ruined every good innovation of my life. They encouraged us to destroy the analog world, and after we did, they replaced it with bullshit and lies.

“Google, once a wellspring of information sorted by chronology and preserved in caches, is an unusable cesspool. Photos taken by real people of real places have been replaced with AI fakes. Niche online hobby forums were sold to corporations and became unusable due to spam and bots.

“The early excitement of reconnecting with old friends on Facebook was replaced by the relentless push of automatons. You reach out for connection, but the algorithm ties your hands. You follow friends but are instead shown influencers. Where did everyone go, and who are these made-up strangers in their place?

“On YouTube and Tik-Tok, people transform their lives into infomercials, often to make cash in the gig economy that politicians deny exists. On Twitter, people become indistinguishable from the bots and paid operatives of political groups. Mobs spout vicious mantras in service of a cause or candidate that onlookers are told merits the cruelty inflicted on the last real human beings.

“There is no safe place to talk to a friend. Privacy has been obliterated. Anyone can go viral, and virality, true to its early internet coinage, is a disease. You go viral in pieces, devoid of context, like a chalk outline at a crime scene. Your crime was existing.

“Humanity has been stripped from the virtual world: deliberately, maliciously. The goal is to make humans less human. Less imaginative and more callous; more desperate and less kind. Less demanding of authority, but ruthlessly demanding of ordinary people who hold neither leverage nor power. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and compassion, rendering humans indistinguishable from bots.”

SK: A lot of times when I talk about the Internet, I feel like my Boomer parents. The way I talk about GeoCities is how they sound talking about Woodstock. I look back with a fondness that maybe isn't merited. Obviously, there were problems in the early Internet. But I was a teenager when the Internet first became widely available — and it was mind-blowing. It was in its primitive form where to post something you had to know HTML. Most Americans weren’t using it yet.

But the ability to connect, to share knowledge, the curiosity of people, the eccentricity of people, the weirdness of people. It was this glorious, strange space — and it remained that way, I think, until about 2010. Around the time Facebook changed. On Facebook biographies, people used to enter in their hobbies manually, list things they were interested in. Suddenly everything turned into categories that you click on, little boxes that you check to define yourself, which I think makes everybody less human and less themselves. They make you choose.

Once I saw that happening, I assumed the motive was to sell personal data to corporations in order to make money. Now I think it was a much darker motive. You see that with people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel and all of these Silicon Valley engineers who are now engineering society. They're trying to change the fundamental makeup of human nature. They’re trying to eliminate it.

They’re trying to bury the archives of a freer, more independent time and the freer, more independent, population that inhabited it and shared their thoughts in a more carefree way. It’s sad to me to see what's happening to the internet. The works that have been lost. The sites that have been deleted over the last just few months. Vast archives of information. Our cultural history.

They’re trying to destroy the cohesiveness of being an American. We live in a time where not a lot is binding us together. First it was the music industry, then movies, and now TV is the last to go in terms of a shared pop monoculture. We used to watch TV at the same time each week and talk about it the next day. Now politics is the only thing left that everybody is engaged in, and that’s terrible.

[Tech gurus] are trying to bury the evidence and to prohibit people from forming meaningful communal ties, ones based on shared interests — but more importantly, to prohibit political organization and activism.

I live in St. Louis. I covered the Ferguson uprising. I saw how powerful the Internet was for allowing the world to see what’s happening here, although it was often distorted or exploited. Before that, I studied former Soviet Central Asia and how dissidents there were using the internet to combat their authoritarian governments.

The internet is a very powerful and once beautiful tool. It’s really sad to see it be eroded. The feeling of powerlessness that it stokes, you know, like — I feel powerless on Twitter. The fact that the search function doesn’t work anymore, and I can’t find my own past, my own memories, my own interactions. Someone took that from me. They’re taking that from all of us. There is very little we can do about it except try to curate and archive things ourselves. But that's a monumental task.

BT: Yet when you bring this up to friends, there's still that shiny objectness of tech. You know, if you talk about it in this way, you’re either old or you’re ungrateful.

SK: Right. There's that old line that if you're not paying for it, you’re the product. Folks got wise to that a long time ago, but now it’s more nefarious.

We have no choice but to be on here. Our careers often rely on it. We are being preyed upon for political purposes by really vicious actors. The kind of authoritarian regimes that I studied 15 years ago became the imprint for what happened to the West. Everyone thought it would be the other way around — that once people living under oppressive governments had the internet, they’d be able to expose state crimes, and the internet would act as a naturally democratizing force. But the opposite happened.

We’ve become more repressive because we’re living in a panopticon, in a surveillance society. I think the culprit is smartphones much more than the Internet. The sense that you can walk around and…say you're having a bad day, and you start crying in a store. Someone can video you and make a TikTok and make fun of you and the worst day of your life could go viral. This happens to people every single day, over and over.

There aren’t boundaries. There is little empathy. The gig economy contributes to this. So many folks think, “I cannot get a good 9 to 5 job with benefits anymore. Maybe I’ll make it big on YouTube or TikTok.” But they need to provide content constantly. They start seeing other human beings as content. That's a really sad thing because I think folks are very lonely. One of the reasons they're watching all these TikToks in the first place is they want to see how other people are living. But we’ve become voyeurs in each other’s lives instead of friends.

BT: You get to the core in such an economical way in in your writing. I sort of feel like you’re the Iggy Pop of political writing right now. I wonder what I wonder what your process is like. You're very crafted and to the point.

SK: I do a lot of rewriting, a lot of editing. Like Elmore Leonard said, I try to leave the boring parts out. With the substack, it’s weird because I’m the only person running it. I don’t have an editor. I don’t have anyone telling me what to do. I love that, but it means that I have all the responsibility. I have to be very careful. In choosing topics, I can do anything. There's something freeing and liberating in that, but also something overwhelming.

It’s exhausting because I would like each article to stand up over time. I don’t like writing things that only respond to the news cycle. I don’t like writing things that won't make sense a few months from now. I have a book of essays, The View from Flyover Country. Those essays came out between 2012 and 2014, and people still read them now. They still hold up, which is unfortunate because they’re about terrible things happening in America and around the world. It would be nice if that were out of date! But I try to get that kind of quality.

I’m very influenced by songwriting and music as well as literature. There’s a dryness to a lot of political writing. Either a “just the facts” kind of attitude or a desire to not show emotion, to not want to be stylistically creative or strange, I think for fear of being mocked. Or for those who are more careerist, that style might be a strike against them as they try to climb the ladder.

The nice thing about having your own publication is you don’t need to pay attention to any of that. I try to take advantage and be as free as I can be but also keep the quality high. Every now and again, I reread something and want to go back and change one word, but I don't quite know the ethics of that. Technically I could, but it seems sneaky! I figure I should let my bad choices stand for what they are too.

BT: Bit of a deep question here. What is the difference between hope, faith, and despair?

SK: People always ask me about hope. They’ve been asking me this since Trump started running for office and I started saying he’s going to win, if you want to call what he did winning. And that he’s going to rule like an autocrat or a kleptocrat. And I’d always get this, “But is there any hope?”

I'm just like, hope about what? I don't think of things that way. I don’t think about things in terms of hope or hopelessness. I think about what I can do morally as a human being, about how I treat people, about compassion. Sometimes about pragmatism in the sense of whether I can impact a situation.

What I feel is more like faith. The word “hope” gets abused so much by hopium peddlers: people who are selling false promises all the time that things will magically get better. I can’t stand people like that because it encourages passivity and a refusal to take on corrupt and criminal entities.

Faith is something different. Faith is perseverance in the face of hardship. We’re all facing hardship right now. I think continuing to try to find the good things in life, which are often, at least for me, very simple things, is a form of faith. Nature and my children and my dog and art and music and writing. Things that people loved 100 years ago are often the same things that I love now.

As for despair, I see a lot of policing of people’s emotions. I don’t like that. If someone feels despair, they should be able to express that without it being lectured. They get this response of “How dare you say you feel this? It’s going to hurt Biden or Harris” or whatever.

People have a right in a very tough time to feel however they want and express it however they want. It shows a lack of empathy to criticize somebody for that. At the same time, if you're feeling despair, I think it’s important to try to take care of yourself and not feel bad about doing so. It’s okay to take time off. It’s okay to do something you enjoy.

If you’re in a career like journalism or law or government or, I don’t know, climate change scientist, despair is part of the profession. Despair comes with the news cycle. Despair is inevitable. It’s important not to deny that it’s there and that it’s real, but also to do something to keep your reverence of what is good in life alive. To remind yourself that there are still good things and that we should strive to protect them and appreciate them while they're there.

BT: So the terrifying scenario, just pure amnesia to the mainstream, Harris may win the election, but that does not mean she will get to be president.

SK: I wrote several articles on this. I also wrote this about Biden and Trump back in 2020 and people called me crazy. They said, of course Trump’s not gonna attempt to stage a coup. Of course he’s not going to refuse to leave office.

I'm like, why? He’s explicitly said it and planned it. His advisers like Roger Stone have promised a bloodbath unless Trump is reinstalled. We should take seriously the fact that not only did he try it openly in 2020 and 2021, in all these different ways that were taped, whether a phone call in Georgia or the storming of the Capitol we saw on TV or his many confessions of his crimes, which include recently conceding that he knew the whole time he had lost, and was trying to steal the election. It’s sedition.

The reason that people who vote for Trump think he’s innocent or don’t take it seriously is because the DOJ has refused to prosecute sedition. The US is, to my knowledge, the only country in the history of the world that has done this. Even in Germany, Hitler went to prison between his putsch and his presidency. There was a punishment when there was a coup attempt recently in Brazil. Like, that's normal. That is what normal countries do.

We’re the only country in the history of the world where the seditionists stayed in office and were able to make new laws to protect themselves. And the head seditionist, the person around whom the coup was plotted, is allowed to run for president again, like Mafia Grover Cleveland.

That everyone is treating this election like it’s normal, as if we didn’t just have this unprecedented historic event four years ago, shows that the system has completely failed.

I cannot take this election seriously as an election at all. I take it seriously when it comes to like the lower ballot races: the senate races, local races. But this, whatever this is, is something where I think the winner has already been selected and they're going through the motions. I could tell by early spring 2021 that the Biden administration had no intention of holding anybody accountable except for the lowest level actors who are of no significance. I’m not up at night worrying about the QAnon Shaman.

It was obvious early because no normal functional country reacts this way to sedition. And so, I’m like, yeah, there is some bigger plot at hand. I know it sounds conspiratorial, and I don’t care. I wrote a whole book about how it’s okay to be conspiratorial when there are actual conspiracies.

I think the point of the Biden administration was to turn liberals into a Democratic version of MAGA. They want people who will accept absolutely horrific acts, accept corruption, accept a lack of accountability, and stop demanding that things change.

Because beforehand, you had the George Floyd protests. You had climate change protests. You had citizens demanding that their government actually serve them. People in power did not like that. They needed to temper it by saying, okay, the Democrats have now won the election. Your guys are in, and here’s what they want from you.

They want obedience. They want you to shut up. They want you to stop making demands. If you’re making demands, you’re a bad person, because obviously behind the scenes everything is being worked out, and the Democrats are not going to do something crazy like, you know, not punish Trump and let him run for president again!

They lied and lied and lied. They brainwashed people. That’s what we’re dealing with now. Honestly, I get the feeling they do want Harris to win because I think that the goal — and this is true of both the Trump camp and the Harris camp — is war with Iran. That’s what they’re all aiming for.

I think that with Harris, if you’re going to go for war with Iran, you're going to get a more bureaucratic war with fewer massive random acts of theft than you would get from Trump. Trump doesn’t give a shit about policy, but he is very interested in whatever kind of money he can gain from a wartime situation.

So they may prefer her. I’m not sure. But I look at the alliances with the Cheney family and the backing of all of the Bush administration officials. Having Leon Panetta speak at the Democratic National Convention. Having Harris talk about how proud she is to create the world’s most lethal military. Not the best, not the smartest, not the bravest — just lethal, just a killing machine.

Those are all signs that we are headed to war against our will. I don’t think anyone wants it. I don’t think Trump voters or Harris voters want a war with Iran. But I think that a lot of powerful people in DC and in other countries do. That’s their aim, and whomever they think will fulfill it, is, I think, who will become president.

BT: I want to move towards Israel and AIPAC. You write: “AIPAC should have to register as a foreign agent and should be banned from funding elections. I also think the US should end military aid to Israel immediately and should refuse to participate in Israel’s regional wars in any way beyond providing humanitarian aid. That this is now considered a radical view instead of a commonsense humane view disturbs me.” I think it disturbs a lot of people.

SK: Yeah. One of the most mind-blowing things to me is watching how differently Russia was treated. People rightfully condemned Putin. They condemned Russia invading Ukraine. They condemned the Russian military killing innocent Ukrainian civilians. And when Putin was pumping tons of money into our electoral system, as he did through proxies with Trump, people condemned that. It prompted federal investigations.

There was never the accountability that there should have been, but at least people recognized it was wrong. But when Israel, with Netanyahu, who is as bad as Putin, does the same thing, they applaud Israel. They proudly take this dirty money, and it is both sides of the aisle. It is absolutely uniform.

There’s almost nothing that people in Congress agree on unanimously and in a rigid way. It is only support for Israel, and it is absolutely unmerited because Israel is doing things that hurt the interests of the United States. Israel’s also carrying out a genocide and has been for a year. That doesn’t mean that Hamas is good or Hezbollah is good or that Israel doesn’t have the right to defend itself. But it’s not defending itself.

When you’re killing children — who make up nearly half of the victims of people killed in Gaza and also in the West Bank, where Hamas never held power — you are not acting in self-defense. It wasn’t a three-year-old who attacked Israelis and took them hostage. The mass murder of Palestinian children has been one of the most unbelievably vicious, bloodthirsty, and overt war crimes I’ve ever seen in my life.

The photos that the IDF post of themselves are among the most incriminating evidence. It’s not speculative. We know what Netanyahu and his extremist government are doing. They now have a hard right-wing government that used to be banned in Israel. The Kahanists, formed by Meir Kahane back in the 1970s. They were banned in both the US and Israel as terrorists. Acts of terrorism were routinely carried out by the JDL and other branches of the movement.

Biden took the Kahanists off the terrorist list in 2022, and now they’re in the Israeli parliament with Netanyahu, who is a known criminal, who has had multiple criminal trials. This is obviously not someone the US should be partnered with in any way. I’m completely against giving aid to Israel. But if Congress is going to give aid, it needs to be conditioned and that conditions need to be, one, you don't commit genocide, and you also don't bribe and threaten US politicians.

I’m in Cori Bush’s district. I watched what happened. I would get these flyers every day from all of these fake PACs with names like “Progressives for Missouri Inc.” I’d be like, what the hell is that? I’d look it up and trace the money back and it was all from Republican far right-wing Zionists. They first tried that in 2022.

In 2024, they did it to her again, only this time it was the most expensive race for this district in its history. It was all AIPAC money given to her opponent, Wesley Bell, to oust her. And now that he’s won, I feel like I don't have a representative anymore. I have criticisms of Cori Bush, like I do of anybody. But I feel like she was at least representing St. Louis, representing the United States. I think Wesley Bell will represent his donors, who only have one interest — and that is serving Israel and Israel's interests. In that sense, St. Louis is an unrepresented city.

That’s a very scary thing. That’s a loss of sovereignty. I shouldn’t have to live with that. I also have to live with the fact that I’m a journalist at a time that they’re trying to legally outlaw criticism of Israel — while my representative is completely beholden to Israel. I’m a potential target of this kind of action, even though I’m not saying things that are untrue.

I’m not saying things that in normal circumstances would be inflammatory. They weren’t inflammatory when I said them about Russia, but for some reason they’re inflammatory when I say them about Israel. A lot of the stuff I write is fairly benign. I wrote an article about Palestinian embroidery, about the tradition of tatreez as folk art that preserves cultural heritage. That’s now considered too controversial because they’ve banned Palestinian art in St. Louis.

That’s how far this censorship is going. I see dark times ahead and worry about my ability to work as an independent writer in this capacity if they create new laws prohibiting any critical discussion of Israel, because that would be a very far-reaching law.

BT: Back to your core, what was your political awakening?

SK: I'm not sure I was ever asleep! I wrote in one of my articles that I ruined a sleepover party by blabbing on about Iran-Contra. I was like eight or nine when I did that, a very annoying kid.

My mom subscribed to a lot of magazines. She subscribed to SPY. That was a big thing because SPY was covering Trump. That’s how I learned about all of Trump's mafia activity and Iran-Contra and a lot of names that pop up in the news now. That's what I would read when I was, like, nine. Of course, I didn’t fully understand what I was reading, but there was some good journalism back in the 1980s and 1990s. I loved TV Guide. I mean, I wanted to read about what TV shows were on and my horoscope and whatnot — but I also read all the political articles in TV Guide.

Even as a little kid, I was aware of what was going on. I had a strong sense of right and wrong. If I felt like someone was doing something wrong, if they were hurting people, what party they were in or how fancy they were, how famous they were — it meant absolutely nothing to me, and it still doesn’t.

I did a Q & A where somebody asked, have I always been like this? I don't know what they meant exactly, if I was always this annoying or whatnot, but my answer is yes. And I proved it. I posted diary entries from when I was a kid. I’m exactly the same.

BT: You’re a music person. I’m wondering what music is guiding you and healing you and keeping you okay in these times.

SK: I really run the spectrum, but lately I've been listening to a lot of obscure 1970s outlaw country. Especially Sammi Smith, this female country singer. A lot of her music is hard to find. I have to get it on vinyl. But she covered a lot of songs, a lot of classics. She has this beautiful voice. There’s something about it that reminds me of Roy Orbison, where you feel the pain of it no matter what she’s singing.

She reentered the news cycle briefly because she was close to Kris Kristofferson, and he died. But I’ve been listening to tons of her and Bobbie Gentry, a sort of similar figure from that era. I love singers who vanish because they’re just like, “Fuck it. I’m sick of all of this. I’m sick of you screwing me over. I’m sick of you not letting me do what I want.”

I see this a lot with female singers and can very much relate. There’s a lot of times I just want to check out of this scene too. And with Bobbie Gentry, she wrote — do you know her?

BT: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SK: Yeah. She wrote “Ode to Billie Joe.” I feel like we’re in an “Ode to Billie Joe” society. I feel like covid and climate change and all these crises that are constantly going on around are very much in that vein. All these terrible things are happening, and everyone is acting like it’s normal.

The point of that song is that people cover pain with politeness. They don’t show empathy. They don’t even notice when people in front of them are deeply hurt and wounded. I think Bobbie Gentry is a great singer and songwriter. I’ve driven my family nuts listening to her so much; my son got me a T-shirt with the Choctaw Ridge on it as a birthday present.

Anyway, that era had a lot of really interesting lyricism and also a lot of really dark murder ballad country songs. Even the Everly Brothers had a really disturbing murder ballad. I’ve been exploring these benign 1950s and early 1960s groups who have one song about, you know, killing someone and throwing them in a river. It turns up a lot! It’s an interesting thing to retrace in American history when people have such a nostalgic view of that time.

BT: Well, the Everly Brothers were really trying to reinvent themselves in the seventies with their Warner Brothers contract. They were trying everything. There’s an interview, where they’re like, “I tried everything. Acid, I tried cocaine, I tried you know…” It’s this old paradigm that's trying to stay current.

One of my favorite albums by them is this album called Show. They do these crazy medleys. It’s like this punk rock version of the Everly Brothers. They're playing everything at this speed that’s so crazy. I can see why we would listen to music like that in these times because we're looking at America as this broken thing trying to reinvent itself, but it's really just flailing.

SK: Yeah. I have to check that out because I've gotten more intrigued by them over time. [Note from Sarah: this Everly Brothers live album is amazing!] My introduction to them was, like, Axl Rose dating Erin Everly. It’s all one long story.

BT: Your relationship with nature and road trips, we’d obviously be remiss if we didn’t mention that you have a new book coming out in 2025, The Last American Road Trip.

SK: That book is a bit of a departure from my previous books, which tended to be more on state crimes and America's political history. This is about my family and I going on road trips all over the US from 2016 onward. That history is still in there. But we didn’t go for the purpose of writing a book; this is just the way I live my life.

I live in Missouri. It's easier to drive. I like to visit national parks, state parks, historical sites, anywhere interesting. I’ll go anywhere and I’m open to anything. I had two young children back in 2016. They were nine and five, good ages for an adventure. They were 16 and 13 on the last trip described. So it’s a book about being a parent in this era, too.

I wrote about our time driving all over the country in all these different directions for eight years, visiting around 40 states, as things changed. The Trump era and covid and how that changed everything. And recently with things like the fact that when we cross to Illinois, my daughter and I suddenly have full bodily autonomy by law again.

The road trips were meant to be an escape, like they would be for anyone. But of course, I have this interest in the darker side of American history. So among our vacation spots, along with Yellowstone and Route 66, is the Mena, Arkansas airport where the Iran-Contra drug smuggling took place. I took my kids there.

It’s a personal book. It's a travelogue. It’s more like my substack in terms of the content. It’s not as heavy as Hiding in Plain Sight, which was like getting hit on the head with a hammer with all these horrible revelations. Some of that was a little too much for people, which I understand. This is lighter.

When I was writing The Last American Road Trip, I was thinking of Ray Bradbury and how he wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine, which was kind of the flip side of the same place, but full of nostalgia and sentimentality and raw emotion. That’s what I was thinking of as I wrote. This is the Dandelion Wine version of my other books, which are all Something Wicked This Way Comes.

BT: A recent passage of yours: “I loathe savior syndrome. This idea that some power broker is going to rescue us, but I love the world and will fight for it.” What is America at its best and what’s worth fighting for?

SK: Our lands and our natural beauty are definitely worth fighting for. I’ve seen so much of it. I feel very lucky, because these days, you never know what will crumble. In The Last American Road Trip, I talk about driving around during a time of climate change and visiting places that are in obvious peril, like Glacier National Park, for example. But I also describe us driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Never in my wildest dreams would I think the place that would close down, that would be imperiled in the worst way after I wrote this book, would be Asheville and the surrounding area of western North Carolina. We're in a very fragile state.

Our natural sites are worth preserving, our historic sites. But also, you know, I love our people. I do think Americans want to come together and help each other. They’re actively discouraged from being kind and generous and good. People feel vulnerable, like acting this way is almost a sucker’s bet, but there’s a good communal spirit that exists. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the last few years, it doesn’t always come out in times of tragedy. You would hope people would band together, but instead — you know, covid is a good example of this. People were at each other’s throats.

Generally, I think we're a good country with a terrible government and many institutions that are not really worth preserving. But there is a freeness and a humor to this country and such diversity of population. I love how it feels like we’re a hundred little countries in one. That something to preserve.

I don’t like the way the internet and AI and this monoculture of digitization have made things seem more the same. It corresponds to the loss of independent businesses, especially since 2008 and the financial collapse. I hope that we’re able to preserve our individuality, our independence.

I think we’re a tragic country. I think we are a very evil country in terms of the actions of our government and sometimes of our people. But I think we’re in many ways a wonderful country to live in, in terms of the people and the natural beauty and all the interesting and fun and weird things to see.

BT: And last question, what can we do?

SK: About what?

BT: Exactly.

SK: That’s your version of the hope question, because you already asked the hope question. The hope question is usually the last one I get. The most important thing for people to do now is know their own moral compass because they are being told to accept things and back things that they normally would not.

They're trying to rationalize that decision to themselves. So take a hard look at what you believe is right and wrong and pay attention to that inner voice more than to any voice you’re hearing outside, even if it proclaims itself to be an expert. You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong. Retain that compassion and retain that strength. And if people try to beat it out of you, don’t let them.

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Photo I took in Montana in 2019. I wrote about it in The Last American Road Trip.