Jared had the chance to sit down with the one and only Sarah Kendzior. Here they discuss the current state of American politics, the clashes over Gaza, growing authoritarianism, and more. Sarah's book They Knew: How A Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent is now out in paperback. You can find her writings on her Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Alright everybody, I'm not gonna spend too long on introductions. | |
| Y'all know who Sarah Kinzier is, the author of They Knew, which I believe Sarah is out in paperback now, correct? | |
| Yes it is! | |
| You can get it in paperback. | |
| You can get it, you can put it in your backpack, walk around, it feels better. | |
| Sarah, I've been wanting to talk to you for a while. | |
| We've been talking about this, like, getting into what all is happening. | |
| The last time we talked was at the beginning of 2024. | |
| I believe the episode came out on New Year's Day, and you and I were lamenting what we thought 2024 was going to look like. | |
| And it looks even more different than I think we even imagined it possibly could. | |
| How's this year treating you, anyway? | |
| Oh, I mean... | |
| On a personal level, I don't know, that's a mixed bag, but on a political level, it's mostly worse, but there are signs of life and movement that I think neither of us really saw coming that are actually encouraging, although depressing in their own right. | |
| Mainly the protest movement against the genocide of Palestinians that are happening all over universities and cities. | |
| All across America and all across the world. | |
| And of course they're being brutally suppressed, which is the depressing part. | |
| But the fact that there is this connectivity, this pushback, this sense of moral obligation and resistance, and that it's tangible, it's something we can all witness, I don't think you and I really anticipated that. | |
| And I think it's a positive development. | |
| I just worry It will end in Tiananmen Square-style tragedy, but it's still good at least to see that people, some people, still have their conscience intact. | |
| You know, I there's so much to get into on everything you just said, because you're exactly right. | |
| I think for me, and it's funny, you know, and I think you work the same way. | |
| It's like the research we do. | |
| It's like the more that you learn about how this stuff works, the more that when stuff actually happens, you're like, holy hell, I got that part of it. | |
| I didn't see this other part. | |
| And like, obviously, it's always the college students and students who are the ones who sound the alarm and say, no, we're done with this. | |
| I think I was looking for like the labor unions to sort of do battle in the streets or for sort of political demonstrations to come out and sort of do that, you know, on the adult level. | |
| And I think what I missed out on this. | |
| And it was something that I've been looking at for years. | |
| You know, back in 2023, I was always trying to tell people, and there was so much pushback, I kept telling people, I said, you know, I have conversations with liberals, and I have conversations with never-Trump liberals, and they are always flirting with authoritarianism. | |
| Right? | |
| Like, like they would, they would say, God, Donald Trump's so disgusting. | |
| He's so awful. | |
| Like, I can't believe he's so awful. | |
| Here are the things that I believe. | |
| Obviously, in this house, we believe in science, you name it. | |
| And then immediately, there would be like this sort of curious flirting with like Ron DeSantis. | |
| And, you know, like if somebody could just put this things to right and like, obviously, I believe that trans people deserve to be protected, but maybe they shouldn't, you know, be out there and be so loud about it. | |
| Like these weird little caveats that were always being carved up. | |
| And if you look at history, it's like that sort of class is always making a deal with authoritarians, right? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Power, profit, influence, affluence, you name it. | |
| And I guess what I had forgotten is that the people who are always going to stand up and say it the loudest are the people who haven't been socialized into this, who don't necessarily already have their careers completely tied within it and their economic fates and political fates tied within it. | |
| And now I look at it and what I see is that the entire sort of Liberal coalition is absolutely cracking under the pressure of basically a situation that you can't sort of equivocate. | |
| You have to take a stand on, and as a result, like, the way that this thing has presented itself makes all the sense in the world, but it's not exactly what I expected it to, the form I expected it to take. | |
| Yeah, and it's interesting because I think that the right wing and the far right absolutely did see this coming, which is why they made these, you know, preemptive efforts to do things like shut down TikTok and to ban, you know, the teaching of accurate history in schools and to ban, you know, protests. | |
| I mean, some of that was aimed at the kind of, you know, adult I guess, you know, multi-age movements that were all throughout the Trump administration in the summer of 2020, you know, and obviously there are people of different generations participating in this movement as well, you know, but the main group, the dominant group, are students, are people under 30 years old, as you noted, you know, has historically been the case. | |
| I think they felt this fear. | |
| And I do think that, you know, some of this has to do with, you know, where people get their media and the fact that younger people are much, much more likely to get information straight from Gaza, straight from Palestinians, straight from people whose families have been killed, sometimes from people straight from people whose families have been killed, sometimes from people who then are killed You know, this is hard to talk about, but there are people that were, you know, mutuals of mine on Twitter. | |
| I don't know if I quite see friends. | |
| You know, people you follow back and forth, have casual conversations with. | |
| For a long time, I knew in Gaza, you know, who are, they've been murdered. | |
| You know, they've been murdered by Israel with U.S. | |
| assistance. | |
| And, you know, every day we've woken up to these horrific images. | |
| And we know that this is true. | |
| We know this is happening. | |
| We know it can be stopped if the people who are doing it would choose to do so. | |
| And I think younger people see this very clearly as well, because they're also directly interacting with, you know, Palestinians abroad or witnessing this. | |
| And also, you know, this is their age group. | |
| This is a genocide of children. | |
| You know, nearly half of the victims of, you know, who've been killed in Palestine are kids. | |
| So when kids are out in college campuses, they're looking at people near their own And thinking, you know, what if that was me? | |
| What if that was, you know, my little brother? | |
| The same way when I look at these kids, you know, I see my own children. | |
| And honestly, it baffles me how people don't, how any parent looks at this and they don't see, you know, in the eyes of a Palestinian child crying and screaming for their murdered parents, how they don't see their own child reflected back, how they don't see all that in any child anywhere. | |
| You know, they don't see this as a universal crime. | |
| It's really disorienting, and it's so upsetting to me. | |
| It's not something I almost expect from anyone, because murdering children is a universal taboo. | |
| Wanting to protect children is something you see in every culture, and what I've seen are the exact same people who were up in arms about Trump's family separation policy five years ago. | |
| Yeah, perfectly fine, by the way, when Biden has the same policy. | |
| They're fine with Palestinian children being murdered. | |
| If you ask them straight out, they'll deny this. | |
| But they support Biden. | |
| They support all of the pro-Israel policies. | |
| They support all the actions that have led to this. | |
| They even support Mike Johnson. | |
| They're out defending him, saying how great it is that The Democrats are reaching across the aisle to work with seditionists, to work with far right wing seditionists who are connected to multiple authoritarian states, including Russia, including Israel, including Saudi Arabia. | |
| None of this is good. | |
| This is just a soft, focused, watered-down version of Trumpism, a continuation of the same policies. | |
| It was bad then. | |
| It's bad now. | |
| It's very clear-cut. | |
| And, you know, I appreciate all these young folks and also the older folks who do see it for seeing it. | |
| But I'm so disgusted by a lot of the people who were on the same side we were, you know, two or three years ago, trying to get rid of Trump and his, you know, mafia cohort and trying to make structural reforms or sometimes just, mafia cohort and trying to make structural reforms or sometimes just, you know, bulldoze certain institutions that we don't need, like the Department of Homeland You know, in this country, really trying to change things, really trying to get to the guts of it and tear it out. | |
| They've abandoned all of that for a life of complicity. | |
| Yeah, and I think that's the thing that pisses me off the most. | |
| The research I've been doing in the past year or so, the thing that has become more and more clear is how much of a difference there is between stated principles and actual principles. | |
| We can talk all day about how much children matter and we need to give children better lives, but when it really comes down to it, unconsciously, a lot of people want to make sure that children not only don't live better lives, that they might even live worse lives. | |
| Right, because like they, you know, it's it's you don't want somebody else to have something that you didn't have or there's some sort of internalized violence. | |
| And, you know, I think a lot because when we talk about this, on one hand, the situation in Gaza is so unequivocally wrong and cruel and immoral. | |
| But it's linked through all these through lines of other things that we're putting through, putting it through. | |
| There's so much intersectionality in all this. | |
| And you look at like, how is it we could put children through this? | |
| How is it that we can look at like college students and like, how many times do we see on social media, people just absolutely chanting blood, blood, blood, wanting these kids to be literally murdered on camera. | |
| And meanwhile, Look at the fact of how many people who know better have subjected these children to mass shootings, a life of nothing but mass shootings. | |
| And, you know, on one hand, I want to say, like, you almost you can say, like, listen, the Republicans obviously have their relationships with not just the NRA, but a culture of death and destruction. | |
| At least they own it. | |
| You know, at least they are the ones who are like, yeah, absolutely. | |
| I want everyone to have guns except for, you know, certain people with certain pigment in their skin. | |
| But I don't care if these children are dying. | |
| I'm not even going to talk about it. | |
| The other people who are like, well, you know, I would love to do something about this, but it's not a politically convenient time. | |
| It's never a convenient time. | |
| There's an election in, you know, three years and 11 months. | |
| We can't afford to speak about that. | |
| Sarah, we just won the election last night. | |
| And, like, we really got to get this coalition together or whatever. | |
| And what you start to realize, and this is unfortunate, and one of the reasons why I felt common cause with you and I felt close to you over the years is, like, we have to tell people something which is uncomfortable, which is, The reason we're always told that it's not time to do this is because it's not a priority to do it. | |
| They don't actually want to do it. | |
| They're not interested in using political capital or capital in general or anything. | |
| It's not on their list of priorities, but they understand that they are supposed to say it is because it's a performative thing. | |
| And unfortunately, the time for performance is done and the time of action is here. | |
| Yeah, they are open enablers at this point. | |
| And the thing is, this was clear from about mid-2021. | |
| That's when I started talking about it. | |
| That's when I started defining the situation as you have one party that's an abuser, the Republican Party, and you have one party that's an enabler, the Democratic Party. | |
| And the very obvious clue that this dynamic would continue was the fact that they refused to prosecute a seditionist | |
| Congress and a career criminal, mafioso, you know, insurrectionist former president who had committed and confessed to a incredibly large variety of crimes over a four-year period, you know, and then also the DOJ was given the Mueller report already finished on a silver platter. | |
| That was the moment where you would learn, you know, are they actually going to hold the powerful accountable? | |
| Are they going to take on transnational organized crime? | |
| Are they serious about the sovereignty and the public safety of this country? | |
| Or are they just placeholders? | |
| Is this a placeholder presidency meant to just, you know, basically acclimatize liberals? | |
| Into authoritarian support, you know, that's what they've done. | |
| They've made a lot of Trump policies palatable to the liberal audience. | |
| And then reinstall Trump. | |
| You know, I look at this election not as an election, but as a reinstallation. | |
| And it was obvious to me that that was the case for 2021. | |
| I could not figure out why other people were having a hard time seeing it. | |
| I mean, you can look at the people who Biden appointed. | |
| You can look at the fact that it was, you know, Jared Kushner's lawyer, his ethics lawyer, Jamie Grayley, you know, who helped get Garland into the DOJ. | |
| She's also a close friend of Biden. | |
| Biden's appointed her to multiple other divisions of the government as well. | |
| He left in Christopher Wray. | |
| He left in Louis DeJoy. | |
| He was, you know, building Trump's wall. | |
| I mean, that's what he was doing before he switched focus to Israel. | |
| He was in the middle of overriding 26 federal laws to build Trump's wall. | |
| Like Biden is in there to carry out the Trump agenda, only to talk about it with different words in softer rhetoric in order to make it appealing to liberals. | |
| And so we now have a situation where liberals are running around screaming at people that, you know, ha, ha, ha, just wait till Trump comes back and you'll be deported. | |
| are saying this to people who could actually... | |
| He deported. | |
| You know, I saw them saying this to a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union who supports Palestine, who is anti-Netanyahu and anti-Biden because of Biden's support for Israel. | |
| And they were saying this to him. | |
| And I'm thinking, you know, this guy's in an incredibly vulnerable position. | |
| He could actually be deported. | |
| You know, as an American Jew pushing back against Israel and the Biden administration, he's taking a brave stance. | |
| You know, this is somebody admirable. | |
| And this is your enemy. | |
| This is who the liberals of America think is their great enemy and that they're going to taunt and tease online. | |
| This is just one of many people. | |
| They've done this to so many vulnerable people, to all the marginalized groups that Trump and his brigade of white supremacists have targeted. | |
| You know, and they do it to trans people, to disabled people. | |
| Like they don't care. | |
| They don't care about the humanity of other human beings. | |
| And they seem to thrive in it. | |
| And the never-Trumpers really kind of dominate the discussion of our political system, which is what I also said back in 2021. | |
| But by 2024, we're going to end up with two parties, unless things change soon. | |
| We're going to have a hard core, far right, lunatic MAGA thing. | |
| And then we're going to have a, you know, Republican Party that people will just call the Democratic Party, you know, which is basically what we've got. | |
| Like the never Trumpers are the Democratic Party. | |
| And they keep saying things to me like, you know, Sarah, you better stop talking about Gaza or, you know, Trump's going to take away your reproductive rights. | |
| And I'm like, well, sorry, like that already happened. | |
| That ship sailed. | |
| I live in Missouri and I don't have any reproductive rights there. | |
| I mean, that's the thing is like their reaction to me and others literally losing our bodily autonomy. | |
| It's not wow, you know, that's that's horrible. | |
| That's so such a terrible way to live. | |
| What can we do to help? | |
| Just to see it as another little, you know, tool to batter us with in their horse race politics with, you know, their horse race politics to taunt us with, to mock us with. | |
| And I think that folks in what they call red states, in GOP legislature states, they see the situation so much more clearly because we've already lost all the things that they're threatening us with. | |
| Like, oh, you're going to take away our freedom of speech? | |
| Oh, you're going to ban our right to protest? | |
| Like, we've already learned how to live around the law. | |
| You know, we've already figured out ways of getting by. | |
| Like, is it unpleasant? | |
| Yeah, it sure as hell would be nice if some folks would lend a hand and, you know, instead of slapping us across the face. | |
| But it's like, don't even try to take away what I do have left, which is the ability, you know, to criticize my government and the moral obligation to criticize my government when my government is abetting genocide and carrying out crimes. | |
| Yeah, it's a good cop, bad cop routine. | |
| And what basically happens in all of it is that one side says the absolute ugliest shit imaginable, and then the other side is like, oh God, we could never even like abide by that. | |
| And I think one of the things that unfortunately, and this is one of the aspects of it I wanted to talk with you about, because I've had a lot of people I've been reaching out to me lately. | |
| And, you know, they've either read a book of mine or they've read a book of yours. | |
| And like in the past, they'd be like, wow, I didn't realize history or politics look this way. | |
| I'm sort of realizing everything I was told I was a was a lie. | |
| Recently, even the people who understood that politics and history were necessarily lies and propaganda, they say I've looked around and a lot of the people that I found common cause with or I found comfort with over the past few years, Have changed and or maybe they didn't change. | |
| Maybe I realized something about them, which by the way is horrific. | |
| That's the literal definition of horror is thinking something was one way and it was actually another and you know, there are a lot of people and I want to have a conversation about this and let's keep it generalized, but there are a lot of people who have made a lot of money and have built a lot of power. | |
| and have built a lot of influence for themselves, uh, standing against Donald Trump because he is an absolutely detestable human being. | |
| It's not hard to do that. | |
| And meanwhile, there is such a yawning silence right now. | |
| The number of people who we both know have been paid in order to do the things that they've done. | |
| Some people have been paid in simple access, which is actually even more disgusting than getting paid for it. | |
| And then there are other people That I think have simply made a calculated choice. | |
| And I think people need to understand that in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of fascism, the choice that everybody has to make is, are you going to put on the armband? | |
| Are you going to say something? | |
| Or are you going to sit in silence and not say anything and try and live your life and get what is yours and not worry about the people who are being crushed? | |
| And right now, it is a time of choosing. | |
| And what we're seeing from a lot of people is that by not making a choice, they're making a choice. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And there's such a profound irony in you and I having this conversation because we were both very, very early in calling out Trump as a proto-autocrat, and we were relentlessly mocked by the exact same people who now are making their livelihood by calling Trump a proto-autocrat. | |
| That is all that they talk about. | |
| They don't talk about any of the conditions that led to Trump even being able to run. | |
| Or to get into power or to get away with these crimes. | |
| They won't address any of that. | |
| They won't address the enablers. | |
| They won't address the system. | |
| They won't address broader existential problems like climate change or COVID. | |
| It's all just Trump, Trump, Trump, the minutiae of trials of a legal soap opera that we know is going nowhere. | |
| And the story of why it's going nowhere is actually very important. | |
| That's why I wrote two books about it, you know, Hiding in Plain Sight. | |
| Is the story of that, you know, so is the new to some extent of corruption in our judiciary system of transnational organized crime infiltrating our institutions. | |
| That is why Trump is not being held accountable. | |
| They don't want to cover that and, you know, they see as enemies the people who really truly do | |
| We want to bring this all to a stop, meaning hold Trump accountable, hold his crime cohort accountable, hold the institutions that let them all get away with it accountable, and radically transform them and expose them, expose all of the crimes and secrets that these institutions have kept for so long, and let the American people know what their tax money is paying for. | |
| That's what they see as the enemy. | |
| It's not really Trump. | |
| Trump's their partner. | |
| It's a cave fame WWE situation. | |
| And yeah, like a lot of people's money is riding on this, which is why, you know, if there are say podcasts you listen to that have a sudden switch in tone, that's the reason for it. | |
| You know, they buy them off in subtle ways. | |
| Like, I'm not going to name names, but I can think of, you know, one podcast where somebody had an enormous amount of loans, and then those loans were forgiven. | |
| They also will pay through things like PPP loans. | |
| There's also, you know, some of these people are listed on, you know, FEC receipts, and you can see that they are literally paid just tweet obnoxious shit all day. | |
| Some people are bought off by a trip to the White House. | |
| Like that's a bluff. | |
| That's the grossest thing. | |
| That is so sad. | |
| It's the grossest thing. | |
| Like I would pay to not go to the White House. | |
| Like, if they wanted to bring me out, I'd take them off so I didn't have to go. | |
| Like, I don't understand how that's alluring in our current context. | |
| Like, I just don't. | |
| I can see it as sort of like, I don't know, like when I go see like the world's biggest ball of twine or whatever, you know, it has like that sort of appeal where you're like, yeah, that's You know, might as well. | |
| But this is not. | |
| This is a place where evil is being decided. | |
| It's not a place I would want to bring my children to, and it's certainly not a place I feel honored to show up at, given what they're doing in the White House. | |
| It actually matters who's in there. | |
| I mean, would you feel psyched to see the Kremlin? | |
| What's wrong with these people? | |
| I don't know. | |
| But yeah, they're bought off through access, through some sense that they're now viewed as quote-unquote important, through the desire to be on cable news, which again, I mean, like, I've been on cable news a lot. | |
| It's not that exciting. | |
| Like, you talk for two minutes, they ask the same questions that they asked you four years ago and pretend that you didn't have that conversation on live television. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's depressing to me. | |
| By the way, just to pull back the curtain, because I'm sure there are people who hear us talking about this, I try and tell people, because everybody still thinks cable news is cable news. | |
| It's not! | |
| It doesn't spike your book sales! | |
| It doesn't do anything! | |
| And that you have to, like, clean your bedroom before you go on it, or your house, or whatever. | |
| Literally. | |
| At least before we got hair and makeup. | |
| He asked me for the billionth time if I think Trump will be prosecuted, and for the billionth time I say no because of transnational crime syndicates masquerading as the government. | |
| Like, no! | |
| I'm not sweeping and vacuuming for that shit. | |
| Anyway, go on. | |
| It literally, no, it's the equivalent, honestly, of burying your principles in order to be the person when, like, the local news is doing, like, a remote shot, and you walk behind it and wave your hand, and then you say to your family, I'm on the news! | |
| Yeah! | |
| There's no- And that many people see it, that's the thing, it's just- Right! | |
| It's not circulating and it's in part because they're refusing to cover the stories people genuinely are interested in, which are therefore appearing over on TikTok, sometimes in forums that are not reliable at all. | |
| But, you know, for example, Palestine, Gaza, human rights violations against Palestinians, they don't want to cover that. | |
| When they do, it goes viral because people are actually very interested in the subject. | |
| But they've been told, you know, don't cover that. | |
| Too touchy. | |
| Stay away. | |
| And then, of course, people like, you know, Mehdi Hassan and others who did cover it anyway ended up fired. | |
| You know, we're all watching this happen right in front of our eyes. | |
| And one of the most bizarre things about it is that they're not being fired for criticizing America. | |
| You know, this is not typical autocratic maneuver. | |
| They're being criticized and fired and blacklisted for criticizing a foreign state. | |
| And it's like, I think if this were any other state, if this was Russia or China or something like that, people would see very clearly how bizarre this is, that there's some sort of prohibition against criticizing a state that is committing genocide as that state is openly bragging about their murders. | |
| And no, we're not supposed to talk about it. | |
| And I think folks have just had enough of that. | |
| You know, the majority of Americans are on the same side as us. | |
| I mean, including nearly half of registered Republicans even. | |
| So this is not some fringe, weird view. | |
| You know, people don't want to see children murdered. | |
| It's very basic. | |
| Cable news posts mind seeing children murdered. | |
| I don't think they mind it that much, or at least they're told to not express that if they do. | |
| And they're willing to go along with that. | |
| And that's their choice. | |
| Like you said, that's what they're choosing. | |
| But for somebody to be lured by that, you know, lured into silence otherwise, like it is so weird. | |
| It is so weird to watch all these like scholars of authoritarianism who rightly warn of Trump as an autocratic threat just go completely silent when Biden is doing the same things. | |
| Because it's the people who get hurt that matter. | |
| And the same people are getting hurt under each administration. | |
| And, of course, if Trump gets in, he's just going to continue all of this. | |
| But they don't seem to care about the victims. | |
| It's just about the sort of, you know, binary, this weird kind of soap opera style war on top of the war that they've, you know, cooked up to keep to make sure that we do not focus on the real war, the real deaths, the real casualty, the real pain. | |
| They just want us to look at this silly, you know, big lead shit. | |
| Yeah, I couldn't agree more. | |
| And I think, again, I think that reveals everything in terms of like what your actual principles are. | |
| Because I know a lot of people that I've talked to are like, well, you know, like, the semester's almost over, this thing's gonna go away. | |
| This isn't going away. | |
| Nothing that's happening right now, and by the way, like, maybe the police will crack, you know, enough skulls or maybe even kill enough people that, like, people will be afraid to protest. | |
| Like, the train that is coming down, like, this is not the last thing that's going to happen on this path. | |
| Like, this is the beginning of the beginning of where we're going. | |
| Like, not just climate change, but growing authoritarianism, the continued corruption of all of this stuff. | |
| Like, we're watching... I'm sorry, but anybody who isn't paying attention to what Jon Fetterman is doing? | |
| Oh, God, yes! | |
| Like, daily. | |
| You brought up Mike Johnson earlier. | |
| Like, him and Mike Johnson are, like, a couple of weeks away from doing, like, a buddy cop comedy movie. | |
| Like, it's incredible, like, the signaling that he's doing, the ways that the Democratic Party is starting to co-opt even the things that the Republican Party is doing, as resources dwindle, as economic austerity gets worse, like, we're going to see more of this. | |
| Like, these kids aren't protesting because they're crazy or because they want attention, it's because they're screaming something's wrong and it's not being handled. | |
| And what are you doing? | |
| You're beating them and brutalizing them and going ahead and killing all these people over here instead of actually addressing what's happening. | |
| And I'm sorry, you can kick this can down the road all you want, but it's only going to grow and grow. | |
| I tried to say a couple of weeks ago, What we're actually watching is we're seeing the terms of how the conversation about what's coming, what those terms are. | |
| And the terms are, if you say anything about it and you don't get in line, you can get killed or you're going to lose your careers, you're going to lose any economic standing. | |
| They'll start with the economics, they'll start with your career, they'll start with loans, any of that stuff. | |
| The next thing that comes are batons and rubber bullets and outright violence. | |
| And after that, I mean, all bets are off. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And, you know, to go back to your point about Fetterman, you know, what were the kids doing that are like on college campuses now protesting to protect, you know, Palestinians? | |
| They were helping out on campaigns like John Fetterman's. | |
| That's right. | |
| Democrats, they were the canvassers. | |
| They were the activists. | |
| They were the people going door to door. | |
| They're the people with the energy and the free time to do stuff like that. | |
| And they were willing to do it in 2020 and in 2022 for the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party had made a lot of promises to them about what their future would be, that they would take issues like climate change seriously, student loan forgiveness, economic opportunity, civil rights, you know, all of these things. | |
| Instead, they've gone and done the opposite. | |
| And I think that sense of betrayal It's one of the most powerful emotions you can feel, and I think people's reaction to Fetterman, who's cheering as cops at Penn and other universities in Pennsylvania, are beating young people in the streets. | |
| They are profoundly full of regret that they ever participated in the process of getting him elected. | |
| I see people express guilt and it's not their fault. | |
| You know, they were duped. | |
| They were absolutely duped by, you know, the DNC and by Fetterman himself and by so many others. | |
| But then you see the people who act as if that never happened, as if this was just, you know, always out there and they should have expected this. | |
| It's like, no, you know, they're right to feel betrayed. | |
| But the thing is, is that you never forget who betrayed you. | |
| When someone starts out overtly awful, you know, like for the way Donald Trump is, where of course you expect him to do awful things, the emotion of that is very different than when somebody gives you hope and somebody makes you promises and you have, you know, you and I are, I think, too beaten down by life for others. | |
| They have a flickering inside them of like, okay, you know, maybe this will finally end, maybe things will finally get better, but not to be snuffed out by the very person who you gave up your time and energy and money for. | |
| It's just such a horrific form of abuse, and they will never forget how that made them feel, and that's going to give them the energy, you know, to continue these protests and to continue, you know, what's basically a youth uprising. | |
| And, you know, I agree with you that it's not going to stop. | |
| If the Democrats wanted to stop it, they would radically change their policies. | |
| That's the thing. | |
| People wanted the campaign promises that Biden and others ran on to be enacted. | |
| They're not, on the whole, asking for very radical things. | |
| Asking for our country to stop massacring children, that's not radical. | |
| That's the most basic, elemental expression of morality you can have. | |
| That our government treats it as radical shows where their morality stands and how deeply it's sunk and how there really, in this regard, is no difference between them and the Trump camp. | |
| They want the exact same thing when it comes to this particular policy and when it comes to their value of human life in general. | |
| You know, like, before Gaza, there was how the Biden administration handled COVID. | |
| You know, denying the existence of long COVID, hiding data, lying about the vaccine, saying the pandemic is over. | |
| People learned the hard way that that administration just simply does not value human life. | |
| And they see people as disposable. | |
| And now we see them, you know, seeing people abroad as so disposable they can be murdered along with their families and their children. | |
| And they're not going to just forget that. | |
| I just don't think it's possible. | |
| I think that what we're seeing right now, people think that this is just some sort of a rash breakout of things, disrespectful kids who have been radicalized by TikTok. | |
| But what they've been radicalized is by a system that hasn't listened to them and hasn't cared for them. | |
| And they have every right to feel that way. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And, you know, I don't know, the things I was thinking about were so bleak is that one thing that does make us distinct from previous generations is that this generation has a ticking time bomb above their heads, you know, with climate change. | |
| I guess other generations felt that way with nuclear war. | |
| But, you know, which is also unfortunately on the table. | |
| But I think that that is something, there's a sense of urgency that, you know, this geriatric administration is not responding to in ways that, you know, I think that's perhaps part of why we see the age discrepancy, you know, where the leadership is so, so much older than the people protesting. | |
| like they know, you know, I don't mean to be used to blunt about it, but they, you know, they know they're not going to be here in 10 and 20 years to deal with it. | |
| Like Trump and Biden will not live to see the consequences of their actions. | |
| Everybody who's, you know, under 30 now or many of them, you know, will. | |
| And we're all at the same time as trying to, you know, change our political system, work within it, work around it. | |
| Like people also are cultivating a survivalist instinct. | |
| They're thinking, literally, how do we survive rising temperatures that eliminate crops, that deny us free water? | |
| I don't know. | |
| You know, I think the reason my mind kind of wandered as I was, you know, thinking about all the apocalypse themes, like the really, really dark undercurrent of this, which is basically, you know, mafia operations, you know, mercenary genocide heirs, like people who truly Like, they want fewer people alive, because then there are more resources for them. | |
| And that's all it boils down to. | |
| And that's kind of the undercurrent of everything. | |
| And, you know, in a way, I hope a lot of these protesters aren't thinking about that. | |
| I hope they're able to stick to their, you know, their concrete demands and their moral integrity. | |
| Because when you go down that road, you know, when you read what a lot of these billionaires are after, it's a very dark, dark road. | |
| But, you know, I am Somewhat hopeful, at least hopeful about the moral integrity of this nation and that people feel that they see the situation clearly and they feel obliged to speak up against it, even if it jeopardizes their career, their money, and so forth. | |
| I just hope it doesn't culminate as you said in You know, how it often does, especially in autocratic states with batons and bullets and prison sentences and, you know, the kind of horrific massacres we see, you know, in Gaza. | |
| You know, we've seen Russia do in Ukraine. | |
| You know, we've seen all around the world. | |
| I hope we don't get to that place. | |
| I think it's a place that a lot of people on both sides of the aisle want to bring us to, and the bulk of Americans thankfully do not, but we'll see. | |
| There's a lot of things we've wanted that they haven't given us, so we'll have to take them. | |
| Just before we finish this up, I agree. | |
| And the problem here, and I've talked to a few of the protesters and I, you know, they've asked me sort of where I think it's going. | |
| And I tell them that this is like these great clashes of not just generations, but also in authoritarian movements. | |
| Like, the push for small-d, democratic, populist movements is always met with reactionary forces. | |
| It's always met with crackdowns. | |
| It's always met with violence. | |
| You always see the authoritarian right that rises up. | |
| And by the way, the middle, the center, gets radicalized along with it. | |
| And I say this isn't comfortable, but the chances are that as this grows, the reaction is going to grow. | |
| And the danger is going to grow. | |
| And I just want to make sure that everybody understands that, that this isn't some sort of, it's not a television show. | |
| It's not a movie. | |
| There's not a speech that's given and suddenly everything's okay. | |
| Like, there is a lot of tribulation and trial, I think, ahead of us. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And I think, you know, folks have learned that the hard way, but the problem was I think they linked it specifically to Trump, even though it had happened before. | |
| You know, I covered Ferguson. | |
| I watched those police meetings. | |
| You know, I ran from tear gas and, you know, anybody who covered Occupy or other protests during the Obama era, they witnessed a lot of the same behavior. | |
| I think there is this illusion that this would stop if we just got rid of Trump. | |
| And then when Biden came in, and then the same behavior not only was carried out, but we saw the rise of pop cities, enormous amounts of money given to the police, you know, all of the conditions created to make the crackdown we have now. | |
| Now it's dawning on people that this doesn't really have to do with who is the president. | |
| You know, it has to do with structures that are a lot more powerful and entrenched and well-funded than that, that you can't vote out the mafia. | |
| You can't exactly vote out police brutality. | |
| I mean, it's so important to vote. | |
| And I think, honestly, the further down the chain you go on that ballot, the more local you get, I think more important your vote is going to be, because those people are going to be the bulwark against you know a federal uh autocracy which is i do think what we're going to have um kind of regardless of who wins you know obviously with trump it's more overt um you know so it's so it's important but i think uh a lot of folks uh you know and again i i don't blame them | |
| i don't blame like young people for being deceived by a bunch of people who are professional deceivers you know they lied they campaigned on things they were never going to do we were all terrified because of covid we all thought well this is rock bottom there's no way to go up um that's unfortunately not true there's a whole chasm right next to us that we didn't even notice and we've all fallen inside uh but at least now you know we see each other there there's some uh safety in the darkness well thank you sarah | |
| as always uh for the chat i I needed this. | |
| I think a lot of people did. | |
| And yeah, please be safe. | |
| Yeah, you too. |