I'm worried about young people too. They govt/corporations have created a perfect nightmare situation by making college required and expensive and making ICE seem like a way out, much like joining the military used to be. They are marketing ICE to youth in a way that disguises how horrific it is. Given the gutting of local media, I worry parents won't understand exactly what it is their children are signing up for. It's not like ICE's horrors are being reported widely or accurately.
Very good and frightening analogy! Teaching young people to pursue people without legal justification will go a long way towards destroying the chance for a democratic, rule of law based future!
What human beings choose to survive becomes the bottom line, I’m afraid.
We all have strengths. But survival of the fittest is really survival of the richest with the Trump regime: THE REPUBLICAN-FEDERALIST COUP AGAINST AMERICA!
The so called, “Supreme” Court was installed to be EXTREME.
You have helped the world. I will miss reading your words and knowing that they were really yours. That's why I bought your books. I'll miss trusting books. I already miss trusting my judgement. I mistrust my judgment. Lol
Ugh
I hate this time and all the powerful ppl who are profiting from so much evil.
It is VERY frustrating to be a writer right now. I do not trust that the digital versions of my books will stay intact, and there have already been multiple attempts to pull the print versions of a couple of them out of circulation. Meanwhile the mainstream media has collapsed and social media is full of ghouls yammering about how the real danger is anti-fascist substack writers while being perfectly content to fund genocidaires. Ironically, substack is one of the only places I reliably encounter kind and thoughtful people; even the comments I disagree with (on my own articles at least) are respectful and interesting. Reminds me of the old internet, which is a good thing. I wrote recently for a well-established print magazine and I was horrified by the lack of professionalism -- I have a feeling I got edited by AI because of the sheer sloppiness.
I agree. This is (for now) a place to meet and read the work of "kind, thoughtful" people. Some Substackers are already seeing some algorithm shenanigans. It's hard to say how much longer this will be a good place.
I used AI years ago, to summarize massive documentation I had, concerning crimes committed against me by some in law enforcement. The AI tool said doing
that, was against its values. So, what were its values? That, it would not answer. I
posted screenshots of that thread. They subsequently evaporated. It seems we are in a world of censorship, where proving what one has to say, is what gets censored. Only unsubstantiated opinion, seems to currently rule.
After one of my posts, Substack began refusing my accurate logons to my Substack newsletters account. Next, after I alternatively put out the, “Repeat Offenders…” issue, Substack then amped up to wrongfully taking down ALL of my Substack newsletters’ issues.
See -
No Longer Available: (all my Substack Newsletters were wrongly taken down, after the, “Repeat Offenders…” post)
Curious: Have you ever had help that fixed anything, from S-S customer service? Ever heard of this with any of their other writers? And idea why they tolerated the bidding of someone who favored a state bill I’d opposed?
Sarah, I'm relieved you are coming across some good, here. My own experiences as a SS writer a different. You can refer to my reply to Robot Bender, below.
Oh Sarah, I I'm so sorry. This really hit home with me because my Masters in Multicultural & Bilingual Ed is no longer offered. The superintendent of education outlawed bilingual ed in public school classrooms a number of years ago. I retired and he left office so it was reinstated, BUT like Trump he was voted back in for a second term with predictable results. The GOP is ruining Arizona but you mostly hear about the Florida GOP. Theyll be the death of imagination, originality and compassion.
I feel so awful for teachers and translators. AI cannot replace them. It's a terrible situation for educators but also for students. I also think bilingual education is awesome and students from other countries learning English need a human support network, not AI modules.
Perhaps, instead of just dissing AI for its nefarious uses in education, we might question our education system as related to our economic system. That lovely heron doesn’t give a hot damn about going to the right schools, getting a good education, GPA, working itself up the corporate ladder, making tons of money, buying stuff.. Perhaps that is why the sense I have of it is serenity. Imagine a photo of NYC at 5:30pm juxtaposed next to the heron. I trust you would agree that the feeling is quite different, at the edge of manic.
AI is just another example of people sitting around inventing basically useless things to convince themselves they are relevant and important. They might not even recognize a heron.
Sarah, thank you for everything. And in response to this element, have you listened to comedian Harry Shearer’s “Le Show” weekly ‘news’ podcast? His reportage/comedic reflections on the news - especially his takes on the latest A.I. & crypto shenanigans. It can be dark, but it often really lands…
Very well said. I hate AI - I am a teacher and refuse to use AI or a lot of tech in class because it doesn't help students learn to do their own thinking and learning. On a larger scale, I can't help but think these oligarchs shoving it into every aspect of life are also trying to get a monopoly on critical thinking by destroying people's ability to do so through dependence on AI.
I heard about a professor who gave a student a zero on a paper for using AI to write a paper. Glad you are also rejecting it. I am a peer tutor and I also refuse to use it.
My daughter is a Ph.D. teaching at the university level here in MO. She has a terrible time with students using AI in their papers. She has a VERY tough policy on it and has to use AI detecting software to screen papers. Some still get through.
‘Mankurt.” In the early 1950’s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote “The Captive Mind”. The time was ripe with Stalin, Totalitarianism and a blind obedience to authoritarian rule. Soulless bodies fed the machine that would run the people into oblivion. It is an exceptional book, that uses examples of personalities to describe today. Yes, it describes today. AI will never tell us what tears from a broken heart taste like, nor will it ever describe an experience of a rose. This authoritarian machine we are living under, cannot take my humanity away. I refuse to stop being human. In the end, I choose the example of Victor Frankel. Thank you Sarah.
This particular passage struck me, especially in the wake of having challenged her in an election:
“For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a ‘Russian agent,’ when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.
This fake ‘Russian agent’ quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.”
I lost my reputation to a public character assassination described by black journalists as a “civic lynching” after winning the jungle primary in 2020 and challenging Pelosi in the general election from the left for the first time in her now 38 year career.
People seem to widely assume this is Trump‘s superpower, but Pelosi has wielded it just as nefariously and to no less an extent in her own self interest.
The most violent threats and most steady harassment I got over the last decade came from Pelosi’s people (I don’t even know what to call them since many were automated toward the end). Worse than what I got from MAGA, which is really saying something given the books I’ve written on Trump. The MAGA people would do things like write “your retarded” (original spelling there) and send me the occasional threat; Pelosi’s people would send graphic violent threats to my family, including threats to my children. People were fired from her volunteer campaign team for reading books by me and a couple other authors who covered authoritarianism. Several people quit after being ordered by her staff to harass me online and refusing to go along with it. The main issue seemed to be financial corruption. Her team did not want me or others nosing around Open Secrets and looking at donations to her and to the DCCC from well-known partners of sanctioned oligarchs. It was very creepy and someday you and I should compare notes, because I saw what they did to you and I think it’s terrible.
I appreciate that thought in the abstract, but I don’t know how well it applies here. The only way in which Pelosi could be considered “extreme” would be that she has embraced—and come to especially embody—extreme corruption.
In every other sense, she not only is far from extreme, but something of a Trojan horse, leading the Democratic Party for years while supporting essentially moderate Republican policy positions. In this case, it is very much the corruption of the center to which we have all fallen victim, rotting America from within and leaving it poised for right wing demagoguery.
Thank you once again, Sarah! Appreciate your work so very much. I remember what you wrote about Nancy Pelosi and her proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the U.S. 6 years ago. I took great pause reading it then. 7 years ago, I spent some time getting to know a colleague/friend who's husband is from Palestine and I began to pay much closer attention to the Palestine/Israel conflict. They have 3 young children. I asked her back then, "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?" She took a moment and said, "on a catamaran." (Later that year, she suggested I meditate daily. I took her up on that and it changed *everything for me.) I hope you're taking care of your nervous system. Everything is changing so quickly and what activism is looking like is changing as well.
I've got my books, archaic looking exercise equipment and art supplies. My husband has his pop culture books and vinyl collection. We're currently living split lives while I plot our way out of consumerism and capitalism to a much more simple life. That will happen in the next 1-2 years. We take our son to college in 10 days - we will then pause and then plan.
So glad to have all your books for my future home library in my anti-capitalism world - to share with my grandkids - some day, I hope, and for the many generations to come... I believe there will be generations to come - so many positive groundswells of activation are happening currently.
Our strength is authentic and real. Nothin' real about A.I. and hunger games dead alive people. It'll continue to be tough, but there's enough of us out there who will not compromise our souls, truths or values for liberation, freedom and justice for every Body. I'd rather have 2 more years in Truth and Love than 20 years being a soul stripped M-Fer.
Peace. Keep writing please. Your writing is light in the darkness.
Ditto, Bill. Early on, when the touting of the wonders of AI began to surface some of my friends and I said, “just wait til the scammers and jerks and conmen get hold of it. It will be turned into something destructive as most of the technology Western “civilization” has invented has been. Sure enough.
As a culture, we do not seem to have a moral core. Everything is turned into something that we can use to our advantage.
It appears that the highest and best use of A.I. is plagiarism and scams, while crypto's best use is money laundering. This is what drives data centers to race to devour the entire natural world.
As always, it seems that if you can use the product for free, it's because YOU are the product.😕
It is pretty disgusting when the “highest and best” use of anything is its usefulness for conning, scamming, lying, misleading, cheating (fill in the blank with your own idea of despicable).
From things I have read about AI, it appears that it is capable of what for most of us is barely imaginable. And is inevitable. I’m not eager to see this planet, which I find endlessly fascinating, destroyed by demented, arrogant idiots. Since I don’t see how it can be stopped, it occurs to me that the best outcome I can think of is for “civilization” to destroy itself.
What irony that Indigenous peoples are so often referred to as “savages” by their colonizers.
The sad, and hopefully NOT inevitable, thing is that the energy and water needed to run AI data centers will be paid for by citizens while the corporate oligarchs reap the profits. You know, the ole private profit, public burden selight of hand.
Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' is here; your reference to "savages made me think of this.
When Sarah wrote here that she lives in "a semi-authoritarian state," I bet she paused.
She knows full well that the federal government got congressional funding to begin building its gulag of concentration camps.
She knows that goon sets of heavily-armed, masked, ID-absent ICE terrorists now routinely throw to the ground restaurant workers, farm workers, construction people, home care aids, students, and others guilty of brown skin. Throw them to the ground, violently arrest them, deny them lawyers, and disappear them.
She knows how much they lie: Trump, Vance, Vought, Bondi, Gabbard, Miller -- all of them. For fascist ideology. For expanded gyres of hatred on mainstream media, social media.
She knows how they ignore the rule of law.
She knows how they cover up what pals Trump, Maxwell, and Epstein were doing.
Sorry, no "semi" in the authoritarian state we inhabit.
There is indeed a "semi" in that we are allowed to have this conversation right now, along with millions of others criticizing, protesting and organizing. I have been to fully authoritarian countries where we'd be visited by agents and jailed immediately for this. I know people who spent years in prison for a blog post. So I hate to tell you, but it can get much worse. And I agree that they are planning for much worse; you don't build massive concentration camps without planning to fill them.
I lived in two red-flag era communist counties of eastern Europe in the late 1980s (was there when they fell). In one of them had some minor police state issues, and in the other got in serious trouble with the secret police, who were convinced I was C.I.A. (I wasn't, and had some protection from the fact that I was a Fulbrighter. Then had less protection as it turned out our State Department aimed in post-commie era to side with the university personnel who'd all been secret police informers during the red star era.)
Paralysed force, gesture without motion . . . " -- T. S. Eliot
Memorized the first stanza of "The Hollow Men" way back in the mid-80s while writing a long paper on the poem for my junior English seminar. Had no idea at the time how much more resonant the lament would seem four decades later in the midst of the A"I" devolution. (Or "demolition," take your pick.)
Thank you, Sarah, for once again speaking desperately urgent truths to so much numbing, inhumane (can't cross out the "hum" in this comment box) power.
I remember I made a thread of that poem on Twitter combined with images from the men at the Kavanaugh hearings. I like that we can visit the parking lot that was Eliot's old digs here in STL, that he saw the same river and some of the same buildings we do.
Yes. As you know, no doubt, his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, also helped to found our graduate alma mater. (Does W. G. still have a plaque in the stonework under the Brookings arch?) T. S. apparently visited the English Dept. in Duncker in the early 60s, not long before his death, and some of my professors liked (when I arrived in the late 80s) to tell stories about finding him not at all as gloomy as his poems. (Insert your own "hollow men" pun here. :)
Recalled that you had invoked the poem and shared pictures of the parking lot, but couldn't remember where (here, book, Twitter, etc). Anyway, seemed a safe allusion, given the prominence of endlessly quotable Thomas Stearns's work in your own equally and remarkably quotable work. The paper I wrote as a naïve and ambitiously melancholic junior English major compared TSE's "Hollow Men" to Tennyson's "Lotos Eaters," trying to argue that both elevated lassitude and spiritual inertia to metaphysical heights, but Alfred Lord in a proto-mythological context that allowed some possibility of escape from the horrors of overwhelming fecklessness, whereas Eliot the modernist allowed no reprieve, only apocalyptic despair. Still suspect, after all these years, that my professor found the comparison baffling, even when I quoted lines like these (from ALT):
Hadn't reread, until just now, that passage of THEY KNEW, which makes a lovely, wrenching prelude to LART, or "The Craftsman," which I recalled as being simply wrenching. Don't trust my own anger, which I pretty invariably end up regretting, but respect it when it's earned and works for a larger good, as yours does, so palpably, in "The Craftsman." (Sidebar: you now must have at least *two* books' worth of excellent essays here.)
Hadn't thought about these lines in a long time, but they certainly resonate with your work here and elsewhere:
Geez, Sarah. No one I know does a better job of writing about tragic, optimism crushing things. Thanks (I guess).
Whoever said “It’s better to know what we’re up against. At least then we know the nature of the fight we are in” was right. The fight for the future is a terrifyingly real one… worse than any SciFi story I can think of.
Thanks as always for doing what you can to open our eyes! Fond memories of meeting you at Magic City Books in Tulsa!
Sarah, this chills me to the bone. I’m glad I’m old, but I constantly worry about my two young great nieces (6 and 9). Their parents have told me that they will keep AI out the house, but the children don’t live in a bubble. I gave each little girl a library of 50 books when she was born, and I’m gratified by the fact that they both love to read. The older girl has become quite a writer at her young age and has sent me some of her poetry. I’m also thankful to live in a town where the public library is a centerpiece.
It mystifies me that everyone doesn’t find the same joy from writing and reading as I do. I once worked with a man with two PhDs, who constantly bragged about having never read a book. No surprise that he worked on AI in its infancy; unfathomable to someone who always has her nose in a book.
All your predictions are coming true. Instead of taking heed years ago, the political class has done nothing…sometimes worse than nothing. I see no good end.
Thank you for your insight and your wonderful writing.
Thank you. I'm so glad you're giving your young relatives real books! I understand reluctance to write in the "I hate writing, but I love to have written" way (a common affliction for those of us who do it for a living) but for kids, writing is usually freeing and adventurous. It's a natural outlet for a big imagination that should not be constrained. I miss when my kids were little and would blurt out whatever they were thinking because it was so bizarre. I loved reading the little stories they would write. I think childhood make-believe is such a primal instinct that unless it is harshly stamped out, it will endure, so I have fledgling hope there. However it's also why parents need to keep kids away from AI or any tool purporting to "write for them".
So very grateful and at the same time for your intelligence, intuition, insight.
Thank you for loving America and Americans. Our survival, welfare, progress, protection.
I am like an egg sometimes, keeping warm under YOUR wings.
I am old.
I am anxious for my three Grandsons.
ICE is recruiting 18 year olds.
Just wait, they will adjust to 13 year olds.
I'm worried about young people too. They govt/corporations have created a perfect nightmare situation by making college required and expensive and making ICE seem like a way out, much like joining the military used to be. They are marketing ICE to youth in a way that disguises how horrific it is. Given the gutting of local media, I worry parents won't understand exactly what it is their children are signing up for. It's not like ICE's horrors are being reported widely or accurately.
Sounds like Hitler Youth to me.
Very good and frightening analogy! Teaching young people to pursue people without legal justification will go a long way towards destroying the chance for a democratic, rule of law based future!
Suddenly reminds me of the child soldiers of Africa.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Research.
Yup.
Exactly
Exactly!
Thank you for your warm wings!❤️ (selfishly)😉
What human beings choose to survive becomes the bottom line, I’m afraid.
We all have strengths. But survival of the fittest is really survival of the richest with the Trump regime: THE REPUBLICAN-FEDERALIST COUP AGAINST AMERICA!
The so called, “Supreme” Court was installed to be EXTREME.
Actually, ICE is now recruiting 18 year olds, having reduced the age requirement from 21, mainly because they are having recruitment problems.
Okay, thank you. So 18 year old teenagers-
UPDATE: Noem has dropped age requirements again!
Yes, unfortunately; not a good sign.
😳
You have helped the world. I will miss reading your words and knowing that they were really yours. That's why I bought your books. I'll miss trusting books. I already miss trusting my judgement. I mistrust my judgment. Lol
Ugh
I hate this time and all the powerful ppl who are profiting from so much evil.
It is VERY frustrating to be a writer right now. I do not trust that the digital versions of my books will stay intact, and there have already been multiple attempts to pull the print versions of a couple of them out of circulation. Meanwhile the mainstream media has collapsed and social media is full of ghouls yammering about how the real danger is anti-fascist substack writers while being perfectly content to fund genocidaires. Ironically, substack is one of the only places I reliably encounter kind and thoughtful people; even the comments I disagree with (on my own articles at least) are respectful and interesting. Reminds me of the old internet, which is a good thing. I wrote recently for a well-established print magazine and I was horrified by the lack of professionalism -- I have a feeling I got edited by AI because of the sheer sloppiness.
I agree. This is (for now) a place to meet and read the work of "kind, thoughtful" people. Some Substackers are already seeing some algorithm shenanigans. It's hard to say how much longer this will be a good place.
Ah, yes. SS algorithm shenanigans.
I used AI years ago, to summarize massive documentation I had, concerning crimes committed against me by some in law enforcement. The AI tool said doing
that, was against its values. So, what were its values? That, it would not answer. I
posted screenshots of that thread. They subsequently evaporated. It seems we are in a world of censorship, where proving what one has to say, is what gets censored. Only unsubstantiated opinion, seems to currently rule.
After one of my posts, Substack began refusing my accurate logons to my Substack newsletters account. Next, after I alternatively put out the, “Repeat Offenders…” issue, Substack then amped up to wrongfully taking down ALL of my Substack newsletters’ issues.
See -
No Longer Available: (all my Substack Newsletters were wrongly taken down, after the, “Repeat Offenders…” post)
https://8b1f01ae-005e-480a-b5ae-7a634fa3f553.usrfiles.com/ugd/8b1f01_1942a289c75149229e787d92986aad8b.pdf
Repeat Offenders, The Dingbat Defense, and Wolf Criers:
https://8b1f01ae-005e-480a-b5ae-7a634fa3f553.usrfiles.com/ugd/8b1f01_085fcece9a8b4f6cb9af05b02cca4a71.pdf
Scroll to the end of the doc below, to find out a bit more.
8 - Fwd of HSD ... Survey:
https://8b1f01ae-005e-480a-b5ae-7a634fa3f553.usrfiles.com/ugd/8b1f01_db6b635972bb4df0b87bb22545facfff.pdf
Curious: Have you ever had help that fixed anything, from S-S customer service? Ever heard of this with any of their other writers? And idea why they tolerated the bidding of someone who favored a state bill I’d opposed?
Sarah, I'm relieved you are coming across some good, here. My own experiences as a SS writer a different. You can refer to my reply to Robot Bender, below.
are different.
Oh Sarah, I I'm so sorry. This really hit home with me because my Masters in Multicultural & Bilingual Ed is no longer offered. The superintendent of education outlawed bilingual ed in public school classrooms a number of years ago. I retired and he left office so it was reinstated, BUT like Trump he was voted back in for a second term with predictable results. The GOP is ruining Arizona but you mostly hear about the Florida GOP. Theyll be the death of imagination, originality and compassion.
I feel so awful for teachers and translators. AI cannot replace them. It's a terrible situation for educators but also for students. I also think bilingual education is awesome and students from other countries learning English need a human support network, not AI modules.
Perhaps, instead of just dissing AI for its nefarious uses in education, we might question our education system as related to our economic system. That lovely heron doesn’t give a hot damn about going to the right schools, getting a good education, GPA, working itself up the corporate ladder, making tons of money, buying stuff.. Perhaps that is why the sense I have of it is serenity. Imagine a photo of NYC at 5:30pm juxtaposed next to the heron. I trust you would agree that the feeling is quite different, at the edge of manic.
AI is just another example of people sitting around inventing basically useless things to convince themselves they are relevant and important. They might not even recognize a heron.
The stillness is part of waiting for the precise moment to stab a fish and swallow it.
This is horrifying how fast this has been thrust at us. Also, “doppelgänger ransom” would be a great band name.
The speed astounds me! And really scares me, especially the effect on kids. And yes I may start a band called that!
The speed also astounds those who made AI possible. It's a runaway train!
Remember 'Player Piano' I'm thinking Kurt Vonnegut might be smirking right about now and thinking, "Told ya."
Sarah, thank you for everything. And in response to this element, have you listened to comedian Harry Shearer’s “Le Show” weekly ‘news’ podcast? His reportage/comedic reflections on the news - especially his takes on the latest A.I. & crypto shenanigans. It can be dark, but it often really lands…
Very well said. I hate AI - I am a teacher and refuse to use AI or a lot of tech in class because it doesn't help students learn to do their own thinking and learning. On a larger scale, I can't help but think these oligarchs shoving it into every aspect of life are also trying to get a monopoly on critical thinking by destroying people's ability to do so through dependence on AI.
Agree with all of that and thank you for not using AI! I appreciate any teacher who rejects it
I heard about a professor who gave a student a zero on a paper for using AI to write a paper. Glad you are also rejecting it. I am a peer tutor and I also refuse to use it.
I’m glad!
My daughter is a Ph.D. teaching at the university level here in MO. She has a terrible time with students using AI in their papers. She has a VERY tough policy on it and has to use AI detecting software to screen papers. Some still get through.
Right, using AI to detect AI. Seems like the dog chasing its tail doesn't it?
No one seems to have come up with any other ideas yet. 🤷♂️
‘Mankurt.” In the early 1950’s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote “The Captive Mind”. The time was ripe with Stalin, Totalitarianism and a blind obedience to authoritarian rule. Soulless bodies fed the machine that would run the people into oblivion. It is an exceptional book, that uses examples of personalities to describe today. Yes, it describes today. AI will never tell us what tears from a broken heart taste like, nor will it ever describe an experience of a rose. This authoritarian machine we are living under, cannot take my humanity away. I refuse to stop being human. In the end, I choose the example of Victor Frankel. Thank you Sarah.
I love Milosz and this is one of my all time favorite poems by anyone. It's EXTREMELY relevant to the present moment: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49482/you-who-wronged
"Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight."
Thank you so much for the poem. I ran down the link. He left, “defected”, I believe in 1951. So this was a living poem at its peak.
"AI will never tell us what tears from a broken heart taste like, nor will it ever describe an experience of a rose." Beautifully stated, Art.
I agree that is beautifully stated.
This particular passage struck me, especially in the wake of having challenged her in an election:
“For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a ‘Russian agent,’ when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.
This fake ‘Russian agent’ quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.”
I lost my reputation to a public character assassination described by black journalists as a “civic lynching” after winning the jungle primary in 2020 and challenging Pelosi in the general election from the left for the first time in her now 38 year career.
People seem to widely assume this is Trump‘s superpower, but Pelosi has wielded it just as nefariously and to no less an extent in her own self interest.
What explains the ability of oligarchs to manufacture political narratives? I wrote about Pelosi in this context two years ago: https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/they-call-that-news
Also, incredible shot of that heron!
The most violent threats and most steady harassment I got over the last decade came from Pelosi’s people (I don’t even know what to call them since many were automated toward the end). Worse than what I got from MAGA, which is really saying something given the books I’ve written on Trump. The MAGA people would do things like write “your retarded” (original spelling there) and send me the occasional threat; Pelosi’s people would send graphic violent threats to my family, including threats to my children. People were fired from her volunteer campaign team for reading books by me and a couple other authors who covered authoritarianism. Several people quit after being ordered by her staff to harass me online and refusing to go along with it. The main issue seemed to be financial corruption. Her team did not want me or others nosing around Open Secrets and looking at donations to her and to the DCCC from well-known partners of sanctioned oligarchs. It was very creepy and someday you and I should compare notes, because I saw what they did to you and I think it’s terrible.
"... steady harassment I got over the last decade ..."
Yes: Neither main party has been devoid of corruption. It has become worse, since Citizens United. Money talks. Sincerity walks.
Never underestimate the extreme ends of EITHER party.
I appreciate that thought in the abstract, but I don’t know how well it applies here. The only way in which Pelosi could be considered “extreme” would be that she has embraced—and come to especially embody—extreme corruption.
In every other sense, she not only is far from extreme, but something of a Trojan horse, leading the Democratic Party for years while supporting essentially moderate Republican policy positions. In this case, it is very much the corruption of the center to which we have all fallen victim, rotting America from within and leaving it poised for right wing demagoguery.
God, this is the TRUTH! Rot from the center.
Ditto. Please see my reply to Sarah, above yours.
Thank you once again, Sarah! Appreciate your work so very much. I remember what you wrote about Nancy Pelosi and her proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the U.S. 6 years ago. I took great pause reading it then. 7 years ago, I spent some time getting to know a colleague/friend who's husband is from Palestine and I began to pay much closer attention to the Palestine/Israel conflict. They have 3 young children. I asked her back then, "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?" She took a moment and said, "on a catamaran." (Later that year, she suggested I meditate daily. I took her up on that and it changed *everything for me.) I hope you're taking care of your nervous system. Everything is changing so quickly and what activism is looking like is changing as well.
I've got my books, archaic looking exercise equipment and art supplies. My husband has his pop culture books and vinyl collection. We're currently living split lives while I plot our way out of consumerism and capitalism to a much more simple life. That will happen in the next 1-2 years. We take our son to college in 10 days - we will then pause and then plan.
So glad to have all your books for my future home library in my anti-capitalism world - to share with my grandkids - some day, I hope, and for the many generations to come... I believe there will be generations to come - so many positive groundswells of activation are happening currently.
Our strength is authentic and real. Nothin' real about A.I. and hunger games dead alive people. It'll continue to be tough, but there's enough of us out there who will not compromise our souls, truths or values for liberation, freedom and justice for every Body. I'd rather have 2 more years in Truth and Love than 20 years being a soul stripped M-Fer.
Peace. Keep writing please. Your writing is light in the darkness.
You said it very well. I detest AI.
Ditto, Bill. Early on, when the touting of the wonders of AI began to surface some of my friends and I said, “just wait til the scammers and jerks and conmen get hold of it. It will be turned into something destructive as most of the technology Western “civilization” has invented has been. Sure enough.
As a culture, we do not seem to have a moral core. Everything is turned into something that we can use to our advantage.
It appears that the highest and best use of A.I. is plagiarism and scams, while crypto's best use is money laundering. This is what drives data centers to race to devour the entire natural world.
As always, it seems that if you can use the product for free, it's because YOU are the product.😕
Art,
It is pretty disgusting when the “highest and best” use of anything is its usefulness for conning, scamming, lying, misleading, cheating (fill in the blank with your own idea of despicable).
From things I have read about AI, it appears that it is capable of what for most of us is barely imaginable. And is inevitable. I’m not eager to see this planet, which I find endlessly fascinating, destroyed by demented, arrogant idiots. Since I don’t see how it can be stopped, it occurs to me that the best outcome I can think of is for “civilization” to destroy itself.
What irony that Indigenous peoples are so often referred to as “savages” by their colonizers.
The sad, and hopefully NOT inevitable, thing is that the energy and water needed to run AI data centers will be paid for by citizens while the corporate oligarchs reap the profits. You know, the ole private profit, public burden selight of hand.
Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' is here; your reference to "savages made me think of this.
Well said. Sadly, I don't think capitalistic culture allows for a moral core.
Great piece, Sarah. You may find this deep dive into Military AI informative, and a bit frightening, but, hey, people gotta know, so we can resist: https://www.projectcensored.org/military-ai-watch/
Military AI scares me so much!
When Sarah wrote here that she lives in "a semi-authoritarian state," I bet she paused.
She knows full well that the federal government got congressional funding to begin building its gulag of concentration camps.
She knows that goon sets of heavily-armed, masked, ID-absent ICE terrorists now routinely throw to the ground restaurant workers, farm workers, construction people, home care aids, students, and others guilty of brown skin. Throw them to the ground, violently arrest them, deny them lawyers, and disappear them.
She knows how much they lie: Trump, Vance, Vought, Bondi, Gabbard, Miller -- all of them. For fascist ideology. For expanded gyres of hatred on mainstream media, social media.
She knows how they ignore the rule of law.
She knows how they cover up what pals Trump, Maxwell, and Epstein were doing.
Sorry, no "semi" in the authoritarian state we inhabit.
There is indeed a "semi" in that we are allowed to have this conversation right now, along with millions of others criticizing, protesting and organizing. I have been to fully authoritarian countries where we'd be visited by agents and jailed immediately for this. I know people who spent years in prison for a blog post. So I hate to tell you, but it can get much worse. And I agree that they are planning for much worse; you don't build massive concentration camps without planning to fill them.
Accept your correction, Sarah.
I lived in two red-flag era communist counties of eastern Europe in the late 1980s (was there when they fell). In one of them had some minor police state issues, and in the other got in serious trouble with the secret police, who were convinced I was C.I.A. (I wasn't, and had some protection from the fact that I was a Fulbrighter. Then had less protection as it turned out our State Department aimed in post-commie era to side with the university personnel who'd all been secret police informers during the red star era.)
I've read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We're well on our way.
Stephen Miller and ICE are ethnic cleansing America.
Plenty to think about in your article. Thank you for your fire and your flaming truth telling.
"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion . . . " -- T. S. Eliot
Memorized the first stanza of "The Hollow Men" way back in the mid-80s while writing a long paper on the poem for my junior English seminar. Had no idea at the time how much more resonant the lament would seem four decades later in the midst of the A"I" devolution. (Or "demolition," take your pick.)
Thank you, Sarah, for once again speaking desperately urgent truths to so much numbing, inhumane (can't cross out the "hum" in this comment box) power.
https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men
I remember I made a thread of that poem on Twitter combined with images from the men at the Kavanaugh hearings. I like that we can visit the parking lot that was Eliot's old digs here in STL, that he saw the same river and some of the same buildings we do.
Yes. As you know, no doubt, his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, also helped to found our graduate alma mater. (Does W. G. still have a plaque in the stonework under the Brookings arch?) T. S. apparently visited the English Dept. in Duncker in the early 60s, not long before his death, and some of my professors liked (when I arrived in the late 80s) to tell stories about finding him not at all as gloomy as his poems. (Insert your own "hollow men" pun here. :)
Recalled that you had invoked the poem and shared pictures of the parking lot, but couldn't remember where (here, book, Twitter, etc). Anyway, seemed a safe allusion, given the prominence of endlessly quotable Thomas Stearns's work in your own equally and remarkably quotable work. The paper I wrote as a naïve and ambitiously melancholic junior English major compared TSE's "Hollow Men" to Tennyson's "Lotos Eaters," trying to argue that both elevated lassitude and spiritual inertia to metaphysical heights, but Alfred Lord in a proto-mythological context that allowed some possibility of escape from the horrors of overwhelming fecklessness, whereas Eliot the modernist allowed no reprieve, only apocalyptic despair. Still suspect, after all these years, that my professor found the comparison baffling, even when I quoted lines like these (from ALT):
Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
Did I mention that I was 20 (going on 86)? :)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters
I mentioned the poem and the parking lot in THEY KNEW (to the bafflement of my editors, but it worked) and also in “The Craftsman”: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-craftsman
Hadn't reread, until just now, that passage of THEY KNEW, which makes a lovely, wrenching prelude to LART, or "The Craftsman," which I recalled as being simply wrenching. Don't trust my own anger, which I pretty invariably end up regretting, but respect it when it's earned and works for a larger good, as yours does, so palpably, in "The Craftsman." (Sidebar: you now must have at least *two* books' worth of excellent essays here.)
Hadn't thought about these lines in a long time, but they certainly resonate with your work here and elsewhere:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Many thanks again, Sarah.
Resist with originality - music sung, words spoken, hugs freely given...
Yes!
Geez, Sarah. No one I know does a better job of writing about tragic, optimism crushing things. Thanks (I guess).
Whoever said “It’s better to know what we’re up against. At least then we know the nature of the fight we are in” was right. The fight for the future is a terrifyingly real one… worse than any SciFi story I can think of.
Thanks as always for doing what you can to open our eyes! Fond memories of meeting you at Magic City Books in Tulsa!
Sarah, this chills me to the bone. I’m glad I’m old, but I constantly worry about my two young great nieces (6 and 9). Their parents have told me that they will keep AI out the house, but the children don’t live in a bubble. I gave each little girl a library of 50 books when she was born, and I’m gratified by the fact that they both love to read. The older girl has become quite a writer at her young age and has sent me some of her poetry. I’m also thankful to live in a town where the public library is a centerpiece.
It mystifies me that everyone doesn’t find the same joy from writing and reading as I do. I once worked with a man with two PhDs, who constantly bragged about having never read a book. No surprise that he worked on AI in its infancy; unfathomable to someone who always has her nose in a book.
All your predictions are coming true. Instead of taking heed years ago, the political class has done nothing…sometimes worse than nothing. I see no good end.
Thank you for your insight and your wonderful writing.
Thank you. I'm so glad you're giving your young relatives real books! I understand reluctance to write in the "I hate writing, but I love to have written" way (a common affliction for those of us who do it for a living) but for kids, writing is usually freeing and adventurous. It's a natural outlet for a big imagination that should not be constrained. I miss when my kids were little and would blurt out whatever they were thinking because it was so bizarre. I loved reading the little stories they would write. I think childhood make-believe is such a primal instinct that unless it is harshly stamped out, it will endure, so I have fledgling hope there. However it's also why parents need to keep kids away from AI or any tool purporting to "write for them".