I recorded this conversation with Sarah Kendzior for my podcast Audio From A Collapsing State over on my Substack. I want as many people as possible to hear it, so I'm posting it here as a bonus episode of The Muckrake.
Sarah and I discuss the worsening political environment as we head toward the 2024 Election, the awful trajectory of the Democratic Party as presently constituted, and where we feel this may be heading. Spoiler: nowhere good.
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Hey, everybody. I am releasing this conversation with Sarah Kinzier as a bonus episode here on the Muckrig podcast.
I recorded this for the podcast over at my substack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State.
The podcast is audio from a collapsing state.
But I thought it was an important conversation that I wanted as many people as possible to hear, and I thought the McRae community would be interested in it as well.
This conversation, it clarified a few things for me.
Sarah and I have been talking now for years about the threats that we've been facing and where they were heading if something didn't change.
And lo and behold, we're looking directly in the face of the consequences of those things not changing.
Yeah. And what I have decided as I've been looking at the 2024 election and thinking about the space beyond it is that a little bit different of a tact is necessary.
I love making the muckrake with my friend Nick Halsman and getting into breaking news and current events and giving them historical context and, you know, more in-depth analysis.
So I want to have a place as well, where much like some of the solo episodes I've done on this show, I can go increasingly further and further into the subjects at hand, get into some historical narratives, but also focus more and more on organizing, and what we as individuals can do in order to fight back against what is either going to be an inherently
fascistic presidential administration, creating an occupied state more or less that I think a lot of us are scared of, but also an environment in which things are increasingly growing more authoritarian as it feels like we do not have representation.
And I think that a new tact is necessary.
In that regard, I'm going to be releasing a lot more regular episodes of Audio from a Collapsing State over at Dispatches from a Collapsing State.
If you haven't already, check out that sub stack and consider becoming a paid subscriber to hear those podcast episodes.
And the work that I'm planning on doing here, including talking about, I'm working on a project right now, an organizing project that I'm really, really excited that's going to take off after the new year.
And I'm really hoping it can take this analysis and this understanding and put it into good use.
As well, I'm going to be making more videos because they seem like they have a decent educational reach, like the Midnight Kingdom lecture series, which just finished over at YouTube, if you haven't had a chance to check it out.
But I really do think, after having this conversation with Sarah and finding that we are both in agreement about where things are and where they're heading, I do think a new tact is necessary.
So in addition to the muckrake, I'll be doing a lot more of the Audio from a Collapsing State series in an effort to further educate, but also organize and also affect change.
So I hope you'll join me over there.
I appreciate your support as always.
And without further ado, bonus episode of the Muckrake podcast, an exclusive conversation with my good friend, Sarah Kinzier.
All right, everybody.
As promised, I'm here with Sarah Kinzier, you know, as the author of the new book, The Last American Road Trip.
You read her sub stack, all that good stuff.
My good friend, Sarah Kinzier, we have been talking this year.
I feel like we have checked in a few times over the course of 2024, immediately after the new year and during each of these stops as this thing has completely changed.
You are one of the touchstones when it comes to me trying to keep my sanity with what is going on in this current environment.
I am so, so glad to have you here.
Oh, I'm happy to be back.
Sarah, we are about 20 days, I think actually 20 days away from the election, and this has been one of the most whipsawing environments that I have ever even imagined.
You know, we've been on this trail now for going on nearly a decade.
We've been trying to explain how things have happened, telling people where things are going.
We've then seen that happen.
And now we are entering a new phase of American politics that is harrowing, quite frankly, frustrating.
It pisses me off.
It breaks my heart regularly.
20 days out from the election.
I know what the answer is going to be on this, but I just want to see how you're feeling.
I'm feeling horrible.
Part of me feels bad saying that because I feel like other people will listen to this and they'll take their cues from us.
If you feel great, hang on to that.
Keep it.
Put it in your pocket. It's not going to last for a long time.
I think it's awesome if If you feel good, then that's great.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
But this is the worst political environment I have seen in my life, mostly because of international affairs and how they're combining with our domestic crises and the feeling of dread of knowing not exactly what's going to happen, but some idea that it's going to be very, very bad.
And very, very violent, no matter what the outcome is.
It's just a horrible way to live, where everything you do feels like, maybe this is the last time I get to do this, or this is the last time I get to see this person.
There's just a feeling of finality about it, and also a lot of masks off kind of moments where people that We thought we're either good people or at least like halfway decent people, you know, turned out to be incredibly evil and in support of evil and dishonest in their behavior and, you know, their motivation and all sorts of stuff.
And that to me is it's very dispiriting.
You know, I'm used to dealing with evil people.
I spent my years getting my PhD studying Uzbekistan, studying in dictatorship, and also all the dissidents who were bravely trying to fight that dictatorship, and then went on to write about corruption and systemic crises in the United States.
And none of this is new to me. And then, of course, I went on to write these books about Trump and his mafia circles and organized crime.
So again, none of this is new.
The lack of good guys, the lack of people in power with Any morality whatsoever.
Any obligation to the public good.
Any will to make our lives even tolerable.
I've never seen anything quite like this.
Where there's just sort of no good guys left.
And I don't look for heroes.
Everybody knows that about me.
They get mad at me for it.
And I'm not looking for heroes now.
I'm looking for like a modicum of humanity.
I'm looking for like a baseline...
Acceptance of things like, you know, killing children is bad or we should not burn the planet out, you know, really basic shit.
And it's just not there.
A lot of people are on team murder that I didn't realize were there.
Yeah, I'm anti-team murder for the record, not wearing that jersey.
I've been thinking about this, trying to wrap my head around it, and luckily, you know, one of the great metaphors of our time, I think, really gave explanation to it, which was the embrace and the laundering of Dick Cheney.
Oh, God, yes. Watching that happen, you know, I came to political maturity back in the early 2000s.
2003 was sort of...
A real clarifying moment for me.
I think like a lot of people in America and around the world, I saw the imminent invasion of Iraq as not just a crime, but like a deviation from basic humanity.
And in watching that, I think this gets memory hold because everyone just blames Bush and Cheney, who obviously are war criminals who belong in The Hague, instead of being lauded as patriots standing up against Donald Trump.
Mm-hmm.
It gave a similar feeling to this, like hearing regular people in your life and in politics dehumanizing others, you know, just sort of flagrantly talking about genocide, wiping out the entire Middle East, you know, carrying out just absolutely barbaric war crimes.
And watching that take place for me was sort of a moment where I realized that politics were different.
And now, coming to 2024, which is, you know, of course, a later evolution of what we saw at that point, now looking around and, you know, seeing that on one side, we have an absolutely diminished fascist who has been bought and sold
by tech fascists.
He doesn't even know what he's talking about, but he's talking about handing the keys over to Elon Musk and basically giving him control, you know, writ large of the United States government.
And then on the other side, because I think you and I and a lot of the people listening to this, if you have a fascist who has already tried to overthrow the government and has already promised to be a fascist as a president, you want a counterbalance.
You want somebody standing up for basic human dignity.
You want somebody who's going to be – like you said, I don't believe in heroes or messiahs.
I think it's one of the worst things about our political environment, people wanting that.
I don't want that to be a result.
But I do want somebody who will at least voice protective ideas around taking care of vulnerable people and also stopping wanton slaughter of citizens and children.
And what we have seen – and I think people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around this.
We have seen the Democratic Party basically as an apparatus be taken over by neoconservativism.
We now have basically the early 2000s turn of the millennium Republican Party that has now turned into the Democratic Party that still says some of the things that We're good to go.
Watching this happen has been one of the more demoralizing and infuriating things that I've ever come across in my entire life.
It makes my heart hurt.
It has diminished my hope in terms of what this duopolistic system can accomplish.
I look at this and I have no other way to say it.
I feel rage.
I feel almost uncontained rage over this.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
And, you know, it's very much in the tradition of the Iraq War run-up.
And it's very overt.
You know, they're not fighting it.
You know, Dick Cheney could have endorsed Kamala and she could have just said something like, you know, thanks, we appreciate every vote we got.
And that could have been the end of it. That's not it.
It is this, you know, forceful, overt airing.
And, you know, she's now applauding Alberto Gonzalez.
And, you know, Don Holton is vouching for her.
And she says she wants Republicans in her cabinet.
They spent months saying that the Republicans were a fascist, apocalyptic death cult, which is accurate.
And now they're saying they want Republicans in their cabinet.
They are very obviously gearing up for an Iran war.
When I saw that Panetta had spoken at the DNC, I'd fallen asleep before that happened, but then I watched the speech, and I'm like, he's talking.
First of all, it's weird that Dion Panetta is a speaker at the Democratic National Convention, but putting that aside for minutes, He is talking as if we are on the verge of World War III, of a major world war.
And I'm like, oh God, this must be Iran.
Because, you know, Biden was an Iran hawk.
You know, he and Blinken actually wrote a whole paper for the partitioning of Iran in coordination with the government of Israel.
They did this 20 years ago.
Like, Biden and the people surrounding him.
The people who are running Kamala Harris' campaign have been in the tank for an Iran war for our entire lives, like since basically the Iranian revolution.
And now the moment has come.
You know, we see Israel invading Lebanon in addition to annihilating Gaza.
And they're not going to stop with Lebanon.
And they're not even going to stop with Iran.
You know, we have a complete infiltration where we're beholden.
To a genocidal apartheid state.
And they're doing things.
First of all, everyone forgets this.
AIPAC was who funded the seditionists.
AIPAC funded the people who wanted to overthrow the United States of America.
And they have funded all of these batshit crazy Republicans.
They've also funded primary challengers.
People who removed people like my representative, Cori Bush, from August because they were given so much money for the specific task.
Of ousting our duly elected representatives.
And so there is an internal takeover.
And the thing that blows my mind is that Russia has attempted this too.
We saw this with the Republican Party.
They worked through proxies like the NRA. They worked through all of these groups in order to elevate Trump and to elevate pro-Russia, pro-Putin Republicans who are completely fine with Russia invading Ukraine and hack them into the government.
Everyone rightly said, this is terrible.
This has to stop. This is foreign interference.
We need to study it. None of their committees or their papers or whatever really went anywhere.
You know, Russia has been able to evade their sanctions.
At least there is recognition that this is a profound threat to the sovereignty of the United States.
What Israel is doing is much more of a profound threat to the sovereignty of the United States because they're much more successful at it.
And we have both parties with the Republicans in Russia.
You know, it's basically those two together and then the Democrats, you know, on the side of Ukraine.
So there's a split. It's basically the only meaningful foreign policy split between the two parties is that.
And so when I think about, you know, who do they want in office, I'm just trying to figure out what do Exactly what they want as the result of the Ukraine-Russia war, because that's going to determine who gets in.
Because I don't think our votes are going to determine that at all.
I think it's going to be a Supreme Court ruling, because I don't think Trump has enough to win.
I mean, it's a tight race, but I definitely don't think he's in some sort of position to come in and sweep and have it be clear-cut.
He will, of course, contest the results.
And of course, there's going to be violence and militias and all the stuff we had the other times.
And so, you know, once that happens, the Supreme Court will rule.
And then, I don't know, I feel like all of this, the election in my mind has basically been just sort of this background thing about who is going to run this.
The illegal war in Iran that we are about to participate in just like we did in the war with Iraq.
It is so uncanny.
It is so similar.
It is literally the same people.
And it is that feeling, that pit in your stomach, awful feeling of dread that you know this is going to go on for like a decade.
Peter Moore of your life.
And it's going to probably, I mean, it's going to hurt our country very badly.
But I mean, I were able to destroy it.
And they don't care.
This is all they care about at heart is, you know, this war in Iran that they've been fantasizing about since we were born.
And it's so sad.
It is so, so sad that all of the progressive initiatives and dreams and hopes that people had back in 2020 and 2021, all the hard work people did, is getting shut aside and obliterated for this terrible objective.
And I am glad that you said it that way, because I completely agree.
You know, the election is sort of a background thing, you know, and it's sort of this lightning rod, like it's something to share things about or get excited about or feel like there's some sort of like major change that's coming.
And you know, I think one of the things that gets lost, and if I may, I think one of the themes of what you and I have talked about for the past few years is people get way too focused on the individuals in politics.
You know, like what their personalities are like or what the rumors are about them or Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or whatever it is.
And the truth is that...
Going back to the Iraq War and what we're talking about now, there are so many different interests that people have no idea are at play in any of this, right?
Like, Iraq, the Iraq War didn't happen because people actually thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
That was the story that made it possible, right?
This was part of a larger idea to go in and get the resources of Iraq not for the United States of America But for a bunch of private interests that were in the United States, but also Russia and China There are drivers here that are taking place And so what we're actually seeing and I think you very aptly put it like there is no Daylight when it comes to anything foreign policy wise except for Ukraine and that's because of the GOP is Ideologically aligned with Russia and that's what they have to do
Meanwhile the focus on Iran at every level everybody with any kind of power save for people who are isolated within the Democratic Party Everybody is in favor of striking Iran and continuing to escalate that Meanwhile, Israel makes a really good proxy to go ahead and take care of that.
Meanwhile, going after Iran doesn't just mean going after Iran.
It is a part of a larger push in terms of the new Cold War with China and who is going to have power in the next few decades.
So what happens when we have these big giant wars?
Sarah, I got bad news.
We would love to pay for programs that help people.
We would really like to have childcare.
We would really like to fund education.
But ah, we got this war we got to take care of.
And it is a constant cycle here.
And for anyone who doesn't see it, just look back through history and see how the wealthy and the powerful have continually used conflict between nation-states, between ideologies.
These are stories that always cover it up.
And what is important in this?
It's resources, it's power, it's wealth, but it's also the fact that America has been Absolutely decimated by these people.
They are the same ones who basically run the entire Trump campaign, but also Kamala Harris, who has been donated over a billion dollars and also has now inexplicably tied herself to Goldman Sachs.
I can't believe in 2024 we have a Democratic nominee who is in every speech talking about Goldman Sachs.
That is wild.
That entire thing shows that there is a momentum that is happening here that is taking America long for the ride.
And the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are different expressions of that.
What you're actually voting for in many ways is, are you going for overt fascism or are you going for sort of a slower sort of authoritarianism that's going to continue this trend but say the right things?
And, you know, in Bill Clinton's parlance, they feel your pain.
They wish they could help, but they can't necessarily do it.
And so when looking at this, it has the feeling of an overwhelming heft and weight and momentum.
And everything that you just lined out, one thing that we need to, I think, iterate here, we're talking about innocent people who are being slaughtered.
We're not talking about soldiers.
We're not talking about nation versus nation.
We're talking about innocent people who are caught between these different influences and powers.
They could be our neighbors.
They could be our family members.
They could be us. And what we're actually doing right now is we're sort of negotiating in a very awkward and heartbreaking way exactly how many of those people are going to suffer.
Exactly how many of those people are going to be butchered.
And, like, for that to be the conversation and to have it dressed up in all of this, like, star-spangled, you know, bunting, it is offensive.
And also, it is so frustrating because we're not actually talking about what's happening in this world, which is the powerful have redistributed Trillions of dollars to themselves.
They have unprecedented wealth and power.
They have unprecedented influence over our politics.
And meanwhile, we're still talking about elections as if elections are what elections used to be.
Yeah, no, it is the most diabolical thing when you kind of look at the last few months and how they did this, because, you know, they love to throw around, the Democrats love to throw around this word permission structure.
This is how they try to justify having Dick Cheney, you know, Harold, they're like, oh, well, if Dick Cheney likes Kamala, then it gives a permission structure for Republicans to vote for him.
No, it doesn't. No, it isn't.
Everyone hates Dick Cheney.
That actually unified the country.
He left with a 13% approval rating.
The whole country hates him.
Nobody is going to vote for her based on Dick Cheney's approval.
In fact, she will lose votes based on Dick Cheney's approval.
But what they did, in the very beginning, when Biden dropped out, and there was this enormous feeling of relief, to the point that I had young people asking me, Is this what it was like when Obama was running for office in 2008?
And I was like, yeah, honestly, there are some similarities.
I'm like, I'm very wary of what's to come.
But sure, there is this feeling of hopefulness, of relief, of possibility.
We're finally getting rid of this bad guy and all these bad people.
We can start fresh. And now, of course, we feel like we're back in 2002, 2003 with the Iraq War.
And what they did, this permission structure that they created was all those little Zoom calls and stuff where they got people to volunteer their time and give up their money to Kamala Harris so that she could be the figurehead of a war with Iran.
That is ultimately, that's not what I don't, I don't think people intended for that at all.
I think when they supported her, it was from the heart.
I think they wanted to save our country from Trump.
They wanted to save it from far right-wing agendas, you know, good motivations.
What they're getting are far right-wing agendas, you know, people like Dick Cheney being the template for that, you know, people who are seeking the approval of George W. Bush, they are getting that instead and they have given their permission for it in a way by participating in all this canvassing and all this activity under a completely false pretext, that they were getting something else. And I think we don't want to admit this yet. I think this will
all be discussed after the election. They're too afraid to talk about this because the election is around the bend. And of course, we don't want Trump to win. You know, nobody wants Trump to win.
I'm terrified of Kamala Harris becoming the president for all the reasons I'm laying out.
Of course, I'm also terrified of Trump becoming the president.
I know a bit more of what to expect with him, so that's kind of the only difference.
But, you know, it's administration.
It was full of Iran hawks.
Anybody who thinks he's going to be some sort of exception to the rule is out of their mind.
He had Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Jared Kushner, who now is trying to buy up the remains of Gaza to make luxury hotels.
He had Sheldon Edelson.
He had a bunch of hard-line Zionist fanatics who literally wanted to bring in Armageddon, who based their foreign policy around Armageddon.
And this is true for Jewish advisors like Kushner.
Or for Christian advisors like Mike Pompeo, who's a complete psycho when it comes to this sort of thing.
He talks about the rapture all the time, and his whole strategy for the Middle East was based around the rapture.
With Trump himself, I see much more of like a A kleptocratic figure, a grifter, somebody who doesn't have any spiritual beliefs, you know, kind of a void.
I don't know really where Kamala Harris lines up on this at all, but I think she's basically just, she's a figurehead.
She's the person they're using in order to carry out an agenda that they have been plotting to some extent for like 45 years, like basically since 1979, that they've certainly been putting the pieces in place.
For all of our lifetime and since Trump got into office, that's why it's important here that everyone is to blame, like the people who are trying to say that Trump will be an exception or he'll prevent this.
He put the pieces together, he and Kushner especially, in Israel, protecting Netanyahu, backing the Kahanists, although of course it was Biden who took them off the terrorist list and therefore allowed them to be in the Israeli parliament.
It was a joint effort, but Trump laid the groundwork And then Biden and Blinken, in particular, carried it out.
And then whoever comes in next is just going to continue down.
This road has already been mapped out, regardless of who wins the election.
And this road is going to dominate so much of our lives.
Like, even though you might not have any interest in this subject, this is unfortunately what is on the table, just like with Iraq.
That is what dominated our lives from, you know, 2003 on.
And we discovered a lot about our country through that, through things like agribe, through things like the use of torture, the incredible lying and propaganda that that administration performed, how far they would go.
I mean, I was young enough to be shocked that, like, Colin Powell would lie to the U.N. You know, I was shocked that their lies would be so brazen and also that there were real experts, like remember Hans Blix and how much shit he took, you know, that were out there saying...
They don't have weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. government is making this all up.
And I kept thinking, well, they can't all be making it up.
There's got to be. They're confused or they have bad info.
I was naive enough to think it couldn't be that elaborate a plot because they wouldn't be able to keep it together.
But they were.
They were able to plot this quietly for a very long time and then carry it out and have it be an absolute disaster.
And so, you know, I'm scared because I think what's happened in that time, and particularly since 2020 and since COVID appeared, is a devaluing of the sanctity of human life just across the board.
You see it in the reaction to COVID.
You see it in the reaction to death in general.
You see mockery of death.
And of course, you know, in the most egregious and horrifying way, you see it in the genocide in Gaza and the mass murder of children and people celebrating the mass murder of children, I've never seen that before.
I can't think of a corollary.
In world history, where children were targeted, children are casualties of war, children are recruited into horrible militia groups all over the world.
It's not like this is new to have children die in war, but for children to be the targets of war, to be tortured, to have babies killed in an incubator in a NICU or something...
I've never seen that kind of evil.
I don't have another word for it.
I mean, I sound like George W. Bush or something, you know, going on about the evil and the evildoers.
This, to me, this is evil.
Like, this is incredibly evil, and it can't be viewed as a side issue.
Like, oh, I like...
You know, Kamala's health care plan and her support for abortion rights, but I don't really like the genocide part.
It's like, oh my God, you know, this is genocide.
This isn't a side issue.
You can't kind of just put it in the back of your mind.
If you're human, it will stay in the front of your mind because if you see those Palestinian children, you know, you'll think of any child you know.
I mean, at least that's what happens to me.
Like, you know, I think of my own children or I just see...
You know, an innocent person, like somebody who's just the epitome of innocence, just, you know, their lives snuck out at age four, age five, and I'm like, there's no justification for it.
This is not self-defense.
This has nothing to do with self-defense.
This is just There's cruelty and sadism.
And I don't understand why our country is supporting it.
And it makes me so deeply, deeply ashamed.
You know, a lot of times I don't feel ashamed to be an American because I feel like there's this gap, as in basically every country, between the government and the people who live in the country.
But what our government is doing in this case is so profound, To back this.
That, like, the shame extends where I just feel like, like, what more can I do?
Like, I know I'm jeopardizing my own job.
I know I'm jeopardizing my own future by even talking about it, which is nuts because this is clearly the right side to be on.
The anti-genocide side is always the correct side to be on.
But it's controversial to do it.
You know, we were talking a bit earlier about, you know, it's happening to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Like, It's just the fact that you can condemn something like child murder, but I really thought everybody was against that and it was not controversial to be against child murder.
It now is.
It's now like you're supposed to be for it, I guess.
And he speaks about it quite bluntly and makes comparisons between Israel's system and Jim Crow and things like that.
That this is all so taboo.
Even though it's right in our faces every day, every time we open Twitter and we see all these videos and photos and commentary from people in Gaza who are like, this will probably be my final post because they're going to murder me tonight.
And then you do. And they do it.
And you never hear from that person again.
We're witnessing horrors that I don't think the human mind is designed to be able to To kind of withstand with this digital media, this onslaught of information, very personal, very painful, from a variety of people, with us in this helpless position as bystanders and sort of feeling like voyeurs, just wishing you could do more.
And I feel like all we can kind of do that at least I know is the right thing to do is talk about it and not pretend it's not happening or not set it aside for the election, but just, you know, Afford people the full dignity and humanity that they inherently deserve just by being virtue, you know, by virtue of them being human beings.
That's all you have to be.
Like, you don't have to be something special or achieve something.
Like, you're just human.
You're just a person, and you deserve, you respect, and you deserve the right to live and not be obliterated by a foreign power.
I mean, those are so basic.
It's so clear.
Yeah. I don't understand how folks like me or you, how we're the outliers here, especially when we're combating fascism through Trump.
And the people who are supposed to be combating fascism alongside us are very selective in the fascism that they will combat.
Yeah, and I think that that is a really opportunistic way to view it for a variety of people, and I think it speaks to a larger disease within liberal democracy.
Like, you know, people... People want to look at Donald Trump and it is so, so easy for some people to say that, like, everything was fine before Donald Trump came around.
He obviously is the disease.
I always say he's the symptom of a much larger disease.
And people need to understand that when a Trump comes around or when fascism comes around, it doesn't emerge, you know, out of nowhere.
Like, there has to be sort of a womb that births this stuff.
And part of the issue, and Sarah, I have been so pissed off, and to go back to something you said, one of the things that pisses me off to the point where, like, I can't even contain my rage are the people who not only embrace this genocide, but, like, seem to relish it.
I'm talking about people who are supposedly liberals or support liberal ideas who are joking about people dying, right?
Like, they deserve to die.
They have done that sort of dance with cognitive dissonance.
They are totally embracing it.
Meanwhile, what are we seeing?
We're seeing a lot of the aesthetics of MAGA that are now being replicated within the liberal sphere and the democratic sphere.
It's the other people I think that I see doing this sort of pragmatic dance in their brains that are like, man, I do not support this.
This is ugly. This is obviously genocide.
But meanwhile, we have an election to win.
And one of the problems here...
Is that liberals for a very long time have been doing this dance.
And this goes back.
I mean, America has always had a relationship with limited democracy, controlled democracy, particularly when it comes to other countries, especially when it comes to other countries that are populated by people who have, I don't know, different colored skin.
And one of the parts of this that drives me nuts is that in the post-war era, the United States has always embraced pragmatic, negotiable democracy, right?
Like the idea that like, yeah, that person might be a dictator, but they're our dictator.
And they're making sure that they're keeping that country under control.
And yeah, they get a little out of hand sometimes.
And yeah, we wish Pinochet wouldn't kill as many people, but he makes sure that the people go to work and make sure that the world system sort of continues.
And I think watching this is one of the most stark lessons that we will ever see in it, which is not just how the powerful do it, because they have their reasons.
You know, they have incredible wealth, they have incredible power, they have like a vested interest in watching the status quo continue down this disastrous path, this tragic path.
Meanwhile, watching the people who support them because they're engaged in cult-like behavior with political figures, watching them sort of work it through their mind in terms of accepting it or turning the other way from it or making these supposed pragmatic decisions to sort of look beyond it, I think what we're seeing, and this is I think the really, really demoralizing point, there are people who have had to work through this in
their heads in order to support a candidacy at this point with Kamala Harris that they don't even agree with everything that's happening, but they're also doing it because they're so afraid of the threat of fascism that they think that they need to embrace elements of fascism, which is how this process works.
It is a systematic abuse of people that limits your imagination for a better future.
And I know from times that you and I have talked, one of the reasons I think we're able to do this is I have not given up my imagination for what a better world would look like.
I expect better for me.
I expect better for you.
I expect better for our listeners and future generations.
It should not be like this.
But it feels like a limited imagination that has been brutalized by decades of abuse, systematic abuse, and also terror.
I want to remind people, Donald Trump has been one of the most singular best weapons that basically every part of American politics has been able to utilize.
The media has been able to capitalize off of it and profit off of it.
it. This is well documented. The Democratic Party has used him as a scarecrow or a boogeyman that they can basically point to and say, hey, we just need to get past this and then we'll actually do some stuff that you want us to do. The Republican Party and their donors that they represent have been able to use him as a battering ram. They are now like absolutely on the precipice of finishing the job that they started back in the early 1970s of dismantling liberal democracy writ large. And the reason why they're in the position to
do that is because what you and I are talking about now, which are deals with the devil that people have always talked themselves And what has happened? It has seeded the ground for this thing to get worse and worse and worse.
And these are the consequences of the actions of people who have made those deals with the devil.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that's been one of the most dispiriting thing is just watching people slowly surrender their soul, you know, and I think that that was kind of the point of the Biden administration.
You know, I think that there are power brokers, you know, you see them kind of moving between both political parties, you know, what party somebody is in is of no matter to them, they have a broader agenda.
Yeah, I think.
You know, through all these horrific portrayals, you know, through homophobia, like of any American who falls into some sort of marginalized group, you know, or of women, of, you know, the sort of standard humanization that we've seen for centuries being revived.
On the liberal side, I think it was harder.
Because in 2020, there were these mass protests.
You saw these people turning out for George Floyd and climate change and all of these issues.
And also being very afraid of COVID and wanting to protect not only themselves but others from COVID.
There's this revisionism that everybody was out protesting any kind of mask wearing or any kind of policy that would protect people.
That's not true.
I mean, most people just wanted to survive it.
They just wanted to get through it and not hurt anybody and not hurt themselves and not die.
And this was true even in the most conservative regions.
Like there's a county I like to go to in Missouri that politically is very conservative.
It's a very large county, but with a very small population.
And there's a guy, there's only one road in, one kind of, I wouldn't even call it a highway, just a road in.
And there's a guy out there with a shotgun to block any car that would come in to protect the couple thousand people who live in this giant rural county to make sure nobody with COVID entered.
People took it seriously.
they did things their own way, but they were trying to protect the communities and themselves, and they weren't all like, la la la, I'm gonna go, you know, drink bleach at COVID, and it's not real.
And, you know, it wasn't how it started. It started with people kind of looking out for each other.
And then it turned, and I think the turning point was the summer of 2021, with Delta COVID, and the realization that the vaccines did not protect you from COVID completely at all, that breakthrough COVID was in fact quite common. And then they kept trying to map it onto political They kept trying to say, oh, it's the South.
It's the states that were once in the Confederacy.
They won't get vaccinated.
First of all, that wasn't true.
Boomers largely are people who voted for Trump and Republicans, and they went and got vaccinated.
They got vaccinated first.
But then my point here is that you saw a very common liberal refrain of they deserve to die.
They have it coming.
They deserve it.
And then I got to hear it again in 2022 when Roe was overturned.
Women in the United States, we deserve to die.
We don't deserve to be able to go to an OBGYN. We don't deserve rights.
We deserve to die. Why?
Because we live here.
It doesn't matter what my beliefs are, what my city is, the makeup of the electoral map, gerrymandering, dark money.
I don't care about any of that.
what they were doing, because it was the paid propagandists of this administration. It's not like it was just random assholes on the internet. It was people whose job it is to create a kind of political culture that they think is conducive to the aims of the Biden administration. And their aim was to get people to believe that other Americans deserve to die based on their geographical location. And the unstated part of this, and this is the thing that people need to remember, every time you hear somebody ranting about the evil people
of red states, red states, quote unquote, are dominated by black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans.
where do you think all the reservations are?
Poor Americans. Poor Americans.
That's who you're saying is, you know, deserves to die.
He, you know, the legislature, you know, never represents the will of the people.
When we have ballot initiatives and stuff, they just toss it out.
We did that in Missouri, they did that in Ohio, they did in Wisconsin, you know, they do this all over the place.
But the unstated premise, I think, of the liberals who go on about all of this is they don't want to live in a country where there are powerful Black Americans or Latino Americans.
They want a sort of subservient figurehead position.
And I think that they actually were thrown off by a lot of the protests that came from the Trump years.
And a lot of the reexamination of American history, this is why they complained about, quote, wokeness and people becoming too woken.
They are bigoted, and they express it in a different way than MAGA. They're not as overt about it.
They're slicker about it.
But the main thing they want is for people to blame themselves for things that they did not bring upon themselves and that they're not responsible for.
And that, of course, no one deserves to die.
Even if you're a horrible, horrible person, unless you killed someone or something, whatever your beliefs are, you don't deserve to be murdered for them or catch a terrible disease for them.
There should be a baseline kind of empathy for anyone in that position and thoughts about their family and what their people love them would go through if they die.
That all went out the window starting around 2022, and that's when I realized what we were dealing with with the Biden administration and when They behaved in the way they did with Israel and Israel's response to the attacks on October 7th, which was to annihilate Gaza's response and to murder children.
And they supported that unequivocally.
And that was all obvious that they were going to do that, that the Biden administration would do that because they were paving the groundwork Right.
Right. That's really indistinguishable from the Bush administration,
except for possibly more protective, rhetorically at least, of reproductive rights and of women's rights, maybe.
But other than that, I think they're going for the third term of a Bush administration, and that's what we're going to see.
But people will lie about it.
They're going to deny it. They'll say, how is that possible?
Kamala Harris is a Black woman.
This can't be. And I'm going to be like, did you forget Condoleezza Rice?
I'm kidding. We've been down this before!
I remember this argument with the Bush administration, you know, oh, it can't be that conservative.
Look at Colin Powell, look at Condoleezza Rice.
Like, pay attention to what any of them believe in or their expertise in or their stated goals are.
Like, these are not liberal folks.
Like, you know, they have their...
It's just so... I don't know.
There's something so... What's the word?
Condescending about the way that a lot of white liberals speak about, you know, conservative Black Americans, but also people like Kamala Harris that are more than amenable to extreme right-wing individuals like the Cheney family.
Liz Cheney or Dick Cheney.
Liz Cheney is a right-wing extremist.
The only difference with her is that she doesn't like Trump, but that's it.
Every other policy, every other position is something that a right-wing extremist would support.
I don't know if she still thinks that all Democrats are secretly Russian operatives, which is something she said, or that Democrats kill babies after they're born, which is something she said.
Those are things she said, and we're just supposed to forget about that, that that's That's just sort of cool to say now.
We want to align with people like that, trust people like that, work with people like that.
I worry that Harris will make for a Secretary of Defense.
I think that that might happen.
Oh, that's a brutal thought.
I want to drill down very quickly before we start to wrap up.
And something you just said, I think, is absolutely essential.
You know, when I first started doing this, I got attention back in 2016.
I would do all these media hits and they would interview me.
They would have me on TV. And then immediately after the recording light went off, they would say, you're in Georgia.
When are you getting out of there?
Because the idea was you had somehow or another sort of transcended to another class.
So now you're going to escape the red state, right?
You're going to get away from these people.
And I surprise people.
I tell them, outside of a three-year stretch when I went to graduate school in Illinois, I have never lived in a so-called blue state.
And there's a reason for that and there are economic reasons for that.
There are personal reasons for that.
But one of the things that has happened and I think you were outlining it very well here.
Fascism and authoritarianism breaks down to this.
The ideology is that some people deserve better and some people deserve to live and some people deserve to die.
And we are going to determine who those people are.
The Republican Party has made it very clear.
They are the party of patriarchal, evangelical, right wing, nativist hate.
And they are going to decide who deserves to live a better life and who deserves to live a worse life.
The liberal construct of that, which I think tells you everything you need to know about this is the market decides.
And what has happened is that we have turned into roughly two Americas.
We have people who live in so-called blue states, who look at so-called red states and think, what are those people doing?
Obviously, they've done something wrong in their lives to deserve living in this state.
And I think the overturning of Roe v.
Wade made this apparent.
I've said over and over, I expected there to be just absolutely riots in the streets.
But what had happened was that we had been so bifurcated in terms of red state and blue state America that to think about it, I always use the metaphor of getting on a plane.
Some of you are going to be in the back of the plane.
You're going to have a terrible ride.
you're not going to be treated with respect. You can pay a little bit extra, you can get a little bit more leg room and actually get some overhead compartment. Then the people at the front are going to get the luxury experience. That market-driven ideology has divided America.
And we are seeing people who are able to live in these enclaves that have all of the sort of trappings of metropolitan life. And meanwhile, they look at the people outside of it and think that they either deserve death or whatever lot it is that they deserve.
Like my neighbors and your neighbors, they deserve to have autonomy over their bodies.
They deserve health care.
They deserve basic human dignity in the same way that Gazans deserve it.
And when you start slicing the world up into...
As long as I can get my safety and my needs met, as long as this movement and trajectory doesn't touch upon me, it doesn't matter what happens to these people over here.
Not only is that fundamentally wrong because we have seen time and time again that my Fate is tied to your fate and our fate is tied to people that we will never ever meet in our entire lives Fates and once that ideology starts to come in we're not actually talking about politics anymore We're talking about straight-up versions of authoritarianism that find their expression Through different policies and through different
expressions of that idea. And so that has I think infected America so much so over decades And it was an intentional push for this that we have now reached this point where we're not even Discussing how to make the world better or how to make the future better What we're discussing is how to mitigate the consequences of it for select groups of people and who is going to decide who those individuals are.
Yeah, and that's a very frightening thing.
You know, like, it's like, my kids used to play Minecraft, and there were two modes.
There was creative mode and survival mode.
And when you're, you know, not in, you're forced into survival mode, you know, creative mode goes out the window.
And I think that's... The point that we're in, and it is stifling.
I think it's why we see so many memes.
It's why we see so much repetition.
It's a frightening place to be, and it's not a place that we deserve to be.
I wrote an essay 13 years ago now called Survival is Not an Aspiration.
You know, it's in my book, The View from Flyover Country.
And the fact that we're at that point and that the life, honestly, of 2012 looks pretty good by comparison to what we have now, which is a wild thing.
Life back then was pretty bad.
You know, it's just, it's shameful.
And I do have, you know, some kind of, I don't know whether to call it hope.
But, you know, like I'm a mom and I see kids, teenagers, you know, with dreams and a view of the world that's untarnished by what we've witnessed firsthand.
And, you know, when I talk to them, like a little bit of light comes back inside me because I do see that I feel that sense of possibility and I want it for them so badly that it does, you know, It also resets my moral compass.
It keeps it strong. But my gosh, I don't know what's wrong.
I mean, I sound like an asshole.
I'm like, I'm great. What's wrong with everybody?
It's frustrating that it's become so much more normal to become such a hateful and cruel person to people you don't know arbitrarily based on nothing, like based on their race or their geography or their class or what have you.
Of course, there's always been these prejudices, these hatreds, but they are so openly expressed and it is so across the board in terms of like party affiliation or whatever.
You know, people are clouded by hate.
And I hope that that fog lifts with the election because I think that the election brings fear, you know, and people are afraid to do anything honest and they're afraid to examine these questions.
So they just retreat into these kind of cults and cliques of hate.
And I'm hoping that at least some of that will go away in November.
But, you know, I don't know what else.
I don't know how we can survive as a society like this.
I share your sense of hope in that, which is that these things are becoming much more obvious and we are seeing people reject it.
I think that's where my sense of hope comes from on this.
Yeah, definitely. All right, Sarah Kinzier, one of my favorite people walking the planet Earth.
Thank you so much for coming by.
Again, the book is Last American Road Trip.
Of course, Sarah Kinzier's Substack is absolutely required reading.
