I had read all 3 of your books when you started the Promo tour for They Knew in the days after the Covid vaccine became available. Brought my KU son and we listened to you and Sarah Smersh at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence - and it was my birthday. It was an evening well spent. After you signed my books (and the promo poster) my last comment to you was "you still give me hope". What I meant was I am hopeful because you are out there turning over the rocks, exposing the slimy underbelly of America's unique forms of corruption. Keep it up Sarah. What you do matters so much.
I have the book, and it is well worth the read! As are your other ones. Indeed, the mysterious "higher ups." Staff just doing what they were told. Not their fault, just following orders. Get along to go along. I admire and respect your perspective!
I bought, and read, as soon as it was available. I felt then and know now that it is one of the most important pieces I have ever read or will read.
My frustration is that it isn’t widespread to huge audiences. Not the least bit surprised, due to the nature of its content. The criminal elite have no intentions of releasing their stranglehold on the American sheep.
Sarah will be a historic figure as one who “knew,” and helped many “know..
Thank you very much! It's a weird book in that it sold well but it spread like a rumor, with official channels blocking discussion of it but people embracing it. It came out at the exact time media and entertainment and politics were all lurching hard to the right (Musk buying Twitter, Zaslav destroying HBO, GOP taking the House, etc).
But in a moment that brought the country together, THEY KNEW was censored by political elites from ALL sides! lol/sob
I turned 27 in Oct. 1980, the presidential election year. ABC's Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel, which was created because of the Iran hostage crisis, had been on the air since late 1979, and I watched it every night. I learned about the deal made by Reagan's people on Nightline. Then the story disappeared quite literally as soon as it was reported. I did try to find further reporting on it, starting the next day, but . . . nothing. Every time I looked for the story I ran into a wall.
In THEY KNEW I write about Robert Parry, the reporter who broke the 1980 "October Surprise" you're describing and then the Iran-Contra, and was marginalized and demonized for breaking both stories. He wrote several books on the October Surprise that are worth reading.
What Reagan did in Iran was beyond despicable. And he and his cronies got away with it. I cried when he won the election. I knew then he was a monster.
Because I spend most of my time reading eastern European history and following the war in Ukraine, I also spend a lot of time with dead journalists and writers. Speaking truth to power means taking truth so seriously that you're willing to take a corporeal risk in order to speak it. Imagine being so devoted to the truth that you keep speaking and writing it in full awareness of the consequences! But you don't have to imagine it. Those dead journalists and writers didn't want to die, but they also didn't want to live in a world of lies without at least trying to write the truth.
In 'Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened,' the late Vika Amelina writes that all of eastern Europe is a haunted house. 'Such set-ups never felt particularly frightening to me. I wonder if it’s because I’m from Eastern Europe. If gruesome murder were all it took to create a haunted house, then, where I come from, we’d have haunted villages, haunted cities, haunted countries.' She writes about what it is like to live in a house in eastern Europe--the one she grew up in L'viv, for example--in which the names of its owners have been lost to history. Eastern Europeans and those who are familiar with eastern European history know what it means to live in a house in which the names of the previous owners are unknown. In the end, it is the truth that she seeks, no matter how painful it is: 'No city is doomed to be haunted forever. We break the spell not when we banish the ghosts, but when we invite them to breakfast.' https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/nothing-bad
Her murder by the Russians last year in Kramators'k still seems impossible to believe, as if one fully expects her to walk into a room full of people at any moment, ready to read her poetry or other writings. I remember a video from last year when an old Ukrainian man crawled on his hands and knees to a piece of his best friend's body after it had been pulled out of the wreckage after a missile strike: 'Yura, Yura, what have they done to you?'
Yes, absolutely. I’m sure you’ve read Anna Politkovskaya. She was a big influence on how I covered Trump in HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT because she put emotion at the foreground of her coverage of Putin instead of worrying it made her look weak or unserious. Emotion and humanity were what Putin was trying to strip away and her record of it in Chechnya and elsewhere — along with her own personal recollections — were a revolt against that inhumanity, a way of leading by example. I reread her every Oct 7, which was when she was assassinated (not coincidentally, on Putin’s birthday.)
I think people from the former USSR or from any other autocratic regime (or from ethnic groups who lived under the dictates of a selectively autocratic US, which is true for Black and Native Americans) have had a more realistic assessment of the threat of autocracy in the US from the start. And of how real and relentless the risks speaking against it really are.
The reason I love Anna Politkovskaya's 'A Small Corner of Hell' is because she treated each life she wrote about not as a piece on a chess board, but as unique. 'To every face she placed a name.' Mon dieu, the second Chechen War! Throughout it all she still managed not to lose what really mattered to her. As I was reading 'HiPS' right after it was published, I thought of her, but had no idea that she had influenced you.
Yes, Putin loves dates, especially his own birth date.
Reading eastern European history has led me closer both to African American and Native American history. It's kind of hard not to miss the connection. And talking of Vika Amelina's ghosts, we white Americans have ghosts of our own that we need to invite to breakfast.
Sarah, there is something I wanted to ask you about earlier but forgot. You said awhile back that you think you know what happened in the JFK assassination, but were afraid it would put your life in danger to say it out loud. Is there a source you can provide? I'm guessing probably not because it's more likely that, after spending years reading about it, you came to a conclusion based on your reading. I'd turned 10 about 5 weeks before 11/22/63. One might think that at that age, even an event like that couldn't have had much of an impression on a 10-year-old. But that would be a wrong assumption. It's impossible to explain what it did to us psychologically, and it continues to haunt me.
The fact that last year marked the 60th anniversary and we still don't know, tells me that there must be something that if made public, would prove embarrassing to the CIA or FBI, not just domestically, but even more so, internationally. It usually takes 50-60 years for governments to declassify and make documents public. As a comparison, Soviet scholars admitted in 1989 that it was Stalin, not Hitler, who'd ordered the 1940 Katyń massacres, and in 1990 Gorbachev confirmed that the NKVD was responsible, so 49 years for that one. Of course it was a cynical move on Gorbachev's part, as he was trying to hold the Warsaw Pact countries together. But this was a crime of such magnitude that the wound is still gaping among Poles, who to this day are not in a forgiving mood.
I wonder if what those agencies are trying to keep secret has nothing to do with the familiar conspiracy theories, but something more hum-drum. Am I even close?
I don’t know anything definitive about what happened to JFK that others don’t also know, there are people who have studied it *much* more closely than me. I also don’t remember saying that people would kill me in some sort of serious sense. I think it’s more that I don’t believe the official story and think it was a combination of the CIA and organized crime that did it, and that JFK’s opposition to Israel getting nukes may have been a factor, along with his wariness of the CIA itself. Those are all theories that piss various people off, even though they’re fairly common, and it’s possible I said in some offhanded way “This is gonna make people wanna kill me!” But I don’t think it would — they wanna kill me for stuff about which I have much more concrete information!
I absolutely understand what you mean when you speak about the generational trauma of the assassination. My parents are around your age and they talk about it the same way. They also watched Oswald get killed on live television, and to see that happen is both traumatic and confusing for a child. That the govt has hidden the files for 60 years makes it reasonable to assume the worst. The other disturbing aspect of it is that every admin that followed likely knows more than we do, yet they feel no obligation to share this with the American public. It’s just secrets upon secrets, which is very damaging to the country, and contributes to the same bad secret-keepers staying in office for decades on end.
JFK also was pushing for Israel to register as the foreign agent that it is. I find that alone a good enough clue to why he was assassinated. I’m sure if it is the reason, however, it’s not the only one.
He died of natural causes to my knowledge but they certainly went out of their way to destroy his career. As a result he started one of the earliest political websites, back when the internet felt free.
In a similar vein, E.l. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” reflects the unsettling, unjust and twisted-tiered society we live in today. Has anything changed? No. And “Ragtime” came out 50 years ago.
“ I’m extremely in favor of questions and wish people would stop demonizing those asking them. That demonization leads to conformity, which leads to complacency — and in times of extreme danger, complacency is complicity.” Your newsletters are amazing, but this one..brought up everything for me. Honestly, I had been reluctant to read THEY KNEW. And I know why. But today…I just ordered it.
I bought your 1st two books, Sarah, but didn't preorder"They Knew" bc I figured I'd be dead of Covid, killed by MAGA authoritarians, living underground across the OK border, or that the DeJoy USPS wouldn't deliver it from Left Bank Books to Joplin. I did borrow it from the Joplin Library and revisited it on audio to begin 2024. Thank you for your truthful and timely books and essays !!!
Like your other books, "They Knew" is a treasure. A terrifying treasure, but a treasure nevertheless. Thank you for that, and all your writing, and for your great and good heart and your commitment to speaking the truth, always with love and compassion!
I am (we are) forever in your debt for so many things, not least of all your clarity and persistence, always leading with love. In other words, thank YOU!!
I love all your writing, but this one was like a crime novel... a real page-turner... but unfortunately... not fiction. Keep up the great and important work!
Thank you so much Sarah! That's so kind of you to do, considering how busy you must be. I will be happy to pay extra for personalized signing if possible. I'm proud to support your great work!
Trying to figure out today’s political landscape is similar to trying to trace down the source of a first floor water leak in a 20 story building! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! You’re enabling us to put the puzzle together‼️
Thanks! And yes it's gotten so much worse since I wrote the book. At least Google worked relatively well then and AI wasn't rampant. It's wild to look back at the 2010s, when I wrote two of my three books, and see the sheer volume of free information available that let us decipher our past.
You’re exactly right about how much more complicated it has gotten. Too many times we get no meaningful answers from the media (my opinion). If Ben Bradley had “fair & balanced” as his goal in the 1970.’s , Nixon might have gotten off the hook!
I had read all 3 of your books when you started the Promo tour for They Knew in the days after the Covid vaccine became available. Brought my KU son and we listened to you and Sarah Smersh at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence - and it was my birthday. It was an evening well spent. After you signed my books (and the promo poster) my last comment to you was "you still give me hope". What I meant was I am hopeful because you are out there turning over the rocks, exposing the slimy underbelly of America's unique forms of corruption. Keep it up Sarah. What you do matters so much.
Thank you! And thank you for coming out to Lawrence that day -- I think I may remember you!
I have the book, and it is well worth the read! As are your other ones. Indeed, the mysterious "higher ups." Staff just doing what they were told. Not their fault, just following orders. Get along to go along. I admire and respect your perspective!
Thank you, I appreciate that!
I bought, and read, as soon as it was available. I felt then and know now that it is one of the most important pieces I have ever read or will read.
My frustration is that it isn’t widespread to huge audiences. Not the least bit surprised, due to the nature of its content. The criminal elite have no intentions of releasing their stranglehold on the American sheep.
Sarah will be a historic figure as one who “knew,” and helped many “know..
I anxiously await the next one. 👏
Thank you very much! It's a weird book in that it sold well but it spread like a rumor, with official channels blocking discussion of it but people embracing it. It came out at the exact time media and entertainment and politics were all lurching hard to the right (Musk buying Twitter, Zaslav destroying HBO, GOP taking the House, etc).
But in a moment that brought the country together, THEY KNEW was censored by political elites from ALL sides! lol/sob
I turned 27 in Oct. 1980, the presidential election year. ABC's Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel, which was created because of the Iran hostage crisis, had been on the air since late 1979, and I watched it every night. I learned about the deal made by Reagan's people on Nightline. Then the story disappeared quite literally as soon as it was reported. I did try to find further reporting on it, starting the next day, but . . . nothing. Every time I looked for the story I ran into a wall.
In THEY KNEW I write about Robert Parry, the reporter who broke the 1980 "October Surprise" you're describing and then the Iran-Contra, and was marginalized and demonized for breaking both stories. He wrote several books on the October Surprise that are worth reading.
What Reagan did in Iran was beyond despicable. And he and his cronies got away with it. I cried when he won the election. I knew then he was a monster.
Thanks for this, Sarah.
Because I spend most of my time reading eastern European history and following the war in Ukraine, I also spend a lot of time with dead journalists and writers. Speaking truth to power means taking truth so seriously that you're willing to take a corporeal risk in order to speak it. Imagine being so devoted to the truth that you keep speaking and writing it in full awareness of the consequences! But you don't have to imagine it. Those dead journalists and writers didn't want to die, but they also didn't want to live in a world of lies without at least trying to write the truth.
In 'Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened,' the late Vika Amelina writes that all of eastern Europe is a haunted house. 'Such set-ups never felt particularly frightening to me. I wonder if it’s because I’m from Eastern Europe. If gruesome murder were all it took to create a haunted house, then, where I come from, we’d have haunted villages, haunted cities, haunted countries.' She writes about what it is like to live in a house in eastern Europe--the one she grew up in L'viv, for example--in which the names of its owners have been lost to history. Eastern Europeans and those who are familiar with eastern European history know what it means to live in a house in which the names of the previous owners are unknown. In the end, it is the truth that she seeks, no matter how painful it is: 'No city is doomed to be haunted forever. We break the spell not when we banish the ghosts, but when we invite them to breakfast.' https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/nothing-bad
Her murder by the Russians last year in Kramators'k still seems impossible to believe, as if one fully expects her to walk into a room full of people at any moment, ready to read her poetry or other writings. I remember a video from last year when an old Ukrainian man crawled on his hands and knees to a piece of his best friend's body after it had been pulled out of the wreckage after a missile strike: 'Yura, Yura, what have they done to you?'
All of this, for Putin's lies.
Yes, absolutely. I’m sure you’ve read Anna Politkovskaya. She was a big influence on how I covered Trump in HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT because she put emotion at the foreground of her coverage of Putin instead of worrying it made her look weak or unserious. Emotion and humanity were what Putin was trying to strip away and her record of it in Chechnya and elsewhere — along with her own personal recollections — were a revolt against that inhumanity, a way of leading by example. I reread her every Oct 7, which was when she was assassinated (not coincidentally, on Putin’s birthday.)
I think people from the former USSR or from any other autocratic regime (or from ethnic groups who lived under the dictates of a selectively autocratic US, which is true for Black and Native Americans) have had a more realistic assessment of the threat of autocracy in the US from the start. And of how real and relentless the risks speaking against it really are.
The reason I love Anna Politkovskaya's 'A Small Corner of Hell' is because she treated each life she wrote about not as a piece on a chess board, but as unique. 'To every face she placed a name.' Mon dieu, the second Chechen War! Throughout it all she still managed not to lose what really mattered to her. As I was reading 'HiPS' right after it was published, I thought of her, but had no idea that she had influenced you.
Yes, Putin loves dates, especially his own birth date.
Reading eastern European history has led me closer both to African American and Native American history. It's kind of hard not to miss the connection. And talking of Vika Amelina's ghosts, we white Americans have ghosts of our own that we need to invite to breakfast.
Sarah, there is something I wanted to ask you about earlier but forgot. You said awhile back that you think you know what happened in the JFK assassination, but were afraid it would put your life in danger to say it out loud. Is there a source you can provide? I'm guessing probably not because it's more likely that, after spending years reading about it, you came to a conclusion based on your reading. I'd turned 10 about 5 weeks before 11/22/63. One might think that at that age, even an event like that couldn't have had much of an impression on a 10-year-old. But that would be a wrong assumption. It's impossible to explain what it did to us psychologically, and it continues to haunt me.
The fact that last year marked the 60th anniversary and we still don't know, tells me that there must be something that if made public, would prove embarrassing to the CIA or FBI, not just domestically, but even more so, internationally. It usually takes 50-60 years for governments to declassify and make documents public. As a comparison, Soviet scholars admitted in 1989 that it was Stalin, not Hitler, who'd ordered the 1940 Katyń massacres, and in 1990 Gorbachev confirmed that the NKVD was responsible, so 49 years for that one. Of course it was a cynical move on Gorbachev's part, as he was trying to hold the Warsaw Pact countries together. But this was a crime of such magnitude that the wound is still gaping among Poles, who to this day are not in a forgiving mood.
I wonder if what those agencies are trying to keep secret has nothing to do with the familiar conspiracy theories, but something more hum-drum. Am I even close?
I don’t know anything definitive about what happened to JFK that others don’t also know, there are people who have studied it *much* more closely than me. I also don’t remember saying that people would kill me in some sort of serious sense. I think it’s more that I don’t believe the official story and think it was a combination of the CIA and organized crime that did it, and that JFK’s opposition to Israel getting nukes may have been a factor, along with his wariness of the CIA itself. Those are all theories that piss various people off, even though they’re fairly common, and it’s possible I said in some offhanded way “This is gonna make people wanna kill me!” But I don’t think it would — they wanna kill me for stuff about which I have much more concrete information!
I absolutely understand what you mean when you speak about the generational trauma of the assassination. My parents are around your age and they talk about it the same way. They also watched Oswald get killed on live television, and to see that happen is both traumatic and confusing for a child. That the govt has hidden the files for 60 years makes it reasonable to assume the worst. The other disturbing aspect of it is that every admin that followed likely knows more than we do, yet they feel no obligation to share this with the American public. It’s just secrets upon secrets, which is very damaging to the country, and contributes to the same bad secret-keepers staying in office for decades on end.
JFK also was pushing for Israel to register as the foreign agent that it is. I find that alone a good enough clue to why he was assassinated. I’m sure if it is the reason, however, it’s not the only one.
Yep, I watched Oswald get shot on TV, too. To this day I remember the look on his face before he collapsed.
Sounds like “catch & kill.”
He died of natural causes to my knowledge but they certainly went out of their way to destroy his career. As a result he started one of the earliest political websites, back when the internet felt free.
Must. Buy. Today.
In a similar vein, E.l. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime” reflects the unsettling, unjust and twisted-tiered society we live in today. Has anything changed? No. And “Ragtime” came out 50 years ago.
Thank you!! Great company
“ I’m extremely in favor of questions and wish people would stop demonizing those asking them. That demonization leads to conformity, which leads to complacency — and in times of extreme danger, complacency is complicity.” Your newsletters are amazing, but this one..brought up everything for me. Honestly, I had been reluctant to read THEY KNEW. And I know why. But today…I just ordered it.
Yet again, thank you.
Thank YOU!
I bought your 1st two books, Sarah, but didn't preorder"They Knew" bc I figured I'd be dead of Covid, killed by MAGA authoritarians, living underground across the OK border, or that the DeJoy USPS wouldn't deliver it from Left Bank Books to Joplin. I did borrow it from the Joplin Library and revisited it on audio to begin 2024. Thank you for your truthful and timely books and essays !!!
Thank you and I hear you!
Like your other books, "They Knew" is a treasure. A terrifying treasure, but a treasure nevertheless. Thank you for that, and all your writing, and for your great and good heart and your commitment to speaking the truth, always with love and compassion!
Thank you!
I am (we are) forever in your debt for so many things, not least of all your clarity and persistence, always leading with love. In other words, thank YOU!!
Thank you for all you do.
No need - Read it and spread it. March 2025 is ominous enough with just the right timing, I think.
Thanks Sarah
I love all your writing, but this one was like a crime novel... a real page-turner... but unfortunately... not fiction. Keep up the great and important work!
Thank you very much!
Thank you so much Sarah! That's so kind of you to do, considering how busy you must be. I will be happy to pay extra for personalized signing if possible. I'm proud to support your great work!
MiGod Sarah. I love your brain!
Who else could sum up the situation more evocatively than "The world is a white Bronco and the highway never ends" ?
Trying to figure out today’s political landscape is similar to trying to trace down the source of a first floor water leak in a 20 story building! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! You’re enabling us to put the puzzle together‼️
Thanks! And yes it's gotten so much worse since I wrote the book. At least Google worked relatively well then and AI wasn't rampant. It's wild to look back at the 2010s, when I wrote two of my three books, and see the sheer volume of free information available that let us decipher our past.
You’re exactly right about how much more complicated it has gotten. Too many times we get no meaningful answers from the media (my opinion). If Ben Bradley had “fair & balanced” as his goal in the 1970.’s , Nixon might have gotten off the hook!
I have made sure I own a hard copy of each of your books, in case they are banned. What a world.
Your books are like deja vu, Sarah. I swear, when I see something happen in the media, I think, “She wrote about this, that, and that years ago.”
I am looking forward to your next book coming out in 2025!
Thank you!