Weekender PREVIEW: A Conversation with Sarah Kendzior
In this second of two exclusive Weekender episodes, I sat down with Sarah Kendzior to discuss our current political climate, the renewed threat of authoritarianism, and everything in-between.
Pre-order Sarah's new book The Last American Road Trip here.
To gain access to this show, as well as the full interview with Jake Rockatansky of QAA, head over to Patreon and become a patron.
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I'm very open to beer, so I'm not going to just go ahead and open another one.
But welcome to a special second episode of the Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
As promised, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to talk with Sarah Kinzier.
You know her.
You love her.
Her new book available for pre-order is The Last American Road Trip.
Not only is Sarah prescient and insightful and one of our absolute most indispensable voices, she's also a hell of a writer.
You're gonna want to go over and go ahead and pre-order The Last American Road Trip.
If you're like me, I like to pre-order a book, kind of forget that it's coming, and one day it shows up on my doorstep.
I don't know.
Pretty cool.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast to listen to this interview in full.
If you are already supporting the show, thank you so much.
You are really, really helping us out.
And during these times, it means so much to us that you trust our analysis, that you trust us to give you the news that no one else is going to give.
It literally means the world to us.
All right, so without further ado, this is my conversation with the one and only Sarah Kinzier.
Hope you enjoy.
All right.
As promised, I am here with my friend Sarah Kinzier.
Her new book, The Last American Road Trip, is now available for pre-order, correct?
Yes, it is.
Listen, if this thing reads at all like what your substack has been reading, I think we're all in for not just a treat, but a really useful and important piece of work.
I couldn't be more excited about it.
Oh, thank you so much.
And yes, it's very much in the vein of the substack and in the vein of any kind of travelogue, road trip aspect of the previous books, which somehow I managed to sneak its way in there and now I just went full throttle.
I hope everybody enjoys and you might actually enjoy.
Less terrifying this time around.
Yeah, right.
I mean, you know, you and I were talking about we talk about this all the time.
It's like everything that is enjoyable or everything that is hopeful is still sort of tinged with the, you know, for to borrow the boss's phrase, the darkness on the edge of town.
And, you know, I was wanting to talk to you because I feel like Between the last time you and I talked and now, I feel like we have lived a good 15 or 20 years.
I was listening to our past conversation this morning to prepare for this one, and man, it feels like we slipped into a completely different reality, doesn't it?
When was that?
I don't even know how long ago that was because It was a couple of months ago.
And I don't know about you.
I am both emboldened by a lot of what has happened.
I knew that it was possible.
I'm also terrified by what has arisen and also For the record, I know, you know, and I'm sure some of our listeners know that there are so many ways that even the most optimistic best case scenarios can be co-opted and perverted and bastardized.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, this has been quite a wild ride.
I think everyone is going to remember July 2024, assuming we have a future in which we remember things.
You know, so much happened just in that one week where it started out with Trump, you know, allegedly getting shot.
It's not clear about that.
You know, targeted by an assassin, I guess I can say.
And then ending with Biden dropping out, Harris dropping in.
You know, that was an eight day span, which felt like a millennium.
And then in addition to that, we had a lot of really horrific Supreme Court rulings.
Trump was given king-like powers.
There was a lot of disaster.
And one of the interesting things is that, you know, a lot of folks were predicting that if Biden dropped out, the Democrats would just fall into complete disarray and wouldn't be able to converge around a singular candidate.
And there would be a lot of infighting and that did not happen at all.
You know it followed the order of secession.
She's the vice president so then she became the presidential nominee and you know I really I assume that that's what she's going to be and they're just going to formalize it at the convention and that for a little while Unleashed genuinely positive energy where people were mobilized.
They were incredibly relieved that Biden was not running anymore.
I think people were having a very difficult case trying to convince people to vote for Biden because there really was no good reason for it.
You know, he had enacted a lot of the same policies as Trump.
refused to prosecute Trump, allowing Trump to be the candidate, you know, by allowing Merrick Garland to remain as the attorney general, and he failed to do his job.
I think a lot of folks came out in 2020 purely to get rid of Trump.
And they expected, of course, prosecution for crimes like sedition.
And the fact that we have a seditionist whose explicit goal is to destroy this country running as the GOP nominee again, you know, with us fully knowing what he's capable of is appalling.
And so it was very hard for those Biden, those Biden I mean, they did their best, little propagandists that they are, you know, to make a case for him, but they couldn't.
And so suddenly we have, you know, a fresh new face, a younger person, someone who can put sentences together and is, you know, energetic and cheerful and whatnot.
And folks get genuinely excited, and even I.
In all my gloom.
I felt relieved, and I felt like, well, you know, I just don't know what's going to happen anymore.
This whole series of events was not predictable, so maybe really good things will come.
And then I wrote an article, and in that article I warned, please don't build a cult around Kamala Harris as you have around Mueller, Garland, Biden, Pelosi, all these failed bureaucrats.
Please don't do this because it will suck all that energy away and turn it into something really conformist and oppressive.
So what do they do?
They build a cult around Kamala Harris.
I mean, there already sort of was one, but they made it bigger.
And then they make the whole premise of the cult conformity at all costs to the point that the word weird is now stigmatized.
It's like the worst thing you could possibly be.
Not a criminal, not a seditionist, not a bigot, not a racist, not a murderer, but weird.
God forbid you're weird.
And I just look at this and I'm like, what, what are you all doing?
And I think it'll burn itself out.
So I am not really even weighing in.
I'm just letting folks get it out of their system.
What a letdown!
And I'm just sitting here also, I don't know about you, but I'm like waiting for a platform for some policy plans, for some, you know, I'm gonna maybe hire these people in my cabinet, maybe fire some of these people who should have been fired like four years ago, like Christopher Wray, Louis DeJoy, Merrick Garland, etc.
And I haven't seen any of that.
Instead, I've seen a lot of memes.
And, you know, we are in a weird frame of time.
It feels like she's been the candidate for much longer than she has, you know.
But at the same time, the election is less than 100 days away.
So it'd be nice to know, well, what are we voting for here?
Well, and I feel everything that you just expressed.
I, you know, I think one of the, for people like you and me, and I think that we're sort of cut from the same cloth, which is we are hypervigilant.
We want to pay attention to what's going on and what's actually going on.
I think we're kind of allergic to getting caught up in sort of the good feeling veneer of things.
We want to understand how they work, where things are going.
And I think, you know, for the two of us who have been talking about this and telling people where it's going, there are moments that can kind of catch us by surprise.
And you can you can see them and know that they're there.
So like when that unbridled sort of optimism and hope came out, I think it's important to remember, and I wrote about this too, I was basically trying to warn, do not form a cult of personality around this person.
It does feel like, oh my god, this is originating from within us.
It's an organic human desire to not be under authoritarianism, to not be abused by totalitarian states, to not accept a decrepit, poisonous, dangerous status quo.
But the problem is that those things are so often tunneled into these like weaponized cults of personality.
I do think that it's important to take a look at what happened in 2008 with Barack Obama, who capitalized off that in a way that I don't know that we've ever seen a politician in our lives capitalize off of it.
Um, you know, it was after the Bush administration, the war on terror, the financial collapse, Katrina, you name it.
And what we wanted was we wanted this to be tunneled into something that could take care of the problem for us, which was the weird promise that Obama made.
Listen, I'm a professional.
I'm a technocrat.
You need the adults in the room to set things right, which is also how Biden got elected, for the record.
And now what I am trying to talk to people about, because I've been in a few rooms and a few meetings in the past couple of weeks, and that hope and enthusiasm, shockingly enough, by some people, they're wanting direction.
They're wanting to put something together that might not just protect our rights but extend our rights and give us the world that we deserve and that has been held from us by these autocrats and these neoliberals and authoritarians.
But there are other people who are still saying, and I know this is shocking to you and everybody else, we just need to ride this for right now.
Which is what the Democratic Party always says.
We don't need to talk about what we need to do.
We don't need to go where you think we need to go.
Don't worry, we'll get there.
And of course it always ends up getting diluted by the election cycle.
But that tunneling into the cult of personality right now feels like as dangerous as anything else in the world, having that sort of contained and co-opted.
Yeah, it is dangerous.
I mean, I saw an individual who I don't particularly like, but I was very much on his side in this case, where he was saying, hey, you know, quit using this word, weird.
You know, my son is, I mean, the threat ended up getting deleted because he got bullied so much.
He's saying, I think that his son was non-binary or maybe autistic.
He said something in a category where they're marginalized, they're vulnerable.
And he was like, you know, a lot of folks are in this position where they've been bullied or their children are getting bullied.
You are forming a cult personality in which you're telling people that unless they are of a certain type of person, like they have no place in the system, in this world, and you're tapping into a lot of vulnerabilities, only to, in your view, hurt the feelings of the Republicans.
Is that really the goal?
Who cares about the Republicans' feelings?
I truly don't care.
And I'm talking about people like the, you know, officials.
People like Trump or J.D.
Vance.
I don't care what they feel about anything.
I care about what they do.
I care about what they do to other people who are actually hurting.
And this guy got bullied so much that he just deleted his whole thread.
And this is a Democratic voter.
This is someone who could, you know, potentially be a very persuasive voice.
And I'm seeing that happen over and over again.
A real culture of bullying, if you, you know, make any kind of request for a platform, Or for some more concrete demands, you face that targeted bullying again, and I think it's creating a culture of political timidity in which, you know, folks don't want to ask for the most basic things.
They're acting like we're very fragile, and that if we ask for these things, everything will break, whereas we just showed the opposite.
You know, there was a broad, broad demand for Biden to drop out, and it didn't just come from Twitter and from people who are online a lot.
It came from the American public who, you know, a lot of them just had health concerns or age concerns or things like that about Biden.
Others were upset about Gaza.
Others were upset about the economy and others were upset about Trump.
Or they just didn't have confidence that he was going to beat Trump and they really wanted to beat him.
And so this was a ground up movement.
And that should give us all a lot of confidence in our ability, you know, to make demands of people and insist that they, you know, if they're reasonable demands that they be followed or at least heard out and taken seriously.
And I'm kind of watching the opposite happen.
And I think there'll be a few moments, you know, in the next couple of weeks where we kind of see who we're dealing with here.
You know, one will be the vice presidential pick.
Others will be, you know, suggested personnel for her administration, and then just policy positions.
But I'm already watching her say, oh, I like fracking now.
I'm against health care now.
And I'm like, oh, geez.
And I feel like she's surrounded by a lot of the same folks who surrounded Obama and Biden and made their administrations worse and more dangerous and kind of drained that hope away.
And honestly, there's nothing worse than bashed hope.
It's better in a way psychologically that I want this outcome.
But if Trump wins, no one has an expectation that anything will be good.
It's all about survival.
The survival instinct kicks in and everybody is vigilant and everyone's like, okay, how do we survive this?
How do we end this?
And how do we help our fellow countrymen out?
Whereas when a Democrat comes in, like the opposite happens where they just assume this is going to be a positive change.
I don't need to pay that much attention.
I need to just trust in authority, which is a bad idea.
And things will work themselves out.
And they don't realize that a lot of these kind of backstage operators in these administrations are doing many of the same things.
That people in the Trump administration and the Bush administration, for that matter, do.
They just call them something else.
And, you know, you've written about this quite a lot with the overlap between neoliberalism and fascism and how they feed into each other.
And that is a scary prospect.
And I'm not sure that people look at Kamala Harris and think she's capable of that, in part because She's female, and there's this tendency to kind of underestimate the tyrannical power of women, like as if Margaret Thatcher never existed.
But also, you know, because her demeanor is lighthearted, because Trump is a raving sociopath, so obviously by comparison, she seems better.
She seems better than Biden.
You know, people are just relieved to not have Trump and not have Biden.
And I'm not as worried about Harris, the person, as I am about, like, well, wait, who else is involved here?
Because that was the same problem Biden had, is he picked a really terrible group of people to be in his administration.
Blinken and Garland and, you know, Kevin, Christopher Wray and Louis DeJoy and others.
